February 2021

Enterprise article dated February 12, 2021 By Anne Ternus-Bellamy Some of Yolo County’s poorest families with young children will receive a hand up and out of poverty through a universal basic income pilot project approved by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. The 31 families in the CalWORKS Housing Support Program who have children under the age of 2 will receive monthly payments for a year, up to a maximum of $12,155. That cash assistance, combined with the CalWORKS grant they already...

By Michael Burke, EdSource, February 11, 2021 Freshman applications to the University of California surged this year, a trend that college access advocates hope will translate into higher enrollments of low-income, Black, Latino and other underrepresented students across the university’s nine undergraduate campuses. The university received 203,700 applications for freshman admission this cycle, about 32,000 more than a year ago. Experts attribute the increases partially to the elimination of...

By Institute for Global Health Sciences, UCSF, February 10, 2021 In 2020, the unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, laid bare the persistent disparities in access to quality health care, education, and opportunity facing Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other people of color. IGHS has undertaken a number of new projects to reduce the inequities in our own house and backyard and across the world. Today, we are...

NO GOING BACK: Providing Telemental Health Services to California Children and Youth After the Pandemic, is the first in a series of briefs outlining how technology can make mental health more accessible with concrete recommendations based on providers’ perspectives, and lessons learned during the pandemic. Read the Report When the shelter-in-place mandate started, California’s mental and behavioral health providers quickly pivoted to telehealth delivery for children and adolescents. Recent...

In this installment of A Better Normal community discussion, ACEs Connection's Race & Equity workgroup reconvenes and discusses ACEs Connection’s internal processes to address racism, racial trauma and civil unrest. In this discussion, we will highlight the five ways ACEs initiatives, including our own, get DEI wrong. Discussions will include racial trauma, historical trauma, healing centered practices and effective DEI strategies. In addition to our internal processes, ACEs Connection...

Pediatrician Tasneem Ismailji is a cofounder and former president of the Academy on Violence and Abuse (AVA). Her Pakistani heritage and love of children have informed not only her career choices but also her decades-long commitment to the prevention of the health effects of violence and abuse. Born in the ancient city of Karachi, Pakistan, Ismailji was one of seven siblings — four girls and three boys — growing up in a loving Muslim family, where she spoke both Urdu and English. In the...

By Rajni Dronamraju and Debbie I. Chang, San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2021 Almost everyone, to some extent, has suffered from the isolation, uncertainty, or emotional and economic effects of the pandemic. But for some kids and families — particularly those who are low-income and part of communities of color — the scars of the pandemic threaten to last a lifetime. In the short term, the Bay Area’s most vulnerable children are at greater risk for exposure to domestic violence,...

By Darius Stovall, The Modesto Bee, February 10, 2021 “You are not depressed” is a sentence that I have heard in my family a lot. As an African American man, the word “depression” was colored as dirty, better yet heresy. Mental health was not viewed as something that I needed to be a successful Black man. I needed God, good test scores, and connections to people who could put me in places I couldn’t get into by myself. Black culture and mental health have always been as separate as the East...

On behalf of ACEs Connection , the CTIPP (The Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy & Practice), and the Relentless School Nurse , we want to invite you to the streaming of parts 4 and 5 of the Whole People documentary series on the weekend o f March 12th through March 14th, 2021. We will stream both parts on ACEs Connection in the Transforming Trauma with ACEs Sciences Film Festival community. The documentary viewing weekend will be followed by a discussion with special guest, Father Paul...

Eleven years ago, Pennsylvania Executive Deputy Attorney General Robert Reed learned about the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study , which linked childhood trauma to a higher risk of aggression, substance abuse, suicide and many life-threatening mental and physical diseases later in life. For him, it was a revelation. “The [ACE Study] gave me the language to understand what I felt, but didn’t have the language to express,” Reed said. “I had been in law enforcement for 30 years and...

FORUM: Help Me Grow Marin County REGISTER NOW and plan to join us on Thursday, February 25th for the launch of " Help Me Grow Marin County ." Help Me Grow Marin is a new program that connects parents, caregivers, healthcare and social service providers with programs, services, resources and information about early childhood development, behavior and health. AGENDA: Speakers will include representatives from Help Me Grow National, Heather Little from the First 5 Association, and Dr. Tracey...