Blog

From Human Impact Parters: A COVID-19 Public Health Response & Recovery Policy Platform Decades of underinvestment in our public infrastructure and neoliberal policies that gutted protections for working people, our healthcare, and our wider safety net are vividly exposing their consequences. People of color — most harshly Black, Latinx, and Native people — are disproportionately experiencing the consequences of these conditions. In this context, directly impacted communities are naming...

"COVID-19 hits countries with preexisting conditions harder...USA — Inequality, callousness, racism, selfishness, profit over people." John Darkow, Missourian Tuesday, May 5, 2020 — Family ACEs (aka domestic violence) This pandemic gives us an opportunity to shift the focus from the traditional narrative of a violent man, a woman victim, and an abused child to…something else that looks at the family as a whole, at interventions that are inclusive, that are gentle, that nurture and heal, and...

Dear Friends, Please see the link below to my interview last Thursday on Insight with Beth Ruyak. I discuss my book The Gifts of Adversity and my experience of sexual abuse by a priest. I hope my book and interview can be a resource for you and others you know. https://www.capradio.org/news/insight/2020/04/30/local-author-carolee-tran-and-her-new-memoir-the-gifts-of-adversity/ Take good care friends and be well. Warmly, Carolee

The NCTSN is happy to announce the release of The Child Welfare Trauma Training Toolkit (3 rd Edition)! The Child Welfare Trauma Training Toolkit (CWTTT) 3rd Edition is a training series designed to support the infusion of trauma-informed knowledge and skills into child welfare organizational cultures. The CWTTT contains targeted training for various levels and roles within child welfare organizations, resulting in positive sustainable changes in the policies, programs, and practices which...

From FUTURES Without Violence, April 2020 The FUTURES policy team in Washington D.C. helped secure direct support for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and for children who experience trauma and abuse, and for the nonprofit advocates who support them, including: $45 million in Family Violence Prevention and Services grants that prevent and respond to family and domestic violence, and $2 million for the National Domestic Violence Hotline $45 million in Child Welfare Services, for...

By Ryan Sabalow, The Sacramento Bee, April 29, 2020 The town of Paradise and the surrounding communities had burned to the ground. The victims, many of them poor and with nowhere to go, barely escaped. They were exhausted and scared. Then the norovirus hit as they crammed together in churches and a local fairground. They shared restrooms and slept shoulder-to-shoulder on cots. At the East Ave Church in Chico , some 300 Camp Fire evacuees had it better than some others in Butte County. Only...

By Aidin Vaziri, San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2020 We already know life will not return to normal when Bay Area shelter-in-place restrictions are lifted. But for seniors , and other people who are at higher risk for developing more serious complications from COVID-19 illness, things will be especially challenging. “It is going to be a new way of life,” said Dr. Nima Afshar , who specializes in emergency and internal medicine at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “It...

By Byrhonda Lyons, Cal Matters, April 30, 2020 The vast majority of people who were unhoused in California before coronavirus swept across the state are exactly where they were. Encampments still line the streets. Shelters feel more like a risk than a refuge. And affordable housing is as elusive as ever. Watch as they capture moments from their everyday lives — and talk about how they struggle to stay safe and healthy under circumstances that have often grown only more hazardous. For the...

By Lori Basheda, California Healthline, April 30, 2020 Jane Gunter, a nurse practitioner in Tuolumne County, California, has long wanted to specialize in mental health so she can treat patients who have anxiety, depression and more complicated mental illnesses. Her county, a rural outpost in the Sierra Nevada foothills with a population of about 54,000, has only five psychiatrists — “a huge shortage,” she said. But Gunter, 56, wasn’t about to quit her job at the Me-Wuk Indian Health Center...

By Lulu Orozco, The New York Times, April 30, 2020 It was 5 p.m. on a recent Wednesday when Domitila Alvarez, 52, set down her cutting tools and walked from the broccoli fields to the crowded company bus taking the workers back to town. Ms. Alvarez did her best to protect herself before boarding. She wound a white bandanna tight over her face, leaving just a sliver for her eyes. She pulled on two pairs of gloves — a latex pair and then a cloth pair. “The truth is,” Ms. Alvarez said, “we all...

By Manuela Tobias and Robert Rodriguez, Cal Matters, April 11, 2020 Last week, Isabel Solorio turned away five families from the Lanare food bank serving farmworkers in rural Fresno County. There just wasn’t enough food to feed the 215 families who showed up. It was twice the number of families that needed food a week earlier, she said. But that same week, on a farm just 20 minutes away, at least two fields of fresh lettuce were disced back into the ground, left to rot as the restaurants...

By Michelle Esrick, Cracked Up Movie, April 2020 — A letter from Director Michelle Esrick — Dear friends, My heart goes out to everyone during this extremely challenging and unprecedented time. We are all experiencing what a traumatic event this is for everyone around the world -- from the reports we all hear on the news, to stories from family and friends, and for me personally being hospitalized with Covid-19. Many trauma survivors, including myself, are experiencing higher levels of...