Blog

By Sonia Waraich, Times-Standard, September 1, 2019 School suspension rates are unusually high in Humboldt County, but school districts say they’re working on reducing those numbers. Overall, the county had a 6.6% suspension rate across all its schools during the 2017-2018 school year, compared with a rate of 3.5% for the rest of the state, according to data from the state Department of Education. In some districts, school suspensions jump into the double digits – 11.2% at Southern Humboldt...

By Mariel Padilla, The New York Times, September 4, 2019 Unsettled by recent mass shootings across the nation, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution this week declaring the National Rifle Association a domestic terrorist organization. The resolution was introduced by Supervisor Catherine Stefani on July 30, two days after a shooting at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., in which three people were killed and more than a dozen others injured. Before the...

By Aditi Vaidya, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, August 20, 2019 While many think of the Bay Area of California as the center of big tech and wealth, my memories of Oakland take me back to its Port truck drivers. Working an average of 11 hours a day, waiting in long lines at the Port of Oakland to pick up their loads, truck drivers in the Bay Area were isolated—living in the rigs they decorated with photos of their children and families. You can guess all of the reasons this is...

Re-visioning Prevention: Exploring Systems Innovation and Best Practices in the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect The Strategies 2.0 Southern California Learning Community is pleased to announce the 2019-2020 series designed to build leadership capacity to improve outcomes for children and families in the SoCal region . Gain a shared understanding of effective primary , secondary and tertiary child abuse prevention programs in the SoCal region Increase your knowledge of research evidence...

By Rob Waters, One week ago, for California Healthline. In a career full of twists, turns and high-powered assignments, Thomas Insel may now be embarking on one of his most daunting tasks yet — helping California find its way out of a worrisome mental health care crisis. This year, he assumed a new role to help Gov. Gavin Newsom revamp mental health care in the state. Newsom called Insel his “ mental health czar ,” though his position is unpaid and Insel says it grants him “no authority.”...

By Carlina Hansen, California Health Care Foundation, August 16, 2019 Over the last few months, I’ve had the privilege of listening to more than 100 low-income Californians talk about their experiences and aspirations in the health care system. One takeaway from those conversations rises above everything else I heard: They want to be treated as whole people, not as symptoms, visits, or poor people. The focus groups and interviews we’ve been conducting in recent months were part of a...

By Zaidee Stavley, EdSource, September 3, 2019 For almost two years, Eva Morales moved from homeless shelter to homeless shelter. Sometimes she stayed with friends. On the worst nights, she slept in a friend’s car. It was hard for Morales, but harder for her two small children, who had to adapt with each move, only to be uprooted again soon after. Her son, who is now 4, angered easily. He didn’t want to play with his 2-year-old sister and he refused to eat most of the food at the shelter.

New reports, recently released: The California Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review (CA-PAMR) is a statewide, in-depth examination of deaths while pregnant or within one year after end of pregnancy, which aims to identify the cause and timing of death, factors that contributed to the death, and improvement opportunities in maternity care and support, with the ultimate goal to reduce preventable deaths and associated health disparities. CA-PAMR is a collaborative effort between the Maternal,...

By Strategies CA, September 4, 2019 Healthy families are the bedrock of strong, vibrant communities. When the skills and abilities of professionals and their organizations grow and strengthen, they can create bigger, more sustainable changes in their communities so that all families can be healthy. Organizations working with families want to support as many people as possible and make a bigger impact but their budgets and resources fall far short of their aspirations. With no-cost trainings...

By Jackie Botts and Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado, The Fresno Bee, September 2, 2019 In May 2017, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors set an ambitious goal: enroll 70,000 new families in food stamps in two years. Home to the state’s highest poverty rate and a growing homeless crisis, the county was enrolling just 69% of residents who were eligible for CalFresh, the state’s name for the federal food stamps program. With full participation, the county would have been expected to gain...

By Jessica Lander Roughly half of American school children have experienced at least some form of trauma — from neglect, to abuse, to violence. In response, educators often find themselves having to take on the role of counselors, supporting the emotional healing of their students, not just their academic growth. With this evolving role comes an increasing need to understand and address the ways in which student trauma affects our education professionals. In a growing number of professions,...

The California Department of Social Services (CDSS), Office of Child Abuse Prevention (OCAP) has partnered with the Chadwick Center for Children and Families at Rady Children’s Hospital – San Diego to launch the Advancing California’s Trauma-Informed Systems (ACTS) project. Designed for child welfare systems, the ACTS Project includes opportunities for: Collaborative planning and thoughtful identification of individualized areas for trauma-informed care (TIC) advancement In-depth resource...