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A new Prevention Institute report, featured Wednesday in USA Today , offers a groundbreaking framework for understanding the relationship between community trauma and violence. In doing so, the report provides insight into how we can overcome the inequities that contribute to a cycle of inner-city gun violence, poverty, unemployment, and poor health in communities of color. As additional treatment models are developed for individual trauma, there is a growing need for addressing trauma as a...

Image: fostercarekidsneedlovetoo.files.wordpress.com About 9,000 foster children in Los Angeles County — or 52 percent of all county foster youth — live with relatives, DCFS Director Philip Browning told the Board of Supervisors. A 2015 survey of relative caregivers, many of whom care for more than one child, found that 51 percent of those responding were 51-70 years old. About half of the foster children are grandsons or granddaughters. That means that many of the caregivers are...

                                           Image: Wikipedia.org Today, probation is the linchpin of the criminal justice system The Los Angeles Times article states the present lens of the County of Los Angeles Probation Department. When Sacramento transferred responsibility for...

Yes, that's at 2 p.m. this Thursday at the Lobero Theater , California's oldest, continuously operating theatre! James Redford, who directed  Resilience , will be doing a Q-and-A following the screening on Thursday. (He will not attend the Friday screening.) Resilience premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, Jan. 22 , followed by several more screenings last week.   Here's the description from the Resilience page on the Santa Barbara International Film Festival web...

Children's Bureau - Office of the Administration for Children and Families - January 25, 2016 This report presents national data about child abuse and neglect known to child protective services agencies in the United States during federal fiscal year 2014. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/resource/child-maltreatment-2014

As a college student, Rob Bonta had a summer job working as a counselor for troubled kids. Now, two decades later he is bringing legislation to address some of the needs he saw then. “I worked with some of these kids as a counselor out of college, and I’d walk them home and hear some of these stories,” Assembly member Bonta (D-Oakland) said. “Shootings they heard. Or shootings they witnessed the night before.” It was the summer of his junior year at Yale, when...

Just moments into watching "Paper Tigers" last August, Angie Dillon Shore and Socorro Shiels found themselves wiping away tears.  By the film's conclusion, Angie, a former youth counselor and current Upstream Investments Program Manager, and Socorro, then the Superintendent of Santa Rosa City Schools both felt compelled to take immediate action.  What if together, these two women could bring the film to local educators and parents?  Could the film change the conversation...

Julie Ellerton / TMT Several agencies worked together during a recent meeting at Malibu City Hall to discuss the needs of homeless in Malibu. Pictured, from left: Timothy Lippman, Leah Randall, Gail Block, Tony Walczuk, Mark Winn and Carol Moss. Although the predicted El Niño has only resulted in a few days of rain in Malibu so far, an interagency group is concerned how the Malibu homeless might fare in the face of heavy downpours, flooding and mudslides that could still occur over...

Photo: thomashawk/Flickr One major difference separates the troubling Minority Report policing programs from what happened in L.A. County's Child Welfare system. One of the primary goals of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system is keeping kids out of lock-up. But in this pursuit, the county took a surprising step: It used a predictive analytics tool as part of a program to identify which specific kids might end up behind bars. The process wasn’t incredibly complicated: It...

Community members got their first chance Wednesday to weigh in on new plans by the city and county of Los Angeles to address the region's growing problem with homelessness. During two public hearings, advocates for the homeless praised the proposals while others pointed to gaps in the plans, including a lack of strategies to help women who are forced out of their homes because of domestic violence. The county's draft, released last week, proposed spending $150 million in county and state...

Dozens of inmates at the North County Correctional Facility were subjected to the “potty watch” process, according to the Los Angeles Times. L.A. county jail will no longer shackle inmates to walls for ‘potty watch’ A Los Angeles county jail has ended the practice of shackling inmates to walls while waiting for them to expel contraband — a practice known as “potty watch” — after 24 cases of alleged abuse were referred to prosecutors. Dozens of...

A Dynamic and Deepening Crisis That Demands Our Attention By Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas The Board of Supervisors’ most recent initiative set aside $4 million for teams of social workers and health professionals to go out into the streets of Skid Row and connect homeless single adults to housing and supportive services. Los Angeles County has half a million more very low-income households than available apartments so the typical monthly rent has skyrocketed 27 percent since...