When Tiffany Harris and her two children emerged from their hotel after Hurricane Michael roared past, her 3-year-old son pointed to a sea of fallen trees and shattered buildings. "It's broken. It's broken, Mommy, fix it," she recalls her little boy Amari begging. Harris, who lives with her boyfriend, two children, plus her sister and her four children near Panama City, soon learned their town house was uninhabitable. Everything was a total loss after Michael powered inland across the...

Members of Florida's health, mental health, child-serving agencies, faith-based communities, law enforcement groups and others are invited to attend a free webinar tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. EST on trauma response and how to better help communities find resilience following natural disasters. You can register for the webinar now by clicking on this link . Elaine Miller Karas , executive director of the Trauma Resource Institute in Claremont, CA, will lead the webinar. It will be recorded and...

Even asking how best to wean drug abusers off opioids can raise hackles. Addiction specialists have straddled a philosophical divide over the use of pharmaceuticals in the process. But the side advocating against medication assisted treatment is shrinking in Tennessee and nationwide. One line of thinking is that freedom from all drugs is the only real recovery. So it’s been difficult for those with that mindset to embrace special opioids that tame the cravings and ward off the misery of...

Room erupts in applause for the grandmother of witness William Kellibrew during July 11 House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing. The power of personal stories from witnesses and committee members fueled the July 11 hearing on childhood trauma in the House Oversight and Reform Committee* throughout the nearly four hours of often emotional and searing testimony and member questions and statements (Click here for 3:47 hour video). The hearing was organized into a two panels—testimony from...

Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...

To read the announcement and all details, click HERE and see below key dates. BUILD is looking to support dynamic collaboratives driving sustainable improvements in community health. Are you ready to BUILD with us? For this new third cohort, BUILD is looking to support up to 17 innovative collaboratives across the US t hat include a community-based organization, hospital or health system, and public health department working together in dynamic ways to address upstream challenges and drive...

Thanks to an explosion in scientific research now possible with imaging technologies, such as fMRI and SPECT, experts can actually see how the brain develops. This helps explain why exposure to adverse childhood experiences can so deeply influence and change a child's brain and thus their physical and emotional health and quality of life across their lifetime. The above time-lapse study was conducted over 10 years. The darker colors represent brain maturity (brain development). I have added...

The second of two free Community Resiliency (CRM) webinars with Elaine Miller-Karas , key creator of the CRM, will be held Thursday, May 14, from 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. ET, (10 a.m. CT; 9 a.m. MT, and 8 a.m. PT) and will include the practical application of tools of the model. CRM is an ACEs science-based biological model for helping individuals become emotionally regulated during natural disasters and other dysregulating times. Miller-Karas will be joined by CRM trainers from Wilmington, NC:...

The University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions partnered with Peace4Tarpon under the Robert Wood Johnson Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) grant. Together they created 2 online graduate courses that focus on addressing ACEs and creating trauma-informed and resilience-based programs from a public health approach. Peace4Gainesville and Peace4 TheBigBend have also contributed to these courses. This post is intended to showcase some of the work of the...

The World Health Organization has compiled a recent meta-analysis about how much ACEs cost us Millions of adults across Europe and north America live with a legacy of ACEs. Their findings suggest that a 10% reduction in ACE prevalence could equate to annual savings of $105 billion. Programs to prevent ACEs and moderate their effects are available. Rebalancing expenditure towards ensuring safe and nurturing childhoods would be economically beneficial and relieve pressures on health-care...

When you first hear about it, it sounds unlikely, fact that something that happened to someone in utero, at the age of two months, or four years, or any time in childhood, is what is killing them as an adult, or making them want to die, or making them want to hurt themselves or others. Yet the connection between childhood trauma and adult disease, mental illness, addiction, suicide, violence – most all of society’s ills – is as irrefutable as the myriad truths revealed about it in the...

By Maria Godoy and Daniel Wood, National Public Radio, May 30, 2020 In April, New Orleans health officials realized their drive-through testing strategy for the coronavirus wasn't working. The reason? Census tract data revealed hot spots for the virus were located in predominantly low-income African-American neighborhoods where many residents lacked cars. In response, officials have changed their strategy, sending mobile testing vans to some of those areas, says Thomas LaVeist , dean of...

In 2012, Greater Richmond SCAN and five other community partners hatched a one-year plan to educate the Richmond, Virginia, community about ACEs science and to embed trauma-informed practices. Eight years later, the original group has evolved into the Greater Richmond Trauma-Informed Community Network (GRTICN) with 495 people and 170 organizations. And they're just scratching the surface.

ACEs initiative participants in communities where there is tension between the community and law enforcement will want to join Becky Haas in a compelling conversation on law enforcement, ACEs science, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement and protests. Haas is a nationally recognized adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) science initiative builder and trainer. She and colleagues Renee Wilson-Simmons, the head of the ACE Awareness Foundation of Memphis, Tennessee, and Maggi Duncan,...

Monica McCasklill, left, and her daughter Kena Johnson, at their home in Greenwood, Missisppi. They respectively lost their grandmother and great grandmother, Ethel Huntley, to Covid-19. Huntley lived in a nearby nursing home and the family allege failings in her primary care. Photograph: Rory Doyle/The Guardian. By Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, August 5, 2020 Poor access to healthcare, failed political leadership and the endurance of segregation and racism have contributed to a surge in...

Nadine Burke Harris, California’s Surgeon General, has a lot in common with the vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris—Jamaican heritage, surname, home state—and a commitment to addressing ACEs and toxic stress. As reported in the New Yorker article by Paul Tough, “The Poverty Clinic,” Dr. Harris told Kamala Harris, then San Francisco district attorney, about ACEs in 2008 and in response, she offered to help. District Attorney Harris then introduced her to professor of child and...

Register for A Better Normal- Our reckoning with race and equity at ACEs Connection

Join us on Friday November 6, 2020 from noon to 1:00 PST as we come together and join Satya Chandragiri MD, Bonnie O’Hern RN, Denise Proudfoot RN, & Michael Polacek RN for a discussion around the tender issue of suicide. Together we will discuss ways people and providers can support each other and encourage communities to take action to support one another around suicide prevention, crisis intervention, and the layers of culture and structural barriers to care. A special emphasis will be...

Southeastern ACEs Connection and national CTIPP leaders on the quarterly leader call welcomed guest speaker Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz (top left) for their quarterly call. Also among those present were (top row l-r) Carey Sipp, Jesse Kohler, Jesse Hardin, (second row, l-r) Patti Tiberi, Mebane Boyd, Jen Drake-Croft, Dan Press, (third row, l-r) Mimi Graham, Christopher Freeze, Margaret Stagmeier, (fourth row, l-r) Emily Marsh, Liz Peterson, Alyssa Koziarski and Janet Pozmantier. Also present was...

Please join us for our next installment of A Better Normal, our live webinar series in which we imagine and create our society as trauma-informed! You may have seen we changed our name recently from ACEs Connection to PACEs Connection. Please join us to learn all about the groundbreaking research of Positive Childhood Experiences and how this is going to transform the work we are all doing. >>Click here to register<< PACEs and HOPE Live Event Friday, March 26, 2021 Noon PT / 1pm...

Our version of a “Path to a Just Society” is our first attempt at creating a common language and identifying points along the path to a just society. The Race and Equity workgroup of PACEs Connection started the project in early 2021, following a staff meeting where we realized that we, our organization and the movement needed this. We think it can help all of us gauge where we are, where we want to be, and what’s needed to get to the next level of integrating practices and policies based on...

By Elaine Miller-Karas MSW, LCSW Building Resiliency to Trauma Psychology Today, September 30, 2022 Mental health can suffer after extreme climate events. KEY POINTS Mental health conditions exacerbated by natural disasters include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. After a disaster, the number of people needing assistance from the mental health systems strains or exceeds community capacity. There are simple strategies helpers can use to help survivors restore...