Local Stories

Did you see this article in the Sacramento Bee? This Community Connections Forum was hosted by Health Net, and focused on educating the community about childhood trauma, as well as the need to build resilient communities in Sacramento and throughout California. Health Net expects to continue to engage this issue. Local partners include Greater Sacramento Urban League, La Familia Counseling Center, Sacramento County, and WellSpace Health. As you can see from the photo, members of Resilient...

On AB 1808: "Emphasized under that umbrella will be restorative justice, social emotional learning and other alternatives that focus on mediation and building healthy relationships over traditional punishments."

Sacramento City Unified School District has made headlines as one of the nation's most discriminatory in disciplining African American students. Board President Jessie Ryan responded in an Op-Ed, writing movingly from her experience both as a mom and as a leader of this school district.

On August 25, Bina Lefkovitz was inducted as the new Trustee for Area 1 of the Sacramento Board of Education. Bina's community work has long foregrounded socio-emotional supports children, and she will certainly bring this perspective to her work at SCOE.

Vacant lots and decaying apartment buildings are scattered through Chanowk Yisrael’s neighborhood in South Oak Park. Across the street is the shuttered Fruit Ridge Elementary School. But even though Yisrael’s neighborhood lacks many things, his home is a scene of abundance. Fruit trees fill his front lawn and grapes line the chain link fence. A passing woman stops to eat the fruit. “My husband is diabetic," she says. "We stop here and get some grapes when his diabetes is acting up." Diabetes...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — The UC Davis CAARE Center has been awarded a $1.6 million grant by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA) to provide mental health services to all newly placed foster children throughout Sacramento County for the next five years. The “Fostering Secure Placements for Traumatized Children in Transition” project, led by Susan Timmer, will allow UC Davis mental health therapists to provide services in the home of newly placed foster children who...

See the attached flyer for information about how you or your organization can help support this Back to School fair in South Sacramento.

As the flyer indicates, the panel introduced Senator Pan’s legislative agenda to develop a Children’s Bill of Rights, with the mission of creating a child-centered California. The issues raised by the attendees, some of whom were community members and parents, and others that represented a range of Sacramento’s public agencies and community based organizations, foregrounded mental health needs in policy advocacy.

On June 1st Resilient Sacramento ACEs Connection representatives Carolyn Curtis, Barbara Stern, and Wendie Skala met with Sacramento Superintendent Don Nottoli to share how they are working together to reduce the number of Adverse Childhood Experiences in the greater Sacramento area and provide opportunities to promote healing and increase resiliency. Superintendent Nottoli expressed interest in helping Resilient Sacramento increase awareness about trauma-informed practices.

Vincent Felitti, a Kaiser Permanente physician in San Diego in the 1990s, had a radical idea. Instead of just asking patients about their symptoms, what would happen if doctors asked them about their childhoods? His hypothesis, built on a hunch informed by experience, was that childhood trauma was connected to poor health later in life. Felitti helped lead an exhaustive study of 17,000 patients that seemed to confirm his theory. That was in 1998. But for years Felitti’s study and his...

See recent Sacramento Bee article about city budget planning. Funds are being proposed for a couple of priority areas that the Sacramento ACEs Connection group are addressing but is it enough to address what is needed here in Sacramento? Sacramento would direct money toward development in the railyard and along the riverfront, as well as pay for homeless needs and after-school programs under a $961.1 million budget proposed Monday by City Manager John Shirey for the upcoming fiscal year.

Room 30 at Oak Ridge Elementary School in Sacramento is decked out with inspirational posters. Board games and art supplies fill the shelves. An exercise treadmill is tucked in one corner. Students use this piece of equipment on a daily basis to manage stress and refocus their energy. Across the room sits school social worker Danielle Martin. She has a stack of student files on her desk this morning, and gets ready to make some phone calls to families. But first, she turns on a small device...