Saeeda Hafiz, author of The Healing: One Woman's Journey from Poverty to Inner Riches, is a nutrition educator for San Francisco Unified School District, wellness expert, trained cook, and yoga teacher. "On the surface, she was an accomplished professional. Beneath the exterior, however, she suffered from her past and her family challenges, including domestic violence, addiction and poverty that she witnessed throughout her childhood. Through her writing, Saeeda takes us on a journey...

When prompted by a life coach to comfort the child inside of her, Kim Montleon, a young mother at the center of the documentary film, Wrestling Ghosts , says emphatically: “I can’t do that; I’m afraid I won’t come back!” That’s the beginning of Montleon’s two-year struggle to dig deep into her own harrowing childhood trauma to find a way to heal so that she can nurture her young children. The documentary by filmmaker Ana Sofia Joanes was screened to more than 140 people on Saturday,...

Trauma: a story of hope Any story about healing trauma is a story of hope, and a story for all of us. Because we all carry trauma. Whether we think of ourselves this way or not. We know now that we all carry trauma because we know that trauma is transmitted intergenerationally . And we know that in the U.S., our country was built on--and continues to be sustained by--legacies of trauma : violence against Native Africans, violence against African Americans, violence against Latinos, violence...

Mental Health Symposium is on November 9!

Hi ACEs San Francisco community! Would you be our VIP guests at the Oakland Screening of Wrestling Ghosts on Saturday Sept. 29th @5pm at the First Congregational Church of Oakland? We have a limited number of FREE tickets that we want to share with you. You are the forefront of the resilience movement and we would be honored to have you for the premiere! Please email charlotte@wrestlingghosts.com if you’d like a ticket (first come first serve). And PLEASE, let us know if there’s anyone in LA...

In July, medical residents in family medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, CA, began screening adult patients for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). But it’s an ACE survey with a twist: it’s shorter, not the 10-question survey of the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study , according to Dr. Kathryn Ridout who is leading the pilot along with Dr. Francis Chu and Dr. Alec Uy . Why a shorter ACE survey? Dr. Kathryn Ridout “When we were doing our initial discussions with stakeholders in...

When Dr. Angela Bymaster thinks about ACEs exposure, her thoughts often turn to the adolescents who are her patients now. “It’s the teenagers who keep me up at night,” says Bymaster, a family medicine doctor who works at the Washington Neighborhood Health Clinic in San Jose. The clinic serves low-income families in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. Dr. Angela Bymaster “They’re so often starting with the behaviors themselves. The teenagers are the intersection of adverse childhood events...

This Wrestling Ghosts screening promises to be a healing event for all who gather. And our hope is that it will catalyze the formation of a lasting local network of support around parents and care providers of children in the Bay Area. As things speed up all across the Bay, we need supportive infrastructure now more than ever.

The addiction treatment program at Highland Hospital’s emergency room is only one way that cities and health care providers are connecting with people in unusual settings. Another is in San Francisco, where city health workers are taking to the streets to find homeless people with opioid use disorder and offering them buprenorphine prescriptions on the spot. The city is spending $6 million on the program in the next two years, partly in response to a striking increase in the number of people...

One of the earliest steps many ACEs Connection community initiatives take, is to create a mission statement. If you're ever stuck for ideas, check out examples like the attached statement from the University of San Francisco Center for Child and Family Development, School Based Counseling.

When Marin Community Clinics (MCC) first considered screening their patients for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) they already had decided that if they were going to prevent children from acquiring ACEs, they had to take a radical approach.

Oakland BSC activity: Photo/ Courtesy of Trauma Transformed/East Bay Agency for Children When a group of community organizations in Baltimore came together in 2015, they already knew trauma figured large in many lives. There was violence in the community, in schools, and in community members’ homes. Police brutality occurred. Many suffered the loss of loved ones to incarceration or death. There were house fires and homelessness. Much of the dysfunction was systemic and rooted in racism,...