Tagged With "foster youth"
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Sold-out Paper Tigers screening and panel in Berkeley, CA
Over 130 residents from across the San Francisco Bay Area representing education, health, and law enforcement attended the sold-out screening of Paper Tigers and panel on December 9 at the Brower Center in Berkeley, CA. The panel discussion was so involved it went 25 minutes longer than scheduled and spilled into the lobby where attendees talked until 10 pm! The documentary Paper Tigers follows six students during a school year at Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA. Lincoln is the...
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Survey: Healthcare providers, community organizations weigh in on California's ACEs screening program
In January, California took a historic leap forward to promote universal ACEs screening of the state’s 13 million adults and children in the Medi-Cal program. The eventual goal is to promote ACEs screening for all patients, but this is a first step in dealing with a major issue that ACEs science has identified: that many children will develop serious health problems later in life because the healthcare system is not currently set up to detect the roots of those problems. The term ACEs, which...
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The San Francisco Jail That Started a School [Medium.com]
I t’s the first day of class for Child Development 123: Learning Disabilities, and instructor Sylvia Buford, PhD, is laying down some rules. “I do children’s disabilities. I don’t do adult meltdowns,” she says. “If there’s a problem” — she points at her desk — “I will have to use that radio” to summon help. Her students, more than a dozen women dressed in the orange sweatshirts and sweatpants worn by inmates of San Francisco County Jail Number 2 near downtown San Francisco, listen quietly as...
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This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline (nationswell.com)
Almost half of all foster care youth end up in jail within two years of aging out of the system. First Place for Youth has figured out a housing and support strategy to keep these young adults out from behind bars and living on their own. Moments of stability were rare during Pamela Bolnick's childhood. She repeatedly witnessed her father beat her mother, a Venezuelan immigrant diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bolnick's mom eventually left her abusive spouse, fleeing to the Bay Area with her...
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Toxic Stress, Behavioral Health, and the Next Major Era in Public Health by Mental Health America
To view the document, click on the following link: http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/issues/toxic-stress-behavioral-health-and-next-major-era-public-health
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Toxic Stress, Toxic Streets (4 minute video)
This video is about 2 years old, but I just came across it last week and wanted to share with you all. It is a powerful statement by the students at Leadership High School in San Francisco, CA. They speak about the ongoing adversity and toxic stress in their daily lives and in their community, all through the power of music. The youth voice is so important as we work to bring trauma-informed and resilience building practices to communities. Link to video: Toxic Stress, Toxic Streets
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Trauma education and mindfulness help youth living amid gun violence
Armon Hurst, 2nd from left, first row, Teens on Target, courtesy of YouthAlive! Eighteen-year-old Armon Hurst serves as vice president of the student body at Castlemont High School in Oakland, Calif. He has a 4.0 grade point average, is an avid baseball player, and is slated to go to college next year. But until a few years ago, Hurst would find himself waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. It was difficult to concentrate at school, and he wasn’t eating well. Armon Hurst “There...
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Trauma-inducing Youth Leadership Retreats
According to an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle , residential retreats aimed at developing leadership and empathy in high school students are using questionable methods such as asking participants to reenact racist behavior, shout degrading slurs at one another and divulge family trauma. While some students say the camp experiences are transformative, the investigation finds the teaching methods suspect, unethical and possibly harmful. A San Jose judge has now called for the Bay...
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Trauma-informed groups rev up to address race, inclusion
Eighteen-year-old Kia Hanson has always enjoyed her time as a youth leader at the East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC). She’s worked mostly with five- and six-year-olds since she began in 2016. Recently, she tapped into new skills, especially if the kids were having a meltdown. Kia Hanson “If they’re off, we ask them, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Do you want to talk about anything?’,” she explains. “Basically asking before assuming they’re mad at the world for no reason.” What made the...
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Trauma Transformed launches regional effort in San Francisco Bay Area
Nearly 300 impassioned and committed people crowded into the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center last week to launch Trauma Transformed. Known as T2, the regional effort representing the San Francisco...
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Two New Grant Opportunities for Youth Development and Diversion Services
In 2019, more than $40 million will become available to fund community-based, culturally rooted, trauma-informed services for youth in California as alternatives to arrest and incarceration. Thousands of California youth are arrested every year for low-level offenses. Youth who are arrested or incarcerated for low-level offenses are less likely to graduate high school, more likely to suffer negative health-outcomes, and more likely to have later contact with the justice system.
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UCSF Plans to Shutter Clinic Serving Minority Youth [missionlocal.org]
One of a handful of youth clinics serving the Mission, Bayview, Excelsior, and Visitacion Valley communities will be shut down by the end of April, a move decried by school nurses who say it leaves young women and men of color without easy access to birth control, testing for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and reproductive health education. “There’s going to be a lot of schools in this area that are going to be severely impacted by not having them in this area,” said...
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Young Women’s Freedom Center Reports Dire Impact of Criminalization in San Francisco [sfbayview.com]
By Layla Crater, San Francisco Bay View, August 25, 2019 The Young Women’s Freedom Center, in partnership with the San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families (DCYF) and the San Francisco Adult Probation Department, has released the findings of a report that shows the dire impact of criminalization on women, girls and transgender and gender non-conforming people of color – from housing instability to economic hardship and the intergenerational trauma of mass incarceration.
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Youth court banishes blame; leads with ACEs science
YMCA Marin County Youth Court in San Rafael, California In her opening statement, 17-year-old youth advocate Eva advises jurors how to proceed and summarizes her “client’s” good qualities. “As you will see, Julian is genuine, well-spoken and friendly. I recommend asking him about his friends and family, his future plans and his activities outside of school.” (First names only of all minors are used to protect their privacy.) Welcome to the YMCA Marin County (CA) Youth Court, one of 1,400...
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Youth-led community organizing as a tool for building resilience
It started as an answer to a youth-led campaign. Young people in arts programs in San Francisco Bay Area schools had produced spoken word videos about inequities in their communities that helped put them at risk for type 2 diabetes. Dr. Jean Junior The response by their peers was enormous, according to Dr. Jean Junior, who volunteered for the project as a pediatric resident at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). “Young people would say ‘You’ve actually gotten me interested.
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Trauma to Trust uses ACEs science to heal wounds between community members, police
photo courtesy of EJUSA/Ron Holtz Studio Forty-seven-year-old Al-Tariq Best, founder and executive director of the HUBB , an arts and healing organization for youth, recalls the rage, humiliation and fear he felt as a 17-year-old when he and three other Black friends were pulled over by police in Newark, N.J. Al-Tariq Best “[There were] all these people around us. They search the car. They strip the car down. They make us pull our pants down in broad daylight. And I'm, I'm upset. And I'm...
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California reaches milestone with ACEs initiatives pulsing in all 58 counties. Next: All CA cities.
Karen Clemmer, the Northwest community facilitator with ACEs Connection, was already deeply interested in the CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study when she and a colleague from the Child Parent Institute were invited to lunch by ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens in 2012. But that lunch meeting changed everything.
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Greater Richmond Trauma Informed Community Network, first to join ACEs Cooperative of Communities, shows what it means to ROCK!
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.
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Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: One-Pager
Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: One-Pager
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COVID-19 Black initiative delivers call to action in San Francisco Bay Area
As the COVID-19 pandemic began its devastating sweep through African American communities in April, Andre Chapman, CEO of the San Jose, California-based Unity Care , saw a glaring need for developing a COVID-19 prevention campaign that spoke directly to African Americans. “Many of our young folks and families really didn't understand the impact of this virus, nor did they believe much of the information that was coming through the media,” says Chapman. His organization provides housing and...
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Behavioral health issues deepen among local youth experiencing homelessness [bizjournals.com]
By Erin Bernall, San Francisco Business Times, October 5, 2020 For young people experiencing homelessness, each day begins in search of urgent basics, such as food and safety. This quest is compounded with threats of violence and exploitation, uncertainty and distrust, and extreme stress, all of which can impact health and wellness for this vulnerable group of young people ages 12-24. In San Francisco, an estimated one in five individuals experiencing homelessness is under the age of 25, and...
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Tools to Mitigate Work Stress and Prevent Burnout: For Health Care Providers during COVID and Beyond
Whether you work in a hospital, a safety net clinic, or in another health care setting, no health care provider working during the COVID-19 pandemic needs to read the flurry of news stories that highlight the extreme stress experienced by people in this line of work – you already know it firsthand. This webinar will introduce health care providers to the Community Resiliency Model ( CRM ), an evidence-based method of managing traumatic stress, preventing burnout and building resiliency. This...
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The 'war on drugs' was a war on people of color
In the spring of 1982, Susan Burton turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with the death of her 5-year-old son, who had run into the street and was hit by a vehicle driven by an off-duty police officer . Over the course of the next 17 years, Burton was in and out of prison. “Each time I left, I felt a little more broken,” she told me recently. What would have made a difference, she said, was “if there could have been a way to have therapy from traumatic childhood events, disappointments and...
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Want to empower youth in communities of color during COVID? Let them lead.
Widespread reporting has revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many poor communities of color. Less widely known is how the pandemic has affected young people in those communities. “COVID-19 has had a particularly harsh impact on youth of color,” further traumatizing [juvenile-justice] system-impacted youth and their families already struggling with disproportionately high rates of disease, death, job loss and housing insecurity,” said Jim Keddy of Youth Forward . Keddy was...
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Speakers at children & youth conference call for systems change based in love, liberation
California can support children and youth by tackling the state’s — and the country’s — legacy of White supremacy and replacing it with a trauma-informed approach of love, empathy, and support.
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Youth Detention Facility finds culture of kindness more effective than punishment
A corner of the Multi-Sensory De-escalation Room, All MSDR photos courtesy of Valerie Clark When a young person enters the de-escalation room in the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility , they’ll find dimmed lights, bottles of lavender, orange and other essential oils, an audio menu featuring the rush of ocean waves and other calming sounds, along with squeeze balls, TheraPutty, jigsaw puzzles, and an exercise ball to bounce on. TheraPutty, squeeze balls and more Sometimes, with a...
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Marisol Tamez
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Bre Gentile
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Stacey Blankenbaker
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Cassandra Zawilski
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Sandra Naughton
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Jim Hickman
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Laura Shaw
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Policing in schools: Redefining public safety to be supportive & healing, instead of punitive & criminalizing
A recent video , shared on the national news, shows a 16-year-old Florida student being slammed to the ground by a police officer working at her school. It’s one of many such incidents of school-based police violence against students captured in videos around the country. Some of the victims are as young as five years old. About 47% of U.S. schools employ armed police officers , known as school resource officers, who are there to keep students safe. But students who attend these schools...
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California PACEs Connection initiatives spark new connections in regional meeting
Among PACEs Connection initiatives around the country, it’s well known that our social network is something like a bustling, giant town square where people share ideas, resources and any number of conversations about how to prevent childhood adversity and promote positive childhood experiences. On May 14, PACEs Connection assembled a virtual town square gathering of PACEs initiatives in California, where we have 58 initiatives sparking action all across the state. Speakers at the gathering,...
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Resource: Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic One-Pager (English & Spanish!)
English: The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP) , Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative , ACEs Connection , and the Yolo County Children’s Alliance co-created “Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic” in both English and Spanish. This material is intended for Californian families experiencing the severe economic consequences resulting from...
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Jen Leland
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Racing ACEs Series! Sacramento and Bay Area--join us Fall 2021
Please join us for upcoming Sacramento and Bay Area Racing ACEs Fall 2021 Series! Please join our expanded Racing ACEs Network and join our upcoming Fall series. You all are among the first invites as you have partnered with RYSE or Trauma Transformed at the nexus of racial justice, ACEs, and/or trauma-informed praxis. We do hope you can join us for this three part series. Please see attached Info Packet for our Fall Bay Area and Sacramento Racing ACEs series--September 1, September 23, and...
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Me & My Emotions: A New, Free Resource for Teens
The pandemic has had a lasting effect on youth mental health. Moved by a desire to reduce youth’s toxic stress and increase their resilience, The Dibble Institute, in partnership with a team of students and alumni from ArtCenter College of Design and author Carolyn Curtis, PhD, is releasing Me & My Emotions —a new, free adaptation of our beloved Mind Matters Curriculum. The mobile-friendly Me & My Emotions website features engaging graphics and bite-sized lessons teens can access and...
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Southern Oregon Success wants all children, families to thrive by 2025
For Peter Buckley, program manager for the PACEs initiative, Southern Oregon Success (SORS), the “aha moment” around positive and adverse childhood experiences was more of an “aha month.”
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Donielle Prince
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John Flores
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Check Out New July Dates Added to the 2023 CRC Summer Curriculum and the Official Launch of the Dedicated CRC Community Page
July is a time to celebrate all summer has to offer by building bridges and innovating with community to get to the heart of trauma-informed awareness and resilience building. This month, we’ve added new July dates to the summer 2023 *CRC* curriculum—but that’s only half of the good news. Last year, the CRC began as a pilot program. Now that it's evolved, what better time to bring accelerator participants together in a PACEs Connection CRC community than the summer? We are proud to announce...
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World Mental Health Day: Mobilizing the Human Family Through the CRC & the PACEs Movement
Awareness about health outcomes are as much about the long-term impact caused by adverse childhood experiences as they are by positive childhood experiences. By providing education on trauma-informed awareness and resilience building frameworks, the CRC Accelerator certification is a tool for both.
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Our Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities (TREC) Model's website launched on 1.25.24 with our Award Ceremony!
The culmination of thousands of hours from our Trauma-Resilient Educational Communities (TREC) team in developing our TREC Model, we launched TRECeducation.com website on Thursday, January 25, 2024. Craig Beswick, Vice-President, School Development Division, Lifelong Learning Administration Corporation (LLAC) opened up our exciting launch, which was hosted by the beautiful UCSD Park & Market in downtown San Diego. Craig warmly welcomed over 200 attendees to our Awards Ceremony and TREC...
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