April 2017

An important part of my job working as a pediatrician in one of the most impoverished communities in America for children, is writing for our local newspaper. My 50th article for the Inquirer was published yesterday and is all about resilience. Here it is, please share http://www.philly.com/philly/health/kidshealth/Overcome-toxic-stress-poverty-Oprah-Sotomayor-kids-health-resiliency.html...

In this module, we will explore ancestral influences on individuation/connection, and merging dynamics. As the twin and multiple birth rate is continuing to increase this module also looks at twin pregnancy, the impact of losing a twin during pregnancy, and growing up as a twin.  I will delineate the difference between identical and fraternal twins and because more twins mean more breech positions for babies about to be born we will also look briefly at breech birth.

At the recent Trauma & Resiliency Summit in the Columbia River Gorge, the sheriff of Sherman County (population 1700) approached Claire Ranit, MARC project director, to talk about creating a trauma-informed justice system. He wasn’t the only one seeking Ranit out that day. A woman with tears in her eyes also approached; inspired by discussions of resilience at the Summit, she’d texted her 20-year-old son, who has developmental disabilities, and praised his recent efforts to move into his...

2017 Call for Proposals Release Date: April 5, 2017 | Application Deadline: May 02, 2017, 3:00 p.m. ET Purpose Forward Promise aims to promote opportunities for boys and young men of color (BYMOC) to heal, grow, and thrive in the face of chronic stress and trauma. Empowerment Projects seek to strengthen organizations that provide culturally relevant healing responses to trauma, and can partner with the youth-serving systems that touch BYMOC to advance new practices to prevent further...

Gigi’s freshman year at Amundsen High School started with a bang, for all the wrong reasons. She snapped at teachers, got into fights, was often late to class, and was a regular in detention. Before, just one of those transgressions at the 1,200-student school on Chicago’s North Side would likely have gotten her what it got most kids across America’s third-largest school district: a no-questions-asked 10-day suspension. But when Christian Pederson, the school’s restorative justice...

Introduction: Making Real Change We have reached a tipping point in our society where a critical mass of people is demanding a new social contract. Alongside this wave, our clients and partners have been expanding their focus of attention from their own organizations and single-issue coalitions to movement networks oriented around a shared vision and aligned action. Leaders are committing to nurturing movements over the long term and forging values-based relationships across issue areas,...

America today is beset by a New Urban Crisis. If the old urban crisis was defined by the flight of business, jobs, and the middle class to the suburbs, the New Urban Crisis is defined by the back-to-the-city movement of the affluent and the educated—accompanied by rising inequality, deepening economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing. [For more of this story, written by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/04/new-urban-crisis-index/521037/]

The day Tarra Simmons walked out of Mission Creek Correctional Center for Women in 2013, she owed $7,500 to Kitsap County in Washington state. These court-mandated fines and fees, known as legal financial obligations, or LFOs, included charges for “services” she had “rendered” — police, court, public defender , DNA collection — and some line items unrelated to her case, such as expert witnesses and victims’ services. (Her case had no named victim.) Simmons had spent the previous 20 months of...

COACH is a method for developing authentic healing relationships with patients, encompassing the Camden Coalition’s tools, philosophies, and techniques for supporting patients with complex health and social needs in managing their health. Recently, we published our COACH framework as a manual with the help of our friends at the PolicyLab of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia . COACH is proving useful for not just health care providers: In Camden, the city’s school district is learning...

Jo Poshard of the Poshard Foundation says more and more social service agencies are interacting and sharing information. She believes they are trying hard to take a team approach to serve the best interest of the child. “Trauma-focused training that we did and that we completed was a wonderful example of agencies coming together and working together,” Poshard said. Ginger Meyer, clinical director for the Children’s Medical and Mental Health Resource Network, said the training grew out of a...

ABOUT THE PROJECT Today, we can accurately predict a Coloradan’s health outcomes and access to health care based on factors like their race, income, or ZIP code. This is unacceptable, because it means that people of color, Coloradans with less economic opportunity, those living in communities with fewer resources, and others, face increased barriers to good health simply due to their life circumstances. How did this happen? Colorado—just like the rest of the US—has a long, well-documented...

The current adverse childhood experience (ACE) survey does not include exposure to community violence (ECV) as a category. A new study by Lee, Larkin, and Esaki (2017) point to evidence that ECV fits the World Health Organization (WHO)’s classification for an ACE category, that it must: cause biological stress response, be sensitive to policies, be common across societies, be able to be measured quickly and easily, and be proximal in respect to causality (WHO, 2011). Lee et al. (2017)...