August 2017

As the debate over last Friday’s presidential pardon of Joe Arpaio , the former sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ continues to roil the nation, WitnessLA turned for comment to a law enforcement figure who frequently found himself at war with the self-styled “toughest sheriff” in America. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón , who served as chief of the Mesa, AZ police department between 2006-2009, possesses a trove of hard-won personal knowledge about how Arpaio works—perhaps more than...

Five core values for establishing a trauma-informed culture in your classroom and/or school. An emphasis on these values lead to a relationship-based culture.

Hello! We wanted to help conference attendees at our June 28-29 Beyond Paper Tigers Conference here in Walla Walla get a sense of the many "Paper Tigers" at work in Walla Walla. This 12-min. video features why a community-wide approach is so critical is helping to create a resilient community. We want to share it with other communities working toward the same goal of creating healthier, more connected communities, around the framework of the NEAR (neurobiology, epigenetics, aces, resilience)...

Today is the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and yet little progress has been made in preparing communities for better outcomes in disasters as we are seeing with Hurricane Harvey in Texas. Each year millions of children are disproportionately impacted and find themselves in great danger and traumatized by disasters disrupting their lives, families, schools, and communities. Despite the dangers of our reality, we are constantly witnessing an unacceptable lack of awareness when it comes...

In a campus near the river here, a program that focuses on helping women who have suffered trauma is seeing success a year and a half after its inception. Riverside Recovery and Reentry Program, operated by the state Department of Corrections along with private contractors, aims to provide a safe, secure and trauma-informed program for women who have been sentenced to time with the department. [For more of this story, witten by Holly K. Michels, go to ...

As the affordability crisis deepens in America’s most expensive cities, many are adopting ambitious plans to increase their housing supply. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has pledged to create or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing, following the 165,000 preserved and created by his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. Seattle has completed or begun construction on more apartments in the 2010s than in all of the previous 50 years combined . Even the notoriously growth-averse Bay Area...

As a man, I can tell you that talking about the topic of depression with other guys makes you about as popular as a porcupine in a balloon factory. But here’s the thing – nearly 10% of men in the United States struggle with this mental health issue (CDC, 2015). And it’s safe to say those numbers are likely much higher. The reason? Most guys would rather admit to anything other than what they feel. For many of us, it’s just not part of our DNA. [For more of this story, written by John D.

Yoga and meditation have both become increasingly popular in the Western world, and practitioners praise their psychological and physical benefits. Current research also suggests that meditating and doing yoga can boost overall well-being and resilience to stress factors. Increasingly, yoga practice and meditation have been the focus of research aiming to test their benefits. Recently, Medical News Today have reported on a wealth of studies pointing to many different advantages of yoga and...

As California teachers return to the classroom this fall, many of them will be faced with the multiple challenges of how to deal with children’s responses to the No. 1 political issue in the United States: the increasingly troubled presidency of Donald Trump. It will be hard for teachers to avoid the issue. Students will show up after a summer during which Trump ignited some of the most intense controversies and passions of his presidency. [For more of this story, written by Louis Freedberg,...

When a kid acts out in New Britain, the first question teachers, administrators and mental health professionals are asking is no longer, “What’s wrong with you?” but, “What happened to you?” The reaction is no longer to punish, but to empathize. The shift is just the beginning of the city’s efforts to become “trauma-informed.” To be “trauma-informed” is to recognize that 25 percent of children under 17 have suffered some form of trauma in their life, according to the National Child Traumatic...

Real estate developer Marjy Stagmeier was sifting through tenant applications for an apartment complex she had purchased in Atlanta and noticed something disturbing: Many of the applicants were single mothers making $8/hour. “I wondered how these women could they afford to live on so little, with the cost of housing, childcare and the daily needs of life being so high. Seeing how little they made moved me to decide, then and there, not to ever raise the rent,” says Marjy.

In her recently published book, Survivor Café , Elizabeth Rosner brings a deeper meaning to genocide, an experience she has been trying to process as a writer and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In her first work of nonfiction, she explores the common threads that tie all survivors of mass trauma – from Armenia to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bosnia – but always returns to Buchenwald, the concentration camp where her father, a young teenager, was imprisoned during the last year of WWII. She...