May 2016

A state law going into effect this month would make several thousand undocumented children in Santa Barbara County eligible for full-scope Medi-Cal coverage . Starting this month, undocumented children 19 and under in California are eligible for full-scope Medi-Cal coverage, including an estimated 3,000-4,000 children in Santa Barbara County . Senate Bill 75 , signed into law last June, expands health insurance coverage options to undocumented children. Currently, many of these children are...

A decent two-bedroom rental today will cost you on average more than you could afford working full time on the local minimum wage everywhere in America — in every state, every county, every metropolitan area. No matter how you draw the geography. Whether you live in Sioux Falls or San Francisco. What the government considers to be a local "fair market rent" for a two-bedroom would eat up more than 30 percent of a minimum-wage worker's earnings. This fact, from updated data annually compiled...

Even as the federal government provides housing assistance for 5.5 million households, 7.2 million housing units are needed for more than 10 million extremely low-income families. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julián Castro delivered this bad news in a report on housing for low-income renters that is “Out of Reach,” which is the name of the study. “Our nation can’t fulfill any of our major goals — whether it’s tackling inequality, improving health care, keeping neighborhoods...

At a workshop Wednesday in Ukiah, local agencies learned how to apply for a pot of funding for homeless services that typically gets scooped up by larger cities. “In the past two years, we haven’t got a dime of the (Emergency Solutions Grant) funding north of Marin County,” said state Sen. Mike McGuire, (D– Healdsburg), referring to $20 million that is set aside for agencies serving the state’s estimated 144,000 homeless residents by California’s department of Housing and Community...

I'm not sure if this has already made the rounds, but I didn't see it on after scrolling 10 pages, and it's such good news, it's definitely worth a repost! "Oakland Unified school board voted unanimously Wednesday night to eliminate willful defiance as a reason to suspend any student and to invest at least $2.3 million to expand restorative justice practices in its schools". What a beautiful commitment to the child, to meeting their actual needs rather than just sending them away with their...

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...

(l to r) Sienna, one of the teens from Youth Voice from City Heights; Dana Brown, ACEs Connection Network regional facilitator and co-founder of Youth Voice; Francisco Mendoza, CEO, Mendoza Consulting; Jessica, Youth Voice; Lizette, Youth Voice; Talitha Thompson, Youth Voice co-facilitator; Joshua Aguirre, RISE Up Industries board of directors; Stephanie Linderman, Youth Voice mentor; Arturo Soriano, Youth Empowerment co-founder; (in front) Adrian, Youth Voice.

About 50 people drove in from north, east, west and south of Sacramento County, CA, for our first (but not our last) confab for members of ACEsConnection.com groups in Northern California. This was one of two confabs we hosted -- the other was May 10 in Southern California. Both confabs were organized with generous support from The California Endowment. (l to r) Ben Rubin, Charlotte Ormond, Carolyn Curtis, Imani Lucas, DeAngelo Mack, Carlina Ramirez Wheeler We were very fortunate to have the...

Efforts to help and house Orange County’s homeless may become more fruitful under a soon-to-be hired “homeless czar” and the formation of a faith-based coalition focused on Santa Ana’s Civic Center, site of the county’s highest concentration of people living on the streets. County officials confirmed that Susan Price, who has been the point person on homeless issues for the city of Long Beach, is expected to start work May 27 as Orange County’s social care coordinator, a job that entails...

About 230 people fill this room, most from Stanislaus County. The screen has the title of the meeting. Carol Redding, a pioneer in communications about ACEs; Elaine Karas Miller, executive director of the Trauma Resource Institute; and I will be doing presentations today. Angela Ponivas, bureau chief of the state Office of Child Abuse Prevention, says that she's working to educate people in her department about ACE science. She doesn't want California to get any more D- grades from Children...

The Shasta County Public Health Department will use a $50,000 grant from Partnership HealthPlan to begin measuring adverse childhood experiences among Shasta County adults — the first time such a study has been conducted since 2012. Hill Country Health and Wellness Center, Shasta Community Health Center, and Mercy Medical Center's Maternity Center and Family Medicine programs will work on the project starting in June. Health care providers at those medical centers will ask patients whether...

On April 18, at Cuesta College, Gabriella Grant, director of the California Center of Excellence for Trauma Informed Care and an innovative reformer of publicly provided services, presented Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) to nearly 300 professionals from SLO County’s public health and correctional agencies. She described a powerful, low-cost, effective transformation of our services to provide a dramatic solution to thousands of people who struggle with mental health problems, drug abuse,...