February 2017

The phrase “sold down the river” came from Louisville, Kentucky , where the enslaved were traded in one of the largest slave markets of the 19 th century. The Louisville Slave Pens, located in the city’s downtown, held and exported enslaved black laborers to large plantations in the Deep South via the Ohio River. As the website for the new online mapping project Redlining Louisville states, “These slave pens represent the origins of the black residential experience in Louisville.” By the...

Life for most of us in our modern society takes a toll on our emotional, psychological and physical well-being. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan asserts that we do not have the mental framework and associated mental capacities, to adequately to meet the overwhelming demands of modern life. This inadequacy leaves most people with increasing and growing levels of anxiety, depression, disconnected to their experiences of joy, love, happiness and inner peace, and lacking a sense of purpose in...

It was only a matter of time before Attorney General Jeff Sessions backtracked on the Department of Justice’s earlier plans to phase out the use of private prisons. Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union has been concerned about the former senator’s ties to the private prison lobby since October, when Geo Group—one of the biggest private prison corporations—hired two of Sessions’ former aides, David Stewart and Ryan Robichaux. On Thursday, Sessions issued a memo overturning the one put...

Before Donald Trump took the oath of office, Washington’s chattering classes were abound with speculation about how the then president-elect might govern. As a secret moderate? As a foil to Congressional Republicans? As an authoritarian? Less than a week into his term, the new president made his intentions clear — he plans to govern as he campaigned. The problem for the American people is that candidate Trump’s campaign promises flowed from bias, stereotype, and “alternative facts.” As...

The Trump administration issued a new letter on Wednesday: The federal government will no longer stand behind Obama-era guidelines requiring schools to accommodate transgender students based on their gender identity. The new administration is withdrawing two letters, written in 2015 and 2016, in order to “further and more completely consider the legal issues involved.” The Departments of Justice and Education believe “there must be due regard for the primary role of the States and local...

The first time I went to jail, my professor sent me there. Before I could think too much about what I had agreed to do, I piled into a beat-up 12-passenger van with 11 others. I was unsure if my nerves were from my concern that the van wasn’t going to make it the 15 miles across the city or my fear of what awaited me on the other side of the bridge at Rikers Island, New York’s main jail complex. If I’m being honest, it was a bit of both. I peered out the window and watched as my city...

Those three words screamed in my head on a loop for years because I didn’t understand why that one simple act proved so difficult for me. At eighteen I wrote my first play and saw it produced off-Broadway, and by nineteen I rented a newly renovated apartment in my native Brooklyn, one train stop away from Manhattan. When I focused my mind on accomplishing something as challenging as leaving New York for Los Angeles, at twenty-one, I just did it, and barely looked back. In L.A., I created a...

T he National Fish and Wildlife Foundation is partnering with Wells Fargo to support t he Resilient Communities program, an initiative dedicated to helping communities prepare for future impacts associated with sea level rise, water quantity and quality, and forest conservation. The program places special emphasis on helping traditionally underserved, low- and moderate-income communities build capacity for resiliency planning and investments in “greener” infrastructure. In 2017 grants will...

Days filled with stress and anxiety may be upping your risk of becoming overweight or obese, British researchers say. The researchers said they found a link between high levels of the stress hormone cortisol and excess weight. "We don't know which came first, the greater body weight or the higher cortisol," said researcher Andrew Steptoe. He's the British Heart Foundation professor of psychology at University College London. For the study, Steptoe's team analyzed levels of cortisol in a lock...

Juvenile drug treatment courts must do more to bring families into the treatment process if they want to help young offenders overcome addiction and stay out of the criminal justice system, a team of mental health professionals concluded in a sweeping report released today. Using a survey of 158 drug courts in 38 states as a backdrop, the report highlights the need to improve the current approach to treatment and presents a set of tools to help courts incorporate family-involved treatment...

Within the next month, I will be making available a draft version of an adult Sunday School curriculum that will introduce the concept of trauma-informed ministry to churches. If there are members of ACEsConnection that would like to "test run" the curriculum, I'd be honored if you'd reach out to me in the comments section or via a direct message. Email works, too! Just send to chrish@intermountain.org. The curriculum just takes a look at the "slice" of trauma-informed ministry that I am...

Latino students in kindergarten trail their white peers in math by approximately three months’ worth of learning, a new study by Child Trends Hispanic Institute has found. Researchers drew a nationally representative sample of students from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-2011 who were followed through the end of their fifth-grade year. Sixty-two percent of the 2,199 Latino students studied had at least one foreign-born parent, and 45 percent spoke only...