March 2019

Black History Month has come and gone. It is a month that reminds us of the resilience, fortitude and strength black Americans have exhibited to stay alive and thrive in this country. Black women in particular have borne the brunt of adverse experiences created by the nation’s racist foundations. While significant strides have been made, black women continue to suffer needlessly and disproportionately from the seeds of white supremacy that many of us continuously work to uproot. The issue of...

A community meeting at the Route 9 Library & Innovation Center in New Castle saw a healthy attendance and some insight into the direction of services in the First State. Presentations were made by the members of the state Family Services Cabinet Council to give details on how Governor John Carney's Executive Order 24, transitioning Delaware into a 'trauma informed state,' affects services that look to assist in everything from the opioid epidemic, student care and data collaboration...

For the past 15 months, I’ve asked Vox readers to submit emergency room bills to our database. I’ve read lots of those medical bills — 1,182 of them, to be exact. My initial goal was to get a sense of how unpredictable and costly ER billing is across the country. There are millions of emergency room visits every year, making it one of the more frequent ways we interact with our health care system — and a good window into the health costs squeezing consumers today. I started my project...

ACEs Connection is proud to announce the pilot of our Speakers & Trainers Bureau! This pilot program will run from March 14 through May 1, 2019. During this pilot, the bureau is free of charge. The Speakers & Trainers Bureau is a service that provides to subscribers a list of vetted different speakers and trainers for hire. The list contains information on a Speaker's credentials, experience, sector specialties, and contact information. We developed the Speakers & Trainers Bureau...

Danes are some of the happiest people in the world , and they also happen to have a lot of cool words for ways to be happy. You may have heard about “ hygge ,” which has been the subject of countless books , articles and commercials . Often mistranslated to mean “cozy,” it really describes the process of creating intimacy. But another word “pyt” – which sort of sounds like “pid” – was recently voted the most popular word by Danes, beating out “dvæle” (to linger) and “krænkelsesparat” (ready...

With dedication to innovation in trauma-informed care measurement and implementation, the Traumatic Stress Institute (TSI) will soon launch a fully-automated, online version of the widely-used ARTIC Scale. The new online platform will enable organizations and service systems to assess and monitor trauma-informed care in a manner that is user-friendly, secure and cost-effective. Its powerful features include: Online administration at multiple time points Fully-automated data management and...

A growing body of evidence supports the idea that alcohol exposure early in life has lasting effects on the brain and increases the risk of psychological problems in adulthood. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have found that adolescent binge drinking, even if discontinued, increases the risk for anxiety later in life due to abnormal epigenetic programming. The findings of the study, which was conducted in animals, was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Our new Community Indicator Repor t tool has launched and is ready to help you identify and prioritize the health needs of your community! We've got an easy step-by-step tutorial ; you can share your report and invite collaborators ; and you can even compare two different areas within the same report. The reports are great, if we do say so ourselves, but we believe they should be a catalyst for community engagement, prioritization, and action – not just a box to check. See our Community...

Effective relationships may be the most significant key to obtaining desired results in a diverse, complex and interconnected business world. Executive leadership often looks to human resources to lead in developing the organization's culture and ensuring that its values are enacted. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives can and should be a key in the creation of an environment in which effective relationships thrive. To make D&I initiatives a seamless part of the business, HR...

Approximately one in five youths ages 13-18 experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. For children ages 8-15, the number is 13%. The AAP Arizona, California 3, Florida, New Jersey and Virginia chapters received Healthy People 2020 grants to develop programs to empower families, the media and/or communities to address the mental health crisis in children and youths. Following is an overview of each chapter’s...

States have never found so many homeless students in public schools before. The next challenge will be finding ways to keep those students in school long enough to earn a diploma. Nearly 1.36 million children—more than all the students in New York City—went to school in 2017 without knowing where they would sleep at night, finds a new report by the national campaign Education Leads Home , which looked at new national data as well as graduation rates for homeless students in 26 states. That's...

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. After mass shootings, like the ones at Newtown and Parkland, we ask, how can this happen? How do we carry on in the aftermath of such violence? My guest, journalist Alex Kotlowitz, says those are the right questions, but we don't ask the same questions when it comes to the children and teenagers in our city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods, like Chicago's South and West Sides, who are watching their friends and family members get shot. Kotlowitz...