July 2018

“Chronic absenteeism is a community health issue. Why are youth absent from school? And from the conversation?” You could hear a pin drop as one member of the Newark youth team confidently asked this question of everyone in the room. He and his Next Generation Community Leaders (NGCL) teammates then presented the project they will launch next month: a youth-led study to better understand chronic absenteeism in the Newark city schools. As the statewide grantmaking program of the Robert Wood...

Rob’s Kids, Inc. was formed by our family to help your family. We are passionately committed to making a difference in the lives of children who struggle with Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We are proud to provide funding and sponsorship to psychiatric professionals, along with resources and education to families, with the goal of providing a safe place, where kids can find a home away from home.

What should be the cost of a terrible mistake? On Nov. 4, 2013, two young people’s lives tragically intersected on a bus in Oakland, Calif. That afternoon, Oakland’s 57 bus carried Richard and Sasha home after school. Each had had very different life experiences that led them to this moment, including their race, class, education, upbringing and gender identities. Dashka Slater’s “ The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives ” tells the stories of Richard...

Some U.S. cities have been using two strategies to blunt the force of the federal government’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The first: instituting policies (loosely called “sanctuary policies”) that limit cooperation of local jails and police departments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—thus cutting off a primary pipeline to deportations. The second is providing legal aid for immigrants in deportation proceedings. In New York, one such program has led to a 1,100...

I t was just a hair past 7 o’clock in the evening at Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, and Richard Carranza was a little late to the party. The cafeteria was bulging with parents, translators, and a handful of staff. The recently minted chancellor of the New York City public-school system had planned to arrive at 6 to talk to a handful of community activists in advance of a town-hall-style meeting. The topic at hand: diversity in the city’s public schools. Or, to put it more pointedly,...

Objectives. To evaluate combined individual- and community-level interventions to reduce underage drinking by American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) youths on rural California Indian reservations. Methods. Individual-level interventions included brief motivational interviewing and psychoeducation for Tribal youths. Community-level interventions included community mobilization and awareness activities, as well as restricting alcohol sales to minors. To test effects, we compared 7 waves of...

Mission Health, the largest hospital system in western North Carolina, provided $100 million in free charity care last year. This year, it has partnered with 17 civic organizations to deliver substance abuse care to low-income people. Based in bucolic Asheville, the six-hospital system also screens residents for food insecurity; provides free dental care to children in rural areas via the “ToothBus” mobile clinic; helps the homeless find permanent housing, and encourages its 12,000 employees...

The Chronicle of Social Change is highlighting each of the policy recommendations made this summer by the participants of the Foster Youth Internship Program (FYI), a group of 10 former foster youths who have completed congressional internships. The program is overseen each summer by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Each of the FYI participants crafted a policy recommendation during their time in Washington, D.C. Today we highlight the recommendation of Shay House, 22, an...

For almost two centuries now, scientists have noticed a place’s suicide rate bears troubling links to the changing of the seasons and the friendliness of its climate. In 1881, the Italian physician Enrico Morselli noted that suicide rates peak in the summer , deeming the effect “too great for it to be attributed to chance of the human will.” Two decades later, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim noticed the same effect—though he also found the suicide rate was higher in Scandinavian...

I've been thinking and talking a good deal about Rick Hanson since my recent break-up. The work I've done, that I learned from him, has made deep and profound changes in my life and healing. Healing is such a soft sounding word when what I feel is a new sense of solidness. It's as though I have a rock inside myself to lean in and on, how I feel good enough even when life is hard. I've sensed the work is important, helping me transform deep down at the core, in my bones and brain and being.

If you knew your child was engrossed in a chronicle of a schoolgirl’s suicide, or a game that ends in taking your own life, how would you respond? Be ready to answer, because this is the world we live in. We live in a world where children as young as 10 are binge-watching 13 Reasons Why . This series dramatizes a teenage girl’s suicide, through a high school boy’s encounters with cassette tape recordings she made before killing herself. I recently shared my own binge-watching experience of...

It’s almost the end of July which means we are gearing up for school here in Franklin County, MO. Walmart is stocked with all the school supplies you could ever dream of and both kids and parents are anxiously awaiting that start date. Admittedly, many kids are less excited than their parents! Well, with the start of the new school year Franklin County Cares will be beginning a 3-Year Trauma-Informed Schools Training and Consulting Program in two Franklin County Schools; South Point...