August 2017

Our country is facing a crisis in leadership tenure. It's hard to accomplish change when leaders from across public sectors turnover with such frequency. In this "one of kind" retreat style workshop offered at the Hancock Inn in Hancock, NH, participants will examine compassion fatigue/vicarious trauma, the nervous system, the body's energy field, stress response, and means of achieving greater inner regulation and resiliency. This workshop is co-led by Rose Carey (owner of the Life Light...

When I speak to audiences, I often end my keynote with an exercise: I ask you to begin to notice the strangers seated around you. The first one that you can make eye contact with, imagine yourself going to live with them tonight. You can take a bag of things that you already own. In fact, you can keep your job, your volunteer activities, and your car and drivers license. You can move on with your day, like you do each and every other day of your life. The only difference is that every...

Hermes Espinoza was 17 and alone in New York, without a family and undocumented. He had crossed the border a year earlier, in 2006, to escape the LGBTQ discrimination he faced at home in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. In the midst of his loneliness, he even attempted suicide. “I missed my family a lot… There was this moment where I didn’t want to live anymore. I felt completely alone and empty,” Espinoza, now 25 years old, says. But things started to change when a friend told him about a...

What should you do if child-protective services comes to your house? You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks. She will interview you and your kids separately, so you...

This past May, over 800 attendees and hundreds more online viewers joined us for the livestream event Complementary or in Conflict? Community Organizing and Collective Impact , a keynote and panel discussion at the 2017 Collective Impact Convening in Boston. The Collective Impact Forum is excited to share with you the video from this livestream event, as well as a transcript of the keynote remarks by Marshall Ganz (Harvard Kennedy School), with introductory remarks by Monique Miles (Aspen...

An initiative that aims to expand the use of population health strategies has received funding to be used in 500 U.S. cities. The City Health Dashboard compiles county and state health-related data from multiple agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the CDC, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The dashboard was piloted earlier this year, with health data from Flint, Michigan; Kansas City, Kansas; Providence, Rhode Island; and Waco, Texas. A $3.4 million award from the Robert Wood...

As trauma-informed initiatives have multiplied in recent years, more child welfare agencies are now grappling with how to properly screen for trauma. Along with access to trauma-focused, evidence-based treatments and staff training, screening is a key part of building a trauma-informed system. But that approach has until recently had relatively little traction in the child welfare field. According to a new paper that looks at the implementation of a recent wave of trauma screening...

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 12 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 Alexis Arambul, a...

Every year in America, too many young adults leave foster care without a family or the opportunities needed to succeed. Yet, child welfare professionals and caregivers can help these youth better navigate the path toward a healthy adulthood — and a new report from the Casey Foundation's Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative tells how. The Road to Adulthood: Aligning Child Welfare Practice With Adolescent Brain Development explores the latest research on adolescent brain development...