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By Carolyn Jones and Andrew Reed, EdSource, July 29, 2021 For Gov. Gavin Newsom and anyone else promoting college savings accounts for low-income children, Oral Lee Brown has some advice: “It’s not about the money.” Brown, an Oakland real estate agent now in her 70s, has been promoting the same idea since 1987, when she “adopted” a class of first graders from Brookfield Elementary School in East Oakland, promising to pay their college costs if they stayed in school. [ Please click here to...

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Report, July 29, 2021 For Lydia, 40, of southeast Los Angeles County, there was nothing safe about staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being home meant being stuck with her abusive husband who beat her and tried to control her every move. The abuse predated the pandemic – her three children went to live with a family member in 2018 because of it. But when Lydia’s husband lost his job because of the shutdown, he became angry and bored, and...

By Laruen Michele Jackson, The New Yorker, July 27, 2021 I n 1971, Derrick Bell, a forty-year-old civil-rights attorney, became the first Black professor to gain tenure at Harvard Law School. A soft-spoken and prolific scholar, with glasses and a short fro coming to a widow’s peak, Bell was a Pittsburgh native and Air Force veteran who, before his career in academia, had worked with Thurgood Marshall composing legal strategies against school segregation in the South, at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal...

By Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, August 2, 2021 I n the mid-seventies, Ted Ngoy was working the late shift at a gas station in Orange County when he tasted his first doughnut. Ngoy, then in his thirties, was instantly hooked. He trained to become a manager at Winchell’s Donuts, a popular chain, before purchasing Christy’s Donuts, a struggling shop in La Habra. Ngoy turned Christy’s around, and in the next few years he acquired more stores in the area. He is said to have popularized the pink box...

There can be no doubt that emotional wellness and emotional intelligence go hand in hand. But what does it mean to be emotionally well? Is it something mysterious and unattainable? Or is it something that anyone can achieve? This article will explore these questions and discuss how emotional wellness appears and how the lives of emotionally well people appear. Definitions are a Good Place to Begin The National Center for Emotional Wellness is an organization committed to fostering emotional...

By The Annie E. Casey Foundation, July 20, 2021 Public health strategies in Atlanta and Milwaukee have prevented gun homicides over the past several years, according to a new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Often referred to as community-based violence interventions, the safety approaches implemented in the two cities involve examining the root causes of conflicts, interrupting situations likely to result in shootings and promoting community-wide healing. The report, Improving...

By Andrea McDaniels, Center for Health Journalism, July 23, 2021 In communities of color across the country, aggressive overpolicing is eroding the health of residents who live in a constant state of fear. Some worry about a possible bad encounter with law enforcement, while others live with the traumatic memories of already having experienced one. This kind of policing environment, often targeted at people who have done nothing illegal, is leading to chronic stress that puts wear and tear...

By Stephen Marche, The New York Times, September 5, 2018 The use of spanking to discipline children has been in decline for 50 years. But yelling? Almost everybody still yells at their kids sometimes, even the parents who know it doesn’t work. Yelling may be the most widespread parental stupidity around today. Households with regular shouting incidents tend to have children with lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression. A 2014 study in The Journal of Child Development demonstrated...

By Jaclyn Cosgrove, Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2021 America’s largest child welfare system will soon test whether race, ethnicity or neighborhood can influence social workers’ decisions to remove children from their homes. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to support a pilot project that tests “blind removal,” first tried in Nassau County, N.Y. Social workers typically have access to an array of information, including a family’s race, when making the difficult...

Funding opportunity : Promoting Resilience and Mental Health Among Health Professional Workforce HRSA total funding: $29M / 10 awardees / multiple year Application Deadline: 8/30/2021 Description : The purpose of this program is to provide support to entities providing health care, health care providers associations, and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), taking into consideration the needs of rural and medically underserved communities , to establish, enhance, or expand evidence...

If there was ever any doubt that the intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) field is recognizing the critical importance of trauma, three brand new articles in the academic literature published in 2021 have put that to rest. They are all scoping reviews which summarize the professional literature on a particular topic and attempt to synthesize the current state of knowledge. It was rather stunning that, in the same year that these articles were published, the Traumatic Stress...

By Annette Gordon-Reed, The Atlantic, June 2021 W hen i was growing up in Conroe, Texas, about 40 miles north of Houston, my classmates and I took Texas history twice, in the fourth and seventh grades. We learned about Texas’s history in the United States, its previous existence as a republic, and its time as a province of Mexico. Among other things, we were exhorted to “remember the Alamo” and “remember Goliad,” famous events in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexico. Some other aspects...