Blog

By Dr. Nancy Osborn, Thrive Global, December 12, 2019 Holidays can be wonderful opportunities to get together with family and friends. It’s time to eat, drink and be merry, right? Maybe not so much. The eat-drink-and-be-merry holidays don’t always happen that way for everyone. In fact, frequently the ‘be merry’ part fails so often that many of us have learned to no longer look forward to the holidays at all. Instead, our annual tradition is to dread the holidays. This year we can choose to...

On Friday, December 6, I attended "Moving Equity to the Center — Part 2" in Fresno, CA. The morning began with the usual networking. The conversations were enlightening and engaging. I was able to meet several people who work in the Fresno community and provided valuable insight to how issues are being addressed there. Then, after Linda Gleason, the founding director of The Children's Movement, introduced guest speaker Dr. Reverend Karen Crozier, I sat, listened, and thought. Dr. Crozier...

Please check out our latest Healing Our Ghosts' podcast with ECHO's executive director and #metoo Harvey Weinstein's silence breaker Louise Godbold. Healing Our Ghosts shines light into the suffering we keep hidden. We are not alone in our struggles and when we share our pain, we lift the shame secrecy that keeps us alone and disconnected from each other and prevents us from healing. With humor and compassion, Ana Joanes interviews a wide variety of guests about their messy lives, how they...

California is about to launch an ambitious campaign to train tens of thousands of Medi-Cal providers to screen children and adults up to age 65 for trauma, starting on January 1, 2020. It is well-established that the early identification of trauma and providing the appropriate treatment are critical tools for reducing long-term health care costs for both children and adults. Research has shown that individuals who experienced a high number of traumatic childhood events are likely to die...

Lorna Minewiser has taught high school, college, and teacher continuing education classes. Her PhD dissertation “Eliciting Mental Models: Images of teaching and learning” has been published and she has had several articles published as well. In the spring of 2008 she conducted a research project on using EFT to reduce Test Anxiety. She was chair of the ACEP research subcommittee on EFT for Research. Recently she participated in the Veteran Stress Research Project.

By Christina Cross, The New York Times, December 9, 2019 It is a near truism that the best family structure to raise a child in is a two-parent family. We’re repeatedly told by policymakers, social commentators, religious leaders and a host of others that children raised by both biological parents stand the best chance of success in life. Society routinely blames family structures that deviate from this model for many of its problems. Just think about the last time you heard someone use the...

By Steven Ross Johnson, Modern Healthcare, December 12, 2019 Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente on Thursday expanded its multi-year effort to provide tens of thousands of schools across the country with resources to help students and staff members cope with trauma and stress. The Resilience in School Environments, or RISE, project, will reach at least 25,000 schools by 2023, Kaiser said, as it provides mental health and wellness support to staff and students. The initiative began in 2017 to...

By Thomas Lee and Michael Rugen, The Chronicle of Social Change, December 6, 2019 In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente published a landmark study showing that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have a long-lasting negative impact on a person’s overall health and well-being as they enter adulthood. Earlier this month, the CDC released another groundbreaking report looking at the impact of ACEs on the national level. The research...

By Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2019 A high school senior decided recently that she wants to become sexually active with her boyfriend. But she is not yet comfortable talking to her mom about birth control and would be unable to get to a doctor’s appointment on her own. Instead, she walked over to the new well-being center at school during a free period. It was easy. Planned Parenthood runs a sexual healthcare clinic at Esteban Torres High School in East L.A. once a week.

By Aaron Shoyer, Housing Matters, December 11, 2019 The high cost of land poses a significant barrier to producing affordable housing. Land acquisition accounts for 15 percent of total development costs, with some local estimates as high as 35 percent (PDF). Housing is expensive to construct and maintain, so every dollar saved on land or other costs helps affordable developments pencil out. Leveraging public land for affordable housing allows local jurisdictions to make a substantial...

By Linda Jacobson, Education Divide, December 12, 2019 Do your school staff members have gatherings or activities to help them build relationships with each other? Is there a process for collaborating with community-based behavioral health providers for students who need support? Does your district track schools’ use of social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices or other efforts to support students’ and staff members’ well-being? [ Please click here to read more .]

Last week, Benchmarks’ Partnering for Excellence partnered with American Children’s Home to host a free screening of the documentary Broken Places open to everyone in the community. Broken Places revisits three different families that were filmed 15-30 years ago to see how the toxic stress and trauma that they experienced has affected them over the years. It turns out that some people are very damaged by toxic stress and trauma, while others are able to thrive, and the film explores this...