November 2017

In California Wine Country, Child Welfare Responds to Wildfires When wildfires ripped through northern California's wine country in October, the devastation reverberated through the local communities, where more than 40 people were killed and more than 14,000 homes are partial or total losses. The child welfare communities in Sonoma and Napa counties were not immune to the destruction. As the holiday season approached, efforts to stabilize foster care placements moved quickly. Solutions for...

Helping Young Children Recover after the Northern California Wild Fires In the aftermath of the wild fires in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Solano countie s that started on Sunday, October 8, 2017, many children and their parents may be experiencing varying levels of distress related to events associated with the fires. The way in which this time of acute stress is handled can be very predictive of the long-term impact of the fires on each of us, especially children. The most important thing...

Rabbi Niles Goldstein of Congregation Beth Shalom was a first-responder chaplain in New York City after 9/11. The stresses he's seen in Napa over the past two weeks from rampaging wildfires echo those he saw back then. You're seeing people walking around in face masks ... seeing people who are trying to rebuild their lives, he said. Instead of a one-time event, though, the fires have lingered, he said. Here, I feel much more anxiety as we try to find some sort of new normal in light of what...