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Washington State ACEs Action (WA)

A forum to inform and connect individuals and communities working to promote safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments and prevent and mitigate ACEs in Washington State.

Community-Based Efforts

Seattle organization creates tiny home village for the homeless (thinkprogress.org)

An organization in Seattle, Washington will open up a tiny house village on Wednesday to provide 40 homes to families living on the streets. Built by the homelessness advocacy group Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) on a piece of land that the agency owns, the 40 tiny houses will provide much-needed temporary shelter to serve about 70 people who are among the city’s swelling homeless population. The houses, which are 12-foot by eight-foot, will be staffed by two full-time workers who will...

Getting Tri-City kids to read is just what the doctor ordered [tri-cityherald.com]

For about 10 minutes, Aryanna Vargas sat quietly with her Curious George book. Then Dr. Saul Valencia walked in and began asking questions about the book. “Can you tell me what he’s doing in this picture?” he asked, pointing to a man making a phone call. “Who do you think he’s calling? Do you think he’s calling his mom, his dad, a friend?” Aryanna began laughing and filling in the pieces of the story. As they finished with the story, Valencia said, “That’s exactly how it works in the room.”...

It’s about Results at Scale, Not Collective Impact [ssir.org]

I t’s easy to see why collective impact —the commitment of a group of important cross-sector actors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem—caught fire in 2010. During an economic downturn, when few new resources were available, a voice said there was a way to do more with what we already had. The concept offered hope for achieving results at the scale we desired, even though we were feeling constrained. And thank goodness. Collective impact both validated work that had been...

Data – 500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health – CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its partners released a website that provides first-of-its-kind, neighborhood-level health data for the 500 largest US cities [PDF-269KB]. The 500 Cities project provides data on 5 risk behaviors, 13 health outcomes, and 9 prevention practices for the most common, costly, and preventable chronic diseases. Health professionals can view data by city or census tract, explore the interactive map , get map books for individual cities, and...

This Town Adopted Trauma-Informed Care - And Saw a Decrease in Crime and Suspension Rates [yesmagazine.org]

Lincoln Alternative High School is in the small city of Walla Walla in southeastern Washington. It had been a place for students with disciplinary issues, those removed from the area’s other high schools, ordered there by a judge, or those who had performed poorly in middle school. Tucked in the middle of a residential neighborhood, Lincoln’s brick edifice and cherry-red doors now serve as a place of opportunity for many students. At Lincoln, the first trauma-informed high school in the...

Battle Ground High School suspensions see massive drop over the last year [Thereflector.com]

Over the last four calendar school years the number of students being suspended by Battle Ground High School has dropped more than 50 percent. During the 2012-13 school year 387 students were suspended, compared to only 145 during the 2015-16 school year. BGHS Principal Mike Hamilton points at a number of different elements that has led to a more positive culture in the high school. He said it is a product of all the district cogs operating in unison and making student engagement and...

Community-Based Interventions for Trauma Are Cost Effective

Society absorbs a lot of costs that are associated with childhood inflicted trauma (ACEs). Yet we fund programs regularly, and don’t really require solid data on results. That just seems to be a byproduct of people managing programs. We commit to results, secure funding based on that commitment, then do everything we can to prove that we have results. We secure data that suggests progress, and hide any data that then problem might be getting worse (at least in my experience). Fortunately, we...

How Community Networks Stem Childhood Traumas [NYTimes.com]

[Ed. note: This is the second of a three-part series that David Bornstein is doing on how communities are integrating trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on ACEs science.] Liberals and conservatives often disagree about the causes of poverty and other social ills. Broadly speaking, liberals point the finger at structural factors and advocate for policy changes, while conservatives look to individuals and families and favor behavior changes. Clearly, both points of view...

New Study Shows Communities Can Reduce the Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences [Mathematic Policy Research]

[ Ed. note: Following is a media release published yesterday by Mathematica Policy Research. This follows on the heals of the report, "Self-Healing Communities" that Laura Porter, Dr. Robert Anda and WHO wrote for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Both reports and executive summaries are attached to this blog post. Both reports are significant, because they show that community ACEs initiatives -- with "modest investments and limited staff" -- are solving some of our most intractable...

Tapping a Troubled Neighborhood’s Inner Strength [NYTimes.com]

[First of three articles] Ten years ago, Patsy Hite, 70, rarely left her home at night. “I heard a lot of sirens so I always kept to myself,” she said. Hite lives in the Highlands, a 40-block section in Longview, a city in Cowlitz County in southwestern Washington. The Highlands is home to about 5,000 residents. The neighborhood is adjacent to an industrial district, and was hit hard by the loss of jobs in the timber and manufacturing industries. Long-term unemployment has brought blight,...

Beyond Paper Tigers: The Heart of the Matter

Graphic artist Anne Nelson created this visual roadmap during the partner showcase, capturing the "heart of the matter" for each community member Teri Barila, co-founder and CEO of the Children’s Resilience Initiative and the igniting force that brought change to a quiet corner of southeast Washington, kicked off last month’s Beyond Paper Tigers Conference by sharing one of her “aha” moments. In 2007, she attended a conference in Winthrop, WA, where Dr. Robert Anda spoke about the CDC-Kaiser...

Committee aims to make Auburn healthiest city in Washington by 2020 [Auburn-Reporter.com]

Healthy Auburn for Life. That's the vision of the new Blue Ribbon Committee of Auburn tasked to make Auburn the healthiest city in Washington by 2020. The committee's mission is to optimize the health and well being of all residents through education, participation and innovation. Of the nine major health issues identified by the committee, three have been chosen as a primary first focus to analyze and develop plans for improvement: obesity in adults and children; maternal and child health;...

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