Category Archives: Community prevention programs

Investing in cross-sector networks to build a trauma-informed region

January 28, 2019 By in ACE Study, Community prevention programs, Solutions Leave a comment

Participants at a Pottstown Trauma Informed Community Connection community meeting, which typically draw between 75 and 130 people. Courtesy of Valerie Jackson/PTICC.

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When Suzanne O’Connor first joined the Philadelphia ACE Task Force (PATF)—a group then composed mostly of pediatricians who wanted to put ACE science into practice—she did more listening than talking.

“I wasn’t a doctor, I wasn’t a clinician, but a teacher trying to integrate trauma-informed care into early childhood education,” she says. “What struck me the most was what educators didn’t know about social services, mental health and even physical health. We didn’t have language for what we were seeing with kids who were particularly challenging.”

ACEs gave O’Connor that language. She became a passionate advocate for trauma training for early childhood and K-12 teachers. Now, as director of education for United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, O’Connor is helping trauma-informed practice to ripple across the region.

United Way, which recently honed its mission to focus on ending intergenerational poverty, funds and supports cross-sector networks in Philadelphia, surrounding counties and the borough of Pottstown, all part of United Way’s effort to “build a trauma-informed region.”

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Radical Inquiry: Research Practices for Healing and Liberation

October 16, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Resilience 7 Comments

Radical Inquiry

RYSE Center in Richmond, CA, was born of out of young people of color (YPOC) organizing to shift the conditions of violence, distress, and dehumanization in which they suffer, survive, succeed, dream, and die.  We center the lived experiences of YPOC, we lead with love and sacred rage to cultivate healing and build movement, and we take risks as an essential part of transformation and justice, of liberation. We do this in a physical space that feels safe, welcoming, and affirming; that is vibrant with aesthetics created by and for YPOC, and in which members feel ownership, agency, and responsibility.  We do this through cultivating a staff team and organizational culture that is reflective of and responsive to our members, and which engages in ongoing learning, healing, and movement-building.

A third of our current staff started at RYSE as members, half of our staff are under the age 27, and over 90% are people of color. RYSE runs programs across areas of community health; education and justice; youth organizing and leadership; and media, arts, and culture. All programs serve as platforms to cultivate connection, healing, love, and resistance.

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The quest to find biomarkers for toxic stress, resilience in children — A Q-and-A with Jack Shonkoff

October 9, 2018 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Epigenetics, Neurobiology, Solutions Leave a comment

The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress, led by Dr. Jack Shonkoff, is working on developing biological and behavioral markers for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resilience that they believe will be able to measure to what extent a child is experiencing toxic stress, and what effect that stress may be having on the child’s brain and development.

The JPB Research Network on Toxic Stress is comprised of scientists, pediatricians and community leaders, and is a project of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.

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Oakland, CA, trying out model used in Baltimore to reduce trauma, increase resilience

August 15, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 1 Comment
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Baltimore BSC faculty and planning team

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When a group of community organizations in Baltimore came together in 2015, they already knew trauma figured large in many lives. There was violence in the community, in schools, and in community members’ homes. Police brutality occurred. Many suffered the loss of loved ones to incarceration or death. There were house fires and homelessness. Much of the dysfunction was systemic and rooted in racism, according to a report on a collaborative effort to restructure city organizations and agencies. The goal was to build community resilience.

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Study shows most pregnant women and their docs like ACEs screening

July 19, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 1 Comment

Would pregnant women participate in surveys from their doctors asking them about whether they had experienced trauma in their childhood? In surveying moms-to-be at two Northern California Kaiser sites, clinicians discovered that the women were receptive to filling out an adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey, according to a study that was published earlier this year in the Journal of Women’s Health.

In fact, researchers found out that the vast majority of pregnant women — 91 percent of the 375 women— were “very or somewhat comfortable,” filling out the ACE survey. Even more, 93 percent, said that they were comfortable talking about the results with their doctors. The women were surveyed from March through June 2016 at Kaiser Permanente clinics in Antioch and Richmond, CA.

ACE refers to the groundbreaking CDC/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study that tied 10 types of childhood trauma, including living with an alcoholic family member or experiencing verbal abuse from a parent, to a host of health consequences. (Got Your ACE Score?)

The higher the number of ACEs that people have, researchers learned, markedly increases their risk for poor health outcomes, as well as social and economic consequences. Having four ACEs, for example, nearly doubles a person’s risk for heart disease and cancer, raises the risk of attempted suicides by 1200 percent and alcoholism by 700 percent.

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Early childhood educators learn new ways to spot trauma triggers, build resiliency in preschoolers

April 9, 2018 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Education, Resilience, Solutions, Trauma 9 Comments

Julie Kurtz, co-director, trauma-informed practices in early childhood education, WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies/photo by Laurie Udesky

A hug may be comforting to many children, but for a child who has experienced trauma, it may not feel safe.

That’s an example used by Julie Kurtz, co-director of trauma-informed practices in early childhood education at the WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies (CCFS), as she begins a trauma training session. Her audience, preschool teachers and staff of the San Francisco, CA-based Wu Yee Children’s Services at San Francisco’s Women’s Building, listen attentively.

Kurtz leads them into a description of how a child’s young brain functions, how young children – regardless of whether they have experienced trauma or not — live in their reptile brain.

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Tonier Cain Deserves an Evidence-Based Apology

April 4, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Resilience, Solutions 6 Comments

Tonier Cain. Photo: Yi-Chin Lee/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Editor’s note: Over 15 years, Tonier Cain was arrested 83 times, and convicted 66 times. She was addicted to crack. She was a prostitute. She had four children and lost them to child protective services. Remarkably, she didn’t give up hope, and one day, she found someone in the system who knew about trauma and who didn’t give up on her. Cain now advocates for trauma-informed care in prisons and mental health facilities. She gives speeches around the country and the world. Cissy White was fortunate to attend a conference in North Carolina where Cain gave a presentation. This is Cissy’s reaction.
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When Tonier Cain gave a keynote presentation at the Benchmarks’ Partnering for Excellence conference in North Carolina, it took me months to recover from her speech.
Seriously. It was hard to stand after she spoke. When I did, I went right to a yoga mat in the self-care calm room for a while. I took off my high heels and curled up in a ball for a bit.
I’m still digesting her words. It’s not that the content was intense and heavy, though it was. It wasn’t that she talked about a ton of traumatic experiences she had survived – though she did.

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ACEs science can prevent school shootings, but first people have to learn about ACEs science

February 21, 2018 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Solutions 10 Comments

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David Hogg, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, speaks at a rally calling for more gun control. Photo by Jonathan Drake / Reuters

After 17 people, mostly teens, were shot and killed by another teen last week in Parkland, FL, what seems to be a real movement is growing, propelled by kids devastated by their friends’ deaths and wanting to prevent such a massacre from ever happening again.

Their rallies and marches and lie-downs probably won’t have much effect in the short-term, as some of the Parkland teens learned as they witnessed — and some of them wept during — today’s lightning vote by state lawmakers along party lines to end debate on an assault weapons ban, which killed any further consideration of the bill in the Florida legislature’s current session.

But their persistence can make a difference in the long run, especially if they — and we — widen this to include the dozens of kids shot on the streets of Chicago or Camden or in other communities every week. We can even broaden the approach to include the 200 people, including many children, who died in Syrian air strikes in the last two days, because the roots and solutions are the same.

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Dozens of Kaiser Permanente pediatricians in Northern California screening three-year-olds for ACEs

November 14, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 7 Comments

kidsSince August 2016, more than 300 three-year-olds who visit Kaiser Permanente’s pediatric clinics in Hayward and San Leandro have been screened for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as living with a family member who is an alcoholic or losing a parent to separation or divorce. But when the idea to screen toddlers and their families for ACEs was first broached at the Kaiser Permanente Hayward Medical Center, the staff were, in a word, “angsty,” says Dr. Paul Espinas, who led the effort.

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Giving “Zorgos Awards” to prevent bullying and ACEs

November 5, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 4 Comments

 

Zorgos_Cowan©Richard Luibrand

Local leaders were honored for using the power of “Zorgos.” Photo credit: Richard Luibrand


Zorgos is an imaginary superpower that prevents bullying, coined by my co-author, Dr. Louise Hart, and myself for our book, The Bullying Antidote. Zorgos is the collection of learnable skills and/or qualities that calm, interrupt, or upshift bullying dynamics.

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