Category Archives: Community prevention programs

The Hague Protocol: Identifying kids at risk by interviewing parents in the ER

September 12, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Community prevention programs, Solutions 4 Comments

In the summer of 2007, a woman was brought by ambulance to the emergency department of the Medical Center Haaglanden, a hospital that serves an inner city area of The Hague. The woman was drunk and had a severe head injury. Her 8-year-old son was with her.

Hester Diderich, an emergency nurse, and other hospital staff members looked after the boy while they attended to his mother. “We were very nice to him,” Diderich remembers.

After treating the woman’s injuries, they were ready to release her and her son. What happened next led Diderich and her colleagues to realize they needed a better way to protect children and evaluate the risks they face. They created a new process, known as The Hague Protocol, and started a study to evaluate it. The protocol is now in use throughout the Netherlands and is being adopted by other European countries as well.

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Visionary Atlantan grows community model for trauma-informed housing that benefits schools

August 31, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Education, Solutions 9 Comments

Marjy Stagmeier

*Author’s note: This story was co-authored by Jennifer Hossler and Carey Sipp. 

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Real estate developer Marjy Stagmeier was sifting through tenant applications for an apartment complex she had purchased in Atlanta and noticed something disturbing: Many of the applicants were single mothers making $8/hour.

“I wondered how these women could afford to live on so little, with the cost of housing, childcare and the daily needs of life being so high. Seeing how little they made moved me to decide, then and there, not to ever raise the rent,” says Marjy. “I wanted to keep rent affordable.”

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Curiosity and reciprocity: Engaging community in the ACE & resilience movement

August 8, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Alaska, Community prevention programs, Solutions Leave a comment

In an all-day workshop that Laura Porter was leading with community organizers and parents, she told the story of a woman from the Congo who had to leave her homeland. Before the woman left, she had a dream about living in the United States.

The woman said she imagined opening her door, letting her children run free, hearing them laugh and play. She envisioned people asking one another, “How are you?” without any compulsion to evade by answering, “Fine. I’m fine.” And, she added, “I could go with my children to the store and not have to be afraid that they would be arrested for being black.”

Porter was struck by the woman’s words—a vision of safety and belonging that is rarely voiced out loud. “As we’re engaging people, that dream is just under the surface,” says Porter. “When we touch on that, we touch on something very powerful: the core values…that go beyond political strife or individual experience. We can touch an aspirational world.”

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Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Team in Manchester, NH, helps children grapple with trauma, violence, addicted parents

July 31, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Community prevention programs 5 Comments

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Angela Delyani, community health worker; Mariah Cahill, crisis services advocate; and Sgt. Matthew Larochelle knock on the door of a family with children who witnessed a domestic violence incident just days before.

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An often-overlooked aspect of the opioid epidemic that has exploded across the U.S. in recent years is how often the abuse of heroin or prescription opiates is accompanied by domestic violence. This is tragic enough for the adults involved, but it’s a ticking time bomb for children who are exposed to these adversities, raising their risk for future drug use and multiple health and mental health conditions. Here’s how one community is trying to address the problem.

Police officers and emergency dispatchers are a pretty tough bunch but about three years ago, 911 operators in Manchester, NH, began noticing an uptick of an exceptionally distressing call—from children reporting the overdose of their parents.

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Perspectives on building healthy communities

June 13, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 3 Comments

National Policy Implications Panel

 (l to r) Dr. Garth Graham, president, Aetna Foundation; Wendy Ellis, project director, Building Community Resilience Collaborative, GWU; Stuart M. Butler, The Brookings Institution

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After decades of working at the national level on health and mental policy in Washington, DC, I find myself looking for ways to get involved locally—the closer to home the better, and the more tangible the work, the more gratifying. There has never been a better time to act locally, not just because of the polarized national scene, but because opportunities abound to really make a difference at the local level.

With this budding interest local involvement taking shape, I was eager see what lessons I could learn from a May 9th event titled “New directions for communities: How they can boost neighborhood health,” sponsored by the venerable organization The Brookings Institution, best known for leadership at the national and global levels.

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New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s address on removal of four Confederate statues

May 29, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Uncategorized 1 Comment

This 22 minutes is definitely worth the time. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu eloquently describes why New Orleans removed the statues, which weren’t erected immediately after the Civil War to honor the fighters, but to remind all who passed by the statues about white supremacy.

Here’s the text from the YouTube page on which this video appears:

On Friday, May 19, 2017, Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered an address about the City of New Orleans’ efforts to remove monuments that prominently celebrate the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” The statues were erected decades after the Civil War to celebrate the “Cult of the Lost Cause,” a movement recognized across the South as celebrating and promoting white supremacy.

There are four prominent monuments in question. The Battle of Liberty Place monument was erected by the Crescent City White League to remember the deadly insurrection led by white supremacists against the City’s racially integrated police department and government. The Jefferson Davis statue on Jefferson Davis Parkway, the P.G.T. Beauregard equestrian statue on Esplanade Avenue at the entrance to City Park, and the Robert E. Lee statue at Lee Circle.

Battling meth: A rural Montana county starts drug court to reverse surge of kids in foster care

May 10, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Solutions 1 Comment

By Daniel Heimpel

When James Manley came to rural Lake County, Montana, as a district judge in 2013, he knew the meth problem was bad, but he didn’t know how much worse it would get.

Judge James Manley

Three-and-a-half years ago, Manley says the courthouse was processing roughly 220 felony cases a year. This year, he says the county will handle upwards of 500 drug-related felonies, and that at least 400 of those arrested will be parents.

“The destruction to families is incredible,” Manley said. “It breaks your heart to see families torn apart by addiction.”

Lake County, tucked in the northwest corner of the state, is at a breaking point. The jail regularly has inmates sleeping on the floor, the courts are clogged and kids are entering the foster care system at a stunning rate.

While the county is unique in that more than two-thirds of its 1,600 square miles of pristine forest, farms and pastureland sit on the Flathead Reservation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, its meth problem is part of much larger, and disturbing, trend.

In October 2016, the federal Administration for Children and Youth and Families (ACYF), which oversees foster care nationwide, pointed to substance abuse – particularly meth and opioids – as a driving factor in a steady three-year increase in foster care numbers. From 2013 to 2015, the last year of national data available, the number of children in foster care grew from 401,000 to almost 428,000.

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