Blog

It’s a Wednesday morning at the Family Health and Birth Center (FHBC), a prenatal clinic and birth center housed within a larger federally qualified health center called Community of Hope. The clinic is located in a shopping mall, across the street from a Safeway grocery store, next door to an Aldi store, and situated in a predominantly Black and low-income part of the city, that, like most of Washington, D.C., is rapidly changing. The lot on which the clinic stands is set to become condos,...

There are slightly more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States — that's nearly equal to the entire population of Houston. Among those prisoners, thousands serve time in solitary confinement, isolated in small often windowless cells for 22 to 24 hours a day. Some remain isolated for weeks, months or even years. "You're shut off from the world and you wait," says Olay Silva, a 41-year-old inmate serving time in Bismarck, N.D.'s maximum-security prison. Silva spent six months...

What to do when financial stability is beyond one’s grasp? Over the past decade, a coterie of pundits and think-tank scholars have arrived at a surefire answer , a simple one that comes with a snappy title and puts the onus on the individual: pursue the “success sequence.” The slogan refers to a time-honored series of life events: graduating from high school (at least), getting a full-time job, and marrying before having kids (in that order). As the conservative columnist George Will wrote...

PHILADELPHIA — Before they were separated at the southwest border, Ana Carolina Fernandes’s 5-year-old son loved playing with the yellow, impish Minion characters from the “Despicable Me” movies. Now his favorite game is patting down and shackling “migrants” with plastic cuffs. After being separated from his mother for 50 days, Thiago isn’t the same boy who was taken away from her by Border Patrol agents when they arrived in the United States from Brazil, Ms. Fernandes said last week. When...

Hi everyone! I am so excited and honored to be showing our almost done, “work-in-progress” film, CRACKED UP at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan this weekend! I am also a proud member of ACEs Connection and thank Jane Stevens for what she and her team have created and the impact they make every day! Because of people like Jane, the ACE Study is not on the fringes anymore. WE REALLY ARE A MOVEMENT NOW! I hope everyone in the area can come to our two screenings! I will be there...

From time to time, one of you will send me this message: Why did you post a link to THAT article on ACEs Connection? What does it have to do with ACEs science, trauma-informed or resilience-building practices? So, I thought I’d riff on this a bit, especially since the ACEs movement seems to be growing to reach another level of development. We’ll soon be 25,000 strong on this social network! Although we still need to educate people about ACEs science, there’s a lot of foundational work being...

Poor mental health ranks as one of the costliest forms of sickness for U.S. workers and may sap billions of dollars from the country's income growth, according to a team of researchers. In an analysis of economic and demographic data from 2008 to 2014, the researchers found that a single extra poor mental health day in a month was associated with a 1.84 percent drop in the per capita real income growth rate, resulting in $53 billion less total income each year, said Stephan Goetz, professor...

The Chronicle of Social Change is highlighting each of the policy recommendations made this summer by the participants of the Foster Youth Internship Program (FYI), a group of 10 former foster youths who have completed congressional internships. The program is overseen each summer by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Each of the FYI participants crafted a policy recommendation during their time in Washington, D.C. Today we highlight the recommendation of Noor Kathem, 23, an...

More than 43,000 lots in Philadelphia sit vacant, many invaded with overgrown weeds and strewn with trash. As CityLab has previously reported, this is as much a public-health problem as it is an economic one. Walking past such a site, researchers have previously found , can make your heat beat just a little faster, indicating increased levels of stress. And it’s no wonder: Studies have also shown that urban blight tends to attract crime and gun violence. It’s all taking a toll on the mental...

I ONCE BELIEVED the South Carolina Department of Corrections had done my oldest brother, Moochie, a great favor when it decided to place him in solitary confinement. Naively, I thought it would keep him safe, away from being raped or attacked by other prisoners. I now know that even when a man leaves solitary, it may never leave him. That’s why I initially empathized with Paul Manafort when reports surfaced that he had been placed in solitary while facing charges from the much-discussed...

Last week, a court-ordered deadline passed, one set for the federal government to reunify more than 2,500 children separated from their families when they attempted to cross the United States border. Government officials say they have now reunited more than 1,800 families, but some are still waiting. According to a lawsuit, as reported by Reuters , more than 450 immigrant parents have been deported without their children, and their futures are even more uncertain. For the families who have...

Horticultural therapist Thomas Erskine enjoys a “sense of connection” when he works outdoors. Being wholly absorbed in an activity – taking in the immediacy of the environment – enables him “to lose the frenetic noise of a speeding world”. Erskine runs gardening projects for people with learning disabilities and physical and mental health problems. He began his social care career in residential settings but found the environment frustrating and lacking meaningful activity. “I have always...