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This first study , from Loma Linda University, looked at centenarians and seniors, many of whom were “well on their way to becoming centenarians,” in the Loma Linda, CA community. This area is one of the five “blue zones”—areas around the world where people live extraordinarily long lives—outlined in the book of the same title by Dan Buettner. The authors interviewed community members about their early life experiences, and found that they were more often than not peppered with adverse...

Is homelessness in America surging or ebbing? It depends not only upon where you are, but who you ask—and what, precisely, you’re looking for. Should you live in a big, high-cost city like Los Angeles , San Francisco , or Seattle , you’d be forgiven for assuming that the number of people living in homelessness is exploding: In those metros, tent cities full of those priced out by soaring housing costs have created a major crisis for local leaders. Overall national figures from the U.S.

Yesterday, the New York City Council made New York the first jurisdiction in the country to make telephone calls from its prisons and jails free . The city will not only give up the commission it currently makes on phone calls – it is going a step further and making the phone calls themselves free. This change will save the poorest families in the City of New York more than $8 million a year. In many prisons and jails, calls home from jail are very expensive, costing up to $1/minute .

Please sit back and enjoy our "conversation between friends" with the director of volunteers, Michael Weinberg, and volunteer extraordinaire, Mark Dorsey, as they discuss the role of The Ronald McDonald House Charities in helping critically ill children and their families navigate their way through an adverse childhood experience. The support they offer is crucial for helping build resilience in the patients, their siblings and caregivers.

Want to get certified in Echo's new trauma-informed nonviolent parenting curriculum? For the last 18 years, Echo has been providing sliding-scale parenting classes in Los Angeles. The 10-class series includes the latest science on the brain and childhood trauma and gives parents many tools for creating the kind of safe, stable nurturing relationship we all want with our children and underpins healthy development. Classes are available in English and Spanish. This fall, Echo will be offering...

In just six weeks, stakeholders from across North Carolina will get together to learn about system integration work with youth involved with child welfare. This is the third annual Benchmarks' Partnering for Excellence (PFE) Conference and this year, we have decided to really focus on "Creating Nurturing Systems". While the daily work of PFE can be hard and challenges us to think of new ways to meet the needs of the family, the annual conference offers us a way to celebrate our successes and...

Approximately 27 percent of formerly incarcerated people are looking for a job, but are still unemployed, a rate higher even than the general U.S. unemployment rate of 24.9 percent during the Great Depression, according to a new study by the Prison Policy Initiative . According to PPI, the statistic is the first-ever national estimate of unemployment among formerly incarcerated Americans. Researchers used data for 2008—the most recent year for which data was available—to calculate the...

Rates of anxiety and depression among teens in the U.S. have been rising for years. According to one study , nearly one in three adolescents (ages 13-18) now meets the criteria for an anxiety disorder, and in the latest results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 32 percent of teens reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. And there's more bad news, grown-ups: The authors of two new parenting books believe you're part of the...

Raise the banners and strike up the band, because the “ War on Poverty” is won . Mission accomplished! And that means it’s time to hack down the safety net that saved the nation’s poor. That was the head-turning takeaway from a report last week from the White House Council of Economic Advisors that declared the War on Poverty “largely over and a success.” The report diverged sharply from what even other Republicans say about poverty, to say nothing of economists. (“Do these people ever visit...

More than a decade after Jim Wallace moved into a small mobile home community in Duvall, Washington, he said the landlord threatened to sell the property and possibly make everyone leave. Wallace had been living there since 1982. He didn’t want to move. He also didn’t think he could afford to. If he tried to move his 14-foot, single-wide mobile home, it “would fold up like a cardboard box,” he said. Wallace didn’t own the land he was on; like his neighbors, he was renting it. Leaving the...

Julie Davis directs half a dozen volunteers as they unload a 16-foot truck in front of a Nashville duplex. Bunk beds, dressers, lamps and a diaper-changing station come out of the truck; so do boxes with shampoo, books, toys, a kitchen's worth of supplies. Everything going into the empty two-bedroom apartment has been donated to Re-New, a project that Davis, a high-end interior designer, began eight years ago, when she decided to start using her clients' old furniture to help domestic...

As awareness of trauma-informed care has grown in recent years, we’ve stressed the importance offering an authentic healing relationship in our role as therapists. But another core concept deserves more attention: helping clients become aware of, and nurture their authentic self. At this year’s Psychotherapy Networker conference (which I’ve attended almost annually for about the last 22 years) the amazing Brené Brown spoke about her work on authenticity and shame. She beautifully explained...