Blog

I used to will chaos into my life. It was a gift of sorts. Mother said I was born to Thunder—which is an element of chaos and liberation in my culture. I have always believed that an electric chaos ran through my blood. "It's a gift to be born this way," my mother said, the first time I told her that I had a terrible dream of a large wheel spinning before me. It would not stop. "That is Thunder. This is a gift." She saw the world differently, and I by proxy. Her willful nature to name the...

The meeting room in the basement of the First Congregational Church of Memphis was packed on a recent Saturday morning with clergy members, activists, residents and workers. “It’s gone on far too long. It’s gone on far too long,” they chanted, rocking back and forth to a 1960s civil rights anthem. Their purpose for coming together was a four-hour training session on community building and peaceful protest. Ashley Cathey stood in the front of the room to speak, wearing a black shirt that...

For Julia Rosenblatt, the solution to affordable housing was to move in with friends and family—more than 10 people under one roof. Rosenblatt, a co-founder of the HartBeat Ensemble theater group in Hartford, Connecticut, had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in local activist communities. The year was 2003, the United States had launched a war in Iraq, and the post-9/11 environment was making her think differently about what kind of life she was going to have for herself and her...

People killed by police in 2015 and 2016 had a median age of 35, and they still had an average of about 50 years left to live when they died. It’s this metric—the gap between how long someone lives and how long they were expected to live—that’s the focus of a new study by Anthony Bui, Matthew Coates, and Ellicott Matthay in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. To find the true toll of police violence, the authors focused on years of life lost. They used data from “The Counted” a...

A new report from the Casey Foundation lays out a vision of sweeping changes and new and expanded priorities for juvenile probation. Based on more than 25 years of experience with JDAI™ and five years of studying probation with practitioners, youth, families, researchers and pilot sites, Transforming Juvenile Probation: A Vision for Getting It Right describes how and why systems must reimagine the most common disposition in juvenile justice to get better outcomes for young people. Probation...

Flashback Halting Guide: 10 Tips to Halt Flashbacks for Yourself or a Loved One. Includes a link to a printable Flashback Halting Guide

When the question of screening patients for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) was first raised a couple of years ago, Santa Barbara pediatrician Andria Ruth had mixed feelings about it.

When professor John Fitzgerald asked students in his advanced economics class this semester —Economic Evaluation of Public Programs — whether any would like to volunteer, for no academic credit, to help a local healthcare clinic analyze some of its patient data, three students promptly signed up. Oasis Free Clinics was seeking help to compare information it had about some of its patients’ childhood histories — in particular, the traumas they may have experienced in youth — with information...

Sarah Rittenhouse has taught English at Challenger Middle School in Glendale, Arizona, for seven years. She loves her students, she loves her community, and, at the end of the day, she loves her job. But she’s tired. The building in which she works is crumbling . Teacher turnover is high. Class sizes are huge. Counselors are spread too thin to adequately address the trauma experienced by many of her students, who come from refugee populations and low-income neighborhoods. Rittenhouse is also...

"There are various industries that are run by inmates, and we intend to sit down and refuse to work—have an economic protest, if you would—to bring about change," says one of the nearly 100,000 inmates in the Florida prison system. His words, conveyed through anonymized audio recording, refer to "Operation PUSH," the latest in a series of recent prison strikes challenging the corrections system in the United States. According to the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee , a prison labor...

Wake County, North Carolina, is home to more than one million people in Raleigh and 11 other municipalities. Advocates for Health in Action (AHA ) is a network of partners in Wake County working together to improve health and well-being through policy, systems and environmental change, and they are coordinating the ACEs Resilience Initiative in Wake County. Carey Sipp , Southeast Regional Community Facilitator for the ACEs Connection, spoke with AHA Executive Director Sara Merz last week to...

It's been almost 24 hours since the Symposium ended and I don't think we have touched ground yet. When we started thinking about what we wanted to do for this Symposium and we joked that it would be great to have Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, we thought it was nothing more than a joke. It still amazes me that we made it happen, and had James Redford and a screening of Resilience, as well as a great afternoon panel with representatives from local police, schools, pediatrics, and managed care on...