Blog

Professional artists work alongside African American urban youth 15-24 years-old to collect stories, reframe and retell them to promote understanding, pride, intergenerational relationships and literacy.

Yesterday, you ran 5 miles, prepared dinner for several nights, completed a complicated work project and organized your entire office. Or you checked off every task from your very long to-do list. Your focus barely waned and the day almost felt seamless. Today, you showered, put cream cheese on a bagel, and feel like a zombie (or whatever has less energy than that). Your brain is bare. In fact, you can barely string together simple sentences. Everything feels like it requires so much effort,...

Back in 1915, a man named William Warley put in a bid on a property in Louisville, Kentucky. The owner, Charles Buchanan, accepted the bid. But the sale wasn’t squarely legal. Warley, the buyer, was black. Buchanan was white. Buchanan’s property was located in a white neighborhood, and a Louisville ordinance forbid black residents from moving into predominantly white areas (and vice-versa). Warley acknowledged the sale’s dubious legality with a provision he put in the contract: This way,...

The opioid epidemic. Obesity. Low workforce participation. These adult problems have their roots in childhood trauma. Dr. Michael Brumage wants West Virginians to understand what the research shows - that exposure to childhood trauma can lead to a variety of public health problems in adulthood. Brumage is talking about ACES: Adverse Childhood Experiences. In a recent study, West Virginia children scored higher than the national average of 46 percent. [For more on this story by SCOTT FINN, go...

With funding from First 5 Kern, Advancing Parenting has placed our fifty parenting tips on the 120 buses and shuttles of G.E.T. in Bakersfield, CA. These tips will be read 1000s of times by 1000s of people of all ages. We call this proactive, passive/public parenting education...a way to prevent adverse childhood experiences. Visit advancingparenting.org to see all of the fifty tips and read about what we do, why we do it, and our plans for the future.

Many mistakenly believe that resilience is about grit - "toughing it out" or "persevering through hardship." Fortunately, a new paradigm supported by research is emerging. Resilience is about more than the power of the mind to overcome. Resilience is about the body's stress response and its ability to remain in a healthy range of arousal and settling without getting stuck in an over or under activated state. In this unique, one of kind workshop, participants will become "re-embodied" to...

It’s no secret that Alaska struggles with high rates of sexual assault and abuse, neglect, and other crimes against children. Alaska consistently has one of the five highest child abuse rates in the country, according to the Child Welfare League of America. The state Office of Children’s Services told Alaska Dispatch News this summer that in 2017 it has averaged more than 50 reports of abuse and neglect per day. What's less well known is that these kinds of traumatic experiences, along with...

The largest study to compare the mortality outcomes of different types of exercise found people who did strength-based exercise had a 23 percent reduction in risk of premature death by any means, and a 31 percent reduction in cancer-related death. Lead author Associate Professor Emmanuel Stamatakis from the School of Public Health and the Charles Perkins Centre said while strength training has been given some attention for functional benefits as we age, little research has looked at its...

On a recent research visit to the Emily Dickinson museum and archives in Amherst, I chanced upon a most improbable discovery of forgotten, pioneering work by another titan of culture. When thirty-one-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois (February 23, 1868–August 27, 1963) heard that the World’s Fair to be held in Paris in 1900 would include a special exhibition on the subject of sociology, he saw in it an opportunity to open the world’s eyes to what had been occupying him for nearly a decade — “the...

The brain adapts and responds to the environments and conditions in which a person lives. When we speak of addiction as a chronic disorder of the brain, it thus includes an understanding that some individuals are more susceptible to drug use and addiction than others, not only because of genetic factors but also because of stress and a host of other environmental and social factors in their lives that have made them more vulnerable. Opioid addiction is often described as an “equal...

In “ The Lost Children of Tuam ,” the New York Times tells the tragic story of “mother and baby” homes in Ireland, facilities for unmarried mothers where infants died by the hundreds. Those who survived were forcibly separated from their mothers and routinely abused. The mother and baby homes were closely related to and preceded by Ireland’s infamous Magdalene Laundries, Catholic institutions that enslaved thousands of “fallen” women during the 19th and 20th centuries. What the Times article...

At a doctor’s visit, on a college-admissions application, or even in a consumer-marketing survey, Americans are regularly asked to classify themselves by race. Some protest this request by “declining to answer,” as forms often allow. After all, racial categories are social constructs . They don’t connote biological or genetic difference. As an African American, I have never had difficulty knowing which box I am meant to check. Whether I do so depends on my understanding of why the...