Blog

By Heidi de Marco and Angela Hart, Photo: Heidi de Marco/KHN, California Healthline, May 31, 2022 Every Friday, Frances De Los Santos waits for a shipment of healthy, prepared meals to land on her front porch at the edge of the Mojave Desert. From the box, the 80-year-old retired property manager with stage 4 chronic kidney disease unpacks frozen food trays that she can heat in the microwave. Her favorite is sweet-and-sour chicken. In the three months since she began eating the customized...

By Petula Dvorak, Photo: Courtesy of the Martorella Family, The Washington Post, May 30, 2022 When she was growing up, Memorial Day meant a trip to the Honor Wall in the center of Deana Martorella Orellana’s hometown, where the names of Charleroi, Pa., men who died in the world’s battlefields are etched in black granite. Her family is making that trip without her this year. She died with inspirational notes stuffed in her pockets. That March morning in 2016, she had gone to Veterans Affairs...

By Leslie Nguyen-Okwu, Photo: An Rong Xu/The New York Times, The New York Times, May 30, 2022 Black and Asian communities in America today are often portrayed as in conflict with each other. But we have a long history of organizing with each other, too. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Asian Americans working as immigrant laborers in the United States were often subjected to racial violence. That experience of discrimination created solidarity with the Black community. In 1869,...

Investing in youth and families is one of the most impactful ways we can improve and strengthen community health. The barriers that so many families and children face have resulted in child abuse becoming a growing issue that has serious consequences on children, their families, and the communities in which they live. April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month but in reality, child abuse happens every day, of every...

The world is heartbroken. When the news about Uvalde broke, my daughter called me in tears, grieving for the children and families and worried for her five-year-old daughter still at school. She talked with my granddaughter about ways to keep her safer from “mean people” if they came to her school. As a grandmother, it is heart-wrenching to even think of the need to have such a conversation with my innocent granddaughter. In the United States, the 19 children murdered in Uvalde now are...

By Rachel Nuwer, Photo: Amanda Lucier/The New York Times, The New York Times, May 29, 2022 Nigel McCourry removed his shoes and settled back on the daybed in the office of Dr. Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C. “I hadn’t been really anxious about this at all, but I think this morning it started to make me a little bit anxious,” Mr. McCourry said as Annie Mithoefer, a registered nurse and Dr. Mithoefer’s colleague and spouse, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm.

By Turnaround For Children, May 2022 Again this week we have been faced with a horrific reminder that the schools we send our children to each day, the schools where the educators and support staff we depend on show up every morning, are not safe. The impact will spread far beyond the immediate communities where they occurred. Students, educators, families, and entire school communities across the country are feeling the stress and fear. Moving forward is not going to be easy, and we won’t...

By Emily Green, Photo: Emily Green/The Lund Report, The Lund Report, May 24, 2022 For most of her adult life, Crystal Johnson was, as she puts it, a minivan-driving soccer mom. A life-long resident of Newport, the affable 49-year-old thought the meth addiction she battled in her early 20s was behind her. But when the youngest of her four children was in high school, a family crisis sent her reeling. Knowing meth would take the pain away, she dove back in. The only way to explain how she went...

By Nina Lakhani, Photo: Goldman Prize, The Guardian, May 25, 2022 Indigenous activists and lawyers who took on transnational corporations and their own governments to force climate action are among the 2022 winners of the world’s pre-eminent environmental award. Taking on powerful vested interests is a risky business, and the recipients of this year’s Goldman prize demonstrate the power of unified community action, perseverance and the courts in the battle to save the planet from...

Maryann McEvoy, executive director of the Pennsylvania Office of Advocacy and Reform (OAR) and Child advocate, says one of the favorite things for her to talk about is “the beautiful and ingenious design of Heal PA.” She describes Heal PA as “a coalition of trauma experts who create materials and resources and provide the knowledge that we need to get out into our communities.” The path to get trauma and resilience knowledge into communities is provided by a second entity— Resilient PA —that...

Are you a health coach with a mindfulness practice? Would you like to share some easy mindfulness strategies with your clients? Perhaps you're a health coach that hasn't added mindfulness to your self-care yet, but wants to learn more about it? Having a mindfulness practice can improve resilience for both health coaches and their clients.

After three days of working with the mothers on post-traumatic stress, they invited me to take a walk with them to feed the horses. We climbed a hill behind the center in Romania where they have been staying since they evacuated from the region around Odessa.