Blog

By Ashley Judd, Photo: Theo Wargo/WireImage, USA TODAY, May 6, 2022 This Sunday is abruptly, shockingly, my first Mother’s Day without my mama . She died just hours before her peers at the Country Music Hall of Fame could demonstrate to her how much they esteem her. She died just days before my sister and I could show her again how much we love and honor her. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was supposed to visit her on Sunday, to give her a box of old-fashioned candy, our family...

By David Nakamura and Darryl Fears, Photo: Wayne Parry/AP, The Washington Post, May 5, 2022 The Justice Department is ramping up enforcement of environmental cases that officials say disproportionately harm poor and marginalized communities, creating an office to help coordinate investigations and expanding the breadth of litigation against companies and local or state governments that appear to violate federal laws or commit civil infractions. Appearing at a joint news conference Thursday,...

By Catherine Pearson, Photo: Getty Images, The New York Times, May 5, 2022 For two years, working parents in America have been running on fumes, hammered by the stress of remote schooling, day care closures, economic instability and social isolation. Now, a new report says that 66 percent of working parents meet the criteria for parental burnout — a nonclinical term that means they are so exhausted by the pressure of caring for their children, they feel they have nothing left to give. The...

By Jenny Gold, Photo: Jenny Gold/KHN, California Healthline, May 5, 2022 Dr. Andrew Herring has a clear goal walking into every appointment with patients seeking medication to treat an opioid use disorder: persuade them to get an injection of extended-release buprenorphine. At his addiction clinic at Highland Hospital, a bustling public facility in the heart of Oakland, Herring promotes administering a shot of buprenorphine in the belly to provide a month of addiction treatment rather than...

By Nicole Chavez, Photo: Darlene Gomez, CNN US, May 5, 2022 Shawna Toya was eager to carry on her ancestor's legacy of pottery making in New Mexico when her mother's cellphone rang about 3:45 a.m. and the "worst call" came in last year. "Oh no, it can't be... I just talked to her. You have the wrong person," Geraldine Toya recalls telling a police officer. Her 40-year-old daughter Shawna was found dead on July 31, 2021 inside her SUV at a park in Albuquerque. A few hours earlier, the family...

Photo courtesy of Nollie Jenkins Family Center On a Tuesday morning three years ago, Julia Ringo discovered her daughter was in terrible pain. Examining her, Ringo looked in shock at a mass of bruises and swelling on her daughter Kiorey’s buttocks, a day after the 8-year-old Black girl had been paddled with a wooden board at an elementary school in Grenada, Mississippi. Ringo rushed her daughter to the emergency room and told the attending doctor what had transpired. “As soon as he looked at...

While most of our attention here is focused on assisting maltreated children and their families or adults suffering from the residual of their childhood trauma, I have been working at the other (tragic) end of the spectrum of child deaths due to abuse and neglect (in bureaucratic language "critical incidents.") For three years I have been a volunteer member of the CAPTA mandated Citizens Review Panel under the Department of Social Services' (DSS) Office of Child Abuse Prevention. It has...

The Attachment & Trauma Network, Inc. (ATN) announces the launching of Team R&R - an online community for educators and other child-serving professionals on the journey of being trauma-informed and resilience-building. The community focuses on R&R...being regulated & relational...as cornerstone qualities in being trauma-informed, healing-focused and resilience-building. The community's two big focuses are on providing exclusive content and peer-led connection and interaction.

Big thumbs up to Ingrid Cockhren and Mathew Portell. Great interviews! Their History. Culture. Trauma podcast is exceptional. They are informed and articulate. They work well together and know how to get the best from their guests. These quality broadcasts don’t just happen fortuitously. Lots of prep work is involved and I and others appreciate the effort. Keep up the wonderful work.

The HOPE National Resource Center (NRC) is growing. Last week, Kristin Sereyko started as HOPE’s new Senior Project Manager. Kristin will be responsible for overall management of finances and program growth. She will assist with strategic planning and execution of this plan helping to ensure sustainability and successful growth of the HOPE NRC. We are excited to welcome her to the HOPE National Resource Center. As our work expands across the country and around the world, so does our team.

By Maavni Singh, Preston Gannaway/The Guardian, The Guardian, May 5, 2022 “I just don’t know where to go.” Sarah sighed as she looked past her tent off the I-80 highway, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. Sarah and her partner, Kevin, both 55, have lived in the scattered encampments along this stretch of busy highway in Berkeley, California , for years now. They’ve had to pack up several times, moving from one camp to the next as authorities cleared plot after plot. Last month, a federal...

By Jaclyn Peiser, Image: Nashville Public Library, The Washington Post, May 5, 2022 About a week after a Tennessee lawmaker suggested burning banned books , the Nashville Public Library announced a bold campaign encouraging the exact opposite. This month, Nashville residents can trade in their faded library cards for bright yellow ones with an unapologetic message: “I read banned books.” The card is part of the library’s Freedom to Read campaign, which encourages autonomy over what patrons...