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I was caught off guard yesterday as I sat staring out the window, watching the rain pour and trickle down the glass. The smell of fresh laundry and the tobacco candle burning in the kitchen is beyond calming. The sound of Killswitch Engage softly echoed in the background from my desktop speakers; I recognize the irony even typing this. And at that moment, I had an overwhelming sense of emotion run over me. For the first time, I realized that I am in it; I am on my vision quest. Historically...

By Dialynn Dwyer, Boston.com Staff November 13, 2020 “People become afraid to share their exposures, symptoms, and test results with each other, with contact tracers.” A Harvard infectious disease epidemiologist is warning that “shame and blame” perpetuate stigma around COVID-19 and break down public health efforts aimed at controlling the spread of the virus. Julia Marcus, of Harvard Medical School, explained on Twitter Friday how stigma around the virus is “toxic” to public health.

It’s true. I’m not sure if anyone told you yet, but you’re allowed to disconnect from the healing journey for a little bit. We get so caught up in doing all of the things that sometimes we forget that we are allowed to live. To be alive isn’t a series of habits and routines and practices that overtake your life. To be alive is to find the present moment, indulge in it, and to take a little bit of it with you. This trauma healing game is exhausting; wake, meditate, journal, do yoga, set...

After watching the excellent webinar Episode 6 of Cracked Up, the Evolving Conversation: Healing Trauma, I thought it was timely that CNN posted this piece: Former White supremacist: This is how to tackle hate and bigotry In the piece, the author makes the connection between his own ACEs and other trauma and his, as he puts it, addiction to hate. Here is a link to the piece: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/opinions/former-white-supremacist-how-to-tackle-hate-buckley/index.html

Resilience, the ability to overcome adversity, is not an innate skill or genetic trait. Resilience is the ability to recover after adversity strike. None of us escape trauma, at some point in our lives, we will each face at least one overwhelming events that test our capacity to recover. Resilience is a quality that is develops from experiences where a person, even a baby, must deal with manageable stress and is supported enough to recover. It’s not a quality that you are born with, or...

From Stanford Social Innovation Review, November 2020 As our nation reckons with its history of racial injustice, how can philanthropy change its theories and methods of giving in order to contribute to positive social change? What does allyship look like as we move into a new decade, rife with calamity and crisis, at a time when a global pandemic has exacerbated the systemic inequities that devastate the most marginalized among us? [ Please click here for more information and to register .]

We’re reaching out to say Happy Adoption Awareness Month and to invite you again to come join us this weekend for an exclusive partner e-screening of the legal thriller Foster Boy, starring Louis Gossett Jr., Matthew Modine, and Shane Paul McGhie. You can watch the film at your convenience any time in the 48 hour screening window on November 14th and 15th, and you’ll have a chance to register for our Q&A with cast members, the film’s writer Jay Paul Deratany, and a foster youth student...

A self-professed lifelong learner, Dr. Scheinbaum’s life’s work has been centered around education innovation since the very beginning. She began her career in 1972, teaching students with learning disabilities. Her drive to incorporate a more holistic perspective into her work led her to earn a PhD in clinical psychology at Fielding Graduate University, where she specialized in positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mind-body medicine.

There is a place that we get trapped in the choices that we make. I want to think that conflict happens when there is a collision of values between the person you were and the person you are becoming. In the moments of change in the healing process, we reach plateaus, not as in the end but as in a time to create a shift. When this happens, we are faced with making a choice: do we act according to the person we were or the person we have become and are moving in towards. We hit a wall in...

By Z, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, November 9, 2020 In 2000, I was 14 years old, in Los Angeles’ Skid Row. You wouldn’t believe such a Third World slum existed within history’s richest country; oh, but it did. It does. A section of one of the world’s most glamorous cities set aside to hide thousands of homeless people, to hide America’s unwillingness to deal with poverty, mental health, drug addiction and homelessness. It’s all swept under the rug, or under the shadow of downtown’s...

By Brittany R. Collins, Education Week, November 12, 2020 Over the past few decades, trauma-informed teaching has gained ground in the United States, yet rarely is grief included in the conversation. In the midst of a global pandemic, with teachers and students confronting loss in and outside the classroom in new and myriad ways, it is more critical than ever to apply a grief-sensitive lens to our conversations about curricula and trauma in the school system. We are not the people we were a...