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People’s response to the great chasms of structural inequities glaringly laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic have been further inflamed by the murder of George Floyd and deaths of other African Americans in recent weeks. The acute emergency of the pandemic has eased, but the violence inflicted on racial minorities and now those who are protesting the inequities in our society has compounded the outrage. Right after the pandemic began running riot across the US, I often heard people ask: When...

Glass’s mission has always been to protect and foster the practice of nurturing children. That’s because she herself experienced at least five types of adverse childhood experiences, as measured in the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). If the scale could account for childhood adversity such as structural racism and community violence that’s more likely to occur in communities of color, her burden of ACEs is higher.

In his groundbreaking book , In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction , trauma and addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté writes, “There are almost as many addictions as there are people.” ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens read that quote as a springboard to asking Maté to define addiction and explain whether or not it is always rooted in adverse childhood experiences. Maté, along with filmmaker Michelle Esrick and Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond,...

Black Lives Do Matter [chcf.org] By Sandra R. Hernandez, California Health Care Foundation, May 31, 2020 It is hard to find words for the grief, the fear, and the anger that our Black brothers and sisters are feeling at this moment. The outrage and despair so many are experiencing right now are natural responses to the perpetual and unaccountable killing of innocent Black men and women at the hands of the police. All of us have a role to play in addressing this deadly strain of racism and...

By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, May 30, 2020 If recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the world is not just flat. It’s fragile. And we’re the ones who made it that way with our own hands. Just look around. Over the past 20 years, we’ve been steadily removing man-made and natural buffers, redundancies, regulations and norms that provide resilience and protection when big systems — be they ecological, geopolitical or financial — get stressed. We’ve been recklessly removing...

By Chloe Yang, Dr. Robert Sege, and Dr. Dina Burstein, 6/2/20, positiveexperience.org These past few days, the killing of George Floyd has opened a raw wound, one among many, caused by police brutality and a system built on racism. HOPE (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences) seeks to create a world in which every child has the chance to live a long, healthy life. The four building blocks promote positive, nurturing relationships. Safe, stable, and equitable environments. Opportunities...

Please join us on Friday, June 5th for "A Better Normal’ community discussion with @Ed Tronick , Ph.D., and @Claudia Gold , MD. They will be discussing the work in their new book The Power of Discord, Why the Ups and Downs of Relationships are the Secret to Building Intimacy, Resilience, and Trust , which they co-wrote (details about the authors and the book below). This discussion will be hosted by @Cissy White (ACEs Connection Staff) who is the Parenting with ACEs Community Manager and...

Signatures are a great way to let people know who you are! You can include anything you'd like, such as links to your local initiative, an image for your organization, or another to contact you. Your signature will then appear at the bottom of all your blog posts! Here's a video on how to add a signature to your ACEs Connection Profile:

by P. Berman I will introduce Claire to Butch. If she brings up the name Max, I will just act surprised. Craig was feeling satisfied with himself. While he was cold and stiff, from his time sitting out on his front steps, he finally had a plan he felt good about. He would be a strong man and take immediate control of the conversation before any thought of the name Max could be brought up. After kneeling down and helping Butch hold out his paw for a hand– shake, he would laugh and ask Claire...

by P. Berman I wish I could be more like my dad. If I was only as smart as he is, I wouldn’t make stupid mistakes! Craig was caught in a daydream filled with an image of himself as inferior to his dad because he gave Claire the wrong name for his current dog. He was relentlessly cutting himself down; just as Claire, with her very different family background, often cut herself down. They were intolerant of making mistakes. Yet all human’s make mistakes- even Craig’s dad. Claire came from a...

By Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ), May 27, 2020 On Monday evening, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. Video surfaced of a white police officer holding his knee to Floyd’s neck for eight minutes while Floyd pleaded with police saying “I can’t breathe.” Floyd became unresponsive and died shortly after at Hennepin County Medical Center. This brutal killing follows the death of Breonna Taylor in her bed at the hands of police in Louisville, Kentucky, the murder of Ahmaud...

By Holly Bailey, Annie Gowen, Vanessa Williams, and Jose A. Del Real, The Washington Post, May 31, 2020 The whole city still smelled like fire, but Yvonne Passmore wanted to survey the damage wrought by days of violent protests. So she stood beside three neighbors in South Minneapolis, all of them black, all of them trying to process what had happened the past few days, and months, and years. “First, we had the coronavirus , which is wiping us out,” said Passmore, 65, pushing down her mask...