Blog

[March 20, 2019] Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an additional $487 million to supplement first-year funding through its State Opioid Response (SOR) grant program. The awards to states and territories are part of HHS’s Five-Point Opioid Strategy and the Trump administration’s tireless drive to combat the opioid crisis. Together with the $933 million in second-year, continuation awards to be provided under this program later this year, the total amount...

Thank you so much to those of you who were able to join us live for our Heal US call. It was a powerful call that focused on unburdening ourselves from the challenging feelings being activated by the disconnect between the many serious situations in our world calling for enlightened action, and the ongoing failure of our leaders and the political system as a whole to respond in a meaningful and effective way. Our process identified the underlying roots of our reactions to this situation, and...

Tony McGuire is a great carpenter. He ran his own construction business for years. Then he wanted to get into teaching. He became a Tenured Faculty member at a local community college, and landed in the state penitentiary as a Basic Skills Carpentry instructor. So how could that be connected to saving lives with a 20 buck investment? Tony got touched by CRI’s trauma-informed training. He saw himself past and present and knew somehow that, “with this information comes the responsibility to...

By P. Berman, K. Hecht, and A. H osack Life in jail was paralleling Larry’s life growing up; he was always being humiliated or beaten up by someone with more power than him. At night when he was finally was able to fall asleep, he had bizarre dreams in which he always ended up begging Claire to drop the charges and let him out of jail. Waking up from these dreams was an exercise in self-hatred. While they were just “dreams , ” Larry felt they were signs t h at h e was not a “real” man. None...

Chicago students Sabeer Al-Shareef and Shameir Faulkner are looking forward to a crazy few months as they approach high school graduation. In June, they’ll walk across a creaky stage at their historic South Side neighborhood high school and then move on to college in the fall. These are Chicago success stories, exactly the kind Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson loves to highlight — young black men getting their diplomas and taking the next step. “One thing that does not get enough...

For the first 42 years of her life, Sharon daVanport assumed that everyone finds the lights at the grocery store overwhelming. As a child, she knew it was unusual that she rocked back and forth and banged her head on her bedroom wall after school, but she didn’t worry about it. Even after her youngest son, J.D., was diagnosed with autism at age 5, she did not draw any parallels between his behavior, which also included rocking, and her own—although her mother did notice some similarities...

Weight training by older people may build not only strength and muscle mass but also motivation and confidence, potentially spurring them to continue exercising, according to an interesting new study of the emotional impacts of lifting weights. The findings intimate that people worried that they might be too old or inept to start resistance training should perhaps try it, to see how their bodies and minds respond. We already have plenty of evidence, of course, that weight training can help...

For two years in a row, more than 100 newsroom leaders from across the country have gathered to discuss what they’ve learned in the wake of #MeToo revelations that rocked the media industry — and just about every other industry. On Tuesday, the Freedom Forum Institute , a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to defending the First Amendment, released a report highlighting some of the key lessons from this year’s meeting, held in mid-January. They include: “Focus on sexual misconduct alone is...

Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the Native American Voting Rights Act Thursday, enacting a state law designed to empower Native American people to overcome the long-standing obstacles they face when they try to vote. Native voting rights advocates across the nation hope the bill will serve as a model for other states ahead of the 2020 presidential election. The law allows Native American voters to use non-traditional addresses—or, alternatively, the address of a designated building on...

New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey opened his revelatory 2018 book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence by calling the dramatic fall in violence in American cities since the early 1990s a “fundamental change in the nature of U.S. urban life,” one that “no one predicted and that many people still do not believe.” The book amassed a pile of crime statistics to counter that disbelief—and to show how the efforts of community...

Most of us have real anger and suffering living inside us. Perhaps in the past we were oppressed or mistreated, and all that pain is still right there, buried in our store consciousness. We haven’t processed and transformed our relationship with what happened to us and we sit there alone with all that anger, hatred, despair and suffering. If we were abused when were young, every time our thinking mind goes back over that event, it’s like we’re experiencing the abuse all over again. – Thich...

A new study published in Infant and Child Development indicates that complications during birth may increase the risk that children will develop social anxiety by their pre-teen years. For the study, 149 children aged nine to 12 years were screened for behavioral inhibition -- a tendency to exhibit a fearful disposition and withdrawal in unfamiliar contexts and situations -- and assessed for social anxiety symptoms using parent- and child-reports. Investigators found that perinatal...