Blog

For trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran, gun violence is a very personal issue. He has treated hundreds of gun wound victims, comforted anxious loved ones and told mothers and fathers that their children would not be coming home. But Sakran's empathy for his patients and their families extends beyond the hospital. Sakran knows the pain of gun violence because he is a survivor of it; when he was 17, he took a bullet to the throat after a high school football game. Maybe that's why he felt the need...

Foster parents are the primary intervention in the lives of abused and neglected children. In order for children placed into foster care to receive the safety and stability they need to heal and thrive, available and willing high-quality families are needed. In California, finding enough caregivers for the state’s foster children is a key plank of the state’s current child welfare initiative, the Continuum of Care Reform ( CCR ). That reform effort is driven by a need to place more of these...

California’s deadliest wildfire, the Camp Fire, is now fully contained, but its death toll has climbed to 88, and more than 200 people are still missing. How are the people still searching for loved ones, and the thousands of residents displaced from their homes, coping in the disaster's aftermath? Amna Nawaz talks to William Brangham, reporting from Gridley, California. [For more on this story by PBS News Hour, go to...

After years of drug addiction and homelessness, Kenny Sawyer found himself staring at a job application at Hypertherm , a New Hampshire company that makes industrial cutting tools. He was sober at last. He really wanted this job. But the application asked whether he had been convicted of any felonies. Sawyer hadn’t. But he decided later that the company would want to know he had been jailed for misdemeanor assault after a fight over a crack purchase years earlier. He called to volunteer that...

Neighborhood violence has been associated with adverse health effects on youth, including sleep loss, asthma and metabolic syndrome. Yet some youth living in high-crime neighborhoods manage to avoid these effects. A new Northwestern University study aims to answer a resilience puzzle: Why does a second-hand or indirect experience of neighborhood violence affect some youth, but not others? "Little is known about the brain networks that are involved in shaping these different outcomes, a...

Less than a mile south of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Sasabe, Mexico, a Guatemalan man named Giovanni (whose first name is used to protect his undocumented status) propped up his feet while an EMT applied antibiotic ointment to his feet in the shade of a cottonwood. Giovanni left his home country because of a catastrophic drought and was attempting to unite with his brothers who were already in Dallas. After trying to cross the border into the Arizona desert, his feet were ravaged:...

At age 40, Joe Burton was not a mindful leader. He was the COO of an $2 billion company, working 12-hour days and weekends and making more than half a million dollars a year. But his body was paying the price: He was suffering from insomnia, asthma, and eight years of chronic back pain that was so bad it sometimes brought him to tears. “I was frustrated, angry, competitive, and hurting,” Burton writes in his 2018 book Creating Mindful Leaders: How to Power Down, Power Up, and Power Forward .

In case you missed it over the holiday weekend, on late Friday afternoon, the federal government released a worrying new report about climate change. Over 1,600-plus pages, the report explains in blunt terms all the ways that climate change will harm the environment, devastate the economy, and imperil the lives of millions of Americans. The fourth National Climate Assessment shares many similarities with the first, which was released in 2000. Both studies find that temperatures in the United...

To properly understand white supremacy and institutional inequality, there is no need to study the Ku Klux Klan or ask why you can’t say the n-word. Racism has less to do with the hate in one’s heart and more to do with the hard truths of economics and history. A new study titled “ The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods ,” from the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings highlights how race is intertwined with economics, manifesting itself as the inescapable reality of racism. The...

On a Saturday afternoon in Houston, Dennis Rivera-Sarmiento crossed a stage donning a green graduation gown. The 19-year-old was proud of this moment—one he wasn’t sure would happen. Just months before, a scuffle with a classmate near Stephen F. Austin High School threatened his future in the United States. Charged with assault, he was arrested by campus police, sent to county jail, then held in three different Texas immigration detention centers, including one located more than an hour from...

All with the beautiful intention of helping kiddos who need a sprinkling of Sammie hope in their lives. As a child who experienced ACEs and the resulting anxiety, it can feel overwhelming and scary. I am so very happy our Sammie's Bundles of Hope can help alleviate a little bit of that scariness and bring a smile to those kiddos needing hope the most.

Brett A. Loftis, JD, is co-founder of The Center for Trauma Resilient Communities and is also Crossnore’s Chief Executive Officer. Crossnore School & Children’s Home is pleased to announce the opening of the Center for Trauma Resilient Communities. The Center’s focus is to provide training and consultation for building trauma resilience within an organization or community. Start-up funding for the Center has been provided by an anonymous private foundation that is committed to healing...