Blog

Byron Hall mentors adolescent parents for the Community Enrichment Organization , a nonprofit in Tarboro, NC, which partners with a program that supports to keep adolescent parents in school. One of the parents he mentors is 13 years old. At the age of 17, Hall was an adolescent parent himself, growing up with a single parent in the Bronx, NY, then an African American community where drug-dealing and prostitution were common. For the counselor, helping these young men and women, who are...

By Greg Barnes, North Carolina Health News, January 6, 2020 No one told Army veteran Carter Bryant about groundwater contamination near the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant when he bought a home there in July. Bryant said he knew almost nothing about GenX and other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — commonly known as PFAS or “forever chemicals” — before he and his family moved in. About two months later, Bryant said, he received a notice from Chemours stating that contaminants in his...

By Greg Barnes, North Carolina Health News, January 6, 2020 No one told Army veteran Carter Bryant about groundwater contamination near the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant when he bought a home there in July. Bryant said he knew almost nothing about GenX and other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — commonly known as PFAS or “forever chemicals” — before he and his family moved in. About two months later, Bryant said, he received a notice from Chemours stating that contaminants in his...

Last week, Benchmarks’ Partnering for Excellence partnered with American Children’s Home to host a free screening of the documentary Broken Places open to everyone in the community. Broken Places revisits three different families that were filmed 15-30 years ago to see how the toxic stress and trauma that they experienced has affected them over the years. It turns out that some people are very damaged by toxic stress and trauma, while others are able to thrive, and the film explores this...

Rowan County is excited to take the next steps across all sectors to foster a resilient community. We will be offering the Community Resiliency Model Trainer Training on January 27 th – 31 st , 2020. The location will be in downtown Salisbury at St. John’s Lutheran Church. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided for trainees for the entirety of the training. The Community Resiliency Model (CRM) of the Trauma Resource Institute trains community members to not only help themselves but to...

By Alan R. Weil, Health Affairs, December 9, 2019 This month’s Health Affairs explores many dimensions of health and health care for the one out of five Americans who live in what the US Census Bureau defines as a rural area. Much attention is focused these days on the relatively poor health outcomes and heightened rate of socioeconomic disadvantage of rural America. As Janice Probst and colleagues point out in their overview paper, rural mortality rates only started falling behind urban...

Nicole Wetsman The Red River runs north, up along the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, before spilling into Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. Its water flows slowly through a 10,000-year-old glacial lakebed, in one of the flattest stretches of land in the United States, and because it points north, it’s sometimes blocked by ice jams—all of which makes the river prone to flooding . In March 2009, one such flood threatened the city of Fargo. Residents watched for a week as the...

We developed ACEs Connection's Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Tool — called the Inclusion Tool, for short — to ensure that ACEs initiatives across the world focus on being inclusive when forming a steering committee, recruiting leaders, providing education about ACEs science, recruiting members, or providing resources and services within their communities. The more inclusive your ACEs initiative is, the more diverse it will be, giving your initiative a real shot at achieving equity and...

By UNC TV, November 6, 2019 UNC-TV Public Media North Carolina presents the statewide broadcast premiere of the special documentary feature Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope, Tuesday, November 19, at 8 PM, as part of Resilience Week—a statewide initiative to build awareness of childhood trauma, prevention and resilience. The hour-long film focuses on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), what Dr. Robert Anda and Laura Porter of ACE Interface have termed, “the...

By UNC TV, November 6, 2019 UNC-TV Public Media North Carolina presents the statewide broadcast premiere of the special documentary feature Resilience: The Biology of Stress & the Science of Hope, Tuesday, November 19, at 8 PM, as part of Resilience Week—a statewide initiative to build awareness of childhood trauma, prevention and resilience. The hour-long film focuses on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), what Dr. Robert Anda and Laura Porter of ACE Interface have termed, “the...

Last week, three pediatricians — with a combined experience of 15 years integrating ACEs science into their practices — reflected on the urgency they felt several years ago that prompted them to begin screening patients for childhood adversity and resilience when there was practically no guidance at all. Along their journey , they accumulated a list of lessons learned for other pediatricians and family clinics to use. The three pediatricians participated in the ACEs Connection webinar,...

An ACEs Connection webinar co-sponsored with 4 CA In 2017, California became the first state in the country to pass a law supporting universal screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the 5.3 million children in the state’s Medicaid program. As clinicians around California await the state’s announcement of what this new policy will entail, many are wondering what it takes to integrate ACEs science in a pediatric practice. Meet Drs. Deirdre Bernard-Pearl, R.J. Gillespie and...