Blog

By Shannon Green, The Orlando Sentinel, January 3, 2020 Are you going to be OK, mom? Shibbon Winelle said those were among the final words uttered by her son, Bryce Gowdy, before he left their motel room and stood in front of a freight train. Bryce, who was 17, died of suicide a week before the Deerfield Beach football star was due to start classes at Georgia Tech on a scholarship Jan. 6. Bryce, his mom and his brothers were homeless again, and family members said he wrestled with his...

By Cooper Levey-Baker, Sarasota, December 19, 2019 Mimi Graham has spent her life fighting for kids. She began her career in the late 1970s as a Head Start administrator before moving into the world of academia to study child development and advocate for public policies that improve the health of mothers and children. Today, she’s the director of Florida State University’s Center for Prevention & Early Intervention Policy, a position in which she advises government agencies and...

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...

Robin Saenger, Founding Director of Peace4Tarpon and a Champion for ACEs, will be the special guest for the entire hour on "Breaking the Silence with Dr. Gregory Williams" Radio Show this Sunday evening LIVE at 8:00 pm Central Standard Time.

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...

Thank you Governor DeSantis (and Zack Gibson in the Governor’s Office) for declaring today as Florida’s Trauma Informed Care Day . Many of Florida’s most costly, intractable social problems including our opioid and substance dependency crisis, our sky-rocketing public health costs, tragic school failures, and the multigenerational cycle of families into our criminal justice and child welfare systems, can be decreased by addressing early trauma. Initiatives are taking shape at both the state...

Dr. Mimi Graham is Florida’s Johnny Appleseed, but instead of planting apple trees, she’s been seeding hundreds of ACEs-science-informed schools, courts, juvenile detention centers, hospitals, childcare centers, home visiting programs, mental health agencies, law enforcement agencies, and drug treatment centers. Graham, who has served as director of the Florida State University Center for Prevention and Early Intervention Policy in Tallahassee since 1993, focuses on early childhood,...

By Kim Doleatto , Sarasota Herald Tribune, October 27, 2019 - In many elementary schools, it’s easy to know who the class clown is, because on a thermometer cutout on the wall, a clothespin with their name is clipped to the red zone. Likewise, it’s easy to see the names of the “good kids.” But should it be? Behavior charts are still widely used as discipline tools, and for teachers with at least 20 students to manage, they may be effective. But for students who have experienced trauma, it...

Jane Stevens will be the special guest this Sunday evening on the "Breaking the Silence with Dr. Gregory Williams" radio program. The LIVE radio program begins at 8:00 pm CST, Oct. 27, 2019, and the entire hour will be dedicated to Jane and her work with ACEs Connection. The "Breaking the Silence" radio show has over 1.6 million weekly listeners to the LIVE program and then the show goes to over 110 podcast networks around the world the following week. The host of the program is Dr. Gregory...

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...