Hate crimes in the U.S. have been rising for years and white supremacist organizations represent by far the biggest domestic terror threat, according to the FBI and organizations who track the activities of organizations espousing hate and violence. So what leads people to get involved in violent hate groups, and – perhaps more importantly – how can they be helped to get out? That was the question posed by MindSite News writer Laurie Udesky in a story, Breaking Away from Hate , recently...

Photo courtesy of Nollie Jenkins Family Center On a Tuesday morning three years ago, Julia Ringo discovered her daughter was in terrible pain. Examining her, Ringo looked in shock at a mass of bruises and swelling on her daughter Kiorey’s buttocks, a day after the 8-year-old Black girl had been paddled with a wooden board at an elementary school in Grenada, Mississippi. Ringo rushed her daughter to the emergency room and told the attending doctor what had transpired. “As soon as he looked at...

L-R Dr. Mary Cwik, Dr. Tami DeCoteau, Dan Press, Dr. Zach Kaminsky, photo courtesy of Elizabeth Prewitt In 1964, Dan Press was in his first year of law school and was not liking it; he wanted a way out. He applied for a volunteer spot with AmeriCorps VISTA, the domestic version of the Peace Corps, and was intrigued by a position on an Indian reservation. Dan Press “I knew nothing about Indians, but it sounded like a good opportunity,” says Press, who was raised in Flushing, in the Queens...

Virginia's First Lady Pamela Northam recently organized a Road to Resilience Tour in four regions across Virginia with the state’s network of 27 trauma-informed community groups (TICNs).

By Michele L. Norris, The Washington Post, October 26, 2021 Claudette Colvin was 15 years old when she was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., and placed on indefinite probation, after refusing to vacate her seat on a bus so a young White woman could sit down. This was March 1955 — nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Alabama’s racial segregation laws after refusing to give up her seat to a White man, an act that sparked the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. Parks, who died in...

Raging wildfires in California and Turkey, hurricanes in the U.S. southeast, flooding in West Africa, droughts in Iraq and Syria and other environmental catastrophes across the globe traumatize hundreds of thousands of people. Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, founder and director of Indigenous Climate Action , has a different view of these events than what we typically see. She says the trauma of climate change spans generations and is interwoven with colonization in the form of modern extraction...

For Peter Buckley, program manager for the PACEs initiative, Southern Oregon Success (SORS), the “aha moment” around positive and adverse childhood experiences was more of an “aha month.”

According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, 34.8 million children across the United States are impacted by ACEs. ACEs are exposures in childhood to abuse, neglect, parental incarceration, divorce, or domestic violence that have been shown to affect virtually every domain in which a child functions. ACEs are associated with health impairment across the life course and are strongly related to the prevalence of numerous health problems (Felitti, et. al, 1998). The Trauma-informed...

He is sprawled out on the sidewalk, motionless, flushed cheeks framed by high cheekbones. He’s slender, probably in his mid-20s, his straight, coal black hair pulled back, and his orange t-shirt twisted up over his stomach. “He’s OD’ing on fentanyl!” shouts a guy holding a skateboard.

After educators’ experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2014 approach to school health has gained even greater urgency. Under this model, a student's physical health is considered to be inseparable from their mental and social health. Moreover, it assumes that school climate, family engagement, community involvement, and, importantly, the health of school staff are all integral to the health of students. Researchers with ChildTrends recently released a report using metrics based on this...

Through the news media, Americans are served an almost-daily dose of violence caused by guns. This year to date, more than 33,929 people in the United States have been killed and another 30,000+ have been injured by guns. The U.S. homicide rate for firearms is 22 times greater than that of the European Union, even though the European population is 35% larger. But to Dr. Garen Wintemute , the statistics on injuries and deaths are only one part of the story. To reverse those appalling numbers,...

Fresno’s Milestones Tracker provides a map of organizations that have or are becoming trauma-informed. Each dot represents an organization. The dots are color-coded to a particular sector. The larger the dot, the more milestones they’ve done. The dots also provide the name of the organization If there’s one word that captures the engine behind Fresno’s flourishing PACEs Connection initiative, that word is “grassroots.” Just ask Jason Williams, the community manager for Fresno’s initiative...

In a recent nightmare, 8-year-old Jovina dreamt that her father got COVID-19. He was getting sicker, but she and her mother weren’t able to get there in time. “There,” in her father’s case, is a cell at the California Correctional Center (CCC) in Susanville, California, nearly 300 miles from where she lives in San Jose. In Jovina’s mind are a swarm of worries about her father’s welfare, her mother Benee Vejar reports. If an earthquake shakes the Bay Area, Jovina says, “What if the building...

Child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey have known each other for more than 30 years. Both are deeply interested in childhood trauma and healing. But it was following a 60 Minutes segment Winfrey did in 2018 on childhood trauma, for which she interviewed Perry, that the two decided to take their work together to the next level. They tapped Oprah’s star power and worldwide reach and Perry’s deep expertise in brain science to collaborate on a book project, the recently released,...

The stress, fear, grief and loneliness of the pandemic has weighed hard on school-aged children. A teacher, a parent and a school administrator offer strategies for moving beyond loss to healing.

By Karim Doumar, ProPublica, August 26, 2021 I’m Karim, an audience editor here at ProPublica. That means I spend many of my working hours reading about pain and suffering and working with reporters whose job it is to bear witness to the most traumatic moments of people’s lives. It’s something I’ve thought about and struggled with a lot during my time at ProPublica, and it’s been exacerbated by living through the pandemic news cycle of constant misfortune and death. Last week, in partnership...

It might seem odd that President Theodore Roosevelt, who was described as “aggressive,” ”over-engined” and had a talent for delivering insults, would be hailed as a proponent of nurturing relationships. But that’s exactly how Dr. Andrew Garner referenced him in describing a paradigm shift in policy by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care,’” said Garner, referring to a quote often attributed to Roosevelt. Garner , who is a...

Mention the “love drug” Ecstasy and it conjures up images of young people at rave parties on the beach. But MDMA, the chemical compound better known as Ecstasy, is now gaining credibility as a potential treatment for severe trauma. The promise of MDMA (known to scientists as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) as a therapeutic treatment was part of a conversation between Dr. Gabor Maté and pioneers in the field who are researching the synthetic drug to treat the painful manifestations of...

What turns a terrible experience into a traumatic experience? Often, it’s that the subject is—and remains—alone with their pain. That was one of the many insights to emerge from conversations following an online premiere screening earlier this month of “The Wisdom of Trauma,” a documentary by filmmakers Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. The film spotlights the work of Dr. Gabor Maté, physician, addiction medicine specialist and trauma expert. He is the author of four best-selling four books,...

The circumstances were already tragic. The parents of a three-year-old dying from hydranencephaly, a fatal condition marked by abnormal brain development, had requested one final consultation with a neurosurgeon. Dr. Sharon Cooper , a developmental, behavioral and forensic pediatrician who accompanied them to the appointment, recalled the horror she felt at the words the neurosurgeon, who was White, blithely said to the child’s parents who were Black, when he viewed the CT scan of the...

Among PACEs Connection initiatives around the country, it’s well known that our social network is something like a bustling, giant town square where people share ideas, resources and any number of conversations about how to prevent childhood adversity and promote positive childhood experiences. On May 14, PACEs Connection assembled a virtual town square gathering of PACEs initiatives in California, where we have 58 initiatives sparking action all across the state. Speakers at the gathering,...

For anyone who thinks Oregon — long regarded as a liberal, progressive state — was a welcoming place for Blacks and other minorities in the past, a recent webinar sponsored by Oregon health care organizations was a chilling wake-up call. In June 1844, Oregon’s provisional government passed its first Black Exclusionary Act , with language stating that any Black person who set foot in Oregon “would be publicly whipped 39 lashes.” From that time forward, Oregon, like most states, amassed its...

It’s shocking: Preschoolers are three times more likely to be expelled than children in elementary, middle and high school, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Boys are four times more likely than girls to be kicked out, and African American children are twice as likely as Latinx and White children. One organization with childcare centers and mental health providers in Kentucky and Ohio began a long journey 15 years ago, when they began hearing about...

Whether it’s racial profiling at traffic stops or microaggressions at work, racism by any measure can cause toxic stress. That causal relationship and how it leads to a greater burden of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) among communities of color was the subject of a webinar on April 28 entitled “ Racism and Discrimination as Risk Factors for Toxic Stress ,” sponsored by the California Surgeon General’s Office and the ACEs Aware Initiative. “I can't think of a more important conversation...

A recent video , shared on the national news, shows a 16-year-old Florida student being slammed to the ground by a police officer working at her school. It’s one of many such incidents of school-based police violence against students captured in videos around the country. Some of the victims are as young as five years old. About 47% of U.S. schools employ armed police officers , known as school resource officers, who are there to keep students safe. But students who attend these schools...

It’s been all over the news for months: Black women in the United States are dying from complications during their pregnancies or in childbirth at alarming rates, and those deaths are preventable. Less well explored is how systemic racism and historical trauma have been at the core of what’s driven up these rates over several decades. A March 20 conference entitled The Impact of ACEs on Black Maternal Health took an in-depth look into why Black maternal mortality and complications during...

The Rev. Darrell Armstrong, pastor of the historic Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, New Jersey, is an accomplished man. He graduated from Stanford University in public policy and went on to get his master’s degree in divinity studies at Princeton. As a former director in the New Jersey Department of Human Services, he was responsible for New Jersey’s statewide strategy for preventing child abuse and neglect. Armstrong has also worked as an entrepreneur, workshop facilitator, and radio host.

By Judith Warner, The New York Times, April 11, 2021 They’re calling it a “lost year.” On and offline, parents are trading stories — poignant and painful — about all of the ways that they fear their middle schoolers are losing ground. “It’s really hard to put my finger on what happened exactly,” said Jorge Gallegos, whose son, Eyan, is in the seventh grade in Washington, D.C. [ Please click here to read more .]

California will receive $26 billion through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the federal legislation recently signed into law by President Joseph Biden to help state and local economies recover from the pandemic. Media outlets have reported that the money will help fund everything from a stronger COVID-19 response to small businesses, housing, anti-poverty programs, and education, but little has been written about the other ways the act will benefit children. The law’s impact on...

A corner of the Multi-Sensory De-escalation Room, All MSDR photos courtesy of Valerie Clark When a young person enters the de-escalation room in the Sacramento County Youth Detention Facility , they’ll find dimmed lights, bottles of lavender, orange and other essential oils, an audio menu featuring the rush of ocean waves and other calming sounds, along with squeeze balls, TheraPutty, jigsaw puzzles, and an exercise ball to bounce on. TheraPutty, squeeze balls and more Sometimes, with a...

California can support children and youth by tackling the state’s — and the country’s — legacy of White supremacy and replacing it with a trauma-informed approach of love, empathy, and support.

By Akintunde Ahmad, Columbia Journalism Review, February 26, 2021 I n 2017, Michael Tubbs made history as the youngest and first Black mayor of Stockton, California, home to some three hundred thousand people and considered the most diverse city in America. A graduate of Stanford University, Tubbs began his political career on the city council of Stockton, his hometown; during his mayoral campaign, he received an endorsement from Barack Obama—and more than 70 percent of the vote. During his...

Widespread reporting has revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many poor communities of color. Less widely known is how the pandemic has affected young people in those communities. “COVID-19 has had a particularly harsh impact on youth of color,” further traumatizing [juvenile-justice] system-impacted youth and their families already struggling with disproportionately high rates of disease, death, job loss and housing insecurity,” said Jim Keddy of Youth Forward . Keddy was...

By Alyson Sulaski Wyckoff, American Academy of Pediatrics, March 13, 2021 More than 130 Americans will take their lives today. High school students will make over 3,700 attempts to kill themselves. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for individuals ages 10-34 years — representing 425 deaths a year. Yet most health care settings are not screening for this risk. Improved training is needed on early identification of suicide risk, assessment, follow-up and counseling. Those were among...

Recently, the United States reached a sobering milestone. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 500,000 people, surpassing the number of US soldiers who died in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. The pandemic has closed schools, turned urban areas into ghost towns, and caused massive job loss, long food lines, more homelessness, and isolation for many shuttered indoors in response to orders by public health officials. And 2020 also witnessed numerous instances of...

By Elisha Brown, Facing South, February 26, 2021 After Gloria De Los Santos gave birth to her second daughter 12 years ago, she hemorrhaged. She called for a nurse who suggested they go to the bathroom. "When I got up, blood gushed out," said De Los Santos, who is Black. "My husband ran out to find a doctor because some of the nurses behind the desk weren't taking it seriously." "What really got to me was that if my husband and that one nurse weren't there, I probably would have died," she...

Eleven years ago, Pennsylvania Executive Deputy Attorney General Robert Reed learned about the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences Study , which linked childhood trauma to a higher risk of aggression, substance abuse, suicide and many life-threatening mental and physical diseases later in life. For him, it was a revelation. “The [ACE Study] gave me the language to understand what I felt, but didn’t have the language to express,” Reed said. “I had been in law enforcement for 30 years and...

When possession of marijuana for personal use was legalized in California in 2016, Ingrid Archie was among the law’s most ardent supporters. Archie was convinced the new law – known as Proposition 64 on the ballot -- would help reverse the harm the country’s harsh and punitive drug laws had exacted on communities of color. In particular, she was bursting with hope at the law’s promise that victims of the War on Drugs would be given priority to make a living in the cannabis industry and start...

By Jaclyn Paiser, The Washington Post, February 2, 2021 As rioters threatened to breach the Capitol on Jan. 6, a staffer rushed into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office and told her to hide. Soon after she ran into a bathroom, she heard a thunderous banging noise outside. “Where is she? Where is she?” someone yelled, Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in an Instagram Live chat on Monday night. “And this was the moment where I thought everything was over.” The person thumping on the doors turned...

photo courtesy of Diana Rivas Diana Rivas had studied child development as an undergraduate, but it wasn’t until she joined a parenting group in 2019 in Davis, California, that she began to reflect on the way she herself was raised — and punished. Diana Rivas “My dad had experienced a lot of abuse,” she recalls. “He was raised in a small town in Mexico, and his father had used heavy corporal punishment against him. He did the same with me, because he thought that was the way discipline...

In the spring of 1982, Susan Burton turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with the death of her 5-year-old son, who had run into the street and was hit by a vehicle driven by an off-duty police officer . Over the course of the next 17 years, Burton was in and out of prison. “Each time I left, I felt a little more broken,” she told me recently. What would have made a difference, she said, was “if there could have been a way to have therapy from traumatic childhood events, disappointments and...

A recent patient at a clinic in Texarkana, Texas, bowed her head and cried as she talked to Kim Burden. “She was feeling bad about herself. She started crying and telling me things about her past, so I just sat and listened to her. She was appreciative that someone took time to listen and show that they care.” Kim Burden Burden isn’t a therapist; she’s a dental hygienist who was helping a patient at a dental appointment. Had the patient needed a therapist, though, she could have talked to...

It’s an enormous understatement to say that healthcare workers today are suffering. Every day, you hear interviews with nurses, physicians, social workers, and others in healthcare saying they’re pushed to the breaking point and beyond. But, by using skills taught in the Community Resiliency Mode l (CRM), even people under severe stress can weather the onslaught, do their work, and get along with colleagues. CRM is an evidence-based training program that’s being used by millions of people in...

In 2017, Children’s Hospital of Richmond (CHoR) at Virginia Commonwealth University took a huge jump in a new direction. Its CEO assembled 50 leaders from every unit and across disciplines to work on infusing a trauma-informed approach into its entire 182-bed hospital environment. Brittany Corker Kiefer What sent them down this path was a fervent belief that something was missing in standard care. “Being admitted to the hospital can be traumatic enough, without even factoring in past...