Prevention Month Resources
April is National Child Abuse Prevention month, an effort to raise public awareness about and take a stand against child abuse and neglect. It is a time to acknowledge the importance of families and communities who work together to prevent child abuse and neglect, and to promote the social and emotional well-being of children and families through positive childhood experiences and resilience-building.
Celebrate Go Blue!
Date: Friday April 1, 2022
Time: 4:00 – 5:00 PM
R.O.C.K. Mat-Su, Cook Inlet Tribal Council, and other community partners are thrilled to announce that members of the Mat-Su Drug Endangered Children Task Force will be signing the Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) Memorandums of Understanding and Protocols on Go Blue Day, April 1st. Each member of the MDT has worked diligently to help create a system of interventions that will improve the collective ability of Mat-Su agencies to respond to cases involving drug-endangered children and ensure they and their families receive necessary supports and services. We celebrate the Task Force’s collaborative efforts to achieve this milestone!
Trainings | Free
We offer many trainings, check out our flyer to learn more and share.
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Frequent or prolonged exposure to stress can create toxic stress which can damage the developing brain of a child and overall health. A Survival Mode Response to toxic stress increases a child’s heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and muscle tension. Their thinking brain is knocked offline. Self-protection is their priority. In other words: “I can’t hear you! I can’t respond to you! I am just trying to be safe!” Learn How Resilience Trumps ACEs! Parents, Teachers and Caregivers can help by:
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Gaining an understanding of ACEs and how they affect children’s social, emotional, and cognitive abilities and their connection a wide range of health problems throughout a person’s lifespan.
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Creating environments where children feel safe emotionally & physically.
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Helping children identify feelings & manage emotions
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Creating a safe physical & emotional environment at home, in school, and in neighborhoods.
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Share ways to build resilience.
When
Date: Tues April 19, 2022 Times: 1:00 – 2:30 PM Location: Zoom | Calendar Invitation *Add’l Dates: May 18
Year round presentation dates are posted in 2 locations:
Contact
Presentation Content Contact:
Michelle Boyden
boydenmichelle@gmail.com
Event Details Contact:
Colleen Andrews
candrews@rockmatsu.org
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Join us for a presentation on raising resilient youth!
This will include information from a 2019 Johns Hopkins study on the effects of positive childhood experiences. Despite growing up with adversity, positive experiences buffer the trauma and promote healing.
Learn ways to foster healthy growth and development in children that correlates to stronger adult mental health and overall wellness.
When
Dates: Weds April 27, 2022
Times: 10:00 – 11:00 AM
Location: Zoom | Calendar Invitation
*Add’l Dates: May 26
Year round presentation dates are posted in 2 locations:
Contact
Presentation Content Contact:
Michelle Boyden
boydenmichelle@gmail.com
Event Details Contact:
Colleen Andrews
candrews@rockmatsu.org
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Understanding and addressing historical and intergenerational trauma is critical to achieving R.O.C.K. Mat-Su’s vision. Braided Stories, a new racial equity workshop developed for the Mat-Su, incorporates a variety of ways for participants to move in to explore systemic racism, and to move out to reflect, restore and process the emotions that may come up.
This workshop was developed specifically for Mat-Su communities and in deep partnership with local individuals and organizations. The experiences of both contemporary and historical Mat-Su residents are incorporated throughout using multi-media formats.
Learn more at braidedstories.com.When
Location: All workshops will be hosted on Zoom, and is limited to a small cohort of participants in order to encourage meaningful dialogue among all participants.
Attendance: In order to enhance the experience of the whole cohort, your full participation and engagement during the four-session workshop is requested.
Time: 9:00 – 1:30 PM
Location: Zoom
Series Dates:
Mon April 11
Weds April 13
Mon April 18
Weds April 20
Register
Email Betsy Larson to express your interest in this workshop series. Please indicate that you are interested in the April Workshop.
You will receive a reply with your registration status. Due to limited space you may be placed on a waitlist.
To Register Contact:
blarson@rockmatsu.org
Training
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R.O.C.K. Mat-Su is offering a Darkness to Light Facilitator Training to individuals who want to become trainers for the evidence-based child sexual abuse prevention curriculum Stewards of Children®.
A Darkness to Light Authorized Facilitator is an individual who has been trained by Darkness to Light to deliver the Stewards of Children® training program to adults in their organization or community. Facilitators model the core principals of Stewards of Children® in their community by talking openly about child sexual abuse and engaging adults in discussion.
When
Date: Fri April 29, 2022 Times: 8:30 – 4:30 PM Location: Mat-Su Health Foundation Conference Center 777 N. Crusey St. Wasilla, AK 99654
Breakfast & Lunch Included!Register
Registration Link: Coming Soon!
Interested? Contact: Telsche Overby
Scholarships ($450) available to the first 10 Mat-Su community members who register!
Recommendations: Books & Films
Available for individuals and groups at the R.O.C.K. Mat-Su Library!
R.O.C.K. Mat-Su hosts a small lending library through the library management app Libib. Click the button above and let us know you are interested in setting up an account.
R.O.C.K. Mat-Su’s collection focuses on topics associated with the collective’s vision to end child maltreatment and promote family resilience. Books and media focus on adverse childhood resilience, community organizing, healing from child sexual abuse, parenting, partnerships, racial equity, resilience, trauma, and trauma-sensitive education.
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How does trauma affect a child’s mind – and how can that mind recover? In the classic The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry explains what happens to the brains of children exposed to extreme stress and shares their lessons of courage, humanity, and hope. Only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.
Discussion Questions
Source: Reading Between the Wines
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What does it mean to be empathetic to one another? Why is that important?
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Is empathy something you turn on and off depending on who you are interacting with or in what context you are interacting?
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Are doctors who often have to separate their emotions from the situation at hand (e.g. performing heart surgery on a child patient) exhibiting empathy? How does empathy play a role in the doctor-patient relationship?
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How much of an effect will our increased reliance on the Internet / social media to connect with others also impact our children’s children’s biological development?
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If psychiatrists or journalists watch or report on people suffering, should they intervene? (i.e. Kevin Carter and “Starving Child and Vulture”)
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Where does the boundary lie between helping people resolve their issues versus taking care of them?
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Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart.
Doty would go on to put Ruth’s practices to work with extraordinary results—power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth’s most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results—until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts.
Discussion Questions
Source: Super Summary
Discuss the figurative and literal significance of the work’s title. What is “the magic shop” to Doty?
Although Doty provides readers with instructions on how to relax the body, clear the mind, etc., the majority of the book takes the form of a memoir. Why might Doty have chosen this genre to communicate Ruth’s teachings?
How does Doty characterize his childhood in Lancaster? In what ways do his experiences there shape his life going forward?
What initially attracts Doty to medicine? How does his understanding of what it means to be a doctor change over the course of the book?
Discuss the different theories regarding near death experiences that Doty explores. Why does Doty ultimately reject the need to “explain” his own NDE in these terms?
What is neuroplasticity? In what ways does it explain the ability of techniques like visualization to effect real world change?
Choose one of the anecdotes involving Doty’s patients. How does it contribute to the overall meaning of the work?
Although Ruth is clearly a central figure in Doty’s life, he knows relatively little about her life and circumstances; as a boy, in fact, he sees her as an almost “supernatural being” (60).
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Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
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Dr. Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children. But it was Diego—a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault—who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.
The stunning news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce. Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime. For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the fascinating scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent vitally important hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come?
Discussion Questions
Source: Lead to Healing
Chapter by chapter questions available at Lead to Healing.
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TRIGGER WARNING: This documentary discusses multiple forms of trauma, including intergenerational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health.
This film is not appropriated for children.
Directed By: Ana Joanes
Language: English
Language: English
Wrestling Ghosts is a raw, intimate, and heart-opening documentary about parenting, childhood trauma and healing. Wrestling Ghosts follows the epic inner journey of a young mother, who, over two heart-breaking and inspiring years, battles the traumas from her past in order to create a new present and future for her and her family.
Kim knows she is not a natural mother — she shrinks from the touch of her adorable little boys. At thirty, she is married to her high school sweetheart Matt and living on the ragged edge of the middle class. Faced with a constant inner reproach — What is wrong with me? — she embarks on an extremely difficult journey to overcome her unhappiness and become able to give her kids the warmth and attention they deserve.
Over the course of two years, Kim digs deeper and deeper, and makes important progress, but deep down she remains stuck. She only makes a breakthrough when she learns about the new science of childhood trauma, how it physically changes the human brain, creating a neurological straightjacket of sorts.
With relentless self-awareness, amazing openness, and devastating honesty, this extraordinary ordinary woman becomes a real soul warrior, doing battle with the traumas in her past in order to create a new present and future for her and her family
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92 Minutes
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Production Staff: Director/Producer: Marsh Chamberlain
Producers: Evon Peter & Enei Begaye Peter
Production Company: Crawl Walk Run, Native Movement & University of Alaska Fairbanks
Producers: Evon Peter & Enei Begaye Peter
Production Company: Crawl Walk Run, Native Movement & University of Alaska Fairbanks
Long ago survival was not easy for Alaska Native peoples, but we lived full lives. Today survival is easier, but many are dying young.
For centuries Alaska Native peoples survived the harsh conditions of life in the far north while our social, cultural, and spiritual practices thrived. In the 1700’s the battle to claim Alaska and its peoples began, setting into motion disruptive changes for Alaska’s first peoples. The painful scars from colonization continue to cycle from one generation to the next.
Rarely heard of 40 years ago, suicide among Alaska Native peoples is now a silent epidemic — 3.5 times higher than the national average — and affecting Alaska Native youth between the ages of 15-24 at the highest rate in the country. Faced with heartbreaking challenges, Alaska Native communities are striving to recover and regain balance.
In a landscape as dramatic as its stories, We Breathe Again intimately explores the lives of four Alaska Native people, each confronting the impacts of intergenerational trauma and suicide. Reflected in the northern lights and the city streetlights, from the ice roads to the asphalt, the characters battle for personal healing, hoping to break new trail for their families and their communities to follow.
FILMMAKER’S STATEMENT:
The traumatic impacts of colonization and practices of forced assimilation affect generations of Alaska Native people. The associated social outcomes include formidable inter-generational challenges, such as substance abuse, sexual abuse and suicide. The legacy of this recent history and inter-generational trauma is complex and rarely discussed.
The traumatic impacts of colonization and practices of forced assimilation affect generations of Alaska Native people. The associated social outcomes include formidable inter-generational challenges, such as substance abuse, sexual abuse and suicide. The legacy of this recent history and inter-generational trauma is complex and rarely discussed.
Yet, it is through shining a light on these experiences that people may find a path to well-being. The story of Alaska Native peoples’ journeys to heal from the past and shape a self-determined future captured our interest and inspired us to make this film.
Through our involvement in prevention programs and engagement with the struggles of extended family, we reached out across the state to identify a diverse group of Alaska Native people willing to open their lives for us to follow. We are grateful for their courage and willingness to share their stories with us, in what has become a life-changing experience for us all.
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57 minutes
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RESILIENCE: THE BIOLOGY OF STRESS AND THE SCIENCE OF HOPE chronicles the promising beginnings of a national movement to prevent childhood trauma, treat Toxic Stress, and greatly improve the health of future generations.
“This is the biggest public health discovery we’ve ever seen.”
– Laura Porter, Co-Founder, ACE Interface
– Laura Porter, Co-Founder, ACE Interface
When it was controversial to even think of asking patients about taboo subjects, the ACE Study dared to ask questions like, “Were you sexually abused as a child?” AND “Did you have a parent who was an alcoholic?”
The answers produced a public health revelation. For the first time, the loss of a parent through death, divorce or incarceration and other traumatic childhood experiences such as living with an alcoholic parent or being sexually abused was conclusively linked to both physical and mental health problems later in life. ACE, or Acute Childhood Experiences score, are now understood to lead to early-onset heart disease diabetes, addiction, and depression. Understanding that a broken-hearted child is more likely to suffer from mental and physical illnesses as an adult has professionals of all kinds asking, How can we help children before their physical and mental health problems emerge as adults?
RESILIENCE: THE BIOLOGY OF STRESS AND THE SCIENCE OF HOPE uses beautiful animation and compelling characters to explore the science and the solutions. The film follows pioneering
individuals who looked at the ACEs research and the emerging science of Toxic Stress and asked, Why are we waiting? Each took this new information and used it in new ways. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician in San Francisco, intervenes early with her young patients who are at greater risk for diabetes and asthma as well as learning and behavior problems now. In New Haven, Connecticut, we meet Alice Forrester and Laura Lawrence of The Clifford Beers Clinic, which provides mental health services for children by including the entire family in their programs. In an elementary school across town, kindergarteners recite “Miss Kendra’s List”—a bill of rights for children—and learn ways of expressing and coping with their stress. In the great Northwest, communities across the state of Washington brought together teachers, police officers, social service workers, and government officials to learn about the brain science of adversity. Since implementing “trauma-informed” policies and practices, these communities have seen drastic reductions in rates of everything from dropping out of high school to teen pregnancy, and youth suicide domestic violence.
individuals who looked at the ACEs research and the emerging science of Toxic Stress and asked, Why are we waiting? Each took this new information and used it in new ways. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician in San Francisco, intervenes early with her young patients who are at greater risk for diabetes and asthma as well as learning and behavior problems now. In New Haven, Connecticut, we meet Alice Forrester and Laura Lawrence of The Clifford Beers Clinic, which provides mental health services for children by including the entire family in their programs. In an elementary school across town, kindergarteners recite “Miss Kendra’s List”—a bill of rights for children—and learn ways of expressing and coping with their stress. In the great Northwest, communities across the state of Washington brought together teachers, police officers, social service workers, and government officials to learn about the brain science of adversity. Since implementing “trauma-informed” policies and practices, these communities have seen drastic reductions in rates of everything from dropping out of high school to teen pregnancy, and youth suicide domestic violence.
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60 Minutes
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“Stressed brains can’t learn.”
That was the nugget of neuroscience that Jim Sporleder, principal of a high school riddled with violence, drugs, and truancy, took away from an educational conference in 2010. Three years later, the number of fights at Lincoln Alternative High School had gone down by 75% and the graduation rate had increased five-fold. Paper Tigers is the story of how one school made such dramatic progress. Following six students over the course of a school year, we see Lincoln’s staff try a new approach to discipline: one based on understanding and treatment rather than judgment and suspension. Using a combination of vérité and revealing diary cam footage, Paper Tigers is a testament to what the latest developmental science is showing: that just one caring adult can help break the cycle of adversity in a young person’s life.
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