Center for Youth Wellness

The efforts of pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris to address of trauma experienced early in life have vaulted her to national attention. In September, Burke Harris earned recognition from the Heinz Foundation for her work to establish a system to screen and treat children who are dealing with toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect, poverty and violence.

To hear pediatrician and activist Nadine Burke-Harris tell it, the movement to address the epidemic of childhood trauma has come a long way in the past two years. “When I first started talking about this eight years ago, I would get into a room of a thousand people and I would ask how many folks had heard of adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress,” Burke-Harris said at a conference last week organized by her organization, the San Francisco-based Center for Youth Wellness (CYW).

At the Center for Youth Wellness policy convening on childhood adversity in San Diego last Thursday, I kept asking myself if we were having a new conversation or an old conversation, but with different people at the table.

A new report from the Center for Youth Wellness outlines policy ideas and recommendations for creating momentum around addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) across California. A primary-care pediatric clinic in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco, the Center for Youth Wellness (CYW) has taken a leading role in exploring the way early adversity can negatively impact the developing brains and bodies of children, both at its clinic and as a state-wide advocate.

The blockbuster Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study has become the fulcrum of a powerful and diverse consortium of interests bent on preventing and addressing childhood trauma. Groups ranging from pediatricians and charitable foundations to politicians have increasingly asked how this growing body of research—which clearly shows how bad events experienced as a youngster can negatively affect adult health—can be applied to policy and practice.

The high rate of abused and neglected children within the juvenile justice system was one of the themes percolating throughout a three-day conference on childhood trauma last week in San Francisco.

One in six Californians has experienced severe childhood trauma, which is strongly linked to serious health problems in adulthood, according to a new study released today by the Center for Youth Wellness, a San Francisco health organization, and the Public Health Institute, an Oakland-based nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting health.