Origins Training & Consulting Awarded ACEs Aware Grant

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DECEMBER 7, 2020  |  PRESS RELEASE

Origins Training & Consulting has received grant funds from the Office of the California Surgeon General (CA-OSG) and the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) to participate in the state’s ACEs Aware initiative. In partnership with Eisner Health, Origins  will be developing a practice  paper to share learnings from Eisner’s experience developing a trauma-informed approach. Origins will also be providing trainings to support the integration of a trauma-informed approach through the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County (CCALAC) to promote the ACEs Aware initiative among the Medi-Cal provider community in Los Angeles. A total of $14.3 million was awarded to 100 organizations throughout the state to extend the reach and impact of the ACEs Aware initiative. ACEs Aware seeks to change and save lives by helping Medi-Cal providers understand the importance of screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and training them to respond with trauma-informed care.

The ACEs Aware grants will provide funding to organizations to design and implement training, provider engagement, and education activities for providers and organizations that serve Medi-Cal beneficiaries. “We are looking forward to working in partnership with this amazing group of community leaders to further our efforts to help health care providers become ACEs Aware,” said California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. “This work is critical, now more than ever, given the stress so many Californians are experiencing as a result of COVID-19 and the role of racial injustice as a risk factor for toxic stress. A trauma-informed health care workforce is vital for helping our state heal.”

The grant funding will provide critical support to community organizations serving Medi-Cal providers and beneficiaries, which have been experiencing increased stress during the COVID-19 emergency. Grant activities will augment California’s efforts, underway since the summer of 2019, to develop provider training and engage providers, including the promotion of payments to Medi-Cal providers for screening their patients for ACEs. Added Dr. Karen Mark, DHCS Medical Director: “DHCS is committed to preserving and improving the overall health and well-being of all Californians. The ACEs Aware initiative is a vital part of the Medi-Cal program’s response to the COVID-19 emergency. These grants will help us reach Medi-Cal providers who serve diverse and often at-risk populations throughout the state, and will help to ensure that Medi-Cal members receive the high-quality, integrated care that every Californian deserves.” Funding for the ACEs Aware grants was previously authorized in the 2019-20 budget using Proposition 56 funds for provider training on how to conduct ACE screening in the Medi-Cal population. In light of the COVID-19 emergency, the grant funding will provide critical support to the community organizations serving Medi-Cal providers and beneficiaries.

“We are thrilled to providings trainings to the Los Angeles Medi-Cal community on integrating a trauma-informed approach and also to share the learnings from Eisner’s experience with this approach with other organizations who are embarking on this journey,” said Origins Co-Founder Lori Chelius.

The full list of ACEs Aware grantees is available on the ACEs Aware Website.

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About Origins

Origins Training & Consulting supports leaders in their journey to build more resilient organizations and communities through the integration of a trauma-informed approach. Our work is informed by the original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, the neurobiology of toxic stress, the impact of systemic trauma, and the science of resilience. We provide training and consulting services to executives, management and supervisors, direct service professionals and paraprofessionals, caregivers, and community members across sectors aimed at shifting the narrative of how we understand health and behavior. Our approach is centered on the foundational role of organizational culture and emphasizes the importance of internal practices and staff wellness when implementing a trauma-informed and healing approach.

About ACEs Aware

Led by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, California Surgeon General, and Dr. Karen Mark, Medical Director for DHCS, the ACEs Aware initiative offers Medi-Cal providers core training, screening tools, clinical protocols, and payment for screening children and adults for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), which are stressful or  traumatic experiences people have by age 18 that were identified in the landmark ACE Study. ACEs describe 10 categories of adversities in three domains – abuse, neglect, and/or household dysfunction. ACEs are strongly associated with at least nine out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the United States. Part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s California for All initiative, the goal of ACEs Aware is to reduce ACEs and toxic stress by half in one generation. Follow ACEs Aware on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Office of the California Surgeon General

The role of California Surgeon General was created in 2019 by Governor Gavin Newsom to advise the Governor, serve as a leading spokesperson on public health matters, and drive solutions to the state’s most pressing public health challenges. As California’s first Surgeon General, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris has established early childhood, health equity, and ACEs and toxic stress as key priorities.

California Department of Health Care Services

California Department of Health Care Services DHCS is the backbone of California’s health care safety net, helping millions of low-income and disabled Californians each and every day. The mission of DHCS is to provide Californians with access to affordable, integrated, high-quality health care, including medical, dental, mental health, substance use treatment services, and long-term care. DHCS’ vision is to preserve and improve the overall health and well-being of all Californians. DHCS funds health care services for about 13 million Medi-Cal beneficiaries.

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Start here to develop a shared language

The Basics is a two-hour workshop helps introduce to you and your staff establish a common language around trauma-informed principles and practices so everyone can develop a culture centered on resilience-building together.

Begin by exploring the impacts of toxic stress on both clients and staff, while deepening your team’s understanding of ACEs, as well as the role of systemic and intergenerational adversity. Finally, learn more about the concept of resilience, identify how protective factors can help heal the impacts of trauma, and discuss how resilience can be built and sustained within an organization.

Note: Action team members should participate in this workshop before “graduating” to The Resilience Champion series.

I’m ready to build a resilient organizational culture

The Resilience Champion is a six-week course is for leaders who want to integrate a trauma-informed approach in their setting and start building a resilient organizational culture. In the Resilience Champion series, ​your action team (who will lead your implementation) will participate in a six-workshop series which helps translate and operationalize the key concepts of a trauma-informed approach in your unique organization. Together with your colleagues, you will develop a shared foundation, specific goals, and concrete steps to create and sustain a resilient culture.

 

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Building a Resilient Organizational Culture Can Start at Home

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(Pictured above: A wise girl and her best friend)

October 8, 2020|  By: Lori Chelius MBA/MPH

“So I want to get this straight…in our family, when something gets tough, we just give it away?”

That’s what Jill Stamm’s daughter, who was six years old at the time, asked her parents after they concluded they would have to find another home for their rambunctious puppy who was destroying furniture and eating everything in sight.

Stamm was stunned. That was not a value she embraced at all. In fact, with another older daughter with multiple handicaps, she deeply understood the importance of commitment and love, even when things are hard.

Out of the mouth of babes.

That question changed everything. It led to a very explicit value in Stamm’s family that has even passed along to her grandkids (her daughter is now a parent herself): “We don’t turn away from tough stuff. We face things head on.”

In a recent webinar hosted by Origins– “A Trauma-Informed Approach: Three Myths Busted”–we explored the critical role of values in building and sustaining a healing culture. Stamm, who is the Prevention and Brain Science Specialist at Arizona’s Children Association and co-founder of New Directions Institute for Infant Brain Development, shared how the value of not turning away when things get tough became a bedrock for her family across generations. It influenced her in many ways in both her personal and professional life and even contributed to going back to complete her PhD at age 50.

One definition of culture is a “set of shared attitudes, values, goals, or practices that characterize an institution or organization.” All organizations, communities, and families have a culture, whether it has been created intentionally or not. Part of being intentional is articulating these values that really underlie your culture. The puppy incident led Stamm to make explicit a value that was already implicit in her family.

In our training and consulting packages, we explore the critical role of culture in implementing a trauma-informed approach and provide tools to help you intentionally develop the culture in your own unique setting. If you are passionate about this work, you can be a resilience champion and we can support you in the process of integrating a trauma-informed approach into your organization or community. Translate and operationalize the key concepts of a trauma-informed approach to meet the needs of your unique organization. Contact us today and we can get you started on this journey starting with developing a shared foundation, moving into identifying specific goals, and defining concrete steps to create and sustain a resilient culture.

(And, by the way, the puppy stayed).

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Throwback Thursday: It’s been a heck of a journey!

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It was on a chilly Fall day after a long, hot summer in Arizona that I boarded the plane to San Francisco attend the 2016 ACESCONNECTION conference. I think of this day and the day I first learned about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study  as days that I will never forget- days that changed my life. I was (and continue to be) passionate about work in the trauma-informed space.

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Root Your Culture in Values and Watch it Grow

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“Change culture and you change lives. You can also change the course of history. Many well-meaning social activists overlook this essential fact. They focus relentlessly on strategy, but strategy means nothing to our bodies and our lizard brains. When strategy competes with culture, culture wins–every time.”
~Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands No one can dispute Valorie Kondos Field’s record of winning. 

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The Time is Now: How a Principal Changed a School’s Response to COVID

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Now is the time for taking action! We are all passionate about making the world a better place but we can sometimes struggle with how to get started. With so much trauma in the world right now, knowing where to start can seem overwhelming.

In this video, Lori shared how one Resilience Champion took a fundamentally different approach to the pandemic in her school and how that made all the difference for the children and families in the community. From how she managed academics to mental wellness needs of both students and staff, looking through the lens of a trauma-informed approach supported the resilience of the community. 

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mental health awareness tree

Mental Health Awareness: When Suffering Is Not an Illness

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When I was an adolescent and young adult, I struggled with depression. As I reflect back on that time, so much of what I was experiencing was deeply tied to coming to terms with my sexuality. Growing up in the 1980s in a relatively conservative town, I was closeted (even to myself) until I was a young adult. The pain and fear of being different, of not belonging, of being judged or rejected for being me was more than my adolescent brain could wrap its conscious head around. To protect myself from being “found out,” I often turned inward, keeping a safe distance from many.

In a talk by Gabor Mate, he says: “As a physician, I have witnessed and treated what we call mental illness; as a person, I have experienced it. I say ‘what we call mental illness’, because disease is a very narrow perspective from which to view a complex process, one that cannot be reduced to subjective symptoms, observed behaviors or to the biology of an individual human being’s brain and nervous system. Yes, this process entails suffering…But suffering is not the same as disease.”

I think a lot about the line ”suffering is not the same as disease” in terms of my own experience. Was my experience with depression a “mental illness”? Or was it suffering? Are they the same thing?

 

May is mental health awareness month. With the health and economic impacts of the pandemic continuing to grow, it certainly seems timely to raise awareness on the importance of mental well-being. 

 

But what exactly is “mental health?” The National Institute of Mental Health defines its mission as “to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research, paving the way for prevention, recovery, and cure.” But is mental health simply the absence of an illness?

 

We are only beginning to understand the long-term impacts of the collective trauma of the global pandemic. 

And there is a lot of suffering.

As of May 20th, the official U.S. death count has passed 90,000 and continues to climb. Families and friends are often unable to say good-bye to their loved ones in person or grieve the loss in many of the ways people often do. Economic devastation and uncertainty are rampant. The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April alone. Widespread school closures have left many kids vulnerable while they are home with stressed out parents, often cut off from friends and community connections. The health and economic impacts of COVID-19 disproportionately affects communities of color, revealing and often amplifying underlying inequities.

 

Amidst this suffering, there is a window to reexamine how we think about and the language we use for mental health. 

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote that “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

That quote seems pretty relevant right now as we all respond to this collective trauma. For some of us, those responses might include behaviors such as short tempers, obsessively reading the news, or panic buying. Other responses might be more physiological–sleep disruptions, headaches, or upset stomachs. The science behind ACEs and a trauma-informed approach can help us understand these responses as normal responses to an abnormal situation. A trauma-informed approach recognizes that those responses are symptoms, often symptoms of underlying suffering. 

As the impacts of the coronavirus continue to unfold, likely for years and even generations, the importance of emotional wellness for kids and adults should be a huge priority.  But in doing so, let’s not pathologize our normal responses to a very abnormal situation. Grief is not an illness. Fear is not illness. 

In the words of Gabor Mater,  “Let’s all drop the pretense that we are either normal, or abnormal. We are all in the same support group: ordinary people who must deal with the struggles that come with being human.”  And, as Origins co-founder Andi Fetzner likes to say, “being a human is hard.”

 

Amen.

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Navigating the Storm: We’re in the Same Storm, but Not the Same Boat

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At Origins, we encourage self-reflection as we navigate advocacy during this social justice revolution. While we are all in this storm together, we recognize the reality that we are not all in the same boat. In scrolling through social media this last week, I came upon a poem that speaks to this truth. The author is unknown.

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Of Mice & Meetings: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Work During the Pandemic

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My wife works for an educational company and her past few weeks have been busy working with schools and districts across California as they face the herculean task of adapting to distance learning for the remainder of the school year. One of my favorite stories from last week comes from a training that one of her colleagues was conducting with a school site. During the training, without skipping a beat, the trainer announced that his daughter had just handed him their pet mice and he was now doing the training with two mice in hand. What I love about this story is that it reminded everyone on the call that the guy who was doing the training is also a dad doing his best to manage his own family life.

For those of us who are lucky enough to work virtually during these unprecedented times, the stories about working remotely and the sudden ramp-up in video calls are often hilarious. Zoom bombs from spouses and kids asking what’s for dinner. People forgetting that the camera is on while going to the bathroom. People showing up to calls in pajamas.

But in addition to being hilarious, these stories are also very humanizing. We are seeing windows into people’s lives that we often don’t encounter in a working relationship. At least one onscreen pet is now pretty standard for any video call (and a welcome addition). 

As someone who has three kids and has worked from home for years, having to manage background noise and distractions (albeit not for an entire workday) is nothing new. But what is new is no longer having to have to pretend that all of this other “stuff” is not going on in the background. Just a few weeks ago, I would desperately search for the mute button if my dog Oliver barked during a call with a client or make sure to prep my younger kids if I had a call scheduled after they were home from school. A couple of years ago when I had a weekly series of early morning virtual trainings with a client on the east coast dead smack in the middle of what is often the noisiest time in the house, my wife graciously turned it into Friday pancakes at IHOP to get the kids out of the house. My wife also works from home and the contortions we have both engaged in over the years to keep the pretense of having everything under control in the background have been sometimes funny and often exhausting. We have both been known to take a conference call from our car when desperate.

To say the least, all of those pretenses are gone. Suddenly, it’s ok to give an authentic answer when someone asks you how you are doing or to admit that the reason you aren’t available at a particular time is because your kid needs your help. And there is something very human about all of it.

I am struck by how many lessons of the trauma-informed and resilience-building movement are so salient right now–the importance of physical and emotional safety, the power of relationships and community to heal. I guess it makes sense–we are all experiencing a collective societal trauma right now.  Dr. Rob Anda, one of the co-authors of the original Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, a body of research that is foundational to our understanding of the impact of toxic stress physiology on health and behavior, reminds us that “It’s not just ‘them.’ It’s us.” This is one of those rare moments in time when I think we all truly understand what he meant.

The individual and collective suffering is no doubt real and will likely get much worse. By the end of last week, the number of deaths and infections continued to climb. Health care professionals, grocery stores workers, and other essential workers continue to put their lives at risk on the front lines of this pandemic. People are losing their jobs at an astonishing clip. The dad/trainer with the mice was furloughed from his job for three months (and my wife was reduced to 80%).

But the collective trauma and vulnerability we are all facing has also revealed acts of humanity, both large and small. It has led to unanticipated intimacy in places we may not have expected it. Seeing a toddler unexpectedly pop onto a parent’s lap (and the parent embrace them with a hug instead of shooing them away) during a zoom call is an act of astonishing beauty.

As Brene Brown says, “Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.”

And somehow every puppy that slobbers on a computer screen during a zoom call right now reminds me that we are indeed all in this together.

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Lori Chelius is a co-founder of Origins Training & Consulting. Origins helps educators, health care professionals, social service workers, and other leaders integrate a trauma-informed approach into their work so they can build more resilient organizations and communities. She lives in California with her wife, three kids, and their dog, Oliver. Learn more about Origins’ and its online training offerings at www.originstraining.org.

 

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Graduations, non-linear paths, & the importance of getting started

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My oldest graduated elementary school yesterday and I will admit that I shed more than a few tears at his end-of-year ceremony as the entire school community literally “clapped out” the sixth grade. Someone told me to make sure I bring my sunglasses and I am grateful for that advice. While elementary school graduation may not be as big of a deal as high school or college, it still felt like a pretty big milestone for him and our family.  I think back to his first day of kindergarten in 2012 . His youngest sister was still in a baby backpack as we walked him half of a block to his first day of school with another toddler in tow. My wife and I spent a lot of time in that classroom–we eagerly volunteered to share a weekly volunteer spot in his class and attended the frequent performances and parties hosted by his amazing teacher. Almost seven years (and two cross-country moves) later, he biked himself to his last day of elementary school and I had to promise to make sure I hung out with the other parents (and not him) at the end-of-year BBQ celebration.

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