Dear Friends,

As we navigate through the Covid-19 situation and a period of uncertainty, we send you all our best well wishes.

While there are public health reasons to physically distance ourselves right now, our priority is to stay socially connected, engaged and networked. We know that connectedness is vital to health, resilience and well-being and we’re committed to supporting this.

MRBN is currently examining creative ways to stay connected as a community. We will be developing online opportunities for us to gather--please stay tuned and we welcome your ideas.

We remain thankful to all of the people on the front lines of this pandemic who are doing everything that they can to help. We’re also grateful for the generous ways that our network shows up for people across the state. We will move through this together.

Maine citizens appreciate the beauty of nature. In closing, we’d like to offer the calming poetry of Wendell Berry.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

MRBN's April 29th Virtual Meeting:  Restorative Justice &  211 Maine

Restorative practices intentionally build community connectedness, and restorative justice is a continuum of ways to respond to harm through consideration of the needs and obligations of those most affected.  Both center on values of individual voice, choice and dignity - believing that human beings thrive in relationships and need known ways of caring for one another that are non-adversarial and non-punitive.  

Join Ryun Anderson, Executive Director of the Restorative Justice Institute of Maine (RJIM) https://www.rjimaine.org/ and Sarah Mattox from the Restorative Justice Project (RJP) http://www.rjpmidcoast.org/ for a primer in restorative practice and restorative justice, as well as an overview of the exciting restorative work taking shape across the state of Maine.  Participants will explore the ways in which restorative work builds individual and community resilience.

Nikki Busmanis, 211Maine Program Manager, https://211maine.org/ will offer a program overview and updates on this statewide resource. For those living with opiate addictions, 211 Maine, in partnership wit the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, provides a toll-free statewide information and referral Opiate Helpline where you can speak with a specialist to identify treatment options and other resources in your area. Join us for this meeting to learn more about this statewide resource. 

Register now!

Building Resilience With HOPE: Healthy Outcomes of Positive Experience

** This program is being postponed until Tuesday, September 15, 2020. If you are already registered, you will receive an email. Registration will remain open to additional attendees.**

The Maine Resilience Building Network, in partnership with UNE’s Center for Excellence in Public Health, invites you to join colleagues from Maine for a one-day conference on HOPE (Healthy Outcomes of Positive Experiences); a framework co-authored by Dr. Robert Sege from Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston.

For too long, our work with young children and their families has focused on adversity and risk. While these are important, we now know that positive childhood experiences also have dramatic effects on brain growth and development and on adult health. Building on the key insights from toxic stress, our brains develop in response to experience. HOPE (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences) outlines approaches that we can take to incorporate a more holistic understanding of human development. The keynote address will describe the science of HOPE, and lay out the four pillars of HOPE. These pillars describe the common elements of programs that have been successful in promoting child and adolescent development.

Following the keynote, we will have a series of interactive sessions, designed to bring this new scientific understanding into practice. These sessions will explore four areas of implementation of HOPE: (1) HOPE-based intake and assessment, (2) How HOPE supports empathy with individuals who may have had childhood trauma, (3) Programming that creates Positive Childhood Experiences, and (4) Monitoring and improving HOPE-informed implementation.

This daylong session will leave participants, from trainee to experienced practitioners, with new approaches and concrete skills to improve the effectiveness of their work with young children and their families.

Conference Objectives: 

Following this session, participants will:

Who Should Attend: All professionals are invited to attend: social workers, healthcare providers, guidance counselors, educators, child and family advocates, public health and behavioral health professionals, therapists, policy makers and public safety officers.  Education credit for this program is pending.

Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2020  Time: Registration begins at 8:30am   Program begins at 9:00am

Location: UNE’s Innovation Hall, 772 Stevens Ave, Portland, Me

Registration Fees: $75 member, $150 non-member, $30 full-time student

REGISTER NOW!      To become an active MRBN member and receive reduced member pricing for this event, JOIN NOW!

MRBN Memberships for Organizations and Individuals

The Maine Resilience Building Network invites you to become a MRBN member. Together we are raising awareness of the ACEs science and resilience building in Maine and nationally. The MRBN Network is an integral part of the work that is happening across sectors to improve well-being and build systems that strengthen children, family and community connections so all people matter. MRBN is responsive to the network through statewide network meetings, professional development and consultation. MRBN provides contributions to state and local policy development on resilience-building strategies that impacts the well-being of our children, families, and communities. Join the Network today. 

Join us

Maine Resilience Building Network Annual Conference - November 12 & 13 - Samoset Resort

Meet our featured speaker, Dr. Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH

​MRBN is pleased and honored to announce that Dr. Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH will present on the first day of our 2020 conference. Dr. Bethell provided expert testimony to the first-ever congressional hearing on childhood trauma this summer. In addition, her paper on promoting positive relational experiences to promote child and adult health was published in Jama Pediatrics September, 2019. Her 9/9/19 audio interview on NPR’s All Things Considered can be listened to here.   A short video from Stanford’s ChildX talk can be viewed here.

Dr. Bethell is a Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she advances a new integrated Science of Thriving to promote early and lifelong health of children, youth, families and communities. With roots in health care financing reform, social epidemiology and culturally-competent, community-engaged approaches to assessing and improving health and well-being, she is the founding director (1996) of the national Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), the National Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health and the We Are the Medicine consortium. Together, this work operates to promote “top down” (knowledge and data to reveal the big picture and possibilities), “bottom up” (methods to engage families, collect data and track progress) and “inside out” (relationship-centered strategies for successful transformational partnerships). She led the design of a widely endorsed national agenda to address childhood trauma and promote healing and flourishing and advances family-centered approaches to optimize child well-being and national, state and local policies to enable transformation.

Dr. Bethell earned an MBA and an MPH from the University of California, Berkeley and PhD in public policy from the University of Chicago. She teaches Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Healing Through Revealing methods and is an avid student of transparent communication, presence and human potential for flourishing amid adversity. She writes poetry, dances and believes that connection with ourselves, life and others is the source of our creativity and joy.

More information on the conference will be shared soon! Mark your calendar now!