MRBN July Professional Development Meeting
Please join us via Zoom for our July Networking/Member meeting! This meeting will be held virtually from 9am - 11:30am on Thursday, July 30th and will feature Bobbi Johnson, Associate Director of Child Welfare Services at the Office of Child and Family Services (OCFS), Erin Whitham, Performance Management Coordinator at the Maine Children's Trust, and Christine Theriault, Family First Prevention Services Program Manager, OCFS.
Equity Workshop Series - Session 1 - Bias and Brain Development
MRBN is offering a workshop series to engage Maine community members to increase knowledge around systemic injustice. The cost to attend each session is $30 for MRBN members and $40 for non-members.
Anti-racism education builds resilience for everyone. Evidence shows that systemic injustice has a negative effect not only on the marginalized community members who are directly impacted, but every community member, regardless of identity. Studies support the idea that when communities take action to address racism, outcomes for every group improve.
This workshop will use Daniel Kahneman's theory of fast and slow thinking to explain how representation, societal structure, and brain development create a culture of biased thinking and behavior. Attendees will take the Harvard Implicit Bias prior to the training and will receive follow up materials to practice unlearning their own biases.
The speaker, Sultana Khan, is a writer, organizer, and consultant who lives in New England. She works with community members, educators, and young people to increase their understanding and activism around social change. Sultana believes equitable communities can only be developed through education, acknowledgement, and action, and tailors her approach to meet people wherever they are in their journey towards collective liberation. Her writing has been published locally and nationally, and her first book of nonfiction essays is forthcoming. Sultana is a queer woman of color and can most often be found splashing around in cold bodies of water.
Equity Workshop Series - Session 2 - Microaggressions
This workshop will expose and explain the subtle nature of microaggressions, which are defined as "daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental communications, whether intentional or unintentional, that transmit hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to a target person because they belong to a stigmatized group."
Equity Workshop Series Session 3: A Racial History of Maine
This workshop will explore the history of racial prejudice in Maine, from the persecution of residents of Malaga Island to the KKK to the history of US relations with the Tribes that have lived in this area for thousands of years. This real history is a necessary component of anti-racism education for Mainers.
Join MRBN 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:
1. Be able to list the four types of positive experiences (pillars of HOPE) that support the development of resilience. 2. Explain how positive and adverse childhood experiences interact in affecting long-term health. 3. Use positive, strength—based approaches to improve the effectiveness of evidence-based screening. 4. Set a specific, measurable, applicable, realistic, and time-bound objective for the next 60 days.
Who Should Attend: All cross-sector professionals are invited to attend: social workers, public health and healthcare professionals, guidance counselors, educators, child and family advocates, therapists, behavioral health professionals, policy makers and public safety officers.
Thursday and Friday, November 12-13, 2020 - Virtual two-day program
Please join us for a two day virtual event featuring speaker Dr. Christina Bethell, PhD,MBA, MPH. Dr. Bethell is a Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Each day, Dr. Bethell will offer a unique keynote presentation from 10:00am -11:30am.
The first keynote address is titled, We Are the Medicine: Building an EcoSystem to Take Healing and Flourishing to Scale, will allow participants to learn about the science of flourishing amid adversity and approaches to prevent and mitigate the impact of ACEs to promote resilience. In this address, Dr. Bethell will present research evidence supporting bold policies and strategies to translate the science of flourishing into health, education and social services and policy.
The second keynote address is titled, Prioritizing Possibilities: Leveraging the Power of Relationships and Family and Community Engagement to Catalyze and Sustain Flourishing, will take a deeper dive into the science and anatomy of a healing relationships and community engagement to address childhood adversity and promote well-being. She will discuss the neuroscience principles behind the mandate for effectively engaging families and the community to assess priorities, define success and partner to improve and tailor health, education and social services.
Dr. Bethell will facilitate community forums each day from 1:00pm-2:30pm. During these sessions, participants will have the opportunity to reflect on approaches to promote flourishing amid adversity in their current work, review existing strategies and services, evaluate how current work to promote flourishing and healing and assess the impact of adversity and trauma and assess the well-being of their workforce and leadership.
All professionals are invited to attend: social workers, healthcare providers, guidance counselors, educators, child and family advocates, public health and behavioral health professionals, therapists, and policy makers. We encourage community organizations and coalitions to attend.
Meet the speaker, Dr. Christina Bethell, PhD, MBA, MPH!
Dr. Bethell provided expert testimony to the first-ever congressional hearing on childhood trauma last 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 finance 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.
*If you are not yet a MRBN member, please JOIN NOW to receive a substantial discount on all event registrations! You must have a paid membership to qualify for the discounted rate.
