We welcome you to join us for our first virtual gathering being held on the second of April!
The capacity of resilience is invaluable during uncertain times. The good news is that resilience can be supported and promoted--even in the midst of adversity. During this gathering, we’ll prioritize connection as a vital ingredient for cultivating greater resilience and well-being. Our interactive conversation will begin with a short presentation and conclude with a stabilizing, stress-relieving practice.
The Maine Resilience Building Network is hosting free virtual (via the ZOOM platform) professional development for Early Child Care and Public Preschool providers across Maine.
Strong Kids, Strong Families, Strong Communities: The Impact of ACEs and Resilience Building will bring together Early Childhood and public Pre-K providers to learn about Adverse Childhood Experiences research, early brain development science and protective factors such as positive relationships. Family and classroom resilience-informed strategies to promote resilience building for our children birth-5 will be offered. The virtual event will provide an opportunity for new learning and meeting new providers from Maine programs and schools. We encourage everyone to invite a colleague.
This training is offered by the Maine Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services in collaboration with the Maine Resilience Building Network through a Preschool Development Grant. Two contact hours are available for each session.
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.
Program and Speakers: 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.
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:
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.
*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.
* Registration begins at 8:30 am and the program starts promptly at 9:00 am.
MRBN Fall Conference
Thursday and Friday, November 12-13, 2020
A Call for Proposals and Posters will be released in February!
Location: Samoset Resort, 220 Warrenton St, Rockport, ME 04856
Meet 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 talkcan 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.
