CAI Training: Building Capacity for Addressing Maternal Depression

CAI developed this free training package to increase confidence and skills needed to recognize and respond to maternal depression. The training will bolster the ability of a non-licensed, community-based workforce to support and educate clients with maternal depression to increase awareness and reduce stigma.

“Reach out, I’ll be there”: Awakening Resilience Across Communities

Recent discoveries from developmental neurobiology, child development, and trauma science had shown that harsh and unresponsive caregiving during early childhood resulted in disrupted stress regulation systems in the developing brain. In addition, stressful family and community environments had been linked to specific pre-academic, social and health challenges in preschoolers. In response to these findings, new approaches to child abuse prevention started to focus on the need to mitigate young children’s adversities through parent education. The science of resilience has effectively provided the blueprints for a “behavioral therapeutic vaccine” that could buffer the negative impacts of early childhood adversity.

The Roots of Helping, Sharing, and Caring

How do human beings become caring beings? This presentation offers answers from research with young children, whose sensitivity to other people’s feelings increasingly drives their helpful assistance even as their understanding of ingroup-outgroup discrimination is growing. We also consider the social experiences that influence the tension between social exclusion and shared understanding in early childhood.

…But Now I See: Using the Lens of Racial Literacy to Understand Racial Trauma and Promote Justice and Healing

Despite its tragic arc, the so-called “double pandemic” has served as an awakening to the realities of racial injustice across a number of systems. On one front, the pandemic of COVID-19 disproportionately impacted Black adults and youth, both physically and psychologically. Meanwhile, we have borne witness to another pandemic, dating back to 1619, which has been a reminder that racism is “alive and sick”. Justice and healing in the face of the insidiousness of racism in its myriad forms require recognizing how it expresses across the lifespan. In this presentation, I will discuss racial literacy as a tool for recognizing racial trauma across a number of systems and life stages. Collectively, we will reflect on how racial seeing and racial noticing are important elements in our mission towards social justice.