Mental Health & Wellbeing

COVID-19 has disproportionately harmed people of color and communities with lower income with regard to employment, worker protections, and social isolation. Given the adverse impacts that COVID-19 has had on residents across the state including loss of income, increased social isolation, and potential displacement, California has an opportunity to recognize the pandemic as a wake-up call.

Building on our five years of working alongside the Milwaukee Office of Violence Prevention to develop the Blueprint for Peace, which is grounded in our Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) framework, Prevention Institute is currently partnering with the Milwaukee Office of Violence Prevention to design a resident leadership and advocacy training focused on community organizing for community safety.

Communities of Care is an initiative that supports collaborative approaches to wellbeing in the greater Houston Metropolitan Area, with a focus on children and youth of color and their families. Its goal is to strengthen efforts to transform the environments where people live, learn, work, play, and pray to support resilience, mental health, and wellbeing.

The Making Connections Backpack is a resource library for those engaged in building a gendered and community-level approach to improving mental wellbeing among men and boys. It offers tools to shape your journey, and connect with others engaged in or supporting similar upstream prevention work. 

Prevention Institute is researching and planning how to integrate intergenerational partnerships into our health equity efforts. For example, we are collaborating with community-based partners to position young leaders as subject matter experts at national conferences. This improves our work, honors young people’s wisdom, and strengthens the health equity field. We will continue to post new projects to this page as they develop.

Until now, there has been no basis for understanding how community trauma undermines resilience and mental wellbeing, especially in communities highly impacted by violence, and what can be done about it. With the support of Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit, PI and Dr. Howard Pinderhughes developed the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience (ACE|R) framework. PI also works with communities, sectors, and policymakers to address and prevent community trauma, and to foster community resilience.

Prevention Institute and the Center for the Study of Social Policy collaborated to identify the strategic policy, practice, systems, and norms change levers to make communities safer, so that all children have the opportunity to develop optimally and participate fully in the fabric of community life.

COVID-19 and the national outcry for racial justice has illuminated a need for coordinated, culturally-specific and proactive ACEs and suicide prevention efforts. Through a cooperative agreement with the CDC, PI has partnered with the National League of Cities and Dr. Howard Pinderhughes to offer training and tools to local government and their partners in supporting their communities.

Through a cooperative agreement with the CDC, PI has partnered with RTI International and CLASP to update the technical package content and develop modules that provide a foundation for activities during periods of infrastructure disruption.

Since 2010, the Hogg Foundation has hosted a free biennial conference in Houston focusing on children’s mental health topics. From October 21 and October 23, 2021, Prevention Insitute and the Hogg Foundation hosted The Young Minds Matter 2021 Virtual Conference Series.

The Making Connections Backpack is a resource library for those engaged in building a gendered and community-level approach to improving mental wellbeing among men and boys. It offers tools to shape your journey, and connect with others engaged in or supporting similar upstream prevention work. 

Mental health is at the heart of many of the challenges we face, including trauma and adverse childhood experiences, social isolation, institutionalized bias and discrimination, and ‘diseases of despair’ that manifest in depression, suicide, and substance misuse. Addressing social determinants of health is key to helping communities navigate adversity, heal, and flourish. PI’s report, Back to Our Roots: Catalyzing Community Action for Mental Health and Wellbeing, illustrates how improving community conditions can reduce the incidence and intensity of mental health challenges, and help activate resilience.

This report was developed by Prevention Institute for the Movember Foundation to help shape its strategic direction and resource allocation for its mental health focus in the U.S. The report describes the mental health landscape in the U.S. and, in particular, the mental health and wellbeing of boys and men.

This first-of-its-kind framework explores trauma at a community level. It explains how trauma is produced not only by experiencing interpersonal violence but also by experiencing structural violence – the harm that individuals, families, and communities experience from the economic and social structure; social institutions; and social relations of power, privilege and inequity that inhibit them from meeting their basic needs.

California’s state government can play a vital role in facilitating and supporting efforts to improve community-wide health, safety, and wellbeing, by reducing exposure to trauma, and increasing individual and community resilience. This report explores prevention and healing approaches that strengthen mental health and wellbeing, support communities to heal from trauma, and build community resilience. 

What? Why? How? Answers to Frequently Asked Questions About the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework builds off of core concepts in the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework and addresses questions that have emerged in early practice and implementation.

Since the initial development of the Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience Framework in 2016, multiple networks and communities have shared it, as well as adopted, adapted and/or implemented it to address and prevent community trauma. Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience: Learning from Practice reflects valuable lessons from their practice.

THRIVE is a tool for assessing the status of community conditions and prioritizing them for action to improve health, safety, and health equity.

The Spectrum of Prevention is a systematic tool that promotes a multifaceted range of activities for effective prevention. The Spectrum identifies multiple levels of intervention and helps people move beyond the perception that prevention is merely education and serves as a framework for a more comprehensive understanding of prevention that includes six levels for strategy development.

MC Team Lead Becca Krauss is a psychotherapist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Advancing mental health requires clinical expertise and recognition that wellbeing happens at a community level. When violent crime is common, so are trauma and toxic stress which play out in settings like classrooms and playgrounds.

Through Making Connections the Southern Plains Tribal Health Board staff are making suicide prevention among American Indian youth a priority. The project empowers students in Anadarko and the Oklahoma City area to address and prevent suicide among their peers.

UWEAST and its partner organizations work to prevent suicide. They have opened up a dialogue about mental health with community members; encouraged faith leaders to speak out about post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and suicide; and partnered with other local organizations to provide young men with leadership and career development training.