Touchpoints to Resilience: Transforming Trauma-Informed Awareness to Practice

media release:

Speaker: Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Former surgeon general of California, founder of The Center for Youth Wellness, an award-winning physician, and public health leader.

Dr. Burke Harris is featured in the documentary: Resilience, the Biology of Stress & The Science of Hope. https://kpjrfilms.co/resilience. Attendees can rent the film on Apple TV, Fandango, Google Play Movies & TV, or YouTube.

$25 registration. Hosted by The Rainbow Project. Sponsored by Dane County Children, Youth & Families Consortium and the Dane County Child Abuse & Neglect Coordinated Community Response

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris is an award-winning physician, researcher and public health leader who has spent her career on the front lines of some of our world’s most pressing public health challenges. As California’s first-ever Surgeon General, she helped guide the state’s COVID response, co-chairing the committee to recommend vaccine allocation and helping California achieve the lowest cumulative mortality of any large state. Amid the throes of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Burke Harris successfully launched a first-in-the-nation statewide effort to train over 20,000 primary care providers on how to screen for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and respond with trauma-informed care. 

Dr. Burke Harris’ career has been dedicated to serving vulnerable communities and combating the root causes of health disparities. After completing her MPH at Harvard and residency at Stanford, she founded a clinic in one of San Francisco’s most underserved communities, Bayview Hunters Point. It was there that Burke Harris identified Adverse Childhood Experiences as a major risk factor affecting the health of her patients and applied research from the CDC and Kaiser Permanete to develop a novel clinical screening protocol. 

In 2011, she founded the Center for Youth Wellness to advance pediatric medicine, raise public awareness, and transform the way society responds to children exposed to ACEs and toxic stress. In this role she founded the Bay Area Research Consortium on Toxic Stress and Health and led the first-ever randomized-controlled trial to validate ACE screening and assess treatment of toxic stress. 

Dr. Burke Harris served as a committee member and co-author for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the consensus report Vibrant and Healthy Kids: Aligning Science, Practice and Policy to Advance Health Equity, published in 2019; and as a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ National Advisory Board for Screening. 

Her work has been profiled in best-selling books including How Children Succeed by Paul Tough and Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance as well as in Jamie Redford’s feature film, Resilience. She has also been featured on NPR, CNN, and Fox News as well as in USA Today and the New York Times. Dr. Burke Harris’ TED Talk, “How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across the Lifetime” has been viewed more than 10 million times. Her book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity was called “indispensable” by The New York Times.

Dr. Burke Harris is the recipient of the Arnold P. Gold Foundation Humanism in Medicine Award presented by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Heinz Award for the Human Condition. She was named one of 2018’s Most Influential Women in Business by the San Francisco Business Times and as one of Capitol Weekly’s Top 100 most influential people in 2020. 

Dr. Burke Harris is also featured in the film Resilience, which can be rented on on YouTube, Apple TV, Prime, Fandango, and Google Play TV. Read more about the film HERE.

About The Rainbow Project

The Rainbow Project is a non-profit mental health counseling and resource clinic located in Madison, WI. The organization provides individualized and responsive services within a variety of settings. Services include short- and long-term counseling, prevention and early intervention, and crisis response. Rainbow's goal is to promote positive change within families including building, strengthening and supporting healthy parent/child relationships as well as advocate for the mental health needs and support of families and children in the community.