National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day is May 3, 2011!

National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day is a key strategy of the Caring for Every Child's Mental Health Campaign (the Campaign), which is part of the Public Awareness and Support Strategic Initiative by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. The Campaign seeks to raise awareness about the importance of children's mental health and that positive mental health is essential to a child's healthy development from birth. This year, the national theme will focus on building resilience in young children dealing with trauma.

Communities around the country will participate by holding their own Awareness Day events, focusing either on the national theme, or adapting the theme to the populations they serve. On Awareness Day 2010, more than 1,000 sites held Awareness Day events and nearly 11,000 children and youth participated.

As always, the release of the SAMHSA Short Report (PDF – 1.9MB) will coincide with Awareness Day. The 2011 Short Report will feature how systems of care can positively affect children who have experienced trauma.

Calls To Action for Awareness Day 2011 National Event

• Integrate mental health and model resilience skills in every environment that has an impact on child development from birth.
• Enhance resilience and nurture social and emotional skills in young children from birth.
• Provide information to the public and teach them to recognize the signs of traumatic stress.
• Raise awareness that treatment for trauma is critical to achieving the milestones of a child's social and emotional development from birth.
• Promote trauma-informed services and supports in all child-serving settings.

The national event in Washington, DC, will open with an art exhibit sponsored by the American Art Therapy Association at the prestigious Shakespeare Theatre-Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, (http://www.shakespearetheatre.org ) and continue with a tribute to youth who dealt with trauma in their childhood and who built on their resilience. A joint award from the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts will be presented to a celebrity who experienced trauma, who demonstrated resilience, and who used his or her celebrity as a platform to educate about trauma and resilience.

Click here to learn about the Benefits of Collaborating on Awareness Day Year-Round.

Thanks to Chris for passing this

Every once in a while, someone comes along with an idea or a passion that establishes your faith in the human spirit. Jon Rezin, founder of Next Movement Records, is such a man…and he’s bent on making the world a better place through music. A Baha’i and just cool in general, he agreed to take some time out of his busy schedule and talk about how exactly he plans to turn the world upside down for the better.

Whatever suffering and turmoil the years immediately ahead may hold, however dark the immediate circumstances, the Bahá’í community believes that humanity can confront this supreme trial with confidence in its ultimate outcome. Far from signalizing the end of civilization, the convulsive changes towards which humanity is being ever more rapidly impelled will serve to release the “potentialities inherent in the station of man” and reveal “the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality”.

God is not partial and is no respecter of persons. He has made provision for all. The harvest comes forth for everyone. The rain showers upon everybody and the heat of the sun is destined to warm everyone. The verdure of the earth is for everyone. Therefore there should be for all humanity the utmost happiness, the utmost comfort, the utmost well-being.

To understand the nature of the interacting processes that, in their totality, engender the expansion and consolidation of the Faith is vital to the successful execution of the Plan. In your efforts to further such understanding, you and your auxiliaries are encouraged to bear in mind a concept that lies at the foundation of the current global enterprise and, indeed, at the very heart of every stage of the Divine Plan, namely, that progress is achieved through the development of three participants—the individual, the institutions, and the community. Throughout human history, interactions among these three have been fraught with difficulties at every turn, with the individual clamouring for freedom, the institution demanding submission, and the community claiming precedence. Every society has defined, in one way or another, the relationships that bind the three, giving rise to periods of stability, interwoven with turmoil. Today, in this age of transition, as humanity struggles to attain its collective maturity, such relationships—nay, the very conception of the individual, of social institutions, and of the community—continue to be assailed by crises too numerous to count. The worldwide crisis of authority provides proof enough. So grievous have been its abuses, and so deep the suspicion and resentment it now arouses, that the world is becoming increasingly ungovernable—a situation made all the more perilous by the weakening of community ties.