One Trusted Adult: Creating Safety for our Youth

May 9, 2022
Hosted by Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW

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Guest Information

Episode Description

These days, it feels like we can’t look at the front page of a national newspaper or watch five minutes of cable news without hearing of a school shooting or a person in a position of power who abused a child or teenager. These incidents remind us that every young person needs a trusted adult who they can turn to at home and at school—someone who they can confide in and from whom they can receive guidance. According to author and educator Brooklyn Raney, having connections to trusted adults is the best way for young people to stay safe. She explains that parents are usually the first, and closest, trusted adult, but as young people grow they often look toward others. It may be a teacher, a guidance counselor, a coach, a friend’s parent, an aunt or an uncle, or a neighbor. For this reason, all adults in contact with young people should know the ABCs of being a trusted adult: Accessible, Boundaried, and Caring. As Raney shows, being a trusted adult need not be onerous. It doesn’t mean working 24/7, or acting as a mental health counselor, or sharing details of your personal life. At once a call to action for every school to put in place a program to assess whether each student has a trusted adult, a blueprint for how to make her paradigm a reality, and a guide for those interested in helping the next generation, One Trusted Adult stands to revolutionize the way we support the young people in our life.

Resiliency Within

Monday at 1 PM Pacific Time on VoiceAmerica Health and Wellness Channel

Elaine Miller-Karas will amplify the message of hope, healing and resiliency she has learned from our world community as she has traversed the globe after human made and natural disasters. Hope often springs forth in response to suffering and trauma. Our beliefs and our wellbeing are being challenged during these unprecedented times.

The program Resiliency Within is about cultivating individual and community resiliency. Resiliency is the capacity to lean into our strengths with compassion during the most challenging of times and to remember "what else is true?" about our lived experience.

Her guests are inspiring global leaders actively promoting healing and resiliency from a variety of backgrounds. The goal is to spread wellbeing and give individual and community examples to inspire how wellness skills, including ones based upon neuroscience and the biology of the human nervous system, can be integrated into one's life, family and community during challenging times.

Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW

Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW, has been called an "ambassador of hope" and a "resilience guru." She is an author, advocate, a social worker, a trauma therapist, a co-founder of an international organization, the Trauma Resource Institute and key developer of the Community and Trauma Resiliency Models.

She is the author of “Building Resiliency to Trauma, the Trauma and Community Resiliency Models(r)” (2015). She is committed to bringing accessible and affordable interventions based on neuroscience and the biology of the human nervous system to our world's community. Her models have been introduced to over 102 countries.

Elaine is a recognized international speaker and has presented at the Skoll World Forum at Oxford University and the United Nations. Her book was selected by the United Nations curated on-line library as one of the innovations that can help meet its Sustainable Development Goals.

Elaine feels passionately about the impact of climate change on our world community. She is a founding member of the International Transformational Resilience Coalition, an organization focused on the impact of climate change on mental health. She is dedicated to the world's children and she has worked with collaborators to develop interventions for children, parents and teachers to help reduce the impact of trauma. Consequently, she is a Senior Consultant to Emory University’s SEE Learning program, inspired and launched by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 2019.

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