After three and a half years, the Sauer Collaborative for Child Well-Being came full circle.  We came together at the Minneapolis Foundation in June of 2014.  We invited a group of professionals from across the child welfare system to come together to work on aligning the system to child well-being.  Over the years, the collaborative […]

A few years ago, we did two focus groups: one was with youth aging out of foster care and one was with adults who had been in foster care.  In both groups, I listened as they talked about what it felt like to only have adults in their lives who were paid to be there.  […]

Congratulations to Minnesota’s Department of Human Services for winning a federal grant of $3M per year for the next four years ($12M total) to expand and sustain our System of Care for Children’s Mental Health!! The opportunities this grant gives to fill gaps and truly serve the children that need mental health services in our […]

We are just beginning to understand the trauma some children experience at early ages. As funders of programs that help children, it is important to pay attention to trauma and how to heal it. I heard a person from a local school district say they didn’t want to ask children specific questions because when they […]

In the past 10 years, our collective knowledge of how our brains work and the effects of trauma on our brains has increased tenfold. We are living in a time when this knowledge and what it means for serving people in systems like education, criminal justice, and child welfare is still unfolding. The ACES Study […]