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The Center for the Study of Social Policy seeks to honor innovative initiatives that reach diverse populations of cisgender and transgender young women and girls of color and create opportunities for their well-being and success. These innovations disrupt the trajectory experienced by young women and girls of color from the compounding and often negative effects of gender and racial discrimination, personal and community violence and involvement in foster care, juvenile justice and other intervening public systems. This award celebrates the most compelling and creative interventions making a difference in young women and girls’ everyday lives. Selected recipients will join a network of like-minded partners to share ideas and help accelerate positive change and promising futures for women and girls of color nationally. The application deadline is May 8, 2017.

Learn more about the award and apply online.

Everyone involved in the mission to end HIV/AIDS wants to get as many people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) into care as possible. Yet stigma remains a key barrier to achieving that goal. The Black AIDS Institute and the Positive Women’s Network (PWN) USA held a Brown Bag Lunch Webinar in March 2017 to help change that.

The webinar, “Combating Stigma,” looked at the role of stigma in the context of HIV and shared tactics to reduce it. The session was led by Vanessa Johnson, director of national training and leadership development for PWN-USA, and Erica Lillquist, mobilization manager for the Institute.

Before one can look at stigma in terms of HIV, it’s important to get an understanding of the concept in general, Lillquist said. Stigma is a social process in which certain people are perceived to be less valuable than others based on a set of characteristics they possess. HIV-related stigma refers to adverse beliefs people have about PLWHA. Much of the stigma surrounding HIV stems from a lack of knowledge about HIV. For example, some mistakenly believe that HIV is a death sentence. Others wrongly believe that HIV is the result of personal irresponsibility, or is transmitted only through sex, according to Johnson.

Not only is stigma hurtful, but it also has dire consequences. Those who are stigmatized could experience loss of income and livelihood because of discrimination. Others could face the loss of relationships. Stigma can also cause PLWHA to drop out of care or avoid getting the care they need in the first place. In fact, the World Health Organization found that fear of stigma is one of the main reasons people avoid getting tested and getting on treatment.

Read more to learn how you can reduce the effects of stigma on BlackAIDS.org.

While perceived discrimination on college campuses compromises the self-esteem, well-being and mental health of ethnic minority students, new psychology research from The University of Texas at Austin suggests the impostor phenomenon may worsen these effects.

The impostor phenomenon — or feeling like a fraud due to an inability to internalize success — has been linked to psychological distress among ethnic minority students, research shows. In the Journal of Counseling Psychology, UT Austin researchers found that these feelings of fraudulence may fuel the negative relationship between perceived discrimination and depression and anxiety among ethnic minority college students, especially African Americans.

In the study, researchers collected surveys from 322 ethnic minority students, including 106 African Americans, 102 Asian Americans and 108 Latino/a Americans, on perceived discrimination, impostor feelings and mental health. While students in all ethnic minority groups reported similar levels of impostor feelings, African American students reported more perceived discrimination.

The researchers also found that among African American students, high impostor feelings were a positive predictor of anxiety and worsened the impact of perceived discrimination on depression. Similarly, among Asian Americans, high imposter feelings predicted both anxiety and depression. However, for Latino/a students, while high impostor feelings positively predicted anxiety, low impostor feelings exacerbated the impact of perceived discrimination on depression and anxiety.

Read more on News.UTexas.edu. Read the abstract of the study.

There are more than two million women veterans in the U.S. today, and women veterans who are homeless are the fastest-growing group of veteran homeless. Yet if you ask the average American — even the average veteran — to describe a homeless veteran, you’ll quickly hear an almost universal description. The picture most of us seem to carry in our minds is of a grizzled older white male who served in Vietnam, has chronic mental health and/or substance abuse issues, and can be seen panhandling at an intersection with a cardboard sign. The trouble with that picture, besides the fact that it’s become a cliché, is anyone who doesn’t present that way — specifically, women veterans who are homeless — are increasingly left out of the picture.

Ask women veterans who’ve experienced homelessness if they sense that they’re invisible, and they’ll tell you “yes,” but add that the problem didn’t start when they became homeless — it began when they first served in the military.

“When I came home from Iraq, I felt invisible as a woman vet,” says Kayla Williams, Army veteran, author, and current Director of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Center for Women Veterans, in a clip from C-SPAN. She describes how she would go out with groups of other veterans to a bar, and someone would buy just ‘the guys’ a round of free beers, figuring that they’d just come back from the war but that the women in the group must be “just wives, girlfriends or other hangers-on.” “No one looks at me and thinks, ‘combat veteran,’” adds Williams.

The phenomenon of “discounting” exists when we look past a population because we don’t actually “see” them — whether women veterans in general, or homeless women veterans in particular. Columbia anthropologist and public scholar Kim Hopper, Ph.D., author of the seminal work, Reckoning with Homelessness, raised that issue in the American Journal of Public Health in connection with the volunteer counts of street homeless, a big part of how the total number of homeless, veterans and otherwise, in the U.S. is estimated.

Read more on HuffingtonPost.com.

The Center for Juvenile Justice Reform (CJJR) at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy is accepting applications for the Evidence-Based Decision-Making in Juvenile Justice Certificate Program. This new program, hosted in partnership with Vanderbilt University’s Peabody Research Institute, will provide juvenile justice practitioners with instruction on how to use the appropriate tools, including the Standardized Program Evaluation Protocol, to develop an environment that supports comprehensive, evidence-based decision-making. The program will run from August 7 to 11, 2017. Apply by May 5, 2017.

Learn more about this program.

Mental health for decades has proven a vexing national issue; an estimated 10 million people live with a serious mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Washington state is no exception; in fact, in many ways this state stands out as an example of how not to address the problem.

A 2016 report by Mental Health America, a national nonprofit group, rated the 50 states and Washington, D.C., on 15 measures and found Washington ranked 50th — second to last — on getting care to those who need it. A federal judge last year held the state in contempt of court over providing timely services to mentally ill defendants. This came two years after the state Supreme Court ruled that boarding psychiatric patients temporarily in hospital emergency rooms and acute care centers, due to lack of room at psychiatric treatment facilities, is unlawful.

There are approaches that help those who need it, and one Yakima County program shows particular promise with mentally ill individuals who run afoul of the law. Superior Court’s Mental Health Court, which has been operating for three years, aims to help defendants find stability in their lives through efforts such as dealing with substance abuse, finding the right medications, reconnecting with family and friends, and eventually contributing to society through work or attending school.

That’s a lot to offer, and the numbers remain relatively small. The county says 26 defendants have gone through the program with seven currently enrolled. What is missing — at least for now — are hard numbers on recidivism rates, though a probation officer does regularly search to see if court graduates have committed new offenses. Those recidivism numbers would be useful, now that the program has a three-year track record, in gauging the long-term effectiveness of the program.

Advocates do have a point when they say that numbers themselves don’t tell a complete story about how well the program is doing. They cite personal narratives — testimonials, really — of participants who have re-established connections with family, friends and society. There’s no doubt that those connections are critical to ensuring the long-term success of both the individuals and the program. At the same time, quantifying the success — through the tracking of recidivism rates — is also important for evaluating the program.

Read more on YakimaHerald.com.