Integrating Farmer Needs Into Childcare Solutions

Learn about out the unique challenges farmers face in accessing
affordable quality childcare. This interactive breakout session will
include an overview of national USDA and CDC funded research
findings examining how access to childcare and health insurance affects
farm economic development, child farm safety, and farm family quality
of life. We’ll discuss the types of solutions farmers identified, new
tools to assist farmers and communities with childcare solutions, and
collectively develop strategies you can use to effectively engage farmers
and community members in developing childcare solutions.

Resources

Back to top

Recovery Friendly Workplaces

Every day, individuals with substance use disorders and in recovery face challenges to maintain health and well-being. Community connections, including access to stable jobs, steady paychecks, and supportive workplaces help sustain recovery. Recovery Friendly Workplaces is an initiative for local employers to better understand policies and practices that can help make a work environment supportive. RFW offers evidence-based information for employers who want to make foundational changes to the way they hire, engage with, and support employees living with or seeking recovery from substance abuse.

Resources

Back to top

Mental Health Stigma in Rural Communities

Dairy Farmer and Rural Minds founder and director, Jeff Winton will highlight the challenges and differences around mental health for those living in rural America.  He will address how mental health stigma affects rural communities and strategies to help address the stigma. Growing up on his family’s dairy farm, he discovered that many of the families in his small, 500-person town had a relative or friend living with some form of untreated mental illness—depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia. But their struggle was met with silence. There were few or no resources in the community for treating them or conversations about helping them. The stigma attached to mental illness was palpable.  After a personal tragedy in 2012, he founded Rural Minds, a nonprofit organization to serve as the informed voice for mental health in rural America, and to provide mental health information and resources.

Resources

Back to top

Addressing the Stress, the Social Determinants of Health, and Resilience in Rural Communities: A Call to Action

This presentation will focus on understanding the signs, symptoms,
facts, and figures related to stress and physical/mental/chemical health
issues among individuals living in rural communities. Participants will
learn about risk and protective factors and prevention and intervention
strategies to increase emotional health and well-being.

Resources

Back to top

Youth Mental Health & Social Success Series:

Digital Consent Rights for Youth with Disabilities (Part 1)

Foundations of Healthy Relationships: Helping Neurodivergent Teens and Young Adults Connect Safely

Objectives

• 1. Better understand your own values and how people find meaningful connections
• 2. Identify strategies to help neurodivergent teens to develop their own relationship and sexuality goals
• 3. Develop alternative strategies to behavioral support plans, to better address underlying mental health needs around risky dating and sexual behavior, by better understanding what drives the decision making

Resources

Back to top

Youth Mental Health & Social Success Series:

Digital Consent Rights for Youth with Disabilities (Part 2)

Online Dating, Sexting, and Porn, Oh My! Helping Neurodivergent Teens Connect Safely Online

Objectives:

• Learn how to identify the needs behind the behavior, to increase understanding and empathy and respond effectively
• Learn how to build trust with teens to increase safety
• Identify risk factors and “red flags” of online behavior, to better be able to support and educate neurodivergent teens on these topics
• Develop alternative strategies to behavioral modification in addressing risky online behavior

Resources

Back to top

Youth Mental Health & Social Success Series:

Five is Against the Law. Educating Social Skills Differences for Greater Long Term Success

There have been unprecedented advances in neuroscience related to the development of social behavior and emotional understanding. These advances include information about social awareness, social attention, self- awareness, emotion regulation, and self-control. Research not only documents that these skills are brain-based, but emerging educational research indicates that these skills can be taught. The workshop will include a brief overview of this research and focus on specific strategies used to teach these skills. The use of The Incredible 5-Point Scale will be discussed and demonstrated with an emphasis on the scales introduced in the workbook, A 5 is Against the Law! The information in this workshop should be a part of every team discussion for all individuals who exhibit upsetting, confusing, challenging or even violent behavior.

Resources

Back to top

Youth Mental Health & Social Success Series:

The Social Stories Approach

Social Stories™ are a popular evidence-based strategy used worldwide to support autistic people and others with social communication differences. Grounded in the idea of Social Humility, they are a powerful tool to share information about an otherwise confounding aspect of the social world—in a safe, supportive, respectful, and positive way. This workshop will share the Social Stories definition and approach to help families and professionals working on behalf of autistic children, adolescents, and adults. Using several examples, participants will explore the principles of Social Stories to help them apply the approach to provide respectful and safe social support for the autistic people in their lives.

Resources

Back to top

Youth Mental Health & Social Success Series:

Supporting Authentic Communication to Enhance Engagement

*This session included a 57 minute viewing of a video prior to the session presentation that was not recorded.

Following the viewing of “This Isn’t About Me, by Jordyn Zimmerman” we will further discuss simple ways to presume competence by providing and responding to all communication attempts to center autistic perspectives. Additionally, participants will reflect on their environments to ensure we can build skills without asking clients to mask. 

Resources

Back to top

Our Epidemic of Loneliness & Social Isolation

We live in the age of constant connection: People text and drive,
frantically refresh their emails, and doom scroll social media. At any
given time we have a half a dozen ways to contact each other. And yet,
ironically, we have become the most disconnected society in history. In
fact, rates of loneliness and social isolation have been trending lower for
decades. The pandemic, of course, only exacerbated this problem.
How lonely are we really? How did we get so lonely? And what can we
do about it? In this session, we explore the Epidemic of Loneliness and
Social Isolation. We answer these essential questions and more as we
devise solutions to counteract loneliness.

Resources

Back to top

Intersection of Diet, Nutrition, Physical Activity in Mental Health and Substance Use Recovery

In 2019, 1 in every 8 persons around the world were living with a mental disorder which rose significantly during the COVID‐19 pandemic.  Methamphetamine and the opioid epidemic is at an all‐time high. While Extension has made some progress to address these issues, there is much more to be done, including through integrated health programming. This webinar will:

• Share strategies to equip professionals to integrate nutrition education programming to augment existing mental health treatment
• Provide SNAP-Ed educators with an understanding of the role that nutrition and physical activity play a role in substance use and mental health.

Resources

Back to top

Early Warning Signs and Suicide Prevention Best Practices in Children and Youth

2 part session

Attendees will learn strategies, interventions, accommodations and modifications to help students flourish emotionally and socially in school settings and in the community. The presenter will describe sings and symptoms of mental illness in children and youth, including developmental differences from infant and early childhood through transition age youth. Resources will be shared to help educators, families and other professionals connect children and youth with appropriate levels of care when needed. A comprehensive school wide toolkit for prevention, intervention and postvention of suicide and will be discussed and shared with participants.

Resources

Back to top

A Closer Look at the Farm – Mental Health, Wellness and Risk

During this session participants will identify unique stressors, risks, and factors supporting farmers, family, rural life and agriculture workers.

Session Objectives

Identify opportunities for access to wellness services

• Indentify unique stressors impacting daily rural life, work/life balance and agriculture
• Assess impact of stressors on daily life, morale and job satisfaction for agriculture workers, familes and communities
• Assess the impact of uncertainty as related to aspects of farming and the business of agriculture

Resources

Back to top

Nutrition as a Pathway to Recovery

The relationship between nutrition and substance use is complicated. Nutrition can either help or hinder recovery. In fact, food can become an addiction of its own! This workshop aims to provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of the role of nutrition in substance use recovery. More specifically, we identify common nutrition-related challenges faced by those in recovery, explore practical strategies for supporting and improving nutrition, and consider the impact of sustained nutritional wellness on long-term recovery. Eat Good, Feel Good. Feel Good, Do Good!

Session Objectives

Identify opportunities for access to wellness services

Resources

Back to top

ACE’s and Trauma Mitigation as Prevention

This interactive presentation will provide discussion regarding the impact of adverse childhood experiences as it relates to three specific cases. We will take an in-depth look at these cases, discuss warning signs that may have prevented the event, and examine how we, as community systems of support, can adjust its efforts. This discussion, related to a collaborative approach to trauma, will help mitigate the growing mental health crisis.

Resources

Back to top

Childhood Trauma and Coping

Children have a variety of experiences beginning in the earliest moments of their lives. We now know how deeply these moments can impact their future abilities, strengths, and relationships. Both positive and negative experiences can set the foundations for our resilience skills and coping mechanisms as we grow. The more our experiences are negative or involve traumatic events, the more we are at risk for developing unhealthy coping mechanisms and outcomes as adults. This session is a discussion of childhood psychological trauma and the impact on a child’s ability to cope, grow, learn, and behave. We will discuss both the stress response system as well as the onset of traumatic stressors by exposure and duration. The session will also examine the possible effects of early exposure to traumatic events on a child’s physical health, emotional health, behavioral health, and the overall risks for maladaptive coping practices in adolescence and adulthood.

Resources

Back to top