NEW Newsletter from Safe Living Space!

Dear Friends

Thank you for viewing the first Safe Living Space Newsletter highlighting our expanded clinical research and the 2025 focus on the Mental Health Symptoms of Traumatic Brain Injury. We look forward to your feedback on the Newsletter and appreciate your posts and shares to spread the word on social media!

Dr. Edie Zusman

A Warm Welcome to the Safe Living Space Newsletter

Whether brain injuries are from sports, military service, bullying, working as a first responder, consensual strangulation, violence, or falls... THEY ALL COUNT and must be identified and appropriately treated! Safe Living Space is committed to brain injury research, education and advocacy so that our communities are safe places to live, work, and play.

Safe Living Space recently updated its website to align with our mission to integrate cutting-edge education, research, and policy to identify, prevent, and treat brain injury. We hope you join us on this journey for quarterly updates in our new Safe Living Space Newsletter. Your continued commitment enables us to expand our efforts, helping us grow and fulfill our mission by advancing brain injury research, education, and advocacy. Together, we are making a difference.

The Safe Living Space 5K Your Way-historically held in October, will now be in March aligning with Brain Injury Awareness Month. Save the date and plan to increase your impact, as Safe Living Space focuses on the mental health symptoms of brain injury in 2025.

Thank you for being on this journey with us!

Current Research

Safe Living Space Steps into the Mental Health World: Research at the National American Brain Injury Society Conference and a New Vision for Trauma and Brain Injury Informed Care

Safe Living Space Continuous Efforts to Understand The Occurrence and Repercussions of Repetitive Brain Injury: Research at the National American Brain Injury Society Conference

Research Initiatives

Safe Living Space Research has made significant strides in brain injury research, focusing on three key initiatives: brain trauma, mental health, and domestic and intimate partner violence. For more information on our initiatives, 2024 abstracts, poster presentations, and manuscript related to brain trauma, mental health, and domestic and intimate partner violence, please follow the link below.

SLS Impact

Wendy Wood Kjelvik Women Making History Award

Last March, Safe Living Space awarded the Women Making History Award to our late team member and beloved friend, Wendy Wood-Kjelvik.

As a founding volunteer of SLS in 2021, Wendy worked hard to bring changes in the diagnosis, treatment, and care of individuals with recognized and unrecognized brain injury caused by domestic and intimate partner violence (DV/IPV). She was instrumental in crafting our mission statement, the very heart of our organization, and contributed to a variety of projects, including grant applications, the annual Safe Living Space 5K-Your Way, and brain injury guidelines for mental health providers as Co-Lead of the SLS Mental Health Psychosocial team. She was also one of SLS’s top donors, funding the operating expenses of the Brain Injury 5K so that all donations could go towards the mission she very much believed in. With her spirit to guide us, we have renamed the award the Wendy Wood Kjelvik Women Making History Award to honor exceptional women changemakers in the fields of traumatic brain injury and DV/IPV so that her inspiration for this work continues.

Get Involved

Visit our Website

Voice of Safe Living Space... A Message from our Founder

During Covid, our Mayo Clinic Network Affiliated Traumatic Brain Injury and Concussion Clinic was seeing a lot more women than usual due to brain injuries from domestic and intimate partner violence. We did research and what we found was shocking. There was little to no information about brain injuries resulting from abuse and strangulation.

To address that gap, we founded Safe Living Space in 2021, an educational non profit devoted to the mission that everyone should be safe where they live, work and play. We are proud to be making a difference on a national and global level. SLS has already impacted the standard of care for the 44 million people living in New York State where Governor Hochul's office sent a letter of guidance to all licensed medical practitioners that based on our data and others, everyone who has experienced DV/IPV should be evaluated for possible TBI. We were asked as experts to prepare an Amicus Brief for the US Supreme Court defining the first 24 hours after a DV/IPV induced strangulation and/or TBI as a medical emergency. We have partnered with the CDC to bring concussion education as they have done so successfully for sports to those providing care and social services for people who have experienced DV/IPV.

Safe Living Space | Our Mission | Our Teams