Blog

On a recent weekday, an unlikely crew of 18-to-24 year-olds gathered in a classroom in an office building, proving wrong a mantra often heard in economic development: Training programs aren’t effective at getting people good jobs. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., the students, mostly minorities from poor families, will tinker with computers, hone their e-mail skills,work on PowerPoint presentations, and even practice giving professional handshakes. And in a few months’ time, the 80 students will move...

As part of a growing movement that looks at stable housing as a health issue, a local insurance provider is wading into Los Angeles' efforts to end homelessness. L.A. Care, the county's largest MediCal health plan, announced Thursday it will donate $20 million over the next five years to a program that houses homeless people who have medical issues. "The research is showing that if people don't have basic needs like food and shelter, their health-care expenses are going to be higher because...

In this letter to the editor , a reader from California, Kathleen Streeter, questions whether or not young people are learning the skills they need through our public education system to become informed and engaged voters. To answer her, we reached out to Alex Robins, a social science high school teacher in San Rafael, California to get his perspective. To the Editor, I am a 75-year-old retired banker. I have always tried to be informed and have never failed to vote in an election, local or...

How do people become addicted to pain pills? This question has taken on prime importance, as about two million Americans are thought to be dependent on prescription painkillers, and prescription-pill overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. [For more of this story, written by Francie Diep, go to https://psmag.com/when-surgery-leads-to-a-prescription-painkiller-dependence-3120d6dacd76]

An important part of my job working as a pediatrician in one of the most impoverished communities in America for children, is writing for our local newspaper. My 50th article for the Inquirer was published yesterday and is all about resilience. Here it is, please share http://www.philly.com/philly/health/kidshealth/Overcome-toxic-stress-poverty-Oprah-Sotomayor-kids-health-resiliency.html...

In this module, we will explore ancestral influences on individuation/connection, and merging dynamics. As the twin and multiple birth rate is continuing to increase this module also looks at twin pregnancy, the impact of losing a twin during pregnancy, and growing up as a twin.  I will delineate the difference between identical and fraternal twins and because more twins mean more breech positions for babies about to be born we will also look briefly at breech birth.

At the recent Trauma & Resiliency Summit in the Columbia River Gorge, the sheriff of Sherman County (population 1700) approached Claire Ranit, MARC project director, to talk about creating a trauma-informed justice system. He wasn’t the only one seeking Ranit out that day. A woman with tears in her eyes also approached; inspired by discussions of resilience at the Summit, she’d texted her 20-year-old son, who has developmental disabilities, and praised his recent efforts to move into his...

2017 Call for Proposals Release Date: April 5, 2017 | Application Deadline: May 02, 2017, 3:00 p.m. ET Purpose Forward Promise aims to promote opportunities for boys and young men of color (BYMOC) to heal, grow, and thrive in the face of chronic stress and trauma. Empowerment Projects seek to strengthen organizations that provide culturally relevant healing responses to trauma, and can partner with the youth-serving systems that touch BYMOC to advance new practices to prevent further...

Gigi’s freshman year at Amundsen High School started with a bang, for all the wrong reasons. She snapped at teachers, got into fights, was often late to class, and was a regular in detention. Before, just one of those transgressions at the 1,200-student school on Chicago’s North Side would likely have gotten her what it got most kids across America’s third-largest school district: a no-questions-asked 10-day suspension. But when Christian Pederson, the school’s restorative justice...

Introduction: Making Real Change We have reached a tipping point in our society where a critical mass of people is demanding a new social contract. Alongside this wave, our clients and partners have been expanding their focus of attention from their own organizations and single-issue coalitions to movement networks oriented around a shared vision and aligned action. Leaders are committing to nurturing movements over the long term and forging values-based relationships across issue areas,...

America today is beset by a New Urban Crisis. If the old urban crisis was defined by the flight of business, jobs, and the middle class to the suburbs, the New Urban Crisis is defined by the back-to-the-city movement of the affluent and the educated—accompanied by rising inequality, deepening economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing. [For more of this story, written by Richard Florida, go to https://www.citylab.com/politics/2017/04/new-urban-crisis-index/521037/]

The day Tarra Simmons walked out of Mission Creek Correctional Center for Women in 2013, she owed $7,500 to Kitsap County in Washington state. These court-mandated fines and fees, known as legal financial obligations, or LFOs, included charges for “services” she had “rendered” — police, court, public defender , DNA collection — and some line items unrelated to her case, such as expert witnesses and victims’ services. (Her case had no named victim.) Simmons had spent the previous 20 months of...