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Donovan Smith knows what it’s like to be in need: He lived in a New Mexico homeless shelter after his single mother lost her job and their apartment. For six months, the Henderson House in Albuquerque, N.M., was his home. That was about five years ago. Today, Donovan has his own business — an online shop that sells artisanal bath soaps he made himself using aloe vera and goat’s milk. He’s donated hundreds of dollars of his earnings to a nonprofit that helped him and his mother when they were...

The owner of a secondhand bookstore in a northern English market town was sorting through a pile of old books when an envelope fell from one. Inside was an undated letter and a faded photo of a woman holding a little girl on her lap. The letter was addressed to “Bethany (My tiny treasure)” and signed “Mam.” It said if Bethany was reading it, it meant the letter’s author had died. Gordon Draper’s eyes welled. These were a dying woman’s last words to her child. He had to find Bethany. He...

It's rare to get good news when it comes to hunger. But the government says there was a big drop last year in the number of people in the country struggling to get enough to eat, especially children. Overall, 15.8 million U.S. households, or 12.7 percent, experienced what the government calls "food insecurity" at some point during 2015. That's compared to about 17.4 million households — or 14 percent — in 2014, according to a new report by the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research...

Community members will have the opportunity to learn about Trauma-Informed Care and be part of a conversation about heroin use and its impacts. Several events related to these topics will take place in Waupaca and area communities next week. They are being sponsored by the Waupaca County Department of Health & Human Services, the Waupaca Community Health Action Team (CHAT) and ThedaCare. “It’s different opportunities at different times so all people can come to at least one event and...

The topics of homelessness and affordable housing were common themes during Tuesday night’s Edmonds City Council meeting. The council heard from Lynnwood City Council President M. Christopher Boyer on what Edmonds’ neighbor to the north is doing to address those issues and had a joint discussion with the Edmonds Planning Board about council priorities for housing during the next several years. The Lynnwood City Council formed a task group on homelessness and “we began by listening to city...

[Ed. note: This blog is cross-posted from the Walla Walla Valley, WA, group, about how the Children's Resilience Initiative wanted to reach a new audience for their work. This new 15-second video ad they created will be shown before every movie in the local 12-theater complex, for a total of 1,642 times during October. It plays with other ads, such as those from the local hospital.] Effectively communicating a message in 15 seconds can take hours to formulate. After spending weeks, months...

Abstract Meditation is becoming increasingly practiced, especially for stress-related medical conditions. Meditation may improve cellular health; however, studies have not separated out effects of meditation from vacation-like effects in a residential randomized controlled trial. We recruited healthy women non-meditators to live at a resort for 6 days and randomized to either meditation retreat or relaxing on-site, with both groups compared with ‘regular meditators’ already enrolled in the...

In the United States, geography affects everything from economic mobility to lifespan. In a paper published earlier this year , the economist Raj Chetty and a number of co-authors explored the life expectancies of the rich and poor. They found not only a staggering rich-poor life expectancy gap, but also that the life expectancies of the poor vary greatly depending on location, with low-income people in certain cities living approximately five years longer than those in other cities. The...

Plagued by very public allegations of user bias , Airbnb, the polarizing , popular home-rental platform vowed to enact tougher measures against hosts who discriminate against potential guests. In a sweeping internal report released on Thursday , the San Francisco company formally reckoned with the claims. “An increasing number of Airbnb hosts and guests have voiced their concerns about being discriminated against when trying to book a listing because of their race, sexual orientation or...

[Photo by Juhan Sonin ] Non-pharmacologic strategies and tactics to ease a child's pain may help expedite treatment and improve care in this challenging population, clinicians said here. With both increased pressure to decrease waiting times in the ED and minimize the use of pharmacologic therapies due to the opioid abuse crisis, providers have been forced to get creative, according to presenters at the annual Pain Week conference. This may mean turning to certain behavioral and...

It could be any of us. Any of our kids. Any of our nieces or nephews. Our grandkids. The students in our class. Our friends' kids. Our neighbours' kids. Our co-workers' kids. The list goes on... The fact is, mental illness impacts more of us than we realize. The reality is, one in five Canadians will experience mental illness in their lifetime. Did you know that 10 to 20 per cent of Canadian youth are affected by a mental illness or disorder? Sadly, only one out of five children who need...

When the Reed family  — Becca (51), James (57), and their son Drew (26) — decided to re-gain their health through a radical change in diet and exercise, they entered into their project with cautious optimism. Honestly, they didn’t have much to lose. But they never could have imagined how quickly results would follow. In just two months, despite several challenges in the gym , Becca and James have each lost over 25 pounds. Drew, who is still recovering from the gastric bypass surgery he had...