Blog

On an early February morning just east of Florida’s I-75, sea fog lies low over the fields. It nearly obscures the farmworkers, ghost-like, bent over as they harvest the winter crops. Though the sun’s just coming up, they’ve been laboring for hours. “It’s cool in the early morning, but even the winters are getting warmer,” said Jeannie Economos, project coordinator with the Farmworker Association of Florida . “By the afternoon, it will be in the 80s in the sun.” Most people are unaware that...

Income inequality has soared in the United States over the past half century. Has educational inequality increased alongside, in lockstep? Of course, say public intellectuals from across the political spectrum. As Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute puts it: “Incomes have become more unequally distributed in the United States in the last generation, and this inequality contributes to the academic achievement gap.” Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, citing...

The more I work with clients, the more I am aware of one of the greatest hopes we have: That our hurts will not have been in vain, that there is some way to make it matter. I know we often look to volunteering with organizations, offering our time and energy to support a particular cause, or serving in some other way that contributes to society. This practice is of great value to both the giver and the receiver. Yet what often goes unnoticed are the opportunities to serve those who are in...

Press Release March 11, 2019 AUSTIN, Texas — At the annual South by Southwest Conference, Kaiser Permanente today announced a partnership with Community Solutions to help accelerate efforts to end chronic homelessness in 15 communities (scroll down for list) within Kaiser Permanente’s national footprint. As part of the new partnership, Kaiser Permanente will provide $3 million over a three-year period to Community Solutions’ Built for Zero initiative, which uses real-time data to help local...

On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, extreme weather and bad roads have left some residents stranded for nearly two weeks with limited food and water. PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Ella Red Cloud-Yellow Horse, marooned for days by a blizzard and then a flood, needed to get out. Supplies at her house were running low. She had come down with pneumonia. She had a chemotherapy appointment to keep. But her long driveway was blocked by mountains of mud — impassable even for an ambulance or a...

[March 20, 2019] Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an additional $487 million to supplement first-year funding through its State Opioid Response (SOR) grant program. The awards to states and territories are part of HHS’s Five-Point Opioid Strategy and the Trump administration’s tireless drive to combat the opioid crisis. Together with the $933 million in second-year, continuation awards to be provided under this program later this year, the total amount...

Thank you so much to those of you who were able to join us live for our Heal US call. It was a powerful call that focused on unburdening ourselves from the challenging feelings being activated by the disconnect between the many serious situations in our world calling for enlightened action, and the ongoing failure of our leaders and the political system as a whole to respond in a meaningful and effective way. Our process identified the underlying roots of our reactions to this situation, and...

Tony McGuire is a great carpenter. He ran his own construction business for years. Then he wanted to get into teaching. He became a Tenured Faculty member at a local community college, and landed in the state penitentiary as a Basic Skills Carpentry instructor. So how could that be connected to saving lives with a 20 buck investment? Tony got touched by CRI’s trauma-informed training. He saw himself past and present and knew somehow that, “with this information comes the responsibility to...

By P. Berman, K. Hecht, and A. H osack Life in jail was paralleling Larry’s life growing up; he was always being humiliated or beaten up by someone with more power than him. At night when he was finally was able to fall asleep, he had bizarre dreams in which he always ended up begging Claire to drop the charges and let him out of jail. Waking up from these dreams was an exercise in self-hatred. While they were just “dreams , ” Larry felt they were signs t h at h e was not a “real” man. None...

Chicago students Sabeer Al-Shareef and Shameir Faulkner are looking forward to a crazy few months as they approach high school graduation. In June, they’ll walk across a creaky stage at their historic South Side neighborhood high school and then move on to college in the fall. These are Chicago success stories, exactly the kind Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson loves to highlight — young black men getting their diplomas and taking the next step. “One thing that does not get enough...

For the first 42 years of her life, Sharon daVanport assumed that everyone finds the lights at the grocery store overwhelming. As a child, she knew it was unusual that she rocked back and forth and banged her head on her bedroom wall after school, but she didn’t worry about it. Even after her youngest son, J.D., was diagnosed with autism at age 5, she did not draw any parallels between his behavior, which also included rocking, and her own—although her mother did notice some similarities...

Weight training by older people may build not only strength and muscle mass but also motivation and confidence, potentially spurring them to continue exercising, according to an interesting new study of the emotional impacts of lifting weights. The findings intimate that people worried that they might be too old or inept to start resistance training should perhaps try it, to see how their bodies and minds respond. We already have plenty of evidence, of course, that weight training can help...