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Author Alissa Quart writes that the costs of housing, child care, health care and college are outpacing salaries and threatening the livelihoods of middle class Americans. [For more on this story by TERRY GROSS, go to https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/623367320/squeezed-explores-why-america-is-getting-too-expensive-for-the-middle-class ]

California plans to spend $13.3 million over six years to identify and replicate successful ingredients of community engagement, an essential but, for many school districts, elusive part of local control — the shorthand for setting budgeting and academic priorities under the state’s school financing law. The new money — included in the 2018-19 budget — will fund a network that eventually will reach as many as 80 districts. The funding represents the first substantial state effort to...

In October of 2017, Dr. Andi Clements and I applied to receive Technical Assistance from SAMHA’s National Center for Trauma Informed Care (NCTIC) requesting to host a webinar during in 2018 of all the cities who are creating a community-wide Trauma-Informed System of Care. Much to our surprise, the response we received from Dr. Joan Gillece, Executive Director of NCTIC was that Johnson City had emerged as a leader in this work. She explained, “In 2014, the Substance Abuse Mental Health...

It was a very gratifying week, being told that our Santa Fe community forum “The Preventable Death of Anna, Age Eight,” focused on the need to design Child Welfare 2.0, was filled to capacity. It says something very good about a city when an event on childhood trauma gets booked up. To meet the interest, another workshop has been added. More will be sponsored across New Mexico to enlist people in our social moonshot and create Child Welfare 2.0. Our challenges in New Mexico are not unlike...

By @Anndee Hochman During a December 2017 convening in Philadelphia, several leaders from Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) realized they had more in common than a passion for building resilience in their communities. They all hailed from places that had recently been scorched or flooded by natural disasters: wildfires in California and the Columbia River Gorge, hurricanes in Florida, the lingering residue of 2012’s post-tropical cyclone Sandy in the Northeast.

Both the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and National Juvenile Justice Network are recognizing the people who achieved the most in the past year. The CJJ gives its awards to inspiring individuals who honor its core mission to improve the lives of children, families and communities nationwide. They will be presented this week in Washington, DC, at its annual conference. This year’s Spirit of Youth Award goes to Amanda Clifford of California. It’s given to celebrate young adults under 28 who...

For 43 days in 1968, Washington’s National Mall was transformed into a protestor’s shantytown . Approximately 3,000 people moved into tents and makeshift structures lining the grass between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol to create Resurrection City. Activists camped to advocate for better wages, better social services, and affordable housing for the poor. The thousands of protestors were part of a new group called the Poor People’s Campaign, a coalition organized by Reverend Martin...

The psychiatrist who has been prescribing powerful psychotropic medications to immigrant children at a federally funded residential treatment center in Texas has practiced without board certification to treat children and adolescents for nearly a decade, records show. On the Texas Medical Board’s website , though, Dr. Javier Ruíz-Nazario reported he had that specialized certification for treating children and adolescents. However, according to the website, he has not yet updated the board on...

After the October fires, the Community Foundation of Sonoma County co-sponsored a survey of local nonprofit organizations to gauge the effect that the disaster had on the people they serve and their organizational capacity to provide services in response. Throughout the “2018 Wildfire Response Survey,” mental health was consistently cited among the top three impacts of the wildfires. Since 2016, the Hanna Institute, a program based at the Hanna Boys Center on Arnold Drive, has trained...

Growing up in public housing in North Charleston, S.C., in the 1970s, David Hayward was familiar with poverty, violence and loss. His mother, grandmother and brother all died when he was young, and his father was in prison. He became addicted to alcohol and cocaine and occasionally lived under bridges and in abandoned buildings, he says. Over the years, his rap sheet grew: At least 15 arrests, mostly for minor crimes like driving with a suspended license and possession of drug paraphernalia...

In my more exasperated moments of residency, I must admit I was envious not only of what my supervising doctors knew, but also who they treated. Residents in our clinic, doctors in training just out of medical school, generally picked up patients they cared for in the hospital — with lots of medical problems, little medical care and often without a place to stay. The attending physicians who supervised us, it seemed, built their patient panels handing out business cards in luxury suites at...

According to the latest World Inequality Report , inequality is like the world's oceans: almost everywhere, and rising all the time. The United States is no exception. Its wealth gap today is as large as it's been since the turn of the 20th century. The authors of the report sound genuinely alarmed. "If rising inequality is not properly monitored and addressed," they warn us, "it can lead to various sorts of political, economic, and social catastrophes." One of the report's authors is the...