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On the corner of Washington and Decatur streets in Montgomery, Alabama, a visitor can feel history pressing in from every side. Just down the street is the church where Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned the Montgomery bus boycott. Two blocks away sits the First White House of the Confederacy, where Jefferson Davis once lived. But although the city is crowded with historical markers—including, by one count, 59 Confederate memorials, and a similar number devoted to the civil-rights...

All children have incredible potential, most with parents, teachers and other adults in their lives who want the best for them. Unfortunately, many schools, particularly those that serve children with the greatest need, face obstacles that limit children's educational success -- rote curriculums, insufficient support for teachers and scant extracurricular options, to name a few. Educators, parents and policymakers have long acknowledged such obstacles, but we now know that there is another...

Investing in children’s health is a sound economic decision with a long-term impact on achieving sustainable human, social, and economic development. The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky’s Investing in Kentucky’s Future initiative was designed as a partnership with local community health coalitions to reduce the risk that today’s children will develop chronic diseases as they grow into adults. The Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky is a statewide nonprofit organization working to address the...

How do children become delinquent? Well, there are many theories about that! In one of the most rigorous reviews of juvenile criminal justice records, the Adverse Childhood Experiences in the New Mexico Juvenile Justice Population study revealed that the frequency of early abuse, neglect and family chaos of incarcerated youth reaches staggering rates, skyrocketing above national averages. Join our Free WEBINAR next Friday (the 13th) where Robbyn Peters Bennett will discuss the research with...

When wealthy New Yorkers decided to build Central Park, they eliminated an egalitarian community known as Seneca Village. [See more of this story at https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/the-city-needed-them-out/541773/]

One common response to the national anthem protests originated by Colin Kaepernick is to disparage them as polarizing. Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, summed up this particular critique in a tweet last weekend: Follow Joe Scarborough ✔ @JoeNBC This may be unpopular but it is a political reality: Every NFL player refusing to stand for the national anthem helps Trump politically. The idea here is that kneeling NFL players are committing an act of such blatant disrespect that they hand...

There’s a type of racism in the workplace many of us have personally witnessed, perpetrated or experienced: tokenism. Nowhere have I seen this play out more than in the nonprofit space. Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color (POC). Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because...

Yesterday, a friend asked me if she could borrow my car to run a long-distance errand because my little car gets better mileage than her big one. I wanted to say no; switching cars on an already busy day felt like a hassle to me. But I didn’t say no. Instead, I hemmed and hawed and hesitated, hoping she’d get the hint. It can be really hard to say no. Despite my best attempts not to care what other people think of me , I still find myself wanting to be liked. I don’t want people to think I’m...

Alison is only 14 but she knows what she wants to be when she grows up: A surgeon. It’s not easy to study, however, when you’re so exhausted and hungry you can barely get through 9 th -grade biology. An immigrant from Colombia, Alison is one of more than 200,000 K-12 students in California considered homeless because they lack stable housing. And like most of those students, she lives with her family in a home shared with other families — in her case, two other families. “I go to school...

Even identical twins who are born with the same genome show variations in their health span during the aging process. In addition to our genetic information, many environmental and lifestyle-related factors can influence the aging rate of cells and tissues. One of the most accurate predictors of the rate of biological aging is the"epigenetic clock" formed by chemical tags (methyl groups) that are added to the DNA molecules. When the ticking of this clock is too fast, the risks of chronic...

In the summer of 2007, a woman was brought by ambulance to the emergency department of the Medical Center Haaglanden, a hospital that serves an inner city area of The Hague in the Netherlands. The woman was drunk and had a severe head injury. Her eight-year-old son was with her. Hester Diderich, an emergency nurse, and other hospital staff members looked after the boy while they attended to his mother. “We were very nice to him,” Diderich remembers. After treating the woman’s injuries, they...

Pierce County partners center their work on what The Building Community Resilience Collaborative calls the “pair of ACEs”: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adverse Community Environments.