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Houston is embarking upon a $220 million parks project called Bayou Greenways 2020 , a 150-mile network of continuous hiking trails, biking paths, and green space that will run throughout the city. When completed in 2020, it will make good on plans made by the urban planner Arthur Comey in 1912 to connect the city’s parks with the many strips of bayous scratching open the Houston landscape. Residents approved by ballot referendum a $166 million bond in 2012 to pay for the Bayou Greenways...

Many more black students are graduating from college than a decade ago. According to a new report from The Education Trust , a nonprofit that focuses on improving outcomes for low-income students of color, completion rates for African Americans increased at nearly 70 percent of the four-year public schools that raised their overall graduations rates between 2003 and 2013. But at the same time, a third of the colleges the group studied that had rising overall graduation rates actually had...

The North Carolina General Assembly called lawmakers back to Raleigh on Wednesday for a special session. The reason wasn’t a pressing budget crisis, a natural disaster, or court-mandated redistricting. (That happened last month .) Instead, legislators returned to the state house to overrule a local ordinance in Charlotte banning discrimination against LGBT people. A bill written for that purpose passed Wednesday evening and was signed by Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican. In the House,...

Michelle Johnson and her three children have called a modest three bedroom apartment in North Philadelphia home for almost 20 years. Stepping into their apartment, it's easy to tell that it's a place where children have grown up. Small scuff marks in the hallway and old video game controllers stashed on the bottom shelf of a bookcase attest to the past presence of kids. In the family room, there is a collection of framed portraits and school photographs. Pointing to a picture in the center,...

So, your boss is a workaholic and expects you to emulate her? Whether that means working ridiculous hours, inhaling lunch at your desk (or skipping it altogether), and even sacrificing your weekends, reporting to a person like this can be taxing on both your career and home life. The negative impact of problem managers is pervasive. Studies consistently link a lack of support for work-life balance by managers to fewer profits and more on-the-job mistakes. What’s more, a bad boss may...

Babies born in the shadow of Yankee Stadium are likely to be lifelong fans of the Bronx Bombers. They are also likely to live seven years less than a baby born a handful of subway stops south near Lincoln Center. The same is true in Las Vegas, where a baby born near The Strip is likely to live nine or 10 years less than someone born west of town. When it comes to health across cities, zip codes are unequal and so are health outcomes. For example, ethnic minorities continue to experience...

National statistics reveal that 20 percent of adolescents and teens struggle with a mental health issue. That's a big reason why the Ector County Independent School District is looking to implement new mental health clinics in their high schools. "Some of our students had some mental health issues that were difficult for them. We felt that they would probably succeed more in their academics if someone was taking care of those issues," said Laura Mathew, ECISD Director of Nursing. A...

A group of lawmakers spent nearly eight hours Tuesday studying the complexities of childhood mental illness, an issue legislators have indicated will be a high priority for the legislative session that begins in January. Lawmakers heard from physicians, educators and juvenile justice experts who outlined the need for a better-funded, integrated mental health care model that takes pressure off schools, steers children away from the juvenile justice system and provides more screenings for...

his seems like a contradiction: Put a dangerous prison inmate into solitary confinement, and then give him a cellmate. An investigation by NPR and The Marshall Project, a news organization that specializes in criminal justice, found that this practice — called double celling — is widespread in state and federal prisons. And as we learned, those cellmates often fight, attack and, sometimes, kill. On Nov. 19, 2014, the door clanged shut behind David Sesson and Bernard Simmons. Sesson put his...

Buffalo, NY - On March 4th, 2016 over 90 community leaders from across the 8 counties of Western New York (WNY) met to discuss the need for trauma-informed legislation and policies in New York State. Organized by a team of fellows from the WNY Health Foundation, the event drew a diverse crowd with participants from a wide cross-section of professions, including educators, police officers, behavioral health professionals, medical providers, and legislators. The morning began with a brief...

Kathryn EvansMadden remembers the day she understood the power of systems to shape people’s daily lives. She was still in graduate school, working as an intern in a social service center that served poor and homeless children and their families. One of the mothers had taken out a “payday loan” to finance a utility bill; months later, she was still paying more than $200 a month on that loan, stuck in a cycle of renewal and exorbitant interest rates. “She was constantly worried about how she...

Older adults who exercise regularly could buy an extra decade of good brain functioning, a new study suggests. The study found that seniors who got moderate to intense exercise retained more of their mental skills over the next five years, versus older adults who got light exercise or none at all. On average, those less-active seniors showed an extra 10 years of "brain aging," the researchers said. The findings do not prove that exercise itself slows brain aging, cautioned senior researcher...