Tagged With "Drinking Water Quality Institute"

By Amanda Adams Imagine pulling into a school parking lot and seeing a garden full of flowers, fruit and vegetables, a spacious playground and well-paved walkways to several building entrances. As you get out of your car and approach the building there is clear signage, in multiple languages, to help you find the main entrance with welcoming and uplifting messages for students and their parents. When you walk in the building there is soft music playing over the intercom and someone is near...

Above is U.S. Coast Guard photo of Emlen Tunnell, who served in the Coast Guard during and after World War II, was the first Black player inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Before he became the first Black player inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Emlen Tunnell served in the U.S. Coast Guard during and after World War II, where he was credited with saving the lives of two shipmates. Now, a Coast Guard cutter and an athletic building on the Coast Guard Academy campus are...

“... Philanthropy is overlooking leaders of color who have the most lived experience with and understanding of the problems we are trying to solve.”

Kathleen Neal Cleaver In the '60s, Kathleen Neal Cleaver was a prominent member of the Black Panther Party, in which she created the position of communications secretary. In 1998, she said , "I think it is important to place the women who fought oppression as Black Panthers within the longer tradition of freedom fighters like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, who took on an entirely oppressive world and insisted that their race, their gender, and their humanity be respected...

ANDREW S. LEWIS | NJ Spotlight When Veronica Grant reflects on growing up in the Venice Park section of Atlantic City in the 1970s, regular nuisance flooding isn’t a memory that comes to mind. Yet these days, high tides spill across the neighborhood’s streets and yards so frequently that Grant can’t keep count. Flooding has been a reality in Atlantic City since its founding a century-and-a-half ago, but it has never been as frequent as it is today. Since 1911, the city’s tide station has...

Yorm Bopha is a Cambodian housing rights and land activist who was jailed for her opposition against a luxury development in her community that led to the ousting of thousands of local residents from their homes. The Boeung Kak Lake is centrally located in the Khmer capital of Phnom Penh, making it prime real estate for foreign developers to expand. When a foreign company was given a 99-year lease to develop in a central, urban area surrounding the lake, Bopha and her neighbors found...

In 2020, New Jersey, a state with about 9 million people spread over the rural countryside and dense urban areas like Newark, launched a new entity: the NJ Office of Resilience (NJOR). The NJOR is unusual because it is a public-private partnership. It brings together three private foundations as well as the NJ Department of Children and Families to provide community-driven strategies for preventing, treating, and healing from ACEs. Like a ship’s navigator laying out a course on charts, Dwana...

JON HURDLE, CONTRIBUTING WRITER | AUGUST 6, 2021 | NJ SPOTLIGHT NEWS A science panel Thursday urged the Department of Environmental Protection to set one the nation’s strictest standards for a likely carcinogenic chemical in drinking water, in New Jersey’s latest initiative to protect public health from water-borne contaminants. The Drinking Water Quality Institute, a group of scientists and water company executives that advises the DEP, unanimously recommended that the level of 1,4-dioxane,...

We’re back! The 2021 NJAEYC Annual Conference is scheduled for October 21 at the Hilton Meadowlands, New Jersey. We are changing the conference to one day this year and still plan on reaching as many early childhood educators as possible. The theme of this year’s conference is The Comeback Conference 2021. For additional information contact Helen Muscato, Conference Coordinator at (732) 329-0033 or online at mail@njaeyc.org Are you a student? Click here to apply to be an Annual Conference...

Aedy Miller & Josh Friedman | Cherry Hill Courier-Post With South Jersey students back in school — some for the first appreciable time in 18 months due to the pandemic — educators are once again seeing the effects of a different public health emergency: the ongoing mental health crisis. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of mental health issues — such as anxiety, depression, suicidality and substance use — had already been getting worse. Between 2009 and 2019, overdose deaths increased...

Decolonization starts inside of you. It is a lot about finding compassion and kindness, and less about anger and fear. We should remember that it begins with an internal process of healing and reconciliation. Once we find that peace, then we will be able to move forward and unify as peoples. We must remember that we are all related. At Standing Rock, we saw a new vision of what it means to be human. The fire and the water were our tools for healing. It was not just a protest; it was an...

Lunar New Year is one of the most important celebrations of the year among East and Southeast Asian cultures, including Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean communities, among others. The New Year celebration is usually celebrated for multiple days—not just one day as in the Gregorian calendar’s New Year. In 2022, Lunar New Year begins on February 1. China’s Lunar New Year is known as the Spring Festival or Chūnjié in Mandarin, while Koreans call it Seollal and Vietnamese refer to it as Tết. Tied...

Holi, also known as the festival of colours, is a religious occasion celebrated with much pomp. It is considered the second biggest Hindu festival after Diwali, and the celebrations last for two days - Choti Holi or Holika Dahan and Dhulandi or Rangwali Holi . It marks the celebration of the victory of good over evil. The festival falls in the Hindu calendar month of Phalgun, which usually falls between February and March. On this day, people play with colours, water, flowers and more,...

In recent years, more than a quarter of a million children each year have been removed from their families and placed in foster care because of alleged neglect and these children are disproportionately Black or Indigenous. Too often, circumstances stemming from poverty are construed as neglect, but underlying both poverty and neglect is historic and present-day racism. This report outlines the history of how child protective services developed to over-surveil families of color, examines how...

The First Round of RAC projects, funded by DCF’s Office of Resilience, is now five months into the grant period and we have seen some outstanding results. While three of our projects in the Central RAC are preparing to launch, five others are up and running. We are seeing creative project activities and curriculums, participants experiencing success, and programs evolving. Projects are currently serving Hunterdon, Union, Mercer, and Middlesex counties. One of the most exciting, inspiring...

Work within or interact with the child welfare community in New Jersey and want to get involved in a movement to prevent childhood adversity? You're invited to participate in embrella's P.E.A.C.E. Initiative! Our goal is to Help Build a Connected and Healthy New Jersey Child Welfare Community embrella’s inaugural Power to End Adverse Childhood Experiences (P.E.A.C.E.) Initiative is a year-long series of Educational Workshops and Family/Community Engagement Events for foster, adoptive, and...

Not having secure housing is a huge stress for anyone. But when children experience this, especially in early childhood, it can affect their health years down the line. That’s the finding of a new study in the journal Pediatrics, which says that teens who experienced housing insecurity earlier in life were more likely to report worse health. “Pediatricians, for a long time, have suspected that housing insecurity is associated with negative health outcomes,” says Dr. Hemen Muleta, a...

Do you have a plan in place to manage your thoughts and emotions next week? Here are some practices that are helping me to take a “resiliency pause”: