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When cities plant trees, they help reduce pollution levels and improve people’s health. While studies show that America’s trees save thousands of lives a year, cities tend to have spotty canopies, with richer residential areas generally enjoying more cover and poorer industrial areas less. See how a new “Trees and Health APP” is starting to change that. Read more here.
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In 1938 civil rights activist and poet Langston Hughes wrote his chilling poem “Kids Who Die” which illuminates the horrors of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Now, Hughes’ vivid poetry is being featured in a three minute video created by Frank Chii and @Terrance Green and narrated by Danny Glover. It is a startling reminder that the assault on Black lives did not end with the Jim Crow era. Watch video of poem.
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Matika Wilbur has traveled more than 250,000 miles to ensure stereotyped images are replaced with accurate ones to change history’s collective psyche. Read more here.
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In 2003, Cynthia Park asked her staff to make a map showing where every gifted student lived in Broward County, Fla. The result was an atlas of inequality. “All of them were scattered in the suburbs and in the wealthier communities, where parents were more involved in education,” recalls Park, who oversaw the county’s gifted students program. “The map was virtually void in other areas." Park's map helped convince board members for the school district, which serves over a quarter-million children in and around Fort Lauderdale, that it needed to work much harder at identifying precocious children from all neighborhoods. Read more here.
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The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history. The human rights inquiry led by James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous peoples, is scheduled to begin on Monday. Many of the country's estimated 2.7 million Native Americans live in federally recognised tribal areas which are plagued with unemployment, alcoholism, high suicide rates, incest and other social problems. Read more here.
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How do low-income communities learn to advance economically and build wealth? Low-income communities and communities of color, in challenging structural economic and social inequality, have historically grappled with tensions inherent to development. Who participates in, directs, and ultimately owns the economic-development process? In creating and sustaining new, inclusive economic institutions, how do community members cultivate and pass on skills, commitment and knowledge—especially among those who have long faced barriers to education and employment? And how should communities strike an appropriate balance between utilizing local knowledge and accessing outside expertise? Read more here.
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Sylvia Mendez says the only reason she wanted to go to an all-white school in California's Westminster District in the 1940s was because of its beautiful playground. The school that she and other Latino students were forced to attend didn't have monkey bars or swings. Seven years before the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Mendezes brought a class-action lawsuit with other Latino families against four Orange County school districts that had separate schools for whites and Mexicans. Their case went all the way to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. And in 1947 they won: Segregation in those districts ended, and the rest of the state followed. Read more here.
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Over the last decade, the school-to-prison pipeline has gone from a fringe educational issue to a national youth-led movement anchored by grassroots communities across the country. Because of the school-toprison pipeline’s unique effects on students of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students, and especially LGBTQ students of color, the issue has provided an opportunity for powerful intersectional work among the racial justice community and the LGBTQ community. And while we have made a lot of progress by harnessing our joint power, we would like to—and desperately need to—build even more. This is essential if we are going to win. Power in Partnerships is a resource for
all racial justice and LGBTQ groups to help build or continue to build that power. View PDF report here.
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The Raising of America is out on DVD! Get your copy and let's change the conversation about early childhood in America. raisingofamerica.org
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