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As service providers in low-income communities explore new methods to more effectively aid those in need, they are confronting the disturbing reality that some of their own policies may actually be part of the problem. Bread for the City, one of Washington, D.C.'s pre-eminent non-profit service providers, provides food, clothing, legal counsel, and other aid to District of Columbia residents. Read more here.
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On the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming, there's not a single trained sexual assault nurse examiner. The cultural insensitivity of non-tribal hospitals leads a lot of women not to report, Friday says. And without official reports, there's no way to bring charges. But Friday thinks more women might report with the help of an organization called Safe Stars. Safe Stars is a national group that allows victims to call a respected tribal woman in the community for confidential emergency care and evidence collection. Read & listen to the story here.
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Older people contend with lots of common ordeals: struggles with health and mobility, thinning social networks, dismissal by a youth-besotted culture. “But people face these challenges on an uneven playing field,” said Corey Abramson, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. “The inequality that shapes our lives from birth onward doesn’t end with the first Social Security check.” Socioeconomic inequality, he noted, helps determine who gets to grow old. Read more
here.
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Recently a neighborhood in Brooklyn made national headlines for a fight over public schools. Lots of affluent, mainly white families have been moving into new condos in the waterfront area called DUMBO, and the local elementary school is getting overcrowded. The city wants to redraw the zones in a way that would send kids from this predominantly white school to a nearby school where enrollment is over 90 percent black and Hispanic and which draws many of its students from a public housing project. Some parents on both sides of the line balked. Read more here.
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Faced with mounting and bipartisan opposition to increased and often high-stakes testing in the nation’s public schools, the Obama administration declared Saturday that the push had gone too far, acknowledged its own role in the proliferation of tests, and urged schools to step back and make exams less onerous and more purposeful. Read more here.
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Seattle’s City Council will vote on a resolution calling for the end of youth detention and develop policies that eliminate the need for the practice. The resolution comes amid a years-long community-led movement to prevent a new juvenile detention center from being constructed. Organizers of the movement argue that there are significant racial disparities in the way that youth detention is used. Read more here.
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Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. First of a two-part series. Read more here.
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"To understand everything wrong about health care in America today, look to a horrifying trend in amputation. A bright sans-serif sign announces the location as if for a lemonade stand—HAVE A SEAT / OCEAN PROMENADE’S NURSES WILL BE RIGHT WITH YOU—but this is a place where toes are denumbered, heels unrounded, and ankles disarticulated. Out of elevators, blanket-lapped four-wheelers are still emerging. Some trail tubes. They station themselves in peloton-like rows down the center’s hallway to the café, where multiple mop-wielding orderlies hoof back and forth at the front of the lunch line, demarcated by a cautioning yellow placard. It is 10 past 10." Read full article by Noah Pisner
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A year ago Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. What has followed has been the greatest national reckoning on racism since the beating of Rodney King. Read more here.
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