Expert Insights and Resources for Caregivers in Honor of National Caregivers Day

balanced with our roles as intergenerational caregivers. Both these roles have become incredibly strained in the challenges of COVID and racial injustice. 
Caregiving is a complex web that brings together cultural beliefs about our roles at home, our views of our responsibility in families and our own balance and boundaries on how we can stay whole while managing work and life.
We also know that family caregiving is often silent, viewed as just part of what we do as family, with many of us not even identifying as “caregivers”.
That said, the data show us that many women, especially women of color, and millennials are now filling a gap in the care system while also struggling to stay at work. Without care at home, and services to help navigate the complexities of care, it would be impossible for work and life to come into balance.
As we work toward reimagining a future of work, while also reimagining our healthcare system, we know we can more equitably support caregivers and their families, and enable them to thrive.  But first, we need to acknowledge what we are seeing, what can be improved, and how we can get to resources quickly. 
In honor of National Caregivers Day, together with our NationSwell network, we have assembled valuable insights, quotes and matching resources to help dissect the many challenges and facets of caregiving
Insight #1: Better awareness is needed in the workplace so that we can all understand caregiving as a universal experience that we will likely all face as we get older.
“Caregiving– once one of the most personal and private matters in family life – is a growing public issue. The costs of caregiving impact individual workers, employers and society as a whole,” Jean C. Accius, Senior Vice President AARP Global Thought Leadership, said. “When it becomes stressful to juggle caregiving activities with work and other family responsibilities, or if work requirements come into conflict with caregiving tasks, some employed caregivers make changes in their work life, including leaving the labor force altogether, resulting in loss income at the individual level, loss productivity that impact the bottom line for employers and we all suffer due to the loss of opportunities for economic growth. As the nation faces unprecedented economic challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, it is a critical time to consider support for working family caregivers as part of a larger strategy for economic recovery and growth.” 
Resources:

Insight #2: Whether you are a new caregiver or supporting a loved one through a later stage challenge, trusted tools can help caregivers navigate the system to get the support that they need.
“There are so many resources for different groups, people just don’t know where to access them or need a ‘coach’ to find the right resources,” Jenn Wolff, a community organizer, said. “That’s why I’m currently working on a new virtual space to share resources for people with disabilities and would like to have several others trained to be Community Health Workers so folks can talk with someone they relate to” 
Resources: 
Caregiver Action Network
AARP Caregiving Resource Center
Caring Across Generations
Cake
Daughters in the Workplace
Insight #3: Caregivers need to remember the importance of caring for themselves in addition to their loved ones, and they should recruit help in their ongoing effort.
“Self-care is not something to put off or see as a luxury, it is an essential part of survival.” Elissa Yancey, author and co-founder of A Picture’s Worth, said. “Believing, truly believing, that you are worth taking care of is, in itself, a revelation for many caregivers. Especially those of us who define ourselves, consciously or not, by our value to others. Without a grounding in self-worth, your caregiver duties can become an excuse for self-pity and resentment, neither of which are deserving of your precious time.”
Resources: 
Atul Gawande article Letting Go
Grab Happy: The Serendipitous and Surprising Sides of Caregiving
Insight #4: Caregiving and balancing work requires a support system for the family caregiver and the person in need. Employer benefits are key; but home health agencies and community-based organizations who bring care home are often missed as part of our system. We need them when caring for our loved ones. 
“Getting out of homes right now is tough for any of us, but it’s even harder for the folks that we care for,” Paurvi Bhatt, President of Medtronic Foundation and NationSwell Council member, said.
Resource: 
Home Instead 
Wellthy
Insight #5: Embrace hospice care.
“End of life is a part of life that we don’t talk enough about.. and it’s easy to forget about hospice care as a critical part of our healthcare system,” Adam Dole, Managing Director of Not Impossible Labs, said. “When my father-in-law recently passed away, I had a really positive experience with hospice — it was a night and day difference for me, in terms of what the end-of-life experience can mean when it’s done right, proactively with dignity and thoughtfulness, versus left to chance.” 
Resources: 
Hospice Foundation of America
Find Hospice Care Options Near Me
What Are Palliative Care and Hospice Care?
Insight #6: We need to have end-of-life conversations with our loved ones (and for ourselves) when they are theoretical, rather than pressing. 
“Planning ahead helps caregivers so much,” Dr. Lori Choi, a vascular surgeon and founder of I’ll Have What She’s Having it, said. “It relieves so much of the guilt and pressure, and lets us respect our loved ones’ wishes.”
Resource:
Starting the Conversation
Insight #7: Many people do not even know that they are caregivers. How do we define “caregiver” today, and how do we change the image of caregivers to be a more accurate representation?
“I do believe people need to know this work is so noble, so compassionate – perhaps the most important role we’ll ever have,” Zach Weismann, founder of MAG Impact Collective, said. 
Resources: 
End Well
Millennials: The Emerging Generation of Family Caregivers
Recalibrating for Caregivers: Recognizing the Public Health Challenge
Caregiving Doesn’t Care, But You Can


Paurvi Bhatt is President of Medtronic Foundation. Zach Weisman is co-founder and CEO of MAG Impact Collective. This article was written in cooperation with members of the NationSwell Council.

NationSwell Celebrates 5 Years of Nicole Navratil

Thursday marks the five year work anniversary of Nicole Navratil, NationSwell’s Chief Operating Officer. Today, we celebrate her indelible, transformative impact on every aspect of the work we do here.

I asked my fellow members of the NationSwell team to share some of their favorite memories of Nicole, and what she means to NationSwell. This is what we had to say.
Greg Behrman, NationSwell CEO + Founder:  My favorite collective memory is something that I have seen time and time again over the past years from Nicole. It’s how — so often when no one is looking — she is thinking about how to help our team, or one of our team members. She cares so much about our culture, our mission and team members as human beings — and is constantly thinking about how to help us to flourish. She’s been the wind in our sails in so many ways – big and small.
Nicole has been a rock of guidance, care, and steadiness for NationSwell, and for me personally, for the past 5 years. She has been an incredible advisor, partner, friend — and companion on this great adventure!
Amy Lee, Managing Director, NationSwell Studio: My most fun memory of Nicole has to be her incredible array of textured and patterned sweaters and pants. She is the only person I know who is more of a magpie than me when it comes to clothes, and her leopard print velvet slacks are one of my all time sartorial highlights. If Nicole ever turns up to work in a quintessential New Yorker all black outfit I would fall over in shock.
Nicole is the backbone and the heart of NationSwell — basically we wouldn’t be standing up and living without her! She is the funkiest math nerd I ever met, with a capacity for both business rigor and human sensitivity that I have never seen in one human before.
Kate Dinota, Senior Director of Community + Impact: Nicole is our calm, confident, colorful leader. My favorite memory of her is when I met Marty for the first time at the Impact Hub, I learned that his first nap started at 8am and I’m pretty sure my jaw fell on the floor. Years later when I became a mom, Nicole and I definitely shared some laughs over our blissfully ignorant, well-rested, pre-children selves.
Jessica Lacombe, Director of Creative Content, NationSwell Studio: I appreciate that this is probs supposed to be funny stories, but I consistently find myself being grateful to Nicole for navigating the PPP hellscape in the wake of COVID.  Everything I know/have heard about that process is that it was a nightmare to navigate, and I’m sure I haven’t thanked her enough for it.
Nicole does not shy from a clothing pattern, and this is something I deeply, deeply respect. For me, and NationSwell.
Patricia Ureña, Community Manager: My favorite memory of Nicole was the huge hug she gave me in Denali on my first day at NationSwell. She made me feel very welcome.
Christina Montero, VP of Accounts @ NationSwell Studio: It was Halloween 2018 and it was an in-office day and given it is my favorite holiday, I was dressed to the nines in 80’s neon gear. When the elevator doors opened and I walked into the office, NO ONE was wearing a costume… except Nicole. I recall it was also 80’s ski and/or workout gear and she looked amazing. I even think she had a few outside clients/interviews that day, and she still rocked her gear.  #kindredspirits
Nicole is my mother hen. She has given me the right amount of guidance, support and encouragement over the years — as a colleague, a mother, and a friend.  This is especially true when she is donning one of her oversized cozy sweaters.
Elyssa Dole, Community Director: Nicole means strength, clarity, attention and attentiveness. My favorite memory of her is all the amazing prints she wore around the office that brightened my day.
Jeremy Hurewitz, Curation Director @ NationSwell Council: I appreciate Nicole’s rigor and attention to detail and her drive to always push NS to be better. I also love to practice my terrible Czech with her and talk about skiing!
Mikhail Relushchin, Operations Senior Associate: My favorite memory of Nicole is the burst of color that accompanied her entrance into the office every morning — what with the shawls, the leopard print, or just the lion’s mane hat-hair!
Nicole is someone who keeps her eyes on the prize, and keeps the team focused on the necessary things!
Taekia Blackwell, Director of Business Operations; Chief of Staff to the COO: Joining my first call on my first day to her in a unicorn birthday hat was pretty special. Secondly, I interviewed for this job remotely so I didn’t get a chance to meet Nicole IRL until about two weeks after I started. However, she made the whole interview process feel really comprehensive and like we were able to actually start to get to know each other— to the extent that my roommates started to joke that I already worked for NationSwell halfway through the interview process. I appreciate the time and care and effort it takes to make someone feel like part of the team even before they’ve joined.
In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve been incredibly impressed by Nicole’s ability to keep all of the plates spinning. She’s clearly foundational to the success of NationSwell and just a super smart, super caring, super efficient lady that I feel lucky to work with every day.
Allie Mahler, Strategy Director: Nicole is masterful at keeping the trains running on track and on time, always. She does so with grace, curiosity, and a sense of joy – all while holding the vision for where NationSwell is and where it can go.
Kelsey Overby, Senior Director + Head of Partnerships, NationSwell Studio: Nicole is the Queen of NationSwell, guiding all of us to excellence and brilliance.
Faustyna Hariasz, Member Partnerships Manager: I love her wild and colorful sweaters (and her jumpsuit game), and I think she is just effortlessly chic. I also love that she notices people’s haircuts and style game right back. It’s important to make people feel seen for the little, personal things and she does that so well.
On a more professional note, she is able to distill complicated, wandering ideas into very actionable and clear ways forward and we would be lost without her lighthouse/beacon ways.
Anthony Smith, VP for Published Content + Growth: I will never forget meeting Nicole at a crowded coffee shop in Chelsea. We were introduced by a mutual friend because he thought that we would get along. He was right! Talking to Nicole about journalism and audiences and what might be possible if storytelling galvanized — instead of just informed — I realized I wanted to keep talking to her and maybe even work with her. I made professional decisions accordingly, and it’s probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Nicole is the rising tide that lifts all boats, really and truly. The people that work here are always on her mind, and she is a fearless advocate for us. Lots of leaders talk about caring for their teams, but our lives are tangibly better because of the ways she cares about us. NationSwell is the place that it is because of her, and I’ve learned so much about leading and listening just from watching her.

The Tweet That Launched a Movement

Two thousand and forty-four miles.
A distance that would take 677 hours to walk.
A distance that would take around 30 hours to drive.
A distance that technology immediately obliterated as four passionate citizens united against police violence.

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Just days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, civil rights activists DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie were on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., documenting on social media the unrest that ruled the streets. Shortly thereafter, the two connected with Brittany Packnett, the then-executive director of Teach for America in St. Louis.
As #Ferguson became a rallying cry on social media, Oprah Winfrey leveled a critique at the Black Lives Matter movement (which used Twitter to mobilize its followers), saying that it didn’t have clear goals, leadership or asks. Mckesson tweeted a reply, listing demands of the protesters.
Meanwhile, more than half a continent away, Samuel Sinyangwe spotted Mckesson’s response and felt compelled to reach out.
“I replied to the tweet saying that I could help develop a policy agenda that implements these demands in practice. I didn’t know who DeRay or anyone was,” says Sinyangwe, who was doing policy work for a nonprofit in Oakland, Calif. “As a policy analyst, I wanted to contribute policy.”
Two thousand and forty-four miles separated Sinyangwe from Mckesson and the other protesters in Ferguson. Yet Mckesson’s 140-character post forged a virtual connection and jumpstarted a conversation that would, in just a few short months, result in the formation of the far-left leaning nationwide organization WeTheProtesters.
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Initial phone calls between Sinyangwe and Mckesson (and later, Elzie and Packnett as well) focused on a shared understanding that data needed to inform policy making so that it would gain traction with both the public and government officials at all levels.
“What made it work was that we’re all committed to the same goals, and we each have a particular skillset that added value to each other’s work. It was all about the commitment to work; it was not about our own personalities,” says Sinyangwe. “I can analyze the data and identify policy solutions. DeRay can communicate that very well in relationships with media. [Joh]Netta can make sure the information — this sort of ivory tower research — is accessible to people and Brittany has institutional access to make sure these recommendations are embedded in some of the foremost institutions of government.”
Not surprising to the activists, their data mining uncovered systemic problems with policing use-of-force practices nationwide. Taking that information, they developed and launched Campaign Zero, a series of 10 proposed policing policy solutions, like ending broken windows policing, community representation, demilitarization and fair police union contracts.
“No other group had ID’ed solutions and grounded it in data and evidence,” Sinyangwe says.
Sinyangwe and company also leveraged data to create a second resource, a groundbreaking interactive map that provides comprehensive information (name, location, description of incident and a link to related, authoritative news coverage) for each police-involved shooting in the United States.
“In the beginning, it was all about convincing the country that it was a crisis — that police violence was happening everywhere, not just in St. Louis or Baltimore,” says Sinyangwe. “No one is going to read a 30-page report on this, but people will look at something that looks high quality and communicates [the information] in much less time.”
Using off-the-shelf technology (often free or free-trial versions) as they continued to collaborate virtually, Sinyangwe and his WTP cofounders built a tech-powered infrastructure that overcame geographic limitations. (“It was literally a period of months before I met everyone in person,” says Sinyangwe.) They shared information in Google docs and sheets, held meetings in Hangouts, designed infographics with Piktocharts and created data tables using Tableau.
Typeform proved to be particularly valuable to WeTheProtesters in recruiting volunteers. The group used the platform to increase its ranks by around 16,000 people in just two weeks. These helpers were then organized into groups and used Slack to communicate, building a bond in cyberspace.
WeTheProtesters is supported by Fast Forward, an accelerator for tech-focused nonprofits and a partner of Comcast NBCUniversal. Today, the group’s biggest challenge is scaling its systems so that more citizens can become effective advocates.
“Across the country, as I’m meeting people and speaking at various venues, people come up to me and ask, ‘How do I get involved?… I want to do something, but I don’t know what to do about it,’” says Sinyangwe. “In today’s day and age, when you see the hyper-targeting of every political campaign, there is no excuse to not have a pathway to get involved. People shouldn’t have to ask anymore.”
But just in case, WeTheProtesters created a Wikipedia-style guide known as the Resistance Manual. The crowdsourced webpage tracks local, state and federal issues, offers resources on effective organizing and lists upcoming teach-ins, town halls and marches across the country. It’s part of a wave of new digital tools created since the 2016 presidential election in response to people’s renewed interest in politics.
Sinyangwe believes that it’s possible to awaken and amplify more voices, “in part because of the tools that we have available to us, because of the platforms and technology and the creative ways we’re using it.”
If he’s right, this tech-driven era of activism may bring about a level of civic engagement unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Additional reporting by Chris Peak.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

Streaming Government in a Smartphone Era

Provoking a citywide debate about the safety of downtown Eugene, Ore., isn’t what Matt Sayre set out to do when he put together a three-minute video of a passionate citizen speaking at a City Council meeting and posted it on Facebook, where it reached an audience of 40,000 people. But that’s exactly what happened.
“Not everyone makes it to the meetings, so to be effective, we brought the meeting to where [citizens] are: on social media,” Sayre says.
Sayre stitched the clips together using software created by Open Media Foundation, a Denver-based nonprofit. Its Open Media Project initiative transforms traditional local government meetings into modern, in-the-palm-of-your-hand video streams.
In today’s increasingly hectic world, constituents don’t have time to track whether their state and local politicians are upholding their campaign promises. Combined with that is a decline in local news coverage. The outcome? Power is being handed to lobbyists, says Tony Shawcross, the foundation’s executive director.
“We’ve seen trust in government and voter turnout drop for 50 years, and we think the reason is because government is falling behind the times. Our big-picture goal is lowering the bar for what it takes to be engaged,” Shawcross says.
Accessible via desktop or mobile, school boards and municipal and state governments can use the foundation’s cloud-based platform — Open Media Project (OMP) — to give citizens quick access to what’s going on. Constituents can watch live webcasts of government meetings and search through archived agendas and transcribed video files to jump straight to points in the video where specific topics of interest (like “homeless shelters” or “tobacco”) are mentioned. If users find a moment worth sharing, they can, like Sayre, package a video to share on social media.
The tools themselves might not sound flashy, but the transparency they promote is what makes democracy function, says Neil Moyer, director of the Lane Council of Government’s Metro Television, which coordinates with the foundation to stream meetings for Eugene and other nearby cities.
“Our driving motivation is not just to replay meetings but to help our community thrive, and I really believe we thrive only when we have good governance. We only get good governance when people are paying attention.”
Sometimes, politicians push back on OMP’s capabilities, hesitant to practice full disclosure online. But as a nonprofit, the Open Media Foundation prioritizes what its beneficiaries — constituents themselves — need above all else. “We’re putting in features that are above and beyond what governments demand and expect in terms of accessibility,” Shawcross says.
The Open Media Foundation was founded in 2001 under its original name [denverevolution]. In 2006, it helped the City of Denver set up a new public broadcasting station on the cheap. That project attracted the attention of Andrew Romanoff, then speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, who was trying to set up a state version of C-SPAN.
In 2013, the foundation created a video-on-demand tool for the legislature’s web portal. The number of visitors to the site doubled and inspired Shawcross to replicate the idea on a smaller scale. By the end of 2016, 10 local governments in Colorado used the service.
The Open Media Project is supported by Comcast NBCUniversal and Fast Forward, an accelerator for tech-focused nonprofits. It makes its software available through an online portal, and the video is streamed through YouTube. The basic software package is free for towns with less than 5,000 residents, $3,000 for cities of 5,000 to 50,000 residents and $6,000 for cities of more than 50,000. The organization’s founders hope the software’s low cost will help spread it to local government websites across the country.  
Back in Eugene, Sayre’s video posts have increased attendance at city council meetings where community safety is a key agenda item.
“To hear what someone is saying at a meeting and to see their body language is engaging,” Sayre says. “Energy attracts energy.”
Sayre hopes that this rise in community involvement in the political process will lead to greater safety in downtown Eugene.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo by iStock/Getty.

Learning to Code Is Vital for Today’s Students. This Nonprofit Helps Schools Teach It

Acerlia Bennet, a 17-year-old New Yorker from the Bronx, likes to read heady political news, often twice, from top to bottom, to make sure she’s fully comprehending the story. But she knows she’s unique: Her peers spend more time sharing memes. So at a local hackathon sponsored by Code/Interactive last summer, Bennet and three other high schoolers built a preliminary website that could translate hard news into more entertaining teen-speak. The algorithm, written with the programming language Python over a 72-hour weekend, extracts text from newspapers and replaces big, confusing words with simpler terms. “That way, they read it and know what’s going on,” Bennet says.
That type of out-of-the-box thinking — and the deep understanding of code to make it a reality — is the end goal of Code/Interactive (C/I), a nonprofit based in New York City. Since 2010, C/I has helped public schools better teach computer science. The program, which currently counts about 5,000 students in six states, is comprehensive: As early as third grade, kids begin experimenting with simple, block-based coding. By the time they reach high school, C/I is preparing them to excel on the Advance Placement (AP) computer science exam.
Besides equipping students with invaluable coding and web development skills, C/I provides teacher training and curricula for the classroom; hosts hackathons and arranges office tours at tech companies for students; and provides a select number of full-ride college scholarships, attracting those teens who otherwise wouldn’t apply for, or couldn’t afford to earn, a computer science degree.
“These computer skills are as fundamental to this generation of students as carpentry was to my father. Back then, not everyone built a home, but they all knew how to hang a picture and how to assemble a table,” says Mike Denton, C/I’s executive director. “The knowledge about tech you interact with is invaluable, and it’s necessary as these technologies become ubiquitous in every industry.”
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C/I got its start in 2001 as an arts organization in the Bronx. Back then, the nonprofit was providing basic technology like video cameras, color printers and online-accessible computers to at-risk youth. By 2010, though, as more and more people gained internet access through smartphones, the mission felt outdated. Denton, then a board member, left his consulting work to revamp the agency. Under his leadership, C/I began offering an after-school coding class on JavaScript at a local community center. “We recognized pretty quickly that teaching 20 kids would not solve the problems we knew existed,” Denton says. To scale their vision, C/I turned its focus to integrating programming lessons into the school day.
C/I first works with teachers who don’t have a background in computer science or engineering, offering seminars during professional development days. Over the course of anywhere from six days to six weeks throughout the year, educators come together to talk through the coding coursework, asking questions ranging from the simple, like what HTML stands for (that would be HyperText Markup Language), to wondering if there is a way to learn coding without a computer on hand (there is).
They also learn that C/I’s pedagogical method derives from an unexpected source: foreign language classes. After all, says Denton, “Computer science, more than anything else, is a language.” So like in Spanish or German classes, the teachers coach students in “grammar,” showing how individual units must be strung together, line by line. The new coders then, in turn, put those lessons into practice as they work to build a website or design a mobile app. Later on in their instruction, students participate in the equivalent of an all-immersive study-abroad trip, diving in to collaborative projects at weekend hackathons.
As students master the new language, like Bennet has done, C/I organizes office tours to show the multiplicity of careers in tech. In Austin, Texas, for example, students might visit a cloud-storage company’s offices or an architectural firm, all of which can use the language of coding in different ways. In New York, Bennet has dropped in at Google, BuzzFeed, FourSquare and so many small startups that she can’t remember all of the names.
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“A lot of times students say they want to be a lawyer or doctor because they know those are professions where you can make money more easily. But they might not be aware of the other positions that are available to them,” says Julia Barraford-Temel, C/I’s program manager for its Texas program, Coding4TX. “We bring them there so they can visualize their future.”
To be sure, C/I is not a workforce-development program. Students aren’t funneled into entry-level software testing jobs as soon as they complete their coursework. (About 70 percent of graduating seniors from C/I do choose computer science as a major or minor in college.) As a student at an arts high school focused on film, Bennet, for example, likes the idea of pursuing animation at a company like Pixar. But whichever career path she chooses, she credits C/I with strengthening her creative approach to problem-solving. “Computer science is not just a bunch of code,” she says. “It’s more about connecting through software and tech, with everyone building and creating and being more innovative.”
Denton echoes her point. To him, the main goal of C/I is for young people to understand the technology that now dictates so much of our lives. “We’re only at the beginning of the tech revolution,” he says. “By 2025, these kids are genuinely going to make a massive difference in the world.”

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
 
 

The High-Tech Way Foster Youth Are Safeguarding Their Records (And Their Memories, Too)

Florida’s child welfare system shuttled Jay Schad to a new home every of couple months — roughly 25 placements in all. (He lost the exact count.) The most disruptive move sent him to a group home in Tallahassee, two hours east of Panama City, his hometown, and plopped him into a new high school. Already a month behind his classmates, the freshman attempted to make friends by trying out for the football team. But with many of his records back in Panama City, including his latest physical exam, the coaches couldn’t let him take the field. Eventually, Schad got the go-ahead from a local doctor and started playing. But the setback made him feel, as he says, “let down by the system.” Hadn’t the 14-year-old been through enough with his mother’s meth addiction, his father’s violence and dozens of destabilizing moves to have to worry about his personal papers?
Record-keeping, a seemingly bureaucratic task, poses a huge challenge for the nation’s 428,000 foster youth. Already struggling to keep up with their peers, these adolescents might not realize the need to preserve their important documents until it’s too late. Even if a diligent social worker does compile a binder, it might be lost in a hectic move, and in some states, there are extra hurdles for a teen who’s aged out of the system. This means most applications — whether for financial aid, a new job or housing — can be stymied simply because documents are missing.
Cloud-based technology, however, might have an answer for these teens. My JumpVault, a virtual storage locker, allows a foster kid to upload and protect their essential files, like a birth certificate, medical history and school transcripts. Developed by Five Points Technology Group (FPTG), a business headquartered in the Tampa suburb of Bradenton, Fla., and funded by the state, My JumpVault currently has about 7,000 users. The digital records it holds, maintained securely behind several layers of authentication, won’t disappear like hard copies might.
Former foster youth played a large role in building My JumpVault. In 2009, two 19-year-old former foster kids led a statewide campaign to streamline access to Florida’s child welfare records. (Previously, emancipated youth needed a judge’s order to see their case file.) After successfully pushing a bill through the legislature, they started to question what access truly meant. Even though they’d won the legal right to look at their papers, did adolescents truly have access if the process of obtaining a copy was so difficult? That’s when the young men — Thomas Fair, now a member of the design team, and Mike Williams, an assistant product manager — signed on with FPTG to advise the team behind My JumpVault and help code the nascent app.
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Accessible by desktop or smartphone, an email address is all a teen needs to sign up for the service. Once they’ve locked the account with a password, they might log in to scan an important document they’ve just received or to locate an image, like Schad did eight months ago when applying for a waiter job at a restaurant. He’d misplaced his social security card, and his new manager told him he couldn’t clock in until he found it. Schad pulled up his electronic copy, and luckily, the boss accepted it.
To further ease the process, a couple of agencies recently partnered with FPTG to store files directly on My JumpVault’s servers. For example, Sunshine Health, the state’s Medicaid provider, lists a kid’s prior hospital visits and prescription medications. Soon, My JumpVault could integrate with the court system to track hearing dates and with local schools to keep report cards. “Tactically, it frees caseworkers up from having to provide documents over and over again in hard copy, and it puts youth in a better position for independence,” notes Chris Pantaleon, the company’s business development director.
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In addition to vital records, one of My JumpVault’s unique features provides storage space for memories. Because foster children might have only one or two pictures of their birth parents, storing photos is the best way to preserve a sense of self. Without these keepsakes, “You don’t understand who you are,” says Williams, who knows the feeling firsthand. “It’s like having no identity.” That’s why they encourage users to add pictures, certificates and awards. Even if a foster kid is relocated to another home, one whose walls might be covered with family portraits, he can take comfort in his own background and family roots, too.
Another powerful feature, which Fair pushed to include within the app, is a series of guides to help foster youth navigate difficult situations. These worksheets might list the names of all service providers in a metro area, provide instructions on applying for food stamps or explain the types of questions employers ask in an interview.
Schad knows there are plenty of issues still plaguing the foster care system. But at least with My JumpVault’s storage in the cloud, those kids don’t have to worry about whether paperwork might hold them back.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
 

The Simple Way to Keep Struggling College Students in Check

One morning last summer, Zulmaly Ramirez, an academic advocate who advises undergraduates at the University of South Florida, logged on to her computer and saw a notification that a new freshman was at risk of dropping out. The student, an off-campus commuter, hadn’t been signing in to the course portal, where reading assignments are posted, and his grades were slipping, the software showed. Ramirez asked the young man to stop by.
In person, the teen confirmed exactly what the computer program’s algorithm had predicted. His half-hour drive to campus made him feel removed from the other students, he had yet to decide on a major, and he had recently broken up with his girlfriend. Ramirez proposed some quick fixes. She introduced him to the ultimate Frisbee team, helped him settle on a business track and personally walked him to the counseling center to make his first appointment.
Ramirez’s intervention can be credited to Civitas Learning, a software company that sorts reams of student data to warn counselors, in real time, which students are in the greatest danger of dropping out — before the semester has ended and grades have been posted. The company, based in Austin, Texas, also has programs designed to help students pick classes and allow administrators to track what impact they have on student performance.
Civitas, which has contracts with Texas A&M, the University of Arizona, Penn State University, Morehouse College and hundreds of others, has pledged to boost graduation rates by 1 million more students each year, before 2025. (Economists predict America must add up to 23 million skilled college grads to its increasingly tech-centric workforce, by 2025, to be globally competitive.) The company plans to reach that goal by completely revamping the function of advisers in higher education.
“Most students’ relationship with their adviser is fairly transactional. ‘What are the classes that I have to take next?’ And, ‘How do I enroll?’ Unfortunately, the conversation is hurried and infrequent,” says Charles Thornburgh, one of Civitas’s two co-founders. “Hopefully in the future, more tools will provide more personalized recommendations to students, with both the student and adviser coming in dramatically better informed about where the student is on the journey to success.”
Previously, most college advising departments merely guessed who might not graduate on time. These counselors often based their speculation on whether a student was meeting traditional markers of success, like a high grade point average — a policy backed up by intuition, not evidence. Civitas, by contrast, starts with a review of a college’s historical data to detect which factors recur among dropouts, a more accurate way to develop a school-specific predictor.
Often, the results of this analysis surprise even veteran administrators. One of Civitas’s recent findings, for example, showed that GPAs were nearly meaningless when correlated with retention rates. A student with a 2.0 was no more likely to quit than a high achiever with a 4.0. Rather, the surest sign a kid wouldn’t make it was his grade in a freshman writing course.
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Using Civitas, an administrator can easily see which students are thinking of quitting. They can also test how well an intervention can reverse a downward trend. Armed with a vast archive of historical data, Civitas’s software first digs up the records of past students with similar circumstances. Then, it analyzes how intervening would change the students’ learning trajectory, compared to the past. “There’s an opportunity there for educators and administrators, who’ve been operating in the dark forever,” he adds. “They can become more scientific.”
Of course, there’s a danger in placing too much faith in numbers. In the wrong hands, predictive analytics in education might divert resources (or deny college admission) from students who are careening toward failure anyway. But Civitas maintains that its approach is intended to direct help to those students who need it most, not to take it away from their classmates. Thornburgh notes that the education system already relies on an insidious predictive model. Fixed characteristics like family wealth, race and gender are seen as factors in student success — inherent conditions that, Thornburgh points out, can’t be changed or reversed. Luckily, as he’s found in his research, demographics aren’t the best way to predict who stays in school. “How students engage while on campus is dramatically more important than anything else, and that’s what really drives our model.”
Civitas emphasizes its role as a tool to support more personal academic advising. After the software flags a student, the intervention comes from a counselor, not a machine. “With our freshmen, even though they do use their phones and technology a lot, I’m always surprised by how much they enjoy just sitting down for 30 minutes or an hour,” says Ramirez. “I see students change dramatically when they have a meeting face-to-face, rather than receive alerts on their phones.” Especially when isolation drives disengagement, that human interaction can go a long way.
So far, it seems to be working. At the University of South Florida, retention rates that had plateaued for years finally surpassed 90 percent this year, reports Paul Dosal, vice provost for student success. And while the data’s not in yet, he expects that USF will finally crack a 70 percent graduation rate very soon, a huge step as the college looks to boost its prominence.
Across academia, researchers spend plenty of time conducting research in the humanities, sociology and the hard sciences. But they too rarely turn that critical eye to assessing the best way to teach the degree-seekers in their own lecture halls. With Civitas, these professors and administrators can begin to study themselves.
“There’s a lot of capital, time and energy spent on educating students, and we should find a way to make sure that we keep getting better at it,” Thornburgh says. “As educators, we have to learn from each other and every student’s journey.”

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
 

Can Citizen Science Save Us From Environmental Disasters?

During the rush-hour commute on Tokyo’s trains, it’s easy to spot riders gaming on their phones, sorting sweets in Candy Crush or mustering armies in Clash of Clans. But Kevin Hemphill, a geeky ex-pat, played a different game on his iPad, flipping through images of forests and meadows in Pennsylvania that had been cleared. Tapping the screen, he marked the location of ponds and transmitted the data to a nonprofit halfway across the globe.
Through the web-based FrackFinder, a project of the nonprofit SkyTruth, Hemphill, nostalgic for his childhood home in the Rust Belt of Ohio, pored over the images of the Keystone State. He was looking for evidence of hydraulic fracturing. Better known “fracking,” it’s the process of blasting chemicals, sand and water into underground rock layers to dislodge natural gas — a controversial method of energy extraction that’s brought jobs to the region while potentially putting locals’ health at risk. In a uniquely digital “citizen science” effort, Hemphill and hundreds of volunteers around the world have plotted Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure, creating a detailed map that can be shared with activists, regulators and academics.
Biologists have long relied on group expeditions to study wildlife populations, but FrackFinder brings the process online, giving anyone with a keyboard the chance to participate. As users click through FrackFinder, SkyTruth’s team hopes the abstract science of environmental exploitation becomes tangible. Their pictures, shot from aircraft and 400-mile high satellites, clearly depict the damage that can be hard to visualize, and even harder to reverse.
“We can look at not just one township or county or state. We’re able to look at changes across entire regions over decades. That’s almost like having access to a time machine,” says David Manthos, SkyTruth’s program coordinator. “It’s the region-wide perspective we offer that you just can’t get from one place on the ground.”
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Geologist John Amos founded the nonpartisan Skytruth, which collects satellite images of potential eco-hazards, in 2001, moving it to tiny Shepherdstown, W.V., two years later. A former consultant for a natural resources exploration firm, Amos put similar tracking tools into the hands of conservationists, as a way to atone for his past “disservice to the planet.” But for nearly a decade, SkyTruth remained a one-man shop. Few donors could see how SkyTruth’s aerial imagery might help the environmental movement. That all changed in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Coast Guard estimated 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing out each day, but after studying photos of a vast, shimmering pool of oil on the ocean’s surface, he and oceanographer Dr. Ian MacDonald calculated the spill was more than 20 times worse than officials claimed. After publishing a critical blog post, the federal government quickly revised its numbers upward.
Now a 12-person staff, SkyTruth has used their planetary perspective to create the first repository of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Appalachia; to film flaring over North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields by equipping a high-altitude hydrogen balloon with a camera; and to track unregulated commercial fishing in the world’s most remote waters. After wrapping up in Ohio, FrackFinder will launch in its third state, West Virginia, early this year. Analyses of other states will likely follow.
How is this data used? FrackFinder’s crowdsourced analysis confirmed the exact location of 1,400 active wells and 7,835 wastewater ponds, allowing a team of public health researchers at Johns Hopkins to verify a list of drilling permits provided by the state. Guided by that knowledge, paired with extensive medical records, the university epidemiologists proved that asthmatics were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an attack near the drilling, and mothers were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely near the most active sites. The researchers weren’t able to pinpoint why locals sickened — maybe sleeplessness from noisy, earth-shaking vibrations, stress from dropping home values or the chemicals themselves — but SkyTruth’s data helped them prove a point.
Surprisingly, crowdsourcing the information is actually harder for SkyTruth than sifting through the images themselves. But the team continues to invest in citizen science because they know the value of the public’s involvement. “It actually puts an image of what’s going on in the world in front of citizens, so they can see for themselves,” Manthos explains. “What kinds of regions are being developed? Is it all forest, rural land or a little of the suburbs? We’re exposing people, up close and personal, to these images. That’s a formative process, and they can draw their own conclusions.”
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Hemphill, for example, says he used to support fracking as a reasonable way to bring much-needed economic growth to Northern Appalachia’s struggling towns. His support persisted, even as he analyzed nearly 5,000 images of Pennsylvania’s scarred terrain. “Wow, they’re really tearing up the earth,” he thought, almost disinterestedly. But because of his exposure to the issue through FrackFinder, he began paying more attention to relevant news stories, reading, for instance, that some homeowners could set the contaminated water in their kitchen sink on fire. Eventually, he turned against the unconventional drilling method for good.
The process influenced Hemphill in another way, too, by reaffirming his faith in technology’s possibilities beyond our social media addictions and diversionary entertainment. “People are on the internet a lot. What do you have to show for so many hours of your life?” he asks. “Especially for millennials, where does it go from here? It’s not a guaranteed thing that we all will just watch Netflix forever. The internet needs to go beyond that now.”
Hemphill imagines closing our Tetris-stacking apps, halting the Instagram scroll and doing something meaningful online. With just a few clicks, he still believes, the Earth can be improved.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

This Trans Woman’s Mission? To Help People Like Her Excel in the Tech Industry

The statistics are startling: In the United States, being transgender doubles a person’s chances of living in poverty and triples the risk of being unemployed, according to a study conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality. That financial setback is largely due to the difficulty of finding and retaining stable employment: Nearly one in three trans individuals report experiencing discrimination in the workplace, such as losing a job, denial of a promotion or being subjected to verbal harassment or sexual assault.
But what if those stats could be shifted in the tech industry, a booming sector that provides a growing share of jobs? How would you build a talent pipeline? Could a change there lead the rest of the economy to follow suit? Obsessed with these questions, Angelica Ross, a transgender activist, decided to find out. She started TransTech Social Enterprises, an incubator for LGBTQ talent, as a hub for trans people to work on freelance web development, graphic design and multimedia projects, while further enriching their tech skills at training academies. Ross launched her organization in Chicago and, after three years of iterations and the scheduled opening of additional branches in Washington, D.C., and Buffalo, N.Y., the network now includes 347 members. Last year, the company disbursed $90,000 in compensation for projects its members completed.
“The main mission behind all of this is to get trans and other marginalized people to realize that they are their own best bet, their own heroes,” Ross says. “They’re much stronger than the world communicates to them.”
Ross knows the importance of instilling this self-worth, because at one time she herself believed there were few paths to economic advancement for people like her. At age 19, she decided to officially make the transition to female. Her parents tossed her out, and she lost her job at a makeup counter in Racine, Wis. (Years later, she and her mother reconciled.) Desperate for work, Ross moved to Hollywood, Fla., where she worked as an escort and a model for an adult website. “At that time for trans women, especially those who were looking to get any transition-related surgery, there was a high level of trafficking into the adult industry,” she says. But then the website’s owner noticed her skill with computers and tasked her with touching up, cropping and resizing pictures. The experience made Ross realize she didn’t need to be working for anyone else — at an adult site, no less — to apply her technical skills. She left and founded TransTech a few years later.
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Because she experienced firsthand the many barriers to success for transgender people, Ross made a conscious decision that TransTech’s programming be as accessible as possible. Annual fees are $99, but scholarships cover those who can’t pay. And there’s no formal curriculum, a boon to aspiring techies who might not have the time to complete an intensive weeks-long program. Ross, who now lives in L.A., describes the model she eventually settled on as akin to a gym membership. Much like the equipment that fills a fitness center, TransTech’s co-working spaces are stocked with their own tools of the trade: Macs preloaded with Adobe’s Creative Suite, and plenty of scanners and printers. In place of personal trainers, TransTech offers peer mentorship. Like lifting weights to build muscle, her members are developing technical know-how by learning from others in the space, attending workshops and applying YouTube lessons to real-life projects.
The tech training is often a natural fit, as LGBTQ individuals have long been plugged in to the web. “When trans people were really just coming out of the shadows, it was on AOL, Yahoo! chat groups, even Craigslist. These are places where we found community, found love, found job opportunities,” Ross explains. “Tech is just the catalyst for everything.”
And the types of jobs TransTech members pick up are often easier to fit into their lives. Frequent medical appointments and friction with disapproving colleagues make working in an office a potential minefield. But as freelancers, they have the flexibility to set their own hours and communicate with colleagues in whatever format they wish.
Ross believes the model she’s building at TransTech will eventually help serve those beyond the transgender community. Parents with infants or people with physical disabilities would both benefit from a looser conception of a workplace. “The tech industry’s policies are half of the solution,” she points out. The other half? Installing more transgender employees in leadership positions, where they can bring a different, and much-needed, perspective to a company’s decisions.
“The trans community is bigger and more valuable than companies usually acknowledge,” Ross says. “If you look, and especially if you look to TransTech, you will find a plethora of talent.”
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

For These Students, Gaming Isn’t a Way to Kill Time. It’s a Way to Success

It’s late one night when two teenagers — one an aloof perfectionist; the other, a troubled target of bullying — find themselves inhabiting the same strange dream. Though they’ve never met, the strangers share a heartbreaking connection: the recent death of a mutual friend. In their shared lucid dream, they walk under an indigo sky, trying to figure out where to go next while simultaneously coping with feelings of anger, sadness and fear after the loss of their friend. Soon, the teens encounter a giant lantern. It surges toward them, chasing them down a hallway and through a door.
It’s a nocturnal sequence that seems straight out of a mind-bending Charlie Kaufman movie. But the creator of this inventive world isn’t an established filmmaker; she’s Rebecca Taylor, herself a teenager living in the Bay Area. And the premise isn’t the plot of a blockbuster; it’s the basis for a video game about the stages of grief, called “Lucid,” that she’s helping develop. A high school senior, Taylor spends most weekends writing code with other young designers, storytellers and programmers at Gameheads, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to training underserved youth the foundations of video-game design.
The yearlong curriculum, targeted to those between the ages of 15 and 24, seeks to open Silicon Valley’s enormous possibilities to low-income communities just across the San Francisco Bay, says Damon Packwood, the executive director of Gameheads. “The ubiquity of computing is akin to the printing press — it changes us culturally and permanently,” he says. “But if you have just one group of people that is part of that change, it doesn’t benefit us all.”
Packwood stumbled upon the model for Gameheads while he was teaching a web design class at another organization. To get his students interested in the subject matter, he suggested designing a website around gaming. But the students wanted to cut to the chase and learn how to build games themselves. “It’s a language they already understand,” Packwood says of the young people he mentors. Interactive storytelling, he adds, “is the medium of the 21st century.” By switching the focus of his class to video-game design, he found it was much easier to get kids excited about technology.
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That unique focus makes Gameheads, which currently serves about 60 students, the only tech boot camp of its kind in the Bay Area. While most other programs prioritize software development, an in-demand skill set to be sure, Packwood believes putting all the emphasis on what’s job-worthy is misplaced. Gameheads, on the other hand, is open to a wider range of roles, welcoming animators and sound engineers alongside programmers.
Since most of the Gameheads attendees are still in high school, Packwood says his main goal is seeing his students go to college. He has helped Taylor and the other students apply for financial aid, draft college essays and figure out where to enroll. (For her part, Taylor is readying applications to several schools in the University of California system and plans to study computer science once there.) And after they obtain their degree, about half of the grads consider joining the industry — a possibility many hadn’t considered before their time in Gameheads.
Taylor once suspected that because she didn’t have an “in,” she wouldn’t ever be considered as a serious job candidate by game studios. (One look at classic cult movies like “WarGames,” “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter” reveals why: White men predominate in the popular imagery of who creates electronic entertainment.) “I didn’t think it was possible,” says Taylor. But after working with Packwood and other mentors, who come from Sledgehammer, Ubisoft and other studios, her views changed. “I don’t really see it as much of a daunting task, only because a lot of my mentors are actually people of color who work in the game industry,” she says. “It seems very possible now.”
Just as Packwood had hoped — and predicted — the games being crafted by such a diverse population of young people defy genre. Teens like Taylor, whose gaming interests aren’t necessarily represented on Best Buy’s shelves, are more interested in playing “Life Is Strange,” an adventure about a high school girl who can rewind time, than first-person shooter games. “I think the industry has had enough of ‘Halo’ and ‘Call of Duty.’ They need something fresh and original, something that’s meaningful,” she says.
Taylor hopes “Lucid” is that type of game. By design, it necessitates two characters, so that one person can’t play it alone. The two players have to work through the grieving process together, like an interactive therapy. (When Packwood first heard the premise, he asked who gave the group the idea; it came from their own experiences, they told him.) “When I see friends of mine that are going through grief, they shut themselves out of the world. So why not have people try to get over it together?” Taylor asks. “I want people to know that games are more than just something you do when you’re bored. Games actually have the potential to save a life, maybe.”
Like Packwood and his cohort know, most successful game developers are the ones who can build new worlds. At Gameheads, he’s helping his students do just that: They’re carving out a space, both on their computers and in Silicon Valley.

Homepage photo of Gameheads participants courtesy of TJ Ransom

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.