For Kids Afraid of Broccoli, This Center Helps Squash Their Fear

You’ve heard about the importance of literacy for reading, for finances (“financial literacy”), and maybe even for math — aka, numeracy — but what about food literacy?
The Food Literacy Center, a nonprofit in Sacramento, Calif., is inspiring kids to become knowledgeable about food in the hopes that they’ll develop life long healthy eating habits.
It opened its doors three years ago, offering classes on cooking and all-around vegetable know-how to children and has become so popular that now, dozens of volunteers work alongside its four full-time employees — reaching 2,400 kids at public libraries, after-school programs and other nonprofits. It specializes in reaching low-income kids and those who qualify for free and reduced lunch. These families often can’t afford fresh produce, leaving their kids inexperienced in everything from carrots to kohlrabi.
At the Food Literacy Center, they learn such facts as how to distinguish fruits — including the frequently misidentified bell pepper — and why whole fruits are better for them than juices and jellies.
The founder of the center, Amber Stott, tells the Sacramento Bee, “Because kids’ eating habits haven’t been firmly formed yet, we have a great opportunity to create healthy eaters, to help these kids become food adventurers and build habits that will last a lifetime.”
The effect of fruit and veggie literacy often extends to the kids’ parents. Evonne Fisher, the mother of a seven-year-old participating in the program, says that before her daughter’s food lessons, neither of them were culinary adventurers. “Before Food Literacy, if I was scared of how a certain food looked, I wouldn’t try it,” she says. “But this has really opened me up. I never would have tried a persimmon before, and now? I love them.”
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When Skiers Leave Behind Warm Clothing, These Teens Dole It Out to the Homeless

There’s more than a mountain of snow at ski resorts each season, as giant piles of winter coats, mittens, hats and scarves accumulate in the lost-and-found departments.
Back in 2011, two 11-year-old ski racers from the Bay Area, Corinne Hindes and Katherine Kirsebom, noticed these mountains of unclaimed winter wear at Lake Tahoe ski resorts and decided to use them to help less fortunate people.
They didn’t stop with just donating one batch of coats to homeless shelters and other charities, however. The girls founded the nonprofit Warm Winters, and to date, the organization has donated 5,000 pieces of warm clothing to help thousands of homeless people.
Even though Hindes and Kirsebom are still only teenagers, they plan to expand Warm Winters nationally with the help of a 2013 Jefferson Award, given by a foundation that describes itself as “the country’s longest standing and most prestigious organization dedicated to activating and celebrating public service.”
As part of the award, Hindes is studying leadership with the Jefferson Awards Globe Changers Leadership Program. She aims to expand Warm Winters to 10 ski-friendly states, while keeping the program a teen-led initiative as they work with the National Ski Area Association to get it off the ground at 50 or more ski resorts.
Hindes tells TalkingGood, “There was a time a few years back where I saw a homeless man in a T-shirt and jeans on a terribly cold day in winter and I was horrified by how cold he was, and the fact that he had no jacket to shield him from the cold broke my heart. That was a moment where I gained clarity about my purpose because I knew that I had to help him and others like him in any way that I could, and I had to do all that I could to make their situation better. When I gave my first coat to a homeless person, the smile on his face gave me the most rewarding feeling I had ever felt, and it still does today.”
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When Families Can’t Make It to a Food Pantry, This Nonprofit Brings Food to Them

Food pantries run by nonprofits, churches, schools and other groups are often all that stands between a poor family and going hungry. But what if a family is struggling so much that they can’t find transportation needed to reach a food pantry?
To alleviate this problem, the Salvation Army in High Point, N.C., started operating a mobile food pantry this month.
High Point Salvation Army social services director Tashina Oladunjoye explains the need for the service to Sarah Krueger of Fox 8: “We have individuals in low income apartments that are in dry, food desert areas. These are individuals who cannot get out to pantries. Who cannot get out to their local grocery stores because of transportation, money in general.”
Each week, the mobile food pantry visits two different apartment complexes, reaching eight different locations in total before returning the first so that the needy in each building receives food once a month. Oladunjoye aims to add a refrigerated truck to the program within six months so that she can provide fresh produce to the families.
Darlene Graves, a single mother who received food from the truck, tells Krueger, “I thank God for the program and I thank God for the Salvation Army. It’s going to help me feed my family another day.”
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To Combat Child Food Insecurity, These Brothers Biked Cross Country

What does two brothers plus one penny per mile times 4,000 miles equal?
The answer: 400 meals for children living in poverty in the U.S.
Hailing from Ferndale, Michigan, Jon and Chris Gagnon are well acquainted with the childhood food insecurity problem in Detroit. In Wayne County, Mich., the rate of child food insecurity is 22.3 percent, meaning 102,790 children don’t have sufficient access to nutritious food.
While volunteering with an AmeriCorps summer program, Jon heard about No Kid Hungry – a national nonprofit that helps bring federal and state assistance programs to families and children. Jon is now employed by Groundwerx.CI, a Detroit nonprofit that works with No Kid Hungry.
Due to this experience, the Gagnon brothers saw that something needed to be done, and their solution was a cross-country bike campaign to raise money for the organization.
Their ride started on Sept. 3 in San Francisco and concluded Oct. 17 in Washington D.C. For six weeks, the brothers toured all around the country seeing sights all too common in Detroit: tons of grocery stores and farmers markets, but people still living without healthy food. During their trip, they were able to witness and experience the daily struggle of those families.
“Being hungry doesn’t just make your stomach growl,” Chris wrote on the brothers’ blog. “It drains your energy, steals your focus and makes the simplest actions feel impossible.”
Before they started their trip, the brothers began an online fundraising campaign on the No Kid Hungry website. Donors could make a straight donation or an amount per mile. Just $1 can provide 10 meals for a child.
Of the collected donations, 20 percent will go to the national No Kid Hungry and the other 80 percent is heading to the Detroit chapter. The brothers’ goal was to raise $25,000. As of November 13, $18, 117 was raised, and donations are still being accepted online.
While fighting child food insecurity is a long journey not near completion, the Gagnon brothers have shown what can be accomplished with a few dollars, bikes and some perseverance.
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Meet The Woman Putting a Personal Touch on Health Insurance Enrollment

With all the intricate details of the health care system, it’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed, making it next to impossible to choose the best insurance option. Which is why King County, Wash. is taking a different approach — they’re letting the people that know the community take the lead.
So instead of residents hearing about health care options in a general format, a representative of the community presents information catered to the individual area’s needs.
The woman behind the idea? Daphne Pie, King County’s manager of access and outreach at the Public Health Department for Seattle and King County. Her group of workers consists of 24 community leaders, including representatives from Cierra Sisters, Arms Perinatal Doula Program, Gay City health project and the Asian Counseling and Referral Service.
All of this began about four years when the County Council put forth their ‘equity and social justice’ strategic plan, according to National Journal. The measure has each county department focus on reaching the communities where there is the greatest inequity in their respective area of expertise.
For Pie, that meant finding a way to reach diverse groups about their health insurance choices. Her solution? For every community that had above average rates of uninsured citizens, a leader that spreads the message: “you can have health care insurance for free or at a very low cost.”
Communities in King County are quite diverse, featuring African-Americans, Native American tribes, Latinas and homosexuals, among others. Therefore, it’s useful to have a member of that community who can understand and address each group’s specific needs — whether it be HIV medication or natural childbirth.
The County’s commitment to this project isn’t just on paper, either. In 2013, out of the $1.6 million of federal grants King County received, $1.3 million of it went to community partners.
“You have to reach the uninsured where they live,” Pie tells National Journal. “We can’t expect these people to always come to us.”
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When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process

Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”

Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.

So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.

Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.

While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.

Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”

The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.

With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

DIVERTING THE PIPELINE

The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.

Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.

Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.

Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.

“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.

Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.

Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.

At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.

MAKING IT RIGHT

In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.

In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.

Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.

“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.

According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.

On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.

For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.

“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.

Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.

Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.

As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”

The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.

The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”

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When the Poor and Elderly Can’t Afford to Feed Their Pets, This Nonprofit Comes to the Rescue

As an owner of dogs, finches, cockatiels, guinea pigs, mice, tropical fish, a duck, a rabbit and more through the years, it’s obvious that Marianne Iaquinto of Wyndmoor, Penn. has always been a pet lover.
When her beloved Shih Tzu, Sam, was dying in 2012, Iaquinto decided to let her grief fuel a vital service: Helping the poor and elderly  keep their pets instead of turning them over to shelters when they can’t afford them. So she started the nonprofit Sam’s Hope.
To date, Sam’s Hope has collected and distributed more than 44,000 pounds of pet food to the needy.
In particular, Iaquinto is moved by the plight of impoverished elderly people who aren’t able to pay for their pet’s upkeep and are forced to put them in a shelter.
“The elderly, sometimes all they have in life is their pet, their only reason to get up in the morning,” Iaquinto tells Len Lear of Chestnut Hill Local. “In this case, they don’t surrender their pets; they sacrifice their own health and well-being, sharing their food and forgoing medication to provide for the pet.”
The Doris Day Animal Foundation has recognized Sam’s Hope for its work, providing funding to the organization to start a new service: Meals for the Pets of the Homebound and Elderly. Just as their owners are given monthly meal deliveries, the pets receive food, too.
Besides distributing about 4,000 pounds of pet food and cat litter each month to both pet food pantries and directly to pet owners, Sam’s Hope assists in a variety of ways — including veterinary care for pets whose owners can’t afford it. Volunteers for the nonprofit once also captured and relocated a bunch of feral cats after their owner died and helped a sick pet owner find homes for eight of his cats.
Iaquinto plans to start two voucher programs: One giving the poor the ability to have their pets spayed and neutered, and the other, which will enable people to adopt older shelter pets who often are left behind in favor of puppies and kittens.
In 2013, Iaquinto left her job as the vice-president of McGruff Safe Kids’ Total ID System and now volunteers 50 to 60 hours a week with Sam’s Hope. “How do I do it? Well, I have found that there are things in life that are more important than money. I am happier than I have ever been before. Money doesn’t buy that,” she says.
Guaranteed the pet owners and their furry friends that have received assistance from Sam’s Hope are happier than ever, too.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Sam’s Hope operated out of a local restaurant. NationSwell apologizes for the error.
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The Yelp-Like Website Helping Migrant Workers Avoid Bad Bosses

We’ve all seen groups of day laborers congregating on a street corner, hoping to be hired for a job. These workers, as well as those in this country on temporary work visas, are taking a big risk: They have to trust that the people who hire them will pay them as promised.
A new social media site, Contratados.org (the name roughly translates as “hired hands”), aims to offer some insurance against dishonest employers to day laborers.
On the website, workers can look for a job, write and read reviews of companies, bosses or recruiters, learn about their rights and read about news developments of relevance to them. For those who don’t have Internet access, there’s even the ability to leave a review via the telephone.
These Yelp-like reviews can help workers avoid bad work situations and find fair ones. For instance, one man who regularly employs undocumented workers recently received two one-star ratings. One reviewer says that this man had him working without a salary for two months, and in exchange for his work, promised a tourist visa. Instead, he gave him a fake visa, which resulted in deportation. On the other hand, another reviewer employed by a seafood market in Louisiana praised his bosses in a five-star review. “It’s a good company and a pure good thing,” the anonymous reviewer writes.
The reviews can be anonymous (which could, of course, result in the posting of falsehoods and exaggerations), but as with Yelp, the more reviews that accumulate, the more the consensus can be trusted.
Michelle Chen of The Nation spoke to Alissa Ecarce of Contratados, who says, “The beauty of the Contratados.org employer review feature is that it does not rely on any legal mechanism — the point is for workers to share information with one another so that they can make more informed employment decisions. Both guest workers and undocumented workers work within a system where they are at a power disadvantage due to their status, and we hope that Contratados.org will be a tool that all workers can use to increase their power in the labor market.”
This website, which offers a contemporary solution to an age-old problem, could prevent a lot of low-income workers from experiencing needless misery.
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When Its Only Grocery Store Closed Its Doors, This Town Didn’t Have to Look Far for New Owners

What do you do when your local supermarket closes? For one town, it means you open your own community-owned store.
When the local Winn Dixie shut its doors in northeast Greensboro, N.C. in the 1990s, the area became a barren food desert. For the past 15 years, residents have been waiting for another grocery story to fill the void, according to Yes! magazine, but none came. The community isn’t big enough to satiate the needs of a large shareholder corporation, which has acted as a deterrent for other chain stores.
Left without access to food for too long, the community took the matter into their own hands and started researching. After exploring various options, it decided to form a grocery store cooperative.
Starting next year, northeast Greensboro residents will have access to a store that will provide them quality food as well as well-paid jobs. All workers at the Renaissance Community Cooperative will be paid more than minimum wage, starting at $10 per hour.
There’s a common belief about co-ops that they work best in more affluent communities. However, northeast Greensboro is a low-income and predominantly African-American community, so with the start of the cooperative, the town is looking to break that stereotype.
While the results and success of the co-op remain to be seen, right now it can be viewed as a positive step in the right direction. And, if it does become successful, it will serve as an example and model for other low-income areas to follow.
It goes just to show what positives can come from what first seem to be a devastating event.
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When Low-Income People Can’t Afford Solar Energy, This Organization Helps Out

What nonprofit asks low-income people to don hard hats and safety harnesses and scramble up on roofs?
GRID Alternatives does.
The organization not only provides solar energy to low-income neighborhoods, it also teaches residents how to install the panels themselves — helping them gain experience for potential jobs in the solar industry.
Low-income people are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods, and they definitely can use the break on energy bills that solar panels provide — but most can’t afford to have them installed. That’s where GRID Alternatives steps in. According to the nonprofit’s website, its solar installation efforts have prevented “the release of 340,000 tons of greenhouse gasses over the systems’ lifetimes and provid[ed] more than $110 million in energy cost savings.”
One hundred and fifty volunteers turned up recently to help install solar panels on 10 Habitat for Humanity homes in a low-income Washington D.C. neighborhood, according to Katherine Ling of E&E. The installation celebrated the grand opening of the Oakland-based nonprofit’s D.C. office, which joins branches in California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
The D.C. installation event also gave 10 “solar trainees” from a local organization for at-risk youth the chance to gain some valuable job skills and learn about an industry that might eventually provide them with a career.
GRID Alternatives has been able to expand its mission recently due to a $2 million grant from Wells Fargo, as well as equipment donations from Enphase Energy Inc., Sun Edison LLC and SunPower Corp.
The group also sponsors SolarCorps Fellowships, a one-year volunteer training period that qualifies participants for employment in the solar industry. The nonprofit is especially interested in providing jobs to low-income people, minorities and women. To that end, it hosts “women builds” as a part of its National Women in Solar initiative.
Ling visited a woman-only solar installation project in Los Angeles, where SolarCorps construction fellow Ilana Feingold declared, “We love power tools!”
We’re sure they love the energy savings and the jobs that come along with it, too.
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