Internet for All

Between 1979 and 2013, wages of middle-income workers rose just 6 percent. The wallets of low-income workers have been hit even harder: Their incomes fell 5 percent during the same time period.  
As stagnant wages and flat mobility continue to deepen inequality in America, politicians, social entrepreneurs and other leaders are looking to technology for a solution. The number of jobs in computers and information technology is projected to increase 12 percent by 2024 — faster than any other sector. According to industry experts, nearly 60 million of Americans can’t even access the internet in their own homes because of cost.
To spur much-needed job growth, the digital divide must be eliminated. Watch the video above to see how EveryoneOn‘s pioneering model is leading the way by making high-speed, low-cost internet plans, refurbished computers and digital literacy courses available to low-income communities nationwide.

It’s Possible to Close the Achievement Gap and Have Fun at the Same Time

If it looks like summer camp, and kids are having fun like they do at summer camp, it must be summer camp, right?
Not if you’re talking about Horizons National’s intensive, six-week-long summer session. Watch the video above to see how the program utilizes project-based learning, extracurriculars like swimming and gardening and a low 5:1 student-to-teacher ratio (compared to 16.1 nationally) to instill a love of learning in students.
At a time when all eyes are on the latest proposed cuts to education and numerous states have already slashed school spending, Horizons has found an innovative, fun way to help close the achievement gap between kids living in poverty and their more affluent peers. Its low-income students are succeeding — both in school and beyond.
MORE: What Does Swimming Have to Do With Stopping the Summer Slide?

Notes From the Field: Miriam Altman on School Absenteeism

One hot afternoon in late August, I spotted a familiar face as I exited the Prospect Avenue subway station in New York City’s South Bronx. It was Tonya, one of my former students. She was holding the hand of a young girl dressed in an orange school uniform.
Bright and focused on earning her high school diploma, Tonya’s plans to go to college changed when she became pregnant during her senior year with Destiny, the girl whose hand she held. After a three month hiatus from school, Tonya graduated, and went on to have two more children — all by the age of 22. As a single mother, she worked odd jobs and collected food stamps to make ends meet.
I know first hand that Tonya’s story is not uncommon where she lives in Community District 3.  I am the cofounder of Kinvolved, a company that is working in her community to increase graduation rates by fighting school absenteeism.
Tonya lives in the poorest congressional district in the country, where about 37 percent of residents live in poverty and nearly 50 percent of residents earn less than a high school degree. By targeting the specific challenges facing the area’s youth, there’s hope to dramatically alter their futures.
South Bronx Rising Together is a group of neighborhood stakeholders working to improve the quality of life of neighborhood residents, in part, by ensuring that kids are college and career ready. Focused on elevating literacy rates, the organization discovered that student absenteeism is the main cause of lower-than-average scores. SBRT uses Collective Action Networks (CANs) made up of families, educators, business leaders, service providers and others to combat absenteeism.
Research proves chronic absence patterns can predict students’ graduation as early as sixth grade. New York City schools have one of the highest chronic absence rates in the country; public schools in Community District 3 have some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the city: 36.6 percent of preK-12 students miss a month or more of school each year.
As SBRT analyzed absentee data, my colleagues and I at Kinvolved were working to help schools address absenteeism. We developed an app — KiNVO — that schools use to track attendance and to send text messages to families so they know whether or not their children are in class in real time. More than 100,000 stakeholders at 90 preK-12 schools in New York City benefit from KiNVO. At schools using the app, attendance rates improved 13 times that of an average NYC school.
As a CAN participant, my efforts focus on supporting the 60 schools in Community District 3. My CAN colleagues and I recruit schools in the neighborhood to be “All-In” schools, meaning they have committed to joining the fight against chronic absenteeism. By the end of the school year, there will be 30 “All-In” schools that participate in SBRT-sponsored events, webinars and meetings to exchange best practices to elevate attendance.
In part, as a result of these efforts, “All-In” schools that had regular attendance meetings and staff dedicated to attendance, experienced a drop in absenteeism between 5.7 percent and 10.3 percent from the 2014-2015 school year to the 2015-2016 school year.
According to SBRT co-directors Elizabeth Clay-Roy and Abe Fernandez, the organization wants its model and learnings to be open sourced. That way, improvement in school attendance will extend beyond Community District 3 in the South Bronx to the entire country.
Looking back, I have realized that I learned about SBRT and its focus on chronic absenteeism just before my reunion with Tonya and her daughter Destiny.  That day, as we parted ways, I hugged Tonya goodbye and felt Destiny’s small arms hugging my knees. I looked down at her eager smile and bright eyes and wished her a wonderful school year.
I believe that through the work of South Bronx Rising Together and also Kinvolved’s progress in fighting chronic absenteeism, we’re going to help Destiny and her peers achieve a future that hasn’t been as easily attained for her mother.
Miriam Altman is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Kinvolved.
Correction: The original version of this post misidentified Miriam Altman in the second photo. NationSwell apologizes for the error.

Las Vegas’s First Family Gambles on Downtown, Indoor Agriculture Gets a Boost and More

 
Meet the Goodmans: Las Vegas’ Flamboyant Political Family, Governing
Did you know the Strip — with its high-rolling casinos and debauched dance clubs — isn’t actually within Las Vegas’s city limits? It’s technically on Clark County’s turf. The timeworn battle between city and county is playing out in the Nevada desert, as a husband-and-wife pair who’ve held the mayor’s office for a collective 17 years try to remake the city’s downtown, gambling their future on a performing arts center, a med school and a pro sports team.
High-Rise Greens, The New Yorker
In 2003, Ed Harwood, a 66-year-old inventor from Ithaca, N.Y., sketched out designs for a seemingly impossible idea: a compact vertical farm, where produce could grow without any soil, sunlight or more water than a fine mist. Today, his grow tower has been perfected and adopted by AeroFarms, a company in Newark, N.J., whose indoor agriculture aims to compete with California’s kale, bok choi and arugula farmers.
Did Free College Save This City? Christian Science Monitor
For every graduate of the Kalamazoo, Mich., school system — rich or poor — a group of anonymous donors has guaranteed scholarships to cover the cost of college tuition. The 11-year-old educational experiment, known as Kalamazoo Promise, has revived the district public schools and fostered a college-going culture in this frozen Rust Belt city that’s trying to transition to the digital economy.
Continue reading “Las Vegas’s First Family Gambles on Downtown, Indoor Agriculture Gets a Boost and More”

Where Does the YWCA Go From Here?

After the YWCA of the City of New York sold its uptown Lexington Avenue headquarters — its home for nearly a century — and moved downtown in 2005, the organization was looking to reinvent itself. Enter Danielle Moss Lee, a former teacher and administrator with a doctorate in education and decades of experience in nonprofit leadership. After taking the reins as the YWCA’s CEO in 2012, Moss Lee expanded the nonprofit’s after-school and summer programs while redoubling efforts to reach out to girls of color in underserved neighborhoods. NationSwell spoke with Moss Lee about the new direction for a 158-year-old charity at the YWCA’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
What’s the YWCA’s biggest need right now?
Ensuring the future sustainability of the organization. We’ve been out of the game for a little bit. How do you make something that’s 158 years old new again, so that people care about it and want it to continue, in terms of manpower, woman-power, volunteerism? We’ve got 2,500 kids whose lives we hope to impact in some way. It’s not all the kids in the city, but we can do our best to do our part.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I like the questions that young activists are asking, because it positions us for a different America. We can say without a doubt that all of our lives have been materially and visibly changed by the civil rights movement. But now we’re addressing issues around institutional and structural racism that I don’t think prior generations fully understood: Health services, education, the police and the banking system all really conspire together to advantage some and disadvantage others. I’m excited about these new movements. Protesting and social media campaigns are important. I hope that, at the end of this, the way we live and experience our daily lives will be similarly transformed like they were with desegregation and all of the access and opportunities that civil rights opened up.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
The best advice I’ve gotten over my career was to be someone that I would want to follow myself. It’s been important advice because it’s made me more conscious that who I am and how I show up is really important to the people around me when I’m in a leadership role. It keeps you honest and conscious.
Where do you find your inner motivation?
It’s always different, but one thing I think about is all the kids I’m not serving. I hear lots of folks in this sector say of college-access or girls’ programming: “We have 200 girls” or “We have 1,000 girls,” whatever the number is. But then when I think about how many girls actually live in this city, that’s what keeps me going.
Years ago, I was teaching a graduate course on urban youth policy, and one day the discussion got really personal. A young woman getting her master’s degree told this story of how her family’s apartment had burned down in Brooklyn. At first, friends and family were willing to house them. As the months dragged on, they went into a homeless shelter. At some point, her mother, in a desperate attempt to provide for her kids, made the decision to join the Armed Forces. The student said, “Do you realize we lived in that shelter with no adult and nobody noticed?” And then she said, “I didn’t know that there were middle-class black people. I didn’t know for a long time that something else was possible for my life.” A lot of mentoring is focused around Manhattan. Let’s be real, people aren’t going out to Coney Island (where the YWCA has programming) or other far-flung Brooklyn neighborhoods like Flatbush, East New York and Brownsville. It’s always at the convenience of the volunteer, but that’s not necessarily where the greatest need is. I can always recall that student’s voice asking, “Where were you?” — to which I didn’t really have an answer. She said, “All these civic organizations are always talking about all the work they do in the community, but I never saw them.” Nobody asked her if she wanted to go to college. That’s our job.
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What’s on your nightstand right now?
Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently” [by Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur]. It’s really about how you develop teams with people who just think differently. I started to think about this because there’s been a lot of emphasis in some new progressive nonprofits in the sector around organizational fit and building a specific kind of culture within their organizations to drive results. There’s a value in that. But a lot of those organizations have challenges around having a diverse staff.
I was listening to two managers have a semi-debate. A young white woman was talking about two of her staff members: Her white staff member was really great with data, Excel spreadsheets and metrics — things she really valued — but this staff person wasn’t as good at relating to young people and doing outreach to families. And so while the person of color was much more relatable with the young people in the organization, it was almost like her skill set wasn’t seen as a value. We all operate predominantly with different sides of our brain. How can we tease away some of the judgment that comes with very different strengths and make sure that we’re not using this idea of “fit” really to only work with people who look like us, share our experiences and perspective? You’re probably not growing if everyone agrees with everything you say.
What’s your perfect day look like?
No bad news, and a big check in the mail — in that order.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I recently had the opportunity to have a reunion with students I previously worked with at another organization. First of all, to see them now as college-educated adults and hear all the amazing things they were doing was a reward in itself. Back when I was working that job, I was also raising my daughter and going to graduate school. I remember one of those kids saying, “I didn’t know anybody else who had a doctorate. When I came into your office and saw your degrees on the wall, I knew I couldn’t just get a bachelor’s. Tell me: What do you have to do to get a master’s degree? What’s a dissertation?”
I’m just blown away by the number of students, many first-generation college students, who have graduate degrees. That changes not just the trajectory of their lives, but also their families’ for years to come. It was nice to know that I had that kind of impact.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
Homepage photo courtesy of YWCANYC.

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.
 
 

This Millennial Is on a Mission to Unleash the Next Generation of Techies

In the next four years, economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics predict that the country will add more than 1.4 million new technology jobs. Yet, based on current graduation rates, there will be only 400,000 computer science majors to fill those jobs. NationSwell Council member Jessica Santana sees that gap as an opportunity for the 1 million children who attend public school in New York City. At the nonprofit she co-founded, New York on Tech (NYOT), students from more than high schools (and counting) learn the digital skills employers desire. NationSwell spoke with Santana, herself a product of the city’s public-school system who has worked in the tech industry, about how the next generation can diversify tech’s booming business.

What’s on New York on Tech’s curriculum?
From September through June, the program provides about 152 hours of training, which consists of markup and programming languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python. But we also realize that not every student wants to be an engineer, so they learn about project management, quality assurance, digital media — all these different career opportunities. Afterward, our students get the opportunity to do paid internships over the summer with some of our corporate partners; this year, those included The Bank of New York Mellon and Warby Parker. They get to apply their new skills in a way that’s professional, in a way that gives them the social capital to keep on getting internships after the experience.

About 85 percent of the tech workforce is white or Asian, and 74 percent are male. Do the students you meet express that they don’t see role models in tech?
At the beginning of our program, we survey how many students know somebody in the industry or participate in a technology extracurricular program. Last year, about 90 percent said that New York on Tech was the first time they ever did anything technology-related as an extracurricular program. For many, they’re the first [in their family] to go to college. There’s a huge disconnect in where they can access career advice. So while they don’t formally say they lack mentors, the information we collect shows they do.

On the other hand, it’s also important to know that some students in our program don’t realize they are the only African-Americans and Latinos in technology. We intentionally place mentors of color from diverse backgrounds into their lives, so they won’t feel alone in their journey. If we come from the school of thought that they can’t be what they can’t see, then it’s our job to make sure that we recruit mentors intentionally.

Only 1 percent of New York City students are receiving computer science education. How should public schools be teaching the material?
There’s an opportunity for schools to explore how they teach 21st-century skills outside the actual computer science curriculum. To be a real technologist, what’s currently being offered [in computer science classes] in under-resourced schools is insufficient to move the needle on diversity in the tech workforce. Schools need to ask themselves whether their lessons are industry-aligned, that they’re actually going to prepare students for jobs, as opposed to just meeting educational standards.

Tech is so often associated with Silicon Valley. How does New York’s scene, on the other coast, differ?
The biggest difference between the valley and here is that New York City has diversity. Over there, it’s very homogenous. But here, there are so many pockets of diverse talent that can be employed. Most of the engineering departments stay in Silicon Valley, so you’ll notice there are a lot of opportunities in New York in sales, media and business development, a lot of non-technical jobs, too. It’s not the biggest industry yet in New York. Do I think it has the potential to get there? I’m not sure, to be honest. FinTech (or financial technology) is huge here, and we’re seeing a move toward tech in fashion and food as well.

Jessica Santana, with her mother, at their local Univision station, where Jessica anchors a segment on technology.

How did you personally get involved in this work?
I’ve always been a technologist. I got a MacBook in eighth grade through PowerMyLearning, which was founded by fellow NationSwell Council member Elisabeth Stock. My parents were very strict. When my friends couldn’t come over, it was me and my computer. Having access to that first computer ignited a curiosity in me that wouldn’t have been possible for my friends, who didn’t have machines of their own.

I was a first-generation college student. As soon as I graduated with a master’s in information technology and started working in the industry, I was making four times my parents’ household income. When I realized that, in one year, I was going to make what my parents were making combined in four years, I asked myself, “How did I get here?” That question quickly became, “How do I get others here?” Because going into a technical program was an avenue out of poverty for me. I see how transformative it is for students, who came from communities like mine, to have these skills.

Was it tough for you to break into the tech industry?
When I was still working in the industry proper, as a technology consultant, I learned that the things that made me different made me powerful. It took me a long time to get comfortable with that. Oftentimes, I was the only woman, the only person of color, the only woman of color. As I matured, I started owning that difference: the fact that I was a Latina with curly hair and an accent who wouldn’t let those things stand in my way.

What are you most proud of having accomplished?
To this day, the greatest thing I’ve accomplished, honestly, is graduating from high school. Then being able to go to a four-year college completely transformed the way I saw opportunity, the way I set goals, the way I thought about business and the way I saw myself as a global citizen.

The Test-Prep Program That’s Helping Low-Income Students Get to College

It’s one of the most glaring indicators of inequity in the nation’s education system: Students from low-income families tested 166 points below the average on last year’s SAT and 396 points behind than their wealthiest peers. Put another way, the poorest students (whose parents earned less than $20,000) could barely meet the baseline for applying to California State University, Northridge, while most rich kids (whose parents rake in over $200,000) would have the same shot of getting into the higher ranked University of California, Los Angeles.
CollegeSpring, an eight-year-old San Francisco–based nonprofit with offices in L.A. and New York, is trying to upend those inequalities by helping low-income high school students boost their SAT scores, navigate the college admission process and complete four-year degrees. While the organization can’t make up all the differences that exist between the rich and the poor, CollegeSpring’s 80-hour prep program has helped 15,000 high schoolers in California and New York improve their SAT scores by an average of 183 points, effectively erasing the statistical disadvantage usually seen among poorer students.
“The SAT isn’t a test that’s trying to trick or trap you. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate what you know how to do,” says Julie Bachur Gopalan, CollegeSpring’s senior vice president of strategy and impact. “You can put up a number that you can improve pretty quickly over a short period of time. You can’t do that with a GPA by the time you get to junior year.”
Garrett Neiman, CollegeSpring’s co-founder and CEO, agrees. Upping SAT scores, he says, is a “point of leverage in the system” that has been overlooked by other educational nonprofits. Meanwhile, for-profit test-prep companies, like the one Neiman once worked for, have cashed in.
The need for CollegeSpring, which is free for qualified students, became apparent during Neiman’s sophomore year at Stanford (the school accepted him after he nailed a perfect 2400 on his own SAT), when he befriended several classmates on full scholarship. “They all credited some catalyst: a teacher, parent, mentor or a specific college-access program,” he says. “On one hand, it was disheartening. From a meritocratic lens, if they came from an inner-city background, [their acceptance to Stanford] wasn’t possible without that help. But at the same time, it felt like if there were more or better programs, the gap could be closed.”
Neiman decided to quit his lucrative job as an SAT coach. Tutoring had been “a great way to pay for school,” he says, but only a rarified group had the money to sit in on his lessons. In other words, he’d been exacerbating an economic disparity. During a social entrepreneurship course at Stanford, Neiman and his co-founder, Jessica Perez, crafted a new test-prep curriculum. After three pilot programs that summer, CollegeSpring emerged.
Recognizing that the simple tricks taught by for-profit SAT companies (like knowing how many choices to eliminate before randomly guessing) wouldn’t sufficiently boost scores to erase the gap, Neiman devised a curriculum that would help students sharpen the academic skills they already possess: High school juniors and seniors would take 40 hours of SAT prep, tailored to the needs of those with low-income backgrounds; follow that up with four full-length practice tests; and then receive another 20 hours of instruction about the college application and financial aid processes.
“We meet our students wherever they are when they enter the program, which is often at a lower baseline score, with a lot less knowledge of the test and the way it’s scored and not much information about the college application process in general,” says Bachur Gopalan. “That means that our curriculum itself has a lot of scaffolding; it doesn’t assume they know certain concepts. What we do is remediation, then apply the core academic concepts in an SAT setting.”
Unlike Kaplan and other for-profit tutors, CollegeSpring’s curriculum is taught by classroom teachers. That personnel choice is important because students need a foundation of trust before they dive into the forbidding world of college admissions, says Bachur Gopalan, a former high school teacher. “They don’t want to learn from people who make them feel they are not smart,” she says. “They don’t want to feel like charity cases.”

Students who completed the 2014-15 CollegeSpring program at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School.

Besides arming teachers with the curricular resources to coach low-income students, the nonprofit employs top undergraduates from area colleges to reinforce the teacher’s lessons in a small-group setting. In what’s known as “near-peer mentoring,” these students, who’ve successfully enrolled in college, instill confidence in the younger students who are just embarking on their post–high school journey.

That’s exactly how it went for Karimah Omer, a Yemeni immigrant who came to the US in 2000 to live with 17 relatives in a one-bedroom apartment in East Oakland. “Coming from a family of nine siblings, it was hard to think about my parents being able to afford college,” says Omer, who thought, if anything, her parents could save up for her younger sister’s education. But her CollegeSpring mentor, a junior enrolled at UC Berkeley, entranced Omer with her description of the university as another world unto itself — a message that resonated because the mentor was from Oakland too. “We’re so underestimated. We’re expected to get local restaurant jobs and live off that. The whole group was happy we had someone from our city, doing really great things, who went to Cal. She showed us what it means to be a leader for the community.”

With CollegeSpring’s help, Omer devoted her energies to improving her SAT score in the hopes a school would notice her determination. She watched the tallies on her practice test rise, “little by little,” until her final score on the real exam rose 325 points. With that score, Omer matriculated to Mills College, an all-female liberal arts school in Oakland. She’s now a sophomore with an eye toward earning a master’s to work with autistic children. She’s also paying it forward, having become a CollegeSpring mentor herself.

Since 2008, about half of CollegeSpring’s students have gone on to four-year colleges, which generally have higher graduation rates than community colleges. (Nationally, 52 percent of low-income students who finish high school enroll in either community college or four-year programs.) About 80 percent of those alumni, Neiman adds, are on track to finish their degree. With each additional correct answer on the SAT, thousands of first-generation college-bound students are springing out of their disadvantaged circumstances.

This Chef Has Been Putting Food Sustainability on the Table for Decades

Back in 2007, there were only two farmers’ markets in the country that offered a special deal for poor families: one in New York City and another in Columbia Heights, Md. That’s before Michel Nischan, a James Beard Award-winning chef long associated with the sustainable food movement, got involved. His grassroots organization, the nonprofit Wholesome Wave, helped persuade Congress to provide low-income families with extra bucks if they bought healthy, local fare. NationSwell spoke to Nischan by phone about his efforts to end food insecurity.
Wholesome Wave aspires to make healthy, local food more affordable to low-income shoppers. How have you accomplished that goal?
The target of our activity is federal dollars. The average person’s benefit through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) is about $4.20 a day — and that’s to spend on breakfast, lunch and dinner. When that’s all you have to spend on food, you’re really forced to make choices that you might not want to make.
The 2014 Farm Bill included the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program, with $100 million dollars in federal funding that has to be matched in full from the private sector to double SNAP dollars spent on fruits and vegetables. We wanted to level the playing field between healthy food and artificially inexpensive foods, like instant rice and noodles or snack chips, which are cheaper because of agriculture policies, tax breaks for large manufacturing facilities and transportation subsidies that scaled system enjoys. We raised private money to double SNAP and started with fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets. The message to the consumer was “Spend your SNAP on anything you want, but if you come over here [to the farmers’ market], you double your money.”
Why do fruits and vegetables often cost more than less healthy foods?
The major reason some foods are so incredibly inexpensive is the public support for soy, corn, rice and wheat. Cereal companies often pay a price that is below the cost of production. After world wars I and II, these crops were favored as the future, and we produced a lot of them, because whichever country or ally bloc had the most food for its marching armies would be the one to win a war. When we learned how to process food to make it last 10 years, how to make it lighter so it’s cheaper to transport, how to put nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium in the ground so things would miraculously grow, we felt secure. And we also thought we could end starvation and feed the world. In that compelling moment, it was really easy to get the American public and Congress on board. It wasn’t to give one sector an unfair advantage, but those systems are still in place. It’s kind of a false economy; it’s not a true free market. [The question now is], how do we create a case to shift all of that public money that goes to funding these artificially inexpensive foods, which we now know are not good for us and the environment, to the types of foods that are good?
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What has building this grassroots organization taught you about leadership?
We need people to understand what they can align on. What I’ve learned over the years — and I think this is endemic in our society — is that we only want to work with people who think just like we do. Whether it’s in business or nonprofits, you’d much prefer working with someone who shares your core values. People ask us, “Is Wholesome Wave anti-GMO?” Why are you asking us that question? We’re about affordable access. Let’s align on that. If the thing you deeply, personally believe in is migrant farm-worker rights, equitable access to land or a ban on GMOs, work on those things. But there are other ways, while we’re doing our work, to come together on food justice.
What can the rest of us do to help further this movement?
I think food is one of the most powerful lenses to evaluate the quality of a lawmaker when we’re going to the polls. What’s their stance on abortion or marriage equality? All of those are important things and informed by deeply held religious beliefs. But if you’re going to take a meal a day off the table of a child by eliminating nutrition in schools, or you say that you don’t see the point of paying for healthcare in schools, you’re probably a jerk. How they vote on food and hunger is a great lens into their soul. Personally, I want an honorable, good person in office making decisions on my behalf. When you show up to vote, make sure you know what these folks do with food votes. You can go on Food Policy Action, put in your zip code and get a score for your representatives based on how they vote on food issues.
What books would you recommend to read up on the current system?
I’d recommend Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire,” Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America,” Mas Masumoto’s “Wisdom of the Last Farmer,” and “Fair Food” by Oran B. Hesterman. Still, none of those really touches on the potential power of changing the decision you make at the grocery store. Food has the amazing potential to fix human health, the environment, our economy and our society, and people need to be inspired.
What other innovations are you excited about right now?
With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, we see an opportunity in the way Medicare and Medicaid dollars are spent, now that we’re shifting to more of a prevention culture rather than a fee-for-service model. We could potentially see billions of dollars put toward creating a fruit-and-vegetable prescription program. [In 2011, Wholesome Wave launched the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program to encourage healthcare providers to prescribe fresh produce to patients.] Doctors, nutritionists and nurse practitioners can work together to diagnose an at-risk patient, work to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables, and then measure that for health outcomes.
It’s actually less expensive to feed a family of four fruits and vegetables for 20 years than it is to have one person go on dialysis for four years. Dialysis from diabetes and kidney failure is the most expensive line-item in Medicare and Medicaid. And if we could get certain healthy food item SKUs coded as reimbursable for prevention, that would unlock billions of dollars and affordability for the country’s 66 million food-insecure people who are having difficulty making the lifestyle changes to prevent diseases that cost us over half a trillion dollars a year.

This Nonprofit’s Goal? To Be the Yelp of Social Services

In East Palo Alto, a short drive from the headquarters of Google, Sun Microsystems and Facebook, a high school student without housing was contemplating where she’d sleep that night. The girl asked Rey Faustino, then an employee at the nonprofit BUILD, an incubator for low-income entrepreneurs, to help her find a shelter. Faustino located a dusty binder whose plastic sleeves held flyers about social services. But most of the information proved outdated or incorrect, he recalls. “It took us all night to find one shelter for a student and her family, and it took us weeks to get them into stable, affordable housing.” The support net, it became clear at that moment, had holes.
Social services, provided by charities and government, largely haven’t kept pace in today’s hyper-connected world. Most nonprofits have websites, but that doesn’t mean they’re SEO-friendly or that they’ve been updated recently. The absence of quality information online forces struggling families to rely on what they hear through word of mouth. That leaves the most disconnected individuals in the most vulnerable position.
“How do you find the best Indian restaurant in San Francisco? By using Yelp or Google,” Faustino says. “We’re doing all these amazing things to advance life for the middle class, but we weren’t using any of these technologies and assets for the most vulnerable families. I thought that was ridiculous, and I wanted to do something about it.”
Five years ago, Faustino founded One Degree. A comprehensive directory of the 20,000 social service resources in the Bay Area, the online database is searchable by location and proximity to public transit, language and entry requirements, like age, household size and income. The platform works on both computers and smartphones, making it easy for most people to connect. (Surveys by Pew Research Center have found that nearly two-thirds of Americans own smartphones, and the number is expected to keep rising; for 13 percent of low-income earners, the devices are their primary way to access the internet.) Once a user has identified a match, One Degree helps with the intake process, such as scheduling an appointment or filling out an online application. That extra info might save someone a bus trip to the charity’s doors, only to find they’re not accepting applications.
So far, One Degree has connected more than 140,000 people in the Bay Area to the right agency. After a national competition, Faustino’s work was recognized by Inherent Group in November, when they presented the organization with the $50,000 grand prize at NationSwell’s Summit on Solutions. (Jukay Hsu, the founder and executive director of Coalition for Queens, which trains a diverse and underserved population of NYC residents to be app and web developers, snagged the second-place $25,000 prize.)


Read more about the Inherent Prize and the 2016 finalists


Faustino knows firsthand about the necessity of social services — and the difficulty of finding the right ones. As new immigrants from the Philippines, his parents worked multiple jobs to afford the rent in Los Angeles: his mother as a hospital administrator and, later, a nurse; his father, a salesman at Home Depot and a handyman on the weekends. They got the extra support they needed with naturalization papers, healthcare and summer school from local charities. Faustino became his family’s connector, finding out about programs from his teachers and translating for his parents. One Degree, he says, is the program he wishes he had as a kid.
Like Yelp, Faustino envisions that One Degree’s users will rate nonprofits and write about their experience. While that feature sounds simple enough to people who are used to streaming movies on Netflix and reading books on their tablets, it would upend the way nonprofits work. Forced to reckon with users’ commentary, a nonprofit might be more responsive to community needs, Faustino believes.
And, in a further boon to efficiency, collecting search data might give a more accurate picture of how disparate parts of the sector should fit together, he adds. Currently, many cities and counties focus only on the constituents who live within a district’s limits. But One Degree might register a fuller scope, picking up on the need for services where people work or where they hope to move. In the Bay Area, for example, you might see San Francisco residents looking for cheaper housing in nearby Contra Costa or childcare in San Mateo where their kids go to school. That could allow government agencies to better allocate services where they’re actually needed.
“In the past, nonprofit social services were transactional. You go to a place, receive a service and then go home,” explains Faustino. “Now we have the opportunity to make it more relationship-based, to see it not as a one-time change to a person’s life, but as a whole constellation or web of services” that a person has at their disposal.
In fact, these groups find that interconnectedness so valuable that one-fifth of One Degree’s revenue comes from social-service organizations that pay Faustino’s team for sophisticated referral tools. Some of these assessment tools direct users to other resources, like to a hospital for a screening of diabetes risk; other tools track where else clients go for help, enabling a caseworker to see, for instance, that her client visited a food bank, shelter and workforce development program. “No one agency can do everything for every client, so they’re always relying on other resources to help,” Faustino says. “One Degree makes it easy for them to access those other resources and stay organized.”
One Degree’s model could change the way we think about impact. Because social-service recipients get help from multiple organizations — a dozen, on average, Faustino says — the reviews could establish which programs actually helped, as described from the user’s perspective. “A lot of impact reports and messaging says that so-and-so went to a shelter, and we changed her life. Part of that is true — the shelter did help — but it wasn’t the only thing,” he says. “We take away a person’s agency when we say it’s just the organization that helped. She’s the one who made the choice, the one who went and found the shelter and other services. Funding streams are very competitive, and organizations have to paint themselves as the savior. But I fundamentally believe that holds back the nonprofit sector from seeing huge impact in our communities.”
Traditionally, social-service nonprofits have lagged behind in these high-tech times, but with One Degree, they’re finally starting to catch up.