These Mobile Showers for the Homeless Offer Much More Than Hot Water

In Jersey City, New Jersey, weekday mornings are bustling at the Journal Square station. People rush in and out of trains and across platforms; most are coming from or going to New  York City, commuting to work or dropping children off at daycare.
But a few people near the Journal Square station won’t be stepping onto a train. Instead, they’re stepping into a mobile shower. They’ll be met with soap, warm water and clean towels.
This month, the City of Jersey City launched a pilot program offering free access to showers, bathrooms and a new set of clothes to anyone in need. Many of the people visiting these showers are experiencing homelessness; after their shower, they have the opportunity to talk to coordinators on site who can refer them to additional resources.  
A hot shower creates a launching point to connect people with what they need, whether it’s mental health support, checking in with a case manager or receiving SNAP or Medicaid benefits. 
Mayor Steven Fulop said that the program goes beyond cleanliness. The goal is to build trust. 
“We started to think about how to use the resources — simple things like a shower — as a conduit to building a bond and trust and a larger conversation to steer people towards better services,” Fulop told NationSwell. 
The pilot program was created after a series of meetings between citizens and the mayor’s Quality of Life Task Force, a group of leaders from across city departments involved with issues pertaining to the public. One common concern from Journal Square business owners and residents was sanitation in and around the station. 
“This isn’t a police issue, this isn’t a prosecution issue … this is really a health and human services issue,” Stacey Flanagan, the director for Health and Human Services of Jersey City told NationSwell. 
For a solution, the city turned to a similar one implemented after Hurricane Sandy. To help with recovery from the superstorm’s impact, Jersey City used grant funds to purchase a mobile shower unit. For years, the showers sat unused. Today, the unit has a new purpose. It serves about five people every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. 
Jersey City isn’t the first place to implement mobile showers. In Oregon’s Washington County, Community Connection, a coalition of nonprofits, finished building a mobile shower unit earlier this month. The City of San Antonio, California, is currently in discussions to purchase a $58,000 mobile shower.
Since 2014, the nonprofit Lava Mae has been driving throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland serving hundreds of people every week. In California, where there are thousands of individuals facing homelessness and few public showers, the ability to get clean is a challenge. 
“Here we are in this first-world country, in a super affluent city, and still, we have people who don’t have access to water and sanitation,” the founder, Doneice Sandoval, told NationSwell
Flanagan noted that “we’re not promising a shower’s going to change your whole life,” but that being clean can create a sense of dignity. It can give people the courage to interact with business owners, apply for jobs and move through the world without fear of judgment. One man left saying he “felt like a million bucks,” she said.
Currently, the project is projected to run throughout the rest of the year. Afterward, the city will assess the best location and times to offer showers. 
Jersey City is part of Hudson County, where homelessness has been on a steady rise over the last three years. A 2019 study conducted by the nonprofit Monarch Housing Associates found a 3% increase — approximately 30 individuals — in the number of people experiencing homelessness from January 2018 to January 2019.
Jobs and affordable housing were among the top causes of homelessness, which gives insight into areas of improvement for Hudson County. 
“There are organizations doing great work around homelessness, but there are some things that fall through the cracks,” said Flanagan.
Jersey City also has plans to open a shelter next year that would provide rooms for 150 individuals, with space for 14 people living with HIV/AIDS and six permanent homes. 
“I think the system has failed these people in many different ways,” Fulop said. “So doing a simple gesture that most people take for granted on a daily basis, can really go a long way.”
More: Showers and Toilet on Wheels Give Homeless a Clean Slate 

NYC Airport Workers Receive $19 Minimum Wage — the Highest in the Country

New York City labor advocates just achieved a huge milestone for workers’ rights. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey recently approved a plan to increase the minimum wage for airport workers to $19 per hour, the highest in the nation. The wage hike would affect some 40,000 baggage handlers, security guards, catering staff and other workers at the three major airports in the region.  
The announcement comes after years of research, protest and advocacy from unionized workers. Proponents of the increase faced severe pushback from airline companies, which argued that higher wages would mean higher prices for customers.
However, labor advocates noted that high turnover rates fueled by insufficient wages were making the travel experience less safe and efficient for passengers. New York City’s airport worker turnover rates are exceptionally high — more than 30 percent annually, and even as high as 160 percent at one company, according to a report issued by the Port Authority.
New York City’s airports are vulnerable on multiple levels. Together they serve more than 100 million travelers annually, and they have faced overwhelming crowds and inclement weather in recent years, not to mention several thwarted attacks.
https://www.facebook.com/senatorsanders/posts/10157350736527908
“The new policy will benefit the traveling public by reducing staff turnover and providing an experienced, well-trained, motivated workforce that can better assist in responding to an emergency, identifying security issues, operating equipment safely, and providing experienced customer service,” reads a statement from the New Jersey governor’s office.
The Port Authority modeled its plan after other airports around the country saw success improving operations and safety by increasing their minimum wages. “Lifting airport workers’ wages is now a tried and tested tool for responding to a recurring set of problems at airports around the United States,” the agency noted in its report.   
Airport workers in New York currently earn at least $13 per hour under state law, and workers in New Jersey earn a minimum of $10.45. Beginning on Nov. 1, New York workers will receive $13.60 an hour and New Jersey workers will earn $12.45. The wages will increase annually until they hit a minimum of $19 an hour in 2023.
Raising the minimum wage is a hot-button issue. While proponents argue that an increase will lift people out of poverty and reduce turnover rates, thus saving millions in training costs, critics say that wage hikes will ultimately lead to massive job loss.
Nonetheless, the airport workers’ wage bump has been hailed as a triumph for the American worker. “Their struggle will send a message around the country that when workers stand together and fight for justice, they can win,” said Senator Bernie Sanders.

The Job-Training Program Giving City Kids a Reason to Hope

As urban areas across the nation experience renewal and transformation, Camden, N.J., is at the beginning of its renaissance.
The city — once known as America’s most dangerous — has been experiencing dramatic decreases in gun crime and violence, namely an 80 percent reduction in homicides during the first three months of 2017. That’s good news for Camden, which has also become a testing ground for tech nonprofits that want to help beleaguered youth find their way out of neighborhoods riddled with gang violence and into well-paying tech jobs.
But for Camden’s young residents, an increase in opportunity might not necessarily mean a better economic future.
“We had seen too many times in Camden, programs that had trained young people the same way, the same old skills, the same old methodology. Our young people needed something different,” says Dan Rhoton, executive director for Hopeworks ‘N Camden. “Our young people needed training, they needed healing, so that they could get a career that not only gave them a pathway to the future, but offered them sustainable opportunities now.”
Other nonprofits work to get minority students or young girls interested in tech jobs, but Rhoton says that the biggest challenge most of those organizations face isn’t getting kids interested — it’s that they don’t address the trauma that comes along with poverty or exposure to violence.
By using therapy as a means to address deep issues that can affect work ethic and personal integrity, Hopeworks has been successful in providing a steady stream of quality graduates that are career-focused and mentally prepared for work.
“Our young people have been hurt. Their legs have been broken, and yet we put them at the starting line with everyone else and tell them to run,” says Rhoton. “When they struggle, when they fall over, what too many programs do is they say, ‘Try harder,’ or they say, ‘You’re not motivated.’ If my leg is broken, motivation is not the issue — healing is.”
Hopeworks began 17 years ago under the guidance of three faith-based community leaders that “looked out on the streets and saw young people with no dreams, saw young people with no opportunities,” says Rhoton. The program was meant to address some of the biggest challenges in Camden at the time: getting teens from the tough streets of one of America’s most challenging and economically poor cities into more fulfilling careers in tech.
With a background working at detention centers and bringing education to those formerly incarcerated, Rhoton came to Hopeworks in 2012. At the time, the organization was experiencing problems, namely that it was only seeing a 10 percent success rate.
“We were bad at our job,” he says, adding that the low success rate was the catalyst for Hopeworks to focus on personal issues, such as abuse or neglect that can hamper a student’s ability to learn. “We decided that a 10 percent, or 20 percent, 30 percent success rate wasn’t okay.”
“Yes, young people need to learn technology, but if you can help them deal with what’s happened to them, then you can help them show up on time, you can make sure they’re ready for work,” Rhoton says. “It’s harder, it’s longer.”
Brandon Rodriguez, a 19-year-old student intern for Hopeworks and lifelong Camden resident, says that when he joined the organization, he was only looking for a gig learning graphic design.
“When you come into Hopeworks, you have this pre-conceived notion that you’re coming here for an internship, or you’re coming here to just talk to someone. You don’t think you’re gonna get as much as you get.” he says. “I’ve only been here for less than a week, about five days now, but the opportunities started flying my way.”
Student-turned-mentor Frankie Matas graduated in 2013. Today he works with incoming Hopeworks students.
“Everybody learns different. If some people need to show them a different way, I help them in that aspect,” he says. “Hopeworks noticed that about me, and that’s what got me to become the first youth trainer. It helped me become a better leader.”
That aspect of youth training and leadership is key, says Rhoton.
“It’d be one thing if someone who looked like me was teaching you how to code, but if it’s someone who, just a few weeks ago, was standing on the corner with you, that’s a powerful message about who can do it, and how you can do it,” says Rhoton.
To that extent, Hopeworks has been successful since Rhoton came on board. The program has seen a 300 percent increase in students going into college and employs nearly 50 students each year after graduation to work within their studios, which take in $600,000 in annual revenue designing websites, among other things. Other participants land part-time and full-time jobs in the tech market, says Rhoton.
“What we wanna do is we wanna make sure we change the equation,” says Rhoton. “So that our young people are not only able to change their lives, but they’re able to change lives in the next generation, as well.
The 2017 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from Oct. 2 to Nov. 2 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.
 
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How One New Jersey City Is Boosting Minority Entrepreneurship

Newark, N.J., is an urban renewal success story — but only for some of its 280,000 residents.
As more and more people move into sleek new lofts downtown, and amenities like a new pedestrian bridge and urban park draw hordes more, a disparity has become abundantly clear: Newark’s minority entrepreneurs are being left out of all this development.
Lyneir Richardson, executive director of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CUEED) at Rutgers University, recalls a flood of people knocking on the doors of the business school, asking for help accessing resources. “‘We’re not getting accepted to the local accelerators,’” Richardson says the school kept hearing — particularly from minorities and women looking to launch businesses.
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Underrepresented entrepreneurs like the ones Richardson works with often have trouble breaking into the formal and informal networks that support startups. If you know someone who’s opened a small business you’re likely to get recommendations of lawyers and accountants who can help you. But the would-be business owners CUEED works with — about 70 percent of whom are black or Latino, and 60 percent of whom are women — don’t have that advantage, says Richardson.
They also tend to have more trouble accessing capital in the form of investments or loans, and they may need education on what their financing options are, he adds.

Rich in Resources

In many ways, Richardson is the perfect person to serve as a champion for these marginalized entrepreneurs. He was raised as the son of business owners in Chicago, where his parents owned a bar, a restaurant, and two specialty popcorn stores, and he grew up hearing about the bread-and-butter issues of running small operations.
Later, when Richardson was 27 and a lawyer for a large bank, he was assigned pro bono work helping identify candidates for loans in a tough area of Chicago. From the perspective of the bank, Richardson says, the neighborhood didn’t look promising. But he had a different view.
“I knew people who grew up there — I grew up there,” he says. Right then, he made a life-altering decision: “I wanted my personal mission to be seeing opportunity in people and places that others didn’t.”
From any viewpoint, Newark has a lot of potential. “This is an area that’s always been asset-rich,” Richardson says, with major air, shipping and rail hubs, several colleges and universities, and New York City right next door. The mayor, Ras Baraka, has championed local businesses and recently launched an initiative aimed at encouraging institutions like Rutgers and its employees to “live, buy and hire local.” But there remains a challenge — namely, making sure that all this opportunity is equally open to everyone.

Brainstorming Solutions

Richardson attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit in Kansas City, Mo., which gathered people from around the country who work to support entrepreneurs in their communities. A common goal, no matter where participants hailed from, was generating new ideas to build thriving ecosystems that connect people who want to start businesses with the resources they need to do so. For his part, Richardson came out of the summit with a couple of concrete ideas he hopes to put into action in Newark.
The first is a solution to a problem that many minority and female entrepreneurs face: They don’t know anyone who has thousands of dollars to lend them as informal seed money. At the Summit, Richardson heard about entrepreneurs using crowdfunding to raise that first round of funding. Richardson says he knows people in his community are familiar with crowdfunding, because it’s often used to raise money for funeral costs or other personal needs. “Can crowdfunding be broadly defined as a friends-and-family round for entrepreneurs of color?” Richardson wonders. He intends to find out.
After connecting with someone from Seattle who educates angel investors on how to evaluate small business investment opportunities, Richardson is thinking about launching a similar program in his city. His nascent plan: targeting people who have some history in Newark and might otherwise make a donation to an existing program, and instead trying to persuade them to invest in an entrepreneur who can create new value in the city.
“That’s something I heard that I cannot wait to try,” Richardson says.

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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Summit, convening 435 leaders fighting to help break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.

The School Where Only Addicts Roam the Hallways

A year ago, Penelope sat alone in her darkened bedroom, numbed out on drugs.
It was her junior year in high school. She’d quit the volleyball club after showing up high too many times. Her grades were mostly Cs and Ds. College seemed out of reach. And rehab? She tried that, for four months, but when she got out, she surrendered to the pressure to use again.
“I was just really unhappy unless I was high,” she recalls.
Today, Penelope (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy) is a student at a specialized school in New Jersey that teaches teens how to maintain long-term sobriety—viewing addiction not as a moral wrong, but as a health issue. It ditched old ways of thinking about drug abuse as an acute crisis in favor of a model that treats addiction as a chronic disease that necessitates a lifestyle change.
The school, Raymond J. Lesniak Experience, Strength and Hope Recovery High School, only has seven students. It’s one of just 38 so-called “recovery” schools across the country, says Sasha McLean, a Houston educator who sits on the Association of Recovery Schools’s board of directors. After the failure of the War on Drugs and the spread of addiction into whiter suburbs, new ways of treating addiction view recovery as a long-term, cyclical process that includes relapses and requires new peer relationships, experts say.
Compared to 2002, teen usage of marijuana is on the decline nationwide. Yet over roughly the same period, overdoses have risen. Contrary to popular thought, the classic notion of peer pressure isn’t to blame, explains Brian C. Kelly, Purdue University associate professor of sociology. Rather, young people ponder “whether they think substance use will allow them to have more fun with their friends,” he says. In other words, teens pick their friends based on who else will smoke with them.
While empirical evidence on recovery high schools is limited, they could work by “giving kids the opportunity to hit the reset button on their social networks,” Kelly believes. Extracted from their old schools, young addicts won’t hang out with their drug-using friends and can build strong relationships with other sober youth.

At school, students make a daily contribution to a gratitude chain.

Run by the nonprofit Prevention Links, Penelope’s school is New Jersey’s first recovery high school. Founded in 2015, it integrates traditional classwork with specialized drug counseling. Operating out of a basement in Roselle Park, Lesniak High School’s tiny staff has helped 25 families cope with opioid, cannabis and alcohol abuse. “Really what we’re creating is the opportunity to build new strengths to be able to go back into that [prior] environment and deal with those temptations,” says Pamela Capaci, who opened the school after five years of lobbying.
In most respects, Lesniak resembles a regular public school. Students return home at the end of the day, and no one pays tuition. Math and language arts are taught in person; other courses are conducted online, giving Penelope the responsibility to work through the material at her own pace. Small class sizes prevent Penelope from playing hooky or zoning out in class. “That’s useful if you’re someone like me who likes to be rebellious,” she says.
A sizable portion of the day is devoted to talking about recovery. Penelope sets goals for the short and long term each week in eight categories, ranging from academics to sobriety. After lunch, Penelope and her classmates add links to a paper chain of things for which they’re grateful. If she ever feels the temptation to use, she can retreat to a recovery room to recline on beanbags or jump on a mini-trampoline. But hardest of all, Penelope reports, are the regular drug tests.
That’s because, for months after she enrolled, Penelope couldn’t kick her addiction. She knew she should stay clean. It was her senior year, her one chance to get into college. Still, through December, Penelope couldn’t stop smoking pot. “It was part of my life for so long that it made me feel safe to get away from my problems,” she says, adding, “Addiction isn’t something that is a choice. It’s something you have for your whole life.”
Penelope occasionally sneaks a puff of weed, but relapses are rare. She believes she’s far better off at Lesniak than she’d be at her old school, where she once walked in on a girl snorting a line of coke in the bathroom and the pressure to use felt inescapable.
Temptations flared, in particular, on Friday nights when Penelope’s Snapchat features a torturous live stream of drinking and smoking at local house parties. Old classmates texted her, “Want to burn?” or “Should we get wasted tonight?” Like most teenagers, Penelope struggled to say no.
“Some people can choose to get high. I really can’t stop when I do it.”
What finally changed? Penelope credits her relationship with the school’s clinical social worker and two recovery mentors who are recovering addicts. They draw on personal experiences with sobriety to commiserate and to share tips. Because they understand the tough battle against addiction, they know there will be slip-ups. Rather than berating Penelope when she got high over winter break, they stuck with her. “Recovery is not a linear process,” says program coordinator Morgan Thompson.
A visual recovery plan at Raymond J. Lesniak Experience, Strength and Hope Recovery High School.

Given the complexities youth face, the school says it gauges its effectiveness, not in how many days students stay clean, but in how many full-blown relapses it prevents. “The model allows us to catch things very early. We have kids coming to school saying, ‘I smoked pot last night, and I don’t want to do it again,’” explains Capaci. “The story of our success lies in what happens … to get them back and not experience any lost learning time. It sheds the shame and fear around their struggle to learn new behaviors.”
Penelope vouches this approach works. The fact that someone’s checking in on her makes her think twice, she says. “If I were just at home and came up with a plan, the chance of me following through wouldn’t be too realistic,” Penelope adds. “Here, when I come in every day, they check up on me. It’s a backbone. That’s really what this place is: a backbone for me.”
Penelope has clocked two months of sobriety. She’s back at the gym. Her report card is filled with As. She’s applied to six colleges where she hopes to study medicine and has already been admitted to two.
She will always be vulnerable to addiction, but Penelope now has the tools to triumph over it.

This Small Token Shows Love to Those Affected by Incarceration

Every Friday, during a weekly book hour at a public middle school in Bergen County, N.J., a little girl picked out the same Scholastic pamphlet about Alcatraz Island. Delores Connors, the class’s reading instructor, couldn’t figure out why. What was so captivating about a defunct federal penitentiary?

When Connors asked the kids to share what they were reading, the girl’s arm shot into the air. “I really like this book,” she announced, showing her classmates a picture of a cell. “Now I know what it looks like where my dad sleeps.” Connors tensed. She didn’t want the girl to disclose too much. As the daughter of a convict (Connors’s mother was incarcerated while pregnant with her), she wanted the girl to feel dignified talking about her dad, the way other children are.

“From that moment, I began to think, ‘How many other kids don’t share?’” Connors wondered.

She teamed up with her colleague Mary Joyce Laqui to ease communication about loved ones who are locked up, launching the greeting card line Write to Matter. Inscribed with Hallmark-style messages, the notes cut past stereotypes about the incarcerated as dangerous criminals to express affection for people who’ve made a mistake. While the enterprise is still in its infancy, it could eventually provide an invaluable service to those dealing with the corrections industry, including an estimated 44 percent of black women with a family member behind bars.

“Our greeting card line came out of that need, people who need to be able to communicate with their loved ones,” Connors says. “Because when your family member or the person you love gets in trouble, you still have to show up at work. Your church member knows your son got arrested; they don’t want to mention it, but they want to say something. The cards give us access to do that.”

The schoolteachers initially stamped the cards’ front cover with their own artwork. But after meeting an artist through Fortune Society, they’re pairing with inmates (current or former) who provide photos and drawings that adorn the outsides.

At first, Connors and Laqui set up Write to Matter as a social enterprise, selling cards at a profit that could be reinvested in the company’s operations. But something felt wrong about charging a fee. Now in the process of applying for nonprofit status, the teachers send cards to whomever emails them. They’re also planning to distribute them at Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to families heading to prisons upstate and right outside Rikers Island, New York City’s troubled jail, to those about to enter the visiting room.

Despite their distance, each inmate still matters to his relations on the outside; Write to Matter’s words are making it just a little easier to say so.

Homepage photo by iStock.

MORE: The Hope-Filled Program That’s Keeping One-Time Criminals from Becoming Serial Offenders

Rutgers University Admits Unlikely Student Body, Journalists Use Reporting to Urge Politicians to Act and More

 
A University That Prioritizes the Students Who Are Often Ignored, The Atlantic
Traditionally, America’s colleges seek to attract the best and brightest to their hallowed halls. Committed to cultivating local talent regardless of status, New Jersey’s Rutgers University is bucking that trend, recruiting low-income, public-school graduates with mediocre GPAs and test scores — the very students that other schools shun.
A Plan to Flood San Francisco With News on Homelessness, New York Times
Can journalists advocate for a cause while remaining unbiased in their reporting? Next month, writers and editors from 30 Bay Area media outlets plan to do just that while collaborating on coverage focused on San Francisco’s homeless problem. The goal: To serve as a catalyst for solutions to the seemingly intractable problem.
This City Is Giving Away Super-Fast Internet to Poor Students, CNN Money
No longer are the poorest families in Chattanooga, Tenn., forced to visit a fast-food restaurant so their children can access the Internet needed to complete their homework. Two new programs are bringing citizens online in the Southern city, where 22.5 percent of the population lives in poverty.
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduate from College. This College Is Going to Change That

How Coral Reefs Might Resist Climate Change, America’s Coolest Mayor Runs for Senate and More

 
Unnatural Selection, The New Yorker
The ocean holds many wonders, but perhaps none are more precious and more fragile than its tropical coral reefs. Coral, at first sight, appears to be a lifeless rock, but it’s actually a miniature animal that houses an even smaller plant inside its cells — a symbiotic relationship developed over millennia. Ruth Gates, a University of Hawaii marine biologist, is attempting to speed up that evolutionary process and create a “super coral” by exposing it to the harsher conditions expected by next century: warmer, more acidic water caused by climate change. It’s a new take on conservation — call it “assisted evolution” — that’s also being tested on forests in Syracuse, N.Y., where a professor is genetically engineering a fungus-resistant chestnut tree. Can these scientists do what Mother Nature couldn’t?
This Mayor Wants To Give Struggling Cities a Front-Row Seat in D.C., Next City
Standing at 6’8” with a shaved head and tattoos on his arms, the mayor of Braddock, a Pittsburgh suburb hammered by industrial decline, doesn’t look like your typical public official. Dubbed America’s coolest mayor, John Fetterman has implemented some of the brightest ideas for urban renewal, as he replaced a moribund steel industry with public art, urban agriculture, craft beer and other hipster fare. Now, Fetterman is competing in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat (currently held by a Republican). If he wins, he’s promised a new Marshall Plan (like the billions invested in Europe after WWII) for America’s forgotten cities. In most election cycles, Fetterman would be written off as an outsider without a chance, but in this unpredictable year, this fresh candidate may just have a shot.
The Resurrection of St. Benedict’s, 60 Minutes
Up until 1967, St. Benedict’s Prep was your run-of-the-mill Catholic boy’s school, serving upper-middle class, white families in Newark, N.J. But when racial tensions exploded into bloody riots that summer, whites fled the city en masse. The school nearly collapsed (it closed for one year), but faculty member Edwin Leahy, then 26, quickly got it back on its feet. It reopened with one big change: students would run the school themselves, keeping each other out of gangs and competing for top marks. Of its 550 students today, nearly all from poor neighborhoods, only two percent don’t finish high school — in a city with a 30 percent dropout rate. Intellect isn’t the major problem in American education, Leahy, a Benedictine monk, argues; it’s all about making students’ realizing their own potential and see “the fact that they are a gift to somebody else.”

Everyone Should Stay Warm During the Winter — Especially America’s Heroes

Excluding Veterans Day and Memorial Day, it can be easy to forget the sacrifices that America’s former military personnel made on our country’s behalf. This winter, a national fuel retailer is stepping up to do something more for veterans, providing savings on an essential utility to help them stay warm.
Suburban Propane, a public company with headquarters in New Jersey and 700 locations in 41 states, is offering a special on the next delivery of 100 gallons or more of gas to households where a veteran or active-duty service member lives. For new customers with military ties, Suburban Propane will take $10 off the bill of their first delivery of 100 gallons or more and comp all charges for the change-out, safety check and the tank’s first year of rent. Existing customers have the opportunity to take advantage of the savings as well; they can receive $10 off the next delivery of 100 gallons or more, and by referring another veteran, they can earn an additional 35 gallons of fuel added to their next order.
Across the country, at least 49,900 veterans sleep on the streets on any given night. The shock of combat can make holding down a job, keeping up with bills and being responsible for other aspects of day-to-day civilian life difficult. Suburban Propane decided to lessen the financial burden on veterans after senior management realized how many of their colleagues had military ties, says Mark Wienberg, the company’s chief development officer.
Of Suburban Propane’s 3,600 employees, “many have family members who are veterans or are veterans themselves. Many have sons or daughters, nieces or nephews who are currently deployed. The head of human resources here is a veteran of the Marines. One guy that managed a local service center and is now overseeing our fleet and tank assets, he’s a military vet,” Wienberg says. The savings offer is “our way of giving back to those who have given for us,” he says.
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And it’s a way to reach veterans as the company ramps up recruiting efforts, offering military personnel employment opportunities. “Many, in their duty to the nation, have performed services that are similar to what we do here, driving major trucks and vehicles,” Wienberg explains. “Someone who comes back from duty could be a service technician, or an officer might run a service center.” The company is currently working with lawmakers on legislation at the state level that would streamline the licensing process for veterans who drove vehicles of a similar class overseas. “We’ll do whatever we can to assist them,” Wienberg stresses.
James Marentette, who was stationed on a Navy aircraft carrier in the 1950s, and his wife Cindy, recently signed up for the deal. The couple, who have a grandson serving in the Air Force, met in church after losing their spouses to cancer and now live together in Crossville, Tenn. Frustrated by their previous gas provider’s poor customer service, they switched to Suburban Propane two years ago at their daughter’s suggestion. The special savings for veterans has helped their pocketbooks, as they rely on fixed income from Social Security and a small pension.
“There is nothing more rewarding than serving your country. Not everyone has that privilege — and I considered it a privilege to do that. To be recognized by a company like Suburban, even in a small way, just means so much to me and so much to all of our friends too,” says Jim. “You get a lot of discounts in restaurants and things like that, but I never heard of a company that supplies utilities to homes helping vets.”
“We think it’s wonderful,” Cindy chimes in, “and we’re so thankful. It makes us feel like people really care.”
The offer is good for one delivery taken by March 31, 2016.

A Second Life For Old Shipping Containers: Farms, Shops and Housing

You’ve seen them stacked six high on cargo ships pulling into port, the multi-colored mosaic of corrugated metal boxes carrying products from the other end of the ocean. Built for seamless transition between ships, trucks and trains, the standard size for these crates of steel or aluminum is usually 20-feet long. Worldwide, there’s the equivalent of 34.5 million at that length.

The container’s best asset is its near-endless reusability, a quality that’s attracted those outside the maritime industry. We at NationSwell have written before about how these boxes revitalized downtown Cleveland by lining empty parking lots with pop-up shops, how a homeless man lived in one while he cleaned up a Southern California beach, and how they could be converted into solar power cubes. Seemingly all-purpose, we decided to look into some of the other surprising ways shipping containers are being (re)used to solve social problems. Here’s three inspiring projects we found:

Urban Agriculture

The United States imported more than $100 billion in food in 2013, the bulk of which is grown overseas in places like China, India, France and Chile. Rather than having our produce shipped to us in a container, two Massachusetts entrepreneurs — Brad McNamara and Jon Friedman — converted the boxes into Freight Farms. Inside their containers, dense stacks of plants and vegetables grow hydroponically, meaning their roots reach into a mineral-rich solution rather than dirt. “Our goal was to create a system that works the same in Alaska as it does in Dallas,” Friedman tells Outside magazine. It’s all controlled by computer — the intensity of the LED grow lights, the water’s pH balance, the density of nutrients released through the irrigation system — so crops can grow year-round. “Each farm is a WiFi-enabled hotspot, so your farm gets put down, it’s plugged in and it’s immediately on the web,” McNamara tells the local public radio station. Using a mobile app, farmers can set alerts and alarms. “So if you’re at home and it’s really cold outside, your farm’s covered in snow, you don’t actually have to leave your house to go check on things,” he adds. Each container can produce the equivalent of one acre’s worth of food.

Commercial Redevelopment

Reclaiming industrial materials is often a go-to for urban redevelopment. On the Jersey Shore, shipping containers that might have once been docked in the Newark Bay ports are being converted into stores and artists studios on the beach. In Asbury Park, N.J., Eddie Catalano sells ice cream; on a boardwalk nearby, another container run by Sari Perlstein offers boutique clothing. “I actually never thought it would be possible to get all the equipment that I need in such a small space,” Catalano tells the local paper. “Lo and behold, six years later, it works. It definitely works.” He says the structures aren’t the “most attractive,” but they’re highly functional. “It handles the elements well, it handles the weather well,” he adds. During Hurricane Sandy, the big box stayed firm on the boardwalk. Perlstein’s brick-and-mortar store, on the other hand, wasn’t spared from the flooding. It’s why she moved her operation into the box on the boardwalk. Now, “if there were a horrific storm we can get a crane and move that thing off. We can take it away,” she says. “That is a plus. Because if it was a building again, you’d just wave it goodbye.”

Homes for the Homeless

Hardy structures, watertight and designed not to rust, shipping containers have been proposed as a solution to our housing crunch. In Myrtle Beach, S.C., the Veterans Housing Development, a recently founded nonprofit, is refurbishing shipping containers into a permanent place for homeless veterans to stay. “Anyone notices and sees homeless veterans on street corners and in tent cities around the Horry County area, and around the country. … I have a passion for this because I hate seeing veterans out there on the streets,” Brad Jordan, a disabled veteran and the nonprofit’s executive director, tells The State. “There’s a lot of funding available for veterans housing, but not a lot of housing available.” The group recently finished their first one-bedroom home and displayed it at a fundraiser. Their ultimate goal is to create a gated village somewhere in town, “a secure and safe environment with programs that are going to assist the veterans,” Jordan adds. “If we build 40 [homes], there would be 40 filled tomorrow. The need is there.”