Community Colleges Have Abysmal Graduation Rates. Here’s How to Change That

Community college improves students’ lives — for those who make it to graduation, that is.
The sad reality for many, however, is that they’ll drop out along the way. Only one out of every five students will receive their associates degree within three years, one year past the expected time. After five years, graduation rates rise only to a paltry 35 percent.
“With graduation rates that low, community colleges can be dead ends rather than gateways for students,” says Susan Dynarski, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “Graduation rates are low in part because community colleges can’t exclude poorly prepared students. Unlike selective schools, they are required to take anyone who walks in the door, and they have to work harder to get those students to graduation.”
A program at the City University of New York (CUNY) is working directly with low-income students to boost their success. Since 2007, Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, or ASAP, has reached more than 6,400 students, providing them streamlined access to all of CUNY’s resources. They’re hooked up with advisors and tutors, have early access to enroll in popular courses and receive funds for a metro pass, textbooks and any additional costs not covered by financial aid.
The costs of the program are steep — $5,400 a year per student, much higher than the $3,300 tuition — but backers say it’s well worth the expense. A randomized study released this year found ASAP nearly doubled graduation rates.
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How Do Young Men Become Better Fathers? They Attend This Boot Camp

At 17 years of age, Kaeran Reyes-Little became a father.
Growing up in Queens, N.Y. — dad gone, mom working long shifts at the hospital — Reyes-Little found himself hanging with an older crowd, getting in trouble with the law. “I think that was God’s way of saying slow down,” he says of the birth of his son, Darius.
Even though he had just crossed into adulthood, Reyes-Little refused to perpetuate his own dad’s mistakes, to repeat the cycle. He took full custody of his son and tattooed his name across his forearm. Most mornings, Reyes-Little woke up at 4 a.m., wrestling with anxiety. “Why did I have a kid so early?” he’d ask himself. “I didn’t get to build a foundation before having to lay my son’s. What am I going to do?”
Through his older brother, Reyes-Little heard about Fatherhood Academy, a City University of New York program aiming to stop the downward spiral in broken families. Despite being apprehensive at first, he signed up. What he found there was a revelation: “Life’s not over. You’re still somebody,” he recalls hearing. “When you’re a single parent, you’re in a bubble already. It takes another parent to understand what that feels like. And this is not just parents, but fathers.”
Across New York City, 749,000 kids are raised by single parents. With the help of Fatherhood Academy — an initiative that was put on hold this spring due to uncertain funding — dozens of young dads like Reyes-Little are learning how to make a better life for their children.
As a member of the program, Reyes-Little earned his high school diploma at 19. And with some prodding, he enrolled in community college, where he’s now pulling a 3.0 GPA. Pursuing a passion for science that’s been with him since childhood, he’s specializing in marine biology.
“I’m a geek at heart,” he reveals, an admission that doesn’t sound strange through his wide grin, but on second thought, makes you pause. Did this tattooed 24-year-old with a rap sheet just say that? This guy, who was once so angry at his father, so bitter because it seemed anyone would betray him for a price, really just fess up to being a science nerd? And then, in case you didn’t hear him at first, Reyes-Little laughs and says, “My son’s the same way.”

* * *

For generations, New York City has been the destination for those hoping for a brand new start. But for all of Sinatra’s crooning, the city rarely offers those possibilities to its own children — particularly those in impoverished neighborhoods. In the Bronx, 44 percent of kids are raised below the poverty line, and in Brooklyn, one in three won’t graduate from high school.
Unlike traditional parenting services (which are usually aimed at single mothers), Fatherhood Academy is, as its name indicates, just for dads. Through several weeks of high school equivalency (HSE) test-prep classes, workshops and mentoring, New York City’s young men learn to become better parents and start on the path towards a college degree or a stable career.
“Fathers are the mentors for their children. If they’re in a different situation economically and mentally, those improvements are so huge,” says Raheem Brooks, the program’s coordinator. “We want to stop this cycle that’s been going on in their families, because they’re training the future leaders of our city.”

Fatherhood Academy student James Bell speaks at graduation on April 22, 2013. Bell signed up for the program wanting “equipment to further my education” and lessons in “how to love my child,” two-year-old Janila. He’s now studying to be a math teacher and mentor to other young dads.

With flyers posted in housing projects, Fatherhood Academy targets young men between the ages of 18 and 24. An open enrollment policy (meaning no application questions inquire about criminal history) results in a mix of dads from all over the city. Several still live with the child’s mom, some share custody and an increasing number are single dads raising newborns alone. But they all share an automatic respect for each other as fathers.
“They all want something better for their children, but they don’t know how to get it,” says David Speal, counselor and case manager for Fatherhood Academy. “They just need that understanding and guidance.”

* * *

The program operates out of the continuing education center at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. There’s a persistent bustle in its bright, second-floor office as students drop off forms and ask the secretaries for help (even after being tsk-tsk’ed for wearing hoods inside). The door is always open, even during meetings when it stays slightly ajar.
Brooks and Speal, the two men behind the program, are an odd couple. Brooks is an imposing figure: He’s tall, African-American and sports dreadlocks that fall below his wide shoulder blades. Born in Detroit, he began his career in East Harlem as a “follow-up specialist,” which essentially meant knocking on doors to find the at-risk guys who’d missed appointments.
Beside him, Speal is white, slender and earnestly enthused, like a grown-up camp counselor. A lifelong resident of Queens, he started volunteering at Rikers Island, NYC’s main correctional facility, while enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and was later hired as a case manager there. During one counseling session, a young inmate told Speal, “I gotta go. I got special permission.” “For what?” Speal asked. “To visit my father. He’s in the dorm down the hall.” Fatherhood Academy wasn’t born that moment, but Speal says witnessing the ensnaring cycle firsthand invigorates his work today.
“They don’t want the same thing that happened to them to be true for their kids,” Speal explains.
“The conversations have already changed,” Brooks chimes in. “Our guys can say, ‘Hey, let’s go do homework.’ Suddenly, it’s ‘Daddy’s going to college,’ rather than ‘Daddy’s not around.’ It’s a different dynamic that they never had.”

* * *

Fatherhood Academy begins with a three-week “boot camp” to test commitment and gauge the group’s educational level, then jumps right into 13 weeks of training for the HSE test. Since classes are held on a college campus, dads become accustomed to the feel of higher education. “Rather than just stop here and get my GED, they can see, ‘I’m among young people that look similar to me. I can do that,’” Brooks says.
Afternoons focus on parenting topics. Nonprofits and motivational speakers give presentations on how to cook on a budget (think: a tasty pineapple chicken recipe), balance a budget or administer CPR. In smaller groups, the dads have wide-ranging discussions that touch on everything from changing diapers to relationships with family. “Men don’t have these conversations, you know, talking about feelings towards their father, how they were raised and the values we are going to have in our children,” Brooks says.

Fathers are the mentors for their children…We want to stop this cycle that’s been going on in their families, because they’re training the future leaders of our city.”
 

— Raheem Brooks, Fatherhood Academy

Those conversations build a brotherhood that provides support when members face with bigger challenges: “homelessness, not enough to eat, issues with the mother, visitation and custody, drug addiction and alcohol, anger, just different things,” Brooks says. Many of these trials aren’t new, but now the men’s responses have changed. “We’re noticing that the guys are seeing a different version of themselves now,” Brooks says. “They bought into the program and into the possibilities for their own growth.”
It all concludes with a cap-and-gown ceremony, a first for many. With five cohorts now completed, the program has graduated 136 men. Fifty-nine of the dads passed the HSE test, 21 of whom are now in college. More than half — 80 fathers — were placed in jobs, and another 35 landed internships.
By all counts, the program has been successful, but for months, Fatherhood Academy hasn’t held a class. Launched by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2012 as part of the Young Men’s Initiative, the initial seed grants from the Bloomberg Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation ran dry, and the program wasn’t included in the most recent budget issued by Mayor Bill DeBlasio. “Here’s a program that actually works, and now the funding has vanished like a deadbeat dad,” a reporter at the New York Daily News wrote in October, noting that the $550,000 budget is roughly the same as housing 10 inmates at Rikers for a year.
“It was tough. We know these guys individually, so it’s really personal,” Brooks states. “Guys would call you saying, ‘Hey, can I be in your next cohort?’ and you’d have to tell them, ‘We’re not going to be around, but I’ll take your name down.’”
Good news came from City Hall last month, when Brooks and Speal found out that Fatherhood Academy is set to become an official city program funded in the next budget cycle. They’re planning to start the next session this summer. Meaning that soon, 60 young dads will be receiving a call with good news: The academy is back in session.

Can a Museum Unite the Food Movement?

With all the innovations on display at SXSW Interactive — from virtual reality to artificial intelligence — attendees probably didn’t expect to learn about the puffing gun, which actually made its public debut at the 1904 World’s Fair. But this tool, which gives Kix and Trix their crunch and enables cereal to float on top of milk, was a major focal focus of the panel “Making the Museum of Food and Drink.”
The museum’s first mobile exhibit — “BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal” — illustrates the power of using food to learn about topics from health and the economy to culture and the environment.
“It’s its own spoonful of sugar,” Dave Arnold, founder of the museum (MOFAD), said of food. “There’s no medicine that needs to get shoved down.” Arnold was joined by program director and executive director of the museum Peter Kim and Emma Boast, who, as program director, coordinates the MOFAD Roundtable, a debate series that tackles topics such as genetically engineered food. The team hopes their museum, which aims to be a brick-and-mortar reality in New York City by 2019, will bridge the divide between food as entertainment and food as politics.
Arnold said his “aha moment” for MOFAD came during a visit to the Museum of Natural History. He was walking through a small exhibit about Vietnam that included a small café where they served what he called slipshod interpretations of Vietnamese dishes. “The first thing that hit me was I would learn a whole lot more about Vietnam if they took this food cart seriously as opposed to these photos they have on the wall,” he said.
Most museums start with either a lot of money or a large collection of things, and Arnold explained that he had neither. But he has built a small team, drawn the support of advisors like musician QuestLove and chef Mario Batali and has already launched projects to put the model of food as an interdisciplinary educational experience to the test.
The MOFAD teams shares a common set of values, like the belief that informed eaters are better eaters and that food is personal, participatory and yes, fun. But don’t expect to see words like “superfood” or “junk food” on any of the gallery walls. Boast and Kim added that the museum aims to make food a less polarized and more constructive part of the national conversation.
“We want at MOFAD to create this kind of space where you can actually just get straight up information in a really fun and accessible way that kids can grasp and that adults can enjoy,” Kim said.
Based on the session’s turnout and level of applause at its end, this is an idea that people are sinking their teeth into.
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Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That

It’s a sad fact that fewer than one in 10 American kids raised in impoverished neighborhoods will graduate from college. But in two major U.S. cities, one organization successfully has flipped that statistic on its head.
OneGoal, an educational nonprofit geared to low-performing students in low-income Chicago and Houston neighborhoods, has demonstrated its worth: 83 percent of OneGoal fellows have earned or are actively pursuing a college degree.
That’s why the organization’s leadership is ready to take OneGoal’s proven model to New York City, America’s largest school district and the place where education reforms either make it big or fall apart. Once there, they’ll be graded alongside Harlem Children’s Zone, InBloom (which, it should be noted, got an F), Amplify, Knewton and other innovators changing the way classrooms work.
The city has an acute need for OneGoal: 12 years after entering public high school, only one in five New Yorkers will earn a college degree. Plus, a quarter of the city’s high school grads drop out of college during their freshman year.
“We have been in Chicago for the last eight years, and we’ve really proved what’s possible with a set of students. Once we started to see real results, we almost had a moral imperative to work to serve more students,” explains Nikki Thompson, executive director of OneGoal’s New York operation. After the expansion to Houston in 2013, “it became clear that we could replicate it in other cities. And in the world of social justice, there’s no school system like New York.”
OneGoal’s key belief is that students succeed by empowering themselves. The program’s teacher-led model focuses on training educators to boost the lowest achievers by conducting an intervention with the ones who are usually overlooked: OneGoal’s fellows begin with an average GPA of 2.7 (B-) and a 729 SAT score. Half are black, 42 percent are Latino and 90 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. In contrast, QuestBridge, an organization with a similar mission, tries to pluck out what Thompson calls “the talented tenth,” students most likely to succeed at a selective college.
Pioneering a form of character development, OneGoal’s unique three-year curriculum spans from junior year of high school to freshman year of college and is centered on shattering stereotype disadvantaged students’ carry about themselves so they come to see college as “realistic” and “attainable.” Project directors hone a student’s ability to ace standardized tests, admissions essays and financial aid applications, instilling them with leadership skills of “professionalism, ambition, integrity, resilience and resourcefulness” early — all of which puts them on a path bound for college, and from there, gives them the tools to succeed.
In classes of 25 to 30 kids, “we do actual role-play with the students, not just reading the material,” Thompson says. Analyzing real-world situations, they discuss what actions to take when you and your roommate get into a fight, for instance, or how to manage when there isn’t a teacher saying, “Make sure to bring your homework.” “Once they’re in college,” Thompson says, “it becomes almost muscle memory.”
In New York City, OneGoal is looking to replicate success stories like that of Kewauna Lerma, who was profiled in Paul Tough’s “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.” Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Lerma was barely pulling in a C- average and already had a rap sheet when she became a OneGoal fellow. “I didn’t really have a family. I was scattered all over the place, no father, with my grandma sometimes,” she says in the book. “It was all messed up. Jacked up.” Through the program, she went from being the girl who scored in the bottom percentile on a practice ACT test to having straight A’s on her report card senior year of high school.
Freshman year at Western Illinois University brought Lerma new difficulties, like a tough biology class that seemed far over her head. She didn’t know half the big words her professor used, but she sat in the front row. After class, she always asked him to definitions the words that stumped her. Money was always tight, and Lerma says she once didn’t eat for two days when she had no cash. But she persisted, as OneGoal taught her to do. Her biology grade? A+.
Like Lerma, OneGoal will face many challenges when it makes the move to the Big Apple, particularly in winning support from key political players and making sure they don’t overstep any boundaries with the powerful teachers union. “New York is just so different when you talk about size and scale and competition. There are 100 high schools in Chicago. In New York, there are over 500 high schools. It’s just a different ballgame,” Thomson says. “The challenge is differentiating ourselves.” Additionally, the New York City pilot will need to navigate through a few changes OneGoal is making to its Chicago model, including a fee structure to help fund the nonprofit’s work and a data systems program to help track academic and non-cognitive progress.
But Thompson, a Teach for America alum and chief of staff while Joel Klein served as NYC’s school chancellor, has a network of connections she can draw on. Her efforts so far are showing results. After a roundtable last year, Acorn Community High School in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights signed on to host one of the seven to 10 pilot classes that are anticipated for fall. And the Arbor Brothers, a philanthropic organization that funds social entrepreneurs in the Tri-State area, gave a $60,000 grant to the expansion efforts.
After New York, the group plans to take on five more school districts by 2017. For all their rapid success, OneGoal’s staff has never lost sight of their mission. Whether for seven students or 7,000, the group’s “one goal” remains the same: College graduation. Period.
LISTEN: To This American Life episode, which features former OneGoal Fellow Kewauna Lerma.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that there are 40 or 50 high schools in Chicago. The correct number is 100.
(Homepage photograph: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images)
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These 10 Documentaries Will Change How You See America

Documentary films are known for sparking social change. (Case in point: Who wants to eat at McDonalds after seeing Super Size Me or Food, Inc.? What parent suggests visiting SeaWorld after seeing Blackfish?) Though 2014’s nonfiction films weren’t massive box office hits, they pointed out injustice and lifted our eyes to the doers making a difference. Here are the 10 must-see documentaries that inspired us to action.

10. The Great Invisible

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 still darkens the coastline along the Gulf of Mexico in the form of altered ecosystems and ruined lives. Named best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival, Margaret Brown’s documentary dives deep beyond the news coverage you may remember into a tale of corporate greed and lasting environmental damage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDw1budbZpQ

9. If You Build It

Two designers travel to the poorest county in rural North Carolina to teach a year-long class, culminating in building a structure for the community. In this heartwarming story, 10 students learn much more than construction skills.
http://vimeo.com/79902240

8. The Kill Team

An infantry soldier struggles with his wartime experience after alerting the military his Army platoon had killed civilians in Afghanistan. On the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ long list for best documentary, Dan Krauss’s challenging film shows how morality dissolves in the fog of war and terror of battle.

7. Starfish Throwers

Three people — a renowned cook, a preteen girl and a retired teacher — inspire an international movement to end hunger. Jesse Roesler’s film includes the story of Allan Law, the man who handed out 520,000 sandwiches during the course of a year in Minneapolis, which we featured on NationSwell.

6. Lady Valor: The Kristin Beck Story

A former Navy SEAL (formerly named Christopher, now Kristin) says that changing genders, not military service, was the biggest battle of her life. In retrospect, her SEAL experience takes on new importance as she comes to understand the true value of the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

5. The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

An online pioneer who developed Creative Commons with the academic and political activist Lawrence Lessig at age 15 and co-founded Reddit at 19, Swartz crusaded for a free and open internet. Another potential Oscar candidate, the film poignantly recounts how Swartz ended his own life at age 26 after aggressive prosecutors initiated a federal case against him.

4. True Son

A 22-year-old black man recently graduated from Stanford returns to his bankrupt hometown of Stockton, Calif., to run for city council. Michael Tubbs convinces his neighbors (and the movie’s audiences) you can have “a father in jail and a mother who had you as a teenager, and still have a seat at the table.”

3. The Hand That Feeds

After years of abuse from their bosses, a group of undocumented immigrants working for a New York City bakery unionize for fair wages and better working conditions. Led by a demure sandwich maker, the employees partner with young activists to fight their case against management and the food chain’s well-connected investors.

2. Rich Hill

Three boys confront impoverishment, learning disabilities and dysfunctional families in this human portrait of growing up in small-town America. The backdrop to the teenagers’ lives is their Missouri hometown of 1,396 residents, where one in five lives in poverty and where the fireworks still glow every Fourth of July.
 

1. The Overnighters

Our top film and a favorite for an Academy Award nomination details how an oil boom draws a city-sized influx of workers to a small town in North Dakota, where they scrape by on day labor and live in their cars. With the heft, detail and narrative twists of a Steinbeck novel, Jesse Moss profiles the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke, who welcomes these desperate men into a shelter called “The Overnighters,” to his congregation’s dismay.
 

Are there any documentaries that should have made the cut? Let us know in the comments below.

Gentrification Doesn’t Have to Drive Out a Neighborhood’s Original Residents

As poorer neighborhoods become upscale and hip through gentrification, the residents — often artists — who have made the place what it is often get lost in the shuffle.
But in East Harlem’s El Barrio neighborhood, the nonprofit Artspace is making a home for the neighborhood’s artistic innovators in an old elementary school.
Without the desks, chairs and chalkboards, PS 109 is now offering high quality apartments for cheap prices for artists. So far, 53,000 people have applied for the 89 available apartments, and the first tenants moved in at the end of December, according to Fast Company.  With studios renting for $494 a month and two-bedrooms for $1,022 a month, PS 109 is trying to ensure the survival of Harlem’s artists.
This isn’t Artspace’s first project; it actually has 35 years of experience developing affordable housing options for artists across the country. Started in Minneapolis, the organization’s mission is to keep creative types in their neighborhoods and prevent them from being displaced by the gentrification they helped bring about.
While Artspace’s goal is to provide housing for all artists, it’s particularly interested in providing housing for neighborhood artists, which is why at least half of the new tenants in PS 109 will be locals of El Barrio neighborhood.
There are a few stipulations for potential residents. Applicants must meet the annual income $19,000-$35,000 for one person and $35,000-$50,000 for a family of four, reports Fast Company. Secondly, applicants are interviewed to determine if they meet the artist’s preference criteria and display enthusiasm to participate in the community.
Gloria Duque is one such hopeful applicant. For the past 27 years, she has lived and worked in El Barrio. With space hard to find in New York City, Duque is eager to land a spot in PS 109, which has its own gallery and community areas.
Ultimately, PS 109 is meant to preserve and grow the art scene that makes the area unique.
“The danger of a gentrifying New York is that every community starts to feel the same. The cultural ecosystems become not only less diverse, but the culture of New York as a whole becomes less vital,” Shawn McLearen, Artspace’s vice president of property development and project director for PS 109, says. “Today, you can go in any community, and it feels like it’s a community. That’s the sort of thing we need to invest in.”
MORE: Which Northern City is Selling Homes for $1?

This City’s Police Want to Protect Your Right to Privacy

What did the Seattle Police Department do when an activist requested their entire archive of patrol car videos — all 1.6 million videos? For the hometown of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the answer was easy: Seattle’s cops went to the computer nerds.

Law enforcement agencies are promising body cameras will bring a new era of accountability by capturing cops’ every interaction on film in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and other cities encouraged by Obama’s promise of $263 million in funding. But all that video presents a technical problem: how can a department possibly sort and release so many hours of footage? Stepping up its commitment to transparency and collaboration, Seattle’s police asked 80 local tech wizards from Amazon, Microsoft and Evidence.com to streamline the disclosure process at its first department-sponsored hackathon earlier this month.

“We’re having a conversation about transparency and privacy. How do the two intersect?” Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, a spokesperson, tells the The Seattle Times. “How can the Seattle Police Department share terabytes of information we’re storing?”

Citizens only feel cameras increase accountability if they trust the devices are used properly, if they cannot be switched off at critical moments or if the video won’t be buried by scandal-averse commanders. But police departments cannot simply post raw video of every arrest to YouTube. To protect individuals’ privacy, state law prevents police from releasing details like the faces of juveniles or sexual assault victims as well medical details or mental health history, explains Mary Perry, the police department’s counsel.

But currently, removing a simple cut from a one-minute video “can take specialists upward of half an hour, whereas more complicated edits — like blurring multiple faces or pieces of audio — can take much, much longer,” an S.P.D. statement says. That’s a problem when the police are already burning an average of 7,000 DVDs every month and will have even more as body cams are rolled out for the entire force.

Technologies like image-recognition seem to be the police’s best bet for a quicker, cheaper way to systematically redact sensitive information. “Government agencies don’t jump out to me to be at the forefront of technology research,” says Simon Winder, head of Impressive Machines, a tech company focused on robotics, machine learning and recognition software. But with such huge tasks, cities are primed to adopt cutting-edge solutions. “There are so many ways we can yet use technology,” Seattle’s mayor Ed Murray responds. “We want to be the number one digital city.”

One of the recurring topics the hackers discussed was what to do when an algorithm makes an error in identifying a person or a frame of video, particularly because so many are shot in the dark of night or in the blur of pursuing a suspect. “The problem is you can’t just say ‘oops’ when you violate someone’s right to privacy,” says Brandon Arp, a software developer at Groupon who attended the hackathon. He proposed a “very conservative” system that hides more information from a clip than required by law but allows for a person to request a manual secondary review of individual redactions.

Ideas like this emerged over the five-hour brainstorming session (and free lunch) in the basement of police headquarters, prompting officials to predict they will become a national model. Officer Patrick Michaud says he was “blown away” by the hackathon. “Options came out of it, which is what we look for,” he tells The Seattle Times. “A different way to look for problems always works for us.”

DON’T MISS: This Is What Community Oriented Policing Looks Like
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The Good News for Immigrants Looking to Become the Country’s Future Leaders

Most immigrants only know what it’s like to be a newcomer to a country once. But for Sayu Bhojwani has done it twice.
Immigrant leadership advocate Bhojwani was born in India in 1967, then moved to Belize with her parents when she was four-years-old. She spent the remainder of her childhood in the Central American country, learning the Catholic traditions and the Spanish language, which most of the population speaks despite English being the official language of the country, along with her own family’s heritage.
Then in 1984, she went to college at the University of Miami and moved to New York City after she graduated where she was struck by the vibrant mix of different ethnicities living side-by-side.
Working with Asian immigrants and Asian-American communities through the Asia Society, she soon noticed that there were few elected representatives of this community. So in 1996, she created the nonprofit South Asian Youth Action! (SAYA!), which helps young Asian-Americans feel more at home in their country — connecting kids from immigrant families to tutoring, mentoring, internships and jobs. In other words, the sorts of opportunities American kids from non-immigrant families can take for granted.
“I’m restless,” Bhojwani tells NBC News. “For better or worse I get bored with what I’m doing and I start thinking about what problem I can solve.”
Bhojwani went on to tackle many other problems. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the persecution many immigrants experienced as a result, Bhojwani was named the first New York City Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs. In that role, she pressed for policy changes, such as ensuring that immigrants could maintain their confidentiality when reporting crimes or receiving healthcare. “Really what we did,” she says, “was serve as a pain in the ass, to getting these things through city bureaucracy.”
Then Bhojwani decided she wanted to look beyond New York City and get Americans all over the country to view immigrants in a more positive light and treat them with respect. To do this, she founded the New American Leaders Project (NALP) in 2010, through which she works to foster leaders in immigrant communities and supports representatives of these communities running for public office.
Bhojwani is an inveterate helper and problem solver. “I feel like if I see something, I have to do something about it,” she tells NBC. “As I get older, I am working on this — if I see something, I should point it out to someone else.”
Still, it’s clear the 47-year-old Bhojwani plans to keep solving problems for immigrants for years to come.
MORE: This Immigrant Turned Fast-Food Franchise Owner Has Been Serving Free Thanksgiving Dinner for 23 Years

When Cities Get Connected, Civic Engagement Improves

With tighter budgets and fewer resources, local governments are turning to technology to stay connected to residents and improve their systems. According to the Digital Cities Survey published by Government Technology magazine, four major tech trends are visible across most of the participants, which range from cities with populations of 50,000 to more than a million.
1. Open data
Transparency is important for governments and thanks to technology, it’s easier to achieve than ever. Leading the pack of cities with easily accessible data records is New York City. The Big Apple started its open data system in 2012 and now has 1,300 data sets available for viewing. Chicago ranks second with over 600 data sets, while San Francisco scores the highest rating in U.S. Open Data Census for open data quality.
Open data isn’t limited to the country’s biggest cities, however, as mid-size Tacoma, Wash., offers 40 data sets and Ann Arbor, Mich,. has financial transparency data that is updated daily, according to Governing.
2. Stat programs and data analytics
These types of initiatives originated in the 1980s with the NYPD merging data with staff feedback, but have expanded to other cities. Louisville, Ky., now has Louiestat, which is used to spot weaknesses in performance and cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime.
Governing reports that data analytics are also a popular tool to gauge performance. In Denver, Phoenix and Jacksonville, Fla., local governments use them to sort through all their data sets in search of patterns that can be used for better decision-making.
3. Online citizen engagement
As social media becomes more prevalent in daily life, governments are getting on board to stay connected. Through social media sites and online surveys, local governments are using social media to engage their residents in local issues.
One such city is Avondale, Ariz. (population of 78,822), which connects a mobile app and an online forum for citizen use. Citizens can post ideas on the forum and then residents can vote yay or nay.
4. Geographic information systems
Although it’s been around for a long time, cities are updating the function of GIS to help make financial decisions that will, in turn, improve performance, public transit and public safety as well as organize social service and citizens engagement activities.
Augusta, Ga., recently won an award for its transit maps, while in Sugar Land, Texas, GIS is used for economic development and citizen engagement with 92 percent survey respondents citywide.
Based on all this, it seems that cities have embraced the tech craze.
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Minorities Should Want To Be Police Officers

One of the first facts people noticed after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., was that only three of the 53 cops on the local force were black. That’s nowhere near the city’s racial composition, where two-thirds of residents are African-American.
Though the number of minority cops has grown over the past two decades, this lack of diversity is the norm in hundreds of departments across the country, while the key to recruiting and retaining minority officers remains elusive for most departments. As demands for reform echo across the country, we examined the latest research and contacted experts to find the best methods for hiring police forces that better reflect the neighborhoods they serve.
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