How One School System Is Fighting Back Against the Achievement Gap, A Better Way to Help the Homeless and More

 
What Are Massachusetts Public Schools Doing Right? The Atlantic
The Bay State may be tops when it comes to reading and math, but officials aren’t resting on their laurels. Instead, they’re directing resources towards Massachusetts’s achievement gap, which remains stubbornly high. Can a focus on social-emotional learning and childhood trauma bring disadvantaged students up to the same level as their more affluent peers?
Give Directly to the Homeless Through a New Sharing Economy App, Fast Co.Exist
Known as the “City of Goodwill,” Seattle is living up to its moniker. Thanks to one tech entrepreneur and an advocate for the homeless, residents can now use the WeCount app to donate unwanted items (think: blankets, coats, sleeping bags) directly to those most in need. With homelessness an ongoing problem in many urban areas, let’s hope this technology spreads across the country — fast.
What If Mental Health First Aid Were as Widespread as CPR? New York City’s Planning to Do It, Yes! Magazine
Often, law enforcement encounter people suffering from mental illness, yet many haven’t received the education necessary to recognize and provide assistance (instead of arrest). In response, the New York Police Department is joining forces with the National Council for Behavioral Health to provide 250,000 first responders with mental health first aid training. The ultimate goal? To prevent suicide, which currently takes 40,000 lives each year.
MORE: Dine Out, Feed the Hungry

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.

One Day, One Man, and a Six-Figure Fundraiser Run

Plenty of people go for daily runs. Considerably fewer people go for day-long runs.
But that’s just what Dan O’Keefe, principal of Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, N.Y., did recently to raise money for the school’s 25 sports teams and 50 activity clubs, and the effect has been more than he or anybody else could’ve hoped for.
O’Keefe is an ultra-marathon runner, and the NY Daily News reports that he competes in 100-mile races twice a year. So it wasn’t too much of a stretch for him to converge a passion for his students and for running into one.
“I constantly challenge the students at Spellman to achieve their limits and beyond… to give 100 percent, to achieve 100 percent and to be present 100 percent in everything they do,” says O’Keefe in a press release. “I was pondering different ways of making that message real for them as I was on a long run one day… I would challenge myself mentally and physically but I would also challenge the students to participate in the spirit of the event.”
He called the effort Achieve 100 and challenged each of his 1,400 students to each raise 100 dollars, reminding them that, “whether it’s a hundred on a test or a hundred on a report card or run a hundred miles, if you put your mind to it you can do it.” NY1 reports that the students raised over $10,000.
O’Keefe began running at 6 a.m. on a Friday and didn’t stop until 5:49 a.m. the next morning when he finished the last of 403.25 laps around the high school’s 400m track — 100 miles total. Stopping only for short bathroom breaks, according to the school’s website, “students, faculty, alumni, parents, coaches, and even neighbors from the community” ran laps with O’Keefe and “brought food, made donations, and cheered [him] on.”
The biggest surprise of all came a few minutes after he finished the run when the Achieve 100 donation webpage received an anonymous gift of $100,000, which Cardinal Spellman’s Vice-President of Alumni & Advancement, Jennifer Rivera, says “will be make so much possible for our great school.”
We can’t help but agree with student Samantha Grant: “I just want to do what he’s doing.”
MORE: One Man’s Inspiring Rise from Sweeping the Hallways to Calling the Shots