On August 5, 2012, six people were gunned down by a white supremacist at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, including Satwant Singh Kaleka, the temple’s president. In the aftermath of the shooting, Singh Kaleka’s son, Pardeep, reached out to Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist-turned-activist, to help him find answers amidst his confusion and heartbreak. Out of this meeting, Serve 2 Unite was born.
The organization works primarily with Milwaukee-based schools, bringing together students of all backgrounds to collaborate on art projects and activities, as well as participate in open discussions. Students are connected with Serve 2 Unite’s global mentors, a network of peace activists who have either survived genocide, been involved in gangs or previously promoted radical ideologies. These international peacemakers share a message of inclusivity and the importance of working together, no matter who you are or what your background.
Watch the video above to learn more about the unlikely bond between Singh Kaleka and Michaelis, and how Serve 2 Unite furthers their mission of mutual respect and trust among all people, all over the world.
Tag: Wisconsin
When It Comes to the College Scorecard, How Do the Final Four Schools Match Up?
Tonight’s competitors in the NCAA championship men’s basketball game may be pretty evenly matched on the court, but they’re far apart when it comes to the cost of a college degree.
A look at Obama’s College Scorecard, an education initiative to make data on college affordability transparent, tells you that students at Duke University pay the most for a college education: $24,134 per year, whereas Michigan State offers the cheapest degree among the Final Four contenders, at an average of only $13,836 per year.
While the University of Kentucky was the tournament favorite and has twice as many championships as Duke, the school has by far the lowest graduation rate among all of the final weekend’s competitors — 57.6 percent — and the worst loan default rate — 6.2 percent of grads can’t make the payments. In contrast, 95 percent of students at the North Carolina university graduate, and only 1 percent default on loans.
Correction: An earlier version of this article reported statistics about the University of Wisconsin Colleges, not the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We apologize for the error.
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In These 8 States, Students Are Going to Be Served Healthier School Lunches
A new pilot program aimed at encouraging states to purchase locally-sourced food will bring more fresh produce to school meals across eight states.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced California, Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin will be able to use some of their USDA Foods allocation toward unprocessed fruits and vegetables from local farms rather than going through the USDA Foods program.
The Pilot Project for Procurement of Unprocessed Fruits and Vegetables, which falls under the Agricultural Act of 2014 (Farm Bill), was created to not only promote farm-to-table meals, but also help schools strengthen relationships with vendors, growers, wholesalers and distributors, according to the USDA.
USDA Foods comprises about 20 percent of foods served in schools, with schools using their allocation from a list of 180 items including fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, rice, low fat cheese, beans, pasta, flour and other whole grain products. Under the new program, schools will be able to substitute those allocations for fresher, local options.
“Providing pilot states with more flexibility in the use of their USDA Foods’ dollars offers states another opportunity to provide schoolchildren with additional fruits and vegetables from within their own communities,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services. “When schools invest food dollars into local communities, all of agriculture benefits, including local farmers, ranchers, fishermen, food processors and manufacturers.”
States were selected on criteria including a commitment to farm-to-school efforts, previous promotion initiatives, the variety and abundance of fruit and vegetable growers in the state on a per capita basis, as well as how diverse the state’s educational agencies are in size and geography.
For states like Connecticut, the program not only promotes the local economy, but also helps children form more nutritional habits of buying fresh, local produce.
“Connecticut’s participation in this federal pilot is great news for our farmers, our economy and our children,” says Governor Dannel P. Malloy. “Our state is home to thousands of farming operations responsible for billions in economic activity. By increasing the amount locally-sourced healthy food options for our students, we help lay a foundation for lifelong successful habits.”
MORE: The District Where Healthy School Lunches Are Actually Succeeding
Why a New Start-Up Is Paying Customers to Save Water
Do you delay opening your utility bills, dreading the monthly expenses? Are you baffled by exactly what all those gallons, kilowatt-hours or cubic feet actually mean?
A start-up called MeterHero wants to simplify all those numbers and encourage you to save by comparing your water, gas and electricity consumption against your neighbors, and then offering rebates to those who conserve more. Earlier this month, the company started returning $1 for every 100 gallons of water a customer saves below their two-year average, TakePart reports.
Although MeterHero’s new refunds may seem small at first glance, the Environmental Protection Agency says the average American family of four guzzles through 400 gallons of water every day. So cutting 40 minutes from your household’s daily shower time or doing larger (yet fewer) loads of laundry means an extra dollar in your bank account. And with 29 percent of the continental U.S. facing drought conditions, it also means huge benefits for the environment.
The idea for the company was sparked at Marquette University in Wisconsin when two dozen students brainstormed how to motivate people to save water. Testing a form of peer pressure, they developed an online platform to compare utility bills. Heavy users would be urged to reduce waste through “the force of friendly competition,” Nathan Conroy, a graduate student involved with the project, tells the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
“As humans, how we compare to others informs our behavior,” Conroy says. “We don’t need everyone to become prophets of water scarcity; we just want people to be empowered to understand their water use and take action that works for them.”
McGee Young, a professor at Marquette, founded MeterHero this year after seeing huge demand for his former students’ work. He said the website is groundbreaking because utilities rarely offer incentives for water conservation since “their revenues depend on using water.”
One thousand users in the U.S. and Canada have registered so far. Anyone with a meter, old utility bills or willing landlord can sign up. MeterHero’s next challenge will be obtaining $100,000 in commitments by early next year — enough to fund rebates for 10 million gallons of water saved. They also have plans to launch a mobile app soon, GreenBiz reports.
“There’s going to be no greater public policy challenge we’ll face in our lifetime than managing increasingly scarce resources in a growing population,” Young says. “That’s why we’re doing this. We have no alternative but to think creatively and outside the box on how to manage our water supplies.”
Source: TakePart
How the Bard is Helping Veterans in Milwaukee
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee associate theater professor Bill Watson had a notion that engaging with the works of William Shakespeare would help veterans cope with the problems they faced reintegrating into society, including PTSD. After all, in several of his plays, the Bard captured the conflicted, powerful feelings of warriors both in the midst of battle and after the fighting stopped.
So a year and a half ago, with the help of his professional actor wife, Nancy Smith-Watson, and Jim Tasse, an adjunct theater professor, Bill started Feast of Crispian, an organization that guides veterans in performing Shakespeare through methods uniquely tailored to their needs.
Feast of Crispian began working with veterans who were receiving treatment for substance abuse issues, PTSD and other problems at the Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center. So far, the group has held nine weekend-long workshops for veterans that start with the selection of selecting passages from Shakespeare that have roles for two veterans with plenty of conflict, vivid emotions, and only short lines of dialogue so not to trip up the beginning actors.
“We really get right into it Friday night,” Smith-Watson tells Meg Jones of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “creating a sense of group dynamic, asking them to connect with everyone else in the group really quickly. We’ve been floored at how much that works, that by the end of the first night we have 12 to 18 people who came in saying, ‘I came to check this out but I probably won’t be back tomorrow.’ Yet we rarely lose anyone. They give up a whole weekend to do the work.”
On Saturday and Sunday, they cast the scenes and professional actors work with the veterans to get them expressing the emotions Shakespeare wrote about 400 years ago, yet still speak to the vets’ experiences. The actors define archaic words and feed the veterans their lines as they perform so they don’t have to worry about memorizing. On Sunday afternoon, the vets give a performance that’s open to the public.
Jeff Peterson, a Navy veteran who played the role of Hector in “Troilus and Cressida” in the group’s most recent performance, tells Jones, “It’s an emotional experience like no other treatment. This is something I look forward to. I don’t want it to end.”
Marine Corps veteran John Buck, who portrayed Caliban in a scene from “The Tempest,” agrees. “I consider it theater therapy. It gets veterans to open up about their problems,” he says. “You see veterans slowly opening up throughout the weekend.”
MORE: How Storytelling Can Bridge the Military-Civilian Divide
Introducing the Country’s First Hospital System to Achieve Energy Independence
With a revolving door of patients, high-tech equipment and extensive lighting and heating needs, hospitals and healthcare systems require a lot of energy to run — giving them a sizable environmental footprint. In fact, according to the Department of Energy, they have about 2.5 times the energy intensity and carbon dioxide emissions of commercial office buildings.
As global temperatures continue to rise, hospitals and health care systems need to prepare for a rapidly shifting climate. Just think back to Hurricane Sandy when hospitals needed patients to evacuate due to floods and power outages.
ThinkProgress reports that several hospitals, like in Maine and Massachusetts, are ramping up their efforts to combat climate change. But the Gundersen Health System — an extensive healthcare network comprised of clinics, hospitals, nursing homes and other services in 19 counties (Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota) and has more than 6,000 employees — has really stepped up to the plate.
Gunderson recently reached an environmental milestone: It now produces more energy than it consumes. If you check out the video below, the hospital system (headquartered in La Crosse, Wis.) relies on a whole slew of green energy sources — including a biomass boiler that burns wood chips from milling or forest residue, geothermal pumps that use the earth as a heating/cooling source, a solar thermal water heating system and wind turbines, as well as dairy digesters and generators to create energy from cow manure from farms.
MORE: This Amazing Home Creates More Energy Than It Uses
This eco-friendly behavior all started in back February 2008, after an energy audit discovered dozens of energy-saving opportunities. For example, by simply changing the lightbulbs, ballasts and other fixtures in six buildings, Gunderson saved $265,000 a year and energy use dropped 4.4 kilowatt hours annually — enough to power 440 homes. Simple things such as cutting use of 24/7 exhaust fans and implementing automatic shutoff times for the organization’s 8,500 computers also added up.
By the end of 2009, Gundersen says it was able to improve efficiency by 25 percent, resulting in more than $1 million in annual savings. Fast-forward to today: The hospital system’s energy efficiency has reportedly improved by 50 percent, which translates to $2 million in savings a year.
Gunderson has also distanced itself from gas, oil and coal and has frozen “all future investments in fossil fuels as part of an energy strategy that executives said will help ‘set the standard for environmental stewardship in healthcare,'” Modern Healthcare reports.
“We did not set out to be the greenest health system,” Gundersen CEO Jeff Thompson says in a statement. “We set out to make the air better for our patients to breathe, control our rising energy costs and help our local economy. We believe we have made more progress on all three than anyone else in the country.”
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DON’T MISS: Here’s How Colleges Are Leading the Green Revolution in Sports
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When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process
Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”
Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.
So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.
Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.
While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.
Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”
The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.
With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
DIVERTING THE PIPELINE
The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.
Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.
Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.
Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.
“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.
Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.
Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.
At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.
MAKING IT RIGHT
In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.
In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.
Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.
“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.
According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.
On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.
For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.
“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.
Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.
Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.
As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”
The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.
The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”
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This Nonprofit Makes Sure Transportation Troubles Don’t Stand in Between Low-Income People and Employment
One of the main barriers to consistent employment for low-income people: Unreliable transportation. If the bus is late or doesn’t serve the area where people live or work, say, or a child’s school or daycare is at a distance from a parent’s workplace, it can lead to missed shifts and a lost job — leaving the family worse off than ever.
This is where Wheels to Work steps in. The nonprofit, which serves a variety of locations throughout the U.S., including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, California and South Dakota, accepts donated vehicles, fixes them up and provides them to struggling families — either for free or for a low price.
Before receiving the keys to a dependable car, participants in the Wheels to Work program sponsored by the Wisconsin Automotive & Truck Education Association (WATEA) must take a course called Money Smart, which teaches them about money management, vehicle maintenance and budgeting. Meanwhile, WATEA enlists the help of students overseen by mechanic mentors to repair the vehicles, teaching them automotive skills that might lead to a career.
Participants in the WATEA program must earn no more than twice the salary of the federal poverty level, possess a driver’s license and a good driving record and either have a job or be actively looking for work.
The program has shown such promise that more communities are introducing it every year. The city of Charlottesville and the Monticello Area Community Action Agency hope to introduce Wheels to Work in Virginia early next year, but first, according to WVIR, they’re seeking help from the community to launch it by looking for partners who will help them repair donated cars.
One recipient of a Wheels to Work vehicle named Charles from Virginia, used to be a drug addict but has turned his life around. He now works as a limousine driver and relishes the freedom that the Wheels to Work car has brought him. “I am able to give people rides now,” he tells Jennifer M. Drummond of CARITAS. “I can visit my grandchildren and it gives me an opportunity to enjoy life more.”
MORE: Are Cars the Key to Single Mothers Achieving Self-Sufficiency?
After a Fire Burned This Restaurant Down, the Owner Did Something Extraordinary
Here’s proof that great bosses lead by example.
Bruce Kroll, the owner of a Culver’s in Platteville, Wisconsin, did something that many others in his position probably wouldn’t. When a raging blaze completely tore through his restaurant this past November, his 40 employees weren’t sure if they would still have a job, Channel 3000 reports.
Clearly, Kroll had enough to worry about. And he could have easily told his staff to find other work. Besides, his insurance would keep his employee’s paychecks coming for two months.
His staff understood the predicament. As Culver’s employee Cole Cooper told the TV station, “What the owner could have done is he could have said, ‘Hey, you can find another place of employment.'”
But in a stunning display of generosity, Kroll decided to keep his employees on the payroll using money from his own pocket. As the restaurant went through six whole months of renovations, he reportedly spent a whopping $144,000 to continue paying his staff.
And not only did he give his employees their wages, the generous boss asked that his employees pay it forward as the restaurant chain underwent repairs.
“We asked that, everybody that could, go out and volunteer their time whether it be for a charity or some other organization that needed help,” Kroll told WKOW.
MORE: What This School District Administrator Did Will Warm Your Heart
And volunteer they did. According to THonline, while sporting the Culver’s uniform, some of the workers served Christmas dinner at a local church, while others volunteered at a kids’ camp. Still others helped out the fire department.
Emily Allen, an employee of Kroll’s for nine years said, “Bruce is one of the most caring bosses I have ever had the pleasure of working with.”
She added, “He is one of those bosses who gets dirty just like the rest of us. When he shows up for work, he’s in the kitchen flipping ButterBurgers, taking customers’ orders, delivering food or mopping the floor just like the rest of us.”
ALSO: A Devastating Wildfire Couldn’t Put Out This Community’s Generosity
Channel 3000 reports that Kroll was able to afford paying his employees after the fire because of the strong profits earned from his Culver’s in Dubuque, Iowa. But really, his actions were a no-brainer.
“It is just a building and Culver’s of Platteville is much more than that,” Kroll said. “It is the people and not the building and we didn’t lose the people and so why should we allow the fire to cause that to happen?”
Fortunately for all, the restaurant is now back open.
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Forget Cubicles and Horrible Lighting. This Health Care Tech Company Goes All Natural
Sprawling fields, rippling creeks and acres of farmland – this serene landscape seems like the perfect haven to escape the hectic corporate lifestyle. Yet, this quiet land is the headquarters of a successful health care software development company.
Headquartered in Verona, Wisconsin, just 10 minutes from Madison, Epic Systems Corporation has rejected life in San Francisco and Silicon Valley for this quiet oasis. Epic specializes in creating software that services mid-size and large medical groups, hospitals and integrated health organizations. Their software works to help doctors and patients control the movement of electronic health data.
Although the company’s campus features an apple orchard from 1873, corn and alfalfa fields and cows, don’t let these simplicities fool you. Epic is revolutionizing office space with some of the newest products in sustainable energy. Their dairy farmhouse boasts 5,500 solar collectors, and the farm’s 3,500 geothermal wells control heating and cooling. Epic also maximizes daylight to reduce their use of florescent lighting — which not only lowers their energy costs but also works better with their employees’ circadian rhythms. Overall, these actions saves Epic 15 percent on its energy bills, and their campus uses 40 percent less energy than normal office buildings.
The company’s sustainable actions also have an aesthetic benefit, too. Peaceful rolling acres are preserved as the parking garage is hidden underneath. And this view is something that Epic plans to maintain, despite growing in size. “There are parts of the campus they never plan to touch — they want to see animals as part of their view,” says John Cuningham, founder of Cuningham Group Architecture, the firm who designed the agrarian complex.
Employee comfort is also a high priority, and it is built into the company’s designing plans. The 319,000 square feet of interior space is all divided into individual offices because Epic’s employers work better having their own space.
Epic wants the surrounding community to be able to enjoy their land, too. The company rents 250 acres of corn and alfalfa farmland to local famers, as well as opens its acres to visitors. Free maps of the farm are provided and all visitors are encouraged to take a tour and view the sites — especially the 20 seat treehouse made from reclaimed wood that the company uses for staff meetings.
Unconventional and at odds with most of our conceptions of a software company, Epic Systems is turning the concept of the traditional office space on its head. If more companies follow their lead, “sustainable, natural and serene” could be the next big trend in corporate decor.
MORE: How Burning Man Spawned a Solar ‘Gold Rush’