As all great innovators know, it doesn’t take a specific job title — or an office in our nation’s capital — to create powerful change in our country.
That’s why this list of 40 rising political stars under the age of 40, from the Washington Post‘s politics blog The Fix, is so interesting: It focuses on people who’ve earned their reputation working outside of Washington, D.C., from state governors and mayors to other local operatives. The list has been in the making for months, and editors sought opinions from 100 different people across the country before narrowing it down to 40 names, which will be revealed in batches over the next couple of days.
Here’s a quick look at some of the innovators who made the cut. Be sure to check out the remainder of the list on The Fix today and tomorrow:
Aja Brown, 32, Mayor of Compton, California
After defeating both an incumbent and former mayor for office in 2013, Brown is focused on reducing violence in the notoriously dangerous city, where her own grandmother was raped and murdered in the 1970s.
Carlos Curbelo, 34, U.S. Representative candidate from Florida
A current Miami-Dade County School Board member, Curbelo is running against Democrat Joe Garcia for a spot in the Capitol. He’s also the co-founder of a nonprofit that hosts summer basketball leagues for high school students.
Cyrus Habib, 32, Washington state representative
A Rhodes Scholar, former Yale Law Journal editor, jazz pianist and the first Iranian American to hold state office in the country, Habib is a multi-talented rising star who overcame blindness to great political success.
Category: Making Government Work
Making Access to Emergency Help Easier, One Text at a Time
We’ve already told you about an effort to make 911 calls easier from motel rooms, where people often have to press “9” to make outgoing calls, a small step that had fatal consequences for one family.
Now, a new plan from the FCC is trying to make access to emergency help even easier for the most vulnerable citizens, including those who don’t even have the option of a phone call. Called “text-to-911,” the initiative allows select AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon customers to text 911 for help during emergency situations.
“Access to 911 must catch up with how consumers communicate in the 21st Century,” said Julius Genachowski, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in a press release announcing the plan’s proposal in 2012.
Which is not to say texting is the agency’s preferred method of communication. There’s only a limited number of call centers that can receive texts at the moment, though the plan is slated to be available across the country by the end of the year. Still, dispatchers caution that voice-to-voice communication is still ideal for a number of reasons, including the transmission delays and limited character counts associated with texting.
But as Keith Wagstaff of NBC News writes, “It’s not ideal. But for some people, especially those with disabilities, text-to-911 could be a life-saver.”
More Diversity Doesn’t Have to Mean Decreased Social Mobility
Not only can Salt Lake City boast of its beautiful scenery, but it can also tout that it’s one of the best places in America for a low-income child to have a chance at becoming an economically-secure adult.
The Utah city (along with San Jose, California) has a social mobility rate comparable to Denmark, a country with one of the highest rates of relative mobility in the world. Poor kids in Salt Lake City have a 10.8 percent chance of zooming from the bottom fifth in income to the top fifth. (In contrast, Atlanta and Milwaukee have lower social mobility rates than “any developed country for which data are currently available,” according to the 2013 study by economists at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.)
Salt Lake City’s secret, writes Nancy Cook for the National Journal, was “less economic segregation, a good public school system, strong family stability, a reliable social safety net, and less income inequality. Areas with less urban sprawl and less racial segregation also performed better in the rankings.”
But Salt Lake City has become a different place than the one captured in the aforementioned study, Cook notes. The majority of people in Utah’s capital city used to be Mormon, but according to the Salt Lake City Tribune, the religious group is no longer the majority. This matters because the Church of Latter-day Saints makes a point of providing a wealth of services for its members and encourages families to stay together.
City officials are working to maintain their social mobility rate even as the population becomes more diverse and income inequality rises. Rosemarie Hunter, the director of The University of Utah’s University Neighborhood Partners, says, “Thirteen years ago, the university looked at its data and realized that two ZIP codes in the city had virtually no students coming to the university. That was a huge red flag.” So Neighborhood Partners began to visit the west-side neighborhoods that weren’t sending kids to college, forging partnerships with businesses and community leaders to help get these kids on the right track toward higher education.
Additionally, the Salt Lake City School District has opened community centers serving the poor and offering dental services, medical care, and education.
Natalie Gouchnour of the University of Utah told Cook, “This state has a good network of taking care of people in need. Part of that comes from the Mormon culture, but part of it is just the ethos of the state.” Pamela Perlich of the Salt Lake Bureau of Economic and Business Research agreed with her, saying that her city has “the tradition and wherewithal to do something” to stop social mobility from decreasing.
With Utah setting an example with its housing-first program to end homelessness and its progressive attitude about immigration reform, it has a good chance of maintaining its status as a great place for people of all income levels to live.
MORE: Utah is On Track to End Homelessness by 2015 With This One Simple Idea
Young Women in Technology Band Together in Texas to Succeed
Latina women have a hard road sometimes when it comes to pioneering careers in the tech industry.
They comprise only 1 percent of college students enrolled in engineering nationally, according to the Dallas Morning News. They can be outnumbered two to one by men in classes for some disciplines.
Students at the Singley Academy in Irving, Texas, take care of their own by offering a much-needed peer support group, Girls for Technology, for young women trying to make their way through the lucrative but male-dominated career path.
The club is a model for how banding together could help girls break into the ranks of science and tech careers — and demonstrate the different, and valuable, viewpoints young women bring to the table.
Singley Academy’s Assistant Principal Kacy Barton, who helped start Girls of Technology, told Avi Selk of the Dallas Morning News, “Females think differently. The guys get wrapped up in the technical side. ‘How are we going to make this work?’ Girls tend to respond to things they see changing the world around them.”
Lesly Hernandez, a senior, wants to work for NASA someday. Hernandez spent part of her childhood in Mexico while her parents worked in the United States. She now lives with her single mother, a food court manager, and a 6-year-old brother she looks after while her mom works. She’s also her household’s repairwoman.
Another club member, Rubi Garcia, showed early signs of science prowess when she smashed her Barbie radio — and then repaired it.
Supporting each other has given the young women confidence as they prepare for college. Women are essential, Barton says, because they think differently.
A man might say, “‘Let’s …do something else.’ And one of the girls reaches over and says, ‘If we just do these two steps, we’ll get this accomplished.'”
Leave it to a young woman to figure out how to engineer something simply.
MORE: These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected with an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
For the Good of the Community and the Environment, This Kansas Startup Looks to Make Hitchhiking Popular Again
If you live in an urban area, chances are, you probably use mass transit and don’t even give it a second thought. But 45 percent of Americans don’t have the option of hopping on a train or bus to get somewhere since they have no access to public transportation, Jennifer O’Brien writes for Shareable.
The concepts of the citizen-taxi apps Lyft and Uber and the carpooling app Carma appealed to O’Brien, but since she lives in Lawrence, which is located rural northeast Kansas (instead of downtown San Francisco, where public transit options abound), there are not enough participants to make these services run smoothly. So she decided to create her own system — founding the nonprofit Lawrence OnBoard.
Inspired by a podcast she heard about how hitchhiking isn’t as dangerous as its reputation would have it, and that in many countries it’s the primary mode of transportation, she decided to give the concept a contemporary update. Using Lawrence OnBoard, people can sign up to be drivers (at no cost) or as riders for a monthly membership fee.
Each person receives a background check, a photo ID, and a dry erase board on which they write their destination to display while they stand by the road waiting for a fellow Lawrence OnBoard member or any other driver to give them a lift. Once the rider has been picked up, he or she logs the trip by texting the driver’s member number or license plate to Lawrence OnBoard; O’Brien believes this kind of tracking will help ensure safety. (Although she does caution people against using the ride-sharing service at night or when traveling with young children.)
Last year, O’Brien began field-testing her idea. She sent 23 volunteers out on 121 test rides and found that 95 percent of the time, they scored a lift in less than 30 minutes. Now, Lawrence OnBoard is working to find the best locations for ride-seekers to stand, ensuring that all ethnicities, ages, and genders have equal ease of finding a ride.
And so far, the local government approves of O’Brien’s plan. In fact, city commissioners approved changes to the traffic code this month to allow Lawrence OnBoard to continue legally.
O’Brien writes, “I personally used my dry erase board to commute to town for most of the summer and I found that it was safe, easy, and reliable and saved a lot of gas. But even better, I met more of my neighbors, learned what was happening in the neighborhood and even made a couple of business deals. Building community like this is the big strength of the sharing economy and it’s something we are sadly missing when we all drive alone.”
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After Newtown Shooting, This Critical Program Helps Police Deal with Mental Health Emergencies
In the wake of school shootings like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary, understanding mental health issues has become a major concern in the national dialogue. For authorities, part of that is having the skills to identify red flags, and in a criminal situation, to know when someone is in need of help.
Recognizing mental health has become a priority for the state of Connecticut. To educate workers, authorities have created the Crisis Intervention Team, which trains police officers in understanding how to recognize and respond to the spectrum of behavioral and mental health issues, according to NPR. The program, which is one of about 2,7000 across the country, teaches policemen everything ranging from assessing suicidal people to implementing de-escalation techniques. On Wednesday, Connecticut lawmakers even passed a bill that requires police officials across the state receive similar training.
Lance Newkircher, a patrol officer in Fairfield, Connecticut, said that it’s not difficult to interview “the person who just stole four tires from BJ’s” and get that person to admit what’s going on. But “it’s incredibly difficult to get someone who believes they have an assignment from the FBI to really admit that they don’t, and [that] they do need help, and it’s time to go and talk to somebody at the hospital. So that’s the skill set.”
Newkirchen is one of 18 that are part of Fairfield’s Crisis Intervention Team, which was launched about three years ago. (In total, there are 107 officers on the town’s force.) Members attend statewide workshops and seminars, which encourage police officers to foster relationships not just with their communities but with mental health providers as well.
MORE: For Refugees, American Dream Starts With Better Mental-Health Screenings
Newkirchen points out that having this type of training gives officers a better understanding of a situation before they enter it. For example, if a policeman receives an emergency call from a house he has already visited responding to a suicide attempt, he has the details he needs to assess what happened before he gets there.
For Fairfield, that training is important. Newkirchen estimates he gets two to three calls per eight-hour shift regarding mental health.
“I would say 50 percent of the time, [the calls we get] are calls like this — where we are making, I think, a huge difference,” he told NPR. “We won’t be back, and that family has a very different sense of what we do as police officers.”
That’s a critical step in fostering a relationship between authorities and their community. As we grapple with national tragedies like Newtown, it’s vital that authorities understand the role that mental health can play in any situation.
“You know, protocol for a police officer is always, ‘Protect yourself,’ ” said third-year John McGrath. “To be able to learn what they’re thinking and what’s going on in their mind, kind of gives you a better perspective of what’s going on and what you’re able to do to further protect yourself and to protect them.”
A New Website Shares Inspiring Stories from Those Often Not Heard
A Republican mayor in small-town Georgia befriends his Mexican neighbors and reconsiders his views on the state’s immigration laws. An undocumented Fijian immigrant grows close to the elderly woman she cares for and finds some peace amid her constant fears that she’ll be deported.
While we all know that countless touching stories from immigrants exist — whether focused on their new country, the places they left, or their journeys between the two locals — they’re often never told. But now, they can be, thanks to the new website, Immigrant Nation.
The first-of-its-kind interactive storytelling platform calls on visitors to submit transmedia content (a type of storytelling that uses multiple formats, including digital ones) describing their own, their parents’, or their grandparents’ journeys to the United States.
More than 150 of the site’s users have already done so — mainly in the form of slideshows that, to viewers, are like taking a glimpse inside captioned family photo albums. This user-generated content sits alongside short documentary films, and soon, it’ll also be shared at live events in diverse communities, where attendees will be encouraged to share their own immigrant tales.
The Immigrant Nation project — and the website itself — is designed to get visitors thinking about interconnectedness. As part of its search function, the site applies keyword tags to each person’s story and also maps them onto charts of country-specific data pulled from official U.S. government immigrant arrival records.This makes it easy to explore the answers to all kinds of questions on the site: When did the largest wave of immigrants from various countries enter the U.S., and what was it like to pass through Ellis Island during that time? Who left my country 20 years before I did? Who else has a migration story similar to mine?
So when Immigrant Nation asks, “where does your family’s story begin?” we encourage you to answer.
MORE: Meet the People Hoping to Change the Face of Immigration in America
Can Comic Books Help Spread Public Safety Messages?
It’s a paradox of public safely: often those most in need of learning about health and safety risks and solutions are the most difficult to reach. They may not even be able to read.
The answer may be pictures — they’re worth 1,000 words, after all. Specifically, comic books, with easily understood drawings and messages that appeal across generations.
Enter Miguel Lopez and his wife, Helen Anaya, of Chandler, Ariz. Lopez used to work for a bank, and he remembered counterparts in Mexico using comic books to teach customers about saving and investing. The comics reached those who couldn’t read well.
Lopez and Anaya thought, why not bring this idea to the U.S.?
And so a genre that typically entertains kids and collectors may now reach a whole new audience — with some of the most important lessons of their lives.
The couple launched Storynamics in 2006, and they’ve hooked up with governments, schools, and other organizations to produce comic books about serious topics: hand washing, the West Nile Virus, water safety, diabetes, even how to deal with bat bites. The comics are printed in Spanish and English, with pictures to help reach those who struggle to read.
“One of the… significant challenges we are trying to address with the stories is literacy about health issues,” Lopez told Aaron Rop of AZCentral. “When you are not comfortable reading, you miss out on many things and many of those things are important to your health.”
Storynamics has produced and distributed over 240,000 comic books in 16 states. The comic book approach appeals to many local governments, because they can provide them to families via their children. Their appeal to kids is universal.
Among the project’s smart moves: the kids get the books in school, then bring them home and beg their parents to read. Few parents can resist their kid coming home excited about a gift from school, begging for Mom or Dad to tell a story.
“They go to their parents and they say, ‘Dad can you read this for me? Look at what they gave me at school’,” Lopez told Rop.
With the help of Storynamics comic books, soon it could be the kids helping their parents to eat right, exercise and get to bed early.
MORE: This Special Comic Book Makes Autistic Kids Feel Like Superheroes
A Historic Minimum Pay Hike on the Horizon for One American City
Want to reduce poverty? Increase the minimum wage. It’s that simple, say a handful of reports, and Seattle is on the verge of a city-wide raise.
On May 1, the mayor of the Pacific Northwest bastion announced an ambitious move to up the base wage there to $15 an hour — the highest of any major city worldwide, reports Quartz.
While workers cheer, a common business-owners’ lament is that increasing their costs will cut hiring and spur layoffs. But early data on a handful of areas that have boosted their pay scales suggests that businesses aren’t going under because of wage requirement bumps.
The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that nudging the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 would put $31 billion in the pockets of American workers, 19 percent of that going to families currently living below the poverty line.
At the same time, however, the CBO estimates that some 500,000 would lose their jobs. But San Francisco saw none of the bust and all of the boom when it raised wage minimums to $10.74.
“Our data show that an increase up to $13 an hour has no measurable effect on employment,” Michael Reich, a University of California, Berkeley economics professor, told the Seattle Times. The same for Santa Fe: The minimum wage — upped from $5.15 to $8.50 in 2004 — “seemed to have helped workers and not hurt business too much,” researcher Nicholas Potter told the newspaper.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray‘s plan rolls out the increases over the next decade, and it still has to pass the city council. So while the local burger slingers can’t celebrate yet, they might be able to soon.
This Brave Group of Michigan Business Leaders Are Standing Up For LGBT Rights
Last year was a landmark year for the gay marriage movement, and now this year, supporters are turning the tide on rights in the workplace. Some 10 major Michigan businesses are spearheading a campaign to amend the state’s civil rights act to prohibit employee discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.
Currently, Michigan is one of 29 states that allows an employer to legally fire someone based on his or her sexual orientation; employee discrimination based on gender identity is also legal. But state business leaders from AT&T Michigan, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Consumers Energy, Dow Chemical Co., Google, Herman Miller, PADNOS, Steelcase, Strategic Staffing Solutions and Whirlpool Corporation are aiming to change that by forming the Michigan Competitive Workforce Coalition, according to MLive.com.
The state law outlawing employee discrimination — the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act of 1976 (ELCRA) — extends only to religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status. Business leaders like AT&T Michigan’s Jim Murray, a Republican, believe that should include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, too.
“We need to find ways in Michigan to keep and attract talent, and there are some barriers to that and this happens to be one of them,” Murray said.
Overwhelmingly, more than 75 percent of Michigan residents back the idea of adding sexual orientation to state law, which includes a majority of Republicans and small business owners, according to a recent poll. Meanwhile, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights released a report last year that found excluding LGBT protection hurts the state’s pool of talent as well as its economy. By refusing to update the law, the state loses competitive advantage in keeping some of its college graduates as well as professionals, too.
MORE: This Transgender Athlete Is Taking on Bullying, One School at a Time
While there’s no legislation on the table yet, the coalition has pledged to push lawmakers into a meaningful conversation about the amendment. Previous efforts, which include a proposed bill in the Senate in 2012 and in the House in 2009, failed to receive a floor vote. But late last year Republican Governor Rick Snyder said he’s open to to the idea.
“This is the right time to do it and the right thing to do, and I’m hoping that the Legislature can be brave enough to do it,” said Shelly Padnos, the executive vice president of coalition member PADNOS.
Padnos, who previously worked for the House of Republicans but now identifies as an Independent, points out that ELCRA was passed by a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats who understood that equality was important to Michigan’s economic future. Hopefully, that attitude continues to resonate with the legislature today.