Like many other kids his age, Hector Montoya wanted a PlayStation 4 (PS4). And in order to get this coveted toy, he was willing to save up for it. But after hearing news of a nearby deadly fire, Montoya realized that purchasing the game console wasn’t the most important thing. Saving lives was.
When the nine-year-old from Grand Prairie, Texas, heard a mother and daughter were killed in a house fire that lacked a smoke alarm, he decided to cash in his $300 to purchase 100 smoke detectors to install throughout his community, NBC 5 DFW reports.
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Montoya even teamed up with the local fire department to install the alarms for senior citizens and others in need.
“Helping other people makes me feel good,” Hector told NBC 5 DFW. “I’m making a difference by doing this, and helping everybody.”
Montoya added he would start saving money again to buy the PS4 system later on, but it wasn’t long before he was rewarded for his good deed. News of his safety campaign led to community members pooling together to buy the Good Samaritan the system he had been waiting for as well as donating an extra $150 to install more alarms, CNN reports.
“To be able to do good for others at such a young age and be such a humanitarian,” said Grand Prairie Fire Dept.’s Lt. Brandon Jones. “It’s a testament to his upbringing and his surroundings.”
Category: Moving America Forward
Ask the Experts: How Can We Keep From Drowning in College Debt?
Have you paid off your student loan yet? If not, you’ve got lots of company. In 2012, total student debt in the United States reached $966 billion, a tripling over the previous eight years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Current estimates put the figure even higher — more than $1 trillion. Over the past 35 years or so, the cost of college has also ballooned by a staggering 1,120 percent, so it’s no wonder that people are questioning whether higher education is really worth it.
The consensus, however, is yes. Going to college is still a good investment. You’ll earn more: On average, college graduates aged 25 to 34, who are employed full time, year round, make 50 percent more than their high-school-educated peers. Over a lifetime, that college diploma will earn you about $500,000 more on average, even after factoring in the cost of school.
And yet many graduates are withering under the weight of their student loans — a problem that could potentially negate any economic benefit of going to college in the first place. So, how do we ease the burden for students who need to borrow money to pay for their education? NationSwell convened a panel of experts to talk about how to fix the student loan system, as well as ways to help families spend their education dollars more wisely.
Read on for our experts’ thought-provoking ideas, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box.
Beth Akers
Fellow, Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution
NationSwell: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Beth Akers: I’m not sure it’s entirely broken, but there are two areas where we can make some improvements. First is on the front end. Students are going into college and blindly taking on debt without a lot of information about the investment they’re making or the amount they’re taking on. The [Obama] administration has taken the first step toward solving that problem with the college-ratings system, and [once they] incorporate earnings information into the data available to prospective students, that will help families make wiser decisions on the front end.
Second, on the back end, a lot of these debts are actually affordable. For the most part, students are making good investments in higher education that do pay off over the long run. In theory, it shouldn’t be problematic for the majority of students to repay these debts, if their repayment period is over a sufficient period. So, what we need to do is focus on creating a repayment program for federal loans that makes the process more painless for borrowers. One way is through income-based repayment. Right now, this program is available only to a certain set of students [with low incomes]. I don’t think it’s crazy to expand eligibility for that program to people with larger earnings so that on average, people are repaying their debts over a longer period of time.
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Like everything in education, there are a lot of barriers to information. It’s a very complex — perhaps unnecessarily complex — system. The result of that is that people underutilize the benefits that are available to them. We see that in a lot of different ways. [For example], students are taking on private student-loan debts, when they’re still eligible for government loans at a much lower interest rate. There’s evidence that people are not utilizing the programs properly and that they don’t have the information necessary to make good choices.
NS: How can students and parents be smarter about spending college money?
BA: You have to make wise decisions about where you spend your money and how much you’re willing to spend. There are a lot of great institutions that provide a good return on investment for students. But there are others that do not. The government is not in the business of telling students where to go, and as a result, the responsibility falls on parents and students.
One thing [prospective students] should look at is if people are actually graduating from the school. Graduation rates across institutions vary widely, and that’s a great indicator to see if the institution is doing at least the minimum of what they should. If students aren’t graduating at a sufficiently high rate, then you might want to be skeptical about spending your money there.
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In the future, it would be great to have employment information on the college scorecard, and that’s something that the administration is working on. Once it’s there, I would advise strongly that prospective students use this to make sure that they’re going to see a return that will justify taking on debt to go to college.
Choice is good, right? We have all these institutions, and students can pick a place that’s a perfect fit for them. That’s a really great environment to be in. Unfortunately, that also means that you have a lot of homework to do. There are so many options and the consequences are really very great for making the wrong decision.
Jessica Thompson
Senior Policy Analyst, The Institute for College Access & Success
NS: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Jessica Thompson: I think the No. 1 way is to reduce the need for students to borrow on the front end. That’s going to involve two things: First, increasing our investment in grant aid, especially the federal Pell Grant — which now covers the lowest share of costs at a four-year public institution than it has since the program started — as well as state grants and institutional grants. The other piece is to restore state funding to public higher education, which has played a large role in shifting costs of public higher education from the public to the students and families.
If students do need to borrow some money in order to get to and through college, we have made several recommendations for improving the loan system. First, the current system is far too difficult to manage and understand, and can lead to suboptimal decision-making. There are currently four different income-based repayment plans for loans, and several non-income-based plans. It’s difficult to figure out what you qualify for and how. We recommend streamlining the repayment process so there’s only one income-based repayment plan that any student can opt into, and a limited menu of traditional plans, so that it’s easier for students to understand. We are big proponents for income-based repayment. It’s a crucial safeguard for borrowers who end up being unable to manage their loan payments. However, we don’t support making it the automatic or default repayment plan, because it’s not the best plan for all borrowers.
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Additionally, we need to improve student-loan counseling before, during and after college. This is a great opportunity for us to figure out what actually works to try to empower students to get the information they need in a way they can understand, enabling them to make good choices about borrowing and repayment.
Lastly, we have to educate people about private student loans and make sure that we are reducing the extent to which students and families are relying on them. These loans have variable interest rates, require co-signers, are not dischargeable in bankruptcy as of 2005, and don’t have repayment protection like income-based repayment, deferment and other options that federal student loans have. It’s the riskiest way to pay for college.
We found that over 40 percent of students who take private student loans have not maxed out their federal loan eligibility. Because of this, we support mandatory certification, which would require banks to go through higher ed institutions. In this case, the institution has the ability to counsel the students and tell them whether or not they still have federal student loans available. Currently, institutions don’t automatically package your maximum federal student loan availability in initial financial-aid offers. Many students just look at what the package offers and assume that anything beyond that, they’ll have to find another way to cover. In reality, they may have more federal loan eligibility.
NS: How can students and parents make wiser decisions about college?
JT: I don’t want to leave the impression that students and parents bear the sole responsibility for finding their way through this very complex and confusing process. But I think that actively seeking out as much information as possible to help make the best decisions for students on the front end — what types of schools to apply to and how many schools to apply to — can help maximize the benefits for the student.
Also, taking advantage of consumer tools like the net-price calculators, which all colleges now have on their websites, financial aid shopping sheets, which allow you to compare financial aid offers to one another, and the college scorecards, which give you basic metrics about each institution, can help arm students and families with information they need to make savvier decisions.
Students should also avoid private loans and certain types of institutions that data clearly show leave students worse off than before they started school. Frankly, the for-profit college sector has a poor track record in that regard. But also [families should] look at the repayment options and know that having to borrow some money is not a reason not to go. In the long run we still see that if you complete school and receive a quality education, this is an investment that will pay off. We want to make sure people aren’t scared away from higher education. It’s absolutely still worth it.
Melinda Lewis
Policy Director, Assets and Education Initiative; Associate Professor of Practice, School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas
NS: What can be done to fix our broken college loan system?
Melinda Lewis: A lot of the conversation is about how much people pay in interest rates or the sheer amount of debt that students are taking on. Those are valid points, but we don’t think that they’re going to lead us toward the policy changes that are needed. Instead, we start by asking if the current debt-dependent financial-aid system and the rise in borrowing to finance education are eroding the power of higher education to facilitate economic mobility and greater equity in society?
These are large sums that students are borrowing, and when you look at them in comparison to earnings differential between a student who doesn’t go to postsecondary education and one who does, then clearly this is an amount of debt that’s “worth it.” But is the student who goes to college and obtains a degree and finances that education with student debt getting the same return on his or her college education as a student who gets the same degree but is able to finance his or her education without debt? We believe the answer is no. Therefore, there is reason to believe that our reliance on student debt is making it more difficult for an entire generation to use higher education as a platform for greater economic mobility and prosperity. In fact, a study published in November found that households with outstanding student debt had 63 percent less net worth, 40 percent less home equity and 52 percent less retirement savings than those with equivalent education but no outstanding student debt.
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If those are some of the effects of student loan debt, and student borrowing is going to be a part of the financial aid landscape, then what we need to do to fix the system is determine how to help post-college leavers — whether they’re graduates or not and we hope they are — accumulate assets even while they’re dealing with their debt obligations. Otherwise they will be hindered financially potentially decades into the future because of that student debt, particularly because it hits them at a critically important stage of their economic lives, when if they don’t build assets then, they’re going to be at a disadvantage in the future.
You know what every financial planner says, if you put a little bit of money away now, it’s better than trying to save a lot in the future. And that’s what a lot of these college leavers aren’t able to do because they’re diverting so much of their income to their debt maintenance. That means we’ve got to think about ideas like delays in repayment, so that individuals are able to purchase homes. Or maybe looking at more income-based repayment measures, where we divert some of those payments to an escrow account, so they’re simultaneously building assets. Quite honestly, we’re not spending enough time parsing out the different policy mechanisms that could help individuals and households build positive financial assets to compensate for the drain that the outstanding student debts represent.
Evidence about the inadequate accumulation of assets suggests that we could have a far bigger problem in the future. If we know that Americans across the board are not saving enough for retirement, and that’s a pretty well-accepted economic fact, and that households with student debt are saving 52 percent less that those that don’t have student debt, what are we going to see when this generation reaches retirement age? How can we expect this generation that is dealing with the effects of their own student debt to be adequately preparing for their own children’s college education?
NS: How can students and parents better prepare to pay for college?
ML: It’s really quite clear. We have a new paper coming out soon that looks at the ability of parental college savings to reduce student debt. It kind of sounds obvious, right? If your parents are saving for your college, you have to borrow less. But there hadn’t been any research done on it. Our analysis finds that students whose parents were saving for them have around $3,000 less in student debt. In this particular data set, what that suggests is that the way that students and parents need to prepare for higher education in this debt-dependent, financial-aid landscape, is to save.
This is difficult to do, not only because we have relatively low college savings across the board, but also because we don’t have adequate vehicles to facilitate college savings. There are not enough incentives, especially for those who are lower-income and don’t benefit equitably from the tax-based incentives that are a part of things like the state 529 college savings plans. But it’s going to be even more difficult if parents are paying their own student debt at a time when they should be saving for their children’s future education. It becomes very difficult to imagine how, without some significant policy changes, we can expect families to get out of this debt cycle.
That’s why we need to take a step back and look at what the debt effects are on multiple levels. We need to build structures to help families save. How can we link college savings opportunities with employers? How can we make our existing tax credits for higher education refundable so that low-income families can benefit equitably? How might we explore something like what they do in Canada and the United Kingdom, what some states — like Maine, North Dakota, Nevada — are doing, in making deposits in children’s college savings accounts? Governments are structuring this asset-based approach to financing college a little bit differently, but all with the same rationale: We can use the same net resources, timed differently and delivered on the front end, instead of as a guaranteed debt at the point of enrollment and get better outcomes not only in college, but also for those who leave college, therefore enabling higher education to play the role that it’s really designed to in our society and our economy.
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Celebrity Chefs Urge New York City to Provide Free School Lunch for Every Student
No one wants it pointed out that they can’t afford something. And that certainly applies to kids. Currently, however, New York City students have to stand in a specific line in order to receive a free lunch — opening themselves up to shame and ridicule because of their economic status. Which is why celebrity chefs like Rachael Ray are advocating for free lunch for all students.
Ray, along with “Top Chef” judge Tom Colicchio and a number of other famed foodies are urging New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to make room for a universal free lunch in this year’s city budget. Ray believes by lifting the cost of lunch, more underserved students will have access to healthy food.
“You’re taking away that stigma of the poor and making it a level playing field for everybody, and that’s supposed to be the promise of the de Blasio administration,” Ray told the Daily News.
Public Advocate Letitia James first proposed the idea in March, but earlier this week the City Council made the program a priority in its budget proposal.
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The City Council is asking for an additional $24 million, but de Blasio is concerned it could affect how much federal education funding the city receives. Funding is based on the percentage of children who receive free lunch, a Department of Education spokeswoman said.
An estimated 75 percent of New York City’s 1.1 million students qualify for free lunch, but Ray and others contend children of undocumented immigrants are missing out on because of the federal paperwork required to be filed. More than 300 New York City schools already receive free lunch as a part of a 2012 federal pilot program; advocates, however, say that it’s not enough.
Dan Kluger of ABC Kitchen, Alison Cayne of Haven’s Kitchen in Chelsea and Johnathan Adler of Franny’s in Brooklyn are also throwing their support behind the cause.
“The only way to approach it is improve the quality and access to healthy food in our public schools,” Ray wrote in a Daily News editorial, “and to make lunch free for all of our kids.”
These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
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Meet the Proud Mother Who Takes On a Cyberbully With Harsh Words but Forgiveness, Too
For all the wonderful things the Internet gives us — global communication, information at our fingertips, the opportunity to spread awareness — there’s also an awful flip side to the technology. And that’s the people who use the web to deliberately attack one another with a few simple (often, anonymous) keystrokes.
Unfortunately, Megan Davies Mennes, a mother of a one-year-old son with Down Syndrome, knows this all too well.
After the English teacher and blogger posted an Instagram photo of her son Quinn (who had just recovered from a week-long bout of illness) with the hashtag #downsyndrome, an anonymous commenter named @JusesCrustHD wrote, “Ugly.”
But Mennes didn’t let this cyber bully have the last word, writing a powerful open letter that was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. In her correspondence, she calls out the user for purposely seeking out the hashtag to make derogatory comments behind the anonymity of a screen name.
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The whole letter is definitely worth the read, but here is where she hits the nail on the head as to why Internet trolls aren’t worth anyone’s time or emotional distress: “I recognize that you want to see me get worked up about your little ‘joke.’ I’ll be honest; it’s hard not to be angry about it, but I can’t allow myself to carry that weight on my shoulders. I can’t allow myself to feel anything but sorry for an individual with so little tact. Because in end, you will be the one to face the consequences of your choices someday. There are few people in this world who tolerate that kind of backwards thinking, and you’ll eventually mouth off to the wrong person. My guess is that you already have, which is why you hide behind a screen name.”
She continues, “God knows there were plenty of cruel adolescent boys in my time: boys who took pleasure in pranks and jokes at others’ expense. There were even a few of them that were directed at me, but it gave me tough skin and I grew from the experience of facing such mistreatment. Maybe that’s why I’m willing to let this one go; I know where most of those boys ended up, and it’s nowhere I’d want to be. And as a teacher, I’ve seen kids like you crash and burn. Go outside. Read a book. Compliment someone. Most importantly, enlighten yourself; there’s already enough cruelty in this world, and anyone worth their salt should be striving to make this place better, not worse.”
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In the end, Mennes takes the high road and wishes the user the best: “I simply hope my own children learn to look past ignorant comments and actions and treat others with respect and dignity. We all deserve it, even you.”
A Housing Model That Works — With No Parents
In the summer of 2006, 4-year-old I’nesha Williams went to visit her grandmother, Rose Stigger, at her home in Kansas City, Mo. The little girl was supposed to stay for two days. After settling in, she asked if she could stay forever.
“So I said, ‘Well, we gotta see,’” recalls Stigger, who was 53 at the time, owned a house and worked at Sam’s Club.
Stigger had raised two sons, one of whom was I’nesha’s father. He and I’nesha’s mother had both gone “down the wrong path” and couldn’t take care of her, according to Stigger, so Inesha had been staying with her maternal great-grandmother elsewhere in Kansas City. But Stigger and I’nesha had a special bond, and when the child said she wanted to live with her grandmother instead, Stigger got permission from Inesha’s great-grandmother to take over her care.
For years, Stigger and I’nesha’s life together was unrelentingly stressful.
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In 2007, Stigger was laid off from Sam’s Club, fell behind on her mortgage payments and lost her house to foreclosure. Grandmother and granddaughter took refuge with a relative in town for a month and then found a house to lease, but soon the rent went up, forcing them to move again. Stigger got another retail job, at the payday loan store Quick Cash, only to end up with a pink slip again in 2009, during the depths of the recession. The nightmares continued: Soon, Stigger’s car broke down and the house she was renting became infested with snakes.
“I said, ‘I’ve gotta get away from here,’” she says.
Finally, nearly five years after she took in her granddaughter, Stigger got a chance to start again.
Under the guidance of a local social worker, JoAnn Stovall, Stigger and Inesha, who was then 8, moved to Pemberton Park for Grandfamilies, an innovative new apartment community in Kansas City for grandparents raising their grandchildren under trying emotional and financial circumstances. The “grandfamilies” receive rent support from the federal government under its Section 8 program, and the 36-unit complex, a partnership between a private developer and the Housing Authority of Kansas City, was built with federal stimulus dollars.
Most of the grandparents who live at Pemberton Park are single women, though there’s a single man and a married couple, too. To qualify for the housing, grandparents must be 55 or over, demonstrate serious financial need and agree to seek legal guardianship of their grandchildren, who must be under 21. Neither the grandchildren’s parents nor adult grandchildren are allowed to live there.
Pemberton Park residents benefit from a broad range of amenities and services. There are financial literacy courses for the grandparents and cooking classes for the grandkids. An on-site counselor provides individual therapy and facilitates support groups. The complex is equipped with a computer lab, a children’s activity room, a grandparents’ lounge, a playground and a food pantry. From time to time, there are carnivals and community dinners.
“I’m so glad they did this,” says Stigger, now 61. “Because I don’t know where I would be right now.”
Since moving to Pemberton Park, she has found stability, peace of mind and a sense of kinship with the other grandparents, who look after one another’s grandchildren at home, at the school bus stop and beyond. She’s also found a job: Pemberton Park’s management company was so impressed with Stigger that it offered her a position at one of its other properties. Meanwhile, her granddaughter, Inesha, now 12, talks about applying to the University of California at Berkeley and eventually becoming a lawyer.
More Grandparents Are Raising Grandchildren
In Kansas City and around the country, the number of grandparents raising grandchildren has been increasing for several decades, researchers say. As of 2011, roughly 2.7 million grandparents were responsible for one or more of their grandchildren, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, up from 2.4 million in 2000, the first year the census counted the figure. A parent may drift in and out of these households, but a grandparent is in charge. Some of the parents have died, while others are too troubled to raise their kids. Some are ill; others are addicts; still others are behind bars or homeless.
And the grandparent who takes over — usually a grandmother — tends to be under an enormous amount of stress, as Stigger’s story demonstrates. She may still be grieving the loss of an adult child to drugs, violence or some other misfortune. She may be unfamiliar with the habits and needs of today’s children, and she probably can’t turn to her friends for support because they haven’t raised kids in a generation either. She may have health and financial problems that are exacerbated by her new responsibilities. She may not have a suitable home in which to raise children, and if she lives in federally subsidized senior housing, she’s probably not even allowed to take kids in.
In 1998, the first housing community in the country specifically tailored to the complicated needs of grandparents raising grandchildren opened in Boston. Since then, similar complexes have been built in the Bronx, N.Y., Cleveland, Detroit, Phoenix, Hartford, Conn., Baton Rouge, La., and several other places in addition to Kansas City. More are under construction.
From Concept to Bricks and Mortar
Kansas City housing developer Brian Collins got the idea for Pemberton Park after reading about Grandparent Family Apartments, a complex in the Bronx that opened in 2005. But it took a whole team to make Collins’ idea a reality — a diverse coalition of public and private players, including some grandmothers, who united, collaborated and persisted in spite of unforeseen roadblocks.
First, Collins tried to ascertain whether special grandparent housing might be needed in his city. A former city planner, he was “frankly amazed” when he learned that there were about 9,000 grandparents raising grandchildren in the metropolitan area, which includes both Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kan. Most were single women with low enough incomes to qualify for subsidized apartments.
Soon, Collins began putting together a team of allies, including Jim Scott, a local architect with a specialty in urban redevelopment; John Monroe, director of planning and development at the Housing Authority of Kansas City, who was game for trying something new; and Stovall, the social worker who ran a program at Children’s Mercy Hospital for grandparents raising grandchildren and was raising two of her own grandchildren across the state line in Kansas.
At Collins’ request, Stovall recruited Stigger and about 40 other grandmother caregivers she knew to attend a preliminary brainstorming session. The grandmothers told the building team that the apartment complex would best meet their needs if it was built near schools, day-care sites, grocery stores and parks. As it turned out, the Housing Authority already owned a piece of land on Swope Parkway that was “ideally suited” — near a shopping center, a park and a community center, Monroe says.
Once the site was chosen, the grandmothers assembled for another brainstorming session, this time to talk specifics.
“We simply got a sensitivity to what their lives were like, how complex their lives could be,” says Scott, the architect.
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He realized that the grandparents would need somewhere to relax, so he designed a lounge for adults only. Since many of the grandparents were raising several grandchildren, Scott created a few four-bedroom units, but he grouped them together to isolate noise. He made all the units handicapped accessible. For the grandchildren, he designed indoor and outdoor play areas and put in window guards and childproof locks. Scott, Collins, Monroe and Stovall also traveled to New York to learn what they could about the Bronx development, a shiny and inviting five-story building on Prospect Avenue, south of Crotona Park.
By 2008, the Kansas City team had secured funding for their project through a federal program that gives tax credits to private investors willing to finance affordable housing. But when the recession hit, the investors pulled out, and it looked like the project might fall apart. The team pushed forward, until finally, in 2009, they received a $5.6 million grant from the federal stimulus bill.
Pemberton Park was completed in 2011, and its very first residents were Stigger and I’nesha.
“I said to them, ‘This is my last stop,’” Stigger recalls.
The Community Evolves
“Rose came in and became absolutely our best marketing person,” Collins says of Stigger, who also took in I’nesha’s half-sister, Alexus Stigger, 16, about a year ago. Although Stigger and Stovall both spread the word about how well the apartments had turned out, it took many months for the units to fill up. Initially, the complex required grandparents to become legal guardians of their grandchildren before moving in, a regulation intended to create a stable tenant community. But when the management team realized that few of the grandparents who wanted to live at Pemberton Park had taken this step — some were holding out hope that their adult children would get their lives together and reclaim their children — the rule was changed. Now, grandparents are allowed to move in if they agree to secure guardianship of their grandchildren within a year.
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With occupancy up, Pemberton Park has faced other challenges. Not long after the building was finished, Stovall’s hospital eliminated her position, which left Pemberton Park without its “spiritual leader,” says Scott, the architect. The Housing Authority has assigned one of its own social workers to the site, LaToya Walker, but she says she’s not able to organize nearly as many activities for residents as she’d like because she has such a small budget. Meanwhile, the property’s manager, Michelle Stevens, says security at the site needs to be beefed up to deal with “outside traffic.”
Scott has two regrets. Because of funding constraints, he didn’t get to build the walking trail around the property that the grandmothers wanted. And the resident-run coffee shop that he lobbied for was nixed.
But the community is still evolving, and some tenants, including Stigger, are taking on leadership roles. She liked the idea of a shop, too, especially when she realized that some of the grandchildren were hanging out at a notoriously unsafe store a few blocks away. So she took matters into her own hands and started an informal one in her apartment. Now, when kids want a can of soda or some ice cream, they knock on her door and come in for a snack and some conversation.
“We’re one big happy family,” Stigger says. “We help each other.”
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Watch Out, Victoria! This Driven Teen Is Taking On the Bra Industry
Your first bra-shopping experience is a rite-of-passage, but it can sure be uncomfortable. This is especially the case when all you’re confronted with in the lingerie section are ill-fitting sports bras, frilly ones with flowers and butterflies, or even padded push-up bras that are completely inappropriate.
That’s why 18-year-old Megan Grassell is setting out to change the bra industry with her start-up, Yellowberry. The lingerie company makes bras for girls between 11-15 that are comfortable, age-appropriate — and, yes, even cute.
The Jackson, Wyoming high schooler decided to start her company after a disappointing shopping trip with her younger sister, Mary, to buy her first bra. “I couldn’t believe the bras that she was supposed to buy,” the young entrepreneur says. “The choices for her, and for all girls her age (the 11-15 age group) were simply appalling to me. They were all padded, push-up, and sexual. Not only that, they did not fit her body properly, which automatically made me wonder ‘Where were the young, cute, and realistic bras for girls?!'”
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That’s when she decided she could take on this mission herself. As Megan says, “I realized that I could do it; I could make those bras for girls.”
To build her company, she told Fortune that she used up her own money from summers working at a gas station and waitressing. She also completed a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $42,000 — almost double her initial goal of $25,000. According to Fast Company, after launching her Yellowberry site, she sold out of her first stock of product in just days. The bras are currently available for pre-order.
Despite her success, she told Fast Company that starting her own business has its difficulties, especially due to her young age and a steep learning curve: “[At first] I didn’t know anything, and I still have so much to learn, but it was hard to get people to take me seriously.”
However, Megan (who is deferring her acceptance to Middlebury College for a year to focus on Yellowberry) remains motivated. The company is currently in phase two of its fundraising campaign so they can put out more bra styles, colors, and even underwear.
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But beyond the bra, the young CEO’s story is also inspiring younger girls, including Madison Kimrey, 12-year-old girl from North Carolina who called Megan a role model for their generation in an open letter.
Megan told Fast Company that she found it humbling for another young girl to see her that way, saying, “I guess in a way I’m trying to change the world a little bit.”
Bra-vo, Megan!
[ph]
Could You Survive on Less Than $1.50 Worth of Food Today?
When you have plenty of food to fill your belly, it’s easy to forget about those whose stomachs are empty.
And that’s just what New York City’s Hugh Evans wants to change.
To engage people in the fight against hunger, Evans, co-founder of The Global Poverty Project, is inviting people to join the Live Below the Line campaign, which runs from April 28 to May 2. Participants will live for five days on only the food and drink they can purchase for $1.50 or less a day — which is the amount of money some 1.2 million people have to feed themselves daily — and donate their savings to charities working to solve hunger, including Heifer International, The Hunger Project, and World Food Program USA.
Started in 2010, Live Below the Line has had 50,000 participants, raising $10 million for charity. Evans told Charles Lamb of the Christian Science Monitor that people get creative with their limited funds: “You’re allowed to buy your own seeds and plant your own food,” he said, so some plan ahead and plant crops they can eat for the week, while others pool their funds together to make it stretch farther.
The 31-year-old Evans is especially interested in engaging young people in the effort to fight hunger. “I really believe that every generation is called upon to leave a great mark on this planet,” he told Lamb. He believes Americans “have a wonderful tradition of philanthropy,” and hopes that generosity continues with today’s tech titans in Silicon Valley. “I think it’s crucial that the tech community and the new generation of wealth in America steps up,” he said.
A good way for them to start? By figuring out how to stretch a bowl of ramen during Live Below the Line week and donating the savings.
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This Pro Football Player Fulfills an Extraordinary Promise to His Old High School
How many people promise to do something but never make good on their pledge? We’re guessing lots. But NFLer Darrius Heyward-Bey isn’t one of them.
Back when Heyward-Bey was a senior at McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, he made a thoughtful promise to Mickey Deegan, the school’s athletic director. “We were on the sidelines, and Darrius asked me why we didn’t have lights in the stadium,” Deegan said in a blog post on the college-preparatory school’s website. “When I told him lights were expensive and it would take a very generous gift to make that happen, he put his arm around my shoulders and said, ‘When I go pro I’m going to buy you some lights…because night games are what high school football is all about.’”
Well, the young man certainly made it and now he’s paying it forward. After playing college football for the University of Maryland, Heyward-Bey was drafted by the Oakland Raiders in 2009. Currently, he’s a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Making good on his promise, the entire McDonogh School community will experience the real-life thrill of Friday night lights starting next fall — and maybe even nurture a path for the school’s current football players to make it big.
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“Young players dream of playing under the lights, but the reality is that 95 percent of athletes don’t play after high school,” 27-year-old Heyward-Bey told the school. “I’m glad McDonogh football players will now have that opportunity.”
The school says the move will certainly bring the community together and raise school spirit to another level.
The Maryland-born athlete added that his gesture is his way of showing appreciation to the place he came from. “Giving back is showing that you appreciate where you come from, and McDonogh is where I come from,” Heyward-Bey said. “I learned so much from my teachers and coaches. I would not be the person I am today if McDonogh was not along my path in life.”
Ben’s Bells: Making Random Acts of Kindness Part of School Curriculums
You can’t drive far in Tucson, Ariz., without spying one of the ubiquitous bright-green flower magnets that cling to the backs of cars, reminding you to “be kind.” It’s a message that appears all over the city, in handmade mosaics or on ceramic bells scattered randomly around town for people to find.
You’ll also see the message in hundreds of the city’s schools, and on more and more campuses across the country — a way to encourage compassion among students in an era of indiscriminate school violence. Just last Friday, another tragedy: A 16-year-old student — an athlete, drama club member and twice her class president — was stabbed to death in a stairwell allegedly by a fellow classmate at Jonathan Law High School in Milford, Conn.
Tragedy and grief led to the “be kind” message in Tucson, where the handmade bells, totems of positivity, have become a tradition. Known as Ben’s Bells, they were first created by Jeannette Maré in 2003, a year after the sudden death of her young son, Ben. It was simple acts of kindness from strangers, Maré says — an unexpected smile, a door held open — that had helped her bear the early days of her enormous grief. And so, as a memorial to Ben, she and a small group of friends began crafting bells out of clay, copper and string, and hanging them around town along with a written note encouraging people to take the bell home and to remember to be kind to others. As more of Maré’s friends heard about what she was doing, they showed up to help. The movement — and Maré’s organization — grew organically, with more and more volunteers identifying with its simple and fundamental prescription, Maré says.
“We’re always searching for something that’s way out there” when it comes to seeking solutions, says Maré, “and the point of Ben’s Bells is that it’s actually right here, in this interaction, with this guy at Circle K [convenience store]. Happiness is about savoring the ordinary moments, and that’s not what we’ve been promoting in our culture for a very long time.”
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In 2007, local schools started approaching Maré, asking how they could introduce her message to kids in the hopes of not only fostering a culture of kindness in schools, but also to help reduce bullying and protect against school violence. So, Ben’s Bells developed two kindness programs — Kind Kids (for pre-K through fifth grade) and Kind Campus (for middle school and high school) — which now reach more than 150,000 students in 278 schools in Tucson and beyond. The programs are constantly being launched in schools around the country, including, most recently, 57 schools in and around Newtown, Conn.
It’s simple programming and it’s up to each school to interpret its broad guidelines. At one Arizona school, “kindness crews,” student-led after-school groups, embark on quests to perform random acts of kindness: For instance, one day they held an impromptu parent-appreciation rally as parents came to pick up their children. The group held up handmade signs and cheered as parents pulled up to the school in their cars. At another school, students created a “kindness tree” on whose blank flowers kids record acts of kindness they do with their families, and display them for the rest of the school. Kids also organize schoolwide events to celebrate empathy and kindness, where students, along with their parents and teachers, publicly acknowledge noteworthy acts. Teachers and other adults are encouraged to model kind behavior, too, and they receive monthly educational materials to help them teach kids how to behave more thoughtfully — and to discuss why extending compassion to others is so important.
Jamie Kasen, a second-grade teacher at Lulu Walker Elementary School in Casas Adobes, Ariz., brought the program to her school and says it’s led to a noticeable change. “In day-to-day conversations, within my own classroom, just hearing my kids and the way they speak to each other, I’m pretty amazed by it,” Kasen says.
But don’t take Kasen’s word for it. Researchers at the University of Arizona are now studying the effects of Ben’s Bells’ school-based programs to try to grow them into a national, evidence-based intervention. The scientists are still figuring out exactly how to quantify kindness, and how to measure the impact it has on kids’ health and happiness, and that of their relationships and communities. But what they can say for sure is that the Ben’s Bells model stands out against other similar school-based programs. For one thing, it emphasizes and rewards positive behavior instead of only castigating misbehavior. The researchers say this philosophy appears to help the program gather a much broader base of support and buy-in from kids, which strengthens its effectiveness.
“The thing that’s powerful about Ben’s Bells is that it becomes a social movement within the school setting,” says Dr. Chuck Raison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a member of the Ben’s Bells board, whose own research has shown positive biological effects associated with a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation that fosters compassion. “Kids are so overwhelmingly influenced by peer pressure, that by organically changing the markers of what qualifies as being a cool kid, and moving that marker from the bullying status elite and being nasty to other kids to setting up a climate that’s more supportive of the most vulnerable, you see a huge impact.” Although combatting bullying isn’t the primary goal of Ben’s Bells, the program appears to have had that effect, according to anecdotal evidence from teachers who have participated in it.
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The positive trends aren’t surprising when you consider the reams of research that have already been conducted on the impact of compassion and social connectedness. Maré, a former professor of discourse analysis at the University of Arizona herself, notes that a community’s sense of connectedness — in other words, its social capital — has been found to be directly associated with rates of social ills, including crime, depression and bullying. The more strongly people are connected, the more they are inoculated against these problems. Over the decades, she says, levels of connectedness in the United States as a whole have been on the decline.
Another reason that Tucson has embraced Ben’s Bells’ message so wholeheartedly is that the program was introduced by one of its own. It wasn’t an initiative dreamed up by outsiders and suddenly foisted on the city’s schools and residents. Further, the school-based program has built-in reinforcements even off campus, since the “be kind” motto has already been woven into the fabric of the society: Everywhere you look, the signature flower logo is there, from murals and bumper stickers to T-shirts, ceramic coins and bells. It’s a message that kids won’t easily forget.
“We’ve all done research in the community and in schools, some of us for a really long time, and to find something like this that’s really embraced by a community is really unusual, and that was part of what piqued our interest,” says Michele Walsh, an associate research professor at the University of Arizona who is studying the Ben’s Bells project.
Tragedy is a powerful pollinator for those small ceramic flowers. Ben’s Bells sprang from Maré’s personal loss, after all, and bloomed in 2011, when a shooting in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson left six dead and 12 others injured, including former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The city plunged into despair and turned to Ben’s Bells — with volunteers crafting and hanging 1,400 bells in the aftermath of the attack — for solace. The following year, another mass shooting, this time at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 children, sent another town reeling. Community members in both Tucson and Newtown reached out to each other, and Ben’s Bells opened its second location in the Connecticut town in 2013. Since then, schools in other cities have expressed interest in adopting Kind Kids and Kind Campus, and plans are in the works to expand. Maré is careful to note, however, that her organization is selective about the communities it enters — choosing only those that can demonstrate a broad base of support.
The program isn’t just about responding to tragedy, Maré says. But when catastrophes happen, people truly begin to understand the emotions that nurtured her organization’s earliest moments — the sense of loss, the need for something to do, the small connections and acts of kindness that pull people through. Maré knows how powerful these feelings are, and that they serve a purpose, not only in times of mourning, but also in our everyday lives. “That’s what Ben’s Bells is about, learning to connect and that we need each other — and that we are all in this together,” she says.
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