In Portland, Ore., there’s an idea so innovative that it has managed to bring together two sets of people with different problems — and solve them for both.
Welcome to the Bridge Meadows housing development, which helps elders and kids by providing a supportive environment for families that adopt foster kids alongside 27 units of affordable housing for seniors who agree to pitch in for 10 hours a week to help out with the kids. It’s a solution to a problem you don’t hear about often on the news: According to the PBS News Hour, 15 percent of seniors in America live below the poverty line, which often makes them struggle to find affordable housing. Meanwhile, families who adopt foster children face their own difficulties, as they are pressed for time, money and support.
Jackie Lynn, 60, is in the process of adopting her niece’s children because both of their drug-addicted parents are in jail. She works full time and felt she wasn’t able to give the kids the attention they needed until they moved to Bridge Meadows. Her family is partnered with neighbors Jim and Joy Corcoran, the “elders” who volunteer to spend time with the kids. “They are the reason that we thrive,” Lynn told Cat Wise of the PBS NewsHour. “Jim takes the boys every Sunday morning for about three hours. And they come home excited, with all these wonderful stories. You see children running up to them and giving them hugs. It’s just incredible to watch it.”
Meanwhile, the Corcorans experienced financial trouble after Jim lost his construction job, but now they live comfortably at Bridge Meadows with a $500 monthly rent payment. Joy Corcoran told Wise, “It was really difficult to find any decent housing that we could afford in any regard. And so when we had the opportunity to move here, it was just a godsend. It was like a huge relief.”
Bridge Meadows is funded by rents and donations from corporations and the community, and it provides a myriad of ways for kids and elders to interact every week. Elders lead story times, teach music lessons, tutor kids in school subjects, give them lifts to school and more. Derenda Schubert, the executive director of Bridge Meadows, said that there have been a few families who moved in and found the togetherness a bit too much, but for most of them it’s a perfect fit, and several seniors reported that their health improved through so much interaction. “Connections across the generations is critical, absolutely critical for aging well,” Jim Corcoran told Wise.
Plenty of people agree with Jim — which is why another intergenerational housing development like Bridge Meadows is currently under construction in Portland. But there’s good news for those who don’t live in Oregon, too: The staff of Bridge Meadows is consulting with people across the country who want to start their own such housing projects.
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Category: Moving America Forward
A Dying Grandmother Takes One Last Stroll With the Help of This Incredible Invention
Most people think of virtual reality as video games. But as the touching video below shows, virtual reality can also be a useful tool to help improve the quality of someone’s life.
As The Rift Arcade reports, video game artist Priscilla Firstenberg sent a note to Oculus VR, the Irvine, California-based developers behind the Oculus Rift, to help fulfill her terminally ill grandmother’s wish to go outside again. A virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift is the company’s first product and is currently in development after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
For Priscilla’s cancer-stricken grandmother, Roberta, the 3D headset gave her the chance to stroll along a sunny Tuscan village right from her own home. Her reactions are nothing short of amazing—she describes touching butterflies, hearing the sounds of the beach and seagulls, and looking at all the beautiful colors.
“It’s just like dropping into a mirage, dropping straight down into a bubble of new life. It’s beautiful,” she says in the video.
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But it was the simple action of walking up the stairs that Roberta found the most awe-inspiring. “Her favorite part was just being able to walk up and down the stairs again of the villa in the Tuscany demo,” Priscilla told The Rift Arcade. “I guess we take a lot of things for granted.”
Using the Oculus Rift’s version of Google Street View, Roberta was even able to take a virtual stroll and see an old snap of herself standing with her beloved pet dog.
Unfortunately, about four weeks after her first use of the Oculus, Roberta’s condition took a turn for the worse and she passed away. However, Roberta’s story is a reminder of the incredible possibilities of virtual reality, especially beyond entertainment purposes and video gaming.
As she says in the video, virtual reality can be a real form of therapy: “You can be in pain like I have pain but somehow when you see a blue butterfly reach out to kiss you…it makes you realize that we all are part of this world and this world is very precious to us.”
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The Heartwarming Reason That This Student’s College Acceptance Letter Is So Meaningful
When Noah VanVooren was born with Down syndrome 18 years ago, doctors had a grim forecast for him—and one that didn’t include higher education. But nearly two decades later, VanVooren is defying the odds as he prepares to assume the role of a very happy freshman this fall at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin.
In the most heartwarming video you’ll watch all day, the high school senior opens his college acceptance letter in front of his family at his Little Chute, Wisc. home. His reaction? Pure joy. At one point he gets so excited he takes off his sweater and flexes his muscles in front of the camera.
Noah will be attending the college’s Cutting Edge Program, which is designed for students with intellectual developmental disabilities.
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The young man’s already had quite the banner year. You might remember a story from October when Noah, Little Chute’s varsity football team’s waterboy, got to suit up and score a touchdown for his school. The much-loved student was met with cheers from the crowd, and no one was more proud than his parents.
“He was born 18 years ago and the doctors told us that he would never be able to walk, talk, or do anything,” Noah’s father, Todd, says in the video below. “And then to see him 18 years to do this is amazing.” We couldn’t agree more.
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Meet a Former Big-City Police Chief Who Wants to Turn American Law Enforcement on Its Head
Past behavior doesn’t always predict future behavior. Norm Stamper is a case in point. Stamper was the Seattle Police Chief in 1999, when hundreds of people protested the World Trade Organization meeting. Under Stamper’s direction the police opted to disperse the protesters with tear gas. The tactics resulted in Stamper’s resignation and prompted him to begin a period of “very painful learning,” he told Sarah Stuteville of Seattle Globalist. He told her that using chemical agents to disperse the protesters was “the worst decision” of his career. Ever since, Stamper has been studying law enforcement in other countries to find techniques and ideas that could be effective for the American justice system.
In his book Breaking Rank, Stamper advocates some controversial law-enforcement ideas, including legalizing drugs, abolishing the death penalty, and relying more on citizens for enforcement than police. He told Stuteville that the drug war has incarcerated far too many people, especially minority men. “We’ve got the drug war raging since 1971 and pitting police against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, creating natural animosity and tension between police and the community—in particular young people, poor people and people of color,” he says, pointing to Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, resulting in a decrease in drug use and overdose deaths.
Stamper says we can learn from communities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where women gather to bang pots and pans outside the homes of men who abuse women, creating a ruckus to publicly shame the men and raise awareness of the problem. “I think we should return to the earliest days of primitive law enforcement,” he told Stuteville, believing that America can “have citizens that are attuned to, and actually carrying out, a public safety role.”
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How ‘The Golden Girls’ Can Help Solve a Problem Facing Senior Women
“The Golden Girls” went off the air in 1992, but many of us still remember the show about four senior women sharing a home in Miami, in part because there hasn’t been anything else like it on T.V.
It turns out “The Golden Girls” was ahead of its time in more ways than one, and that its model of communal living—with some good-natured bickering thrown in—might provide a solution to a problem facing millions of Baby Boomer women as they reach retirement age. One third of Baby Boomer women live alone, and 50.8 percent of the 78.2 million Boomers in America are women. Many of these single women are divorced, a situation that often leaves their finances in disarray as they head into retirement.
According to the PBS NewsHour, the median income of senior women in Minneapolis was $11,000 less than that for men, which gave Connie Skillingstad an idea. She runs Golden Girl Homes, Inc., which helps match older women in the Twin Cities with others who’d like to reduce loneliness and split expenses by sharing a home. She told Spencer Michels of the NewsHour that each of the women who band together as roommates offers some asset that can help the others. “For example, there are women who have no money, but they have a house. They have space and they can share it with somebody, and it will help them to survive,” she said.
Karen Bush, Louise Machinist, and Jean McQuillan are longtime friends in their 60s, each of them divorced, who now share houses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sarasota, Florida. The women reach agreements about cooking, cleaning, finances, and what to do should any of them fall ill. They have legal documents in place stipulating what would happen if any of them are no longer able to take care of themselves. Together, they’re renovating their Florida condo to allow them to age in place. Bush told Michels, “The whole setup that we have here is going to help me be independent for a long time. And at the point at which I can no longer be independent, I will have additional resources to pay for what I need.”
Half a million women over the age of 50 in America live with roommates who are not romantic partners. Now this sounds like a case of smart women banding together to solve their own problems. Could a sitcom be next?
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Why This Pastor Continues to Feed the Homeless, Even After the Police Told Him to Stop
Millions of people across the country (about 1 in 6) do not have enough money for a meal. But twice a month for the last six years, Rick Wood, a pastor at The Lord’s House of Prayer in Oneonta, Alabama, has made sure the stomachs in his own community did not go hungry by handing out free hot dogs and bottled water to those in need.
That is, until he was literally stopped by the food police.
As ThinkProgress reports, last month local police stopped Wood due to the city’s food truck law, which meant the pastor had to acquire a pricey permit (that can cost up to $500) in order to continue giving out food. The exact wording of the city ordinance states (per AL.com): “No person or business entity, including religious or charitable organization, shall operate a mobile food vehicle and/or pushcart upon the public rights-of-way within the city without a permit.” Reports say that the law was enacted after local restaurants complained that food trucks were affecting business.
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Wood told ABC 33/40 he wasn’t at all happy with the government’s decision. “I’m just so totally shocked that the city is turning their back on the homeless like this,” he said. “It’s like they want to chase them out of the city. And the homeless can’t help the position they’re in. They need help.”
As ThinkProgress reports, Birmingham’s homeless numbers have gone down in recent years but there are still 1,469 people in the area who do not have a roof over their heads. Wood, who has the Bible verse “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink” etched onto the side of his truck, is not giving up his mission to help feed the hungry. According to a online fundraiser, Wood has already obtained the permit to continue in his good works.
This Organization is Sending Business Students on Road Trips for Change
Casey Gerald and Michael Baker’s new venture, MBAs Across America, sounds a bit like the Amazing Race meets non-profit business consulting. The organization will be sending eight teams (each made up of four MBA students) on cross-country road trips this summer. Over the course of six weeks, the teams will provide free business consulting to six entrepreneurs in six locations.
Gerald and Baker are both second-year Harvard MBA students, but if you’re picturing stodgy, suit-clad men sitting in corporate corner offices, think again. They’re more like business adventurers, changing the face of business education while speeding down the highway.
The idea for the venture came from a road trip the two took last summer with fellow Harvard MBA students Amaris Singer and Hicham Mhammedi Alaoui. In eight weeks, the students drove 8,000 miles and visited eight cities, including New Orleans, Detroit, and Albuquerque. They worked closely with six entrepreneurs, each of whom, despite having an innovative business idea, needed help.
In Asheville, North Carolina, they partnered with the Highland Brewing Company, a family-owned craft brewery that wanted to learn more about engaging with local customers. In White Sulphur Springs, Montana, they teamed with Red Ants Pants, a rural company that makes workwear for women. The partnerships paid off, for both the entrepreneurs and the MBA students, reported Business Education.
Gerald believes that the program adds something essential to business education. “Our classroom becomes cities. Our professors become entrepreneurs. Our tests become the impact we can make, not just over the course of the summer, but over the course of our lives.”
This summer, Gerald and Baker hope to see that impact grow. Eight teams — from Stanford, Columbia, Babson, Michigan Ross, Haas, and Harvard — have been chosen to participate in the cross-country road trips. The teams can pick where they travel, though they must visit at least one rural city.
Currently, Gerald and Baker are choosing entrepreneurs to participate in the program. To be selected, they must be located in a place that has an interesting story, and they must have a compelling vision for the future of their business. Additionally, they must have a positive impact on their communities.
As for its own business model, MBAs Across America is a non-profit, funded by business schools (Stanford and Harvard are each sponsoring their teams this summer), corporations, and individual donors. Gerald says sponsors have been eager to support local businesses while helping to train the next generation of business leaders.
Though the road trip will undoubtedly be full of adventure, Gerald and Baker emphasize that MBAs Across America uses the summer as a launch for continued collaboration between business students and entrepreneurs across the country. Of the newly selected teams of entrepreneurs, Gerald says,“They’re engaged, and we’re engaged, for a lifetime.”
Let’s Do Something For the Holders of the World’s Toughest Job
Last week, a video about the “World’s Toughest Job” made a big splash on the Internet. For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, a fake company called “Rethom” (read it backwards) posted a job listing for a “Director of Operations” position that had some pretty insane requirements:
– Must be able to work 135+ hours a week
– Willingness to forgo any breaks
– Work mostly standing up and/or bending down
– Demonstrate knowledge and experience in negotiating, counseling and culinary arts
– Have an understanding of finance
– Have an understanding of medicine
– Maintain a positive disposition at all times
The position is unpaid, you will be on call 24/7 — and the work will actually increase during the holidays. As Adweek writes, the ad for this position got 2.7 million impressions from paid ad placements, and 24 real-life people actually inquired about this job. On the day of their interview, they got dressed up, were told about the requirements from this job from you know where, and all their reactions were caught on video (which has gone viral in the few short days it’s been out and blogs have applauded it as a tearjerker and amazing). Of course, there’s a big emotional twist.
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Turns out (if you haven’t already guessed or watched the video, which was created by Boston ad company Mullen for the greeting card company Cardstore.com just in time for Mother’s Day next month) there are billions of people around the world who already have this grueling job. (Spoiler alert!) They’re mothers.
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Critics, however, have attacked the video for being schmaltzy or sidelining the dads who take on this role. Point taken, but perhaps the video struck a chord because it highlights the oft-ignored and thankless labor that women go through.
There are an estimated 85.4 million mothers in the United States, not to mention the millions of fathers and caregivers who also hold this position. Maybe instead of buying a greeting card or just forwarding the link of the video with the message, “I love you, mommy,” we should also do something that would really show how much they are appreciated?
Since mothers work 135+ hours a week, how about improving access and affordability of daycare centers or after school programs?
ALSO: Here’s Why We Should Be Investing in Single Moms
Since there’s no vacation, what about increasing maternity leave? American moms take off about 10 weeks on average after giving birth compared to 52 weeks in the United Kingdom.
Since moms need to be medical, culinary and financial experts, what about making sure they actually have the means to keep their families healthy? We’re talking access to adequate health care and leaving welfare, food stamps and WIC programs untouched.
Since the job of motherhood goes unpaid, what about increasing the pay of their day job (or jobs) or closing the wage gap? It’s still 77 cents to every dollar a man earns. For all the talk about “Leaning In,” what about actively promoting more women to top jobs? Maybe then, women could really have it all.
When Mayors MEET: 5 Brilliant Education Ideas Coming to a City Near You
Even the casual observer of current events knows that education reform is a major concern for Americans. Turn on Fox News, MSNBC or any nightly news program, and you’re likely to hear debate on a number of issues, from teacher unions and Common Core to pre-K opportunities and the overall cost of education. But by watching the national debate, which can be as combative as it is complex, it’s easy to forget that we live in a country with nearly 20,000 municipal governments — each of which is working on unique, location-specific efforts to improve their respective public school systems.
Last fall, mayors from four of those municipalities — Michael Hancock (Denver), Kevin Johnson (Sacramento, Calif.), Julian Castro (San Antonio, Texas) and Angel Taveras (Providence, R.I.) — rallied to rise above the national chatter and actually collaborate to improve public schools. And to do that, they hit the road on the inaugural Mayors for Educational Excellence Tour (MEET), an initiative with a simple premise: The four mayors visit one another’s cities to learn successful methods being used in pre-K through 12th-grade public schools, which can then be implemented in their own hometowns — and cities across America. The tour kicked off last October in Denver with Mayor Hancock, before stopping in Sacramento and San Antonio. It’s slated to end April 24 in Providence with Mayor Taveras.
At each stop, the host city’s mayor showcases his community’s most innovative education initiatives. The host city also holds a town hall meeting where all the mayors can engage with parents, students and other education leaders in a wide-ranging conversation about public-school reform. “MEET was designed to be an echo chamber where the mayors could have unfiltered conversations over a day or two in a particular city, as opposed to a rushed 15-minute meeting,” says Peter Groff, a principal at MCG2 Consulting in Woodbridge, Va., and a former Colorado legislator with a longtime interest in education reform. Groff conceived and developed the tour with Hancock; this included choosing the three other mayors based on their education-focused administrations. “They’ve heard about what the other mayors have done, but they haven’t seen it firsthand.”
That Hancock, Johnson, Castro and Taveras are all progressive mayors who favor more liberal reform policies no doubt makes this kind of teamwork easier. All four mayors are also governing the very cities they grew up in — and are graduates of the public-school systems they’re trying to fix. But the biggest factor contributing to their success may be the very fact that they serve as mayors.
Last October, a Pew Research Center report found that just 19 percent of Americans trusted Washington to do what’s right most of the time or all of the time. But living outside the Beltway, MEET’s four mayors say they can buck that stereotype to actually make measurable progress.
“Mayors mostly govern in a nonpartisan environment, so we don’t have to tow the party line from one side to the other,” Mayor Castro says. “Being in local communities, the residents are more likely to know their mayors — people actually approach mayors, so they’re not cardboard cutouts, or just the bad guy or the good guy. Cities are where things can still get done. And that’s not something they can say in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals.”
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With the final stop on the tour approaching, MEET’s organizers are already thinking about next year and how to scale their mission. Mayor Hancock says he’s received inquiries and requests from other mayors to join. And the Educational Excellence Task Force of the United States Conference of Mayors, an organization for leaders of cities with more than 30,000 people, is working to document digitally the lessons from MEET’s first run so all its members can access the takeaways. “If a mayor on another side of the country wants to see what Denver’s doing, they just need to go online and read the case study,” Hancock says. “We’re moving forward with what we’ve learned. We’re moving nationally. And all that is because of this tour.”
Here’s a look at 5 big ideas from MEET that may be coming to a school near you:
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Think You Can Build an App That Saves the World From Asteroids?
If you’ve ever dreamed of saving the world from an impending asteroid collision, and you’ve got a better solution than hiring Bruce Willis to bomb the asteroid to smithereens, we’ve got the competition for you.
On April 12 and 13, during NASA’s third annual Space Apps Challenge, hundreds of scientists and software engineers joined together in a 48-hour hackathon to come up with solutions to vexing global and interstellar problems. NASA comes up with the puzzlers for the event, and anybody with the engineering chops to work on them is invited to try. Teams on six continents and at over a hundred locations work on the problems.
In total, there were 40 challenges, such as this one in the category of asteroids: “Create an open source network of quick-response robotic telescopes that would enable fast follow-up observations of potentially-threatening asteroids.” Other tasks included trying to make a “Track that Wetland” app — allowing citizen scientists to record observations and data on the wetlands in their communities — and creating a design for a greenhouse that NASA could use to keep visitors on the moon or Mars stocked with fresh produce.
Each year, the challenges result in the creation of useful apps. Last year, software engineer James Wanga’s team won the Best Hardware Prize for building the prototype of an asteroid mapper. Wanga told Denise Chow of Space.com, “There’s a spirit that infects everyone when we realize all these people around the world are working on the same thing.”
After participating in the NASA Challenge, Wanga and three colleagues started the company Go Lab, which builds tiny satellites for all sorts of uses. Wanga and Co. were at it again this year, coding all weekend long at the Manhattan NASA Space Apps Challenge location in an effort to build a network that could one day allow far-flung astronauts to communicate in space.
“We all understand here that we’re trying to change the world,” Wanga told Chow. “This is the beginning of the space tech boom, and the people here right now are the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of space tech start-ups.”
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