When people think of home, they often focus on what’s inside. But there’s a privilege in having a place to live that’s often forgotten: having a permanent address.
For people experiencing homelessness, an address can be a gateway to gaining that home. Without an address, an individual can’t receive disability benefits, social security payments or veteran’s benefits. They can’t open a bank account, which is often needed to collect earnings from employers. They can’t receive notifications about newly available affordable housing, messages from their children’s school or correspondence from family members.
In other words, the resources that homeless people need require an address, but in order to have an address — a home, apartment or place to sleep — the individual needs to first obtain those resources.
This vicious cycle has come to be known as the Postal Paradox — and leaders at Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph in San Jose, California, saw an opportunity to disrupt it.
In 1983, the church opened up its reception office so that people experiencing homelessness could have a permanent address to receive mail and use when applying to jobs. Today, the program is called The Window.
“[The Window] is how we keep them connected,” Sharon Miller, the director of Cathedral Social Ministries at Catholic Charities, told NationSwell. “It’s just one small little layer of making a significant difference in someone’s life who doesn’t have a permanent residence.”
Throughout the day about 150 people, typically those recently released from the justice system or those experiencing homelessness, stop by the walk-up counter to collect any mail they might have received. Behind the glass panel is a tiny room with rows of mail slots, boxes of sandwiches and workers bustling around.
You’ll find people leaving The Window with bundles of mail. You’ll also find people walking away with a saran-wrapped sandwich or carrying a tube of toothpaste, a bottle of shampoo or a stick of deodorant.
“It’s just making sure that they have some real simple items, that are life-saving items,” Miller said.
Though it was initially conceived to serve as a permanent address, The Window has since evolved, offering toiletries, food and access to services to those who need it — services like referring individuals to shelters, permanent housing or employment opportunities. The Cathedral Office of Social Ministry also runs a free healthcare clinic, which is accessed through The WIndow.
“[The Window] really did grow over the years, and now we’re in a state of crisis with homelessness,” Miller explained.
Homelessness in San Jose is on the rise — up 42% since 2017. So a resource like The Window is essential to connecting individuals to permanent housing. And although San Jose’s homeless population has increased, Miller said registration rates at the Window are beginning to plateau.
Miller estimates that about 15 new people register with The Window every week and another 15 find permanent housing, so The Window’s total population has consistently hovered around 920.
Miller is constantly reminded of why she does this work. She’ll be flagged walking down the street by people she used to help. “Someone will come up and say, ‘Sharon, Sharon, I still have my housing because of what you provided.” And those are the memories that stick.
So even as homeless rates rise, Miller stays positive.
“All of us know what we need to do to solve this problem,” she said. “It just isn’t happening quick enough.”
It may seem like just a walk-up window, but inside are connections and opportunities for so much more.
More: These Parking Lots Give Homeless People a Safe Place to Sleep for the Night
Category: Bridging the Opportunity Divide
This Yellow Bus Isn’t Taking Children to School — It’s Taking Families Off of Streets
A school bus is typically full of eager, excited kids.
But for the Flood family, a school bus is home. It’s a place full of the essentials: food, hot water, clothes and a place to rest.
During the summer of 2018, David Flood, who was working as a substitute teacher and studying for his master’s, had to quit his job. He needed to take care of his three kids and his wife, Jennifer Flood, who was too sick to work. Rent payments, student loans and hospital bills piled up, and the family was evicted from their home. They were left with only their car and a tent to sleep in.
“We didn’t think it would happen to us—but it did,” David Flood told Julie Atkins, the founder of Vehicles for Changes. “It’s not just the uneducated. I’m finishing my master’s degree. I had nowhere to work, so the skoolie enables me to get it done. I’m so relieved.”
In November 2018, their precarious sleeping situation changed, thanks to Vehicles for Changes, a nonprofit that outfits retired school buses for families experiencing homelessness.
The family moved into a “skoolie,” a term for a bus converted into a home. After being cramped in their car, the family had a chance to stretch out for the first time in months.
Vehicles for Changes launched in May 2018 by Julie Atkins, a journalist covering homelessness in Oregon and up and down the West Coast.
Oregon, like the majority of the United States, has seen its homeless population rise over the past few years. More people are living on the streets, in encampments and in their cars. During the 2016-2017 school year, nearly 23,000 Oregonian students experienced homelessness, according to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.
There are a variety of reasons why more families and individuals end up without a place to rest their heads. The cost of living has risen dramatically while wages haven’t, shifts in the economy can create gaps in job opportunities and sky-high medical bills, even with health insurance, can send a family spiraling into debt.
Atkins started investigating solutions outside of homeless shelters and tiny homes, which each have their strengths and weaknesses
“We wanted to create a home that would last 30 years, that would truly be mobile and would take homelessness off the table for a child for the rest of their childhood,” Atkins told NationSwell.
She found a solution inside of a retired school bus.
“There are a lot of reasons why buses just make for a great canvas,” she said.
School buses go through rigorous safety inspections, have features like windows and roof exits and, at 240 square feet, provide a decent living space. The biggest bonus is that they’re drivable.
If a family can pack up and move without leaving their home behind, they’re able to find more job opportunities, Atkins explained. Low-income families often rely on temporary jobs, which means they move more frequently. But the costs of moving from place to place frequently can quickly drain a family’s savings; a bus provides more flexibility without the financial burden.
However, moving has its drawbacks. Children who switch schools are more likely to disengage and fall behind. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found a link between moving frequently as a child and higher risks of criminality, suicide and drug abuse. But many homeless children have already moved multiple times. It’s possible that not having to start over with a new living space holds an added benefit.
After writing a blog about her idea to convert buses into homes, a reader offered to fund Atkins’ nonprofit for the next five years, donating $25,000 each year. So, she got to work.
Each home costs about $25,000 to buy and build. Atkins works with a contractor to turn the buses into skoolies, adding a full kitchen, bunk bed, master bedroom and living space to each.
From there, the bus is leased out to a family, for free, for one year. Atkins will help the family find a place to park the bus, whether in an RV park, a designated safe parking lot or on private land. If the family wants to keep living on the bus, they have the chance to purchase it using a sliding scale, interest-free payment plan through the nonprofit.
For the Flood family, their bus has been life-changing. As they approach one year of living in their skoolie, they’re hoping to buy it, Atkins said. The family has found a community at the Jackson Wellsprings RV park. Since moving in, the three children have made friends, grown an herb garden and gained a sense of permanency. “Their life has changed dramatically as a result of this,” Atkins said.
“It made the little money we had stronger,” David told People. “It took the stress off of our lives. It allows us to breathe for a moment.”
Atkins understands bus life might not be for everyone. For some, it can act as a safe stepping stone back to living in a house or apartment. For others, if the space is manageable, it could serve as a permanent home.
Vehicles for Changes is currently finishing up its second bus and accepting applicants. It already has a third bus ready to be refurbished, but the nonprofit is in need of financial support.
Their goal is to finish two additional buses by the end of this year and complete five in 2020. Atkins said she also hopes to add solar panels to the roof to decrease energy costs and make the homes carbon neutral.
She sees buses as one simple solution to ending homelessness and hopes to see other communities replicating her work so more families can get off the streets.
“We know the buses exist. We know the need exists. We know that the money, $25,000 for a house, is a lot cheaper than any other option that anyone else has come up with,” she said. ”The goal is that every community out there who sees this as viable jumps in and starts this process themselves.”
More: These Austin Tiny Homes Could House 40% of the City’s Chronically Homeless Population
This Oregon College Knocked Textbook Prices Down From $200 to $40 With One Move
Every semester, college students walk the aisles of their school’s bookstore. They wander between shelves of $200 math textbooks and psychology books more expensive than a month’s groceries, searching for copies they may never even open.
From 1977 to 2015, the price of college textbooks skyrocketed 1,041%. Sixty-five percent of students reported not buying all required course reading because it was too expensive, according to a 2014 report for the Public Research Institute Groups.
But when students step into the bookstore at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, they find many books offered for less than $40. Those books are thanks to the college’s independently run Chemeketa Press.
Since its 2015 launch, the press has printed 33 titles and saved students more than $2.5 million.
In one case, a textbook for an art appreciation course — a class that helps students meet a humanities requirement— used to cost $200.
Today it costs $36.50. Not only are students saving money, but by using a textbook created by the instructor, they gain insight into local artists and a new definition of what art appreciation means.
The school’s administration set out to make sure the cost of a book never deterred someone from taking a class. In 2015, using grant funding and school support, the college opened the press. They collaborate with instructors to write the textbooks, and after students and faculty revise and edit, the final product is sent to print.
At community colleges, where students are more likely to be low-income, the money saved can influence student success and graduation rates.
Brian Mosher, the managing editor of Chemeketa Press, told NationSwell that he loves “the idea of comparing the money a student saves on a textbook with what they could do with that money instead.”
It might mean working fewer hours at a job or taking out smaller loans. For some, the money saved could be put toward taking an extra class, moving that student one step closer to graduation.
While cost savings was what launched Chemeketa Press, faculty and administration also saw it as an opportunity to create more effective books.
Instead of jumping from chapter eight to chapter 23, then back to chapter 14, or using books filled with jargon and confusing syntax, instructors write books that follow their course outline. Classroom testing and evaluation can take years to complete in traditional publishing. For a Chemeketa Press book, it only takes a few months and revisions can be added when there’s a reprint. Instructors are paid for their time and have the chance to become published writers.
“We’re not looking to change the way the class is taught, we’re looking to replace a book and teach the same class,” he said.
But Mosher said the instructors aren’t doing it for the compensation or author credit. They’re doing it to save their students money.
“Most of the faculty who end up with their name on the cover of a book, that’s just a bonus,” Mosher said. “They’re saying they have passion for their students, they want their students to succeed, and they see the hardship of expensive textbooks.”
And the textbooks work. Through institutional research, Chemeketa Press compared the passing percentages of an intermediate algebra class. With the same instructor, one class used the traditional, $140 textbook and another used Chemeketa Press’ $36 book.
Each class had the same passing rate, Mosher said.
“This book can hold water next to [one from] the professional, big time, commercial publisher,” Mosher said.
Professors can connect with Chemeketa Printing Press on its website, where five textbooks are available for purchase through its site. Chemeketa Press is also partnering with other colleges to help students save money by getting these books in their hands.
Mosher said the goal is to create a self-sustaining model that other community colleges across the nation can adopt.
“That’s our long-term, big dream,” Mosher said. “We think any community college across the country can do this.”
More: For Prisoners, Reading Is so Much More Than a Pastime — It’s a Way to Change Their Lives
In Hurricane Dorian’s Wake, Coral Vita Is Helping the People of the Bahamas — and You Can, Too
If you travel 200 miles due east of Miami, you will eventually hit the Abacos, a chain of islands and cays in the northern part of the Bahamas that over 17,000 people call home. Robert and Phyllis Cornea were among those people. As of Sunday, they were homeless.
“All the main buildings, gone,” Robert, a missionary who’d lived in the Abacos for 50 years, told CBS News. “It’s gone. Everything is gone.”
They’re not the only ones on the islands suffering unimaginable losses. In the catastrophic wake of Hurricane Dorian, which lashed the Bahamas Sunday as a devastating Category 5 storm, over 30 people are dead. At least one top-ranking Bahamian official expects that number to soar, CNN reported. The Red Cross estimates that nearly half the homes on the islands of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama have been severely damaged or destroyed, Time reported, and over 60,000 people will need assistance finding food and clean drinking water.
Coral Vita is one of the groups on the ground that has sprung into action to help the Bahamian people in Hurricane Dorian’s aftermath. Before the storm hit, it was devoted to restoring dying coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean. Now they’ve started a GoFundMe to support the “general on the ground help” that the reef restoration company intends to carry out.
“Many of our neighbors’ and friends’ houses are completely destroyed and much of the island is underwater,” Coral Vita said on its GoFundMe. “The people and country of the Bahamas urgently need help and supplies as soon as possible.”
The team pledges to use the money raised to bring “medicine, first-aid, water, generators, canned food, hygienic products and other basic essentials” to families on the island who need them most. Any leftover funds will go toward “long term rebuilding and relief efforts,” the group said.
Coral Vita cautions that humankind needs to take action now to build coastal ecosystems resilient enough to withstand our planet’s destabilizing climate.
“This storm is a prime example of how we need to protect, restore and create resilient coastal ecosystems that can adapt to climate change, shelter communities from natural disasters, and provide livelihoods for local populations,” the group said on its website. “In the long term, Coral Vita will continue to work to make that happen here and around the world, but for now we need all the help we can get to directly help those in The Bahamas in dire need.”
To find out more about how you can help their efforts, click here.
More: Giving Coral Reefs New Life
The Kids Are Alright, and They’re Fixing Their Neighborhoods After Natural Disasters
Andrea Colon spent her Halloweens making the journey to the far side of Rockaway Peninsula, an 11-mile length of land jutting out of Queens, New York. She knew that the west side of the peninsula was where the rich families lived. And their wealth meant a bigger, better haul of treats than the one she would’ve earned had she stayed put on the east side.
But when she entered high school, she realized the holiday wasn’t just a night of costume and treats: It was a reflection of the myriad of disparities that divided the lives of the 127,000 residents of Rockaway Peninsula.
The houses along the west side tend to belong to wealthy, white families. Residents on the east side are typically minorities and lower-income residents. People who live on the west side have private beaches, yacht clubs and the Rockaway Farmers Market. The east side is regarded as a food desert lacking in options for affordable, fresh and healthy food — perhaps one of the key reasons why its residents face high rates of obesity and diabetes. Whereas wealthy commuters on the west side are better positioned — financially and geographically — to get to work, commuters on the east side are more likely to rely on public transportation, where the dearth of options means they must face commutes averaging 53 minutes in each direction a day, the longest commutes of any New York City residents.
The more Colon learned about the chasm of inequality in her own backyard, the more the high school student realized she had to do something. So in 2016, during her junior year, she joined the Rockaway Youth Task Force (RYTF).
RYTF is a “for youth, by youth” group of 60 young people organizing at the grassroots level to equalize outcomes across race and class lines within its community.
“It’s about coming together as young people and trying to get access to spaces where these things are talked about,” Colon, now 18 and lead organizer for the group, told NationSwell. “The youth voice is just not very present.”
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When RYTF was founded in 2011, it initially focused on neighborhood beautification projects and community improvements. Then, in the year following the organization’s founding, Hurricane Sandy hit.
“I think that’s when it all came full circle, and we all just started having more of a social justice lens in thinking about issues that impact our community,” Colon said.
The devastating superstorm left parts of Rockaway without electricity or access to medical attention for weeks and subway service was suspended for seven months. Local grocery stores were destroyed. Colon said families turned to bodegas for food, and despite their best efforts, those corner stores weren’t able to reliably provide fresh produce to customers.
So in 2013, the youth group rallied for access to a vacant, half-acre lot on Beach 54th Street and transformed it into something thriving: the largest youth-run urban farm in New York City for the past six years, bringing the possibility of fresh produce — and therefore healthy food — to a community where such offerings were a rarity.
But RYTF grows more than good greens. Its organizers pride themselves on helping young people grow into the kind of leaders who actually better their communities.
In 2013, the group became a nonprofit and grew to expand its focus into four core areas: food justice, educational equity, criminal justice reform and civic engagement. Those core areas extended out into hosting campaigns around voter registration, lobbying for restorative justice practices in schools and organizing Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the city.
Among its accomplishments was the successful campaign to extend the Q52 bus line 18 blocks east. This gave over 10,000 more residents access to the route, and therefore, access to jobs, schools and resources.
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Young people across Rockaway can join the task force by going through a 12-week course on the history of organized movements and basics of movement building. Then they get to work: The members attend community council meetings, lead rallies and organize protests.
Colon said other communities can and should create similar groups so young people’s voices can be heard.
“All these issues impact young people,” Colon said. “This is the world that we’re going to be living in for quite a while, so our voices should be validated and we should be given a seat at the table.”
RYTF was founded by the simple model of finding a problem, rallying people together and creating change. Its website provides an in-depth look at how the group approaches issues and theory of change. It’s a model that communities across the nation can adapt to their own unique neighborhoods. Colon’s advice is to get people together and act — or else.
“We’re going to be the ones either suffering from the consequences or reaping the benefits,” she warned.
More: Brooklyn Middle Schoolers Are Launching Homemade Boats to Test Their Stem Skills
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Andrea Colon is 22 and joined the task for in 2015. She is 18 and joined in 2016. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
Former Juvenile Inmates Are Earning Double Minimum Wage to Grow Crops — and Business Skills
To many residents of the historically black neighborhoods on Atlanta’s westside, Abiodun Henderson is both local savior and master storyteller. Better known as Miss Abbey, Atlantans drizzle her original hot sauce recipe — which she developed after watching YouTube videos — on their food, and they lean in close when she tells stories of her family’s roots in Liberia and Trinidad.
And when there’s a problem, they go to her. The 36-year-old mother heard about local farmers’ struggles to find enough farmhands to work their land. At the same time, Henderson watched as hordes of young people in her community came home from prison or jail, and went right back in after struggling to find a job with a stable, livable wage.
A lightbulb went off and Henderson, who previously oversaw a community garden in Atlanta’s Westview neighborhood, combined her knowledge of urban farming with a passion for increasing economic opportunities for disadvantaged youth. The result became Gangstas to Growers, an agribusiness training program for formerly incarcerated youth between the ages of 18 and 24.
Launched in 2016, the three-month program equips participants not just with farming and gardening know-how, but also the ins and outs of running a business. There’s a heavy focus on personal development, too, and on any given day the young adults might hear from experts on topics such as financial literacy, environmental sustainability, nutritional cooking, and criminal justice. In between morning yoga sessions and evening seminars, the trainees spend their afternoons at black-owned farms, digging, planting and harvesting crops for which they’re paid $15 an hour — more than twice Georgia’s minimum wage.
“We take care of the folks in these neighborhoods and change how these young people in these neighborhoods act,” Henderson told NationSwell, “and get them to be examples for the younger people coming up.”
Across the country, a black American is five times more likely to be jailed by the time they turn 21 compared to their white counterparts. And in Georgia, black residents make up nearly two-thirds of the prison population, compared to only 30% of the state’s population. Recidivism is a problem throughout Atlanta — where the youth recidivism rate is 65%. One of the main reasons people end up back in jail is a lack of employment.
To date, Henderson and Gangstas to Growers have worked with 15 young adults. When they finish the program, she helps connect them to jobs and fellowships in the food and agriculture industries. While several graduates have indeed gone on to work in the food industry, others have applied their new skills to other fields, like construction.
Henderson stressed that hers is a grassroots movement, not a nonprofit or a charity. All her work designing the Gangsta program and recruiting young people to apply for it starts from the ground up.
But that attitude has also put her work at risk. “I never thought of funding first,” she said. “I thought of programming first.” She received a $10,000 emergency grant from a local nonprofit in 2016, but that was quickly spent. To help ease the financial burden, her team began making, bottling and marketing Henderson’s hot sauce recipe, which the trainees named Sweet Sol. A fiery concoction of habanero and cayenne peppers along with ingredients like lavender, turmeric and muscovado sugar, Sweet Sol is sold for $10 a bottle at Atlanta farmers markets and for $12 online.
Though the city pays the $15 hourly wages through its workforce development program, there are still bills to pay. Last year Gangstas to Growers participants had to rely on Uber to get out to the farms, so a van is high on the wishlist. And with the lofty goal of training another 500 young Atlantans by 2025, Henderson needs all the support she can get.
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Henderson has activism in her blood. Raised in Brooklyn by her immigrant mother and a father who, as she has described, was a “rank-and-file Black Panther member,” she started the long journey to Gangstas and Growers when she was connected to Occupy the Hood, an extension of the Occupy movement of 2011 that sought to expose the hold major banks and corporations have on the democratic process.
Through Occupy the Hood, which in part focused on increasing access to nutritional food in low-income minority communities, Henderson was provided with the resources and connections to put those ideals in action in her own neighborhood. After getting approval from local leaders in 2012 to run operations at the newly hatched community garden in Westview, she started a summer camp for area kids and taught them how to grow produce. Then came the idea for Gangstas to Growers a few years later. “We see this work as really shifting neighborhoods.” Henderson said.
For Raekwon Smith, the program helped him shift his attitude and embrace a straighter path. After finishing his stint at Gangstas to Growers, he earned a fellowship with a youth development program. Now he’s working in construction.
And for Derriontae Trent, the lessons he learned from farming went deeper than harvesting the fruits and vegetables he planted.
“I was so used to seeing death that I didn’t know how it’d feel to see something grow,” Trent told Politico. “To see plants grow full of life, from something I control, it’s probably the best feeling in the world.”
Trent also learned about political justice and systematic oppression. He’s now working with other organizations in Atlanta to raise Georgia’s minimum wage and fighting gentrification in his neighborhood. “He is young and ready,” Henderson said.
But as she also pointed out, “You never really leave. It’s a life program.” Trent can still be found cooking hot sauce in the industrial kitchen on the weekends, and Smith still sells bottles of Sweet Sol at local farmers markets.
“They’ve become organizers and come up with solutions for their own neighborhoods,” Henderson said of Smith and Trent.
“We have to share our privilege and empower these young black folks,” Henderson said. “And saturate the local food movement — and every movement — with the hood.”
More: To Build a Healthier City, Atlanta Is Opening Its Schoolyards to Everyone
At This Sanctuary, Animals and At-Risk Teens Come Together to Heal
Nine times a year, cohorts of young people from San Jose and San Francisco pile into vans and head out for the fresh air and redwood-dotted forests of nearby Half Moon Bay. These are city kids, bonded by a shared experience of growing up in urban centers. But something much darker that bonds them, too. Each child has been affected by abuse, neglect or some other traumatic experience. Their destination: an animal sanctuary called Wildmind, where they’ll begin the healing process by learning and developing coping skills.
But on this three-acre sanctuary, humans aren’t the teachers. Animals are.
A homeless boy might be empowered by Luna, a one-eyed great horned owl that was hit by a car. Or a girl who’s spent time in the juvenile justice system might learn lessons about trust through the tales of a red fox named Inali, found abandoned after a storm.
It’s all part of the at-risk youth program at Wildmind, which houses more than 50 non-releasable wild animals that were rescued after being abused, injured or abandoned. Founded in 1980, the nonprofit has a singular focus on educating people of all stripes on environmental issues and the benefits of connecting with nature through animals. But for the marginalized youth who walk through its doors, it’s also a place to build social, emotional and life skills rooted in the animals’ stories.
Many of the teens who take part in the program come from the foster care and juvenile justice systems. They’re referred to Wildmind by shelters, youth agencies or their schools. Once a month for nine months, groups of 10 to 15 teens with troubled pasts meet at Wildmind’s sprawling Half Moon Bay facility. They start their day outside with a healing circle, where they’ll reflect on their feelings and soak up the nature around them.
Next come the animals — or as they’re called here, “wild teachers.” Lola, a red-tailed boa, might “share” why she sheds her skin every month, driving home the point that it’s important to shed negative memories in order to grow. Luna, the great horned owl, might “tell” a story about losing her mother but gaining support from others. There’s also Suka, an Arctic fox; George, a tamandua; Penny, a porcupine; Tundra, a snowy owl; and dozens of other animals, all of which have stories to share that mirror the kids’ experiences.
“The animals provide examples of surviving, overcoming obstacles and adapting to their environments, and that’s really what it’s all about for young people in crisis,” said Chris Kelley, the executive director of Wildmind.
Over the course of the program, the teens work on a group project, usually helping with construction on one of the animal’s habitats. The group typically ends their day with a hike or walk around the property.
“They get ideas about how to cope with their daily struggles and come through the other end with hope for the future,” Kelley told NationSwell.
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The story of Wildmind goes back nearly four decades ago when Steve Karlin, an environmental educator, opened a sanctuary that encouraged children to connect with nature. The at-risk youth program, which has helped around 2,500 troubled teens, was added in 2001. All in all, Wildmind has brought science and environmental literacy to more than 8 million students.
Jen Motroni, a wildlife educator, said it’s incredible to watch the kids open up over the months. People who would have never crossed paths create lifelong friendships and learn as much from each others’ challenges as they do from their animal teachers.
“They have this idea of what’s going to happen, and then all of that gets broken down,” she told NationSwell. “Many times they open up to us about the abuses and the trials and tribulations they go through.”
Motroni, who has worked at Wildmind for 18 years and with the at-risk program for three, has heard the kids describe all sorts of family challenges, from parents who have been deported or struggle with addiction to fathers who have abandoned their family.
“I have learned so much from these kids,” she said. “Everybody has their own story and you never know what someone has gone through.”
Kelley stressed the dual nature of the program. “It was developed to not only include the animals and the stories around the animals, but to provide young people a forum for opening up, for trusting people, for sharing their feelings,” he said. “Wildmind creates a safe space for them to do that.”
More: This Kentucky Couple Gives Animals a Place to Heal
This Isn’t an Ordinary Dinner Party — It’s a Way to Help Refugees
At any dinner party, you’re bound to experience a wide range of sights, smells and small talk. That’s especially true at a Refugees Welcome dinner, a campaign that brings together refugees and non-refugees to break bread and, maybe more importantly, to foster a deeper sense of community and connection.
Attend one of these dinners, and you’ll be rewarded with an array of aromatic scents wafting from plates of such ethnic dishes as kabsa, baklava or chicken shawarma. You’ll hear stories of abandoning home countries and embarking on new challenges. Frequently, you’ll also witness new friendships blossom.
And that’s exactly the point, said Refugees Welcome co-founder Gissou Nia of the isolation immigrants face when they arrive at an unfamiliar place. “We decided to do something that really spoke to those issues through the lens of culture and using food as a uniter,” Nia told NationSwell.
The Welcome Refugees dinner series started in 2017 as a temporary project spearheaded by Purpose, a social impact branding agency in New York, with support from UNICEF. Two years later, the campaign is still going strong: Each month, there are dinners held in places as diverse as Boston and Berlin, as well as other locations throughout the world. Organizations and businesses can offer to host dinner, and Refugees Welcome has a list of refugee-owned restaurants and catering companies for hosts to reference. The host pays for the caterer and then connects with refugees through nonprofits and local resettlement agencies.
Nia said they function as tangible ways for people to help “that go beyond a social share.” The campaign has hosted over 150 dinners.
There are 68.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world, 25.4 million of whom are refugees. In 2017, 24,559 refugees resettled in the United States.
Nia described how finding friends is difficult in a new country. As they settle into their new cities and towns, refugees and migrants tend to interact with a small circle of people — those from their home country, the social workers assigned to their case and ESL classmates. Those connections are useful, but meeting other kinds of people — for example, those with similar professional backgrounds — can mean the difference between merely surviving and thriving.
“Maybe these are people who were fashion designers back in Iraq or ran restaurants in Syria,” Nia said. “They are interested in connecting with people from their industries.”
Refugees Welcome technically bills itself as a social gathering, but the events can progress into much more. Refugees have found employment opportunities, business partners, investors and, critically, a community. For example, a Yemen refugee won a scholarship through a New York dinner connection and two other guests started a pop-up restaurant.
Niurka Melendez and her family fled their native Venezuela in 2015, but two years later, she said, she still felt like a newcomer. So she signed up to attend a Refugees Welcome dinner in New York City at Civic Hall in 2017. She’s since shared more than 20 meals with fellow refugees, who represent nearly all corners of the globe, from South America to Syria.
Melendez has fond memories of that first dinner. She recalls exiting the elevator and being amazed by the beautiful white office building. “The people and the atmosphere were so welcoming,” she told NationSwell.
The events have been invaluable community builders for her and her family. Her grade-school-age son, Samuel, has met friends through the dinners. Melendez’s husband, Hector Arguinaones, has learned new dishes to cook at home. Arguinaones described how Venezuelans have a meat-heavy diet and these dinners have helped his family incorporate new vegetarian recipes in their daily life. And Melendez has made connections that have strengthened the nonprofit she and Arguinaones founded, called Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid, which connects Venezuelan refugees to resources in New York. Through her work, her family has brought other asylum seekers to dinners.
“It is the perfect place, the perfect moment, to see new people [connect with] local people who are willing to have conversations and share with the newcomers,” Arguinaones said.
Like their son, both Melendez and Arguinaones are still in contact with the people they’ve met through years of attending Refugee Welcome dinners. “This city is very big, and it’s so special when you meet familiar faces,” Arguinaones said.
For co-founder Nia, her favorite moments don’t come from the dinners themselves, but rather when she learns a previous dinner guest has been legally granted asylum.
“For the people who attend these dinners — yes, it’s a fun social moment, but they’re waiting on a really critical life decision,” she said.
Refugees Welcome has created a toolkit for anyone looking to host a dinner, complete with a checklist, ice-breaker prompts, catering advice and FAQs. In the end, a successful dinner isn’t just a one-off event, but rather a catalyst for forging an ongoing, supportive network.
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Interested in hosting a dinner? Sign up for a toolkit here. The Office of Refugee Resettlement offers a great set of resources that can connect you with refugees in your area.
School Lunches Still Aren’t Delicious or Nutritious. That Has to Change
School cafeterias are swapping dino-shaped chicken fingers for carrot purees. They’re trading mac ’n’ cheese for kale salsa and replacing potato chips with green smoothies.
These lunchrooms are part of a pilot program that FoodCorps, a national nonprofit that promotes healthy foods in schools, launched in March in partnership with Sweetgreen, a fast-casual salad chain. The program, Reimagining School Cafeterias, advocates for the adoption of locally grown produce in schools and offers curricula that emphasizes the importance of healthy eating. The goal is to give students more control over designing healthy school menus.
In March, Sweetgreen pledged $1 million to create scalable healthy eating and educational programming in 50 school cafeterias by 2020. Reimagining School Cafeterias builds off a previous nutrition-based curriculum of theirs called Sweetgreen in Schools. Sweetgreen in Schools launched in 2010 and reached 9,000 students. The new initiative aims to expand the number of students they reach and create demographic-specific learning opportunities for the students.
“In order for students to really want to eat healthier options, they have to be able to create the meals themselves,” Sweetgreen co-founder Nate Ru told FastCompany.
School lunches in America are frequently criticized for being unhealthy, as they tend to be high in fat, sugar and salt. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one out of every five schoolaged children is obese, a figure that’s tripled since the 1970s.
“We know that school cafeterias are an incredibly powerful place to connect kids with healthy food,” FoodCorps co-founder and executive director Curt Ellis told FastCompany. “There are over 100,000 school cafeterias in the country — seven times more than the number of McDonalds.”
Reimagining School Cafeterias is currently being piloted in three schools that all vary in terms of geography and socioeconomic status. In the 2019-2020 school year, organizers say the program will expand to 6,500 students at 15 schools. The year after, it will be implemented in 50 schools and will reach an estimated 22,000 students.
At Aberdeen Elementary School, a pilot program in Aberdeen, North Carolina, students are trying veggies cooked in new ways. For example, students traded in raw carrots for carrots that had been roasted or pureed, with the goal of showing students different ways that produce can be prepared. After each taste test, the students vote for a favorite. That winner will be incorporated into the school’s lunch menu. In the coming months, they’ll try asparagus and peas cooked in unfamiliar ways.
In New Mexico’s Navajo Nation territory, the focus is on flavor. Students at Wingate Elementary School are learning to use spices to create new tastes to complement traditional school-lunch vegetables.
Finally, in Oakland, California, at Laurel Elementary School, students look at the big picture, with a focus on how they might improve their cafeteria. Students redesign table layouts and lunch menus. They will work with Sweetgreen and partner organizations to get those ideas implemented in the coming months.
“There are 30 million children a day who walk in the front doors of our nation’s schools. Those kids are going there to learn but they are also going there to eat,” Ellis told Forbes. “If we care about the next generation of kids and their health and long-term potential, we better fix school food.”
More: NYC’s Solution for Food Waste Should Happen In Schools Everywhere
There’s a Way to Connect Homeless People With Their Loved Ones — and You Can Be a Part of It
Whenever Timothy could get someone to listen to him, he would give that person a phone number. That number, Timothy thought, would reach his family back in Chicago.
But that number never worked for anyone who tried it.
Then, Timothy, who was living in St. Anthony’s, a homeless shelter in San Francisco, met a volunteer from Miracle Messages. The volunteer took the phone number — which turned out to be incorrect — a message and all the information Timothy could remember about his family living back east.
The volunteer found a Whitepages listing for Timothy’s sister, wrote her a letter and waited.
Within a week, Timothy’s family responded. Within three weeks, Timothy was on a bus home.
Timothy’s family was ecstatic about having him home again. “We cherish family and we do what we need to do to help one another,” Laveta Carney, Timothy’s niece, told UNILAD. “Without Miracle Messages, we would still be looking, hope silently slipping away as time goes by.”
Miracle Messages is a nonprofit “reunion service” that reconnects people experiencing homelessness with their loved ones. The nonprofit sends volunteers out to record messages through video, audio and text, and with the help of volunteer online “detectives,” finds and shares those messages with loved ones.
There are over half a million homeless people in the United States, and a variety of ways people who experience homelessness lose touch with loved ones. It might be something as straightforward as a misplaced cellphone. Sometimes feelings of shame and embarrassment associated with having lost one’s home hinder a reunion. There are also people who don’t have the digital literacy or digital access to find their loved ones, Jessica Donig, Miracle Messages’ executive director, told NationSwell.
Support from loved ones can be a key element in escaping homelessness, Donig said. Donig recounted her first time volunteering in a shelter where she walked down rows of beds crowded with people at the largest homeless shelter in northern California. There she felt “deep loneliness,” she said.
“A shelter is a place that’s packed full of people,” she said. “But it’s a very lonely place.”
People don’t live for a bed or a roof over their head. They live for their people, Donig said.
Beyond providing a positive life outlook, loved ones can be advocates for the person experiencing homeless. Sometimes a loved one has the means to provide them with a home.
Founder and CEO Kevin Adler described how Miracle Messages is part of the growing movement to triage homelessness. It can also save cities money.
“It’s the most cost effective, humane intervention to tackle homelessness in our communities,” Adler told NationSwell.
Miracle Messages has reconnected over 210 people with their loved ones so far. Thirty-four of those individuals are no longer homeless. Timothy is one of those people.
“When you think about the stories about like Timothy’s, that’s a person who would never have gotten off the streets,” Donig said. “He might have gone into permanent housing but that would’ve been at the cost to the city.”
And a considerable cost, at that. A person experiencing homelessness costs taxpayers an average of $35,578 a year. For someone like Timothy, who wouldn’t have been prioritized in a system that prioritizes families and women, it could take years for him to gain permanent housing.
Miracle Messages works with outreach workers, case managers and shelters to provide the messages as an additional resource.
“Miracle Messages is great when it’s offered as a stand-alone service,” Donig said. “But it’s much better when it’s offered with other resources.”
The nonprofit sends groups out to homeless shelters and streets to record messages. The online volunteers then hunt for family members and try to connect the two parties.
It takes between two and three weeks for a case to be solved. The average time the families are disconnected is 20 years.
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The nonprofit started in 2014 in memory of Adler’s Uncle Mark. Mark was frequently homeless and living on and off the streets for 30 years. Alder said Mark was the sweetest, most family-oriented uncle he could’ve asked for.
Years after Mark died, Adler visited his grave. Afterward, Adler remembered pulling out his phone and scrolling through social media status updates.
“What would it look like to use these storytelling tools to help people like my uncle?”
Adler got involved with the issue of homelessness in California, where he met Jeffrey on the streets. Adler started talking with Jeffery, who hadn’t seen his niece, nephew or sister in 22 years. After chatting, Adler pulled out his phone, recorded a video for Jeffery’s family and posted it to Facebook.
Within an hour it was shared over a hundred times, and within 20 minutes, Jeffery’s sister was tagged.
Jeffery, who had been registered as missing for 12 years, now had his family back. That simple effort of recording a message turned into what Miracle Messages is today.
Donig joined the team after her first visit to a homeless shelter with Miracle Messages.
“What I witnessed at Miracle Messages on that first day really was a paradigm shift for me,” she said.
It’s where she recorded her first message and where she engaged in meaningful conversations.
Donig said she went into the shelter skeptical. She initially felt the work was invasive. Asking about lost family and friends seemed “off limits.” But everyone was so eager to share their stories and reconnect, that those initial thoughts dissipated.
Six weeks later, she joined Miracle Messages.
With a background in sociology and startups, Donig brought her experience to Miracle Messages in 2017 with the hope to expand it into across the nation. She created a systematic approach that anyone can replicate, she said.
Donig said there are four essential pieces of information to collect in each message. The information about the homeless person, information about the loved one, what they want to say and how to reach the homeless person afterward.
Although the team’s main efforts are in California, anyone anywhere can send a message through Miracle Message’s website, email ([email protected]) or helpline (1-800-MISS-YOU).
“In this area of homelessness, everyone needs to work together, because there isn’t a single solution that fits everyone,” she said.
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