Children — especially young children — need to move. But with recess being cut back or even eliminated in elementary schools in favor of academics, kids are being forced to sit much more.
Too much sitting isn’t just bad for anyone’s health, but for youngsters, a lack of movement can negatively impact learning. TIME magazine reported children who exercised more tend to have better grades, higher test scores and performed better in math, English and reading.
That’s why several schools are finding ways to fit in exercise in the classroom. A school in Charleston County uses gym equipment in class; schools in Texas saw that standing desks improved student concentration; in Pennsylvania, a fifth-grade teacher ditched desks for yoga balls and found that it increased her students’ attention spans.
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And as Fast Company reports, Ward Elementary School in North Carolina has a Read and Ride program where students can hop onto exercise bikes while they read.
Incredibly, the bikes have not only helped burn excess energy, it has also boosted academic achievement. According to Fast Company, “students who had spent the most time in the program achieved an 83 percent proficiency in reading, while those who spent the least time in the program had failing scores — only 41 percent proficiency.”
The program was started five years ago by Ward Elementary counselor Scott Ertl and has expanded to 30 other schools. We previously reported that Ertl is an advocate of physical movement in the classroom and is also the inventor of Bouncy Bands that allows fidgety students to bounce their feet and stretch their legs while quietly working (and without distracting their classmates) at their desks.
“Riding exercise bikes makes reading fun for many kids who get frustrated when they read,” Ertl tells Fast Company. “They have a way to release that frustration they feel while they ride.”
DON’T MISS: A Simple Solution For America’s Achievement Gap
Category: Bridging the Opportunity Divide
When the Elderly Need Help With Chores, This Concierge Service Does the Heavy Lifting
Who has time to launch a start-up while she’s still finishing her bachelor’s degree?
Somehow, 25-year-old Amanda Cavaleri of Denver, Colo. did, building on inspiration she received during a year off from school.
Six years ago, Cavaleri was torn about what to major in: classics or business? So she took some time off and worked as a server at The Academy, a Boulder, Colo. retirement community.
Cavaleri tells Claire Martin of the Denver Post that one woman at The Academy couldn’t communicate well, though she could indicate yes or no. “I was serving coffee and tea one day, and I noticed that she always had the same kind of tea. I wondered if she might be bored with it, and might want to try a new kind. So I brought over all the tea choices, so she could pick the tea she preferred. It made such a difference to her. Who knows how long she’d had to drink that same tea? And I knew I’d found my passion.”
Cavaleri began to dream up a business plan for a concierge service for the elderly — a company that would help clients with chores and errands, especially those who live far away from their family members, while connecting millennials with senior citizens.
Soon, she founded Capable Living, a start-up she runs while finishing her bachelor’s degree in business at Regis University.
Capable Living offers help to elders with day-to-day chores, post-surgery needs and travel. And Calaveri has become one of the leading lights of the eldercare industry.
As for her future plans, Calaveri tells Martin, “One of the problems we’re trying to solve is how to get high school and college grads to work with elders, at least for a couple of years, so the younger people can get the benefit of the elders’ experience…There’s such talent out there, and so much potential. How do we shift our attitude toward aging so that we, as a society, value elders’ experiences? We need a cultural paradigm shift.”
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This College Graduate Is on A Cross-Country Mission to Work Hourly Jobs
As more millennials leave college and enter into the workforce, they’re soon realizing that the office job at a computer may not be what they expected. That’s what 23-year-old Heath Padgett found when he graduated from Concordia University in Texas and began working for a software company.
Like many young people, Padgett wanted to find something more meaningful, which led him and his fiancee, Alyssa (who is now his wife), to come up with the idea of traveling across the country while working hourly jobs in each state. The goal, they hope, is to illuminate the nation’s 75.9 million hourly hardworking employees who go unnoticed.
With the help of Snagajob, an online network for hourly employment, Padgett and his wife kicked off Hourly America (and their honeymoon) on June 1, leaving their hometown of Austin, Texas, just one week after their wedding. The two have notched 38 states so far, traveling across the country in a 20-year-old refurbished motorhome.
“Through this journey, I want to be able to create a stronger connection between hourly workers and their customers and help break certain stigmas that exist about the hourly employment industry,” Padgett says.
The couple are currently in Kentucky, working as janitors in a KOA campsite, according to Business Insider. Padgett said he works two or three various jobs each week, showing up to learn about the position and interviewing his coworkers about their work. The pair have experienced everything from lifeguards and paint mixers to line cooks and electricians.
“A lot of businesses have said yes before even taking a look at our website or media coverage,” Padgett tells Business Insider. “Some places think we are just crazy kids who are trying to do something meaningful with their lives, and they would be right.”
Padgett is planning to release a film on his experience in August 2015, but in the meantime, he contends there’s no one way to go about starting a career.
“Don’t let people tell you there is a set way to go about your career. I’ve found that the safe and normal way rarely yields the results of stepping outside of the box,” he says. “I had so many people tell me I was crazy for pursuing this 50-state-50-job quest, however, I’ve had more opportunities open up because of it then I would have ever had if I’d stayed in my office job back in Texas.”
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How Google Is Tackling Death
Google has successfully created a search engine, a web browser and even wearable tech. Now, they’re turning their attention to death. Yes, really.
The tech company is looking to defeat death by using some potentially radical new nanoparticles that would enter one’s bloodstream in search of problematic cells, according to The Verge. These nanoparticles would be most likely ingested and then monitored through a magnetic bracelet that would summon them for a headcount when needed.
While this sounds like science fiction, it’s actually a development from a secret lab, called Google[x], where shoot-for-the-stars experiments like elevators to space (mobilized along cables tethered like antennae to the Earth) are the serious undertakings of some of Google’s most ambitious employees. Google[x] aims to be the Xerox PARC (a similar think-tank-like collaboration from the 1970s in which the personal computer was invented) of the 21st century.
Pending FDA approval, Google’s nanoparticles aren’t due out for another five years. The product also must surpass certain concerns regarding their effectiveness and safety, such as the uncertainty of how many particles will be needed to identify a problematic cell and the potential for these “metallic flakes” (as pointed out in an article by Science of Singularity) to conglomerate and cause issues in areas like heart valves, the lymphatic system and even the brain.
There is also still the need for the development of a coating (probably an antibody) that will allow the nanoparticles to attach to the proteins or fats of the targeted cells. Dr. Clay Marsh, Chief innovation officer at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center talked to Live Science about potential problems the nanoparticles will have getting consistent results in lieu of the slight, individual differences in biological makeup.
Ideally, however, these particles — which will be 1/1000th the size of a red blood cell — could accurately identify cells that might be cancerous or proteins known to be released by at-risk hearts. Gizmodo reports that Google[x] wouldn’t collect or store medical data, but would, instead, license this technology to “others who will handle the information and its security.”
“Fundamentally, our foe is death. Our foe is unnecessary death,” says Andrew Conrad, head of Google[x]’s life science’s division, to The Verge.
The possible effectiveness of having proactive treatment of diseases such as cancer could be monumental. Who knows: maybe one day we will sit our children down and tell them about how a search engine company defeated cancer.
To Combat Child Food Insecurity, These Brothers Biked Cross Country
What does two brothers plus one penny per mile times 4,000 miles equal?
The answer: 400 meals for children living in poverty in the U.S.
Hailing from Ferndale, Michigan, Jon and Chris Gagnon are well acquainted with the childhood food insecurity problem in Detroit. In Wayne County, Mich., the rate of child food insecurity is 22.3 percent, meaning 102,790 children don’t have sufficient access to nutritious food.
While volunteering with an AmeriCorps summer program, Jon heard about No Kid Hungry – a national nonprofit that helps bring federal and state assistance programs to families and children. Jon is now employed by Groundwerx.CI, a Detroit nonprofit that works with No Kid Hungry.
Due to this experience, the Gagnon brothers saw that something needed to be done, and their solution was a cross-country bike campaign to raise money for the organization.
Their ride started on Sept. 3 in San Francisco and concluded Oct. 17 in Washington D.C. For six weeks, the brothers toured all around the country seeing sights all too common in Detroit: tons of grocery stores and farmers markets, but people still living without healthy food. During their trip, they were able to witness and experience the daily struggle of those families.
“Being hungry doesn’t just make your stomach growl,” Chris wrote on the brothers’ blog. “It drains your energy, steals your focus and makes the simplest actions feel impossible.”
Before they started their trip, the brothers began an online fundraising campaign on the No Kid Hungry website. Donors could make a straight donation or an amount per mile. Just $1 can provide 10 meals for a child.
Of the collected donations, 20 percent will go to the national No Kid Hungry and the other 80 percent is heading to the Detroit chapter. The brothers’ goal was to raise $25,000. As of November 13, $18, 117 was raised, and donations are still being accepted online.
While fighting child food insecurity is a long journey not near completion, the Gagnon brothers have shown what can be accomplished with a few dollars, bikes and some perseverance.
MORE: The District Where Healthy School Lunches Are Actually Succeeding
What Prison Inmates Want You to See About Their World
We can all picture bars and razor wire fences, but if we haven’t actually been in prison ourselves, it’s hard to imagine what life inside is like. What’s really happening in there? What would the people incarcerated offer people to see? These are the questions that artist and activist Mark Strandquist wants to help answer.
He sent 2,500 American inmates a blank postcard with these words printed at the top:
If you could create a window in the prison walls, what would you want the world to see? Please draw, describe or create an image that represents your window.
The responses range from innocent and precious to haunting and forlorn. One, from Alfred Espinoza, depicts a man sitting at a desk in an otherwise empty classroom with a blank chalk board and a ball-and-chain around his ankle, crystallizing so much of what is wrong with the prison ethos in America. In a letter to PBS Newshour, Espinoza says, “We are always learning something regardless of our circumstances in here.”
Strandquist started the postcard project through Prison Health News, a newsletter published quarterly by Philadelphia FIGHT, a nonprofit AIDS advocacy organization. According to PBS, the newsletter provides “medical information, news and personal stories and poems submitted by current and former prisoners for an audience of thousands of people in prison.”
The postcards are actually an extension of another project of Strandquist’s — Windows From Prison — which, starting in 2012, posed a similar question to prisoners and incarcerated youth: “If you could have a window in your cell, what place from your past would it look out to?” The artist then set out to photograph the scenes inmates described, some of which were published in Prison Health News.
“It’s a complex conversation we’re trying to have in a small area,” Strandquist says. “It’s amazing that just a tiny flimsy piece of paper could be infused with so much history, ideas, struggles and beautiful reflections on life and love — the piece of paper becomes so incredibly powerful.”
Let’s hope that power can help lead to a more humane prison system.
South Dakota’s Sustainable Plan to End Native American Poverty
As one of the nation’s poorest areas, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is in need of some help. The Oglala Sioux, who occupy the land, often travel more than 120 miles to Rapid City for temporary employment and only one in five has a job. Coupled with a severe housing shortage, 69 percent of Pine Ridge residents live below the poverty line, according to the American Indian Relief Council.
But one of the youngest residents at Pine Ridge is hoping to change the dire conditions by rebuilding a sustainable and affordable community on an empty stretch of 34 acres on the reservation. Nick Tilsen, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and owner of the Thunder Valley Community Economic Development Corporation, has an ambitious plan to build affordable single-family homes and co-housing spaces with green features including onsite wind power and an aquaponics greenhouse.
Using a new, native-owned construction company, the project aims to create homes and jobs for the overcrowded and underemployed population. Tilsen’s development company has already acquired the South Dakota land to build the community, but as Fast Company points out, the area is ill-defined as to where it falls in county lines.
“You don’t have a county able to charge property taxes, which is how counties fund themselves. Without that revenue, you don’t have a revenue stream to build lights,electricity, roads, infrastructure and sewage. Usually it’s the county that does that,” says Marjorie Kelly, a director of special projects with The Democracy Collaborative, which is supporting the idea.
But that hasn’t stopped Tilsen, whose teamed up with an architect from Kansas City-based green firm BNIM. The project was a finalist in the Buckminster Fuller 2014 Fuller Challenge. Tilsen’s goal is to build 30 residences within the first few years, but Tilsen is aiming to use it as a model for other reservations throughout the country.
“It’s a model for Indian country — how can you do sustainable development and affordable housing that’s really ecologically sustainable?” Kelly adds. “A number of federal agencies that work with Native Americans are watching it.”
Why Is This Campaign Asking Kids to Cook Up Social Enterprise Ideas?
There is no shortage of social innovation inspiring students across the country, but an edtech company is asking the nation’s youth to get in on the movement and come up with their own solutions while they’re still in school.
ThinkCERCA, an online educational resource startup, has paired up with the United Nations’s (U.N.) Nothing But Nets campaign to challenge students in grades three through 12 to think critically about a problem either in their community or elsewhere in the world and submit a pitch for a solution to the issue through social enterprise.
Nothing But Nets, a global campaign dedicated to preventing the deadly disease malaria, will be featuredon ThinkCERCA’s site alongside a variety of social entrepreneurs in sharing stories of success. Stories and profiles range from solar energy and Internet access in remote villages to prison education and women’s rights.
Using these articles, students will gain insight that will help build skills in recognizing and solving social problems in their communities.
“These inspiring real-world stories of social entrepreneurship reflect our focus on collaboration, literacy, technology, society and culture,” says Eileen Murphy Buckley, ThinkCERCA CEO. “The lessons also utilize our CERCA framework, which will help students analyze the content, get inspired and apply what they’ve learned. It goes beyond education; it’s also about taking action.”
The site also includes an outline to cultivating a pitch as well as rubrics for each grade. The contest, which kicked off Oct. 24, runs through Dec. 5 and invites students to apply as individuals or as a group. Winners receive feedback from expert social entrepreneurs as well as a profile for a concept for a new QuickCERCA lesson on the company’s site.
MORE: 7 Key Drivers to Turn Social Innovation into Success
The Startup That’s Really Thinking Outside the Box
StartUp Box is the revolutionary social enterprise that is transforming the tech industry by creating opportunities in the South Bronx, N.Y. Majora Carter and James Chase are the unstoppable husband-wife team behind the operation, which is based in the Carter’s childhood home of Hunts Point.
By most accounts, Hunts Point is a dejected and uninspiring part of town. The neighborhood stands in stark contrast to the glittering image that New York City has cultivated for itself: poverty can be found in practically every corner and the concrete expanse is uninviting. It is certainly not a place where you’d imagine an exciting and enterprising startup would be based. But that’s the whole point.
Talking with Chase, he explains his wife’s mission: “…to change the environment here because it’s ugly. And ugly environments negatively impact people’s self-esteem and self-esteem is a main driver for making good decisions in your life.”
Carter and Chase’s tech startup endeavors to end quality assurance (QA) offshoring for gaming and other tech companies by offering the service stateside with a twist. Employees of StartUp Box not only check games and websites for basic bugs but also offer consumer insight.
The young people working for StartUp Box live and breathe gaming. (The only prerequisite when applying for a job is that you’re not under the age of 18.) For many, it’s more than a hobby, it’s a way of life — making them the perfect testers. As a result, they already have all the skills necessary to pilot games and the like.
Being part of the process from the start also offers them an unusual entry-level opportunity into the tech industry that was eliminated when QA and low-skilled jobs were sent overseas.
The service offered by StartUp Box is desired by the gaming industry because offshore QA is a major source of frustration for many companies. Why?
Chase explains the big time-differences slowed down the feedback process, wasting time and money for the companies. Furthermore, there is “…zero return on cultural competency within an entertainment context. So you can tell if a game mechanically functions to a certain extent but they don’t get any insight into, for example, whether or not the level of challenge is commensurate with the current industry.”
For some of the employees, getting their foot in the door has already led to grander job offers. The low barriers required for entry into this field of work has given everyone in the neighborhood — from ex-convicts to recent graduates — an equal opportunity to work towards a better future. And it’s giving people something to smile about.
The Reason Why Businesses Should Hire Employees With Disabilities
Finding a job is difficult for the average person. Add a disability into the mix, and the odds seem impossible, especially since there’s the stereotype that hiring people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) will be a detriment to business.
All that could change, however, thanks to a recent study showing that employees with IDD aren’t just charity cases and that they contribute positively to both the work environment and the bottom line.
The study was conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), an organization which examines high performance organizations. According to the report, hiring people with IDD “adds highly motivated people to the workforce (which can lead to increased productivity) and it promotes an inclusive culture that appeals to the talent pool organizations want to attract.” All of this translates into a better community image and an increase in profits.
Of the employers surveyed, three-quarters gave their employees with IDD ratings of “good” or “very good” in the areas of work quality, motivation, engagement, integration with co-workers, dependability and attendance. Adding to that, 80 percent reported positive experiences and one-third reported having their expectations exceeded.
The Institute’s study confirms what organizations that work with individuals with IDD have been saying for years, like Best Buddies International, a nonprofit that has been working to find equal employment and opportunity for those with disabilities since its inception in 1989.
In response to the study’s release, Best Buddies started a media campaign entitled “I’m In To Hire” highlighting the positives that come along with hiring those with disabilities. As of October 24, the website had 100,000 pledges of support.
Anthony K. Shriver is the Founder and Chairman of Best Buddies and remarks how individuals with IDDs can transform the workplace.
“They’ve hired an effective and enthusiastic employee, and now have lower turnover in those jobs,” Shriver tells The Daily Beast. “The culture of our schools have changed since we began inclusion of people with IDD. Our offices can transform as well.
Pathways to Careers is another organization working with individuals with IDD. Rather than focusing on the disabilities, Pathways markets the individual and matches the skillset with the job.
Considering 85 percent of people with IDD don’t have paid work, both the report and programs such as these has the potential to inspire change.
Bottom line: These workers have much more going for them than the disability that constrains them.
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