Topeka K. Sam sits on a plush purple sofa in the living room of an immaculate row house in the Bronx, ordaining all of the ladies in the room. Sam, a founder of Hope House, a residence for previously incarcerated women, points to her cofounder, Vanee Sykes. “She’s a Lady of Hope,” Sam says, then swivels and points at another woman who has just entered the room. “That’s another Lady of Hope.” And, apparently, so too is this reporter. “The Ladies of Hope is you, and it’s all of us,” she adds. “If you are a resource to women who are coming here, then you are a Lady of Hope, you know? It’s about all women empowering other women and providing them hope and opportunity.”
Both Sam and Sykes know something about needing hope to thrive, having been formerly incarcerated themselves. Their experience with the difficulties most women face when trying to reintegrate into society led them to found Hope House, which officially opened its doors in October 2017.
The idea of Hope House, Sam says, is that women coming out of prison have the deck stacked against them. “You gotta start with basic needs,” Sam says. “I can’t advocate for myself or feel that I’m powerful enough to go get a job if I don’t have somewhere to live and I don’t have food in my stomach.”
In addition to food and shelter, Hope House provides another crucial ingredient: community. The house currently accommodates five women, all of whom sleep on the upstairs level. Signs featuring positive aphorisms, like “Love Life,” hang on the walls, and the beds — which the women are required to make every morning — are decorated with stylish coverlets. Downstairs is the kitchen and cozy living room, all walls painted a soothing shade of gray. It’s here that the women gather, cook, talk about their day, and allow themselves to grieve and to heal.
So many women who land in prison are victims of sexual abuse, Sykes says, and Hope House is a place where women can safely process their pain in order to move forward. “Any given night here, we’re hugging and we’re crying, [because] it’s a safe space,” Sykes adds, tearing up as she speaks. “And it’s not just a safe space where we can live, but it’s a safe space mentally. You know, where it’s OK for me to say that this has happened, and that there’s other women here who are not going to judge, but who are just going to say, ‘This is what worked for me’ or ‘This is how I got through this.’ And that’s what I love about being here.”
Sam and Sykes met in 2013 while at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, a low-security prison about 70 miles north of New York City, and the inspiration for the fictional “Litchfield” prison featured in the hit Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black.” Both did time for nonviolent offenses — Sykes for embezzling money, Sam for drug trafficking — and when they got out, they witnessed the insurmountable barriers that women with a rap sheet can face, the greatest of which is, arguably, finding a landlord who will rent to them. “It was in my heart to do a house [like Hope House] while I was in prison,” Sykes says.
But they were also lucky and had supportive families to come home to. Many women, especially poor women, are not so blessed. “When I got home, I started going around, organizing with other women around women’s issues and incarceration,” Sam says. “And just seeing that it was the same issues happening: Women need housing, women need resources, women need all these things.” She threw herself into community activism and founded Ladies of Hope Ministries, an organization dedicated to helping formerly incarcerated women and girls re-enter society and out of which Hope House grew.
Along the way, Sam earned several grants and fellowships, including at Columbia University, where she was named a Beyond the Bars fellow in 2015 and a Justice-in-Education Initiative scholar in 2016. She also received funding and support from Unlocked Futures, a program backed in part by singer John Legend.
Sam modeled Hope House in part off of a California-based nonprofit called A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project, which helps women with housing and related services when they leave prison. The founder of that organization, Susan Burton, became instrumental in offering guidance and seed money to help Sam get Hope House off the ground. “We need to make investments to get people started in the struggle to reduce recidivism, strengthen our communities, and repair the harm done by mass incarceration,” says Burton, who wrote a memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, about her own journey from prison to community activist. “And that’s what Hope House stands for.”
Not that Sam and Sykes didn’t hit some road bumps along the way. They scoured the city for months to find a place to set up shop before they found the cute, fully remodeled row house in the South Central Bronx neighborhood of Castle Hill, a stone’s throw from bucolic Pugsley Creek Park. The landlord loved the idea of the house, but neighbors kicked up a fuss. So Sam and Sykes took to social media and started a campaign they called Stand With Hope House. They did media interviews and went to community board meetings. Eventually their neighbors relented.
“We stood up for ourselves and said that we’re not going anywhere,” Sykes says. “We have a right to live here, just [like] anyone else.”
Sam and Sykes used similar social media savvy when decorating the house, crowd-funding the project via funds donated from strangers around the world. “We put up the registry on social media, and people donated,” Sam says. “It was absolutely phenomenal.” They now have the funding to open another Hope House in New Jersey and after, that, in Brooklyn. Their hope is that others will step in to help them scale the project, possibly turning Hope House into a franchise.
“Ultimately our goal is to have a Hope House in every single state in our country and abroad,” says Sam.
In 2017, Sam won a Soros Justice Fellowship to work on a project around probation and parole accountability. “It came from my experience on probation and parole, [witnessing] the arbitrariness and counterproductiveness that was happening,” she says. “And I knew if this was happening to me, it had to be happening to many other people. I found out that 4.7 million people are on operational parole in this country.”
The majority of people sitting in prisons are there because of technical violations, Sam says. They need support, to be given access to resources and to opportunity — not to be dumped in a federal halfway house and then shackled with an ankle bracelet for six months, adds Sykes, speaking from personal experience. Burton’s own success speaks to this: Since 1998, she has helped over 1,000 women and children with her re-entry homes, and in 2017, she had a 100% success rate in keeping her residents from being reincarcerated.
The stakes are even higher for people of color: Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to be incarcerated in prison or jail, and Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely to be institutionalized. In addition, black children are almost nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison; and Hispanic children are four times more likely to have a parent behind bars.
The impact on their families can last generations. Sykes had three children when she was incarcerated — her oldest then a senior at Howard University, she says with pride — but her spouse died before she was released. And Sykes considers herself lucky: She comes from a stable upper-middle-class family, and so she saw her children, who were then living with her parents, quite frequently. Many women are not so lucky. “The hardest part of incarceration is not being with your children,” she says.
Jessie Jones (not her real name) has been living at the Hope House since last December. Jones, 64, had been out of prison for a decade — after having spent 23 years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for a drug-fueled robbery gone awry — but her housing situation had become untenable. Her last apartment was cheap, she says, because it was illegal and basically falling apart. The landlord started making passes at her, which she allowed once before trying, and failing, to make him stop. Desperate to avoid moving into a shelter, Jones stumbled upon Hope House. Like all residents, Jones had to apply to live in the house, and she pays 30% of her wages as a cook for a nonprofit as rent. (Residents are required to either have a job or be in school when they apply. Students are exempt from paying rent.)
“It’s a beautiful house, and Vanee and Topeka are the best people, the vision of healing,” Jones says. She still has her bad days, but living at Hope House with people who genuinely love and care about her is helping build her confidence back up.
“Hope House is exactly what it is,” she says. “It gives you hope.”
Category: Bridging the Opportunity Divide
An Unlikely Bond Between Chicago Teens and Veterans Is Saving Lives in the City
“How many people have you killed?”
Former Marine Julio Cortes looked into the face of the curious teen interrogating him.
“Next question,” Cortes replied.
Those are the kinds of questions we’re taught never to ask a veteran: Have you ever seen someone die? Have you been shot? Who did you kill?
But in Chicago’s Urban Warriors program, those kinds of questions are not only permitted but encouraged. That’s because the teens participating in the program have more likely than not witnessed or experienced similar violence themselves.
Cortes is one of 40 veterans currently participating in Urban Warriors, a program operated by the YMCA of Metro Chicago’s Youth Safety and Violence Prevention (YSVP) initiative. The program uses trauma-informed therapy to create and implement community projects throughout the city. Urban Warriors, one of five YSVP projects, is a five-year-old initiative with branches in a handful of Chicago’s most under-resourced neighborhoods, and it pairs veterans with youth who are at risk of committing or being subject to violence.
As nearly half of all homicides in Chicago are attributed to gangs, the need for effective intervention in the city is dire. Nationally, the percentage of those in gangs who are under 18 years old hovers around 35 percent. Psychologists have found that if young people find mentors outside the streets, they are motivated to stay away from gangs.
And that’s exactly what Urban Warriors has found effective in building up the self-esteem and self-worth of the kids in its program. The teens look up to and respect veterans, who can relate to what it feels like living in a war zone. They know what it’s like to fear for one’s life. And talking about the looming specter of violence in their lives helps youth process the resulting trauma.
“Kids identify themselves as soldiers, because they live in war zone communities,” Eddie Bocanegra, the co-founder of Urban Warriors, tells NPR. “They make the parallels between, veterans, you know, carry guns, we carry guns. They got ranks, we got ranks. They got their Army uniforms, we got our gang colors.”
During one recent conversation, Cortes and some teens in his group were discussing what it feels like right before getting shot in a drive-by shooting — the anxiety, sweat and anticipation that hits you right before you think someone’s going to pull the trigger.
“And then it turns out to be an ice-cream truck driving by,” Cortes tells NationSwell. “These kids are over-alert and watching their backs, even when they’re in the safest environments. They try to explain that feeling to other people who don’t get it. But I do.”
As a former gang member, Bocanegra knows what he’s talking about. At 14, he shot and killed a kid he mistook for a rival gang member, which landed him in prison for 14 years. While doing time, his brother — a decorated Army veteran — told him to seek therapy for the trauma he experienced on the streets and in prison.
Bocanegra listened to his brother and sought out counseling. Eventually he started working with anti-violence programs and, out of curiosity, began surveying gang members in 2013 to see who they looked up to.
“It all started based on this question we put out with high-risk youths: whom they felt safe and protected with,” Jadhira Sanchez, the director of Urban Warriors, tells NationSwell. “We gave them options such as EMT’s, cops, lawyers, doctors and veterans. And they chose veterans. That’s who they looked up to; that’s who they respected.”
For 16 weeks, three different cohorts of 20 teens — separated by sex — are partnered with five veterans. Each Saturday, the teens get to talk to each other about issues they’re currently dealing with. They get to ask questions of and seek guidance from the veterans. A social worker who can help to navigate services, such as applying for college or jobs, sits in on every conversation.
All the veterans and case workers are trained in trauma-informed care to help them navigate tense or uncomfortable conversations, but they say the single most effective approach has been simply giving the teens a chance to connect with people with whom they can relate.
“We found youth who [talk about] going into the gang world, and they compare that to basic training in the military branch. When you lose your buddy or brother in combat, some people compare that to losing someone on the streets. When you have those comparisons, they open to each other up because they feel on the same level,” Sanchez says.
“I had family who were involved with gangs, which means that even if you don’t claim it or wear the colors, you’re [guilty by association],” says Cortes. “Think about being 10 years old and your mom takes you to the good stores, and you see all the cool clothes but you can’t get it because of the colors on it. A 10-year-old has to process that. It’s little things like that.”
Urban Warriors participant William Javier can relate to the above. Javier, 17, grew up in Pilsen with an abusive father. He saw his friends join gangs and had to dodge stray bullets countless times.
“You could literally die, going across [the street] to get some food, from a random bullet that wasn’t meant for you,” he says.
It resulted in him living inside his bedroom — trapped in his home by fear. But one day, tired of being inside and wanting to “be out there,” he thought about joining a gang.
“That life slowly starts grabbing at you and pulling you in. And my closest friend started to notice it,” he says.
That same friend pushed him into joining the Urban Warriors program two years ago. Javier was the teen who asked Cortes how many people he killed. (The veterans are not required to answer every question.)
“I knew he killed someone,” Javier says. “It was still a little [shocking] for some reason. But after that, I started to feel comfortable with him.”
Beneficial outcomes of the program have been mostly anecdotal, though Sanchez says they do survey participants before and after they complete the program. But the stories coming out of Chicago’s program are promising, and could be replicated in cities like Los Angeles or New Orleans that are also grappling with gang violence.
“I have youth that never wanted to go to college and now want to,” Sanchez says. “That’s a huge victory.”
Javier’s involvement in Urban Warriors has even saved his life, he says.
“I never saw myself graduating or living at all past freshman year. I saw myself in the grave,” he says. “After Urban Warriors, I saw myself in a better light — more open and confident and positive in life. Now, I’m close to graduating. I’m living happily. And doing the things I’m doing.”
This Program Helps Homeless Students Stay in School
During the 2016-17 school year, over 111,500 students in New York City experienced homelessness at some point. For the past decade, S.I.M.B.A — which stands for “Safe in my Brothers Arms” — has been helping that same population overcome their struggles with homelessness.
Operated by NYC’s Department of Education, S.I.M.B.A. offers academic resources, extracurricular activities and college- and career-readiness training to a current class of 50 young men. In 2008, it launched a sister organization, A.S.E.T. — or “All Sisters Evolving Together” — to serve female high school students. This year, A.S.E.T serves a cohort of 38 young women.
“High school students, above all other homeless cohorts, were dropping out at an exponentially higher rate,” says program director Wayne Harris. “So when I took this position, I said, ‘If that’s what the data says, that’s the population that I want to work with.’”
Since its inception, S.I.M.B.A. and A.S.E.T together have served over 1,000 high school students. Last year, it celebrated its 10th anniversary, and its most recent class of seniors all graduated high school with multiple offers to attend college.
Watch the video above to learn more about S.I.M.B.A. and A.S.E.T.’s work.
This Chef Serves Up a Future for Struggling Kids
When Carmen Rodriguez was two years old, his grandmother would put him in a makeshift baby carrier and take him into the fields as she picked produce. Growing up, he traveled from Chicago to Texas, North Dakota and California with his migrant farmworker family, picking melons, potatoes, strawberries, lettuce, and corn. The first meal he ever cooked was bean and cheese burritos, strapped to the radiator of the family car to keep them warm.
His home base was a rough neighborhood in Chicago, and as the only boy in the family, there was no one to protect him from the gangs. When he was eight years old, a l4-year-old boy was being forced to jump into a Latin gang and, as a rite of passage, “had to beat the crap out of the first kid he saw. I was that kid,” Rodriguez says. His survival instincts kicked in, and instead he beat up the older kid. The gang recruited him that day. He ran away from home at 13 and lived on the streets of Chicago. He ran packages for the gang, broke into homes for the gang, robbed people on the street and sold drugs for the gang.
But after a dressing-down by the local police, he decided to get a job. He started washing dishes at an Italian restaurant, lying about his age. One day, one of the line cooks didn’t show for his shift. Rodriguez decided to help the line and “when the chef came into the kitchen and saw that I was on his line cooking his food, he grabbed the dish that I had just cooked, shrimp scampi, and launched the dish, bowl and all, against the furthest wall in the kitchen. Chef then grabbed me by the back of my neck and screamed in my face, ‘I pay you to wash fucking dishes, not fuck up my food!’
“When I told this to my gang friends, they wanted to burn down his restaurant. I think this is when it hit me that what I was doing with the gang was not going to get me anywhere, so I convinced them that it wasn’t worth our time. I returned to work the next day, and started cleaning and washing dishes. Chef got there and looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Guess you’re not a punk.’ He took me under his wing and taught me all about the business of restaurants. Chef passed away five years ago, and I learned that he had tasted my shrimp scampi, and that’s how he knew that I was not a punk.”
Rodriguez worked his way up from line cook to kitchen manager to sous chef to executive chef. His credits include some of the top restaurants in Santa Barbara, Tampa, Palm Springs, and Santa Fe, where he now lives. In 2012, he was named the New Mexico Chef of the Year, awarded by the New Mexico Restaurant Association.
Two years ago, Rodriguez was contacted by Labor Of Love, which promotes and celebrates the 50,000 largely invisible and unrecognized migrant farmworkers in Yuma, Arizona, by performing “random acts of kindness” like delivering boxes with Thanksgiving dinner and supplying them with blankets and cushions. As Rodriguez delivered 500 gourmet meals to the farmworkers, “the memories of when I was a young boy working in the fields started to creep back into my mind,” he says. “I saw my grandparents sitting around on their breaks and talking about the food we were picking, and how one day we’d be out of work. Then I heard my grandfather say eso nunca va pasar: “Our people will always be in the fields.” The past suddenly slammed into the present and the future, and I knew that I had to give back, to help kids who were lost and troubled and in survival mode like I had been.”
Back in Santa Fe, he and his wife, Penny, had worked tangentially with YouthWorks, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit for at-risk kids. Last year, Rodriguez sat down with Melynn Schuyler, YouthWorks’ executive director, to discuss a brewing crisis: 1,500 young people turn l9 in Santa Fe every year, and over 40 percent of them never graduate from high school, making it difficult for them to land regular employment. Because of the high price of rentals, thousands of them are effectively homeless.
Schuyler had a dream for the future of the YouthWorks Culinary Program, and Rodriguez was the dream person to run it. Rodriguez immediately agreed to the job, knowing how education and positive encouragement can improve young lives. “I have seen immediate satisfaction in my customers,” Rodriguez says. “But to see a young person who has had so many problems in his or her life, be able to look you in the eye and speak to you with confidence and respect, is more satisfying that any comment I have received about my food from a guest.”
The Culinary Program has launched a wildly successful food truck. With Rodriguez and his wife at the helm, they serve up affordable and delicious dishes like charred brussels sprouts tossed in spicy Korean barbecue sauce ($7), with a $2 add-on of achiote pineapple chicken. For sweets, customers love the Pig Newtons –– two graham cracker biscuits filled with spicy pork-belly candy, bacon and fig jam ($6). And the YouthWorks Catering Service is cooking at public and private events for high-profile clients like the American Institute of Architects, the Mayor of Santa Fe, the Spanish Colonial Arts Museum and the Nation of Makers Conference.
It isn’t always easy when kids are having problems and don’t show up for work. “My job is wrangling sabertooth kittens!” Penny jokes. But the satisfaction outweighs the tough stuff. Kids who are successful in the program are getting placed in local restaurants.
Erin, one of Culinary Program’s young apprentices, says it’s the most fun job she has ever had. “Everyone wants to be bettering their personal situation, and I’m working with some of the hardest-working people I know.” she says. And Jackie, a former student who is now a sous chef at YouthWorks, says, “Working with YouthWorks and chef Carmen in the kitchen has brought a new purpose to my life. Teaching and learning how to cook and put on events has opened my eyes to the bigger need of food and food service in my community. When I watch the crew in action, it makes me proud and you can see them also being proud of themselves.”
Rodriguez recently placed another YouthWorks alum, Joe, in a friend’s restaurant as a pantry cook. A month later, Joe called him to say that the owner was so impressed with his skills that he was promoting him to the hot line. “In my toughest chef voice that I could muster, I told Joe, ‘Don’t fuck this up,’ and he answered ‘Yes, chef.’ I had to pull over and wipe tears of pride from my eyes. I knew how the Italian chef had felt when he tasted my shrimp scampi.”
Looking for Housing or Affordable Healthcare? Your Local Library Is Here to Help
Leah Esguerra is a licensed family and marriage therapist, but instead of heading to an office every day to soothe couples’ marital tensions, she reports to the San Francisco Public Library. There she roams the stacks, looking for patrons who might need her help. Some of these patrons are homeless and are looking for a safe place to stay for the day. Others are actively looking for resources, such as showers and food, or just a place to warm up for a while.
No matter their need, Esguerra embraces them all. “Public libraries are sometimes called the last bastion of democracy,” she says. “It’s a community living room where everyone is welcome.”
Esguerra is the nation’s first official library social worker. She was hired by the San Francisco Public Library in 2009, after the collapse of the nation’s economy wiped out jobs and made housing unaffordable for many people. “The housing crisis will always [be a problem here], because there’s not enough houses for people who are on a limited income, are marginalized or are a challenge to house because of mental health and substance abuse issues,” she says.
Esguerra had been working for San Francisco’s Department of Public Health in a community mental health clinic when the city’s public library system reached out to the agency, looking for ways to address the issue of patrons who appeared to be homeless. Some of these library goers had obvious substance abuse or mental health problems, and some were using the library’s bathrooms to wash up or take a nap. Other patrons were aggravated by their presence, and the library staff didn’t feel equipped to handle the situation. The Department of Public Health asked Esguerra if she wanted to try working at the library with people who might need social-service support there, and she agreed to give it a go.
Almost a decade later, Esguerra is still at the main branch of the San Francisco library. And as the number of homeless patrons has ticked up, so has her staff — Esguerra currently oversees a team of seven people who are employed as part-time health-and-safety associates, all of whom have some experience with homelessness themselves.
Jennifer Keys is one such associate, having struggled with mental health issues in the past. Now she works for Esguerra and recently got certified as a peer specialist in mental health. “To be homeless is a full-time job,” says Keys. “The housing crisis here is awful, and the prerequisite for [subsidized] housing is very high.” Nevertheless, her team has helped 116 people find permanent housing since the social-work program began.
Similar library-outreach programs have sprung up in other big cities over the past few years, among them Denver, New York, Philadelphia and San Diego, as well as in smaller communities like Pima County, Arizona, and Georgetown, Texas. “We take pride in being the first in the country, and we’re even considered a national model and blueprint for many other libraries,” Esguerra says. “A lot of times when other libraries start their programs, they call San Francisco.”
Monique le Conge Ziesenhenne, director of library and community services in Palo Alto, California, and current president of the Public Library Association, agrees that the number of libraries that offer outreach programs is on the rise, though she says that the Public Library Association doesn’t track that data. (CityLab reported in 2016 that 24 public libraries across the country offer outreach services.)
“I think what’s really interesting is, in the face of shrinking budgets from every sector of local government, libraries have had to look for creative ways to solve whatever issues are facing them,” Ziesenhenne says. “And as libraries have become more responsive to community needs, it’s interesting how libraries have become community connectors too.”
Maurice Freedman, a former president of the American Library Association, echoes that sentiment. “Libraries are the great democratic equalizer, as anyone can just walk in and sit down,” he says. “It’s the only public service agency that’s not interested in your name and address.”
Not all libraries that employ social workers cater solely to homeless patrons. The Richland Public Library in Columbia, South Carolina, hired a part-time social worker when the Affordable Care Act was introduced in 2013, and people started coming in with questions about different healthcare plans. That part-time employee was soon overwhelmed, and Sharita Moultrie was hired when the branch decided they needed a full-time social worker who specialized in healthcare issues.
“Libraries are the great democratic equalizer. It’s the only public service agency that’s not interested in your name and address.”
— Maurice Freedman, former president of the American Library Association
“There was a great need in the community to be able to sit down one-on-one and talk [to an expert on healthcare], to find options tailored to them,” Moultrie says. “We found that in addition to people needing info about the market, some people also needed help with signing up for food stamps, housing or getting bus tickets so they could look for jobs. If they come through our doors, we do our best to help them.”
Patrick Lloyd is the community resources coordinator at the public library in Georgetown, Texas, a small city about 30 miles north of Austin. He was hired in 2015 when his boss noticed an increase in homeless patrons and people coming in “seeking answers to questions about things that lie outside the library.” In the case of Georgetown, its population essentially doubled over the past decade, Lloyd says, pushing it from “rural” to “urban” on the 2010 census, and so with that came “big city issues” for a place that doesn’t have its own shelter system or reliable public transportation. So the library stepped into the gap, providing patrons with information on everything from hiring a lawyer to earning a GED. The library also loans out bicycles, hosts live music events and has a “mobile library” for patrons who have mobility issues.
“People come in and have questions about books or computers, they ask a librarian,” says Lloyd. “But if they have questions about ESL classes or a low-cost attorney, I help them.”
In Pima County, Arizona, the local library faced a different issue: People who needed medical attention. So instead of a social worker, they hired registered nurses. “Pima is in a rural part of Arizona where it’s difficult to get access to health care,” Esguerra says. That’s not an issue in San Francisco, she adds, as there is a free medical clinic right across the street from the library.
The San Francisco library has partnered with organizations like Lava Mae, which brings buses outfitted with free showers to the library every week, and they also organize a “pop-up village” every two months where people can get access to resources like free dental care, glasses and the like.
“It’s all about our community, and right now our community is in need,” Keys says. “So we let people know that they have some place to go.”
Want Your Kid to Pursue Science? Have Them Dress the Part
In order to encourage more of the nation’s young people to pursue careers in science, it pays to help them dress the part.
That is the key finding of a study we conducted recently to determine what kind of effect a simple article of clothing – in this case white lab coats – have on students’ confidence in their ability to do science. We also wanted to know if lab coats help students see themselves as scientists and aspire to science careers.
We are science education researchers interested in understanding how the symbols and tools of science can promote students’ interest in studying science.
This is an important topic because jobs in science, technology, engineering and math — or STEM jobs — are not only important for the economy, but are also growing faster and pay more than many other fields.
Although the number of jobs in STEM fields are increasing, the number of people choosing to major in those fields remains below what is needed to fill the positions.
THE POWER OF CLOTHING
In order to encourage more young people to choose to major in STEM fields and pursue STEM careers, we believe it is important to help them see themselves as someone who can be successful in those fields. One item often associated with scientists is the white lab coat.
Clothing can be a powerful tool for changing one’s self-image, as seen in previous studies of the effects of suits and lab coats on adults.
In an effort to help students see themselves as scientists and as individuals who can be successful in science, we conducted a study that put students in lab coats for science instruction. Our team worked with five fifth-grade teachers from four rural schools who taught at least two science classes.
SAME LESSONS, DIFFERENT ATTIRE
For each teacher, students in one of the classes wore lab coats for at least 10 class periods over the course of two months. The other class did not wear lab coats. The teachers taught the same lessons to each class to minimize the differences between teachers. The participants were interviewed before and after the 10 lessons and also took a pre- and post-survey that explored many factors, such as their sense of self as a scientist, their confidence in their skills related to science, and whether they had career goals related to STEM fields.
For the 110 youth in the group who didn’t wear lab coats, there were no statistically significant changes in their responses from the pretest to post-test for any question on the written survey. However, for the students who wore the lab coats, there was a significant increase in their perceptions of whether others see them as scientists.
More specifically, of the 72 students who wore lab coats, 47 percent changed their responses on the post-survey to indicate they feel like others see them as someone who likes science.
Also, of the 42 lab coat–wearing students who had low levels of confidence in their science skills, 45 percent changed their responses on the post-test to positive responses. Another 36 percent of the students in lab coats with low levels of self-confidence did not change their response from the pre- to post-test but this included the students who already felt they had high levels of recognition.
POSITIVE EFFECTS
To test for performance and competence in science, students were asked questions such as “I think I am good at science” and “I am good at using science tools like thermometers, rulers or magnifying glasses.” The youth who wore lab coats but had low levels of self-confidence had a significant increase in their responses to these questions. More specifically, 60 percent of the students changed their answer from disagree to agree.
To test for career aspirations, the students were asked questions such as “I would like to have a job that uses science.” For the students wearing the lab coats who had low confidence in their science skills, 50 percent changed their answers from disagree to agree.
A WORTHY INVESTMENT
The bottom line: is that for youth who initially had low levels of confidence in their science skills, the lab coats had a significant improvement in their beliefs in their abilities, their levels of recognition and their science career aspirations.
Of course, lab coats cannot supplant a solid science education. At the same time, these simple articles of clothing may represent an inexpensive way to help more young people get interested in science and see themselves as future scientists.
—
Megan Ennes is a graduate research assistant and M. Gail Jones is a professor of STEM education, both at North Carolina State University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
How Do You Fight Blight? This Man Has an Answer
It’s been 30 years since John George turned around his first crack house.
While living in the Old Redford neighborhood of Detroit — which, like almost every major city in the 1980s, was decaying in large part due to the crack epidemic — he decided one day he was going to give a blighted home a facelift. George repainted the house, repaired the broken windows and tended to the lawn.
From there, fixing up derelict houses became a weekly thing.
“I’m half Lebanese, half Italian and 100 percent Detroit stubborn. Once we get something in our heart and in our head, it’s almost autopilot,” George tells NationSwell, adding that he never considered simply moving away. “I didn’t think leaving the city was the proper thing to do.”
At first George’s goal was to stop property values in his neighborhood from diminishing any further. But as he started fixing up the houses that surrounded his own, he discovered his efforts could have a much larger impact in helping his hometown recover. It’s an idea that has caught on in other cities battling blight: Clean up the streets and empty lots, and you have a recipe for lowering crime and encouraging community engagement and business development.
As multiple studies in different cities have shown, vacant lots and dilapidated homes are key indicators of poverty and crime.
In Detroit, the problem was particularly pronounced. The mortgage crisis of the 1990s, when property ownership began to dramatically decline, was soon followed by the 2008 housing crisis. The city declared bankruptcy, resulting in illegal trash dumping in the streets and plenty of burnt-out and abandoned homes.
“Things started to deteriorate. Problems started to escalate. We had serious problems with our mayors, and the biggest question people had was how did Detroit get to where it is,” says George, who founded the nonprofit Detroit Blight Busters in 1988. “There’s a lot of blame to go around. But blaming people and things weren’t going to fix anything. So instead of blaming, I thought we should do something.”
Every Saturday, George and his Blight Busters cofounder would meet and then go fix something up. A park. A home. A street corner. No project was too small.
“We weren’t naive enough to think we would stop crime or anything, but we wanted to at least minimize the decrease of property values,” he says. It was an antidote to the city’s response, which was to simply board up the houses or demolish them completely. “We didn’t want to be part of the problem of tearing down houses, but be part of the solution to make them nice.”
With thousands of blighted buildings in the Motor City still standing, George and his crew of volunteers, who so far have more than 1,500 renovations under their belts, remain committed to revitalizing as many of them as they can.
A SCALABLE MODEL CATCHES ON
Other cities have taken up similar initiatives. Durham, North Carolina, was one of the first to ban plywood on abandoned homes, instead covering them up with clear polycarbonate. Officials there claim that the change has helped sell the vacant buildings.
In Philadelphia, workers are dispatched to clean up vacant lots and property owners who don’t take care of their land are fined. The city also works with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society through the Philadelphia LandCare program, which has “cleaned and greened” thousands of abandoned properties since 1999.
The result has been a noticeable decrease in crime and an upswing in economic mobility for the neighborhoods.
“Just by the changing the neighborhoods, people’s attitudes toward their community has changed,” says Thomas Conway, deputy managing director of the city’s Community Life Improvements Programs. “Its given them hope.”
Revitalization of the lots include clearing debris, grading the land, planting trees and erecting post-and-rail fencing, essentially transforming the land into de facto parks. In 2010, the city passed an ordinance that mandates private owners of abandoned buildings to install working doors and windows, or face steep fines.
“We’ve cleaned and gleamed about 8,000 properties and 23,000 vacant lots with the Horticultural Society, and at the cost of only a few million dollars,” Conway says. “Compare that to incarceration costs per person, or the cost of poverty, and the benefits far outweigh everything else.”
A decade-long study of the greening program in Philadelphia looked at lots in four areas that were revitalized. It found a direct association between blighted vacant lots and gun assaults; after those lots were cleaned up, there were statistically significant decreases in firearm violence and an uptick in residents’ overall health.
Another study, published in The American Journal of Public Health, backed up those findings. That study examined the results of Philadelphia’s blight-remediation programs on 5,112 vacant lots and buildings, and found that gun violence decreased by 39 percent when buildings were renovated and by almost 5 percent around vacant lots that were beautified. The researches concluded that “there is something unique to firearm violence that makes it especially treatable with programs that transform blighted urban environments.”
For every dollar spent on Philadelphia’s blight program, as much as $26 in net benefits were made.
AHEAD OF THE CURVE
Back in Detroit, George has seen similar returns through his work with Blight Busters. The organization has raised over $20 million from local businesses, sports teams and philanthropists to finance their continued revitalization efforts. He says there’s been a noticeable return on that investment.
An abandoned high school George helped clean up was eventually turned into a shopping center, a $33 million investment. And two blocks of now-prime retail space that Blight Busters renovated were recently snapped up for $3.5 million.
“Because of that $20 million investment, we’ve been able to attract millions of dollars more, [which goes] right back into our community,” George says.
The Blight Busters’ success didn’t just raise property values and make Detroit’s streets prettier and safer. It also became a model for other cities.
“Our investment, our time and energy, was worthwhile, because it not only saved our neighborhood but the whole city. When everyone left, we were holding down the fort till the calvary returned,” he says. “I know it’s because of our work that Detroit is on the right path to recovery. We were just a little ahead of the curve.”
How Community-Owned Wi-Fi Changes the Game for Poor Neighborhoods
Dabriah Alston knows her home is at risk of flooding.
As a resident of Red Hook, a waterfront Brooklyn community, she saw firsthand the devastation wrought when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in 2012. The public-housing resident was inside her apartment when she and her family noticed how quickly the water was flooding into the street.
“I remember that the water started lapping on the windows of the first floor of the building, and that’s about five feet off the ground,” she says. She saw cars floating down the street. The lights began to flicker until they eventually went out. They wouldn’t turn back on for another 13 days.
All in all, it took the neighborhood over a month before things started to feel normal again. But there was something invisible that saved her, along with hundreds of other Red Hook residents, the majority of whom live in public housing: the neighborhood’s open Wi-Fi network.
Unlike personal networks that most people access in their homes via a single router, residents can connect — for free — to the area’s mesh network, which uses a system of nodes, or hot spots, strategically placed throughout the neighborhood. The nodes are accessed via cell phones and laptops and, in the case of an emergency, allow people to communicate with each other even when the internet is down.
For the people living in Red Hook, an area that is already remote by New York standards, that access was crucial. After Superstorm Sandy, the area had no power or cell service, much less reliable internet. It was, more than ever, off the grid.
Luckily, the neighborhood’s mesh network — set up by volunteers with Red Hook WiFi in 2012 before the storm — gave first responders and residents online access to exchange crucial information, such as official evacuation routes and where to go for food and first-aid supplies.
“When the [mesh was installed] we didn’t know it was something we would need, something that would become pivotal during the recovery,” Alston says. “At one point FEMA was using that Wi-Fi as well. It made it easier to find people who could volunteer, and it supported [Red Hook’s] recovery.”
The area’s mesh network is an offshoot of the Red Hook Initiative, a nonprofit that works in part to empower youth in Brooklyn through tech training, among other academic and job-prep programs. Mesh networks had already proven successful in Detroit, where a Digital Stewardship program had been set up by the Open Technology Institute that allowed neighbors to connect with each other wirelessly, even in the event of an internet outage.
“That’s our hope, that the network is used as a source of communication throughout the neighborhood,” Robert Smith, a digital steward in Red Hook, told the New York Times in 2014. “We want to have both, that second layer, so if the Internet goes down we can still connect with each other through the mesh.”
The success of Red Hook’s mesh during and after Superstorm Sandy has led community organizers in other areas with similar characteristics — remote, largely low-income, and at risk of flooding or other climate change–related disasters — to follow in the coastal community’s footsteps.
It’s also a handy solve for the city’s “digital divide,” the term used to describe the lack of access to internet in poor neighborhoods, such as Red Hook and parts of Harlem and the Lower East Side in Manhattan. According to a report released last year, over 1.6 million households in New York City lack basic broadband internet.
The only costs for accessing the internet via a mesh network is the equipment — a rooftop router ranges from $60 to $100 — and upkeep, which is done by volunteers in some cases. And organizations that install a mesh oftentimes only ask for monthly donations — sometimes as little as $20, a pretty nice price-tag considering that service from a conventional ISP can cost hundreds of dollars a year.
“The big companies would have you think that there’s no option than them, especially in New York City,” Jason Howard, a volunteer programmer with NYC Mesh, told the CBC. “It’s so refreshing to come across this ability to do something else as an alternative.”
The network that NYC Mesh operates, which includes dozens of nodes in low-income neighborhoods mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, gives users internet speeds close to 100 megabytes per second (for perspective, Netflix requires 5 mbps for high-definition streaming).
In the Hunts Point neighborhood in the South Bronx — one of the country’s poorest, with 14 percent of its 52,200 residents unemployed — The Point Community Development Corporation is working on a mesh network of its own. Besides providing free internet to those unable to pay for at-home Wi-Fi, the nonprofit sees it as insurance against future disasters Mother Nature might throw its way.
“During Sandy, [the Red Hook Wi-Fi] network helped people communicate with their neighbors,” says Angela A. Tovar, director of community development at The Point CDC. “Hunts Point is by the water too, so it’s important to plan for the next storm.”
Similar to Red Hook’s initiative, The Point CDC’s program, launched last September, hires residents at minimum wage to work as digital stewards. They are taught tech skills, such as coding, and help set up the mesh network, which includes the harrowing task of accessing rooftops and climbing towers to install the nodes and routers. Citi Foundation has invested more than $500,000 into the ongoing project, which will eventually include nodes on 10 local businesses and three high-rises in the area.
Superstorm Sandy crashed into Red Hook more than five years ago, but the destruction it brought remains fresh in the minds of residents.
“I still think about the storm a lot,” says Alston, who sees a silver lining. “It’s brought the community together and it gives us a feeling of empowerment [that] we don’t have to be caught unaware anymore.”
Embracing Diversity in the Great Outdoors
When Nailah Blades moved to Salt Lake City from sunny Santa Clarita, California — a suburb about 20 miles outside of Los Angeles, where she would often go hiking — there was one thing that didn’t change as she walked the nature trails: Everyone around her was very, very white.
“Being outdoors and hiking, and exploring the outdoors and paddle-boarding, is one of those realms where you’re just not expecting a ton of black women to be, or really any people of color,” she tells NationSwell, adding that even women-specific meetup groups she joined also lacked people who looked like her.
“It was intimidating,” recalls Blades. “The lot of groups I saw were women’s groups, but all white women or all women who had been doing this since forever and were experts in biking, hiking and rock-climbing. I did not want to go into that world as a beginner.”
Blades, originally from Montreal, had always been surrounded by people of various backgrounds. But the dearth of diversity she encountered in the great outdoors inspired her to start her own adventure club, called Color Outside, last year.
“I thought it was important to create a community of black women to build each other up,” Blades says.
She’s not alone. There are scores of clubs and communities around the nation — Brown People Camping, Unlikely Hikers and Outdoor Asian, to name a few — that focus on getting underrepresented groups out in nature. Diversify Outdoors, a coalition of like-minded nature lovers, highlights the recent boom, with a reach of more than 150,000 followers on Instagram alone.
But the swell in diversity-focused outdoors groups highlights another issue — namely, that retailers have failed to market premium outdoor products to a portion of society that has seen massive jumps in salaries over the past few years.
One of Diversify Outdoors’ affiliated groups is Sending in Color, co-founded by Justin Forrest Parks (yes, that’s his real name) and a fellow mountain-climber friend in Chicago. The outdoor enthusiasts had noticed that rock-climbing gyms in their city had grown in popularity — one location multiplied to four in a matter of a few years, Parks says — but almost all of the climbers were white.
“So here was this massive expansion of climbing in the city, but then we started looking around and seeing that there weren’t a lot of black or Latino individuals here,” says Parks, who is African-American. “And so we decided to create a group for meetups for people of color in a space that would feel welcoming.”
Sending in Color’s first gathering, last November, drew a few people. Now as many as 80 people attend the group’s monthly meetups.
But feeling welcome in the world of outdoor recreation isn’t always something that comes easy. Both Parks and Blades point out that activities like camping, rafting and hiking have long been marketed as “things only white people do.”
That argument doesn’t come out of nowhere. In 2016, environmental-advocacy nonprofit The Outdoor Foundation found that nearly three-fourths of those who participated in outdoor recreation were white; less than 10 percent were black. Similarly, a 2011 National Park Service survey reported that only one in five visitors to a national park is nonwhite, and one in 10 is Hispanic. The stark difference in participation by race earned a name among activists, who started referring to it as the “adventure gap.”
Historically, outdoor retailers and brands have reflected this gap in their advertising and branding materials.
“There’s this thought, in terms of race, that [being] black means being low income. But if you look at studies of who’s spending money on vacation, typically communities of colors are spending more,” Parks says. “It’s a narrative of ‘We’re not seeing you out here, you don’t want to be here,’ when in reality most probably just don’t know there is a ‘here’ to go to.”
According to the Mandala Research firm, African-American families were likely to take two or more international trips per year, which amounts to $48 billion spent. They’re also responsible for more than half of total spending in certain categories domestically, according to a Nielsen consumer report published this year.
And as other minority groups continue to make up more of the market share, smart retailers have adopted new strategies to include more diverse faces in their branding and advertising.
REI is one example. In 2014, the retail and outdoor recreation chain began to tailor its advertising to minority populations, in part by sponsoring the American Latino Heritage Fund’s American Latino Expedition, which awarded three Latino adventure groups with tours of national parks.
There’s a market for brands looking to be more inclusive in their messaging, says Becky Arreaga, president of the marketing firm Mercury Mambo in Austin, Texas.
“For brands looking to connect with multicultural communities, the timing couldn’t be better. I am very excited to see the groups and nonprofits emerging from the shadows,” says Arreaga, whose firm focuses on helping brands work with diverse voices. “Groups such as Latino Outdoors and Outdoor Afro have been leading the way, and this year I’ve seen a surge of other organizations becoming visible on social media.”
In a 2017 interview, Arreaga expanded on the benefit for brands to go outside — pun intended — their usual demographics.
“The point is to bring people into the conversation that represent this market and know the ins and outs,” she said, adding that the Latino and Hispanic communities, for example, are a growing and influential demographic that will need to be front and center for brands. “So what we are doing as an agency is creating these network of [social media] influencers, so that when brands are looking for that authentic voice, we’ve got the connections to help them do that.”
It’s something that Parks and Blades have been eager to see, as their own organizations have focused on an Instagram-first strategy of inspiring more people of color to get outdoors, share photos and spread a message of inclusion.
“There’s a lot of importance in feeling like you’re taking up space, wherever that space is, whether it’s outdoors or inside the boardroom,” Blades says. “I think it’s important for people of color to co-occupy this space, now, and traditionally be where we haven’t been able to do that.”
Teaching Refugees to Map Their World
I first visited the Zaatari refugee camp in early 2015. Located in northern Jordan, the camp is home to more than 80,000 Syrian refugees. I was there as part of a research study on refugee camp wireless and information infrastructure.
It’s one thing to read about refugees in the news. It’s a whole different thing to actually go visit a camp. I saw people living in metal caravans, mixed with tents and other materials to create a sense of home. Many used improvised electrical systems to keep the power going. People are rebuilding their lives to create a better future for their families and themselves, just like any of us would if faced with a similar situation.
As a geographer, I was quickly struck by how geographically complex the Zaatari camp is. The camp management staff faced serious spatial challenges. By “spatial challenges,” I mean issues that any small city might face, such as keeping track of the electrical grid; understanding where people live within the camp; and locating other important resources, such as schools, mosques and health centers. Officials at Zaatari had some maps of the camp, but they struggled to keep up with its ever-changing nature.
An experiment I launched there led to up-to-date maps of the camp and, I hope, valuable training for some of its residents.
THE POWER OF MAPS
Like many other refugee camps, Zaatari developed quickly in response to a humanitarian emergency. In rapid onset emergencies, mapping often isn’t as high of a priority as basic necessities like food, water and shelter.
However, my research shows that maps can be an invaluable tool in a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis. Modern digital mapping tools have been essential for locating resources and making decisions in a number of crises, from the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to the refugee influx in Rwanda.
This got me thinking that the refugees themselves could be the best people to map Zaatari. They have intimate knowledge of the camp’s layout, understand where important resources are located and benefit most from camp maps.
With these ideas in mind, my lab teamed up with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Al-Balqa and Princess Sumaya universities in Jordan.
Modern maps are often made with a technology known as Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. Using funding from the UNHCR Innovation Fund, we acquired the computer hardware to create a GIS lab. From corporate partner Esri, we obtained low-cost, professional GIS software.
Over a period of about 18 months, we trained 10 Syrian refugees. Students in the RefuGIS class ranged in age from 17 to 60. Their backgrounds from when they lived in Syria ranged from being a math teacher to a tour operator to a civil engineer. I was extremely fortunate that one of my students, Yusuf Hamad, spoke fluent English and was able translate my instructions into Arabic for the other students.
We taught concepts such as coordinate systems, map projections, map design and geographic visualization; we also taught how to collect spatial data in the field using GPS. The class then used this knowledge to map places of interest in the camp, such as the locations of schools, mosques and shops.
The class also learned how to map data using mobile phones. The data has been used to update camp reference maps and to support a wide range of camp activities.
I made a particular point to ensure the class could learn how to do these tasks on their own. This was important: No matter how well-intentioned a technological intervention is, it will often fall apart if the displaced community relies completely on outside people to make it work.
As a teacher, this class was my most satisfying educational experience. This was perhaps my finest group of GIS students across all the types of students I have taught over my 15 years of teaching. Within a relatively short amount of time, they were able to create professional maps that now serve camp management staff and refugees themselves.
JOBS FOR REFUGEES
My experiences training refugees and humanitarian professionals in Jordan and Rwanda have made me reflect upon the broader possibilities that GIS can bring to the over 65 million refugees in the world today.
It’s challenging for refugees to develop livelihoods at a camp. Many struggle to find employment after leaving.
GIS could help refugees create a better future for themselves and their future homes. If people return to their home countries, maps — essential to activities like construction and transportation — can aid the rebuilding process. If they adopt a new home country, they may find they have marketable skills. The worldwide geospatial industry is worth an estimated $400 billion and geospatial jobs are expected to grow over the coming years.
Our team is currently helping some of the refugees get GIS industry certifications. This can further expand their career opportunities when they leave the camp and begin to rebuild their lives.
Technology training interventions for refugees often focus on things like computer programming, web development and other traditional IT skills. However, I would argue that GIS should be given equal importance. It offers a rich and interactive way to learn about people, places and spatial skills — things that I think the world in general needs more of. Refugees could help lead the way.