Rosanne Haggerty grew up going to church in downtown Hartford, Conn. Her parents, both schoolteachers, never outright explained why they took their kids to church in a poor neighborhood full of single-room occupancy hotels and boarding houses. Haggerty, however, learned the lesson her folks were trying to instill. “My parents were both very devout Catholics in the social justice wing of the church,” Haggerty says, describing how the family visited fellow church members when they were sick and invited them over for holiday meals. Haggerty grew up with a sense that “we all can be doing more to provide that kind of support system for others.”
Today, Haggerty is a social change agent in her community, serving as the president of Community Solutions, a national organization that aims to end homelessness. Taking an entrepreneurial approach to address the problem, Community Solutions uses technology to capture data and tailor interventions to meet the needs of a region in the most effective way possible. At its heart, Community Solutions’s mission is the same as Haggerty’s parents’: helping people, one person at a time.
Community Solutions works in neighborhoods around the country to provide practical, data-driven solutions to the complicated problems involved in homelessness. The organization has already achieved great success: its 100,000 Homes campaign, which ran from 2010 to 2014, helped 186 participating communities house more than 105,000 homeless Americans across the country.” (Chronically homeless individuals make up 15 percent of the total homeless population, yet they utilize the majority of social services devoted towards helping them, including drop-in shelters.) To do this, it challenged the traditional approach of ending homelessness: requiring those living on the streets to demonstrate sobriety, steady income or mental health treatment, for example. Instead, it housed people first, an approach that has demonstrated overwhelming success: research finds that more than 85 percent of chronically homeless people housed through “Housing First” programs are still in homes two years later and unlikely to become homeless again.
“Technology played a critical role in the success of the 100,000 Homes campaign because it enabled multiple agencies to share and use the same data,” says Erin Connor, portfolio manager with the Cisco Foundation, which has supported Community Solutions’ technology-based initiatives. “By rigorously tracking, reporting and making decisions based on shared data, participating communities could track and monitor their progress against targets and contribute to achieving the collective goal.” As a result of this campaign, the estimated taxpayer savings was an astonishing $1.3 billion. Building on this achievement, its current Zero 2016 campaign works in 75 communities to sustainably end chronic and veteran homelessness altogether.
Technology and data gathering is critical for local and nationwide campaigns since homelessness is intimately connected to other social problems, like unemployment and poverty. One example of the local impact Community Solutions has had is in Brownsville (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., that’s dominated by multiple public housing projects) via the Brownsville Partnership, which is demonstrating that these problems can be solved — to create “the endgame of homelessness,” as Haggerty puts it.
In Brownsville, the official unemployment rate is 16 percent, “about double that of Brooklyn” as a whole, Haggerty says, noting that the statistic excludes those not currently looking for work. In response, the organization works with existing job training programs, digging into their data and analyzing it to improve effectiveness and achieve success.
“Data is at the heart of everything we do, as far as understanding where to focus our efforts and how to improve our collective performance,” Haggerty explains. Analyzing usage data, Community Solutions works with health care providers, nonprofits, and city and state governments to figure out where the most vulnerable populations live, what systems they interact with and what help they need.
Because of this emphasis on data, Community Solutions increasingly thinks of itself as a tech company, Haggerty says. Since 2010, it’s partnered with Cisco to help bring practical, data-driven solutions to communities around the country, opening doors to innovation and progress. When the collaboration began, Community Solutions was a local New York City-based organization. Today, it works with communities throughout the United States. By looking at the problem more nationally and taking an entrepreneurial approach when it comes to applying technology, Community Solutions is now solving homelessness on a much larger scale and having greater impact — producing real social change.
One person benefitting from this tech-driven approach is Toni Diaz. In and out of homeless shelters since the age of 17, Diaz had three children and a fourth on the way by the time she was 23 years old. Escaping from an abusive partner, Diaz took her kids to a homeless shelter. “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she says. Right when Diaz realized that she needed to make a change in her life, opportunity arrived in the form of a caseworker from the Brownsville Partnership.
Diaz’s journey out of homelessness took years, but Brownsville Partnership walked with her every step of the way. Today, she’s part of an innovative solution that helps people like her connect to the services and training programs that will help them break that same cycle. Stories like Diaz’s are one of the things Haggerty loves most about her work. “It’s especially satisfying when people we initially encountered in a time of crisis end up in a position where they are paying it forward,” she says. Diaz, Haggerty says, shows “what kind of resilience exists in people in this neighborhood” and communities like Brownsville around the country.
This was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur, and act as a social change agent.
Editors’ note: The original version of this story misspelled Rosanne Haggerty’s name. It also erroneously stated that Community Solutions’s 100,000 Homes campaign housed more than 105,000 chronically homeless people in 186 communities across the country. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
Tag: American poverty
The Sneaker Saint
The sneaker business has never been bigger than it is today. Since 2004, sales of high-end athletic shoes increased by 40 percent to nearly $55 billion, and the resale market generates more than $1 billion. Now, one former sneakerhead hopes to put a little soul back in the soles of homeless people and disadvantaged youth by gifting them a brand new or gently worn pair.
Watch the video above to see how Rikki Mendias, founder of the grassroots nonprofit Hav a Sole, uses his background in fashion photography and social media marketing to solicit sneaker donations to stock pop-up shops for his unique patrons.
MORE: Ever Wondered What to Say to a Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say and 5 Things Not to Say
Mental Healthcare Resources Target Communities Left Behind, A Tech Giant Wages War Against ISIS and More
Rural America Finally Gets Mental Health Help, Governing
The absence of clinics, therapists and psychiatrists in our nation’s small towns have fueled incarceration, self-medicating opioid abuse and suicide. But developments like telemedicine and integration of mental health checkups into primary care visits have the potential to alleviate the psychic crises causing headaches in sparsely populated counties.
Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits, WIRED
The search engine is trying a new strategy to fight the Islamic State’s aggressive online recruiting campaigns. Rather than creating or hiding content, Google simply redirects traffic to videos featuring Muslim religious authorities debunking ISIS apocalyptic theology and undercover clips showing the devastation for Syrian and Iraqi civilians.
Can a Montana Community Run its Own Forest? High Country News
In 2002, to prevent real estate developers from subdividing 142 acres of lakefront property, locals in one small Montana town pooled their money to buy the land for the community. After financial hardships threatened to put the parcel back on the market in 2014, an under-utilized government fund saved the shoreline, preserving the West’s rugged landscape.
MORE: This Common Sense Program Could Be the Future of Mental Healthcare Nationwide
Upstanders: Homes For Everyone
Faced with a growing homeless population, Utah changed the way it provides shelter to those on the streets. Under Lloyd Pendleton’s leadership, the state has reduced its chronic homeless population by 91 percent.
Upstanders is a collection of short stories celebrating ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities produced by Howard Schultz and Rajiv Chandrasekaran. These stories of humanity remind us that we all have the power to make a difference.
Working Toward a Just Society: How One American City Is Building Wealth Among Its Disenfranchised
In his seminal 1971 book “A Theory of Justice,” the American political philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment in his quest to define a fair and just society. He asks us to imagine ourselves in a situation in which we know nothing about our personal characteristics — not our gender, race, wealth or educational background. From this blind starting point, we’re tasked with laying the framework for a new, just society — the catch being, of course, that if you don’t know where you’ll land in the social hierarchy, what kind of world would you choose to live in?
Like Rawls, Thad Williamson, associate professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia, believes the key to a fair and just society is one in which capitalism works not to make as much money as possible, but to distribute wealth by offering equal employment and social opportunities. It’s a political theory usually confined to debates in lecture halls and academic journals. But two years ago, the city of Richmond offered Williamson a unique opportunity: to build a new government agency, from the ground up, that would tackle the constellation of causes that has led the city’s poverty rate to swell to 22.1 percent, triple the rest of Virginia.
That agency, the Office of Community Wealth Building, or OCWB, launched in 2014. OCWB attempts to boost the number of high-paying jobs for adults, offer more learning and development opportunities for kids and realign current housing stock to be more affordable and public-transit accessible. By 2030, Williamson hopes these efforts will cut Richmond’s child poverty rate in half, creating a more just city.
“We have a fragmentation of services. The issues that really should be discussed holistically are separated: employment, education and housing are all deeply tied together in an urban context,” Williamson tells NationSwell. “Getting separate departments and agencies to cooperate can be a challenge. That’s one of the reasons why the Office of Community Wealth Building was built: to set the strategy for the city as a whole.”
Richmond’s struggle against poverty can be traced back to more than a century ago, when the city segregated neighborhoods. In 1937, the most destitute areas were redlined, leading to “urban renewal” programs that, just a couple of decades later, razed entire neighborhoods and took blacks’ savings (which was tied up in their property). A dangerous cycle ensued. The city’s next generation found themselves lacking proper education and reliable public transit and involved in crime or child protective services. “Far too many children in Richmond have grown up, and are growing up, with the odds firmly stacked against them, as a result of growing up in poverty conditions,” Richmond’s Anti-Poverty Commission remarked in its final report in 2013, where the idea for OCWB was first suggested.
Williamson proposed that the OCWB focus on employment first, directing people to nursing and medical technician jobs at the area’s 20 hospitals, and to positions as logistics supervisors and welders for an expanded port. “We started unpacking what it takes to get to a job with a living wage, what the career path is and the practical obstacles that a family had to overcome,” says Williamson. “We came back to transportation, child care and health concerns” as issues that needed to be dealt with before parents could begin to think about work. “The thought all along was that a standard workforce program is not a bad thing, but for families in deep poverty, it wouldn’t be sufficient.”
MOVIN’ ON UP
The agency’s signature pilot program, called Building Lives to Independence and Self-Sufficiency (or BLISS, a word rarely used to describe government services) kicked off by providing 18 families living in public housing with whatever support they needed to secure jobs and move out. The participants — 24 adults and 46 kids — say the program is unlike anything they’ve ever seen in government. Only a select number are accepted (though all other workforce-innovation programs are open to everyone). Since BLISS is locally funded, with no mandates set by the state or federal government, members set their own personal goals, and the agency strategizes ways to achieve them. Caseworkers aren’t clock-punching bureaucrats either, cordoned away in an office; once BLISS gets involved in your life, you’ve practically got a new family member, participants report.
Jessica Ortiz is one such person. With two young daughters to support, Ortiz was laid off by a corporate law firm, where she had worked on foreclosure cases against homeowners. Initially, she applied for any job opening she could find: retail sales, administration assistant, hospital staff, line chef, security guard. Weeks later, if Ortiz did hear back from employers, they often said she was overqualified. After eight months of unemployment, Ortiz’s savings had evaporated, and life in her housing project was downright miserable. Her sink had been backed up for two years, the landline phone broke, and “D.C.-sized rats” infested the rooms, including the bathroom, where one rodent managed to dislodge the toilet pipes.
Within about three months of enrolling in BLISS, Ortiz’s caseworkers pointed her to a job opening at a local community-development nonprofit. Armed with her résumé and a reference letter from a BLISS caseworker, Ortiz was offered a job helping people with down payments on their first home or negotiating their debt. And the assistance didn’t stop there. In addition to hooking Ortiz up with a job, the agency called the housing authority to see that her toilet got fixed and the rat holes sealed, and it subsidized her childcare, which would have cost Ortiz about $1,250 a month. OCWB also organized regular meetings for the two dozen BLISS parents (including Ortiz) to swap advice, and it held sessions on topics like saving money via coupons, finding children’s books at the right grade level and balancing a budget. Unlike most state and federal programs, “the regulations [at OCWB] are coming from the people themselves, and they adjust to the participants,” Ortiz says. At BLISS, she adds, the staff views “you as an investment.”
PUSHING FORWARD
At the end of BLISS’s first year, 16 of the 18 heads of household had new jobs, and three-quarters completed financial literacy training to prepare them for homeownership. Seeing the results, the city council voted to make the OCWB a permanent fixture. Williamson says he’s particularly proud of assembling a capable and diverse staff of 14 employees during his tenure. “It’s such a huge undertaking, and the agency is trying to accomplish big things in a context where doing even little things often is very challenging and requires great persistence,” he says.
After laying the groundwork for the OCWB and leading it to its initial success, Williamson has returned full time to the classroom. Taking his spot is Reggie Gordon, a Richmond native and member of the city’s previous anti-poverty commission, who is stepping down as CEO of the American Red Cross’s Virginia chapter. Gordon says he’s got a prototype for how the agency should work, and it’s now a matter of obtaining long-term financing, growing the number of participants and rigorously documenting what’s effective.
In the hands of Gordon, and Williamson before him, what began as a thought experiment turned into something tangible, a government program that helps poor families move toward independence. Rawls would probably agree: Richmond is starting to see what a just society looks like.
MORE: Participants Claim This Program Boosts Them out of Poverty. Should Other Cities Implement It?
The Newspaper That Tells Tales of Homelessness, How to Help the Poor Build Credit and More
On the Streets with a Newspaper Vendor Trying to Sell His Story, CityLab
It can be uncomfortable shelling out change to a beggar living on the street, but would you be willing to pay $2 for a newspaper about homelessness and poverty? Robert Williams, a Marine Corps veteran who writes for Street Sense, a biweekly broadsheet in Washington, D.C., hopes so. For every copy he sells, he keeps 75 percent, his only source of income.
Banking on Justice, YES! Magazine
In the impoverished Mississippi Delta region, most locals can’t borrow from large banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase because small loans don’t make enough interest to be worthwhile. Instead, residents are increasingly turning to Community Development Financial Institutions, known as CDFIs, which receive federal assistance in exchange for making capital available in low-income areas.
When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom, NPR
Educators have it rough. If keeping up with children’s energy levels for six hours isn’t enough, they also need to help students cope with difficulties outside the classroom and meet the rigors of state testing and federal standards. That can lead to a lot of stress, which is why CARE for Teachers trains educators in meditation techniques proven to reduce anxiety and burnout.
MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Baltimore Explores a Bold Solution to Fight Heroin Addiction
In the emergency room at George Washington University (GW) Hospital, in D.C., Dr. Leana S. Wen administered anti-inflammatory meds to kids choking with asthma, rescued middle-aged dads from heart attacks and sewed up shooting victims. Unlike a primary care doctor, she knew almost nothing about the strangers wheeled into the frenzied space: their medical history, financial situation and neighborhood all mysteries.
The usual anonymity made it all the more surprising when she recognized a 24-year-old mother of two. Homeless and addicted to opioids, the woman would show up nearly every week, begging for treatment. Without fail, Wen delivered the disappointing news that the next available appointment was three weeks away. Inevitably, the young mom relapsed during that window. The last time Wen saw the young woman, she wasn’t breathing. Her family had discovered her unresponsive, killed by an overdose.
“I always think back to my patient now: she had come to us requesting help, not once, not twice, but over and over again, dozens of times,” says Wen. “Because we do not have the treatment capacity, the people looking to us for help fall through the cracks, overdose and die. Why has our system failed her, just as it is failing so many others who wish to get help for their addictions?”
Last January, at age 32, Wen took a new job as the city’s health commissioner. As the leader of the country’s oldest public health department (established in 1793), Wen devotes much of her attention to an urgent problem: addiction to opioids (a class of drugs that includes heroin, morphine and oxycodone) and prescription painkillers. In the seaside port city of 622,000 residents, two-thirds of them black, heroin addiction grips 20,000 people. Many more pop prescription drugs before turning to heroin, a drug that’s cheaper than ever and more socially acceptable since it can be snorted and not just injected.
Baltimore’s drug addiction is lethal: Last year, 393 residents died of overdoses, a staggering number that surpassed the city’s 344 murders in a year of record gun violence. Long past a criminal “war on drugs,” Wen is implementing a public health response to this medical crisis. Her three-part plan involves preventing overdoses, treating addiction and ending stigma against drug users. By treating addiction as a sickness, not a scourge, she’s now saving lives on a broader scale than any emergency room physician.
“It ties into every aspect of the city. I’ve spoken to kids who question why they have to go to school every morning when everyone in their family is addicted to drugs and doesn’t get up. If we have employees that are addicted or have criminal histories because of their addiction, then what does that mean for a healthy workforce?” asks Wen, a fast talker who regularly works 14-hour days. “This is absolutely something we need to address as a critical public health emergency.”
Tenacious even in childhood, Wen spent the first eight years of her life in post-Mao China, until the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre forced her politically dissident parents to flee the country. They moved to Los Angeles’s gang-infested neighborhoods like Compton and East Los Angeles, scraping money together from jobs as a dishwasher and hotel maid. With money tight, Wen remembers her aunts choosing between prescription medications, food or bus passes. Never one to wait, Wen enrolled in classes at California State University, Los Angeles, when she was just 13 years old. By age 18, she finished her degree, graduating with the highest honors, and went on to earn her M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Working as a public health professor at GW, Wen spearheaded campaigns to cut healthcare costs, remove lead from homes and design walkable neighborhoods with access to reasonably priced, nutritious food, which caught the attention of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and landed her a new job.
A key to Wen’s plan for fighting opioid addiction is the distribution of an antidote to reverse a life-threatening opioid overdose. Inhaled through a nasal spray or injected into the upper arm or thigh like an EpiPen, Naloxone instantly revives a person from an overdose with few, if any, serious side effects. During a heroin high, chemicals block pain and induce euphoria — dulling the body to such an extent that the lungs forget to breathe while sleeping or the heart fails to pump adequately. Essentially shaking the brain out of its high, Naloxone creates a 30 to 90 minute window in which medical treatment can be sought. “It truly is a miracle drug,” Baltimore County Fire Chief John Hohman tells the Baltimore Sun. “It takes someone from near-death to consciousness in a matter of seconds.”
There’s only one catch: “You can’t give yourself this medication,” Wen explains. A person in the midst of an overdose often doesn’t have the wherewithal to inject the antidote. “That’s why we need every single person in our city to have access to it,” she adds, explaining that friends, family and community members have the ability to save a life.
In a controversial move, Wen issued a blanket prescription to the entire city last October — meaning anyone can buy the drug from a pharmacist. (For recipients of Medicaid, the price was reduced to $1 at a time when the drug’s price spiked drastically.) Wen sent training videos to jails and hospitals. Health department staffers visited areas notorious for open-air drug markets. Last year, the agency distributed 10,000 units of Naloxone and trained 12,500 residents how to administer it. That’s a big number for a program’s first year, but it’s still only half the number of active heroin users in Baltimore.
Outside of the roughly 30 recorded uses of Naloxone by police officers, there’s little hard evidence whether the drug has saved lives inside the city’s crack houses, parks and underpasses. Using data from Poison Control and other sources, Baltimore estimates Naloxone saved hundreds since 2015. “This remains a vastly underreported statistic,” says Sean Naron, a city spokesperson.
Critics claim that Naloxone encourages risky behavior and perpetuates the cycle of addiction because it removes the risk of death. “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” Maine’s Gov. Paul LePage, wrote in April when he vetoed a bill that would have expanded access to Naloxone without a prescription. Suggestions like that make Wen balk. She calls them “specious,” “inhumane” and “ill-informed.” “That argument is based on stigma and not on science,” she responds. “You would never say to someone who is dying from a peanut allergy that you’re withholding their EpiPen to make them not eat peanuts.” Similarly for drug addiction, Wen believes there’s no use in talking about recovery tomorrow, if we don’t have the ability to stop a fatal overdose today.
Most in the medical community agree on the dire need for Naloxone. Experts caution, however, that it can’t be the sole response to this health crisis. Like most other cities, Baltimore is still trying to figure out how to effectively direct users whose lives were saved by Naloxone into long-term treatment programs, says Dr. Marc Fishman, medical director at Maryland Treatment Centers, a regional clinic. After reversing an overdose, an addict may “get dusted off and given a piece of paper with some phone numbers. They’re told to call this number today, tomorrow, next week. Maybe somebody will answer. Maybe they’ll take your insurance. Maybe they’ll see you next week or next month,” explains Fishman, who is also an addiction psychiatrist and faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Instead, Fishman suggests the medical system needs a “full continuum” from Naloxone administration to addiction treatment. It’s not unprecedented: just look to patients with heart issues, he says. They, too, receive lifesaving drugs to stabilize their ticker, but rather than being discharged immediately, a cardiac clinic assigns a care plan and prescribes maintenance medicines to patients.
Wen fully embraces the idea: she wants to see medication-assisted treatment that fools the brain into thinking it’s getting opioids without getting high or blocks an opioid high after shooting up, alongside housing and supportive social services. In the meantime, she’s set up a 24-hour hotline for users to get treatment option referrals. (Since October, it’s received 1,000 calls every month.) By next year, Wen wants to open a stabilization center where a person can drop in for several days to get sober.
It’s far from the perfect solution, Wen acknowledges. But at the moment, she’s constantly iterating new approaches. Last year, at a meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force on Heroin, Wen asked her colleagues to think of what they could do immediately that wouldn’t need further funding or manpower. That type of thinking fits with the approach she learned from life-or-death decisions in the emergency room: it’s better to act quickly now with what’s available than to wait for an instrument that might never come.
“Everybody is working hard and trying stuff. Some things are succeeding, and some are failing,” Fishman says. “I get a sense of dynamic enthusiasm. People are rolling up their shirtsleeves. I’m sorry that white kids from the suburbs had to start dying before anybody started paying attention, but it’s better late than never.”
Despite Wen’s tireless efforts, overdoses continue to rise in Baltimore. Last year, 260 heroin users overdosed, tripling the 76 intoxication deaths in 2011. Why are people still dying? Wen returns to the idea that a heroin user, on the brink of an overdose, can’t save himself; the rest of the city needs to be on the lookout, which isn’t always the case.
Baltimore’s response to this crisis has the ability to end an epidemic and to unite an ailing community. Wen, who says she’s an optimist by nature, might just find a way to cure a hurting American city after all.
Homepage photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
MORE: How Do You Breathe Life into a Neighborhood That’s Been Forgotten?
The Journey of an Idea: This Entrepreneur Took a Cross-Country Trip to Fine-Tune His Higher Education Gamechanger
Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
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Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
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Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
Why America Must Remember Its Lynching Past, The Compassionate Nonagenarian Who Knits Hats for Those on the Streets and More
The Legacy of Lynching, on Death Row, The New Yorker
Bryan Stevenson, one of the foremost civil rights lawyers of our time and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, sees a link between wrongful convictions, today’s police shootings of young black men and the nation’s barbarous history of lynching. To honor the 4,000 African Americans killed in the former Confederate states, Stevenson plans to build a $20 million memorial in Montgomery, Ala., on the site of a former public housing complex.
Man, 91, in hospice care knits hats for the homeless, WXMI
For the last 15 years, Morrie Boogart, a 91-year-old in Grandville, Mich., has knit hats for the homeless. Using donated yarn, Boogart has made at least 8,000 caps to keep the homeless warm during the winter. Confined to bedrest from skin cancer and a mass on his kidney, he’s spending his last days in admirable service to others.
Yes, Queens, The Ringer
When one thinks of podcasts, the image of a bespectacled white man, like “This American Life”’s Ira Glass, probably comes to mind. The seriously irreverent, wildly popular weekly podcast “2 Dope Queens,” hosted by Jessica Williams, formerly of “The Daily Show,” and Phoebe Robinson, a standup comedian, opens the medium to a new type of host. Racism, sexism and politics, as seen from a black woman’s perspective, are all carefully discussed, and somehow hilarity ensues.
MORE: Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
This Is Possibly America’s Most Immigrant-Friendly City, Using Burgers to Bring Police and Community Activists Together and More
How an Ohio Town Became a Model for Resettling Syrian Refugees, Vice
Many politicians don’t believe that the U.S. can properly screen refugees from the Middle East. Yet one city in Ohio is welcoming them with open arms. In Toledo, multiple organizations provide Syrian immigrants with much-needed assistance, helping them locate housing, receive English language lessons and more.
Diverse Wichitans Gather for Barbecue with Police, Wichita Eagle
Across the nation, Black Lives Matter protesters and police officers face off against each other in the streets. But in Wichita, Kan., these two groups came together over hamburgers and hot dogs to discuss the importance of community policing, how poverty and lack of education cause racial disparity and why racial bias still exists.
Meet the Dangling Goddess of Street Art at Ozy Fest, Ozy
Low-income students who receive a strong arts education are more successful at challenging coursework than kids whose schooling is light on the arts. Which is why street artist Alice Mizrachi is teaching urban youth how creative expression can fight poverty and racial inequality.
MORE: Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America