When your 4-year-old daughter is suffering from a 100-degree fever, common sense says that you shouldn’t have to choose between her health and your job. But that’s not always the case, so a coalition of New Mexico’s families is fighting for better treatment in the workplace.
It may be surprising to hear that low-wage workers can be fired for not waiting by the phone on their days off, when they’re expected to be on call in case their store gets busy. Some are unaware that workers have no guarantee of a regular schedule or paid sick leave. They have no idea employees can be scheduled for “doubles,” a swing shift that ends at midnight and an opening shift that begins early the next morning, cramming 16 hours of work in less than 24 hours. For members of Organizing in the Land of Enchantment, or OLÉ, a 5,000-member group that’s made up primarily of females, in Albuquerque, these challenges are a daily reality.
Kris Buchmann, an active member of the group, had to quit her retail job at an Albuquerque mall because childcare for her 1-year-old son during on-call shifts was costing nearly as much as she made working in the store. “I still had to pay a babysitter. Sometimes I would have to go pick her up, take her back to my house because she didn’t have transportation, drive to work, get sent home, still have to pay her and drive her home,” Buchmann explained to The New York Times. Buchmann asked for a more stable work schedule, but her boss refused.
OLÉ is working with Fight for $15 to raise minimum wages for fast food workers and the National Domestic Workers Alliance to ensure fair pay for home caregivers, but the thrust of its own grassroots campaigning is for broad workplace protections that would apply to every industry, transforming low-wage work from dead-end jobs to a stable profession. At the Albuquerque City Council, it’s pushing for the Fair Workweek Act, a proposed ordinance that would require employers to create work schedules three weeks in advance, compensate employees for last-minute changes, provide paid sick days and guarantee a $150 retention stipend for every two weeks a worker was on call but had no work.
OLÉ started in 2010 with an ambitious core agenda that touched on worker’s rights, affordable early childhood education, naturalization for legal residents and conservation of water and public lands. Their most significant victory thus far was passing a hike in the minimum wage, from $7.50 to to $8.50, in a 2012 ballot initiative that swept two-thirds of the vote.
That boost marked a “big step forward for low-wage workers in Albuquerque,” Matthew Henderson, OLÉ’s executive director, tells NationSwell. “Even so, I think everyone recognized that it is still pretty inadequate. Even with the minimum wage increase, there were a growing number of problems with low-wage work so we started thinking about how we could do something bigger that would affect more workers.”
The Fair Workweek Act intended to be just that, but thus far, it’s encountered strong opposition. It was always going to be difficult to get a nine-member City Council divided between five liberals and four conservatives to pass the bill. But before it was even introduced, Mayor Richard Berry, a Republican, promised to veto it, referring to it as “an impossible burden on small businesses.” That scared off at least one Democratic councilmember, who called for an economic impact analysis that would delay the measure for months.
With an election just around the corner this November, OLÉ is using voter pressure to their advantage. In case their legislative attempts fail, they’re also preparing to ask voters directly in the 2016 general election to support the Fair Workweek Act. They’ve already started collecting 14,000 signatures required to get the issue on the ballot.
Henderson has been organizing “folks who felt like they’re getting a raw deal” since 1994. He has advocated on behalf of mobile home park tenants and against predatory mortgage lending schemes. This may be his most ambitious battle yet.
“When we passed a minimum wage increase, it was clear to us that people of every class and political persuasion — no matter age or gender — everyone was with us. We didn’t have to persuade anyone. But still, we felt like it wasn’t really changing the conversation,” he says. “We have been trying to think of a way to talk about all the problems with work these days that is much broader than these single issues like the minimum wage.” That’s why the Fair Workweek Act seems like an important measure. It prompts conversations about work the average person isn’t familiar with, and its policies will affect more people than just the lowest of the low-paid workers.
“The economy has gone down a bad road that is making the employment of most Americans really challenging, unsatisfying and something that makes it impossible to really care for a family and raise it the way you want to,” Henderson adds. If OLÉ’s successful, they’ll truly raise the standard of living. Any full-time job, even with lower wages, would be enough to support a family.
Tag: American poverty
This Man’s Bold Idea: Pay Criminals to Stay Out of Trouble
To some, it’s one of the most dangerous spots in America. Others know it as “a city that pays criminals to behave.” To DeVone Boggan, Richmond, Calif., on the east side of the San Francisco Bay Area, is where a group of people are trying to build safer neighborhoods after three decades of living in what’s essentially a war zone.
Boggan is the director of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS). It’s a bureaucratic title that belies his public-private agency’s innovative work on gun violence prevention and youth outreach. Founded in 2007, when Richmond’s murder rate was nine times the national average, ONS has since helped the rate plummet to its lowest levels in four decades: 11 deaths per 100,000. (Nearby in Oakland, the 2013 rate was 23 per 100,000; in Detroit, 47.) Even more impressive is the fact that the decline in violence is happening faster in Richmond than anywhere else in the country.
How did Boggan do it? His agency contacts a select group of young men that are most likely to be involved in shootings — the ones who’ve brushed off help and stubbornly refused to change. With directed help, ONS gives the boys a profitable alternative to crime, starting with a monthly paycheck up to $1,000 for staying out of trouble.
“I found myself in a room with a myriad of law enforcement agencies and what I continued to hear was that they believed that 28 people were responsible for 70 percent of the gunfire in our city in the year 2009, and I said these 28 people are all were gonna focus on,” Boggan explains. “Before we could hit the ground running, we lost three of those young men to gun violence, so we invited the 25 living to City hall and 21 of them dared to show up. That tells you they’re hungry for something real.”
If you want to “reduce firearm-related homicides,” Boggan says, you can’t simply flood the streets with police, install surveillance cameras or scare people into being good. “You’ve got to understand the nature of [violence] and you’ve got to understand the drivers of it,” he explains. Being a young man in poor circumstances is a situation that Boggan recognizes well. Growing up in Michigan, he was busted for selling drugs.
“The context that has led me to where I’ve landed professionally has a lot to do with having access to positive adult healthy men. My parents divorced when I was nine years old. That meant my father was out of a home,” Boggan says. “It was during that period that my first mentor showed up at a time when I really needed some adult guidance. Having access to adult male figures is vital. In Richmond, it’s vital to survive.”
Almost always seen in a fedora, Boggan picked a team of Neighborhood Change Agents who could make inroads with potential murders. Boggan’s joked before, “It’s the only agency where you’re required to have a criminal background check to be an employee,” but he says that a more important qualification is hiring “people who cared about these young men.”
“Our job is to be on the streets talking to folks, interaction, building relationships,” says Joe McCoy, a Neighborhood Change Agent. “The car is our office; the street corner is our conference room.”
The reach of ONS expanded in 2009 with the creation of the Operation Peacemaker Fellowship. It identified at-risk individuals, ages 13 to 25, and incentivizes them to turn their lives around by paying stipends ranging from $300 to $1,000. Though the reduction in murders speaks to the efficacy of the program, it’s not without controversy.
“I think the biggest question that comes up is, Why would we spend these kinds of resources on people who should be in jail?” Boggan says. “Our philosophy and approach is were not going to arrest our way out of gun violence. The way were going to get ourselves removed from gun violence is developing and shaping these young men in a different way. We see these young men as vital and viable partners and we have to understand the power that these young men bring to the table,” he adds. “Gun violence isn’t being reduced because of the police alone. The primary reason is because these young men are making better decisions.”
The Running Program That’s Pulled 1,300 People Out of Homelessness
At 5:45 a.m., on a recent Friday morning, a group of about 20 homeless guys warmed up in a parking lot across the street from three shelters in East Harlem. In a circle, they did jumping jacks, twisted their torsos and touched their toes. Fifteen minutes later, they huddled up, chanted the Serenity Prayer (“God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change….”) and took off running. As they criss-crossed the bridges between Manhattan and the Bronx during their four-mile trek, the sun’s strengthening rays — bright but not yet burning — reflected off the windows of nearby towering apartment buildings. The streets were nearly empty, and quiet, a rarity in The City That Never Sleeps.
Ryan [last name omitted] began jogging with the group, known as Back on My Feet, seven months ago. Never a runner, he always wondered what the big deal about it was. Ask him today, however, and he’ll tell you it’s “so natural, almost spiritual.” Moreover, running strengthens him and teaches him consistency. Less than a year after first hitting the pavement, Ryan completed a half-marathon and is studying to be a certified substance abuse counselor. As he looped around 138th Street onto the Madison Avenue Bridge, he thought he’d be ready for the NYC marathon a couple months away.
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Back on My Feet is a program that uses running to help the homeless get their lives back on track. In addition to connecting participants with housing and jobs, Back on My Feet is founded on the notion that running can change a person’s self-image. Early morning exercise, three days a week, provides an outlet for pent-up emotions and starts to change the way someone thinks about hard work.
If the concept seems hokey or contrived, the program’s numbers show that’s not the case. Back on My Feet’s program has reached 5,200 homeless individuals. They show up voluntarily for four out of every five runs — an 82.8 percent attendance rate. More than 1,900 have obtained employment, and 1,300 have moved into independent housing.
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Back on My Feet began in Philadelphia in 2007, on one of Anne Mahlum’s morning runs. A 26-year-old social entrepreneur with short bleach-blond hair, Mahlum started running a decade earlier, at age 16, to help cope with her father’s serious gambling addiction. Running as a teen in the City of Brotherly Love, she continually passed by a group of homeless men outside the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, near City Hall’s century-old white tower. In May 2007, she began to develop a friendship with them. By July, they started running with her.
Inspired, Mahlum convinced the Rescue Mission’s staff to let her form an official running club for men in the shelter. At first, nine guys signed up. In exchange, each received a brand-new, donated pair of running shoes, clothes and socks. Mahlum had only one requirement: Each person had to sign a “dedication contract,” committing them to showing up on time for a run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, respecting themselves and supporting their teammates.
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The rules were simple, but that was the point. “If we can change the way people see themselves, can we change the direction of their lives?” Mahlum asked. In her mind, running could function as a metaphor for getting one’s life back on track after experiencing homelessness. It takes the fear that someone who’s experienced homelessness feels about words like “housing,” “employment” and “sobriety” and turns that emotion into something manageable. Running teaches that every step forward takes you closer to that finish line, but also that you don’t get to the end unless you cross every mile marker along the route. Waking up so early every morning — whether the thermometer’s bubbling over or when it’s frozen solid — instills discipline and responsibility in the participants. They’re two valuable concepts, but both are hard to teach in the abstract. They need to be lived to be experienced.
After officially obtaining tax-exempt status, Mahlum’s running club grew into a nationwide organization with 50 employees and a $6.5 million operating budget. Today, Back on My Feet has more than 50 chapters in 11 cities. Since the group began recording miles in January 2009, its residential members have run more than 462,000 miles.
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Jerry, another person who participated in Friday’s outing, used to run with a chapter on the Upper West Side a couple years back and still occasionally runs with the East Harlem group as an alumni member. A few years ago, while receiving assistance from the Fortune Society, a nonprofit focused on supporting successful reentry from prison, he signed up for Back on My Feet’s program. Jerry, who asked that his last name not be used, says he showed up for his first run bitter about his disappointments and distrustful of other people. He didn’t understand why everyone in this group kept trying to hug him or why they kept saying that no one runs alone. The first mile was painful: He felt out of breath, partially because of medication he was taking and partially, he worried, because he was permanently out of shape.
But Jerry stuck with it. Despite a criminal record that meant certain employers never called him back, he landed a job as a doorman and an apartment in Harlem. He credits Back on My Feet with preparing him for success. Today, he’ll tell you that you don’t sprint at the start of a marathon, and you don’t try to win first place either. There’s accomplishment enough, he says, in finishing.
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Which U.S. City Is Close to Eliminating Its Food Desert?
Food deserts — areas without access to nutritious food — dot urban areas. As we previously pointed out, attracting a big-box supermarket isn’t the only solution. San Francisco is proving this by adding fresh produce to bodegas that once relied solely on peddling booze and smokes to the community.
The City by the Bay’s comprehensive approach can be traced back to an initiative started nearly 25 years ago. The Food Trust of Philadelphia, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind in one of America’s poorest and most unhealthy big cities, began in a public housing development in South Philly, with volunteers piling mounds of fruits and veggies on one long table outside the project each week. Since 1992, they’ve taken their work beyond that first farmer’s market, improving access to healthy food and nutritional information for nearly 220,000 residents in poor neighborhoods — making Philadelphia one of the first cities to meet the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” challenge to eliminate food deserts entirely by 2017.
“We started to see that farmer’s markets provide seasonal access to fresh fruits and vegetables, not a long-term solution — or the only solution. They really only can open in summer on the East Coast. We realized it was really important to look at the longer term and more comprehensive approaches to food access,” says Candace Young, The Food Trust’s associate director of research and evaluation. Around 2004, “the first thing we did was we mapped out areas of the city that had low access to supermarkets and high-diet related deaths — the pockets of the city that needed better access. We sent that report to policy makers and practitioners, the health community and its advocates, the food retail community. What was built from there was this multi-million dollar public-private initiative to build new or even just renovate supermarkets around the whole state.”
Just how much of a difference can access to fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood actually make? Research shows that living in a food desert isn’t simply an inconvenience for locals or a matter of how long the bus ride will be; it’s linked to serious health problems like obesity, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. But The Food Trust’s work appears to be making a dent. Between 2006 and 2010, obesity among kids in Philly decreased by five percent — the first downward trend since 1976.
A key aspect of The Food Trust’s work in Pennsylvania involved renovating bodegas — corner stores where the average elementary school student in Philadelphia buys 350 calories worth of food on each visit, according to a 2008 study. More than one quarter — 29 percent — stop in twice a day, five days a week. That means they’re consuming roughly an additional pound of food from this retailer every week.
In response, The Food Trust convinced corner store owners to sell more fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains and offered money for renovations. Since the Healthy Corner Store Initiative launched in 2004, it’s established a network of 650 stores. With $30 million in public financing and $90 million in private financing, it can pay for upgrades that are as easy as buying new refrigeration for $500 and as tough as building a whole new mega-mart for several million, Young says. In total, the organization funded 1.67 million square feet of retail development and created 5,000 jobs.
“Corner store owners are a very different business than large supermarkets. They’re a convenience model: you want to get in and out. Oftentimes, you go in to buy chips and a drink, a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket,” Young says. “Partly what we’re trying to do is shift to a culture of health around corner stores, where they’re seen again as small grocery venues. Instead of packaged foods, I may need to grab eggs, some milk, some bread and a couple of fruits for me and for my family.”
There’s still some debate about whether these interventions are the best way to deal with food deserts. Some critics point to a lack of causal evidence and say the theory’s “intuitive” underpinnings don’t check out. “If you live next to a Mercedes dealership, that doesn’t mean you’ll buy a Mercedes,” Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington, tells the Washington Post. “And it’s the same with living next to a grocery store: That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start eating salads.”
After the first pilot at a handful of stores, The Food Trust documented a 35 percent increase in the sale of healthy items and an even bigger boost — 60 percent — in produce sales. That means $100 in extra profits every week for sellers.
Anecdotally, too, customers seem to be buying. “Now, when I’m talking to people who come into the store, they are asking: What do you have fresh today? And I can say I have apples. I have oranges. I have all kinds of stuff,” says Catalina Morrell-Hunter, one storeowner in North Philadelphia who joined the network after 15 years in business. “We have a refrigerator in the store that we didn’t have before. It has yogurt and fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. And I try to get other products that are better for you, healthier and lower calorie. I’m more conscious of that now.”
The Food Trust’s supporters point to a drop in obesity as evidence something’s clearly working, but they’ll also readily admit fresh food at corner stores isn’t the only explanation. In the City of Brotherly Love, access to fresh and affordable food, amenities for exercise and information to make healthy decisions all go hand-in-hand. Philly’s also added nearly 30 miles of bike lanes, launched a media campaign about sugary drinks that was seen 40 million times and established parent-driven “wellness councils” in 170 public schools.
“We believe that supermarket access is one piece of a comprehensive approach,” says Yael Lehmann, The Food Trust’s executive director. “While bringing in healthy food stores into neighborhoods, we also want to be teaching kids how to eat healthy in schools, we want to be having cooking demonstrations at recreation centers, running farmers’ markets in neighborhoods. All of these things combined is what can improve the health of people and their neighborhoods.”
How Do You Get People to Eat Better? Bring Healthy Food to a Nearby Corner
The cash register has never been busier at Radman’s Produce Market in San Francisco. At 201 Turk St., it’s located smack in the middle of the Tenderloin district, a neighborhood associated with homelessness, substance abuse and extreme poverty and one that you don’t want to be wandering around late at night. Within a two-block radius of Radman’s corner store, police recorded 730 crimes within the past six months.
All of which makes the offerings on owner Fadhl Radman’s shelves even more surprising. He doesn’t peddle the junk food, liquor, cigarettes and pornographic magazines that are the primary items sold at many other bodegas in the area. According to a 2011 count, there are 270 outlets selling tobacco in the district — more than one quarter of all the outlets in the entire city, all condensed in a couple blocks.
“Poison, it’s just poison” is how resident Steve Tennis defines what’s in stock at many other corner stores. “Mothers with little kids in their arms [or] in their strollers. What is the first thing these children see that are two, three years old? Candy, alcohol, dirty books. Nothing healthy,” he tells New American Media. “If this is your experience, week in and week out, it doesn’t take long for you to get hard wired to that food source.”
Because of recent renovations to the store he’s operated since 1998, Radman now sells fresh fruits and vegetables, many farmed in the nearby Central Valley, and has a butcher cutting and grinding meats. He stocks 50 types of fresh produce — staples like apples, oranges, bananas, grapes and tomatoes and less familiar items like celery, broccoli, red lettuce, Italian parsley and kale. It’s made his 2,250-square-foot store a much-needed island of greenery in the impoverished district.
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“The whole idea is to try to modify people’s eating habits,” Radman tells the San Francisco Examiner. “Build up their interest in fruits and vegetables.” At the same time, he can improve his bottom dollar, gaining a bigger profit from produce with a higher sales margin.
Unable to persuade a full-service supermarket to open nearby, the Tenderloin has always struggled with nutritional offerings. The changes to Radman’s store were backed by a city program known as Healthy Retail SF, a $60,000 effort to fix up five stores in San Francisco neighborhoods defined as food deserts, a low-income area lacking healthy food providers. Healthy Retail SF simply looked at existing retailers in the community and invested in the best assets: the bodegas. The collaborative effort between the Mayor’s Office, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) and the Department of Public Health, gives funds and business advice about how to reconfigure shelving and store layout, upgrade refrigerator units and advertise successfully.
“Small investments can go a long way towards creating healthier and more sustainable communities,” Joaquin Torres, OEWD’s deputy director, writes in an email.
After the new upgrades are installed and stores reopen, the next challenge is ensuring the business’s long-term stability. The program’s backers liken their efforts to a three-sided stool: community engagement, physical redesign and business development. Without any of the three, the plan teeters over.
A 2012 survey found that 57 percent of Tenderloin citizens do most of their shopping in other parts of San Francisco. That purchasing power — two-thirds of residents spend more than $100 a month on groceries — means that about $11 million leaves the Tenderloin every year. Redirecting those dollars from Safeway and other supermarkets back into local businesses isn’t easy, but so far, the city’s efforts have gained traction. One store has increased overall sales by 23 percent since the remodel, and all the locations have documented increase in the number of sales of healthy fruit.
You can’t change neighborhoods overnight. But as Healthy Retail SF is finding, adding produce to bodega shelves is a good place to start.
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This 23-Year-Old Has Figured Out a Way to Make Kids Want to Attend Summer School
Thursday morning, 10 a.m. Seventh-grade boys, all young men of color, are hunched over worksheets on subtracting polynomials. (You remember: (x^3 + 4x^2 + 3x – 8) – (5x^3 – 7x^2 – 3x + 2).) Their teacher, a college student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, asks if anyone needs extra time. Hands go up and mentors — older high schoolers in white shirts — help those who are stuck.
Across the hall, a student from Northwestern University in Illinois is instructing sixth-grade boys on personal essays. A chatty buzz fills in the room as mentors read over first drafts and point out errors to small groups of eager learners.
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The multiple “generations” all working in one classroom — a college student delivering a lesson to middle schoolers, coached by a full-time teacher and assisted by high-school-age aides — makes for an unique sight. But it’s even more unusual at I.S. 392, a highly successful middle school that sticks out from the rest of Brownsville, an area that’s long been known as one of Brooklyn’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Stranger still, it’s summer. These kids have voluntarily shown up for school while their buddies watch TV or play outside in the windless, 84-degree heat.
The classes are organized through Practice Makes Perfect, a New York City-based enrichment program now in its fifth year. The nonprofit’s goal: To close the achievement gap that creeps in when school’s not in session, says its founder and CEO Karim Abouelnaga. Known as the “summer slide,” researchers found lower-income students forget up to two months of schooling while their higher-income peers participate in summer reading, camps and other enrichment — exacerbating a divide that’s already wide during the regular school year. In Brownsville, Jamaica and the South Bronx, the program is helping 325 students, between third and seventh grade, get a head start on the next school year.
“As structured, summer school does not work,” Abouelnaga recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times. “The choice should not be between sending children to a broken summer school program or not. There is a third way: It means redesigning summer school, and making it challenging and engaging for children and teachers. Students need summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes that keep them from falling behind. They need summer programs where they feel welcome and where they want to learn. They need to be inspired to achieve.”
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The son of Egyptian immigrants, Abouelnaga grew up in Long Island City, Queens. He went to an underperforming high school, where just half of his classmates graduated with a diploma and less than one-fifth were college-ready. He applied to college almost on a whim, sending applications to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (because he’d liked the movie “Good Will Hunting”) and Baruch College, located across the bridge in Manhattan and where he eventually enrolled. Abouelnaga received a 1770 on his SAT, a score that put him in the top percentile for his class in Queens. But when arrived at Baruch, he found that same number placed him in the 70th percentile of his college classmates.
He eventually transferred to Cornell, where with five friends, he decided to start a nonprofit addressing the achievement gap. Nearly two-thirds of the difference between wealthy students and their less well-off counterparts can be tied to summer learning loss. Few nonprofits were working to solve the problem, so Abouelnaga decided to focus his efforts on those crucial months when school’s not in session. He founded the offices for his 12-person team in the neighborhood where he once grew up.
“So many educational initiatives are sympathetic, instead of empathetic,” he says. “I was that kid who sat here, even though I was blessed with an elite education. I bring a unique perspective.”
On a recent site visit to I.S. 392, Abouelnaga is dressed in a navy blue pinstripe suit, purple tie and matching purple pocket square — business attire that he says sets “an expectation of excellence” for his students. At 23 years old, he projects high ambitions for himself and the growing organization. He wants to completely reform a disciplinary or remedial punishment into an exciting opportunity. He wants kids asking parents to sign them up for summer classes.
“Our brand is relationship-driven. There’s so much emphasis on technology and testing, that we can forget how much relationships matter in education,” he says. “Our mentors are what keeps kids coming back here.”
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The walls of Practice Makes Perfect classrooms are decorated with posters. In bright marker, there’s the expected motivational phrases and standard ground rules (“Respect your classmates,” “If you want to be heard, RAISE YOUR HANDS”) along with some tougher expectations (“Goals: Must have 80% mastery in ELA” — English Language Arts — “and Math”). Beside that are poems written by the young boys. A representative quatrain sounds like this: “I remember the night when I ran from the bullet. / All I heard was clik-clak POW, it was more than five bullets. / I was running non-stop, hoping I didn’t get hit. / I was sprinting so fast that I almost tripped.” Another: “People think that black men won’t / accomplish anything but / that’s not true. / White men beat slaves till they were / black and blue.”
Rather than avoiding current events, Abouelnaga and his team have made them an essential part of the curriculum. Students read recent articles deemed newsworthy, like about the merits of body cameras for police officers. It’s all part of boosting Common Core test scores, which Practice Makes Perfect tries to measure rigorously. Every Thursday, teachers input students’ scores into a system to track progress and identify those that may be in need of more targeted intervention with the help of the mentors.
Through Practice Makes Perfect’s rigorous and engaging curriculum, students so far have made tangible academic gains. Last year, the middle school math scores improved by three percent, on average, and reading by seven percent; the high school mentors, who study the SAT before and after the youngsters show up, improved their scores on the college admission test by an average of 170 points.
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But the program is about more than scores; empowerment is one of its core values. Abouelnaga’s summer school creates a permanently visible institution for the surrounding community, instead of empty hallways and classrooms — in Abouelnaga’s words, “unused real estate.” The children spend at least one day on a community service project, which demonstrates they can “make a difference in their neighborhood.” Some kids in Brownsville picked up trash around their school, one group in Bushwick volunteered at a community center and another class in Jamaica did group activities with younger kids.
Practice Makes Perfect is also creating ties between generations, in the hopes that middle-school students eventually come back as mentors in high school and advise everyone else once they’re off to college. It’s part of the reason why Abouelnaga has his college students do home visits before they start teaching — to break and confirm stereotypes and to create ties with the community.
What’s next for the organization? “There’s 1.1 million schoolchildren in New York City,” Abouelnaga says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface.”
This Man Walked Away From Wall Street. Now His Pizza Parlor Is Feeding Philadelphia’s Homeless
You can’t buy much for two dollars these days, but in Philadelphia, you can feed yourself and a homeless neighbor with just a couple of bucks.
After leaving a successful Wall St. career because he found it unfulfilling, owner Mason Wartman opened Rosa’s Fresh Pizza in late 2013. He had witnessed the popularity of the one-dollar pizza joints in New York City and decided that a the concept might work in his native Philadelphia.
“I knew that we would be feeding homeless people because we’d be providing affordable food,” says Wartman. “About three months into operation, a paying customer asked if he could pre-purchase a slice for a homeless person. And so I ran out, got a stack of Post-it Notes to remind myself and the employees that we could help someone out when they came in short.”
Before long, the walls of Rosa’s became covered in Post-it Notes. Each one signifies someone who has given a dollar so that that a homeless or hungry person can enjoy a meal at no-cost. The messages on some are simple; others have drawings or a friendly letter.
Each day, a few dozen homeless people file into Rosa’s to enjoy the kindness of their neighbors. In the last year, Wartman reports that this system has provided more than 14,000 free slices for Philadelphians in need.
“This is way more rewarding than what I used to do on Wall Street,” says Wartman. “I learn a ton everyday, I meet really cool people — homeless and not homeless. I get to see a positive difference being made in a city that I really love. So, what more could I ask for, right?”
Poverty Is a Way of Life in Appalachia. But This State Proves That It Doesn’t Have to Be
In 1973, 180 coal miners in Harlan County, Ky., stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the picket line. They had been arrested and beaten with nightsticks; their wives had lain down in front of trucks and been thrown in jail by state troopers. Repeating the struggle their fathers waged during strikes in 1931 that earned the county the moniker “Bloody Harlan,” these miners, employees of Duke Power-owned Brookside Mines, endured 13 months of fighting for the right to unionize and earn a living wage, around $45 a day.
One young miner on strike, 23-year-old Lawrence Jones, died — shot by a mine supervisor — before coal operators caved to national pressure and accepted a new union contract. Even then, victory was short-lived. Just 30 years later, there’s not a single union miner working in Harlan County; in fact, there’s no union miners left in all of Kentucky, a region of Central Appalachia once considered the heart of coal country.
The story of Central Appalachia has a recurring plot line: economic boom, devastating bust, public acknowledgement, government assistance, boom, bust….and repeat. Last May, when President Barack Obama announced the launch of Promise Zones, an economic redevelopment plan to bring federal dollars to five regions with persistent poverty, those in Kentucky (the first rural pilot) recalled programs from other commanders in chief: FDR’s Works Progress Administration, Johnson’s War on Poverty and Clinton’s Empowerment Zones. Would this redevelopment be any different? Could it finally drag the mountain region out of poverty?
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A single-industry economy in southeastern Kentucky has led to a reliance on mining at the expense of all else. Even the area’s professional class — consisting of lawyers, bankers and doctors (some who certified or denied claims for disability and Black Lung benefits) — built their businesses around mining. For low-wage workers, coal mining promised decent work, often without the need for multiple diplomas, part of the reason why eastern Kentucky has no major research institution. The land has suffered, too. As strip mining became the cheapest way to extract coal, virgin hillsides were slashed and rarely replaced, leading to erosion and floods.
But natural resources run out — or become inaccessible. In Kentucky’s case, there’s still plenty of coal underground, but it’s too costly and environmentally damaging to extract it. As the Environmental Protection Agency tightens its regulations in what some call a “War on Coal,” the state has lost 7,000 direct mining jobs since 2012. Among residents of counties bordering Harlan, it’s said there’s a month-long wait to get a U-Haul because so many people are leaving town. The rumor’s unfounded (you can get a truck tomorrow), but it speaks to the worry that neighbors are fleeing, a fear of being stuck behind since no money means no development — in infrastructure or human capital. Fourth-generation coal miners in Harlan are hanging up their helmets and moving to urban areas with better employment prospects. The county’s population fell from a height of 75,275 to its lowest since 1920, currently around 28,000.
That’s not to say everything has been stagnant in the half-century since John F. Kennedy, a young senator from New England, first drew national attention to Central Appalachia on the presidential campaign trail. There’s been “progress in reducing isolation and providing assistance” for development, says Kostas Skordas, director of regional planning and research for the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state commission created in 1965, but the pace at which improvements happen is much slower than elsewhere in the nation. “Challenges still remain. Rural areas may progress, but in many cases, metro areas are progressing faster. The gap between Appalachian communities and the rest of the country has grown larger. Education is an example of that, health is an example of that.”
Appalachia is paying the price “in providing the cheap power that built the modern American economy,” Jason Bailey, director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, tells the Associated Press. ”The region has paid it in spoiled water and degraded land and black lung disease, broken backs, torn-up roads, blasted mountains,” issues that make it harder to rebuild a diversified economy.
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A region suffering from decades of persistent poverty due to an exploitative history of resource extraction is nothing new. (There’s the Black Belt of plantations from Maryland to Texas, the Mississippi River Delta, the Texas Colonias along the Mexican border and Indian Country in the Four Corners and the Dakotas, to name a few.) And of course, long before cheap coal ran out, the Iron Belt began rusting. But one state has been working for nearly 75 years to prepare mining towns for the inevitable day when resources run dry.
Minnesota’s Iron Range Resource and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB), a regional economic development agency, was founded by the state legislature in 1941 as a direct response to the one-sector economy in northeastern Minnesota falling apart during the Great Depression.
“Northeastern Minnesota has historically been largely dependent on a single industry, iron ore mining,” Mark Phillips, commissioner of IRRRB, tells NationSwell in an email. “The jobs of thousands of people and the economies of dozens of communities across the region have relied on iron ore mining and are impacted by technology or market changes within the industry.”
Iron-ore mining was once so pervasive in the region that a powdery, deep red dust blanketed entire towns — houses, cars, clothes. Today, IRRRB’s work is considered a public leader in pioneering economic diversification, land reclamation and social services like workforce development. Regional planning by the state agency enabled coordinated development, drawing federal attention and funding — bringing about long-term success that wouldn’t have been possible with isolated efforts.
That’s not to say there haven’t been missteps along the way. In the ’40s, one strategy they chose — diversifying mining operations by expanding from iron to taconite — was a booming success; agricultural experiments cultivating berries, rutabagas and potatoes, on the other hand, largely proved a bust. Eventually, timber (reviving forests that had been logged) and tourism (taking advantage of the state’s 10,000 lakes) developed as profitable sectors. Money paid for new educational facilities, focusing in particular on postsecondary vocational training.
IRRRB’s investment in human capital (something lacking in Appalachia, studies have shown) — education and workforce development — has paid off large dividends. “IRRRB programs and projects have helped existing businesses in the region remain competitive, helped attract a wide range of new jobs and companies to northeastern Minnesota,” Phillips says. Their work “increased the region’s quality of life within communities and assisted in supporting innovative educational programs in our schools and colleges.”
Kentucky’s Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat in office since 2007, and a congressman, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, an 18-term Republican, heard about Minnesota’s success. Working together on a federal-state partnership to redefine southeastern Kentucky (Shaping Our Appalachian Region or SOAR), they held a conference for roughly 2,000 people from across the rural area, remembers Gerry Roll, executive director of Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, a philanthropic community foundation. Those in attendance heard this message: “Coal is still important, it’ll be around for a while, but we need to start thinking beyond that. We need to think about new ideas, with broadband, with infrastructure, with things that will bring people to our region.”
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It became a watershed moment. “All of a sudden, everybody in the room was saying we need to do something different. We have to work together and work harder. I think there was an acknowledgment — not only from a Democrat and a Republican talking to each other, but old people and young people, environmentalists and coal miners talking to each other — that we may not agree on everything, but we need to start where we can,” Roll says. “I think the SOAR initiative gave us permission to think more broadly, outside of our usual box, and the economy was really an opportunity for us to say we’re better together. These 120 little fiefdoms that Kentucky has aren’t going to make it alone.”
The hardscrabble miners in Harlan County once proved that organizing into a union could win them major concessions from the coal mine operators. Now, a hard push for bottom-up change through Obama’s Promise Zones could once again prove the power of banding together.
READ MORE:
Part 2: The Initiative That’s Bringing Appalachia into the 21st Century
Part 3: Stories of Redemption in America’s Coal Country
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The Life-Changing Program Head Start Turns 50: A Conversation with Its Founder
Dr. Edward Zigler is often referred to as the “Father of Head Start.” For the last half-century, he’s been the driving force behind the early intervention program that aims to curb the detrimental effects of growing up in poverty. Since its inception in the summer of 1965, Head Start has served more than 30 million at-risk children and their families. The comprehensive model Zigler pioneered — focusing on every aspect of a child’s early development, not just math skills or reading ability — has been replicated by the Harlem Children’s Zone and other forward-thinking nonprofits, and it’s taking hold in school districts across the country, at all grade levels, through President Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods.
Zigler’s also contributed a dense volume of research to the field. He founded a child development and social policy center at Yale University that’s now staffed by 40 faculty and 50 fellows. Zigler himself authored or edited more than 40 books and 800 scholarly publications. For his work, he was presented with the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2008, the highest honor given by the American Psychological Association.
At age 85, Zigler is an emeritus professor of psychology at Yale, where he’s taught since 1959. Speaking to NationSwell from his home in New Haven, Conn., he reflected on his experience founding a mainstay of America’s education policy half a century ago.
Q: A White House panel was convened in 1964 to find a way to help low-income kids. How did Head Start develop out of it?
A: The War on Poverty was put in place by President Johnson and Sargent Shriver, and the Office of Economic Opportunity was in charge of that effort. That’s when we had something called Community Action, but it was very much disliked in this country, and it got a lot of critical press and a lot of opposition. People wanted to be aggressive about making things better for poor people, but everybody finds out, if you fight City Hall, City Hall fights back. Sargent Shriver was faced with what to do next, and he decided on Head Start. Nobody can be angry at little children that are three or four years old. As part of Community Action, he created Head Start and people did indeed love it since its inception. But it didn’t mean that they became kind to Community Action.
At that point, though, nobody knew what Head Start was, so we needed a planning committee to establish exactly what it would be. Most of its members were in their 50s and 60s and rather well-established psychiatrists, social workers, pediatricians and child psychologists. As it turned out, I was by far the youngest member of the planning committee, at the age of 34. At the age of 40, I took over Head Start in this country and become responsible for it, so I’ve been intimately involved with Head Start for its 50 years.
Q: What did the original eight-week summer pilot project look like?
A: Actually before Head Start, there were some preschool programs, like Citizen Grace in Nashville and a program in New York, but the problem was that they were only interested in one facet of a child’s development: intelligence or school performance, both of which are highly related. On the planning committee for Head Start, we decided on two things that were different and that are still in place after 50 years. The first is comprehensive services. You wouldn’t just give the child I.Q. raisers and school performances enhancers; instead, you give the kids health services, give the family social work and give them things the child would need to escape poverty.
A second pillar was parent involvement. Head Start doesn’t raise small kids; preschool programs don’t raise children. Parents raise their children. So if you want children to do better, you try to get parents to be better socializers. Head Start is pointed as much as the parents as at the child.
Q: During the Nixon Administration, you developed standards for the program as the first director of the Office of Child Development (now the Administration on Children, Youth and Families). Why was that early work important?
A: At that time, I was the federal official responsible for Head Start. The first thing I did was stop Community Action. They already had their own plan for Head Start, and they had absolutely no use for the planning committee. We were essentially a group of scholars from a lot of different fields, whereas they saw themselves as poverty warriors. They didn’t know a lot about child development, but they’d fight to get a better life for poor people, like building a playground in a poor neighborhood. Well, that’s fine — I wouldn’t be against that — but that’s not the solution to what children need. And that’s where the planning committee came in.
We didn’t have enough money to serve all the children trying to get into Head Start, so instead of teaching people how to mobilize, I stopped that aspect of the program, and all the money went to optimizing poor children’s development, which was the planning committee’s only goal. That didn’t meet the satisfaction of a lot of people — self-proclaimed “poverty warriors,” who were getting paid through the program. They wanted to meet with me to see if they could change my mind. As a public official, I was glad to meet with them. As the meeting went on, the guy who was really the leader of the group at the opposite end of this long conferences table from me, stood up and said, “Dr. Zigler, you just don’t understand us. We are willing to give up a generation of our children in order to do our work.” And I remember at the time, I stood up at my end of the table and said, “Well you might be willing to, but I’m trying to help this generation of your children and to help coming generations of children. And this meeting is over.” And that was that.
Q: In the late 1980s you criticized some centers for not living up to their promise, telling The New York Times in a front-page article that one-third of the centers should be shuttered. Why was that rigorous emphasis on results important for Head Start’s success?
A: Head Start probably started too big. Instead of getting the 35,000 kids that Shriver and Johnson wanted, we put 266,000 into Head Start that first summer. The way it was being funded, we were running a lot of very poor, mediocre programs and hadn’t close any that were poorly functioning. When I came in, I emphasized only two things that would determine the effectiveness of Head Start. One is the quality of the program — are there good teachers in the classroom teaching these children? — and second was its length. The longer the program, the more impact it’s going to have.
Another good thing happened recently. See, for years and years, you didn’t have to reapply. Every five years, you automatically got a new grant. This practice has ended. What is in place now is a monitoring system in which Head Start is evaluated, and if the program is poor, its funding is taken away and somebody else gets it. The improvement in Head Start has taken way too long, but it’s in progress in a pretty satisfactory way now.
Q: You’ve worked with nearly every administration from Johnson through Clinton. Did you have a favorite one to work with?
A: I worked with all of them. After a new administration would come in, I was asked to be a consultant for Head Start. [long pause] Let me tell you a story about President Johnson and what Head Start meant to him. When he left the White House and went back to his ranch in Texas, he discovered a Head Start center nearby. His daughters worked in Head Start, and every day he would go to the center. Now, Johnson was a great, big tall man, and he would fill his side pockets with jelly beans. All the kids got to know him. They’d reach into his pocket and get the jelly beans. After a while, all the kids in the Head Start program were calling him Mr. Jelly Beans. He was so obviously in love with education.
Q: Have there been disappointments along the way?
A: Head Start has gone from crisis to crisis. The worst one happened about one week after I got to Washington, D.C. If you know Washington, you know the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) really runs the place. So during the first week, I was called to this meeting and a guy from OMB was there and he puts a piece of white paper on the table and said, “Here’s the plan. In the first year of Head Start, you will close one-third of the Head Start centers. The second year, you will close another third of the Head Start centers, and the third year you will close the remaining ones.” I was one of the founders of Head Start, but it was going to be gone in three years.
So the same day, I went to the head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare [now the Department of Health and Human Services], Eliot Richardson’s office, and told his secretary, “I must see the Secretary immediately.” Nobody says that unless they’re pretty damn serious, so she went in and of course he saw me immediately. He and I had hit it off. He was a great boss, a very smart guy. I told him what had just happened at this meeting run by OMB, and he looked at me in amazement. He didn’t know anything about it either — a Cabinet member in the Nixon administration and he didn’t know about it. He told me to go back to my office, do my work and forget that the meeting ever happened. He also said that he’d go to the White House and clear it up, which he did.
One of the things that always helps is that every time the reauthorization comes up, the parents with children in Head Start march in support of it. It’s been a very important factor in keeping the program alive. I don’t know of another children’s program that’s been alive for 50 years. On the adult side, we’ve got Social Security. But a program for kids? Kids don’t vote, but the parental participation helps keep it alive.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
15 Images That Reveal the Heart and Spirit of One of L.A.’s Toughest Neighborhoods
Jordan Downs is one of Los Angeles’s most underserved communities — but that’s about to change.
The 700-unit public housing project is home to nearly 3,000 residents and for decades, it has struggled with high crime rates and crumbling infrastructure. But recently, plans have been made to transform the neighborhood into a thriving “urban village.”
The proposal, created by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing. It also includes plans for vocational training and job creation for current residents of Jordan Downs, where is the current average household income is $14,594.
Los Angeles-based photographer Isadora Kosofsky recently photographed Jordan Downs for NationSwell to capture a snapshot of this community on the brink of change.
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READ MORE: Inside the Revival of One of the Nation’s Most Notorious Housing Projects
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