The Challenges Facing Military Families are Unique, So This Program Gives Social Workers Specific Training

The suicide rate among veterans standing at an alarming 22 deaths each day. As if that’s not enough, military families also face the challenges of high unemployment, debt and PTSD.
So the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work decided to create a Master’s program that would train graduate students to address the needs of veterans, service members and military families.
Social workers are often on the front lines when service members return home — diagnosing their problems and helping vets find housing, jobs and stability. Part of the USC program’s emphasis is in training students how to deliver effective therapy that doesn’t drive military members and their spouses away, a problem with some counseling that results in veterans failing to get the help they need. But in the USC program, a concept called the Motivational Interviewing Learning Environment and Simulation (MILES) teaches students how to effectively manage that vital first contact with both service members and veterans.
Many of the students that have enrolled in USC’s program since its inception in 2009 have direct experience with the military themselves — either as soldiers themselves or spouses of deployed military.
Pamela and Mark Mischel recently helped endow a new scholarship program, the Yellow Ribbon Scholarship Fund, which will pay the tuition for military members and vets who want to enroll. “These young men and women have given so much, and we want to do our small part to be able to help,” Mark Mischel tells USC News.
Pamela says that when they learned that many veterans and their spouses were interested in enrolling USC’s military social work program, they decided to help. “If these people wanted to become social workers, then we wanted to help them do that,” she says. “This is our small way of giving back to them for the services they’ve done for our country.”
MORE: This Mobile App is Preventing Veteran Suicides

When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process

Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”

Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.

So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.

Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.

While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.

Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”

The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.

With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

DIVERTING THE PIPELINE

The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.

Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.

Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.

Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.

“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.

Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.

Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.

At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.

MAKING IT RIGHT

In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.

In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.

Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.

“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.

According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.

On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.

For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.

“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.

Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.

Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.

As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”

The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.

The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”

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The Bay City’s Latest Plan to Combat Homelessness

San Francisco is a city of paradoxes. Walking around, you can see evidence of the booming tech scene and expensively-clad citizens, yet it also has a chronic homelessness problem. But the City by the Bay finally thinks it may have a solution by combining the needs of both the homeless and corporations: tax breaks for community projects.
With 6,436 homeless people and 3,401 living on its streets, according to the Human Services Agency, San Francisco has to be inventive. And that’s where this new initiative comes in. As more and more tech companies, (like Twitter) move to the area, San Francisco is hoping that its new “community benefit agreement” will encourage these businesses to stay and improve the city.
Through the initiative, tech companies will receive multi-million dollar tax breaks if they set up residence in a troubled neighborhood and invest a portion of those tax breaks into improving it.
While some remain skeptical about the amount of money that a company will actually put towards a neighborhood, this program offers unique possibilities for great change. For instance, many tech companies will set up micro-apartment communities for their employees; if created for homeless people, there’s the potential to drastically reduce the problem.
Salt Lake City is a model for this type of project. Ten years ago, the Utah city started a program to combat homelessness through these micro-apartments communities. Apartments were set up outside of troubled neighborhoods, and residents were quickly placed into them, removing them from the negative influences.
In each housing complex, on-site counseling was available. These counselors helped residents beat drug addictions, find jobs and diagnose and treat mental diseases. The result? Salt Lake City now only has about 400 homeless persons.
Although there are differences in cost of living and other factors between Salt Lake City and San Francisco, there is possibility for replication and improvement.
For Matt Minkevitch, who runs Road Home, the main nonprofit homeless agency in Utah, these houses serve as a stepping stone.
“The idea is, we don’t want people to just live in this shelter,” Minkevitch tells San Francisco Gate. “We want to make it as comfortable as possible, but we want them to move on to housing — on to better lives.”
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How Tablets Are Helping San Francisco Inmates Get Back on Track

It’s no secret that education programs in prison may help reduce recidivism and better transition inmates back into society, which is why California is launching a pilot program to supply tablets to prisoners.

The two year, $275,000 pilot program is directed toward helping inmates tap into the technology that’s now available in most elementary schools. The state is distributing 125 tablets, enabling access to only four websites but allowing prisoners to read books, do homework or prepare for their criminal cases through the use of a law library, MSNBC reports.

The tablets also feature an education application and curriculum developed by Five Keys Charter School, which donated $125,000 to the initiative. The California Wellness Foundation has also bestowed a $75,000 grant for the project, while San Francisco’s Adult Probation Department gave $75,000, according to Steve Good, the executive director for the Five Keys Charter School.

“We hope this will help bridge the digital divide and provide inmates access to technology that every elementary, middle and high school student already has, but has been out of reach for those forgotten by society,” Good says.

The majority of the 125 tablets will be given to men and women who are already part of the Five Keys programs. The tablets, developed by New York-based American Prison Data Systems, can be remotely monitored or disabled and will be available to prisoners most hours of the day. American Prison Data Systems also provides similar devices to juvenile jails in Indiana, Kansas and an adult prison system in Maryland.

“This is really cutting edge,” says San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. “Historically, there’s been resistance, if not prohibitions, on allowing technology into the living quarters of inmates.”

Inmate and former army veteran Dennis Jones hope the use of a tablet will help him earn a high school diploma and keep him off the streets the next time he’s released.

“I’m five credits shy of getting my diploma,” Jones says. “I’m willing to work toward that goal — and hopefully this will help me.”

 MORE: How A New York Program is Reframing Prison Education

When Low-Income People Can’t Afford Solar Energy, This Organization Helps Out

What nonprofit asks low-income people to don hard hats and safety harnesses and scramble up on roofs?
GRID Alternatives does.
The organization not only provides solar energy to low-income neighborhoods, it also teaches residents how to install the panels themselves — helping them gain experience for potential jobs in the solar industry.
Low-income people are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods, and they definitely can use the break on energy bills that solar panels provide — but most can’t afford to have them installed. That’s where GRID Alternatives steps in. According to the nonprofit’s website, its solar installation efforts have prevented “the release of 340,000 tons of greenhouse gasses over the systems’ lifetimes and provid[ed] more than $110 million in energy cost savings.”
One hundred and fifty volunteers turned up recently to help install solar panels on 10 Habitat for Humanity homes in a low-income Washington D.C. neighborhood, according to Katherine Ling of E&E. The installation celebrated the grand opening of the Oakland-based nonprofit’s D.C. office, which joins branches in California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
The D.C. installation event also gave 10 “solar trainees” from a local organization for at-risk youth the chance to gain some valuable job skills and learn about an industry that might eventually provide them with a career.
GRID Alternatives has been able to expand its mission recently due to a $2 million grant from Wells Fargo, as well as equipment donations from Enphase Energy Inc., Sun Edison LLC and SunPower Corp.
The group also sponsors SolarCorps Fellowships, a one-year volunteer training period that qualifies participants for employment in the solar industry. The nonprofit is especially interested in providing jobs to low-income people, minorities and women. To that end, it hosts “women builds” as a part of its National Women in Solar initiative.
Ling visited a woman-only solar installation project in Los Angeles, where SolarCorps construction fellow Ilana Feingold declared, “We love power tools!”
We’re sure they love the energy savings and the jobs that come along with it, too.
MORE: For Those Most In Need of Low Utility Bills, There’s Solar Energy
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L.A.’s New Homeless Shelter Offers More Than Just Four Walls and a Roof to Those in Need

When most of us think of helping the homeless, images of homeless shelters and food kitchens probably come to mind, not community gardens and running tracks. But Los Angeles thought the latter would be beneficial, so that’s what they developed.
The City of Angels and the Skid Row downtown area, in particular, has a chronic homeless problem. And since other policies and endeavors haven’t worked, the city decided to try something different. So they built the Star Apartment complex.
Not only does the 15,000-square-foot apartment complex offer 102 units, but it also boasts a community garden, library, running track, art room and exercise facility.  The purpose of the apartments is to instill a sense of normalcy for the residents — all of whom were previously homeless.
“The community that lives here should have a similar environment to anybody that could afford something more expensive,” Star Apartments designer Michael Maltzan tells the L.A. Times.
Sharing the building is L.A. County’s Department of Health Services Housing for Health Division. Using a variety of services, the Department works to improve the lives and health of the county’s homeless. Over the next 10 years, the Department’s goal is to provide housing for 10,000 people, according to the Huffington Post.
All of this is possible due to the efforts of the Skid Row Housing Trust, which helps find affordable homes for those with disabilities, poor health, mental illness and addiction and the low-income. In order to finance Star Apartments, the Trust received low-income housing tax credit equity from Bank of America and the National Equity Fund.
Any occupant of the Star Apartment complex who earns a salary must allocate 30 percent of it to their rent.
While it may seem that providing housing and amenities for the homeless would be costly to taxpayers and the city, it’s actually saving money. According to the 2014 study by the Central Florida Commission of Homeless, right now it costs about $31,000 a year to provide for one homeless person (due to the high cost of paying for medical and psychiatric hospitalization, jail time and emergency rooms), whereas operating the Star Apartments will only cost about $10,000 per resident for a year.
MORE: A Solution to Outdoor Urban Living, by Homeless People for Homeless People
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You Can Now Have a Virtual Picnic in the Park, Thanks to Google

California’s Department of Parks and Recreation is getting a facelift, and Google is operating.
The Mountain View-based company has spent the last three months traversing the California countryside, through the towering redwoods and atop Mt. Tamalpais to create virtual maps for more than a dozen parks, helping the once-antiquated state agency plug in and capture a new audience online.

“Information is key for people who are not active users of state parks,” says Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the California State Parks Foundation. “You want to know what a place is like. You want to prepare in advance.”

Google mapped the parks at no cost, using Google Trekker, which was previously used on the Grand Canyon in 2012, according to the Los Angeles Times. Users can view the virtual images of the 14 parks mapped using the Street View feature, with the aim of attracting a younger generation of potential hikers and campers.

“It’s really important to connect a new generation to California parks,”  says Jon Christensen, a UCLA senior researcher working on the software. “We know that generation is very technologically adept and socially connected.”

The impetus to play tech catch-up was prompted by an accounting scandal in 2012, which revealed millions of dollars concealed in a department account during the height of state park budget cuts. Earlier this year in April, the Parks Forward Commission, an independent group created by the Legislature, issued a report finding that the parks system “is debilitated by an outdated organizational structure, underinvestment in technology and business tools, and a culture that has not rewarded excellence, innovation, and leadership.”

In addition to the maps, California officials have also begun experimenting with mobile parking payment at some state beaches in Orange County, while budding architecture students at Cal Poly Pomona are designing park cabins as an alternative for camping out in a tent. And state officials plan to triple the number of parks where visitors can pay fees by credit card by the end of the year, too.

Elsewhere in San Francisco, Stamen Design is teaming up with conservation group Resources Legacy Fund to develop a mobile application to assist users with navigating programs and activities throughout the state’s park system, regardless of whether they’re operated by a government agency.

“Years from now, when we look at the parks system, this is the time when we had the opportunity to make great change,” says Lisa Mangat, acting parks director.

MORE: The Doctor’s Order? Spend More Time in Nature

It May Sound Like a Potty Humor, But This Campaign to Conserve Water is Serious Business

California’s drought has marked one of the worst on record, with 100 percent of the state affected. But while some parts of the state are completely tapped out, other areas continue to use water with little regard. Which is why a group of San Francisco entrepreneurs got the bright idea to turn an old money-saving trick into one that could help California save 6 billion gallons of water in just three months.
The Drop-A-Brick project began as a joke among the group about the double meaning of “dropping a brick,” but became an actual solution once the group recognized just how much Californians were flushing away.
Placing a brick in your toilet’s tank can save around a half of gallon of water per flush (a family of four save around 50 gallons a week). For a state under such dire conditions as California, it’s a method worth trying.

“We realized that toilets are the number one user of water in the home,” says Greg Hadden, one of the founders of the project. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 26.7 percent of municipal water is flushed away at residential households and California, in particular, wastes around 203 million gallons each day.

“All of us felt that while we were in this huge drought, there’s a massive lack of awareness of it. Nobody really seemed to understand how serious the situation is,” Hadden tells Fast Company

After researching the practice, Hadden said they realized that actual bricks can dissolve, cause clogging and lead to a pricey visit from the plumber. Instead, the group decided to design their own lightweight, environmentally-friendly rubber brick. Their unique version contains a dye tablet to help identify leaks as another means of water conservation and also ships flat in the mail, plus it doesn’t expand until added to water thanks to a hydrogel technology. The brick is also adaptable and can be formed into different shapes based on toilet design.

“While we’d like to get a lot of bricks out there — we think it’s a great icon for a public awareness campaign — really what we’d like to do is just get people thinking about urban water conservation and how to save water at home,” Hadden says.

The Drop-A-Bricks project is crowdfunding via Indiegogo and is also accepting additional donations to send extra bricks to some of the state’s worst areas that are relying on outsourced water. While the campaign is taking a lighthearted approach to raising awareness about the “big bowl movement,” the drop-a-brick project is a real solution to helping Californians conserve their valuable H2O.

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MORE: The Silver Lining to California’s Terrible Drought

Even If You Have a Black Thumb, It’s Possible to Grow Your Own Greens

Hiring a landscaper to design your yard isn’t a rare concept, but how about a farmscaper for your vegetable garden?
While it’s not a mainstream concept right now, through the efforts of Farmscape Gardens, it might soon be a household phenomenon.
Farmscape Gardens is California’s largest urban farming company, bringing edible gardens to 300 clients across the state. Since 2009, the company has been working with residential and commercial customers to develop a plan based on the needs of the client and the logistics of the space. First, Farmscape surveys the property and then will install the garden.
The company continues to work with the client through the growing process as well. Customers can hire weekly farmers to come and maintain their gardens by pulling weeds, controlling pests and harvesting the produce.
All of the gardens utilize a raised bed design, allowing for control of soil quality. Other components include drip irrigation, organic practices and manual weeding.
Right now, Farmscape Gardens has two offices in California – one in Los Angeles with 12 employees and one in Oakland with two employees. Although, the Oakland office just opened this past spring, it has already installed 15 gardens.
The company’s biggest new project was the downtown LA Jonathon Club. Not only is it’s Farmscape’s first rooftop garden, but it allows the social club to sell its customers fresh food straight from above them.
For CEO Dan Allen, this is a step in the right direction for the group as the homegrown produce movement gains momentum. “I would say it has made progress towards being a more mainstream concept and we’ve had a chance for more models to develop and more gain to be collected in each of the models,” he tells Sustainable Cities Collective.
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California’s New Law on Flame Retardants Could Change the Furniture Industry for the Better

While California’s official plastic bag ban might have gotten the most media attention lately, a different bill from the Golden State could have a much bigger environmental and health impact on the whole country.
The Guardian reports that starting Jan. 1, the state will require furniture manufacturers to label consumer products containing flame-retardant chemicals — a change that could alter the entire furniture industry and literally change how we sit (for the better).
In case you didn’t know, the upholstered furniture in our homes, schools, businesses and hospitals are potentially toxic and dangerous. Why? Due to a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided rule called TB-117 which California enacted in the 1970s (that unfortunately trickled down to furniture manufacturers nationwide), our beloved couches are very likely stuffed with flame-retardant filling.
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What’s not good about that? Well, the National Resources Defense Council (NDRC) calls it a “classic example of a stupid use of a chemical: they are ineffective in preventing furniture fires and are linked to serious health effects.” This includes lower birth weight, reduced IQ (similar to lead poisoning), hyperactivity, poorer coordination, reduced fertility, birth defects, hormonal changes and cancer, the Green Health Policy Institute warns.
As the video below illustrates, these chemicals seep out through couch coverings, mix with the air and get into our bodies and the environment. Young children are particularly vulnerable to exposure because they crawl and tend to put things from the floor into their mouth. Additionally, not only are these couches still incredibly flammable, the chemicals in them can make fires even more toxic by forming deadly gases and soot.
And don’t think you’re safe if you don’t live in California. Most couches purchased outside of the state also contain high levels of many different kinds of retardants, meaning most Americans are exposed. According to the NDRC, “Americans carry much higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies than anyone else in the world and California children contain some of the highest levels ever measured.” (Check this link here to learn how to check if your furniture has flame-retardant materials)
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The Guardian reports that while environmentalists and health advocates have been trying to fight TB-117 since it came out, the chemical industry has successfully pushed back their efforts through lobbying tactics for several decades. It wasn’t until 2012 when the Chicago Tribune ran exposés on flame retardant furniture foams that any serious legal efforts were made. (Last year, California lawmakers amended the outdated law, requiring that covers were flame resistant, rather than its filling.)
That’s why the new measure, Senate Bill 1019 (signed on Sept. 30 by Gov. Jerry Brown), is a big step forward to safer furniture, better health and cleaner air. While furniture makers can still technically create products with chemically laden material, they are now forced to indicate so on a label if they want to sell it in California. And since California has such a large share of the market, it’s likely that manufacturers will adapt this new rule for other states, too. Meaning that this law has the potential to affect citizens nationwide, not just Californians.
Hopefully, we’ll see toxic furniture phased out for good.
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