A Curious Plan to Fight Climate Change: Buy Mines, Sell Coal, The New York Times
The lines in the so-called war on coal were drawn long ago: Sierra Club lawyers, on one side, clashed with Republican legislators and energy companies on the other. Tom Clarke, owner of a chain of nursing homes, set up a lonely camp in the battlefield’s middle ground. His nonprofit is buying up mines at bankruptcy proceedings, then selling the coal bundled with carbon offsets from tree-planting.
The Art of Breathing Lights, Albany Times-Union
At sundown in upstate New York, the blight is aglow with light. For the next two months, as part of a massive public art project, hundreds of vacant clapboard homes in Albany, Schenectady and Troy are being lit from inside with LED lights. Pulsing as if they were slowly exhaling, these abandoned houses refuse to be ignored.
The Children Who Saw Too Much, RYOT
Whipped with a belt buckle by his abusive stepfather, 17-year-old Ryan grew up believing all adults deal with their problems through aggression. At least, until he attended the nation’s first summer camp for children marred by domestic violence, where he learned, amid the Northern California pines and Klamath River rapids, about a different emotion: hope.
Tag: California
Beyond Big Unions: How One Labor-Rights Advocate Envisions the Future for Workers
Carmen Rojas’s parents immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers. Her father drove trucks, and her mother filed papers at a bank. Neither had finished middle school. A generation later, their daughter had graduated with a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and traveled to Venezuela on a Fulbright scholarship. Today, Rojas heads The Workers Lab, a Bay Area accelerator that backs early-stage, labor-focused ventures. When Rojas thinks about her family’s upward mobility, she’s both pleased and disturbed: “It kills me to imagine that I might be part of the last generation in this country to benefit from an economy and a government that saw opportunity as core to its existence,” she says.
“We have a reached a moment where we can no longer deliver on the promise of what work is,” says Rojas over lunch at a Thai restaurant in midtown Manhattan. To live in New York City, for example, even a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t cover the expenses of raising two kids: At minimum, each parent needs to earn $18.97 hourly to adequately support their family. Yet only a tenth of American workers are unionized, about half of what it was in 1983. “The 20th-century labor movement as we imagined it — the labor union, collective bargaining — is no longer in a position to protect and create opportunity for the vast majority of workers.”
Those shortcomings have led people to second-guess traditional institutions, as the rise of Donald Trump suggests. Capitalizing on the hot-button issue of income inequality highlighted by Occupy Wall Street and Fight for 15, The Workers Lab is trying to reimagine what the future could be. “That’s why we exist,” Rojas tells NationSwell, “to jump-start the next-generation workers’ movement.” She shared five current initiatives that illustrate what that future might look like.
1. CLEAN Carwash Campaign, California
Cooperatives place businesses back in the hands of workers, where they share in profits and decision-making. They can be a tool for advancement, nurturing professional skills among blue-collar laborers. The CLEAN Carwash Campaign, which fought legal battles on behalf of Los Angeles’s largely undocumented force of carwasheros, tested whether they could open a worker-owned car wash in South L.A. The model has prompted Rojas to start looking for opportunities elsewhere, including a farm in the Coachella Valley. If that co-op, owned by 7,500 workers, actually gets off the ground, it will be the largest in the country. No small feat for an industry that’s known for some of the worst working conditions in this country, says Rojas. “This farm conversion — and the fact that we’re even talking about cooperatives outside of Vermont or Maine — is awesome.”
2. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Florida
With the rise of the conscious consumer — the person who reads labels and researches brands online — certification has become one of the easiest ways to push businesses into compliance. In South Florida, which produces most of the nation’s tomato supply during winter, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers created a powerful set of standards for tomato-pickers to ensure they get paid on time, have a voice in the workplace, aren’t subjugated to sexual harassment, and can safely submit complaints without retaliation. They then brought these guidelines straight to buyers like McDonald’s and Yum Brands (Taco Bell and Pizza Hut’s owner), rather than the farms’ managers. Fast-food companies and supermarkets agreed to buy tomatoes only from companies that met certifications, forcing the industry as a whole to catch up. “The coalition was so good at creating the standard,” says Rojas.
3. Worker Defense Project, Texas
With just two OSHA inspectors for the entire state, Texas’s construction sites might as well be unregulated, says Rojas. “Employers aren’t required to pay workers’ compensation, and Texas has the highest rate of mortality in construction in the whole country.” For five years, the Worker Defense Project, an immigrant workers’ rights organization, had been advocating for policy change. They won concessions from some high-profile projects, but the sector as a whole wouldn’t budge. So rather than shaming those who wouldn’t get on board, the group launched its Build It Better campaign, which offered incentives instead. “Their idea was to create a certification for developers’ construction projects,” explains Rojas. For adding on-site monitors and training, the Workers Defense Project in turn would work to fast-track permits and reduce the insurance rate. As Rojas points out, “If people aren’t dying on your projects because they’re being trained, then you don’t need as much insurance.”
4. Coworker, District of Columbia
Rojas is still trying to figure out if digital tools are simply an offshoot of old-school worker organizing or something different entirely. But she is clear about which online project is her current favorite: Coworker, which is a petitioning platform that allows disparate workers to make collective grievances about hyper-specific issues known to employers, without the huge undertaking of forming a union. “For instance, they have 25,000 Starbucks baristas who have all signed different types of petitions and that Starbucks has responded to,” Rojas says of Coworker’s impact. “Often, there is no way for you as a barista in one of hundreds of stores in Manhattan to unify your voice with other baristas around scheduling, wages or appearance. Coworker created that way.”
5. Universal Basic Income, California
While the movement toward a universal basic income has yet to be realized (aside from a small pilot project in Oakland), Rojas is intrigued by the idea. Advocating this policy, which guarantees every family a minimum wage regardless of whether they work, might have gotten you laughed out of a room as a “crazy communist” in the past, but it’s now gaining traction. “The appeal of a basic income — a kind of Social Security for everyone — is easy to understand,” The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki wrote this summer. “It’s easy to administer; it avoids the paternalism of social-welfare programs that tell people what they can and cannot buy with the money they’re given; and, if it’s truly universal, it could help destigmatize government assistance.” Adds Rojas, “I’m interested in what it means for somebody who has spent his entire life in the labor movement to imagine non-labor institution solutions for the issues facing workers.”
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This Mover and Shaker Is Changing How Californians Use Technology
Managing the technology that undergirds a $171-billion, 228,000-employee operation is no easy task. And it’s even harder when working under laws that sometimes limit your capabilities. Yet that’s the job for which Amy Tong, a longtime California public employee who has overseen technology for the state lottery, retirement system, taxes and water, was sworn in to earlier this summer. As the new chief information officer for the Golden State and recent speaker at NBCU’s Millennial Tech & Change Summit, Tong must keep all the existing technology systems operational, while trying to make them more adaptable to current usage. In an interview with NationSwell, Tong explained her formula for making state government more streamlined and the lessons she’s learned from Silicon Valley.
Let’s start with the challenges you’re up against. What are the unique barriers state government faces when updating its technology?
One is just the sheer size of state government. When it comes to the utilization of technology, it’s serving the public in a much bigger volume than a lot of cities and counties would normally face. One could say, “Well, the private sector — places like Google — might serve even more.” But the type of information that we collect as a public sector demands the best protection. When it comes to health and human services, law enforcement or governmental affairs, there’s a huge amount of information security and checks and balances that needs to happen. This public data is probably the most sensitive [that exists], so government-run technology systems tend to be more complicated and large. Second, because they’re so large and complex, it’s very costly to update them. I’ll give an example: For our 30-year-old child-welfare system, our regional estimate is half a billion dollars.
As an alternative to costly upgrades, government seems to be moving toward breaking down its massive IT projects into bite-size pieces. Do you have an example of how you’re doing that in California?
We’re taking an alternative approach to upgrading the child-welfare system. Our intent with a more bite-size approach is that each smaller module can be delivered to the end user a lot sooner. For social workers, who are our end users, that means focusing initially on the intake process — which is the first step they take when assessing a child-welfare case — and moving it to a more mobile-based technology. Now, the rest of the steps — let’s say there are five more before a child can be placed into a safe environment — will continue to use the existing system to tie them together, which means we can roll out each of the upgrades one by one, as opposed to waiting until the entire system is upgraded.
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How do you get other state agencies to participate in that innovation? Do you need to convince them to join you?
We are very fortunate that there are a lot of innovators and change agents in the state of California. When we talk about innovation, we’re not necessarily talking about new tools or something you can go play with. It’s really about addressing the barriers people have in moving innovation forward. With this renewed effort and engagement, I often hear the comment, “Yeah, let’s do this!” In the past, people [were less enthusiastic] and they’d say, “We’d like to do things more innovatively, but because of this policy or this regulation or this statute, we can’t.”
What I’ve shared from my experience is the idea that rather than seeing what we can tweak, let’s look at what we can do that’s fundamentally different. I ask the question, “When was the last time you actually read the statute? When was the last time you read the policy that gives you the perception you couldn’t do things differently?” Nine out of 10 times, they say they hadn’t read it; it was just what somebody once said. After you show them the language a couple of times, they see it’s not as constrained as they think. That’s when the ideas start coming out. In some ways, it’s fairly liberating for me to see that it doesn’t take a lot to spark people’s desire to innovate. Once that door’s open, oh my gosh, the ideas will wow you.
You recently created a new Office of Digital Innovation and Technology Engagement. What do you hope that will accomplish?
Number one: By simply using the term “digital innovation,” we’re already setting the tone of what we’re trying to accomplish, which is fresh ideas and innovative ways to solve problems. We understand that, in this day and age, many businesses are looking for technology solutions. We’re hoping to set a tone that the state Department of Technology is not only here to keep the lights on and make sure the existing system is operating well, but also that we’re very much into innovation.
Number two: Our biggest goal is to help individual programs achieve what they need to achieve. The Office of Digital Innovation is providing them infrastructure support, such as the Innovation Lab that we recently launched, so that program agencies, like the California Environmental Protection Agency or Health and Human Services, can say, “Hey, I’ve got this problem. I want to develop some solutions. I just need a sandbox to do it in.” They could come to our lab, which is part of this office, to try out new things without having to invest a lot.
Silicon Valley obviously looms large in people’s perception of California. What can the state government learn from what those techies are doing?
For both the public and private sector, entities get bigger and bigger every year, with process on top of process on top of process. It can bog down an organization. By talking with a lot of the entrepreneurial firms, we get down to the basics. Instead of somebody taking 10 steps to get from A to B, have we ever looked at the minimum number of steps to achieve the same results? Maybe it’s minus the bells and whistles, but you get what you need. A lot of these entrepreneurs will say to keep it simple and streamlined. Don’t overcomplicate things. That’s my motto as well, and it’s what’s helping the state look at things differently.
You’ve been overseeing technology for California’s government for 22 years. What are you most proud of?
I’ve been fortunate that my career has led me to where I am today, and I have surrounded myself with a lot of good people, mentors and others I can learn from. But the greatest accomplishment, I would have to say, is yet to come. We’ll see how much more we can do in the next few years of the administration.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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 NBC/Universal.
7 Ways to Be an Effective 21st-Century Political Activist
Earlier this year, Erin Schrode, a 25-year-old Californian, ran to be America’s youngest female Congresswoman. The New York University graduate and founder of the environmental nonprofit, Turning Green, waged an underdog fight against fellow Democratic incumbent, Jared Huffman. The opponents were in agreement about the issues facing the state’s liberal North Coast (which stretches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the forested Oregon border), but Schrode argued it was time for young people to take the reins in Washington. Although she came in a distant third in the June primary, Schrode brought a youthful energy to staid Congressional politics and believes she switched up the dynamics of the race.
NationSwell spoke to her recently while she was on a visit to New York City about the lessons she’s learned about political organizing in the era of hashtag activism.
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MORE: #ComeClean About Where That Vanilla Aroma Really Comes From
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.
#ComeClean About Household Cleaners
As a participant in Seventh Generation’s Come Clean campaign, NationSwell is asking that cleaning and hygiene product companies do the same thing that Seventh Generation has done for the last 27 years: disclose all of a product’s ingredients so consumers can make educated choices about what they bring into their homes.
To do this, we teamed up with activists and environmental advocates, including Richmond, Calif.-based housecleaner Elva Aguilar. Several years ago, she began having a variety of health problems that she eventually traced to the cleaners used in her daily work. After changing her products and habits, Aguilar’s health recovered. Now she is advocating on behalf of other housecleaners.
Watch the video above to see Aguilar speak out for her colleagues.
Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.
1. Concert Hall
Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.
2. Primary School
Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.
3. Hospital
Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.
4. Government
Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.
5. Police Department
Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.
6. Athletic Competition
Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.
7. Military
Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.
MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
Telepresence Robots Break Down Barriers for Those with Physical Disabilities
Ron Carrico began Kavita Krishnaswamy’s private tour of the San Diego Air & Space Museum near a replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, describing the torturous 33-hour flight across the Atlantic in such a way that isn’t printed in history books. As the two made their way through the facility, Krishnaswamy, a doctoral candidate in computer science, waved hello to fellow patrons and paused to see the planes hanging from the ceiling. The only thing atypical about her visit was that she wasn’t technically at the museum, which is located in Balboa Park, Calif. Extraordinarily, she was more than 2,600 miles away sitting in front of a computer in Baltimore County, Md, controlling a five-foot-tall, roving BeamPro robot equipped with a wide-angle camera and a 20-inch screen that projected her face at eye level.
Originally built to automate industry, to ease business interactions for remote employees or to simply entertain, robotic technologies are taking on a significantly nobler purpose: assisting those with disabilities in their day-to-day lives. Text-to-speech capabilities on iPhones allow the blind to read anything online. Doctors and therapists use robots to make virtual rounds to patients who cannot physically leave their homes. And at the San Diego Air & Space Museum, which received a $25,000 grant from the NBCUniversal Foundation, people with severe disabilities can use innovative “telepresence” BeamPro devices to partake in a historical and cultural adventure they’d never be able to experience otherwise.
APPLY: The San Diego Air & Space Museum is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The museum keeps two robots charged at all times, ready to give BEAM tours to those who can’t make it to Southern California. Katrina Pescador, the museum’s archival director, saw the robotic technology’s potential after the manufacturer held a conference nearby, quickly signing up to offer virtual museum tours to people who are hospitalized or mobility challenged. “I want people to have the freedom to experience the world and not be locked up some place,” says Pescador, whose daughter has a disability. “But it’s also important that people in the world see other people with disabilities. All of us need to be interacting together.”
The device provides those with physical disabilities a unique opportunity to explore the world in a way that clicking through images on Google never can. The BeamPro allowed Krishnaswamy, who has spinal muscular atrophy, to enjoy a rare experience of free movement. “It gave me an immersive experience like I was physically there,” she recalls. “I could move around. I had the ability to turn. I could see people and interact with people,” she adds. “Just moving around on my own without any limitation and seeing somebody eye-to-eye: that’s really a new experience.”
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Pushing application of the technology even further, Carrico’s colleague Ross Davis is attempting to use the BeamPro for virtual school field trips. Davis, the museum’s education resources coordinator, believes it’s the ideal way for budget-conscious schools to engage students. Educators can log on and within seconds, get kids excited about the physics involved in getting 1,500-pound object soaring through the air. “We want to make it easy. We like easy,” Davis, a blunt former Navy pilot, says. (Offering top students a chance to command a robot is a sure-fire way to motivate a group of kids, he adds.) Even better is a virtual field trip’s ability to host low-income children. “We want to bring in the [kids] who wouldn’t get to visit, whose parents are too busy and don’t have time or money to buy tickets,” Davis says.
The school tours are still a project in process. Davis has tried at least three times to connect with one classroom, but the San Diego public school system has a firewall he hasn’t yet been able to circumvent. Once that basic connectivity issue is fixed, Davis has big plans: He envisions integrating 3-D diagrams, YouTube clips and sound bites into his guided tour to bring some of the aircraft hanging in the museum roaring into motion. From there, he’ll offer telepresence tours to anyone in the nation — enabling those with limited financial resources to have the same learning opportunities as their wealthier counterparts.
If the school visits work as well as Krishnaswamy’s tour, the program will be a success. Months later, she still raves that, “It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” A graduate student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Krishnaswamy studies how technology can assist others with disabilities like herself. The BeamPro is a prime example of what she wants to develop: a device that let her experience life in a different way.
As Krishnaswamy viewed the exhibits with Carrico, she thought about how quickly technology advances. In 1903, the Wright Brothers could barely keep a plane off the ground for more than a few seconds. Fast forward to 1969 when men rocketed into space and landed on the Moon. In a way, it’s fitting that Krishnaswamy is using a robot to experience the history of progress on display. In comparison to how fast she can jet into the museum from across the country, a trans-Atlantic flight feels like no big deal. If Lindbergh could see the BeamPro today, surely he would feel a twinge of jealousy.
The San Diego Air & Space Museum is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
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