When it comes to seeing veterans on the big screen, Tom Cruise leading a protest from his wheelchair in “Born on the Fourth of July” or Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro playing a final game of Russian roulette in “The Deer Hunter” probably come to mind. But Hollywood’s usual portrayal of service members being physically and psychologically wounded is too narrow, says Charlie Ebersol, a Los Angeles-based TV and film producer. “It’s so staid and boring.”
Having on-screen veterans look like ordinary Americans, however, causes our views and politics will change, Ebersol believes. So along with Got Your 6 and support from the White House, he developed a certification system for films and television shows that “contain a representative and balanced depiction of veterans.” (Think: Chris Pratt playing a Navy veteran in the blockbuster Jurassic World, or the latest season of Dancing with the Stars, which featured an Army vet and double amputee doing the Tango.)
NationSwell recently spoke to Ebersol by phone from Southern California about the role Hollywood should be playing in bridging the civilian-military divide.
What misconceptions does traditional media perpetuate about veterans? That they’re either heroes or they’re victims; they either need our help or they don’t need any help at all. It’s not binary, and the real story is so much more complex and interesting, in that, you have great opportunity in all these veterans coming home, but we don’t take advantage of it because we think they all have PTSD or hero syndrome.
How are you personally changing that narrative? In keeping with Hollywood tradition, I operate from a philosophy that if you offer some sort of shiny prize or award to producers, they will do what they need to do to get said prize. So we’ve been certifying movies and television shows that do a good job telling veterans’ stories. Lo and behold, people started telling better veterans’ stories when they got a gold star at the end of their show or movie.
Should filmmakers be meeting with veterans to turn their stories into films? It’s literally that simple. The problem is that, for so long, we were trying to drum up support for the veterans coming home. To do that, people have always [done something similar] to those ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) commercials where the dogs look really pathetic and what’s her name — [Sarah] McLachlan — is playing her sad song. You may donate money, but what they found was the best way to get people to actually adopt dogs was to show how much fun and how fabulous these dogs were.
After Word War II, veterans came back and people wanted to hire them because they were highly trained. They knew they did well under pressure, and some people started really reaching out. We don’t do that [today]. So when you look for a story, all you really have to do is talk to a veteran, say, “Thank you for your service. Can you tell me about interesting people that are in your lives or unique stories?” And the majority of the stories you’re going to hear are not going to be stories of, “oh, my buddy who’s got a massive drinking problem and is living on the street,” because that’s such a fraction of the population. A lot of the stories are going to be about guys who served two or three tours and now they run a hardware shop or now they’re working in a corporation or are in the tech business. Those stories make for interesting characters.
In telling these stories, what have you learned about what defines an American soldier? Loyalty, duty and commitment. As an employer, when I’m interviewing somebody, if I could know inherently those were a person’s three strongest traits, that would be the ultimate cheat sheet. That’s the beauty of hiring a veteran. You know going in that that person is loyal, feels a sense of duty and is all about commitment because the guy or girl put themselves in harm’s way for their country and for their fellow soldier or sailor or airman. That’s what you’re looking for in a company, in a family, in a friend. You want people that you know are going to show up, and nobody shows up like the military.
What can the rest of us do to support veterans? The platitude needs to stop being, “Thank you for your service,” and actualize that into something meaningful. The yellow ribbon and the stickers, that’s all well and good, but that’s not actually translating into anything. We have to look past that and ask, “How are we creating job opportunities? How are we creating community support where we’re embracing these people?” A lot of people want to do it under the guise of “They served our country, so we owe them.” That’s not what I’m saying. Don’t get me wrong: You do have to take into account that we enjoy our freedoms because of them. But I think the other side of it is significantly more important; they have show their true character and their true colors, and in showing us that and in being trained, at the absolute worst, they are certainly the best qualified people for almost any job.
It’s rare that the person I hire into my company is the most suited because they went to the right types of schools; it’s always about how they act under pressure and how they understand teamwork and the mission being bigger than the man or woman. Veterans are always significantly better at that than anyone else.
Is a Different Kind of Silicon Valley Possible?, The Atlantic Deep in the heart of tobacco country, Durham, N.C. is fostering the next home for digital start-ups. Thanks to free or low-cost office space, business advice, tax credits and financial compensation, more than 400 jobs and $29 million have been added to the local economy. But will this latest tech hub, which is located south of the Mason-Dixon line, find a way to be more diverse than its California predecessor? Humanizing Homelessness at the San Francisco Public Library, CityLab Those in the Bay Area without a roof over their heads don’t head to the library to check out the latest page turner. They head to the public building to meet with Leah Esguerra, the library’s social worker — a first of her kind. Connecting at-risk patrons with social programs and outreach services including housing and medical care, Esquerra has provided assistance to almost 1,000 people. She’s also a trend setter: inspiring 24 libraries nationwide to hire their own social workers. A New Twist on ‘Pay for Success’ Programs, Governing Governments and the private-sector partnering to fund social programs (an agreement known as social impact bonds, or SIBs) is the latest — and one of the most buzzed about — types of investing. These “pay for success” contracts are risky since investors only receive their money back if the operation achieves its goals. A new model, the social impact guarantee, is more enticing to potential investors while also eliminating some of the traditional complications that accompany SIBs. MORE:The New Way to Govern: Paying for Progress
At the age of 13, Tyrone Mullins had his first contact with the justice system in 1998, handcuffed for starting a small tussle at school. He could’ve been hit with a minor reprimand, serving a few weeks of detention or even a suspension, but instead, he was formally charged with a crime — setting Mullins on a path of near-permanent incarceration for the next half of his life. “From that point on, it was juvenile hall, county jail and prison,” says Mullins, a San Francisco native who grew up in a Western Addition public housing project. As a felon, Mullins had limited employment opportunities after each release. Rejected from positions at hotels, supermarkets, department stores, doughnut shops, Jamba Juice and McDonald’s, Mullins subsided on money from the government ($336 a month, split into two checks). “All that allows is temptation to come in and make you do another thing, follow another walk of life,” Mullins explains. “You may not necessarily want to take that route, but people do things when they’re hurting.” And Mullins was hurting.
Navigating past numerous hard knocks, in 2010, Mullins co-founded a successful business that provides jobs to public housing residents, regardless of their parole status. At three Bay Area public housing complexes, Green Streets pays employees $12.25 an hour to sort trash from recyclables and compostables. While handling garbage is far from glamorous in a city that’s home to Salesforce, Twitter and Dropbox, Green Streets’s roughly two dozen workers wear their grey jumpsuits with pride. For many, it marks the first time they’ve financially supported themselves. (“Legally,” Mullins likes to add.) In a city that’s witnessed a mass exodus of low-income African-Americans due to the rising cost of living, these denizens of the projects can finally point to ownership of an enterprise in a world where so much is out of their price range. Tyrone Mullins leads the design team from Exploratorium, a public learning lab, on a tour of the Buchanan Mall in San Francisco.
Green Streets got its unofficial start in 2010, when a work crew arrived at a Western Addition affordable housing development, managed by the for-profit company McCormack Baron Ragan, to install solar panels. Worried about thieves, round-the-clock security was desired. David Mauroff, McCormack Baron’s vice president at the time, didn’t have the money for guards, but he had another idea: “Why don’t you hire the guys who you think are gonna steal your stuff?” Resident DeMaurio Lee staffed the job, and nothing was stolen. Mullins, meanwhile, with two out of three felony strikes against him, installed panels himself, after finding the job through a nonprofit. Four months later, after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, DeMaurio and Mullins gathered the courage to approach Mauroff (despised by most residents,Mauroff says of himself, as the man who personally signed off on evictions) and asked for more work. With a background in city-run gang intervention programs, Mauroff could see the determination on their faces and agreed to see what he could do.
The solution appeared when the complex’s next waste disposal bill arrived. At just one project, Buena Vista Plaza East (193 units, known to many as “O.C.” or “Outta Control”), McCormack Baron faced a $14,000 annual charge from Recology to haul trash to the landfill or an incinerator. As part of San Francisco’s plan to become a zero-waste city by 2020, the bill could be significantly lowered by removing plastic bottles, aluminum cans, food, soiled paper and garden clippings from the overflowing dumpsters. Mauroff, who’s now credited as one of Green Streets’s co-founders, told Mullins he would pay residents to sort through waste, earmarking any savings on his bills for their wages. “I’m not telling you how to do this. I will just help you get the resources in place for you to launch this business,” he told the two men.
Neighbors made fun of the crew digging through rat-infested trash piles in their white protective suits. Yet within six months, thousands of gallons of trash were diverted each month, saving the property 60 percent on its bills. Soon, neighbors started handing Mullins their résumés.
To turn the model into a business, complete with hiring plans, a mission statement, marketing and sound financials, Mullins enrolled in free classes at San Francisco City College’s Small Business Institute. Severely complicating matters was the fact that in the Western Addition complex, danger and temptation were omnipresent. In the courtyards, residents had to dodge literal bullets. Mullins himself was sent back to prison for two years for violating his parole. Tyrone and his crew sort through recyclables.
While Mullins served his time, the rest of San Francisco’s black population continued its decades-long “black flight.” (Since 1970, the city’s portion of African-Americans has been halved, from 13.4 percent to just 5.8 percent in 2014.) Green Streets employees interviewed for this story feel keenly aware of their skin color. Unprompted, they often identified others by race: Mauroff was a “white dude”; neighbors, a “bunch of black people.” They feel that racial differences have been exaggerated by California’s penal system, with which many public housing residents come into contact. In the past, more than half the lockups in San Francisco’s jail have been African-Americans, and last year, four city cops were investigated for trading bigoted text messages. Even in this famously tolerant city, race continues to be a point of tension, says London Breed, one of two African-American city supervisors on the city’s nine-member board. “I am just trying to hold on to evidence that blacks ever existed in San Francisco,” Breed, who grew up in Western Addition public housing, tells the Los Angeles Times.
For those African-Americans who have stayed in the city, the economic outlook looks bleak. The median household income among black residents has fallen to a slim $29,500, while all other racial groups have seen wages rise. (By comparison, the median household pay for white residents, thanks to tech money, now exceeds six figures: $104,300.) Roughly one quarter of the city’s black population relies on subsidized housing, according to data from the Mayor’s Task Force, but the lifeline doesn’t begin to meet demand (only 3.6 percent of applicants receive housing through a lottery system). For the lucky few, like Green Streets employees, housing may be affordable, but the city is anything but.
Gentrification isn’t the only reason why some neighbors are gone: gun violence regularly racks the housing developments. “In San Francisco, with this extreme wealth and income disparity, most of our crime is really centered, not in, but around public housing, these little pockets of poverty isolated from the $1 to $2 million homes right across the street,” Mauroff observers. Last summer, a 19-year-old girl was gunned down in a spray of bullets. The girl’s aunt, Shannon Watts, is Green Streets’s human resources manager. A victim of gun violence herself (taking a bullet in her right leg in 2012), Watts says that her work with Green Streets helped her overcome the debilitating trauma that once kept her captive inside her apartment, door locked and shades drawn.
The difficulties that Green Streets’s employees encounter are considered a badge of honor, a sign of how much they’ve overcome to reach their current success — meager as a minimum-wage job might look to any of the Bay Area’s elites. When Mullins finished his two years in prison, he enrolled in Project ReMADE, a 12-week program at Stanford that trains ex-cons to be entrepreneurs. “I see the transformation I’ve made, and I’m honest with myself,” Mullins says today. “I continue to be a work in progress.”
Reinstated as Green Streets’s operations manager and the leader of the business development team, Mullins took his education back to the informal economy of the projects, where some residents earn extra cash by doing each other’s hair, fixing cars and babysitting, while others sell drugs and break into cars. This self-contained marketplace arose because so many are kept out of workplaces by criminal records or lack of job experience, Mauroff notes. Green Streets bridges that transition to the working world, though it’s not without its bumps. Turf wars between gangs in different housing projects sometimes bleeds over when rivals are staffed together on company cleanup crews. Randolph Lee, the 48-year-old operations supervisor, says he’s responded to fights, stabbings and “a little bit of gunplay.”
A “two-time ex-felon” convicted of murder, Randolph has regularly been tempted to snap back to his old ways. Before he got the job with Green Streets, he says, “I was ready to go back to what I had done before. Just hustling, you know?” he recalls. “I was on my way back to do something I wasn’t supposed to do: I was going to go get it, go get some bread to pay bills.” Since starting with Green Streets in 2013, Randolph has been promoted through the ranks. In his current role as supervisor, he helps employees productively deal with their anger, pointing to his own story: “The only thing we have is our pride, and how far could that go if we allow ourselves to get incarcerated for life,” Randolph says. “I done terrorized and fought my community. It was time to heal my community. I never wanted my last legacy of myself just being a screwup.” Green Streets operations supervisor Randolph Lee, pictured with Meaghan Shannon-Vlkovic of Enterprise Community Partners, at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation Film Series in Atlanta.
Mullins envisions the same impact helping the poorest residents of Detroit, St. Louis, Miami and Phoenix, but a recent failed expansion to nearby Richmond and Oakland shows any scaling must overcome logistical issues. Because the two East Bay cities don’t have strong zero-waste initiatives that discount hauling of recyclables and compostables, the trash bill at housing projects only increased by hiring Green Streets. That’s not to say the model can’t be applied elsewhere, but green subsidies will have to be in place for it to work.
The Western Addition and Plaza East projects serve as evidence of just how successful this business can be. There’s a changed vibe and it’s cleaner, too, as 60,960 gallons of trash are being diverted into other waste streams. But more importantly, there’s fewer men on the corner, whispering street names for drugs to passersby. Many, like Randolph, now work for Green Streets, a model demonstrating that an entrepreneurial spirit can be found in any community, Mauroff says, no matter how unexpected. “A bunch of guys and girls in public housing aren’t given the credit for showing they can do that,” he argues. “I want people to understand that: Under the right circumstances, everyone will go back to work and try to compete in the market.”
For all the frustrations tech startups have unleashed on the Bay Area, they’ve also instilled a sense that the calcified structures of the past don’t necessarily need to be around tomorrow. Mullins brought that Silicon Valley ethic to the Western Addition projects. He deserves credit for his own powerful disruption: not just finding a new way to sort trash and manage its pickup, but for an entirely new vision of labor for those the tech world’s prosperity is leaving behind.
In Its Quest to Decrease Water Use, Levi’s Is Open Sourcing Production Methods, FastCo.Exist 3,781: The number of liters of water required to produce a pair of jeans and grow the cotton they’re made with. To reduce its H2O usage, Levi’s developed a process that consumes 96 percent less water (think: transitioning from roomy boyfriend to super skinny cut). Even better? Instead of sequestering its eco-friendly methods in a top-secret lab, the producer of the classic 501 is sharing its techniques with industry competitors. A Federal Judge’s New Model for Forgiveness, New York Times Checking the conviction history question on a job application can make it next to impossible for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. When issuing a 15-month-long prison sentence to a woman for faking an auto accident in order to collect insurance money, New York judge John Gleeson didn’t mean to issue the lifelong punishment of unemployment. Which is why, 13 years later, he handed her something unusual: a federal certificate for rehabilitation. The Powerful, Young Gallery Owner Shaping L.A.’s Art Scene, OZY The Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which boasts the city’s second highest property crime rate, is also the unlikely home of Michelle Papillion’s art gallery. Showcasing the works of emerging African-American artists, Papillion is out to do more than just bring awareness to creatives that aren’t widely recognized and celebrated; she’s working to beautify the community around her. MORE:To Reduce Drug Abuse, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation. Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair. Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics. MORE:Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
Moments of stability were rare during Pamela Bolnick’s childhood. She repeatedly witnessed her father beat her mother, a Venezuelan immigrant diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bolnick’s mom eventually left her abusive spouse, fleeing to the Bay Area with her two kids. When she stopped taking her medication, the county child welfare department stepped in and placed six-year-old Bolnick and her younger brother in foster care. Her mother resumed treatment for her mental illness, and for two short years, retained custody of her children. After another relapse, Bolnick and her sibling were permanently removed from their home.
Bolnick was placed with her godparents in Richmond, Calif., an East Bay city then known for its notoriously high murder rates. Toughened by her childhood, she excelled at El Cerrito High School, impressing teachers in her Advanced Placement classes and filling her schedule with softball games and dance rehearsals. By senior year, however, she felt her foster family was pressuring her to move on. “All this time, I looked at them as being my own family. I did everything that you’d expect of a child, going to school, not getting into trouble, applying to college,” Bolnick says. “I came to see it as a business transaction: them being paid [by the government] for taking care of me, and me getting the benefit of being a child in their custody.” Disgusted, she left and spent the summer living at friend’s house. Shortly afterwards, she enrolled at Holy Names University in nearby Oakland Hills.
Alone for the first time, juggling 19 credits of core classes and a full-time job overwhelmed Bolnick. Short on time and seared by her past relationships, she distanced herself from others. “I almost grew to believe that I could be this Superwoman figure,” she recalls. “It burned me out completely. I didn’t have time to enjoy my first year of college, a time that’s supposed to be so liberating. I had finally reached the only thing my mother wanted me to do, and it made me so sad knowing I wasn’t happy.” Bolnick dropped out. Her foster parents refused to take her back, and without a permanent place to go, she couch-surfed at friends’ dorms.
The foster care system is one of America’s most troublesome institutions: chronically underfunded and largely uninformed and unsuccessful at raising children much better than the parents from whom they were removed. Its primary recipients — children under the age of 18 — have no political leverage, so policy decisions are often driven by scandals. In New York City, for example, after a mother killed her daughter in 1995, thousands of kids were forcefully removed from their homes, but when troubles beset the administration in 2005, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. While the system as a whole has experienced some reforms (motivated by Victorian sensationalism, as Jill Lepore documents in The New Yorker), a subset of its population gets little attention: those who “age out” of the system.
Each year in California, several thousandyouth exit foster care immediately upon turning 21 years old. (Previously emancipated at 18, youth care was extended by a 2012 state law.) Longitudinal studies by researchers from University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children found that 24 percent of youth were homeless after exiting the system and nearly half had been incarcerated within two years. Perhaps most shockingly, 77 percent of the young women reported a pregnancy, risking another generation reentering the system.
While other children can mature gradually, relying on their parents for emotional advice or a bit of extra cash, these youth are entirely on their own. Amy Lemley, a former case manager at a group home for foster youth in Boston, remembers teenagers celebrating their 18th birthdays by stuffing their few belongings into a backpack and saying goodbye. “We kind of looked the other way and pretended that it was going to work out, but we knew that it wasn’t,” she says. Recognizing that these kids needed help transitioning into adulthood, Lemley enrolled in a public policy graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, and with her classmate and “kindred spirit” Deanne Pearn, the women founded an organization in 1999 to provide that support.
Headquartered in Oakland, Calif., First Place for Youth provides emancipated youth in five Bay Area counties and Los Angeles with their very first apartment, covering both the security deposit and the monthly rental fees. Last year, 464 youth moved into these residences. Most stay in the program for around 18 months; some kids drop in for 30 days, while others stay for three years, current First Place for Youth CEO Sam Cobbs says. Before exiting, the organization assists the young adults meet four main goals: find stable employment, locate housing that matches their income, complete two semesters of community college or a certificate program and, finally, achieve “healthy living,” which means avoiding arrests, unintended pregnancies and substance abuse.
First Place for Youth CEO Sam Cobb.
The program’s scope wasn’t always so large. The way Lemley originally envisioned it, housing would be enough. But after realizing that some First Place participants couldn’t read, she quickly pivoted, including educational and career services as well. Targeting a group that’s significantly behind their peers, First Place’s goals are modest. “I can tell you, we don’t have anybody at Goldman Sachs,” Claudia Miller, the group’s spokeswoman says. Instead, it aims for participants to land jobs that provide a livable wage, like a paralegal, nurse or solar panel installer. A full 86 percent obtain employment, and 91 percent attend college. (The program did not provide numbers on how many complete their education.)
“This program is not a handout; it is a hand up,” Cobbs says. “What we’re doing is trying to help you understand and make choices so that you can provide for yourself. You have to meet us, if not halfway, at least 30 percent, and invest in your own future. Which I think is one of the reasons it’s such a big success: it depends on them.”
Bolnick heard about First Place for Youth through a college counselor, who advised her that the program could provide her with the financial and emotional support she needed. Feeling like she was “working to live each day,” Bolnick initially signed up for just classes. But after dropping out of Holy Names University, experiencing a brief period of homelessness and crashing with friends for a bit, she moved into housing provided by First Place.
The transition wasn’t always easy. Like in her dorm room, she shared the space (a two-bedroom apartment in San Leandro, Calif.) with another teenager, this time a foster youth who’d faced her own hardships. At first, the pair bonded, but soon Bolnick felt that her roommate began to shirk responsibilities, hanging around at home and smoking pot and cigarettes, even after she found out she was pregnant. “It literally put a flash of light in front of me, knowing there are kids out there who don’t even want to make a difference in their life,” she says. The environment became so tense that Bolnick couldn’t take it anymore and had to move to another apartment. There, Bolnick found another First Place participant who became like “a little sister to me.”
It’s a result that can’t be quantified, but Bolnick says First Place provided a community that understood her. After losing both parents (her father left the picture when the family moved to California, and her mother committed suicide) and then feeling betrayed by her foster family, Bolnick learned to distance herself from those closest to her. Before getting to First Place, she didn’t express any emotions related to her upbringing. She couldn’t tell her little brother how scared she was for fear of traumatizing him, and she kept her biological parents a secret through high school so that her friends wouldn’t pity her. Getting to know other emancipated youth at First Place helped her, Bolnick says, not because they necessarily knew the specifics of her story, but because each of them had a similar experience to share. Up until her early 20s, she says she never knew what it was like to cry. When asked what the rush of emotions feels like now, Bolnick says simply, “I appreciate it.”
Foster youth “have completely normal behavior,” Cobbs says, “and what I mean by that is, if you are moved nine times, then you probably wouldn’t establish relationships really quickly. It is normal behavior to protect yourself from building intimate relationships, because every time you get attached, you get hurt. It’s abnormal not to do that.”
Pamela Bolnick in her current apartment.
Today, Bolnick pays for her own apartmentnear Oakland, where she bikes and reads by Lake Merritt. She’s working full-time as an assistant manager for a high-end fashion company, and she’s saved enough money to take a two-week trip to Venezuela to meet her mother’s family. Within the next year, she plans to complete her last semester of community college and apply to U.C. Berkeley, where she’s planning to major in biophysics (the next step towards her goal of practicing pediatric neurosurgery) and minor in sociology (a way to understand where she’s been and what she’s faced). She spoke to NationSwell, she confessed, partially because she wanted to hear more about the neighborhood around New York University in downtown Manhattan where she plans to go to medical school. But she also mentioned she wanted to talk because she feels she has an important story to share — one that has a brighter ending than her mother’s.
Why was Bolnick able to beat the odds? Some of the latest scientific research on trauma might call it grit or resilience — an inborn ability to overcome. In her words, “I think it has to do with seeing the light behind all the blockages that get in the way. It takes a lot mentally,” she explains. “If I keep telling myself I am a foster kid, I am a Latina woman, I live in Richmond and all of my friends are doing the same things that people expect me to do, I should just as easily do that. But I never once had that thought at all. I just wanted to make the best of what I had.” Bolnick also credits First Place for Youth for providing her with the network she needed to halt a situation that was spiraling out of control. She says the nonprofit gave her “stability, stability, stability.”
With results like that, Cobbs wants to see the model expand across the country, whether it’s run by his organization or a partner. He acknowledges specific benefits — support for transitional housing in Sacramento and a top-notch community college system statewide — that make the model work in California, but he also points to challenges, including the Golden State’s high cost of living and the fact that it is the largest foster care system in the country (largely because it hasn’t been as aggressive in returning kids to their homes, even if conditions improve, and because a flood of orphaned immigrant children keep adding to the total, he says). If replicated in just 10 more cities nationwide, Cobbs says that about 70 percent of America’s foster youth could have another option available to them.
Before Lemley founded First Place for Youth, the safety net for America’s foster youth abruptly disappeared at age 18, abandoning these vulnerable children at the most critical moment. First Place for Youth lengthens and stabilizes that transition to adulthood. Homelessness and jail-time are no longer mandatory chapters in stories about foster care. With the organization’s work, emancipated youth finally have a home to call their own.
In a sunlit office building in northwest Austin, Texas, former Marine Corps electro-optical technician Logan Razinski greets his boss, a one-time sailor who maintained naval nuclear reactors. The day’s work ahead between the two soldiers won’t involve military operations, however. Both are now employees for SunPower, a solar energy company.
Razinski, a lance corporal (not “one of those movie star ranks”) who was previously stationed at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, found the job through a Department of Energy-sponsored program, Solar Ready Vets (SRV), which prepares former service members to work in the solar energy industry. Living in California, where utilities will get one-third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, Razinski saw the field “growing like wildfire” and joined SRV’s first cohort. After receiving four weeks of intensive training (since expanded to six) covering photovoltaic panel installation, electrical grids and local building codes, Razinski interviewed and landed a job with SunPower, where he now remotely controls utility-scale arrays.
“There is still an alarming mix of veterans, who, as soon as they get out, look for work or try the college thing, and, for some reason, that doesn’t work out. Next thing, you know, they’re living on the street,“ Razinski says. Nationwide, in 2014, close to 50,000 vets lacked housing, and 573,000 lacked jobs. With SRV, “I went from somebody who was in the Marine Corps to being a far cry from the poverty line,” he adds. Transitioning veterans at Fort Carson in Colorado receive hands-on experience working with solar panels as members of the base’s first Solar Ready Vets cohort.
So far, Solar Ready Vets has trained nearly 200 soldiers at five pilot bases: Camp Pendleton, Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Fort Carson in Colorado, Fort Drum in New York and Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.
While the connection between military service and solar power might seem tenuous, Razinski says it’s about transitioning workers with proven leadership skills into industries that need talent now. As the solar industry adds new jobs 12 times faster than the overall economy, America’s veterans are a natural fit for various positions. “In an industry that’s growing as rapidly as the solar industry, you need somebody to actually be promotable. You need somebody who’s going to understand the magnitude of the situation and say, ‘Holy cow, this is growing faster than anybody anticipated,’” he says.
“This is definitely a path that I believe in,” Razinski adds. “I see it going nowhere but up.” MORE:Going Solar Is Cheaper Than Ever. Here’s What You Need to Know About Getting Your Power from the Sun
Learn Different, The New Yorker Brooklyn’s AltSchool is just one of seven “educational ecosystems” (there’s six in the Bay Area as well) that uses technology to create a personalized learning experience for each individual student. The brainchild of Max Ventilla, an entrepreneur and former Google employee, AltSchool aims to turn education on its head: teaching skills that are applicable to the 21st century workplace instead of the memorization of facts — creating an educational model grounded in Silicon Valley values. But can be replicated in existing public schools nationwide? Can a GOP Donor Get Conservatives to Fight Climate Change?, CityLab What can get politicians to put partisan bickering aside? North Carolina businessman Jay Faison is bringing congressional candidates from both sides of the aisle together to support clean energy initiatives, arguing that these policies (which are notoriously used to drive a wedge between the left and the right) increase jobs and energy independence, while also reducing carbon pollution. Government Goes Agile, Stanford Social Innovation Review Bringing the federal government into the digital age doesn’t have to increase the deficit — or be as disastrous as the rollout of HealthCare.gov. Implementing the commonly-used tech practice of agile development, groups like the United States Digital Services and 18F are giving citizens frustration-free, web-based opportunities to interact with their government for a fraction of the cost.
General Jeff Page walked under the crooked backboard and onto the dusty concrete floor. The basketball court, one of two in downtown Los Angeles’s Gladys Park, seemed like it had once been painted green, now dulled to gray, marred by dirt and grime. General Jeff couldn’t find any basketballs, only deflated rubber kickballs that plopped onto the ground when he tried to dribble. Nearby, cardboard boxes and tents surrounded 40 single-room occupancy hotels and a couple of nonprofit missions. None of the squalor came as any surprise to General Jeff, who, in August 2006, was a brand-new arrival to Skid Row, an area that consists of 50 blocks and is home to a sizable chunk of the county’s 44,000 homeless residents, many of whom are black males struggling with substance abuse, mental illness and trauma. Compacted into one district that borders a resurgent downtown, Skid Row contains the largest concentration of unsheltered people in America.
Skid Row, in downtown Los Angeles, has the city’s largest concentration of homeless people who regularly live on the sidewalks in tents and cardboard boxes.
As General Jeff, an experienced basketball player, nailed jump shots (and retrieved bounceless rebounds under the basket), homeless guys sprawled under the shady queen palms and California sycamores, dodging the heat. When he took a break, a squat, elderly man waved him over. General Jeff thought he knew the guy — an old-timer, Manuel Benito Compito, known as “O.G. Man” on the streets. From beneath O.G.’s graying mustache came a gravelly voice: “Hey, man, I want you to help me start this basketball league.” General Jeff swiveled, looking for eager players. But the vagrant men on the sidelines were mostly gabbing or shuffling through their stuff. “I’ve only been on Skid Row a few months,” he explained. “I’m not sure I want to be involved,” he said and left.
After more pestering, General Jeff (whose name, he says, refers to his willingness to tackle any problem, like high-ranking military commanders do)gave into O.G.’s request. Over the course of a decade, he’d take on many more projects in the community: fixing streetlights, cleaning up trash, painting murals, setting up chess clubs and art collectives and fighting for a seat on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. People started calling him the unofficial mayor of Skid Row. Jeff on the basketball court at Gladys Park.
From that shoddy basketball court, he and O.G. launched the Positive Movement, a paradigm shift asking Skid Row residents to reclaim their section of the city as a functioning neighborhood, rather than a containment zone. By offering more activities, the Positive Movement provides alternatives to drugs and other undesirable activities. In the process, as residents help themselves, the movement undoes the negative images of substance abuse that have tainted the area. As part of the initiative, next spring, Skid Row residents will ask their fellow downtown citizens to recognize the neighborhood as its own space. With this change in status, citizens would be able to make planning and land use decisions (such as preserving low-income housing from developers, advising city leaders on public transportation and policing and distributing a small coffer of funds for community projects). If downtown residents approve the change, the vote would mark the first time the city has recognized Skid Row as a unique neighborhood, rather than its unofficial status as a dumping ground for lost souls that don’t belong elsewhere in the City of Angels.
“As human beings, we adapt to our environment. And if the environment is completely negative, we’re going to adapt to that…When we talk about Skid Row, when we hear about it on paper, we think of it as a place of rehabilitation, just like a hospital where a human body can heal. But when you think of Skid Row and a hospital, you get two different visuals,” Gen. Jeff says. “As soon as you go into a hospital, the human subconscious, the mind will allow itself to heal. There’s a different smell, a sense of energy, sanitized rooms and walls. You go to Skid Row, and you say, ‘Oh no.’ This is dirty, this isn’t healthy, this isn’t good. It’s hard to heal and truly, naturally rehabilitate on Skid Row.”
Which is why General Jeff set out to change that feeling from the inside out. This memorial tree was planted in memory of Barbara Brown, a homeless woman who died at the site.
General Jeff came to Skid Row from another notorious L.A. neighborhood: South Central, a place known for its race riots and gang violence. A rap producer who once worked with Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg, “writing, producing, mixing, rapping, deejaying, pop, lock and dancing,” General Jeff says. “You name it, I’ve done it.” After traveling the world, he returned to South Central to organize community members to end gun violence, but ran into difficulties getting them to the table and gave up hope. When the bills started to mount, he gave up his place, stuffed a wad of cash in his sock and started sleeping on the street, finding shelter in warehouses and cooking food with heat lamps. When he moved to Skid Row, he carried two suitcases: one full of clothes, the other containing a drum set — his last tie to his former life. “I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t know why I am here. There’s no blueprint or degree or beacon of light,” he recalls. “The drum machine, that was reality.” He spent a few nights in the park, then at a mission (where men sleep in gigantic dorms with no privacy), before ending up in a single occupancy room (a type of housing for low-income individuals, where, to save on rent, they live alone in a tiny residence, often with a shared kitchen or bathroom)in one of the district’s many hotels, and meeting O.G. in Gladys Park. General Jeff believes that the negativity of Skid Row can make it hard for residents to rehabilitate themselves, which is why he created the Positive Movement.
After the Vietnam War, servicemen flooded downtown, taking up residence in Skid Row’s dilapidated hotels and using cheap liquor and drugs to obliterate the memories of battle. From that point on, through the crack epidemic in the 1990s, chronic homelessness on Skid Row has been associated with substance abuse and recovery. A 1970 book, “Stations of the Lost: The Treatment of Skid Row Alcoholics,” found that most of the neighborhood’s homeless only spent one-third of the year without a roof over their heads; the rest of the time, they shuffled through jails, mental hospitals, rehab and the missions, before landing back on the streets. Forty-five years later, not much has changed, says O.G. “You go to Union Rescue Mission and spend some nights there. You relapse, then you go to the L.A. Mission. You relapse, then the Midnight Mission. You keep going next door,” he explains. That cycle reveals itself in L.A.’s extremely high percentage of chronically homeless individuals. About 15 percent of all the city’s unsheltered have been on the streets for more than a year or several times over three years. While there’s no data available on why this population remains homeless, it can be assumed that drugs and alcohol continue to play a role.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” one homeless woman from Las Vegas tells the L.A. Times in 2005, when three people died of an overdose on the same day. “People getting high on the streets like it was legal.”
In Skid Row especially, temptation is always around the corner. Most of the shelters let men out of the large dorms at 5 a.m., and some prevent them from reentering until the evening intake. With few constructive activities in the area, grabbing a beer might suddenly sound like an attractive way to pass the time during non-work hours. Add to that the armies of drug dealers and liquor store owners who profit at users’ expense. (One infamous profiteer, Recondal “Ricky” Wesco, is said to set up his beer cart outside rehab centers and hawk tall boys for just $2, undeterred by more than 50 arrests.) General Jeff feels that the infrastructure of Skid Row itself is designed for people to fail — making the Positive Movement’s “outlets” like basketball, chess, visual and dramatic arts so crucial to the neighborhood; they provide a better way for residents to occupy their time. General Jeff helped get the mural in the background installed on Skid Row’s San Julian Street.
But as soon as these groups got off the ground, the basketball players asked for whistles, scoreboards and uniforms, and the photography club wondered if they could afford an extra camera. General Jeff realized he would need sustained funding to keep them around. Across Los Angeles, 96 elected neighborhood councils, which can range from seven to 30 members per board, are each allocated $42,000 by EmpowerLA, a city-funded umbrella organization, for discretionary use. General Jeff heard that the education committee of the council that oversees Skid Row — the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC, pronounced “dee-link”) — would be willing to help fund the Positive Movement’s operations, so he simply added an educational component to the basketball league. (The team would discuss various concepts, like teamwork, family, and punctuality before tip-off.) Pretty soon, the team sported jerseys emblazoned with “Skid Row Streetball League,” and the camera club had 10 new digital cameras and an exhibition timed with the Downtown Art Walk.
When General Jeff returned to DLANC a few weeks later to thank the council for the funds, a board member asked why the name “Skid Row” was printed on the jerseys. The elected official was ashamed of the name, painting it as a blight on downtown, General Jeff recalls of the tense meeting. Stating that players were proud to wear their community’s name on their chests, General Jeff argued that if Skid Row didn’t own up to its reputation, it would be easy for the rest of the city to forget about the homeless. After all, he’d seen it happen before. In 2003, “South Central” was renamed “South Los Angeles.” The rebranding effort scrubbed away the images of gang violence associated with the name — a boon to developers hoping for growth but a blow to activists wanting to launch a public relations campaign highlighting old issues that persisted onto the new map. After the meeting ended, General Jeff found out the angry board member was, in fact, his representative for “Central City East,” the preferred name for Skid Row among developers and bureaucrats. General Jeff had never considered a career in politics before, but wanting the person off DLANC, General Jeff ran against him and won in a landslide in 2008, capturing more than half the votes in a four-way race.
From his new position, General Jeff highlighted his neighbors’ concerns. Unlike elsewhere, city maintenance rarely happened in Skid Row. Streetlights burnt out (or were shattered by drug dealers seeking a cover of darkness) and weren’t replaced. Garbage and feces littered the gutters because trash cans and public restrooms in the area were limited out of concern they would become sites for drug use or trafficking. Along with O.G., General Jeff started a cleaning force to pick up trash and made a map of broken streetlights. His most significant battle on DLANC erupted in 2014, when a nonprofit developer wanted to bring in a restaurant with a liquor license on the ground floor of a permanent supportive housing unit that hosts recovery programs and addict support groups. DLANC board members, worried about the impact of pouring drinks around residents with histories of substance abuse and the steady encroachment of gentrification into the area’s borders, fought back. The Skid Row community largely won the fight, but General Jeff lost any goodwill with downtown business owners in the process.
All of General Jeff’s work of the past 10 years started to unravel last spring. He lost his post on DLANC to a newcomer, and he seemed disillusioned with the system. After homeless counts of Skid Row residents hovering roughly around 39,000 for several years, the numbers suddenly spiked to 44,359 people. Charities and public services strained to meet the need, but with no new housing lined up, a long-term solution wasn’t readily available.
Meanwhile, police relations, historically turbulent, frayed even further as law enforcement continued to crack down on residents. Since the launch of the Safer Cities Initiative in September 2006 (the program piloted in 2005), cops had begun to break up sidewalk encampments and issue tickets for minor infractions. Based on former police chief Bill Bratton’s theory of “broken windows,” (combating minor quality-of-life crimes like vandalism or public drinking as a way to keep order in urban areas and deter more serious crimes) law enforcement wrote 1,000 citations for jaywalking and loitering every month during the program’s first year, according to an independent UCLA study. (General Jeff has been arrested for loitering in 2013, but successfully fought the case at trial and avoided a conviction. A related charge of resisting arrest, however, resulted in a sentence of 20 days of community service.) Tensions came to a head in March 2015 when police approached Charly Leundeu Keunang, a 43-year-old Cameroonian national living on Skid Row, known to his friends as “Africa,” and tried to take him into custody for a suspected robbery. Keunang, mentally ill and high on methat the time, reached for the gun in an officer’s holster. After a brief scuffle, six shots were fired, hitting Keunang in the chest, torso and left arm. Bystanders captured his death on camera, and it was viewed millions of times on Facebook. Skid Row might have looked safer to outsiders, but it didn’t feel that way to its residents. A memorial in the spot where Charly Leundeu Keunang was shot and killed.
Skid Row citizens have a different set of priorities for day-to-day life, where staying sober or getting to work is an accomplishment, says John Malpede, an artist who started “the other LAPD,” the Los Angeles Poverty Department, an arts group for those who live or work in Skid Row, 30 years ago. “We’re the biggest recovery community anywhere. Skid Row is a resource for not only all of Los Angeles, but also for all of Southern California. It’s a place where there are services and an understanding and a long-term community that suits the needs of people who are suffering from all kinds of disabilities and traumas, whether it be domestic abuse or wars or addiction,” says Malpede, who came to Skid Row to work at a free legal clinic and began offering art workshops when the lawyers weren’t around. “We’re tarred and feathered on a daily basis. They always say there’s drugs and alcohol on Skid Row. Well, there is everywhere, and it’s also true that there are 80 recovery meetings run by community members every week. It’s a very sophisticated recovery culture.”
General Jeff decided to solidify that ethos by creating Skid Row’s own neighborhood council. Through it, Skid Row residents could fight developers to preserve the $365 median rents in the area and other low-income housing, prevent businesses from acquiring liquor licenses and fund community programs. In formation meetings chaired by General Jeff, residents have been discussing the board’s ideal structure. They’ll submit a formal application to break away from DLANC in October, and then start campaigning for the special election that could happen as early as spring 2017. There’s one main issue standing in the neighborhood’s way: a previous requirement that each council must oversee a minimum of 20,000 residents; the Skid Row zip code, according to city data, was just 8,096. Stephen Box, a spokesperson for EmpowerLA, confirmed that the average neighborhood council serves 40,000 residents. But he also pointed out that councils represent communities that greatly differ in size, from the massive 103,364 people served by Wilshire Center-Koreatown’s group to the tiny 7,323 residents in Elysian Valley Riverside. “We’re getting up and doing something positive for ourselves. We’re not waiting for a handout or even a hand up,” says General Jeff.
“Historically, going back to stereotypes, they’re all drunks bums and addicts. They’re all panhandlers. They don’t contribute anything productive to society. ‘Why don’t you get up and do a job? Why don’t you do something?’” General Jeff squeaks in a high-pitched voice, imitating his critics talk about Skid Row community members. “Let me tell you, that’s what we’re doing,” he says. “We’re getting up and doing something positive for ourselves. We’re not waiting for a handout or even a hand up. We feel that we have something to contribute. We want to add our voice to the conversation that dictates our future.”
Come election season, General Jeff and his neighbors will see whether the rest of downtown is willing to let them assume decision-making power — or whether the poor of Los Angeles will continue to be voiceless.
Berkeley Votes to Boost Co-op Economy in the Face of Gentrification, YES! Magazine The co-op already thrives in Northern California. But in an effort to keep locals in the area (which has an extremely high cost of living), the city council in Berkeley, Calif., is throwing even more support behind the model. Similar to initiatives already passed in New York City; Madison, Wisc.; Cleveland; and Richmond, Calif.; Berkeley’s move provides tax incentives, support for worker-owners and financial aid to small businesses — making it easier for co-ops to become powerful job generators. The Miracle of Minneapolis, The Atlantic The Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., metro area has a higher median household income than New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago. Despite the Twin Cities’ wealth, affordable housing remains in reach for most residents. Unusual plans that encourage rich neighborhoods to share tax revenue with middle class and low-income residents — a move referred to as “fiscal equalization” — means that the American Dream is alive and thriving in Minnesota. Giving Students What They Really Need, Bright No matter how good a school is, a child’s learning suffers when he or she is subjected to chronic stress. But schools often add to or ignore kids’ anxiety and tension, instead of teaching tips and strategies to diffuse it. Turnaround for Children* is teaching social-emotional skills, such as stress management and self-regulation, in the classroom, enabling all kids (namely low-income ones and those that suffer from abuse or neglect) to be high achievers in an academic setting. *Editors’ note: Pamela Cantor, founder of Turnaround for Children, is a NationSwell Council member.
