Robin Dickinson was working as a physician in Denver while her husband looked after their two young children when she suffered two strokes. Unable to work because of the resulting dizziness and fatigue, Dickinson lived off savings while her husband took care of her and the kids. Their money dwindled to the point where they could only afford potatoes, oatmeal and rice. Then Dickinson realized her family qualified for food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
“There’s a safety net there for a reason. It’s for people in our situation,” she told Mary Jo Brooks of the PBS News Hour. “It has nothing to do with your education. It has nothing to do with how good a person you are or how hard you work. It has everything to do with your financial situation. And our financial situation was really bad.” Dickinson’s kids cheered when they were able to purchase fruits and vegetables for the first time in weeks with the help of SNAP.
As she recovered, Dickinson became determined to change people’s perceptions about the sort of people who rely on SNAP. She joined Hunger Free Colorado‘s photography program. The non-profit gave cameras to people receiving food assistance, and mounted an exhibit of their photos called “Hunger Through My Lens” at the Colorado State Capitol. Now Dickinson has a goal of working her way off public assistance within a year, and has started her own family practice to serve the poor. She can only work a few hours at a time, but she told Brooks, “We have a five-year goal of building my own building in order to have more services offered for my patients at affordable prices. And I have big plans.”
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Can a New Approach to Treating Vets Keep Them Off the Streets for Good?
This week the Department of Veterans Affairs opened a new residential treatment center in San Diego, designed to help veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are in danger of slipping into homelessness. The Aspire Center has rooms for 34 men and 6 women, and is unique in its focus on only veterans from these two wars. Directors of the Aspire Center hope that grouping together veterans of similar ages who’ve had similar experiences will produce better results.
The Aspire Center’s 28 staff members will offer vets therapy for PTSD, treatment for substance abuse, and occupational counseling. These types of services proved to be life-saving for Kris Warren, an Iraq Marine veteran who sought help from the VA in Los Angeles and after counseling was able to reunite with his family. Warren will be on staff as a social services assistant at The Aspire Center. “I know what it’s like to walk up those stairs, prideful, and ask for help,” he told Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times.
The VA plans to open four more such residential facilities over the next two years in Atlanta, Denver, Philadelphia, and West Palm Beach, Fla. They will serve veterans of all ages, but if studies prove an advantage of grouping veterans with similar experiences together, the VA may expand the San Diego approach in the future. An estimated 286 veterans in San Diego are homeless or at risk for becoming homeless, and VA officials will be watching that number and the veterans who stay at The Aspire Center closely to determine if this approach can make a difference. So will Kris Warren. “Where they go, I’ll go,” he told Perry.
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This Photographer Is on a Mission to Make People Rethink What Makes a Woman Successful
Denver photographer Suzanne Heintz, a self-described “spinster,” hauls mannequins all over the world to pose in self-portraits that she hopes will have people rethinking how they view single women.
Heintz was tired of people asking whether she was going to ever get married and have kids, according to Jenna Garrett of Feature Shoot. In her ongoing project “Life Once Removed,” Heintz depicts herself with an ecstatic smile enjoying a cup of coffee in a café with her second-hand mannequin husband, standing with him and a mannequin daughter in front of the Eiffel Tower, delirious with joy, serving them Christmas dinner, and hauling them on a toboggan up a mountain.
Heintz told Garrett, “For women, the path to fulfillment is not through one thing, it’s all things—education, career, home, family, accomplishment, enlightenment. If any one of those things is left out, it’s often perceived that there’s something wrong with your life. We are somehow never enough just as we are. We are constantly set up by our expectations to feel as though we are missing something.”
“I’m simply trying to get people to open up their minds and quit clinging to antiquated notions of what a successful life looks like,” she said. And her photos just might do that, while giving everyone a laugh.
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When This Armless Paralympian Couldn’t Feed His Family, He Took Up a Hobby That Changed His Life
Matt Stutzman was born without his arms, but like most kids growing up in rural Fairfield, Iowa, he learned to drive early, and he told Tom McGhee of the Denver Post, “The only accident I was in was when they hit me because they were staring at my feet.” The silver medal-winning Paralympic archer was in Denver last week, telling his inspirational story to disabled people at the Laradon School.
Stutzman had always been an athlete, growing up playing soccer, football, and basketball, as well as hunting. But he didn’t start the sport that would make him well-known until 2010, when he couldn’t find a job, and didn’t know how he was going to feed his wife and kids. It wasn’t the right season to hunt deer with a rifle, but bowhunting was allowed, so his father bought him a bow, and soon he was able to bring home venison for his family.
From the first time Stutzman competed against archers with both arms, he excelled, and a company offered to buy him a bow and become his sponsor. Stutzman sold his old bow to support his family, and used the new one to practice eight hours a day. The sport took him to the Paralympics in London in 2012, where he won the silver medal in archery, losing by a few points to a Jere Forsberg, a wheelchair-bound competitor from Finland.
One of the students Stutzman spoke to, Bryttney Lint, told Tom McGhee, “He touched my heart, he changed my perspective.”
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How One Veteran Discovered the Healing Power of Art and Made it His Mission to Share With Others
Denver’s Curtis Bean is an Army veteran who’s finally found his footing in civilian life through art. He enlisted at age 17, served two tours in Iraq as a sniper, and returned home haunted by the memory of a roadside bomb explosion that killed four friends. When those past traumas interfered with his personal life, he enrolled in the Denver VA Medical Center’s program for PTSD, where, he told Kasey Cordell of 5280, “I realized how therapeutic art was for me.” He told Jeremy Hubbard of Fox 31 Denver, “It’s very relaxing, and it helps me get the things that I have in my head out on paper, and hopefully out of my head for good.”
Bean, now 28, is a fine arts student at the University of Colorado in Denver, and runs a program for veterans called the Art of War Project. He offers free art classes for veterans at Hope Tank in Denver, and helped the VA introduce a regular art therapy program, in which he teaches once a week. Bean funds all the art supplies himself through donations and sales of Art of War t-shirts and hats.
Stacey Carroll, a nurse in the Denver VA Medical Center’s PTSD program, told Cordell, “It’s Curtis’ way of paying it forward and he has mad a great impact. The connection he gets—it’s like no other.”
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A Guidance Counselor Told Her Daughter Not to Bother Applying for College Scholarships. What She Did Next Will Inspire You
Pensal McCray wasn’t the kind of woman to back down. So when the guidance counselor at her daughter’s Denver high school told her the honor student wasn’t eligible for any scholarships, McCray refused to believe there was no one out there who wanted to help.
In 1983 she and her husband Christophe started the Ethnic College Counseling Center to serve as an alternative source for guidance for minority teenagers. Since then, the center has helped 3,000 youths attend college. The ECCC offers tutoring, mentoring, scholarship help, and tours of colleges. McCray, who died January 17 at age 71 while organizing a tour of historical black colleges, is being remembered as “a giant among giants,” civil rights attorney Anne Sulton told Joanne Davidson of the Denver Post.
McCray’s daughter not only went to college, but earned her Ph.D. in Urban Technological and Environmental Planning from the University of Michigan, served as Fulbright Scholar at the Glasgow Urban Lab in Scotland, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin. “Our mother lived a very full life,” she told Davidson. “And she died doing what she loved to do. You just can’t ask for anything better than that.”
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This Teacher’s Selfless Act Saved a Student’s Life
Many teachers are inspirations to their students, but it’s not every day that one truly saves a life. When Jen Sculley, a physical education teacher at Denver’s East High School, heard that one of her students was suffering from kidney disease, she immediately knew she wanted to help. “As she was telling me, this very clear voice said, ‘You’re going to give her a kidney,’” Sculley told Denver’s CBS4. Luckily, Sculley was a perfect match, and not just medically. Sculley says that the student in need — who wishes to remain anonymous — shared a name with her beloved aunt, who had passed away from cancer a year ago. She feels that her kidney donation was simply meant to be. “Through her I get to pass on the memory of my aunt, and that’s amazing.” The transplant took place on January 15, and Sculley will be on one month of medical leave before returning to school, minus a kidney, but with a heart full of kindness.
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Soda Cans and Computer Fans Are Keeping Poor Denver Families Warm
Aaron Brown, a mechanical engineering professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver, has volunteered in poverty-stricken areas around the world. But now he’s using his expertise to help low-income families in his home city. Brown and his students are building solar-powered furnaces with simple components, including soda cans and computer fans, and installing them in the homes of low-income families in Denver. The devices work by drawing on heat stored in sun-warmed aluminum cans, and run on just two cents of electricity per day. When Brown first started the project at the University of Colorado in Boulder, students came up with a design that cost $60 to build. He challenged his next group of students at Metro in Denver to further reduce the cost, and they succeeded, designing units that could be built for $30 a piece. The furnaces are capable of saving families $30 a month on their heating bills. The students get something out of it too. “There was a little boy who was going to be sleeping there. He was going, ‘I’m going to be so warm tonight,'” Richard Anderson, a Metro State senior, told the Denver Post. “That was just so cool — it’s really exceeded my expectations.”
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This Dad Went to Heroic Lengths to Help His Disabled Sons Finish College
Brian Horan’s three sons were born with Duchenne, a severe form of muscular dystrophy that is often fatal by age 25. But rather than give in to despair, Horan, 47, set about building a future for his boys, including a college education. When they entered university, Horan quit his job as an auto mechanic in Colorado to become a full-time caretaker and help his wheelchair-bound sons navigate the campus of Metropolitan State University in Denver. To pass the time while his sons took classes, Horan enrolled too, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering last month. After Horan’s two younger sons graduate next spring, he plans to help them move out on their own, with the support of Band of Brothers, a group for people with muscular dystrophy the Horans recently founded. “There are parents out there in situations like ours who worry about their kids to the point where they don’t let them or want them to experience life,” Horan told Anthony Cotton of the Denver Post. “We’re trying to push our kids to do as much as they can.”
You Won’t Believe How Much This Record-Setting 85-Year-Old Veteran Has Given Back
The first time Bill Cell, 85, donated blood was in 1946. Back then, phlebotomists thanked him for his donation with a shot of bourbon and $25. But even when the liquor-and-cash incentives dried up, Cell continued to donate. “They’ll tell me what my blood went for, like a cancer patient or an accident victim,” Cell told the Denver Post, explaining why he continues to give as much as he does. “I have met a couple of people who needed it.”
Starting in 1969, Bonfils Blood Center in Denver, where Cell makes his donations, began logging how much people contributed. This week, Cell set the record for the center, having donated 85 gallons of A+ blood since the center began keeping track. He beats the next highest donor by 15 gallons, and he has no plans to quit anytime soon. Since 1990, he’s given a pint of blood at least once every two weeks — a rate that the center’s supervisor notes is possible for most healthy adults. And, yet, only about 4% of Americans give blood, with donations dropping off during the holidays. So if you’re looking for an easy way to make a potentially life-saving difference in another person’s life, now’s the time.