Want Power? Fire Up the Tomatoes and Potatoes, National Geographic
In Florida, scientists discovered that the tomato can be transformed from a lycopene storehouse into an electrical powerhouse. Considering that the annual surplus in South Florida could power Disney World for three months, is a new type of utility — one that’s fueled by food waste — in the state’s future?
How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood, Politico
Simply put, in 2009, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was the nation’s worst. When city government couldn’t provide a lifeline to the downtrodden area, a nonprofit private development company stepped in. Now, in just seven short years, the community is experiencing a blossoming transformation.
New California Law Could Keep Guns Away from People Like Omar Mateen, Reveal
After a mass shooting tragedy in 2014, the Golden State proved that it’s possible to pass sensible gun legislation. Its gun violence restraining order can prevent someone from purchasing or possessing a firearm for 21 days if law enforcement or a family member is worried they’ll turn violent.
MORE: The Surprising Second Life of Urine
Tag: Florida
Will Cars of the Future Run on Algae?
Algae, the photosynthetic organisms that float at the ocean’s surface, already produce roughly three quarters of the planet’s oxygen. But one group of scientists think these simple cells could do even more to clean the atmosphere.
Algenol, a Florida-based biotech company founded in 2006, has patented a way for the blue-green, single-celled organisms to produce four key fuels — ethanol, gasoline, diesel and jet fuel — all for a little under $1.30 a gallon and with two-thirds less greenhouse gas emissions.
While it may sound strange to think of pulling up to a gas station to buy algae, supporters point out that’s what drivers are already doing: crude oil pumped from underground is often derived from algae that settled on the seafloor eons ago and decayed into a waxy substance known as kerogen. When heated by pressure, kerogen liquifies into either oil or natural gas. Essentially, Algenol has condensed the timeline, creating the biofuels at their four-acre plant, rather than waiting for them to be drilled out of the crust.
In broad strokes, Algenol’s technology looks similar to what many biofuel companies already do to ferment sugars from corn, soybeans or animal fats into fuels like ethanol. But its method requires no farmland or freshwater. Instead, Algenol’s algae hangs in bags of seawater and is exposed to the Florida sunshine and carbon-dioxide to produce the sugars required for ethanol directly. That’s where the science gets tricky: by adding enzymes, the process enhances algae’s fermentation, so that it devotes its energy to producing sugar for fuel rather than its own maintenance and survival. After that, the spent “green crude” by-product is further refined into other fuels. The company boasts that the process is far more efficient than anything farm-raised, converting more than 85 percent of its inputs into fuel.
It’s an impressive scientific achievement, but Algenol’s financials face strong headwinds. A recent glut of oil from worldwide markets caused a steep drop in prices at the pump, creating obstacles to market penetration and slowing emergent technologies. And major support from the federal government, in the form of grants, loans and tax credits, largely expired in 2011. In late October, the company announced a 20 percent reduction in the workforce and the Algenol’s founder, Paul Woods, stepped down.
While cheap gas may be a boon to consumers’ pocketbooks now, eventually we will all have to pay the steep price for its pollution. It’s up to us to pick what kind of algae we want to keep putting in our cars.
MORE: It’s No Bull: These 400 Homes Are Powered by Cow Manure
Wrongful Conviction Spurs Texas to Reform Police Lineups, Scientist Discovers Efficient Way to Restore Coral Reefs and More
Recognition, The New Yorker
Texas has the reputation of being tough on crime and even harsher on those found guilty. For those who binged Netflix’s recent “Making a Murderer,” the tale of Tim Cole, an Army veteran who, because of incorrect eyewitness identification by the victim herself, was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault in 1986 (and died while incarcerated), will make it seem like our criminal justice system is broken. Fortunately, there is a silver lining to this tragic story.
This Village of Tiny Houses Is Giving Seattle’s Homeless a Place to Live, Fast Co. Exist
With approximately 10,000 people living on the streets, it’s an understatement to say that there’s a homelessness crisis happening in Seattle. Since affordable and free housing for the homeless is a costly endeavor, the nonprofit Low Income Housing Institute needed to get creative. Their idea? Tiny houses that can house a small family, yet cost just $2,000 to construct.
A Coral Reef Revival, The Atlantic
Helping a century’s old coral reef come back to life certainly sounds like science fiction, but it’s exactly what David Vaughan, Ph.D., is doing off the coast of south Florida. He and his team of scientists are restoring reefs by producing thousands of new pieces of coral using microfragmentation — a new process that he developed by accident.
10 Outstanding Solutions of 2015
In a year when policing controversies, mass shootings and debates over immigration have dominated the headlines and discourse, there’s a group of inspirational pioneers at work. Not all of these individuals, policy makers and entrepreneurs are household names, but they all are improving this country by developing new ways to solve America’s biggest challenges. Here, NationSwell’s favorite solutions of the year.
THE GUTSY DAD THAT STARTED A BUSINESS TO HELP HIS SON FIND PURPOSE
Eighty percent of the workers at Rising Tide Car Wash, located in Parkland, Fla., are on the autism spectrum. Started by the father-and-son team of John and Tom D’Eri, Rising Tide gives their son and brother, Andrew, who was identified as an autistic individual at the age of three, and its other employees the chance to lead a fulfilling life. John and Tom determined that the car wash industry is a good match for those with autism since they’re more likely to be engaged by detailed, repetitive processes than those not on the spectrum. [ph]
THE ALLSTARS THAT ARE TACKLING SOME OF AMERICA’S GREATEST CHALLENGES
The six NationSwell AllStars — Karen Washington, Eli Williamson, Rinku Sen, Seth Flaxman, DeVone Boggan and Amy Kaherl — are encouraging advancements in education and environmental sustainability, making government work better for its citizens, engaging people in national service, advancing the American dream and supporting our veterans. Click here to read and see how their individual projects are moving America forward. [ph]
THE INDIANA COUNTY THAT HAS DONE THE MOST TO REDUCE INCOME INEQUALITY IN AMERICA
The Midwest exurb of Boone County, Ind., has reduced the ratio of the top 20th percentile’s earnings compared to the bottom 80th percentile by 23 percent — the largest decline for any American county with more than 50,000 residents and an achievement stumped county officials. NationSwell pieced together the story of how a land battle and a statewide tax revolt altered the course of Boone County. Find out exactly how it happened here. [ph]
THE TESLA CO-FOUNDER THAT’S ELECTRIFYING GARBAGE TRUCKS
Ian Wright’s new venture, Wrightspeed, is far less glamorous than his previous venture creating luxury electric sedans. But Wrightspeed, which is installing range-extended electric powertrains (the generators that electric vehicles run on) in medium- and heavy-duty trucks for companies like the Ratto Group, Sonoma and Marin counties’ waste hauler, and shipping giant FedEx, could have a greater impact on the environment than electrifying personal vehicles. Click here to learn how. [ph]
THE ORGANIZATION THAT IS TURNING A NOTORIOUS PROJECT INTO AN URBAN VILLAGE
Los Angeles’s large, 700-unit public housing development Jordan Downs consists of 103 identical buildings. Entryways to the two-story beige structures are darkened with black soot and grime, and the doors and windows are crossed with bars. Soon, the dilapidated complex will be revitalized by Joseph Paul, Jr., and his outreach team from SHIELDS for Families, which provides counseling, education and vocational training services. Read more about the plan, which calls for recreational parks and retail on site and would double the amount of available housing with 700 more units tiered at affordable and market rates. [ph]
THE HARDWORKING GROUP THAT’S RESTORING THE SHORELINE OF AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER
Chris Pallister and his small, devoted crew are leading the largest ongoing marine cleanup effort on the planet. Since 2002, Pallister’s organization, Gulf of Alaska Keeper, has been actively cleaning beaches in Prince William Sound and the Northern Gulf Coast. The nonprofit’s five boats, seasonal crew of 12 and dozens of regular volunteers has removed an estimated 2.5 million pounds of marine debris (mostly plastic items washed ashore from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) from more than 1,500 miles of coastline. [ph]
THE STATE THAT’S ENDING HOMELESSNESS WITH ONE SIMPLE IDEA
Utah set the ambitious goal to end homelessness in 2015. As the state’s decade-long “Housing First” program, an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites, wraps up this year, it’s already reduced chronic homelessness (those with deeper disabling conditions, like substance abuse or schizophrenia, who had been on the streets for a year or longer or four times within three years) by 72 percent and is on track to end it altogether by early next year. Read more about the initiative here. [ph]
THE RESIDENT THAT’S REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS’S MOST DEVASTATED WARD
New Orleans native Burnell Cotlon wants to feed his 3,000 neighbors. So he’s turned a two-story building that was destroyed by catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (along with most of the Lower 9th Ward community) into a shopping plaza. Already, he’s opened a barbershop, a convenience store, and a full-service grocery store in a neighborhood that has been identified as a food desert. [ph]
THE MAN THAT’S GIVING CAREERS TO UNEMPLOYED MILITARY VETERANS
“They had our backs, let’s keep the shirts on theirs” is more than just a motto for Mark Doyle. It’s the business model on which he built Rags of Honor, his silk-screen printing company based in Chicago that provides employment and other services to veterans. In the three years since its inception, Rags of Honor has grown from four employees to 22, all but one of whom are veterans at high risk of homelessness. [ph]
THE PRESIDENT THAT’S PRESERVING OUR ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
After promising to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal our planet during his 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama has faltered on environmental legislation during his first term, preferring to expend his political capital on the Affordable Care Act. But the 44th president’s use of regulatory authority and his agreement with China likely ensure his place in the pantheon of modern environmental champions. Here’s why. [ph]
Just Because You’re a Member of the Far Right Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Believe in the Importance of Solar Energy
They’ve been called an “unholy alliance” and “strange bedfellows,” and it’s partly true: Debbie Dooley, a Tea Party firebrand, is solar power’s most unlikely ally.
A lifetime campaign operative for the Republican Party and an organizer of the first nationwide Tea Party protests in 2009, Dooley is making some very persuasive arguments for why conservatives should support renewable energy. She’s reached across the aisle to form the Green Tea Coalition, breaking with Republican candidates she says are in the energy sector’s pocket. By teaming up with progressive groups like the Sierra Club, Dooley is taking on a utility and fighting to bring solar power to the Sunshine State.
Dooley’s reasons for selecting clean energy as her pet project may sound somewhat trite — her baby grandson became an in-the-flesh reminder of the urgent necessity of conserving the planet for future generations — but her reason for supporting solar power is fresh. Unlike liberals who tout the environmental benefits of solar’s clean technology, Dooley makes her argument based on Tea Party mainstays like free market economics and self-sufficiency.
A New Orleans native and a preacher’s daughter, Dooley’s always been involved in politics, usually of the right-wing brand. Fifty miles north of The Big Easy, her grandfather ran a popular gas station and became well-known in political circles as a “power broker,” she says. “When someone ran for political office, they always paid him a visit.” Dooley spent much of her childhood at political events, accompanying him to rallies and town hall meetings.
She got involved in her first serious campaign as a high school senior in Montgomery, Ala., staffing the phone bank and canvassing door-to-door during Ronald Reagan’s first attempt at the presidency. When she moved to Georgia at the tail end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, she became an active member of the state’s Republican party.
But it’s policy, not party, that matters to Dooley. She’s unafraid to call out politicians on both sides when they shy away from their principles. Her interest in founding the Tea Party — when the “teapot started boiling,” she says — was prompted by disappointment with President George W. Bush’s policies, particularly the Wall Street bailouts. “I began to feel like the Republican Party had lost its way. They began to be the party of big spenders,” she explains. She co-founded of the Atlanta Tea Party, and she’s still on the board of directors for the national Tea Party Patriots.
“Debbie is somebody that has a lot of integrity in the positions that she takes,” says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), a nonpartisan energy watchdog group, since 1993. “She will point out inconsistencies where there are conservatives that are on the financial take from utilities and fossil fuel companies. Debbie is an absolute watchdog on the political right when conservatives start taking positions that aren’t true to conservative values.”
In 2012, Dooley won her first victories for solar power before the Georgia Public Service Commission, the regulatory authority for the energy utility. Competition is virtually nonexistent in the utility business because there’s no need to construct multiple overlapping grids (a neighborhood only needs one set of power lines), and shakeups are rare. To ensure there’s no blackouts and that customers get a fair price, utilities are monitored — and often protected — by government. In Georgia, the state had a number of laws on the books that stifled better technology. Essentially, “If I purchase electricity, I must purchase it from this government-created monopoly,” Dooley explains. She promised that expanding access to solar would create “competition and choice,” two values that persuaded the commission to open the market.
In Florida, Dooley faces a similar battle, but against an even stronger opponent. Florida Power & Light has huge influence over legislators, killing some bills before they ever reach the floor for a debate and, along with three other utilities, spending $12 million on Florida’s legislative races since 2010. The Sunshine State is one of only five states that forces consumers to buy electricity from a utility, meaning a resident can’t install a solar array and sell the excess power to neighbors or lease panels from a solar company to reduce up-front costs. That power — Dooley calls it “corruption” — is why she’s asking voters to pass a constitutional amendment tearing down barriers to supplying local solar power. (NationSwell reached out to Florida Power & Light for comment, but did not receive a response.)
“It shall be the policy of the state to encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers,” the measure reads. “This section is intended to accomplish this purpose by limiting and preventing regulatory and economic barriers that discourage the supply of electricity generated from solar.”
In an early telephone poll of 600 registered voters in Florida (commissioned by SACE and executed by North Star Opinion Research), nearly three quarters of voters said they would support a proposal to amend the current law to allow solar companies to install panels at no up-front cost and sell the power to the resident. More than half — 54 percent — believed their average monthly electricity bill was too high.
Dooley’s “been a very strong voice from the beginning. She recognized the tremendous national significance of opening the Sunshine State to solar. There, the utilities have an absolute stranglehold on the market. It has enormous potential but it continues to underperform,” says Smith, who also serves on the board of Floridians for Solar Choice. “There’s a lot of issues that Debbie and I disagree on, but on opening markets for solar power, we’re in lockstep. There’s no daylight between our positions there.”
Her campaign has already collected over 100,000 signatures in the first five weeks, Dooley says, but it needs several hundred thousand more to qualify for the election and the Florida Supreme Court’s approval of the ballot text, which the utility has promised to challenge.
Dooley couldn’t have chosen a better proving ground to test her ideas. The fourth largest state, Florida has a huge energy market powering homes for 19.9 million residents. But unlike other massive states — California, New York and Texas — Florida is a swing state. Her proposition will likely appear on the November 2016 ballot, downticket from the race that will decide Obama’s successor. If she’s successful, the Sunshine State’s expansion of solar power would be a beacon of bipartisan unity, potentially igniting a movement across the nation.
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7 Environmental Disasters That Are No More
On the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 100 homes and a public school stood on Love Canal — an unfitting name for a ditch filled with industrial waste that had been covered over with earth and sold for $1. The three blocks of working-class households looked like any other community, but in basements and backyards, residents found carcinogenic compounds seeping through the soil, leached out of the rotting drum containers buried underneath.
“Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals,” recounts Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s. “Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play[ing] with burns on their hands and faces.”
The environmental calamity at Love Canal prompted officials to launch a national cleanup of the country’s most toxic wastelands. The program — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund, named for a trust fund bolstered by taxes on petroleum and chemical products — promised long-term remediation for dangerous sites and gave the agency power to bill offending companies for the costs. Since its inception in 1981, 387 sites have been officially cleared. But chronic underfunding — the petro-chemical taxes expired in 1995 — has weakened the EPA’s efforts. Most funding goes to less than a dozen major projects, even though there’s still 1,322 sites in need of further detox, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Despite the odds, here are seven projects that prove a cleaner future is possible and that the residents of Love Canal didn’t suffer for naught.
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What Kale and Arugula Have to Do with Reducing Recidivism
It’s mango season in Miami, and James Jiler’s kitchen counter keeps filling with bags and bags of the tropical fruit. The towering mound accumulates nearly faster than he can slice the mangos apart or blend them together in a summer daiquiri.
Tasty as the fresh fruit is already, it’s even sweeter to Jiler because of where it comes from: many of the mangoes were nurtured and picked by at-risk youth, halfway house residents and the formerly incarcerated. As the executive director of Urban Greenworks, Jiler provides green jobs and environmental programs like planting in urban spaces or science education in schools to troubled residents of Miami. Since the organization’s start in 2010, roughly 55 people have been employed by the nonprofit, plus hundreds more have served as volunteers.
“Every time we plant a cluster of native trees, we create a little, cool sanctuary, or a butterfly garden or a natural habitat for the endangered Dade pine that was once there 150 years ago,” Jiler says. “My philosophy is to change one person, one garden, one community at a time.”
Before he arrived on the southeast tip of Florida, Jiler lived in New York’s East Village for more than a decade. He spent his time organizing with his neighbors to protect several community gardens — precious land in dense Lower Manhattan — from the dual threats of gentrification and former mayor Rudy Giuliani. He spent his days heading up the GreenHouse Program, a “jail to street” program at Rikers Island, the city’s central corrections facility, where he taught male and female prisoners “the art of gardening” on two acres of land adjacent to the penitentiary. Schooled in the methods of tending plants from seed to blossom, the formerly incarcerated left “immediately employable,” Jiler says. They could quickly transition to jobs in the city’s parks department or nature conservancies. Some alums even found themselves potting flowerbeds at spacious penthouse terraces, overlooking skyscrapers and the great emerald of Central Park.
“I would say, of close to 700 inmates I worked with over 10 years, I could count on my hands the ones that had a college education and on my hands and feet the ones that graduated high school. The rank and file of incarcerated in our cities are undereducated, underemployed and generally poor,” explains Jiler, who completed a graduate program at Yale University’s School of Forestry. “Using horticulture and gardening and food production, we’d redirect their lives. It’s a way to develop vocational skills and educate. When the real difficulties begin, it’s a way to reduce recidivism.”
Not only did gardening provide the incarcerated with work, its rhythms and routines could soothe tensions and relieve anxiety by troweling the earth. “It’s horticulture as therapy,” Jiler explains. “People’s lives could be transformed having these positive interactions with nature.” If a convict needed to confront the old buddies that once got him into trouble, for example, the rote actions of pruning could be meditative, could prove that small and painful incisions do eventually beautify the whole.
“I like to see beauty. What gets me going is to see a garden made by people in that community who have been marginalized, who are considered unemployable, involved in something productive and meaningful,” Jiler says.
In 2008, Jiler packed up from his New York neighborhood, feeling it had lost its edge, and journeyed south to Miami. He thought his work in the penal system had been effective, but he started to wonder if it was possible to bust what he calls the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” at an earlier stage. In Liberty City, “one of the most neglected inner-city neighborhoods in Miami,” Jiler found the Belafonte TACOLCY Center, a community youth center, and a partner with whom to launch a green initiative. Roger Horne, a naturalist who’d co-founded Youth Bike, a program teaching mechanical skills and safety to inner-city kids, and taught gardening at the center, now heads Urban Greenworks’s community health relations.
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At their newly formed organization, Jiler and Horne created Cerasee Farm. It’s named for a tropical vine in the Caribbean that sprouts wherever the land is disturbed and produces seed pods used in medicinal teas — just the antidote the pair believed Liberty City needed. Over the course of a year, the nonprofit’s employees and volunteers transformed an abandoned tract of land into a huge urban farm. They grow moringas, a tree that sprouts healthy superfood, and mulberries, a tree that shoots up quickly and produces fruit within eight months. Higher up in the canopy, there’s avocados and lychees.
In August 2013, Jiler also established the Mustard Seed Project, creating an urban farm of kale, arugula and cranberry hibiscus at the halfway home Agape House, where women reside post-incarceration. Almost all have a history of substance abuse, and a number have suffered as victims of human trafficking. Women from the facility also run the Edible Wall, 400 square feet of fresh herbs and fruits, like peppermint and spearmint, cilantro, basil, passion fruit and strawberries, that supply downtown’s trendy mixologists and chefs.
“I look forward to each day so much: we get to be outside with nature and get our hands dirty,” one woman says of the program. “I used to hate going outside, but now I love to with all the plants and flowers — so much life.” Another adds, “It’s great to be part of something beautiful for a change.”
It’s said that weeds are nothing more than unloved flowers — a lesson that holds true for gardeners, too. No matter if they’re wild, bent or misshapen, Jiler accepts Liberty City’s inmates, addicts and youth — the people that others would uproot and toss aside. Some may not look rosy today, but with a little care, they’ll be like late-spring blossoms, all the more beautiful for the wait.
READ MORE: The Community Garden That’s Bringing a Forgotten Neighborhood Back from the Brink
SEE MORE: 15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden
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Could Acrophobia Help Save America’s Favorite Breakfast Juice?
The fight to save Florida’s orange trees has literally been taken to a higher level.
In case you didn’t know, the state’s $9-billion-a-year industry has been crippled by “citrus greening,” a incurable disease carried by a bug called the Asian citrus psyllid. The bacteria, also known as huanglongbing, causes oranges, lemons, grapefruit, etc. to remain green and useless for consumption or sale. The only way that growers can manage the blight is by removing the infected tree before it wipes out an entire grove.
For a state that supplies 80 percent of America’s orange juice, this little bug is causing a giant problem. Just about every grove in the Florida — as well as every other citrus-growing locale here and around the world — has been infected by this bacteria. We previously noted that the Sunshine State already lost 8,000 jobs and $4.5 billion in crop damage. It’s also why wholesale OJ prices have just about doubled since 2000.
But as it turns out, scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Puerto Rico and Florida have found that these invasive pests might have a weak-spot: heights.
MORE: Despite Pests and a Lack of Experienced Help, This Woman Found Success Raising Organic Produce
For the two-year study (recently published in the Journal of Economic Entomology), researchers analyzed the Asian citrus psyllid populations at 17 different sites in Puerto Rico, ranging from 10 to 880 meters above sea level. Their findings showed that as elevations increased, the number of insects dipped. Intriguingly, at 600 meters above sea level, the population dropped to zero.
“We found the psyllid at all sites below 600 meters but none above it. At 500, we had a high level of psyllids,” David Jenkins, USDA researcher and co-author of the study, tells the Washington Post. It’s unclear why the psyllids don’t thrive in extra-elevated areas, but it’s suggested that they don’t like the difference in air pressure, temperature, oxygen levels, ultraviolet light or perhaps the food supply found in high elevation is unsuitable to their diets.
So how can the citrus industry apply this to their own groves? Planting nurseries above 600 meters is one way, the authors of the study suggest. Also, as Jenkins tells the Post, “if atmospheric scientists can somehow duplicate conditions near the trees, the psyllid could be controlled.”
The new research has already sparked interest. “In fact some people in Florida have contacted us,” Jenkins adds. “They want to conduct studies with pressure, as far as pressurizing tree. They’ve got atmospheric scientists looking at that kind of stuff. We’re not the ones that have the ideas on how to use it, but somebody out there may have the idea to make this practical.”
With genetic engineering and even parasitic wasps being touted as possible remedies, growers are desperate to save their trees. With any luck, the solution to keeping orange juice on the table will be found on higher ground.
Meet the Nonagenarian Whose Generous Mission Is To Help Veterans See
World War II Army veteran Orville Swett of Port Orange, Fla., has seen a lot in his life.
The Purple Heart recipient sustained a brain injury that nearly killed him while fighting in the Battle of Anzio in Italy. Recovered, he went on to have a fulfilling career as an optician and eyeglass shop owner in Maine. In 1985, Swett retired to Florida and has been on a mission to help fellow vets see better.
Swett, now 91, inquired if the VA clinic in Daytona Beach could use a hand. “The VA had no optician when I started and I had experience. The ophthalmologist hired me immediately. I was the first volunteer in the system,” he tells the Daytona Beach News-Journal. “I do it because there was a need.”
Since then, Swett has racked up more than 38,000 hours volunteering at the VA, where he repairs and adjusts eyeglasses for vets. “I’m here for the veterans,” he says. “I work for the veterans, not the VA.”
Although Swett’s main work is to help veterans with sight-related needs, he also serves as an inspiration and source of historical information to everyone he meets — including VA interns in their 20s and fellow veterans. Dr. Dianne Kowing, who leads the ophthalmology department at the VA, says, “He gives them an understanding of their role. He’s inspiring to them. And he has a wicked Maine sense of humor.”
Swett volunteers consistently, except for three months in the summer that he spends in Maine. When he returns each fall, his coworkers are always thankful to see him. “I am committed 100 percent in helping [fellow veterans],” he said. “I was brought up that way, to help each other out.”
MORE: An 87-Year-Old World War II Veteran Made A Promise at 19 to Help Someone Every Day
Meet the ‘Entreprenurses’ Behind a Clothing Line That Benefits Low-Income Families
Two nurses working in a neonatal intensive care unit have dubbed themselves “entreprenurses.”
To help the babies and their families at the Broward Health Medical Unit in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Amanda Dubin and Kelly Meyer started a baby clothing company that helps needy families. Luc&Lou donates a onesie to a needy family for each one they sell and also supports nonprofits that benefit low-income families with newborns.
The design feature the tiny footprints of a 29-week-old infant that Dubin and Meyer cared for in the NICU. On one of the onesies, the footprints form the yellow rays of a sun and on another, a purple butterfly. “We were giving back to these little babies, and we wanted to really do it on a larger scale,” Meyer tells the Sun Sentinel.
Dubin says that they were inspired by the fighting spirit of the preemies they care for. “If they can do what they do, we can do anything.”
Now, Luc&Lou onesies go home with every “welcome to the world” package the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Broward County gives to low-income mothers of newborns. Sales from Luc&Lou products also benefit Fort Lauderdale’s Jack & Jill Children’s Center.
Meyer and Dubin have sold about 400 onesies so far and aim to expand. “We will always be nurses,” Dubin says. “That’s who we are. But we want to go bigger so we can help more people.”
MORE: How Texting Can Improve the Health of Babies Born to Low-Income Mothers