In the emergency room at George Washington University (GW) Hospital, in D.C., Dr. Leana S. Wen administered anti-inflammatory meds to kids choking with asthma, rescued middle-aged dads from heart attacks and sewed up shooting victims. Unlike a primary care doctor, she knew almost nothing about the strangers wheeled into the frenzied space: their medical history, financial situation and neighborhood all mysteries.
The usual anonymity made it all the more surprising when she recognized a 24-year-old mother of two. Homeless and addicted to opioids, the woman would show up nearly every week, begging for treatment. Without fail, Wen delivered the disappointing news that the next available appointment was three weeks away. Inevitably, the young mom relapsed during that window. The last time Wen saw the young woman, she wasn’t breathing. Her family had discovered her unresponsive, killed by an overdose.
“I always think back to my patient now: she had come to us requesting help, not once, not twice, but over and over again, dozens of times,” says Wen. “Because we do not have the treatment capacity, the people looking to us for help fall through the cracks, overdose and die. Why has our system failed her, just as it is failing so many others who wish to get help for their addictions?”
Last January, at age 32, Wen took a new job as the city’s health commissioner. As the leader of the country’s oldest public health department (established in 1793), Wen devotes much of her attention to an urgent problem: addiction to opioids (a class of drugs that includes heroin, morphine and oxycodone) and prescription painkillers. In the seaside port city of 622,000 residents, two-thirds of them black, heroin addiction grips 20,000 people. Many more pop prescription drugs before turning to heroin, a drug that’s cheaper than ever and more socially acceptable since it can be snorted and not just injected.
Baltimore’s drug addiction is lethal: Last year, 393 residents died of overdoses, a staggering number that surpassed the city’s 344 murders in a year of record gun violence. Long past a criminal “war on drugs,” Wen is implementing a public health response to this medical crisis. Her three-part plan involves preventing overdoses, treating addiction and ending stigma against drug users. By treating addiction as a sickness, not a scourge, she’s now saving lives on a broader scale than any emergency room physician.
“It ties into every aspect of the city. I’ve spoken to kids who question why they have to go to school every morning when everyone in their family is addicted to drugs and doesn’t get up. If we have employees that are addicted or have criminal histories because of their addiction, then what does that mean for a healthy workforce?” asks Wen, a fast talker who regularly works 14-hour days. “This is absolutely something we need to address as a critical public health emergency.”
Tenacious even in childhood, Wen spent the first eight years of her life in post-Mao China, until the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre forced her politically dissident parents to flee the country. They moved to Los Angeles’s gang-infested neighborhoods like Compton and East Los Angeles, scraping money together from jobs as a dishwasher and hotel maid. With money tight, Wen remembers her aunts choosing between prescription medications, food or bus passes. Never one to wait, Wen enrolled in classes at California State University, Los Angeles, when she was just 13 years old. By age 18, she finished her degree, graduating with the highest honors, and went on to earn her M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Working as a public health professor at GW, Wen spearheaded campaigns to cut healthcare costs, remove lead from homes and design walkable neighborhoods with access to reasonably priced, nutritious food, which caught the attention of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and landed her a new job.
A key to Wen’s plan for fighting opioid addiction is the distribution of an antidote to reverse a life-threatening opioid overdose. Inhaled through a nasal spray or injected into the upper arm or thigh like an EpiPen, Naloxone instantly revives a person from an overdose with few, if any, serious side effects. During a heroin high, chemicals block pain and induce euphoria — dulling the body to such an extent that the lungs forget to breathe while sleeping or the heart fails to pump adequately. Essentially shaking the brain out of its high, Naloxone creates a 30 to 90 minute window in which medical treatment can be sought. “It truly is a miracle drug,” Baltimore County Fire Chief John Hohman tells the Baltimore Sun. “It takes someone from near-death to consciousness in a matter of seconds.”
There’s only one catch: “You can’t give yourself this medication,” Wen explains. A person in the midst of an overdose often doesn’t have the wherewithal to inject the antidote. “That’s why we need every single person in our city to have access to it,” she adds, explaining that friends, family and community members have the ability to save a life.
In a controversial move, Wen issued a blanket prescription to the entire city last October — meaning anyone can buy the drug from a pharmacist. (For recipients of Medicaid, the price was reduced to $1 at a time when the drug’s price spiked drastically.) Wen sent training videos to jails and hospitals. Health department staffers visited areas notorious for open-air drug markets. Last year, the agency distributed 10,000 units of Naloxone and trained 12,500 residents how to administer it. That’s a big number for a program’s first year, but it’s still only half the number of active heroin users in Baltimore.
Outside of the roughly 30 recorded uses of Naloxone by police officers, there’s little hard evidence whether the drug has saved lives inside the city’s crack houses, parks and underpasses. Using data from Poison Control and other sources, Baltimore estimates Naloxone saved hundreds since 2015. “This remains a vastly underreported statistic,” says Sean Naron, a city spokesperson.
Critics claim that Naloxone encourages risky behavior and perpetuates the cycle of addiction because it removes the risk of death. “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” Maine’s Gov. Paul LePage, wrote in April when he vetoed a bill that would have expanded access to Naloxone without a prescription. Suggestions like that make Wen balk. She calls them “specious,” “inhumane” and “ill-informed.” “That argument is based on stigma and not on science,” she responds. “You would never say to someone who is dying from a peanut allergy that you’re withholding their EpiPen to make them not eat peanuts.” Similarly for drug addiction, Wen believes there’s no use in talking about recovery tomorrow, if we don’t have the ability to stop a fatal overdose today.
Most in the medical community agree on the dire need for Naloxone. Experts caution, however, that it can’t be the sole response to this health crisis. Like most other cities, Baltimore is still trying to figure out how to effectively direct users whose lives were saved by Naloxone into long-term treatment programs, says Dr. Marc Fishman, medical director at Maryland Treatment Centers, a regional clinic. After reversing an overdose, an addict may “get dusted off and given a piece of paper with some phone numbers. They’re told to call this number today, tomorrow, next week. Maybe somebody will answer. Maybe they’ll take your insurance. Maybe they’ll see you next week or next month,” explains Fishman, who is also an addiction psychiatrist and faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Instead, Fishman suggests the medical system needs a “full continuum” from Naloxone administration to addiction treatment. It’s not unprecedented: just look to patients with heart issues, he says. They, too, receive lifesaving drugs to stabilize their ticker, but rather than being discharged immediately, a cardiac clinic assigns a care plan and prescribes maintenance medicines to patients.
Wen fully embraces the idea: she wants to see medication-assisted treatment that fools the brain into thinking it’s getting opioids without getting high or blocks an opioid high after shooting up, alongside housing and supportive social services. In the meantime, she’s set up a 24-hour hotline for users to get treatment option referrals. (Since October, it’s received 1,000 calls every month.) By next year, Wen wants to open a stabilization center where a person can drop in for several days to get sober.
It’s far from the perfect solution, Wen acknowledges. But at the moment, she’s constantly iterating new approaches. Last year, at a meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force on Heroin, Wen asked her colleagues to think of what they could do immediately that wouldn’t need further funding or manpower. That type of thinking fits with the approach she learned from life-or-death decisions in the emergency room: it’s better to act quickly now with what’s available than to wait for an instrument that might never come.
“Everybody is working hard and trying stuff. Some things are succeeding, and some are failing,” Fishman says. “I get a sense of dynamic enthusiasm. People are rolling up their shirtsleeves. I’m sorry that white kids from the suburbs had to start dying before anybody started paying attention, but it’s better late than never.”
Despite Wen’s tireless efforts, overdoses continue to rise in Baltimore. Last year, 260 heroin users overdosed, tripling the 76 intoxication deaths in 2011. Why are people still dying? Wen returns to the idea that a heroin user, on the brink of an overdose, can’t save himself; the rest of the city needs to be on the lookout, which isn’t always the case.
Baltimore’s response to this crisis has the ability to end an epidemic and to unite an ailing community. Wen, who says she’s an optimist by nature, might just find a way to cure a hurting American city after all.
Homepage photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
MORE: How Do You Breathe Life into a Neighborhood That’s Been Forgotten?
Tag: Health
Can New Tools End the AIDS Epidemic by 2020?
In 1995, Perry Halkitis watched as New York City’s AIDS crisis unfolded around him and quit his job to focus full-time on the plague killing thousands of gay men. Professionally, it probably wasn’t an advantageous move, but he never doubted that it was the right thing to do. Halkitis, who, at age 18, came out to his Greek immigrant parents in 1981, is now a professor of public health, applied psychology and medicine at New York University. Two years ago, he completed a book about HIV+ gay men who survived that era, and he’s now working on a book about the experience of coming out across generations. Speaking to NationSwell in his Greenwich Village office, Halkitis recalled the experience of witnessing two devastating decades of the AIDS epidemic and his hope of finding a cure.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I do work in gay men’s health, part of which is HIV. I emphasize that because too often people think about gay men’s health work as being synonymous with HIV. The thing that is most exciting me is that there are biomedical interventions that have been developed over the course of the last decade that provide another way to fight the epidemic. Now what do I mean that? We have something called PrEP now, which is administering an antiviral once a day to people who are HIV- that prevents them from becoming infected. It’s miraculous. We also know very clearly that HIV+ people — now living longer, fuller lives — who adhere to their treatment have viral suppression and are un-infectious. That is remarkable to me that these biomedical advances enable people to deter both acquiring and spreading the infection. We haven’t fully realized the power of these tools, and there are some challenges with them. But in the absence of a cure, it is the best thing we have.
Are these tools powerful enough that we can talk about ending the epidemic?
There are conversations about ending the epidemic. In New York, two years ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo put forward a mandate to end AIDS by 2020. By that, he meant making infections go from 3,000 to 750 a year by use of these tools. So, do I think these tools are, in and of themselves, enough to bring an end to AIDS? They can get us near the end. We know perfectly well that people don’t finish their antibiotics and that people don’t exercise regularly. Being dependent completely on administering medicine on a regular basis is challenging reality. So I’m going to say that we’re going to do a really good job at deterring new infections.
What motivates you to do this work?
My decision, about 25 years ago, to enter this field was purely directed by the loss I experienced in my life. I was trained as an applied statistician working at a testing company, and at night, I was an activist. I was in New York City; AIDS was all around me. I witnessed friends dying. I decided to merge the two: to take my skills as a researcher and combine them with my passion as an activist. I find my motivation in the memory of the people who I’ve lost. I find my motivation in making sure that a new generation is free of this disease. And I find my motivation in training my students who are going to continue the good work once I’ve finished. I want gay men to be healthy, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see that.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Don’t expect it to get easier over time. It’s going to get harder and more complicated. The more I learn and the more writing and research I do, the less I think I actually know. Which is good: it opens up more questions. I would have told myself in 1995 to be prepared for any possibility that might happen in this epidemic. I would tell myself to keep hope. I don’t think I had a lot of hope in 1995 that there was going to be an end to this epidemic. I was going to fight the battle for as long as I needed. And I would have told myself to be better about writing about my day-to-day life, which I haven’t done. It would have been an interesting story.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My book “The AIDS Generation,” where I documented the lives of 15 men who were long-term survivors. It could be the period at the end of the sentence of my career, if I did nothing else. (Surprise, I’m doing more.) I’m incredibly proud of that book, because it got a lot of attention in the popular press, and it inspired a conversation. Sean, one of the guys in the book, reminds me all of the time: “You started all of this.” I don’t really know if that’s true, but I like to think that I contributed to the beginning of the dialogue about long-term survivors.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Homepage photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
#ComeClean About What Hard-Working People Deserve
As a participant in Seventh Generation’s Come Clean campaign, NationSwell is asking that cleaning and hygiene product companies do the same thing that Seventh Generation has done for the last 27 years: disclose all of a product’s ingredients so consumers can make educated choices about what they bring into their homes.
To do this, we teamed up with activists and environmental advocates, including Richmond, Calif.-based housecleaner Elva Aguilar. Several years ago, she began having a variety of health problems that she eventually traced to the cleaners used in her daily work. After changing what products she used and her habits, Aguilar’s health recovered. Now she is advocating on behalf of other housecleaners.
Watch the video above to see Aguilar speak out on behalf of her colleagues.
#ComeClean for Life’s Twists and Turns
As a participant in Seventh Generation’s Come Clean campaign, NationSwell is asking that cleaning and hygiene product companies do the same thing that Seventh Generation has done for the last 27 years: disclose all of a product’s ingredients so consumers can make educated choices about what they bring into their homes.
To do this, we teamed up with activists and environmental advocates like Kristi Marsh who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 35. Watch the video above to see how Marsh, founder of the website ChooseWiser and the author of “Little Changes,” began educating herself and others about the chemical dangers lurking in our everyday products.
#ComeClean to Protect Your Family’s Wellbeing
As a participant in Seventh Generation’s Come Clean campaign, NationSwell is asking cleaning and hygiene product companies do the same thing that Seventh Generation has done for the last 27 years: disclose all of a product’s ingredients so consumers can make educated choices about what they bring into their homes.
To do this, we teamed up with activists and environmental advocates, including New York City-based documentary filmmaker and father of two, Jon Whelan. His film, STINK!, reveals his three-year-long quest to uncover the source of a strange smell emanating from his daughter’s pajamas.
Watch the video above to hear what he learned about household products while filming his documentary.
Why America Must Remember Its Lynching Past, The Compassionate Nonagenarian Who Knits Hats for Those on the Streets and More
The Legacy of Lynching, on Death Row, The New Yorker
Bryan Stevenson, one of the foremost civil rights lawyers of our time and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, sees a link between wrongful convictions, today’s police shootings of young black men and the nation’s barbarous history of lynching. To honor the 4,000 African Americans killed in the former Confederate states, Stevenson plans to build a $20 million memorial in Montgomery, Ala., on the site of a former public housing complex.
Man, 91, in hospice care knits hats for the homeless, WXMI
For the last 15 years, Morrie Boogart, a 91-year-old in Grandville, Mich., has knit hats for the homeless. Using donated yarn, Boogart has made at least 8,000 caps to keep the homeless warm during the winter. Confined to bedrest from skin cancer and a mass on his kidney, he’s spending his last days in admirable service to others.
Yes, Queens, The Ringer
When one thinks of podcasts, the image of a bespectacled white man, like “This American Life”’s Ira Glass, probably comes to mind. The seriously irreverent, wildly popular weekly podcast “2 Dope Queens,” hosted by Jessica Williams, formerly of “The Daily Show,” and Phoebe Robinson, a standup comedian, opens the medium to a new type of host. Racism, sexism and politics, as seen from a black woman’s perspective, are all carefully discussed, and somehow hilarity ensues.
MORE: Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
The Big Idea That’s Growing Green Business in America
After a lifetime of eating with disposable knives and forks, Michael Caballero, a 25-year-old industrial engineer at FedEx, looked the plastic cutlery in his workplace cafeteria in a new way. “I think in terms of process,” he says, tallying the environmental upheaval required to manufacture each fork — the extraction of oil from the ground, the overseas shipping, the refining and molding in a factory, the waste created by its packaging — a massive amount of pollution created for just a few minutes of usage before being tossed in a landfill.
Today, thanks to EcoTech Visions, a Miami incubator for green enterprises, Caballero’s 18-month-old company, Earthware, Inc., is building better disposable silverware. At EcoTech Visions’s current headquarters in Liberty City, Fla., Caballero is a member of a class of 26 “ecopreneurs” who receive 15 months of support and have access to office space, manufacturing equipment and other environmentally-minded folks. In the co-working space, architects and designers chat with electricians and engineers — a technical collaboration that’s rare but vital to successfully manufacture products, from battery-run motorcycles and aquaponics systems to plastic-based handbags and aloe salves.
APPLY: EcoTech Visions is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The buzzing incubator is the vision of Dr. Pandwe Gibson, an African-American businesswoman who wanted to spark a sea change in commerce by supporting green jobs, particularly manufacturing ones. Because the consequences of environmental harm are so visible in southern Florida (as atmospheric temperatures rise, the sea levels follow, causing the Atlantic’s high tides to annually creep nearly one inch closer to the art deco real estate along Miami’s coastline), city residents are eager to embrace products that won’t further damage the Earth in the process. When Gibson first came up with EcoTech Visions three years ago, she used her iPad to share the idea with anyone who had time to listen to her elevator pitch. Since its launch, the incubator has created 15 new jobs, won grants for nine of its companies to work on prototypes and helped three other businesses obtain seed funding to kick start operations.
Last year, EcoTech was one of NBCUniversal Foundation’s 21st Century Solutions grant challenge winners, supporting progressive community solutions. “What we love is that it has the four Cs — it’s a catalyst for out-of-the-box solutions, it offers a destination for collaboration, it’s building a community for idea-creators and problem solvers and it’s driving local change by expanding small businesses and jobs,” says Beth Colleton, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at NBCUniversal.
EcoTech Visions played a vital role in helping Earthware produce a durable alternative to the 16 billion pieces of plasticware thrown away in America each year (its cutlery is made with a corn-based resin that decomposes in just six months) and grow to its current state. Perhaps most importantly, the incubator covers the entry-level costs that can prohibit a business from entering the market — office space and manufacturing equipment — while Caballero still works at Fed-Ex to make a living. Without the support, he would have needed to front the money for Earthware’s first injection molding machine (which spits out products in the shape of pre-made molds) and a consultant to help him pick the right one; instead, Caballero pays a small rental fee to EcoTech in order to use the machine they purchased on his behalf.
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Additionally, the incubator introduced Caballero to other locals that could bolster his burgeoning enterprise, including sustainability advocates and potential customers, like the local school board, which recently put out a request for compostable cutlery bids. “The whole goal is to become a leading provider of compostable, sustainable products, using Miami as a hub into Latin America and the Caribbean,” footholds to an international expansion, Caballero says.
Clean tech and green manufacturing, as sectors, could provide the biggest hope of restoring jobs that have been lost due to the historic decline in American manufacturing (nationwide, about 5 million have disappeared since the millennium). Unlike other compostable products, which ship foreign-made cutlery to the U.S., Caballero’s eco-friendly business aims to create high-paying, manufacturing jobs right here in America; the two dozen other companies at EcoTech Visions will only add to this green wave of business. Caballero believes green industries will be most successful if others join the movement. The demand for sustainable products is already there, he notes, but supply will only match those levels if more entrepreneurs and manufacturers arrive on the scene. Even though they’ll technically be his competitors, there will be enough supply that prices will fall and consumers generally will see planet-friendly products as the new standard.
EcoTech Visions is looking to expand nationally, starting with Los Angeles next. If it achieves its goals, not only will Caballero be just one of countless American manufacturers producing environmentally-conscious items and providing jobs around the country, but the incubator could find itself leading the United States into the green industrial revolution.
EcoTech Visions is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
Why It’s Important for Children to Learn Mindfulness at a Young Age
Mindfulness, a secular form of meditation based on old Buddhist practices, is gaining popularity in more and more workplaces, but it still isn’t broadly available in most communities. In New Canaan, Conn., residents Nick and Michelle Seaver, Will Heins, and Erika Long banded together to offer group sessions in public institutions like libraries and wellness centers that help locals train their awareness on their physical existence in the present moment.
NationSwell spoke with Long, a former managing director at J.P. Morgan Chase and founder of the Carpere Group, about how she found meaning in mindfulness after quitting her career in finance.
How did you first become interested in mindfulness?
I was on a business trip to Tokyo and couldn’t fall asleep. In the nightstand next to the bed were the teachings of Buddha. I started reading it and thought the lessons were really interesting. Then I began investigating more about Buddhism and learning that meditation was really a core practice for that spiritual tradition. The more I read, the more it resonated with me. I was leading a very, very busy life in investment banking at the time, and soon after, I had two kids. I spent so much time in my head, trying to figure out investments, that mindfulness really helped me to integrate the mind and the body — to check in and make sure I wasn’t missing stuff that was going on outside my head. And I found that meditation allowed a lot of the clutter in my mind to settle, so that when decisions needed to be made, the path forward became more evident.
What advice do you have for someone who’s just starting to dabble in meditation?
We’re not a culture that supports sitting down without distraction. For some reason, you can justify doing a ton of other things, even if it’s just the crossword puzzle on the train on the way in or looking at Facebook. Some people have to overcome that as a hurdle.
Other people find that their mind won’t stop, and they get frustrated. We say that it’s very difficult to enter meditation or mindfulness thinking with the goal to keep thoughts out, to keep the mind quiet. It’s much easier to engage in the practice if you think when thoughts arise — because they will — choosing not to engage in them, not to get carried away with them, letting them arise and carry on their way.
What do you hope to accomplish through the Community Mindfulness Project (CMP)?
Originally four [founders] lived in the same town, and we all felt tremendous benefit from our own personal meditation practices over the years. But we had a hard time finding a community that we could sit with. There’s a real power to sitting in a group in addition to one’s own personal daily practice: you learn from each other, get support and feel a tremendous energy that arises when you sit in stillness with others. We started with one hour on a Monday night, and it grew and grew. We had the class coming in from lots of different places, asking “Could you do it here? Could you work with the kids in this school? With the teachers in this program?”
The more we looked around, we realized that there weren’t other secular, regular meditation or mindfulness sessions that were free and open to the public on an ongoing basis in community hubs. We offer regular weekly sessions in libraries and wellness centers in New Canaan and Stamford, Conn. We’re expanding out, particularly targeting communities with high numbers of stressors: food, housing and job insecurity, as well as people with other special needs like patients going through chemotherapy (as we’re currently doing at New York-Presbyterian Hospital).
Mindfulness is showing up in more places. What uses are you most excited about right now?
Maybe just because I’m a mom of a couple of teenagers, I feel that very little children are very much in the present moment, and as they get older, all of the adults in their lives and the media influences that they see begin to yank them out of the present moment. They’re sitting down every day with this notion that everything they’re doing in that moment is for the future somehow. It makes it really hard for them just to sit in the present. That’s right about the same time they need to be really connected with their bodies, and they need to be building habits and patterns for self-care. I love the extent to which people are thinking how we show kids these practices so that they can bring them into their lives, during those middle and high school years.
What’s on your nightstand?
I’m reading “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War,” by Lynsey Addario. She was a photographer for The New York Times, and that feeds my love of trying to push myself outside my comfort zone by reading about other people’s lives. And I’ve just been given, by someone in our community, “Buddha’s Brain,” by Rick Hanson, which really is the boiled-down neuroscience behind mindfulness. Then there’s a beautiful book called “Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With,” by Gaylon Ferguson.
What’s your perfect day?
I have to say the perfect day would involve no technology whatsoever. It would involve time with my kids. I’m at that point where I’m very aware they’re going to be heading off on their own soon, so I’m cherishing every moment that I have with them right now. And it would involve being outside. There’s something about the outdoors that really grounds us in the present moment and gives us the sense of connection as part of something better. And there’s some kind of food involved. If we have those elements, it doesn’t really matter what we’re doing.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I worked with amazing people in investment banking. I could not believe how lucky I was to be able to do what I did. I felt like every day the world was my university. I learned so much. But I’m really proud of the fact that I got off that treadmill, even though there were financial ramifications. It wasn’t tapping into a deep need to do something that was more meaningful. I’m proud that I was able to sacrifice the identity that comes with having that job.
One of the CMP cofounders, Michelle Seaver, is from Canada, and she said one of the things she noticed most when she moved to the Northeast is that when people ask, “What do you do?” in Vancouver, the answer is “I waterski. I play tennis.” In the Northeast, it’s all about your job. After having a career for so long, when you go out into public and somebody asks, “What do you do?” you’re no longer able to say, “I manage money, I’m in finance.” There’s that open-ended “I am.” That can be really unsettling, and you have to dig deep inside and figure out where you pull your own identity from. Can you have the courage just to let that be? It’s a beautiful process to go through, and you don’t go through it when you’re on the treadmill of your career. I’m proud of that because my kids watched me do it. Hopefully, that will give them the freedom in their life to pursue what they’re passionate about.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
MORE: 37 Easy Strategies for Living in the Moment All Day Long
Every City Should Replicate What This Michigan City Did, A Smarter System for Doctors Making House Calls and More
The City That Unpoisoned Its Pipes, NextCity
The idea of preemptively improving infrastructure long before a crisis hits is foreign to most Americans. An hour’s drive west of Flint, Mich., the entire water system in Lansing (which once contained lead-lined service mains) will be declared lead-free in 2017 after a decade spent switching to copper pipes. Soon, residents will have the ability to swig their H2O without worry.
A New Brand of Doctor Targets the Unhealthy in Rural Tennessee, The Tennessean
In rural areas, there are a lot of benefits to a country doctor who makes house calls: a robust patient-physician relationship, no administration contributing to overhead. But isolation limits those medics’ ability to understand what’s affecting their region. By banding together, a network of primary-care physicians in 50 desolate counties across Tennessee now share knowledge such as health trends among their populations and best practices for dealing with insurance companies.
The Collapsible Helmet that Could Revolutionize Bike-Share Safety, CityLab
Bike-sharing is one of the easiest ways to get around a city and is friendlier to the environment than a short, gas-guzzling car ride. But cyclists often put themselves at risk on roadways by going without a helmet. To improve safety, a Brooklyn, N.Y., commuter created a collapsible helmet made from paper honeycomb and glue, which folds up to the size of a banana, making a bike-share ride even more desirable.
MORE: In the U.S., 1.7 Million Don’t Have Access to Clean Drinking Water. This Grandma Is Changing That
#ComeClean To Live the Healthiest Life Possible
As a participant in Seventh Generation’s Come Clean campaign, NationSwell is asking that cleaning and hygiene product companies do the same thing that Seventh Generation has done for the last 27 years: disclose all of a product’s ingredients so consumers can make educated choices about what they bring into their homes.
To do this, we teamed up with activists and environmental advocates like Kristi Marsh who was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 35. Watch the video above to see how Marsh, founder the website ChooseWiser and the author of “Little Changes,” began educating herself and others about the chemical dangers lurking in our everyday products.