In pediatric hospitals, incessant beeping and harsh fluorescent lights are often inescapable.
But in some of these hospitals, video games are helping to create a more hospitable (and fun) healing environment for the children who are staying there.
The nonprofit was founded in 2003 by authors of the online comic strip Penny Arcade as a response to an article comparing video games to “murder simulators.” Since its launch, the nonprofit has provided over 180 hospitals with video games.
Donations can be made in one of two ways: By clicking on a hospital via a wishlist on its online network and sending a gift, or by sending cash donations.
To learn more about how Child’s Play helps children, watch the above video.
More: Doctors Could Start Prescribing Video Games Instead of Pills
Tag: Helping Children
Kids Are Learning to Read in a Place You’d Never Expect: The Laundromat
Green Eggs and Ham while your laundry soaks? Goodnight Moon during the spin cycle?
Laundry and literacy may sound like odd bedfellows, but what better place to reach parents with young kids than at the laundromat?
Combining laundry time and storytime is not a new concept, but the Laundry and Literacy Coalition — a recent partnership between the LaundryCares Foundation, Libraries Without Borders and the Clinton Foundation’s Too Small to Fail initiative — is taking it a step further, piloting a project to install literacy spaces for kids under 6 years of age in 600 laundromats by 2020. It’s a joint effort to make early literacy programs available to underserved communities via laundromats nationwide.
Laundromats provide a captive audience for the time it takes to wash, dry and fold clothes, typically at least two hours, Libraries Without Borders Executive Director Adam Echelman told American Libraries magazine. Beyond that, families typically do laundry on a weekly basis. So while parents pour detergent and fold soccer uniforms, their kids have an opportunity to work on their reading skills. Participating laundromats can provide children with services like librarian-helmed reading stations, educational computer games, puzzles and sing-alongs — all free for families. The Laundry and Literacy Coalition is also building a network of nonprofit organizations, academics, foundations, corporations and laundromat owners to help scale strategies and advance research around early literacy in laundromats.
“You have a captive audience, families return weekly, and it’s open all the time,” said Echelman. “Another thing is that most people don’t go to a laundromat outside of their neighborhood, so you’re working really locally.”
The national nonprofit Libraries Without Borders promotes literacy to low-income neighborhoods through pop-up bookshelves at places like bus stops, subway stations and public parks. But one pop-up gained a lot more traction than the rest. Why? It was next to a laundromat.
The goal of Laundry and Literacy is to close the literacy gap between low-income and higher-income students, with a focus on kindergarten readiness. In 2016, only one out of five low-income students read proficiently by fourth grade in the United States, and students who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade very rarely catch up in later grades, according to a report by Business Roundtable. Studies show that lower rates of literacy are linked to poverty and crime.
Although the goal is the same — to get young kids reading — each laundromat’s learning space can vary. Depending on the partnering programs, amenities can vary from shelves filled with books, or full-fledged reading nooks with laptops, games and educational materials. Each space is dependent on funding from nonprofits and other organizations. The current reading nooks have been funded by the coalition, but the groups hope to convince laundromat owners to help fund future reading spaces, which cost around $1,500 to $2,500 a year to maintain.
“Our goal as a coalition is to be working in every laundromat in the country,” Echelman said.
Populous cities like Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Detroit, as well as smaller cities like Winslow, Arizona, and Kamiah, Idaho, all have adopted reading time in the laundromat.
Last year, the Chicago Public Library launched Laundromat Story Time in 14 laundromats across some of Chicago’s lower-income neighborhoods. In Chicago, more than 60 percent of the city’s low-income households don’t have children’s books and four in 10 public school students don’t meet or exceed reading standards, according to the Chicago Literacy Alliance.
“We’re always looking at new ways of reaching our intended audiences,” Brian Bannon, commissioner and CEO of the Chicago Public Library, told USNews. “The laundromat turned out to be one of them.”
Hundreds of miles away in Queens, New York, children are participating in a similar literacy program through Queens Library and Laundry and Literacy. At Lavanderia Express XI, children have access to comfy couches, toys and books in English and Spanish.
“I think the goal of this space, too, is to make sure that kids’ time in laundromats is being used to do creative things or to learn and to give families time to interact with each other,” Queens Library outreach assistant Hal Schrieve told NPR.
Beyond making a weekly chore fun, laundry literacy programs have proven to be effective. The Laundry and Literacy Coalition worked with Susan Neuman, a professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University, to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. The evaluation, which was conducted in 2018 at six New York laundromats, found that children who interacted with literacy laundromats spent an average of 47 minutes per visit doing literacy-based activities and were more likely to engage in reading than those children who didn’t have a laundromat literacy program. Neuman said programs like this can be successful in “book deserts,” which are communities that lack access to books, much like so-called food deserts. Book deserts have been linked to income segregation, meaning that the poorer the child is, the less likely he or she will have access to a library or place to access reading materials.
“Small moments and interactions really help prepare children for success in school,” Jane Park Woo, deputy director of Too Small to Fail, told the Chicago Tribune. “We’re very focused on meeting families where they are and helping them make the most of their small moments … we want to help parents use all these moments to engage in language-rich interaction with their children.”
More: This Exciting Program Moves Struggling Students to the Head of the Class
This Professional Risk-Taker Explains Why Exceptional Leaders Aren’t Always Confident with Their Decisions
In the early aughts, Annie Duke was an unbeatable poker player. At the very first World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions in 2004, she brought home the trophy and a $2 million pot. Later, in 2012, she turned her gambling wins into a speaking business, offering classes to Wall Street traders on risky decision-making and what they could learn from her card-playing successes and mistakes. Once that business became self-sustaining, she folded her cards and largely retired from the game to focus on education, her real passion. Drawing on what she’d learned from volunteering for an after-school program in Northern California and the latest research in behavioral economics, she founded How I Decide, a nonprofit that focuses on developing students’ critical thinking and socio-emotional skills. NationSwell spoke with Duke by phone about the topic she knows best: decision-making, its emotions, risks and rewards.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
People believe that to be a good leader, you have to be incredibly confident. They tend to equate confidence with this idea that you’re 100 percent sure about your decisions and that it’s an unwillingness to admit failure. In order to really effectively lead, you have to allow people to understand that confidence is not that. Admitting when you’ve made a mistake or letting people know that you’re not 100 percent sure of every decision is actually a better way to lead. A lot of people I admire have set a great example by saying, “I just wanted to let you know that I just made this really big mistake, and I thought I’d share it with you because I learned from it.”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
In the world of behavioral economics, there’s a big push recently towards actually applying the research in the field to improving people’s lives in the real world. You can really see this with [Stanford psychologist] Carol Dweck, who is very vocal in saying that she felt like she was sort of locked in a box doing her research for a long time, and now, she’s actually bringing that work to the populations that really need it. With behavioral economics, there was a long period of time where people were saying, “Oh, isn’t this interesting? People are very irrational.” And now that it’s starting to be a focus on, okay, that’s true, but how can we actually improve people’s lives through understanding what we know and trying to figure out real-world strategies that would improve decision-making?
What’s on your nightstand?
Right now, a bunch of stuff. I’m reading “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” [by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner] and “The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing” by Michael Mauboussin. I just finished “Kluge: the Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind,” which is by Gary Marcus, and “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” [by Gabriele Oettingen], which is fantastic look at mental contrasting.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish when I first started out as an adult, I had a broader view of what success looked like. I think that I had a super-narrow view of what it meant to be successful, and I wish that there was a more complete view of success, so it also included emotional success: what it means to really be happy or feel fulfilled. I think that there’s a big push right now around mindfulness, which is really wonderful, because I think that it does treat the person as a whole. When I was growing up, success meant you went to this school and you had this kind of job. I think that when I was younger, I was sort of judgmental about that. Like when I met someone, one of the first questions I asked was, “What school did you got to?” As if that matters. I look at people who didn’t take that particular path, and many of them are incredibly successful individuals. But also I think that taught me to be incredibly judgmental of myself, when I felt like I wasn’t being successful or following whatever path I thought I wanted.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My children. I don’t think that there’s a close second to that.
What inspires you?
As far as poker is concerned, the inspiration was definitely my brother. He was already doing it, and he’s largely responsible for the success that I had, because without his mentorship, I don’t think that it would have happened. Going into the more academic side of things and decision-making, my children really inspired me to work in that [field]. Another person that inspired me is my paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Eastern Europe [and only] graduated from sixth grade, and I went to two Ivy League schools — the journey you can take from getting here not even speaking English to just two generations later. If you get somebody an education, it really removes limitations from their life. I appreciate the arc that happened in my family and how quickly that changed occurred through education.
How do you try to inspire others?
I don’t think about that. I try to focus on doing the stuff that I do, which is what really brings me a lot of happiness. And if someone is inspired by that, that’s great. Obviously, when I’m going and giving speeches, I’m hoping to inspire people to make changes in the way they think. The stuff that we do with kids is to inspire them to continue their education and become better thinkers and all of those things. But me personally, I think if I were really focused on that, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do very well. Because you have to live within yourself and the moment to be effective.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How Does a Professional Skier Inspire Kids Toward Academic Achievement?
If you live in Colorado, you know to expect the release of a movie highlighting the daring exploits of professional skiers in far-flung, snowy mountains from Warren Miller Entertainment each year.
Chris Anthony has been a featured athlete in the films for 25 years, but one of his lesser-known achievements is the inspiration he’s been bringing to young people for 15 years through his Chris Anthony Youth Initiative Project.
The 48-year-old Anthony visits schools across the country and shows clips from the films as a way to teach kids life lessons that he hopes will spur them to achieve academically and athletically. He tells Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, “I want to reach as many kids as possible. I want to let kids know there are many paths to success and they can use whatever talents they have to reach their goals. The idea is to inspire and motivate kids to go out and find their niche.”
Anthony’s presentations emphasize different ways of thinking about academic subjects that might reach kids who don’t connect with traditional methods. For example, he often shows a video of Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shriffin slaloming to teach lessons in physics and geometry. And he teaches history through the film “Climb To Glory,” about the 10th Mountain Division Ski Troopers in World War II.
He also focuses on teaching outdoor safety to kids in mountain schools. “We should be educating our kids in the mountains about both the opportunities and dangers in the backcountry. We have an opportunity here to create more awareness,” he tells the Denver Post.
Anthony recently started a foundation which raises money to fund even more school visits, as well as a scholarship program. Several other professional skiers have joined his mission, realizing that they have skills to showcase off the mountain too. “This becomes a channel for them to give back,” Anthony says.
MORE: Leave it to Teenagers to Find the Most Fun Way to Help Disabled Vets