Tag: Illinois

This User-Friendly Tool Gets You In The Know Before You Vote

Posted on by robbie

With the presidential primary election looming, Chicago public school teacher Megan Augustiny introduced her high school civics students to BallotReady, an online guide to down-ballot races. (Think: state attorney, judgeships, city council — candidates that first-time voters in her class had never heard of, but would soon be electing to office). The nonpartisan site compiles essential information that voters need on little-known candidates — their job experience, positions on controversial issues and endorsements accrued — making it easy for students (and all voters) to “access information in the way they are used to,” she says, favoriting contenders as if their sample ballot were an Instagram feed.
Which is just what Alex Niemczewski and Aviva Rosman, two recent University of Chicago grads who co-founded BallotReady, had envisioned. Both are reserved, heads-down types who prefer to focus on their work, speaking softly about their high-minded ideals of involving more people at all stages of the democratic process. The two built the site in their spare time and spent just $180 on marketing to launch BallotReady. Within a few months, it irreversibly changed voter behavior across Illinois, where thousands of people logged on to the site. During this year’s bombastic election season, instead of skipping many of the contests, or worse, casting an uninformed vote, BallotReady users now have at their fingertips valuable information about local and regional candidates that are virtually unknown to most people.
For a glimpse of BallotReady’s reach, all one needs to do is log on to Twitter on Election Day.


In states where it’s active, BallotReady is so popular that politicians ask to add specifics to their profiles, offering new possibilities for local campaigns that are too small to attract media coverage or buy their own advertisements. If a school board member sees her opponent vows to support a charter school expansion, for instance, the incumbent may add more details to her education platform. “If a candidate says, ‘I support education,’ we don’t include that, because everybody does,” Niemczewski says. Although, “if a candidate didn’t support education, we would include that,” she adds.
BallotReady emerged from a collision of two pasts: Rosman’s as an enthusiastic electioneer and Niemczewski’s nonprofit work, as well as her knack for code. A self-avowed political junkie, Rosman started participating in the political process in middle school, driving with her dad from their native Massachusetts to New Hampshire and attempting to sway the state’s swing voters every election. In 2004, she nearly failed two high school classes when she used frequent flier miles to campaign for John Kerry in Florida. Four years later, while staffing a congressional race in Illinois, Rosman realized her knowledge was severely lacking. “I was trying to inform people about my candidate, and yet, I was unprepared to vote for all these other people on the ballot,” she remembers. Then in 2014, Rosman ran for a seat on the school council in Chicago. She asked Niemczewski, an old classmate then coaching Chicago’s unemployed into IT jobs, to vote for her. “I didn’t even know there was an election,” Niemczewski says, admitting to missing the vote. The two stayed in touch and a few months later, collaborated on the guide that developed into BallotReady.
More than 160,000 voters in Illinois, Virginia, Kentucky and Colorado have used BallotReady to inform their choices — a 10-fold growth from its launch last fall. The site is expanding its reach, developing profiles for candidates in Maryland, New Hampshire and Florida. Scaling hasn’t been easy: “It takes a lot of phone calls and relationship-building. That’s kind of daunting,” Niemczewski says, noting that 100 volunteer curators are needed to build candidate profiles, “but it’s also exciting, because it means we can really help.” By year’s end, BallotReady hopes to reach 1 million voters, and by 2020, to be in every state.
Since BallotReady is committed to educating every American citizen, it devotes resources to eliminating digital access issues that arise. Once, Niemczewski responded to a request from an elderly woman in an assisted living center. After the woman reported being unable to load BallotReady, Niemczewski troubleshot the problem by backdating the site’s functionality, so the senior citizens could use it on their outdated computers.
Ultimately, BallotReady’s founders work to make their innovative site as user-friendly as possible — to both the older electorate and young, first-time voters alike. That mission is just one of the reasons why teachers like Augustiny thinks that its online repository of candidate profiles is a great way to get Millennials more involved in elections. “The Internet is so pervasive at this point: it informs everything that we do, especially for younger people. Not having that information readily accessible online was a real disservice to young people,” she says.

As a teacher, Augustiny always wants her kids to develop in-depth research skills. But when it comes to voting — an activity that’s made so many Americans apathetic — she’s in favor of turning to BallotReady for a digital shortcut.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
MORE: Investing in the Future: This Visionary Program Gets Students Hooked on STEM

The Future of Housing Is Now. What Sustainable Homes Look Like

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Every time your air conditioner or furnace rumbles on, greenhouses gases spew into the air. All those volts —about 10,900 kilowatt-hours per person — used to charge laptops and phones, light rooms, and keep the refrigerator running don’t come without an environmental cost. American electricity generation contributed 2.04 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, clouding the earth’s atmosphere with emissions and worsening climate change.
A hot new trend in architecture may offer one of our best hopes for significantly diminishing that pollution. “Passive house” construction — usually built without central heating or cooling systems — can reduce energy usage to net-zero or even net-positive, meaning a building generates more energy than it consumes. Applicable to both commercial and residential properties, passive construction centers on five key design elements: heavily insulated walls (sometimes up to 15 inches thick), an extremely tight envelope, triple-paned windows and doors that are outfitted with high-performance locks, high-tech ventilation and moisture-recovery systems filter the air and solar panels on rooftops.
“There are no drafts in the winter. And in the summer, it stays cool without strong air conditioning blowing on you,” Jane Sanders, a Brooklyn architect, tells the New York Post about her home. “This morning, there was jackhammering two doors down from me, but I could barely hear it. It’s so quiet that I feel like I live in the country.”
Some homeowners will take objection with the boxy design; others will balk at the price tag. But as more passive homes are built, architects are experimenting with chic design and developing cheaper construction methods. NationSwell looked into five of the most interesting passive houses in America today.

Cheap land helped determine the location of the Smith House.

The Smith House, Urbana, Ill.

American designers first pioneered passive construction — then known as “superinsulation” in the early 1970s — after the oil embargo caused wild swings in energy prices. When conservation fell out of fashion during the Reagan years, the idea caught on among Germans in 1988, but it took until 2002, for the idea to return across the Atlantic. Katrin Klingenberg, a young German architect, and her now-deceased husband Nic Smith broke ground on the first American passive house prototype in Urbana, in part, because they could test the house against the harsh Midwestern climate. “I believe that climate crisis is real and that buildings need to do their part of reducing carbon emissions. The good news is that buildings have a lot of potential to do just that,” Klingenberg tells the Chicago Tribune. “We have to work a bit harder to get those reductions and invest a bit more upfront. But the reward is huge with long-lasting payback.”

Window detail, Kiln Apartments.

Kiln Apartments, Portland, Ore.

Portland is undeniably at the center of the American passive house movement, with more than 100 certified buildings in its metro area, according to some counts. The Kiln Apartments, in North Portland, are one of the largest mixed-use buildings — 19 apartments above ground-floor retail — to meet passive house standards.
The Oregon city already has one of the strictest building codes in the nation, but these units save up to 75 percent more energy than equivalent ones. With many south-facing windows, the buildings is heated largely by the sun during the winter. Thick metal sunshades that look like modernist awnings block the sunlight during hotter months, when the summer sun rises higher in the sky. The four-story building does have an elevator, but because everything is about energy efficiency, residents are encouraged to take the stairs.

Dedication ceremony for the Empowerment House, a 2-unit townhouse.

Habitat for Humanity Townhomes, Washington, D.C.

Demonstrating that passive house principles can be readily implemented, volunteers in the nation’s capital are building six townhouses for poor homeowners. Located in Ivy City, a portion of the structure was originally designed for the U.S. Solar Decathlon, a competition for college students to build the most energy-efficient home. Students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology put the one-bedroom together on the National Mall for under $230,000. After being moved northeast in 2012, a second story was added and Habitat for Humanity built a copy next door. Now, as the neighborhood gentrifies, the families in the six brick rowhouses have affordable rent and a a minimal utility bill. “I just remember thinking, we did it: a non-profit, affordable house developer can do this, even using volunteers with no construction experience,” Orlando Velez, manager of housing services at Habitat for Humanity’s D.C. chapter, tells ThinkProgress. “I started thinking, what’s everyone else waiting for?”

The north building of the Uptown Lofts.

Uptown Lofts, Pittsburgh, Penn.

This 47-unit housing affordable project, provides greener living spaces to those who can’t afford a market-rate home. Split into two buildings across the street from each other, 18- to 23-year-olds who aged out of the foster care system live in the northern building’s 24 one-bedroom apartments; to the south, 23 affordable units go to people who make less than 60 percent of Pittsburgh’s median income. The $12 million project was also notable for being the first time any state subsidized a passive house with tax benefits.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony this February, the project was praised for realizing its ambitious goals with limited dollars. “How proud we are to help bring these buildings to reality,” said Stan Salwocki, manager at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This project shows how cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient affordable housing can be done.”

The central utility plant at Cornell Tech is currently under construction.

Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island, N.Y.

Still in the works, the world’s tallest and largest passive house began construction this June. Rising 26 stories above Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, the apartment tower will house about 530 grad students, professors and staff for Cornell University’s new 12-acre applied sciences campus. Since nearly three quarters of the carbon emissions in New York City’s come from heating and cooling its skyscrapers, school administrators hope this project will set a new standard for energy efficiency and gain the attention of engineers and designers across the Queensboro Bridge in midtown.
The construction “is a clear signal that in today’s era of climate change, it’s not enough to simply build tallest. To lead the market, your tall building will need to be a passive house,” Ken Levenson, president of NY Passive House, an advocacy group, tells The New York Times. The $115 million project is expected to open in 2017 and will save 882 tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of planting 5,300 trees, according to the university.

One App Has Revolutionized How the Red Cross Mobilizes Volunteers

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Volunteers for the American Red Cross of Chicago & Northern Illinois respond to three or four disasters every single day — a total of 1,200 emergencies around the Windy City every year. Most of the incidents are house fires, and at least two of the group’s 1,740 disaster helpers show up at the scene while embers are still smoking to offer shelter, transportation, financial assistance, food, water, clothing and blankets.
That is, if the volunteers get there in time. Until recently, dispatchers picked up the phone after receiving an emergency alert and started going down a list of names. “It was all individual phone calls, one by one,” Jim McGowan, regional director of planning and situational awareness for the Red Cross, tells NationSwell. “It was typically a list in a spreadsheet. It was as good — or as bad — as on paper. We would try to figure out who was closest and then call that person first and hope they can go.” Not surprisingly, the phone tree method proved clunky and inefficient. Too often, assistance arrived at a house dripping with cold firehose water and no one in sight.
Recently, a new open-source application built by John Laxson, an engineer and Red Cross volunteer based in San Francisco, has helped the Chicago regional Red Cross vastly improve its emergency response. With the technology’s help, dispatchers in the Second City now identify volunteers twice as fast.
“We’re not first responders. We’re not going there to put the fire out, so the work that we do isn’t life or death. However, typically in a city like Chicago, where it’s really hot or really cold, we want to get assistance to that client as fast as possible,” McGowan says. “If it takes us took long to get there and the conditions are harsh, that person is going to seek help elsewhere…a friend’s house, a restaurant, the police station. We lose that opportunity to connect with them to begin with, [and they miss] out on services because we’re too slow to respond.”
The system is built with the responders in mind. They input their availability into a schedule, so dispatchers don’t waste time dialing people at work or out of town. When a fire, flood, or other calamity occurs, the dispatcher (also a volunteer) enters its address and receives a list of available names sorted by travel time. After the volunteer arrives, he or she can text updates back to the central hub.
Automatic text messaging and other so-called “cloud communications” are trending in the nonprofit world, bringing volunteerism into smartphone era. For instance, Polaris Project and Thorn use the “BeFree” text messaging hotline to combat human trafficking; the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the country’s sixth largest pediatric hospital, sends reminders to patients’ cell phones to put a small dent in the 250 daily no-shows that were costing the medical institution tens of millions of dollars annually; and the Crisis Text Line offers round-the-clock support for distressed teenagers.
Nonprofits always face the problem of limited means: they take on huge challenges and stretch their budgets as far as they can go. Fortunately, as the Red Cross has found, the web is making it easier than ever to mobilize volunteers. Maybe being hooked to our iPhones isn’t so bad after all. Our chance to do something good is just a text away.
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The Bison are Back. Here’s How These Roaming Beasts Are Restoring America’s Prairies

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Out on the range, the buffalo are roaming once again.
After a nearly 200-year absence, a small herd of bison have been reintroduced to the Nachusa Grasslands in north-central Illinois, two hours outside of Chicago. This marks the first time since the 1830s that the shaggy beasts have set their hooves east of the Mississippi River. The bison were trucked in last October to graze, spread seeds and churn the soil — all essential to restore Illinois’s tallgrass prairies.
“The word that keeps coming up is surreal,” says Jeff Walk, director of science for The Nature Conservancy’s Illinois chapter, which is heading up the Nachusa preservation efforts. Walk rode with the animals during their eight-hour truck ride from Sioux City, Iowa, and stuck around late into the night to see them unloaded from their trailers.
It was a moment The Nature Conservatory staff had been anticipating for a quarter-century.
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Although it’s known as the Prairie State, Illinois alone has lost more than 99 percent of its grasslands — from 22 million acres to just 2,500 acres, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Starting in 1986, The Nature Conservancy, considered the country’s largest environmental nonprofit, began buying up neighboring farms in an effort to return a portion of the land to its original state. Today, it now owns or has conservation easements for 3,500 acres. Over an estimated 450,000 hours, volunteers and employees have been weeding out invasive species, regenerating the preserved land through controlled burns and sowing and harvesting seeds for wild petunias, hazelnuts and hawthorne berries. But the bison’s return — at a price of $6 million — is the final stage in the landscape’s restoration.
“We can go around and do the small prairie restorations, but a true native prairie ecosystem has to have bison in it,” Brook McDonald, president of the Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit preserving untouched land in northeast Illinois, tells the Tribune. “Bison were such a significant part of the prairie that whole ecosystems depended on them. Without them, those species go too.”
Aside from a roundup every fall when they are vaccinated, the bison run wild on 500 acres of land hemmed in by a wire fence. (This year, the project will expand to another 1,000 acres.) Standing six feet tall at their shoulders and weighing close to 1 ton, the animals chomp down grasses and avoid flowering plants, increasing biodiversity by creating more light and root space. “The other thing is poop,” Kirk Hallowell, a volunteer steward, tells onEarth, the magazine of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The manure fertilizes the soil and attracts insects, which in turn will hopefully bring back the prairie’s native birds, including the upland sandpiper.
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Like the grassland itself, the bison struggle to reemerge from the devastation that came with settling the West. When the first colonists arrived, up to 60 million roamed the continent; by the beginning of the 20th century, however, excessive hunting had decimated the population and only a few hundred remained, the Wildlife Conservation Society says. In tandem, two symbols of the American pastoral are slowly being restored.
“We know that bison will be good for the prairie,” Walk says. “This is a unique opportunity to understand exactly how they influence the natural habitat. It’s a chance to study and learn, and from there, we can share those results with grassland restoration projects around the world.”
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The Top 5: America’s Best New Buildings

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Undoubtedly, we associate cities with their iconic structures: New York City’s Empire State Building, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, to name a few. But these edifices — so forward-thinking for their time that we’re still in awe of them today — are at least half a century old, making it seem like the era of erecting statement-making civic structures has passed.
Proving that designers are still as innovative as ever, however, are this year’s recipients of the prestigious Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The winners, which will be formally recognized at AIA’s National Convention in Atlanta this May, are diverse “in scale, expense, concept, use, in virtually every aspect,” says Waller McGuire, executive director of St. Louis Public Library and the only non-architect on AIA’s nine-member jury. “The strongest connection between the award winners is that we looked for architecture that respects and elevates the people using it: the people who will ultimately judge it for themselves.”
With that in mind, here’s a selection of five outstanding buildings, all of whose architects paid particular attention to their social responsibilities, impact and energy usage.
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Sometimes, All It Takes to Help Veterans Is Common Sense

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When veterans return home after being wounded during service, they face innumerable challenges, one of which is often just getting into and navigating around their own houses.
Several charities, including Building for America’s Bravest, the Gary Sinise Foundation, and Operation Homefront, have stepped up to provide wounded veterans with customized homes equipped with ramps, wide doorways and appliances accessible to people in wheelchairs. While these specialized houses are free, they often saddle veterans with a large annual tax bill, which some struggle to afford (especially if their injuries prevent them from working).
Nick Mapson, injured by two IEDs while serving in Afghanistan, is a recipient of a customized home from New American Homes, Inc. “It’s hard to explain all the widened doorways, all the easy accessible things throughout the house, the stoves the microwave, just a whole bunch of the things a lot of people take for granted,” Mapson, who lives in the Chicago area, tells Fox 18.
Mapson described the home as “the most amazing gift.” But then he learned how much he owed in property taxes. “We came to find out that they were almost $11,000 a year. That was out of our tax bracket for us to pay.”
Thankfully, Illinois recently passed a law, Senate Bill 2905, that eases the property tax burden faced by wounded veterans. Prior to the law, up to $70,000 of a wounded veteran’s home’s value was tax exempt, but only if the Disabled American Veterans built it. Now up to $100,000 of the home’s assessed value is exempt from taxes on homes donated by any nonprofit or individual to wounded veterans.
Mapson was relieved. “Now with the bill it affects everybody,” he says. “Veterans in Illinois that have donated homes and specially adapted homes built by the V.A. This is a pretty huge moment for us.”
MORE: Meet the Georgians Putting Energy-Efficient Roofs Over Disabled Vets’ Heads
 

When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process

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Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”

Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.

So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.

Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.

While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.

Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”

The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.

With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

DIVERTING THE PIPELINE

The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.

Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.

Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.

Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.

“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.

Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.

Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.

At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.

MAKING IT RIGHT

In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.

In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.

Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.

“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.

According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.

On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.

For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.

“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.

Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.

Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.

As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”

The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.

The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”

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The Last Thing Veterans Need Is Student Loan Debt…

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A common misconception is that any veteran who wants a college education can finance it through G.I. Bill. But sadly, this isn’t so. Both the old version and the new, post 9/11 one exclude certain education expenses and neither applies to student loan debt accrued before servicemen and women entered the military.
So the Chicago-based nonprofit Leave No Veteran Behind is offering a “Retroactive Scholarship” that has already helped 10 veterans pay off their student loan debt and get back on track toward productive post-military lives.
One of the first beneficiaries is Delaina Conour, who was attending college when the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 spurred her to enlist in the Army. During training, she suffered a back injury and was eventually medically discharged, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Delaina’s husband is a disabled veteran, and in 2006, they had a daughter with Down syndrome who has undergone 12 surgeries. The overwhelming medical expenses, coupled with her preexisting student loan debt, was too much. “We ended up forced into bankruptcy and ended up losing our home because of medical bills,” Conour tells Hayley Fox of Take Part.
Their bankruptcy declaration didn’t clear student loan debt, however, leaving the family with $15,000 worth of debt. But fortunately, Leave No Veteran Behind stepped up and covered Conour’s $10,000 portion of it. “I didn’t even know help like this existed,” Delaina says.
Every year, Leave No Veteran Behind’s scholarship committee meets to review applications. They give priority to veterans suffering hardships — including unemployment and medical difficulties. The committee selects several and pays their outstanding student loan debt off in full.
In exchange for paying off student loan debts, Leave No Veteran Behind also asks the vets to commit to 100 to 400 hours of community service “that leverages their military skills, civilian education and lack of indebtedness to help solve the most pressing issues facing their communities,” according to the nonprofit’s website.
Veterans Roy Sartin and Eli Williamson are the founders of Leave No Veteran Behind. Both struggled with student loan debt and unemployment when they returned from service in Iraq and Afghanistan. So in 2009, they started the nonprofit that they wished had existed for them.
So far, the organization has paid off almost $150,000 in student loan debt. By getting the word out about their efforts, Sartin and Williamson hope to eventually help 60 to 70 veterans a year, removing one big stressor as these soldiers transition to civilian life.
MORE: This Nonprofit is Making Sure Kids of Fallen Heroes Can Go To College

Buy a T-Shirt, Help a Veteran

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Mark Doyle didn’t know a thing about screen-printing t-shirts but that didn’t stop him from starting Rags of Honor, a Chicago-based t-shirt company dedicated to hiring homeless and chronically unemployed veterans.
Doyle now works as the director of Prairie Community Bank in Marengo, Ill., as well as the football coach at St. Pat’s High School in Chicago. But back in 2010, he was hired to help the U.S. Army investigate financial corruption in Afghanistan. While there, he was struck by the dedication of the service members and also by the fact that a lot of money was being spent on foreign aid, while relatively little was dedicated to helping struggling veterans back home.
So Doyle started Rags of Honor, a company that pays its veteran employees a living wage to produce a variety of patriotic and pro-Chicago t-shirts, as well as orders of custom-printed shirts. Rags of Honor trains workers even if they have no related experience and provides them benefits and opportunities for advancement.
The company has been a lifesaver for Navy veteran Tamika Holyfield. “I did two years and a half at the Bartons Air Base in Afghanistan,” she tells Ravi Baichwal of ABC 7 Chicago. “I returned to hardship and turmoil. I didn’t have a place to live, so I was basically living out of my car.”
The same was true for Frank Beamon III, who served as a machine gunner in Afghanistan, but found that his experience there counted for little with employers when he returned home to the Windy City. Both Holyfield and Beamon ended up homeless.
“The day I told them they were hired, they started crying on the spot,” Doyle tells Baichwal. “These are grown men and women. So never underestimate what just a job can mean to somebody who has no hope.”
For those who might think that they don’t have the power to reach out and help veterans, “You don’t have to be the President,” Doyle says. “You don’t have to start Google. Make a difference in the lives immediately around you. Give somebody hope. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what we do, one t-shirt at a time. If I can leave anybody with anything, give somebody hope today.”
MORE: For Homeless Veterans, Gardening Can Be the Therapy That Gets Them Back on Their Feet
 

The National Movement to End Veteran Homelessness Continues in These Two Cities

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Two midwest cities are stepping up and helping out veterans that don’t have homes.
On Sept. 16, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a plan to end homelessness among former service members living in the Windy City by 2015. A $5 million program providing housing and other assistance to veterans will be funded through a federal grant, along with $800,000 from the city’s 2015 budget. Chicago will also donate four acres of land for new housing facilities.
In a press conference, Emanuel said, “By the end of 2015, there will not be a homeless veteran in the city of Chicago.”
Emanuel spoke at Hope Manor I, a supportive housing complex for veterans that provides free places to live for up to 50 homeless veterans and affordable housing for 30 more veterans. On the first floor of the building, veterans and their families can take job-training and employment-readiness classes, learn how to use a computer, attend peer support groups and benefit from counseling and case management services. Residents can also gather in a multi-purpose room designed to foster a sense of community among them.
During the press conference, Emanuel announced that a new center Hope Manor for Families — a facility that will accommodate entire families — will open soon.
Since Hope Manor I opened, two other similar facilities have started welcoming needy vets: Hope Manor II and Veterans New Beginnings. According to Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago took a census of its homeless veterans in January — a “point-in-time count” measuring how many people were out on the streets on one night. The researchers found 721 homeless veterans — 465 lived in shelters and 256 had no place to call home.
The same day that Emanuel announced this program, another Midwestern mayor publicly committed his administration to the cause of ending homelessness among veterans by 2015: Mayor Carl Brewer of Wichita, Kansas. KSN TV reports that Brewer announced at a City Council meeting, “Veteran homelessness is not an intractable social problem that can’t be solved”
“By focusing our resources and renewing our communities’ commitment to this issue, we can end veteran homelessness in our city and our country. I’m proud to join mayors across the country as we work toward the important goal of honoring the service of our veterans by making sure all of them have a home to call their own,” said Brewer.
According to KSN TV, since 2010 when the federal government launched Opening Doors (a comprehensive plan to end homelessness) homelessness among veterans in America has decreased by 24 percent.
If the plans of these mayors succeed, Chicago and Wichita could join Phoenix, Los Angeles and other cities who are striving to make homelessness among veterans a thing of the past.
MORE: Giving Homeless Vets A Helping Hand — And A New Uniform