More than a decade ago, Margaret Martin was at a farmers’ market in Los Angeles when she saw a group of swaggering gang members with shaved heads give money to a little boy playing Brahms on his violin. “Those gang members were teaching me that they would rather be doing what the child was doing than what they were doing, but they never had the chance,” Martin told Josh Aronson of the PBS NewsHour. So in 2001, Martin established the Harmony Project, a non-profit providing low-income Los Angeles youths with instruments and at least five hours of instruction per week. The program now helps more than 2,000 students with stunning results.
In the neighborhoods the Harmony Project serves, on average 50 percent of students do not graduate from high school, and 80 percent of black and Latino students do not read at grade level. This year, students in the Harmony Project graduated at a rate of 93 percent.
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Dr. Nina Kraus of Northwestern University conducted a study that demonstrates even more clearly the profound effect music education is having on these kids. She selected a group of 80 youths from a gang-ridden L.A. neighborhood, and assigned half of them to the Harmony Project, while the others waited a year before enrolling. The group taking music lessons showed a marked increase in language comprehension, gains the second group didn’t begin to make until they also started music lessons. It’s possible, Kraus thinks, that music education may enhance a child’s neurological development enough to help those who perform below grade level catch up. “Early sustained music learning is actually the frame upon which education itself can be built for low-income kids,” Martin said. That’s music to our ears.
Tag: los angeles
You Won’t Believe How Much These Smart Streetlights Could Save Us
A sprawling expanse of illuminated city blocks is beautiful to behold. It’s also incredibly wasteful. Dutch mechanical engineer Chintan Shah discovered that keeping the lights on at night in Europe cost the continent more than 10 billion Euros each year and accounted for more than 40% of the government’s energy use. It also created 40 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, giving a whole new meaning to the term “light pollution.”
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Shah’s company, Tvilight, created a motion sensor for streetlights that dims the light when people aren’t around and restores it to full brightness when triggered by human (or animal) movement. Shah’s sensors can also be adjusted to their location. For uncommonly used places like empty parking lots, the streetlights can be dimmed up to 70% when they’re not needed. For well-trafficked roadways and neighborhood streets, streetlamps may be dimmed only 30% to 40%, in order to keep areas secure. Tvilight’s sensors have already been installed throughout entire municipalities in Ireland and Holland, saving those countries up to 60% on energy costs. Now, Shah and his group are in talks with officials in Germany, Canada and in the U.S. — in Los Angeles. In other words, Shah’s bright idea is taking off.
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The Big City School District That Has Education Reformers Talking
The L.A. Unified school district is improving faster than other large, urban school systems. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says that L.A. is among the districts that set an example for the entire country on what can be accomplished when schools embrace reform. Duncan credits the district’s progress to its transformation of the recruiting and training process for teachers and principals. The district has put demanding teaching standards in place, and in part links teacher evaluations to test scores. Duncan says that the “ambitious, courageous, and sometimes controversial reforms” are working for the district’s students — the ultimate goal and highest mark of success for any education reform.
This Company Solves a Bigger Problem Than You Think
Kabira Stokes’ socially conscious company Isidore Electronics Recycling does more than just re-purpose e-waste, the valuable but potentially hazardous metal components in discarded phones and computers. It employs people with criminal records. Stokes’ motivation to start the company came from a painful personal experience when she realized she had the power to make a difference. After two hundred tons of recycled e-waste and counting, the company is on firm ground to keep helping people stay employed and out of the prison system forever.
What Would a City with No Plastic Bags Look Like?
On January 1, big stores in Los Angeles will no longer offer shoppers plastic bags at all, making it the biggest U.S. city to ban plastic bags. The law will help reduce pollution and encourage the use of reusable totes. And to help Angelinos get used to the idea, city officials have cooked up a plan to give out free reuseable bags. What I love about this LA Times story is how the city “teamed up with environmental and charity groups that work with veterans and former gang members to produce a line of bags made from recycled or repurposed materials.” This kind of city-civic partnership is a great example of bringing every one who cares about an issue to the table and coming up with solutions that offer something to everyone.
Farm-Fresh Food Delivered to Your Doorstep Without the Middleman? It Can Be Done. Here’s How.
If you want fresh fish, you drive to the docks. Fresh vegetables, the farmer’s market. But what if it came to you, hours after being plucked from the ground, hauled out of the water or coaxed out of an oven? What if you could buy all the food you eat from local, sustainable growers and ranchers and fishermen, all year round, every day, without having to traipse from place to place?
If the San Francisco startup Good Eggs continues its impressive run, that’ll soon be possible in cities all over America. Bay Area residents—as well as folks in Brooklyn, N.Y., New Orleans and Los Angeles—can now order and eat enough local food at www.goodeggs.com to avoid supermarkets altogether. Continue reading “Farm-Fresh Food Delivered to Your Doorstep Without the Middleman? It Can Be Done. Here’s How.”