The Impressive Top-to-Bottom Makeover of the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice System

Teenagers make mistakes. They sneak out past curfew to drink at a house party, shoplift clothes, graffiti their names in bathroom stalls, talk back to authorities and throw punches in heated moments. Our juvenile justice system views some of these violations as youthful folly; others are deemed criminal offenses. Unjustly, skin color or socioeconomic status might determine how the behavior is categorized. Suburban white youth are tsk-tsked, while urban black children are handcuffed and jailed.
Massachusetts created the nation’s first juvenile correctional system around 1846, and it also led the first reforms by shutting down Dickensian “training schools.” But during the high-crime spike of the 1990s, the punitive model common to most states made a resurgence. However, while laws passed making it easier to try kids as adults, a group of fed-up employees teamed up to reform youth courts, juvenile detention facilities and probation offices from within. While much of the country continues to arrest more than 1.02 million children every year, Massachusetts reduced the number in custody down to a daily average of about 190 youth, or 2,240 admissions annually. These state workers also dramatically slashed the number of children under age 14 placed in secure facilities from roughly 500 to just a handful.
What changed? The state wised up to normal teenage behavior and its institutions’ role in either furthering or freezing maturity. Reformers implemented what they call “positive youth development” as the main priority. Under this philosophy, which draws much of its insight from developmental psychology, the Massachusetts juvenile justice system stopped focusing on the bad things kids shouldn’t do and started promoting positive outcomes. When a child makes a mistake, the state steps in as the de facto parent, teacher, mentor and neighbor. Recognizing that youth need to grasp a sense of their own future in order to avoid a life of crime, college graduation and job placement replace recidivism as measures of success.
“For example, the kid who comes into court for fighting at school will ordinarily be put on probation, where he’s told, ‘Don’t fight, follow all the rules, keep a curfew.’ But if this is an 8th grade boy who’s old enough to be in high school and reading at a 2nd grade level, he’ll never succeed on probation. It’s never enough to order children to behave better. We need to look at their life circumstances and ask, ‘What resources, opportunities, services or supports are they going to need in order to be able to behave better?’ asks Joshua Dohan, head of the state public defenders’ juvenile unit. “As adults, we need to do something kids are not good at, which is taking the long view. What do we need to invest in over the long run so that we can nurture a healthy adult, as opposed to punishing a kid because he missed school one day?”
A little over a decade ago, Dohan, a public defender representing youth in Boston reached out to one of the men in charge of the state’s juvenile detention facilities. Dohan wanted to know if the official (who regularly locked up plenty of teenagers) wanted to join him at an upcoming conference on juvenile defense. “Ignorant” of the role good defense attorneys played in a child’s case, Edward Dolan, then deputy commissioner of Massachusetts’s Department of Youth Services, accepted. In an unexpected turning point, Massachusetts’s entire juvenile justice system started to flip. As the top leadership started collaborating, a punitive model slowly lost out to a restorative one.
For too long, each separate agency in the criminal justice system — from the lawyers in court, to guards in detention facilities, to officers in probation — had been caught up in its own institutional inertia, carrying out policies because that’s how they had always been done. There’d been some dissenting voices, most prominently Ned Loughran, a former priest who had agitated against harsh retribution for juveniles as head of DYS from 1985–1993. But on the whole, the agencies remained trapped within their respective silos. At the conference, focused on the entire juvenile justice system, Dohan and Dolan had their first chance to look outside their own roles, question the underlying rules and realign the system in kids’ best interests.
“Even though I’m in the business, it was the first time I was seeing the world through [the public defenders’] eyes. I put myself in their position, looking from a kid’s perspective and a…mother’s perspective at some of the things we did as an agency. We were like a machine,” Dolan says. “[Juvenile detention] was a pretty troubled agency at the time, overwhelmed and overcrowded. Even for the big leadership in the organization, we didn’t feel good about the way we were doing things. We were looking for a better pathway forward.”
Starting with that one conference where defense attorneys and a juvenile jailor found common ground, the agencies initiated a conversation about their overlapping roles in helping youth. Side by side, they could no longer blame other parts of the system for the dysfunction. From there, a group of bureaucrats started to rewrite the system together, unified under the banner of an approach that made more sense for children.
“Positive youth development” generally defines the field of academics applying insights from neuroscience and knowledge of human development to criminal justice. As practitioners, attorneys and officers usually don’t have time to get an advanced degree in social work, says Dohan. “The people who apply it have taken it on as their task to sort through and operationalize [the research] for youth workers, teachers, lawyers and probation officers to give us guidance about what works and what doesn’t and why.”
At the height of the War on Drugs, policymakers generally split along partisan lines about how to respond to criminal acts by youth. The right wing saw unchangeable “super-predators” who needed to be incarcerated to restore law and order, while leftists saw victims of poverty who needed counseling and therapy, says Dr. Jeffrey Butts, director of John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Research & Evaluation Center.
Both of these viewpoints are “incredibly biased in terms of class and race,” adds Butts, best known as one of the field’s founders, because they assume teens from high-crime communities are inherently more criminal than their peers elsewhere. The developmental approach, in contrast, doesn’t take a child’s actions as indicative of their character. Butts’s theory holds that the best way to stop crime is to encourage youth to acquire skills. Unlike the other two models, “the fact that a 17-year-old stole a bike doesn’t mean he’s destined to be an adult criminal,” Butts says.
Positive youth development maintains that five assets enable teens to mature into law-abiding citizens: strong bonds with adults and prosocial peers, a safe home, a healthy lifestyle, opportunities for civic engagement and an effective education and success in the labor market. Possessing these resources will make youth naturally begin to see that belonging to conventional society is more valuable, says Butts, than the short-term advantage one might accrue from committing a crime. If a young person feels connected to his community, “there’s more to lose by being caught stealing someone’s phone than by saving the few hundred dollars to buy a new one,” he adds.
“We have to be at least as good as criminal street gangs. They know exactly how to bring a 10-year-old into a group, how to increase their sense of purpose until they become very loyal,” Butts adds. “We need to be at least that good in attaching young people to our community.”
Positive development takes place at every step of the Massachusetts juvenile justice system — from when a public defender meets a client in lockup to the last appointment with a probation officer. For them, it’s not about creating a “feel-good” system, so much as designing systems that will reduce recidivism and lead to positive outcomes. Unlike most other states, Massachusetts offers a network of highly specialized public defenders for juveniles — a benchmark few under-resourced legal aid societies across the country have met. “What makes juvenile defense such a critical area of specialized practice is that in order to be effective, you need to have all the skills of an effective criminal defense lawyer and all the knowledge of adolescent development,” says Mary Ann Scali, head of the National Juvenile Defender Center. “In places like Massachusetts…, we know that we can provide constitutionally mandated access to counsel and effective counsel all the time.”
In Massachusetts, Dohan built the Committee for Public Counsel Services’s Youth Advocacy Department into a premier league of 36 staff attorneys and over 500 private attorneys who receive regular trainings on juvenile-specific topics. That’s a big feat considering these lawyers sign up for an unforgiving job. “The pay is terrible. Juvenile is the hardest place to make a living because there’s no private clients,” Dohan explains. (Still, you won’t hear him brag about what he’s developed; when NationSwell reached out to profile him for this story, the humble attorney sent back a list of 18 other sources to interview.)
Even when these experienced defense lawyers can’t argue their client’s innocence, the child is still in good hands in the Department of Youth Services, which leverages every connection it has to ensure kids receive the services they need. DYS tries to offer “all those things that you’d want for your own 17-year-old teenager,” says Peter Forbes, DYS commissioner. Indeed, kids seem to grasp the value, because half continue to go back to DYS for services (like tutoring, job training, coaching and counseling) for up to three years after they’re released. Most return for about six months on average, Forbes reports — something that would be unheard of at a jail like New York’s Rikers Island or a prison like San Quentin in California.
And finally, once a child is put on probation, her public defender will argue for a reasonable plan that’s created to advance her best interests. It’s a stark contrast with the old model — “trail ‘em and nail ‘em,” as Dohan calls it. The new system’s main goal is to ensure conditions are achievable. Much of this advocacy centers on education. As Dohan’s seen from experience, an 8th grader reading at a 2nd grade level feels like they’re being “tortured.” Bored, frustrated or humiliated, these students are prone to acting out. To help a child catch up, the lawyers are trained to involve the school system. “It’s not enough not to be expelled. We also get them into a program in which they can succeed,” Dohan describes. Kids won’t march themselves into a principal’s office to request this fix, but their lawyers in Massachusetts will. “Our job is not just to make the kid look good in the courtroom,” he adds. “Our job is to litigate but then put them in a much better position to succeed when the case is over.”
In implementing this program, the Massachusetts reformers, at first, fought an uphill battle to win funding from legislators. “In fairness to legislators, you are asking them to make an investment of the public’s money. They should expect a return on that investment,” Dolan says. They quickly saw a payback, in the form of reduced recidivism, and legislators soon allowed money saved from reduced caseloads to be reinvested into other initiatives. (Where that funding didn’t suffice, agencies turned to nonprofits outside the state system to supplement their work, assistance they still rely on today.) As evidence accrues, it’s getting easier to sell the developmental approach.
Even as this model gains traction, it still presents problems to be solved. Up next? The reformers are trying to confront racial and ethnic discrimination that’s endemic to the system by rigorously studying the data to locate what Dolan calls “unintentional but undeniable” disparities in treatment, offering classes on implicit bias and working with partners outside corrections to generate awareness. If they get it right, there’s much that can be used in correctional systems — both juvenile and adult — nationwide. Dohan, Dolan and Forbes started out with the intention of helping kids see their future; in the process, they’ve defined what’s next for a justice system in sore need of a new direction.
MORE: When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process

The Low-Risk Way to Help At-Risk Kids

Perhaps the biggest danger for at-risk youth is the loss of social ties. Stranded by an absent family or an uncaring community, there’s usually no stopgap to prevent a young person from dropping out of school, turning to drugs or uncorking their anger with violence — unless a coach, pastor or neighbor steps in. In other words, these children need a mentor.

Too often, the kids most in need of reassurance and guidance aren’t connected with a mentor. Nearly one-third of America’s youth grow up without a trusted adult relationship outside their home. Of those, more than half — 9 million American kids, about the same size as all of New York City — are considered at-risk.

As the founder and CEO of MentorMe, a tech platform for youth and small business development, Brit Fitzpatrick is out to change that. “I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we shifted the way we view mentoring relationships from something formed by happenstance or as a product of privilege, to something that can be used as a tool to actually strengthen our communities,” she says. “What would happen if we shifted the focus of cities from attracting outside talent to actually investing in the young talent that’s already there? What if, along with great neighborhoods and great schools, every child was given a great mentor?”

The for-profit MentorMe, founded in 2014 in Memphis, Tenn., uses technology to better serve disconnected youth. Their cloud-based platform helps nonprofit organizations match their volunteers to the right child, manage the pair’s activities and then measure the impact of the relationship. As clients like Points of Light, the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce and the State of New York can vouch, MentorMe’s automated software program beats tracking each mentor and mentee on an Excel spreadsheet or, worse, with pen and paper. At Memphis Grizzlies Foundation, senior manager Desiree’ Robertson says the biggest boon has been the online application, particularly useful during the holidays when she might receive five or six requests a day. Fitzpatrick estimates that, for most clients, administrative time is cut by a quarter with the platform.

“The way mentoring programs are traditionally run is not scalable, as they rely on paperwork, spreadsheets and half-baked solutions,” Fitzpatrick says. “Unfortunately, most people underestimate the time needed to run mentoring programs successfully, and while they roll out to great fanfare, most fizzle out before gaining significant traction.”

Why is a streamlined process so important? Matching a kid with the wrong mentor can actually do significant damage. A mentoring relationship that lasts for less than six months actually degrades a young person’s feelings of self-worth and perceived performance in school. That’s why it’s essential to partner adults and children based on shared interests and expectations and to ensure they are meeting up at regular intervals, which MentorMe’s platform tracks.

If the pair jives, the results can be life-changing. Fitzpatrick, who herself benefited from mentoring, knows this firsthand. Raised by a single mom, she spent her after-school hours and summers at the Boys and Girls Club. Since graduating from Howard University in 2009, getting her first job in digital media marketing and founding a startup, she has given back by mentoring others. And her platform has helped another 6,000 volunteers find a young person to advise.

“As individuals, we may not be able to eradicate poverty; we may not be able to wipe out youth violence,” Fitzpatrick says. “But we can all start where we are, reach back and find a young person to invest in. Then, collectively, we can all be part of providing a brighter future for the next generation.”

Homepage photo courtesy of MentorMe.

Continue reading “The Low-Risk Way to Help At-Risk Kids”

Building a Better City Through Big Data

In the nation’s capital, 28 percent of children live in a household that’s below the federal poverty line, and another 20 percent grow up barely above it. As executive director of DC Action for Children, NationSwell Council member HyeSook Chung studied exactly where this deprivation could be found and, more importantly, why. “What are we doing that’s not working, and why are we investing in it?” she asks repeatedly. Unlike the ideological think tanks that populate D.C.’s corridors, she’s a relentless empiricist who searches for answers in data. At DC Action, she partnered with DataKind and joined the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count community to publicly post a number of visuals about the city online, graphically comparing, say, youth unemployment, Medicaid enrollment or the number of parks in every D.C. neighborhood. Last month, Chung accepted a new role as D.C.’s deputy mayor for health and human services. As she makes the transition, NationSwell caught up with her to discuss the data-driven accomplishments at her last job and reflect on what her new role means for the city.
How does better data guide decision-making in Washington, D.C.?
At DC Action, we were the first ones to really look at the neighborhood level. Looking at wards — the equivalent of a county level — was too broad. As a parent, I live in D.C. and my kids go to DCPS, and I wanted to know why parents in certain areas were able to move the needle, despite the lack of support from the city’s administrative offices. With neighborhood data, we could question why a cluster of a few elementary schools were doing better than all the others in that ward. It could be race or income, but I wanted to know exactly why.
That led to visual analysis and asset-mapping that we can show a council member. “Look at grocery stores and the lack of fresh produce in Wards 7 and 8. Look at the poverty in Wards 1, 4 and 5 that’s starting to kick up.” We were able to have a different conversation with city leaders. Some of the big fights in the city are about state representation and all the things happening on the Hill, so I don’t think they were ready for an organization to show up with data on the neighborhood level. Because then, the solutions are really localized solutions, not these macro, citywide policies. That’s a different way of thinking: One solution is not going to meet the needs of all 108,000 kids under 18.
There’s been a lot of debate about how data can be misused. How do you avoid trusting misleading figures or building biased algorithms?
Data is not so black and white, especially in human resources. People dealing with people is very subjective. How can you have an automated evaluation for hiring or firing? In public education, there’s this drive for outcomes in test scores that need to be improved if the teacher is to be effective. I heard from one teacher who scored 6 percent [in his evaluations] one year, then 97 percent the next. The educator said that nothing changed; the calculations were just different those two times. Their salaries, pensions, even their jobs are determined by these equations some person is putting together. That is one thing about open data about which we have to be conscientious.
As the repository for Kids Count at DC Action, we focused on making sure we had the most up-to-date, reliable, unbiased data out there, but we also kept track of how that data is used. We all have biases that data can further or can debunk. We took our role very seriously to be as unbiased as we could, to give as much context as we could, then let the data speak for itself.
How can service providers change their operations to keep better track of their data?
I was training a few of the intake coordinators at one community-based organization, and I walked them through why everything they do is so important to track. I referenced Amazon: As a user, every movement, every click is tracked to give me popups based on what I might like. For nonprofits, the only difference is you meet families and children every day, and you have all these interactions and conversations. But none of that is being recorded or tracked. One of the pitfalls of social finance data is that we’re very great about tracking quantities and caseloads, like how many families you served or how many kids graduated, but we’re not so good about tracking progress or the quality of services. That’s been something I’ve been pushing recently: It shouldn’t be about how many preschool slots we have, because we have to narrow down how many of those are quality. They’re not all equal. We’re trying to set a new bar. Caseloads are not enough information to show progress.

HyeSook Chung speaks in 2015 on the Books From Birth Bill, which provides a free book to D.C. children each month from birth to age 5.

DC Action, in making public data widely available, is really just scratching the surface on the reams of information agencies could collect. What does the future look like if the public sector fully embraces this tool?
Can you imagine what the impact would be on the social-service sector if we had real-time data? It’s profound: Netflix and Amazon are able to adjust, in a matter of seconds, based on consumer knowledge. At nonprofits, we have a long way to go to embrace that and redefine accountability. Of course, it’s not truly transferrable from the private sector, but our decisions about service delivery could be much more engaged and responsive to live information from a family. We have to be careful; we don’t want to profile. But how do we translate, with these ethical and business questions in mind, those insights to the social sector to be more effective for families? That’s my interest. I want to get to a place where we can say, “Because of this investment here, we had this result.” It’s not about money; it’s about how we use the resources we have. If a program is not improving outcomes, have the courage and the data to adapt it. We’re not quick enough, and that’s frustrating to me. I just don’t know why we are in this rut of not giving our kids what they deserve.
How do you define leadership?
Two words come to mind: integrity and resiliency. Being an executive director is really hard work. I’ve made decisions, I’ve dealt with funding changes, I’ve let go of friends and fired people. At the end of the day, if my integrity is intact, I can go to bed, knowing I did the best I could. There were plenty of times I cried a lot and had to make hard decisions. But the work continues, because the bottom line is kids need us. The mission keeps us moving.
Why did you decided to take a new job in city administration?
At DC Action, we were called upon by the mayor’s executive offices to help make data-informed decisions. In many ways, we were partners in an advisory capacity helping departments achieve results and made decisions based on outcomes, not simply compliance. After meeting with Mayor Muriel Bowser, I knew [this job] was another wonderful opportunity to push our starting principles to a much larger scale. The mayor invited me into the administration to help highlight the critical importance of data-driven work for some of the toughest challenges we have before us as a city: homelessness and reform of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits.  As a public servant, I am thrilled to be asked to think more strategically and systematically about how we can truly make a difference in the lives of our residents in need.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.

Giving Poor Kids a Leg Up in Youth Sports, Recruiting Vets to the Ivy League and More

 
Poor Kids Are Being Priced Out of Youth Sports: Here’s One Solution, Washington Post
Low-income parents often can’t afford to buy their children a $300 baseball bat or $250 hockey skates; they may struggle to scrounge up even the $50 fee to join a youth sports league. In Gaithersburg, Md., an outlying D.C. suburb, officials simplified the fee-waiver process — from an explanation why parents couldn’t afford the entry price to a simple checkbox — and participation shot up by 80 percent in high-poverty schools.
Veterans in the Ivy League: Students Seek to Up Their Ranks, Associated Press
Only three Harvard undergrads served in the military; at Princeton, only one. A new intercollegiate student organization, the Ivy League Veterans Council, is advocating that the elite schools’ administrations should do more to bring former service members into their colleges by recruiting soldiers as if they were athletes, establishing a veterans’ office on campus or accepting transfer credits.
King County Tries Counseling, Self-Reflection Instead of Jail for Teens, The Seattle Times
Which juvenile justice system seems preferable: one where kids leave hardened by disruptive prison sentences or one where teens emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their crimes? In a first attempt at restorative justice, the top juvenile prosecutor in King County, Wash., put one defiant, 15-year-old robber through 108 hours of hearings to see if self-reflection could change his attitude where prison cells had failed.

Zakiya Harris of Hack the Hood

For Zakiya Harris, growing up in East Oakland, Calif., meant navigating between two acutely different worlds every day. “I grew up in the hood, but I went to a very affluent school,” she says. “So I spent my days being one of few black people, and I spent my nights being in a predominantly black neighborhood. I believe that really shapes the work that I do, because I’ve always been a bridge-builder.”
Today, Harris is building bridges in the Bay Area as the co-founder of Hack the Hood, an Oakland-based nonprofit that introduces young people of color to careers in technology by training them to design and build free websites for small businesses. The participants, who range in age from 16 to 25, learn crucial skills for the 21st-century economy, and the local businesses establish an online presence that they otherwise might not have had the time, resources or know-how to build themselves. “Hack the Hood is able to level-up the skills of young people and also provide a huge economic development boost for small businesses in their community,” Harris says.
Since 2014, Hack the Hood has sponsored 16 boot camps in eight cities across Northern California. The six-week programs have attracted a total of 234 young minorities from low-income neighborhoods, 92 percent of whom have completed the course. Boot camps begin with an intensive two-week focus on technical skills like website design, coding and social media promotion. “After that, the program transitions into an office,” says Harris, when the young participants are paired with small-business clients and are responsible for self-managing their Web projects. “We want them to feel like freelancers and like a design firm,” she says. The goal is to broaden their relationship to technology. “They start to see their place in tech,” adds Harris. “They don’t just have to be consumers, they can be creatives.”
The local businesses that sign on also reap enormous benefits. Hack the Hood typically works with mom-and-pop shops whose owners aren’t necessarily comfortable online or on social media. “A lot of these folks are small, and they don’t want to be thinking about their website,” Harris says. And because of the rapidly shifting demographics of Bay Area neighborhoods, businesses that lack an online presence aren’t reaching the new residents moving in. “We want our local owners to be more visible,” she says. “When people are Googling the new coffee shop or the closest tax preparer, we want those people who’ve been the backbone of our city to show up in the search results.”


Join the cause! Use your talents to help open doors for low-income, high-potential youth. Volunteer your time as a mentor in the Bay Area or elsewhere in the US.


Hack the Hood participants don’t just gain valuable experience working in tech, they also develop soft skills, like project management, public speaking, networking, perseverance and more. And besides learning to write CSS and HTML code, they’re given a chance to explore the more creative aspects of maintaining a Web presence through site design, photography and videography. Realizing their true passions and talents helps them find their niche in technology, says Max Gibson, a lead instructor and creative strategist at Hack the Hood. “At first, they might not have an idea of what they want to do with their lives, or what their real strengths and skills are,” Gibson says. “So for me, it’s really about allowing them to discover what those things are, and then pointing them in the right direction.”

For her part, Harris sees Hack the Hood as addressing a new kind of gulf between the technological haves and have-nots. “People typically think of the digital divide as those who have Internet access versus those who don’t,” she says. But that idea is quickly becoming outdated. “The issue now is the knowledge divide. Do you know how to pull up the hood and understand the code beneath it? Do you understand what your digital footprint is going to look like?”
Closing that knowledge gap has the potential to impact communities far beyond the Bay Area. “Young people of color are going to create platforms and opportunities in tech that no one else has,” Harris says, pointing to the apps — such as those tackling police brutality, immigrant rights and other issues affecting communities of color — produced at recent hackathons attended by minorities. “My generation is passing on a planet that has many, many problems. Having a diversity of voices in the decision-making process is going to allow a diversity of solutions to come through.” Technology provides important tools for solving today’s problems, Harris says. “It’s imperative that we make sure every young person has access to these tools so they can address the problems of our future.”

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The 2016 AllStars program is produced in partnership with Comcast NBCUniversal and celebrates social entrepreneurs who are powering solutions with innovative technology. Visit NationSwell.com/AllStars from November 1 to 15 to vote for your favorite AllStar. The winner will receive the AllStar Award, a $10,000 grant to help further his or her work advocating for change.

This Innovative Library Program Is Helping Underserved Kids Tap Into Their Creative Potential

Walk into a North Philadelphia library, and you’ll be greeted by an unusual sight. While adult patrons surf the Web and whisper in hushed voices, adolescents giddily piece together sticks and balls to make structures that snake across the room. Grownups leave with books under their arms; kids carry out hand-sewn wallets, colorful birdhouses and wands tipped with glowing LED lights.
Maker Jawn, a year-round Free Library of Philadelphia initiative funded by an NBCUniversal 21st Century Solutions grant, opens branches’ underutilized spaces to middle school students to experiment with hands-on creation. The program began in 2011 as a way to fill a gap in the city’s public school education. Noticing that arts and music classes were being slashed in favor of test-prep memorization, the library stepped in to supplement project-based creative arts learning. The term maker jawn comes from the learning environments known as Makerspaces, in which participants experiment with creative technology, and from the slang word jawn, which originated in Philly’s hip-hop scene and can take on the meaning of any noun in a sentence. The Free Library of Philadelphia chose it for the program’s title to suggest the range of work that youngsters could create, where nothing is off-limits.
Supplied with iPads, power tools, a 3-D printer, hot-glue guns, paint and buckets of marbles, buttons and other knick-knacks, the preteen participants are given free rein to build what they please. To an outsider, it might seem the kids are just messing around, making arts and crafts from leftover junk. But for many of its young devotees, the program is a welcome change from the confines of a school day shaped by strict, rote learning and a respite from some of the hardships of life in an impoverished neighborhood. The mentors who run Maker Jawn’s daily lessons see that the kids are tapping into their creativity, maybe for the first time, and building up diminished self-confidence.
“People who are always told what to do can be overwhelmed at first when you say, ‘Here’s the material. Go for it,’” says Sarah Winchowsky, the project coordinator, of working with the kids. “But by giving them avenues to branch out, they flourish.”
Case in point: Musa Andrews, who wanted to make a sci-fi gangster film in the library’s back room. Andrews was just 13 years old when he began scripting “Godbrothers, Part I,” a time-warped flick with scenes set in prison, space, heaven and hell. Two years later, after crafting props and costumes, recording an original song, shooting in front of a green screen and a belabored editing process, Andrews presented a 22-minute film. Sixty people gathered for the premiere. Andrews has since taken video-production classes and gotten involved with filmmaking groups downtown.
“This is a place to assert some agency over the physical world,” says Goda Trakumaite, a Lithuanian artist who’s been a Maker Mentor for nearly three years. “Self-esteem comes with that. ‘I never used a hammer before, and today I built a bird-house. Tomorrow I want to learn more.’ That feeling of being capable and powerful is the coolest thing that I think kids gain over time in the program.”
To that end, all ideas are encouraged, says Trakumaite. “It’s rare for these kids to be in a place where they’re in charge, and where an adult functions more as support rather than an authority figure,” she says, adding that in the library, you rarely hear a “no” or “don’t do that.”
The freedom to tinker with new materials, to try things out and to fail, is particularly important in low-income neighborhoods. For the primarily black and Hispanic population in North Philadelphia, students who don’t perform well in school often believe they’ve been written off. “There is a cycle that perpetuates itself, of violence and poverty, that leads to self-deprecation,” says Winchowsky. “The kids will say, ‘I’m a failure,’ and then they’re then unlikely to try again.” Every child has inherent talent, she adds, and it would be a shame if a kid never discovered it simply because he or she was too scared to try.
Beyond personal development, Maker Jawn also squeezes in academic enrichment. “Our goal is to have them learning without realizing it,” explains Winchowsky. That can happen when a mentor, for example, subtly schools the kids in thermodynamics while demonstrating how to make a lava lamp from old soda bottles, water, oil and dye. Or when building a self-moving robot — in one instance, a rudimentary, solar-powered motor attached to four wheels became a lesson in circuitry and photovoltaic cells.
And sometimes the education is behavioral too. One 10-year-old troublemaker who poked her classmates and cursed under her breath for her first 18 months of visits did an about-face when one library branch put on a fashion show. “She was in her element,” Winchowsky recalls. “She was engaged and had a purpose.” Mentors stopped reprimanding her; instead, they applauded her suggestions during the four months of prep for the big night.
On the whole, the program offers a different vision for what role libraries might serve in the future. Upending its traditional role as warehouses for printed books, the Free Library of Philadelphia is pushing a broader definition of knowledge that includes artistic experimentation and digital literacy. To some adults, “the library is supposed to be a quiet place for studying or reading a book. But that’s not just what it is about anymore,” notes Winchowsky. While physical pages might be disappearing into the cloud, the library’s physical space is more important than ever as the site for interactions, making it akin to a community center. “I feel that Maker Jawn has a place in this new library model because it’s a space to share ideas,” she says. “That’s what I see libraries moving toward: They’re becoming less about the books and more about hands-on information sharing.”
Maker Jawn is transforming libraries into more freewheeling, open spaces. The kids leaving with kites, cereal-box castles and solar-powered robots aren’t just walking away with cool new toys. Over the course of a couple hours, they’ve been tinkering with a new, stronger sense of self.
Maker Jawn is a recipient of the 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. 

The Sneaker Saint

The sneaker business has never been bigger than it is today. Since 2004, sales of high-end athletic shoes increased by 40 percent to nearly $55 billion, and the resale market generates more than $1 billion. Now, one former sneakerhead hopes to put a little soul back in the soles of homeless people and disadvantaged youth by gifting them a brand new or gently worn pair.
Watch the video above to see how Rikki Mendias, founder of the grassroots nonprofit Hav a Sole, uses his background in fashion photography and social media marketing to solicit sneaker donations to stock pop-up shops for his unique patrons.
MORE: Ever Wondered What to Say to a Homeless Person? Here Are 5 Things to Say and 5 Things Not to Say
 
 

Working Toward a Just Society: How One American City Is Building Wealth Among Its Disenfranchised

In his seminal 1971 book “A Theory of Justice,” the American political philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment in his quest to define a fair and just society. He asks us to imagine ourselves in a situation in which we know nothing about our personal characteristics — not our gender, race, wealth or educational background. From this blind starting point, we’re tasked with laying the framework for a new, just society — the catch being, of course, that if you don’t know where you’ll land in the social hierarchy, what kind of world would you choose to live in?
Like Rawls, Thad Williamson, associate professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia, believes the key to a fair and just society is one in which capitalism works not to make as much money as possible, but to distribute wealth by offering equal employment and social opportunities. It’s a political theory usually confined to debates in lecture halls and academic journals. But two years ago, the city of Richmond offered Williamson a unique opportunity: to build a new government agency, from the ground up, that would tackle the constellation of causes that has led the city’s poverty rate to swell to 22.1 percent, triple the rest of Virginia.
That agency, the Office of Community Wealth Building, or OCWB, launched in 2014. OCWB attempts to boost the number of high-paying jobs for adults, offer more learning and development opportunities for kids and realign current housing stock to be more affordable and public-transit accessible. By 2030, Williamson hopes these efforts will cut Richmond’s child poverty rate in half, creating a more just city.
“We have a fragmentation of services. The issues that really should be discussed holistically are separated: employment, education and housing are all deeply tied together in an urban context,” Williamson tells NationSwell. “Getting separate departments and agencies to cooperate can be a challenge. That’s one of the reasons why the Office of Community Wealth Building was built: to set the strategy for the city as a whole.”
Richmond’s struggle against poverty can be traced back to more than a century ago, when the city segregated neighborhoods. In 1937, the most destitute areas were redlined, leading to “urban renewal” programs that, just a couple of decades later, razed entire neighborhoods and took blacks’ savings (which was tied up in their property). A dangerous cycle ensued. The city’s next generation found themselves lacking proper education and reliable public transit and involved in crime or child protective services. “Far too many children in Richmond have grown up, and are growing up, with the odds firmly stacked against them, as a result of growing up in poverty conditions,” Richmond’s Anti-Poverty Commission remarked in its final report in 2013, where the idea for OCWB was first suggested.
Williamson proposed that the OCWB focus on employment first, directing people to nursing and medical technician jobs at the area’s 20 hospitals, and to positions as logistics supervisors and welders for an expanded port. “We started unpacking what it takes to get to a job with a living wage, what the career path is and the practical obstacles that a family had to overcome,” says Williamson. “We came back to transportation, child care and health concerns” as issues that needed to be dealt with before parents could begin to think about work. “The thought all along was that a standard workforce program is not a bad thing, but for families in deep poverty, it wouldn’t be sufficient.”
MOVIN’ ON UP
The agency’s signature pilot program, called Building Lives to Independence and Self-Sufficiency (or BLISS, a word rarely used to describe government services) kicked off by providing 18 families living in public housing with whatever support they needed to secure jobs and move out. The participants — 24 adults and 46 kids — say the program is unlike anything they’ve ever seen in government. Only a select number are accepted (though all other workforce-innovation programs are open to everyone). Since BLISS is locally funded, with no mandates set by the state or federal government, members set their own personal goals, and the agency strategizes ways to achieve them. Caseworkers aren’t clock-punching bureaucrats either, cordoned away in an office; once BLISS gets involved in your life, you’ve practically got a new family member, participants report.

For training purposes, men assisted by the BLISS program participate in mock job interviews.

Jessica Ortiz is one such person. With two young daughters to support, Ortiz was laid off by a corporate law firm, where she had worked on foreclosure cases against homeowners. Initially, she applied for any job opening she could find: retail sales, administration assistant, hospital staff, line chef, security guard. Weeks later, if Ortiz did hear back from employers, they often said she was overqualified. After eight months of unemployment, Ortiz’s savings had evaporated, and life in her housing project was downright miserable. Her sink had been backed up for two years, the landline phone broke, and “D.C.-sized rats” infested the rooms, including the bathroom, where one rodent managed to dislodge the toilet pipes.
Within about three months of enrolling in BLISS, Ortiz’s caseworkers pointed her to a job opening at a local community-development nonprofit. Armed with her résumé and a reference letter from a BLISS caseworker, Ortiz was offered a job helping people with down payments on their first home or negotiating their debt. And the assistance didn’t stop there. In addition to hooking Ortiz up with a job, the agency called the housing authority to see that her toilet got fixed and the rat holes sealed, and it subsidized her childcare, which would have cost Ortiz about $1,250 a month. OCWB also organized regular meetings for the two dozen BLISS parents (including Ortiz) to swap advice, and it held sessions on topics like saving money via coupons, finding children’s books at the right grade level and balancing a budget. Unlike most state and federal programs, “the regulations [at OCWB] are coming from the people themselves, and they adjust to the participants,” Ortiz says. At BLISS, she adds, the staff views “you as an investment.”
PUSHING FORWARD
At the end of BLISS’s first year, 16 of the 18 heads of household had new jobs, and three-quarters completed financial literacy training to prepare them for homeownership. Seeing the results, the city council voted to make the OCWB a permanent fixture. Williamson says he’s particularly proud of assembling a capable and diverse staff of 14 employees during his tenure. “It’s such a huge undertaking, and the agency is trying to accomplish big things in a context where doing even little things often is very challenging and requires great persistence,” he says.
After laying the groundwork for the OCWB and leading it to its initial success, Williamson has returned full time to the classroom. Taking his spot is Reggie Gordon, a Richmond native and member of the city’s previous anti-poverty commission, who is stepping down as CEO of the American Red Cross’s Virginia chapter. Gordon says he’s got a prototype for how the agency should work, and it’s now a matter of obtaining long-term financing, growing the number of participants and rigorously documenting what’s effective.
In the hands of Gordon, and Williamson before him, what began as a thought experiment turned into something tangible, a government program that helps poor families move toward independence. Rawls would probably agree: Richmond is starting to see what a just society looks like.
MORE: Participants Claim This Program Boosts Them out of Poverty. Should Other Cities Implement It?

The Newspaper That Tells Tales of Homelessness, How to Help the Poor Build Credit and More

 

On the Streets with a Newspaper Vendor Trying to Sell His Story, CityLab

It can be uncomfortable shelling out change to a beggar living on the street, but would you be willing to pay $2 for a newspaper about homelessness and poverty? Robert Williams, a Marine Corps veteran who writes for Street Sense, a biweekly broadsheet in Washington, D.C., hopes so. For every copy he sells, he keeps 75 percent, his only source of income.

Banking on Justice, YES! Magazine

In the impoverished Mississippi Delta region, most locals can’t borrow from large banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase because small loans don’t make enough interest to be worthwhile. Instead, residents are increasingly turning to Community Development Financial Institutions, known as CDFIs, which receive federal assistance in exchange for making capital available in low-income areas.

When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom, NPR

Educators have it rough. If keeping up with children’s energy levels for six hours isn’t enough, they also need to help students cope with difficulties outside the classroom and meet the rigors of state testing and federal standards. That can lead to a lot of stress, which is why CARE for Teachers trains educators in meditation techniques proven to reduce anxiety and burnout.

MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

The Journey of an Idea: This Entrepreneur Took a Cross-Country Trip to Fine-Tune His Higher Education Gamechanger

Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
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Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
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Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
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.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.