Rosanne Haggerty grew up going to church in downtown Hartford, Conn. Her parents, both schoolteachers, never outright explained why they took their kids to church in a poor neighborhood full of single-room occupancy hotels and boarding houses. Haggerty, however, learned the lesson her folks were trying to instill. “My parents were both very devout Catholics in the social justice wing of the church,” Haggerty says, describing how the family visited fellow church members when they were sick and invited them over for holiday meals. Haggerty grew up with a sense that “we all can be doing more to provide that kind of support system for others.”
Today, Haggerty is a social change agent in her community, serving as the president of Community Solutions, a national organization that aims to end homelessness. Taking an entrepreneurial approach to address the problem, Community Solutions uses technology to capture data and tailor interventions to meet the needs of a region in the most effective way possible. At its heart, Community Solutions’s mission is the same as Haggerty’s parents’: helping people, one person at a time.
Community Solutions works in neighborhoods around the country to provide practical, data-driven solutions to the complicated problems involved in homelessness. The organization has already achieved great success: its 100,000 Homes campaign, which ran from 2010 to 2014, helped 186 participating communities house more than 105,000 homeless Americans across the country.” (Chronically homeless individuals make up 15 percent of the total homeless population, yet they utilize the majority of social services devoted towards helping them, including drop-in shelters.) To do this, it challenged the traditional approach of ending homelessness: requiring those living on the streets to demonstrate sobriety, steady income or mental health treatment, for example. Instead, it housed people first, an approach that has demonstrated overwhelming success: research finds that more than 85 percent of chronically homeless people housed through “Housing First” programs are still in homes two years later and unlikely to become homeless again.
“Technology played a critical role in the success of the 100,000 Homes campaign because it enabled multiple agencies to share and use the same data,” says Erin Connor, portfolio manager with the Cisco Foundation, which has supported Community Solutions’ technology-based initiatives. “By rigorously tracking, reporting and making decisions based on shared data, participating communities could track and monitor their progress against targets and contribute to achieving the collective goal.” As a result of this campaign, the estimated taxpayer savings was an astonishing $1.3 billion. Building on this achievement, its current Zero 2016 campaign works in 75 communities to sustainably end chronic and veteran homelessness altogether.
Technology and data gathering is critical for local and nationwide campaigns since homelessness is intimately connected to other social problems, like unemployment and poverty. One example of the local impact Community Solutions has had is in Brownsville (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., that’s dominated by multiple public housing projects) via the Brownsville Partnership, which is demonstrating that these problems can be solved — to create “the endgame of homelessness,” as Haggerty puts it.
In Brownsville, the official unemployment rate is 16 percent, “about double that of Brooklyn” as a whole, Haggerty says, noting that the statistic excludes those not currently looking for work. In response, the organization works with existing job training programs, digging into their data and analyzing it to improve effectiveness and achieve success.
“Data is at the heart of everything we do, as far as understanding where to focus our efforts and how to improve our collective performance,” Haggerty explains. Analyzing usage data, Community Solutions works with health care providers, nonprofits, and city and state governments to figure out where the most vulnerable populations live, what systems they interact with and what help they need.
Because of this emphasis on data, Community Solutions increasingly thinks of itself as a tech company, Haggerty says. Since 2010, it’s partnered with Cisco to help bring practical, data-driven solutions to communities around the country, opening doors to innovation and progress. When the collaboration began, Community Solutions was a local New York City-based organization. Today, it works with communities throughout the United States. By looking at the problem more nationally and taking an entrepreneurial approach when it comes to applying technology, Community Solutions is now solving homelessness on a much larger scale and having greater impact — producing real social change.
One person benefitting from this tech-driven approach is Toni Diaz. In and out of homeless shelters since the age of 17, Diaz had three children and a fourth on the way by the time she was 23 years old. Escaping from an abusive partner, Diaz took her kids to a homeless shelter. “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she says. Right when Diaz realized that she needed to make a change in her life, opportunity arrived in the form of a caseworker from the Brownsville Partnership.
Diaz’s journey out of homelessness took years, but Brownsville Partnership walked with her every step of the way. Today, she’s part of an innovative solution that helps people like her connect to the services and training programs that will help them break that same cycle. Stories like Diaz’s are one of the things Haggerty loves most about her work. “It’s especially satisfying when people we initially encountered in a time of crisis end up in a position where they are paying it forward,” she says. Diaz, Haggerty says, shows “what kind of resilience exists in people in this neighborhood” and communities like Brownsville around the country.
This was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur, and act as a social change agent.
Editors’ note: The original version of this story misspelled Rosanne Haggerty’s name. It also erroneously stated that Community Solutions’s 100,000 Homes campaign housed more than 105,000 chronically homeless people in 186 communities across the country. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.
Tag: low-income families
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
Upstanders: Homes For Everyone
Faced with a growing homeless population, Utah changed the way it provides shelter to those on the streets. Under Lloyd Pendleton’s leadership, the state has reduced its chronic homeless population by 91 percent.
Upstanders is a collection of short stories celebrating ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities produced by Howard Schultz and Rajiv Chandrasekaran. These stories of humanity remind us that we all have the power to make a difference.
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.
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.
The Art of Using Film to Transform the Lives of Formerly-Incarcerated Youth
Comics, with their rowdy action boxed within firm, familiar lines and violence reduced to harmless bams, thwacks and kapows, give Mario Rivera the ability to escape from reality. “When you’re reading the comic book, you’re no longer thinking about your problems,” says Rivera, a 24-year-old New Yorker who served time in prison for a violent crime he committed at age 15. The same goes for Rivera’s younger brother Shawn King, 21, who lived in 37 foster homes between the ages of 7 and 18 and was jailed for a few months earlier this year. Comics gave him a “way of keeping in touch with my brother and my dad…[a feeling] like they were there next to me,” he says.
The two brothers — lanky guys with the same curly, orangish hair and dozens of tattoos between them — barely saw each other during their formative years, but they recently reunited at the Community Producers program at New York City’s Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) and discovered their shared interest in not only comics, but filmmaking as well. At MDC, the siblings, along with two dozen court-involved youth, created documentary shorts about their lives. After six months of production (all at no cost to participants), the films capture day-to-day life of someone who came into contact with the law and compel audience members to change the way they view these adolescents: not as convicts, but as creatives.
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“If you hear from a young person who’s been incarcerated and listen to his story, you’ll leave different somehow, based on what you learned,” says Christine Peng, MDC’s education director who founded and oversees Community Producers. “Serving the communities and neighborhoods of the tri-state region is important to NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47,” says John Durso, Jr., vice president of community and communications for NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47. “Maysles Documentary Center provides an important service to the community in which it’s located and through 21st Century Solutions, our stations work together to support new programs and initiatives, generating positive change within our region.
APPLY: Maysles Documentary Center is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
MDC founder Albert Maysles and his brother, David, were revered documentarians known for “direct cinema,” an approach where the cameraman simply observes without intrusion and edits the clips together without narration. By letting characters in films such as “Grey Gardens” and “Salesman” speak for themselves, the brothers (now both deceased) believed, “you really get to know the world, not the philosophy or point-of-view of the narrator.” Albert’s creed was that “you can listen to someone else’s story and truly hear them out, without jumping to assumptions,” Peng explains.
Similarly, Community Producers gives participants (all racial minorities with a criminal history) the opportunity to share their real-life experiences of growing up — a chance many haven’t been afforded by the social service bureaucracy or criminal justice system. After just a few minutes onscreen, the filmmakers break through misconceptions and reveal their vulnerabilities to moviegoers. For instance, a viewer will discover that the roughly 46 tattoos crowding King and Rivera’s arms aren’t the typical jailhouse variety: they’re actually Pokémon and X-Men cartoons.
The process of breaking down stereotypes starts with the filmmakers themselves, as the adolescent New Yorkers, ever protective of their own turf and judgmental about other neighborhoods, had to learn to trust their peers at MDC. When the program first began in March, King was silent, and Rivera would only pipe up if spoken to one-on-one. They didn’t discuss life at home. “Is this a safe space for me? Are these people going to judge me?” Peng says the kids wondered. “Part of what eventually built that trust was either realizing you were totally wrong about somebody or realizing that you shared a lot in common, as people who lost parents or siblings or who had traumatic experiences growing up.”
Emulating the Maysles brothers by working in a pair, Rivera and King kept the cameras rolling nonstop, finding details from their lives that would resonate with an audience. As they debated artistic vision, their collaboration forced them to learn more about each other. While the brothers describe the experience as “fun,” Peng says she witnessed them learn “to be accountable to each other, emotionally and physically.” Often, the siblings pointed the lens toward their own family members, including a sister with whom they’d lost contact, and sometimes themselves. “The process of making the film gave them an excuse to be around people,” she noticed. “They could be involved and also be a little outside,” retreating behind the viewfinder. One afternoon, on MDC’s rooftop, Rivera and King asked each other about their relationship with their dad, the first time they’d ever discussed him together.
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When NationSwell visited MDC in late June, King had been temporarily kicked out of the MDC space. Despite his brother’s absence, Rivera said he planned to finish the film, even if he was doing it alone. “I’ve already started it, and I’m not the type who’s into starting something and not finishing it,” he told his peers after previewing a two-minute rough cut. King returned after a brief hiatus, and together, the siblings put together “Back to Reality,” a film that shows the their tangible love for each other and, as Rivera puts it, their “daily escapades.” The short movie also tackles weightier issues: learning how to parent while coping with their mother’s recent death and grappling with the lifelong appreciation of comic books their dad instilled in them even though they now hate the man for skipping out on their childhood.
Unlike most arts programs that tout the cathartic value of transforming one’s life into art, the Maysles Documentary Center Community Producers program impacts youth through alternative means. King and Rivera received something that had largely been missing from their childhood: a new way to connect with their family members and each other. With a camera in hand, they could rekindle any relationship and ask questions that previously might have been awkward. After filming her, King and Rivera’s sister arrived at the showcase to watch their finished movie. Sitting together in the back row of MDC’s theater, the siblings once again looked like a family. After years of separation, spent reading comic books alone, this reunion looked better than any caped crusader’s rescue.
Maysles Documentary Center is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
Every City Should Replicate What This Michigan City Did, A Smarter System for Doctors Making House Calls and More
The City That Unpoisoned Its Pipes, NextCity
The idea of preemptively improving infrastructure long before a crisis hits is foreign to most Americans. An hour’s drive west of Flint, Mich., the entire water system in Lansing (which once contained lead-lined service mains) will be declared lead-free in 2017 after a decade spent switching to copper pipes. Soon, residents will have the ability to swig their H2O without worry.
A New Brand of Doctor Targets the Unhealthy in Rural Tennessee, The Tennessean
In rural areas, there are a lot of benefits to a country doctor who makes house calls: a robust patient-physician relationship, no administration contributing to overhead. But isolation limits those medics’ ability to understand what’s affecting their region. By banding together, a network of primary-care physicians in 50 desolate counties across Tennessee now share knowledge such as health trends among their populations and best practices for dealing with insurance companies.
The Collapsible Helmet that Could Revolutionize Bike-Share Safety, CityLab
Bike-sharing is one of the easiest ways to get around a city and is friendlier to the environment than a short, gas-guzzling car ride. But cyclists often put themselves at risk on roadways by going without a helmet. To improve safety, a Brooklyn, N.Y., commuter created a collapsible helmet made from paper honeycomb and glue, which folds up to the size of a banana, making a bike-share ride even more desirable.
MORE: In the U.S., 1.7 Million Don’t Have Access to Clean Drinking Water. This Grandma Is Changing That
Telepresence Robots Break Down Barriers for Those with Physical Disabilities
Ron Carrico began Kavita Krishnaswamy’s private tour of the San Diego Air & Space Museum near a replica of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, describing the torturous 33-hour flight across the Atlantic in such a way that isn’t printed in history books. As the two made their way through the facility, Krishnaswamy, a doctoral candidate in computer science, waved hello to fellow patrons and paused to see the planes hanging from the ceiling. The only thing atypical about her visit was that she wasn’t technically at the museum, which is located in Balboa Park, Calif. Extraordinarily, she was more than 2,600 miles away sitting in front of a computer in Baltimore County, Md, controlling a five-foot-tall, roving BeamPro robot equipped with a wide-angle camera and a 20-inch screen that projected her face at eye level.
Originally built to automate industry, to ease business interactions for remote employees or to simply entertain, robotic technologies are taking on a significantly nobler purpose: assisting those with disabilities in their day-to-day lives. Text-to-speech capabilities on iPhones allow the blind to read anything online. Doctors and therapists use robots to make virtual rounds to patients who cannot physically leave their homes. And at the San Diego Air & Space Museum, which received a $25,000 grant from the NBCUniversal Foundation, people with severe disabilities can use innovative “telepresence” BeamPro devices to partake in a historical and cultural adventure they’d never be able to experience otherwise.
APPLY: The San Diego Air & Space Museum is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The museum keeps two robots charged at all times, ready to give BEAM tours to those who can’t make it to Southern California. Katrina Pescador, the museum’s archival director, saw the robotic technology’s potential after the manufacturer held a conference nearby, quickly signing up to offer virtual museum tours to people who are hospitalized or mobility challenged. “I want people to have the freedom to experience the world and not be locked up some place,” says Pescador, whose daughter has a disability. “But it’s also important that people in the world see other people with disabilities. All of us need to be interacting together.”
The device provides those with physical disabilities a unique opportunity to explore the world in a way that clicking through images on Google never can. The BeamPro allowed Krishnaswamy, who has spinal muscular atrophy, to enjoy a rare experience of free movement. “It gave me an immersive experience like I was physically there,” she recalls. “I could move around. I had the ability to turn. I could see people and interact with people,” she adds. “Just moving around on my own without any limitation and seeing somebody eye-to-eye: that’s really a new experience.”
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Pushing application of the technology even further, Carrico’s colleague Ross Davis is attempting to use the BeamPro for virtual school field trips. Davis, the museum’s education resources coordinator, believes it’s the ideal way for budget-conscious schools to engage students. Educators can log on and within seconds, get kids excited about the physics involved in getting 1,500-pound object soaring through the air. “We want to make it easy. We like easy,” Davis, a blunt former Navy pilot, says. (Offering top students a chance to command a robot is a sure-fire way to motivate a group of kids, he adds.) Even better is a virtual field trip’s ability to host low-income children. “We want to bring in the [kids] who wouldn’t get to visit, whose parents are too busy and don’t have time or money to buy tickets,” Davis says.
The school tours are still a project in process. Davis has tried at least three times to connect with one classroom, but the San Diego public school system has a firewall he hasn’t yet been able to circumvent. Once that basic connectivity issue is fixed, Davis has big plans: He envisions integrating 3-D diagrams, YouTube clips and sound bites into his guided tour to bring some of the aircraft hanging in the museum roaring into motion. From there, he’ll offer telepresence tours to anyone in the nation — enabling those with limited financial resources to have the same learning opportunities as their wealthier counterparts.
If the school visits work as well as Krishnaswamy’s tour, the program will be a success. Months later, she still raves that, “It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” A graduate student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Krishnaswamy studies how technology can assist others with disabilities like herself. The BeamPro is a prime example of what she wants to develop: a device that let her experience life in a different way.
As Krishnaswamy viewed the exhibits with Carrico, she thought about how quickly technology advances. In 1903, the Wright Brothers could barely keep a plane off the ground for more than a few seconds. Fast forward to 1969 when men rocketed into space and landed on the Moon. In a way, it’s fitting that Krishnaswamy is using a robot to experience the history of progress on display. In comparison to how fast she can jet into the museum from across the country, a trans-Atlantic flight feels like no big deal. If Lindbergh could see the BeamPro today, surely he would feel a twinge of jealousy.
The San Diego Air & Space Museum is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
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