Lloyd Pendleton is the most efficient man in Utah. By the hour, he ticks off small achievements in a pocket planner, marking progress toward long-term goals. His mind routinely calculates volumes and outputs; he thinks in returns on investments. When Pendleton speaks, you begin to suspect he’s just sifted through a file cabinet’s worth of data. But then, he tosses in one of his signature colorful aphorisms, and you realize, nope, that’s just Lloyd.
After retiring from high-ranking positions at Ford Motors and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Pendleton began a second career in Utah’s Department of Workforce Services, a seemingly unglamorous government job in Salt Lake City. “I retired on a Friday and went to work with the state on Monday,” he says. As a pet project of sorts, Pendleton set an ambitious goal: To functionally eliminate chronic homelessness across Utah within 10 years. Nine years later, as Utah’s homelessness czar, he’s on track to reach that milestone by year’s end.
“He gets things done” is how his colleague Liz Buehler, Salt Lake City’s homelessness coordinator, describes her state counterpart.
Raised on a ranch at the far western edge of Utah, Pendleton’s early experience working the land gave him a dogged work ethic and a quiet-the-bells directness. He admits he once thought street people panhandled because they were lazy. “I used to tell the homeless to get a job, because that’s all I thought they needed,” he recalls.
But later, through the Mormon Church, he was tasked with restructuring struggling food pantries, emergency shelters and other charities across the country. After working directly with the homeless, including a year on-site at Utah’s largest shelter The Road Home (then known as the Travelers Aid Society), Pendleton had a “major paradigm shift.” Viewing the homeless as his brothers and sisters, he realized that when they suffered, so did the entire community. “We’re all connected,” he now says.
Pendleton’s years of bolstering charities earned him credibility from many nonprofit executive directors. When they knew he was considering retirement, several service providers and then-Gov. Jon Huntsman began lobbying the L.D.S. Church to “loan” Pendleton out to head up the state’s nascent homelessness task force. The church agreed, and Pendleton did the job part-time for two years before committing to being its full-time director in 2006. “We got Lloyd involved before he realized,” one executive director says.
Described by one Salt Lake City social worker as a “voracious reader and researcher,” Pendleton started by signing up for conferences on the latest strategies. While at one in Chicago in 2003, he learned about the 10-year plans to end homelessness taking shape around the country, and he heard the buzz about an innovative idea called “Housing First.” Two years later, after a conference in Las Vegas, Pendleton started chatting up a fellow passenger on the airport shuttle: Sam Tsemberis, considered the originator of the “Housing First” model.
Tsemberis explained how Pathways to Housing (the organization he founded in New York City in 1992) threw out drug tests and waiting lists — the old trappings of getting someone “housing ready.” Instead, the homeless were moved into apartments in Manhattan and Westchester County, N.Y., within two weeks. “You’re curing the housing problem first. You cure the person later,” Tsemberis explained. After its first five years, 88 percent of tenants had stayed in the program’s housing — double the rate for the city’s step-by-step rehab programs. “Recovery starts when you have something you care about, a place where you can go,” he added. Pendleton took an instant liking to Tsemberis and together, they convinced Utah lawmakers and foundations to take a chance on “Housing First.”
Just because it worked in New York City, however, didn’t mean the program would be a fit for Utah. During one tense early meeting, a contractor worried about his reputation almost backed out of building 100 units. As Pendleton listened, a thought came to him: why not test a small pilot program consisting of 25 of the toughest, most distressed people? The idea partially came from a truism he learned on the ranch while chopping kindling for their wood-burning stove: “Chop the big end of the log first.” In other words, if you can house the most chronically homeless, you can house anybody.
The task force gathered the best case managers, convinced landlords across the city to participate and handed over keys to 17 people. “I felt the sweat on my forehead, and I know others did too,” recalls Matt Minkevitch, the executive director of The Road Home, a Salt Lake City shelter. “You’d give each other a casual smile and say, ‘We’ll work through it, okay?’ But they couldn’t hear your stomach growling, hear you praying under your breath,… and just hoping, hoping that you don’t hurt people and damage all these important programs.”
The first night, Pendleton recounts, one man placed all his belongings on the bed and curled up on the floor to sleep. The following few nights, he dozed outside, near a dumpster. Finally, after several days, he moved in and slept on the bed. Housing isn’t “rehabilitation,” Pendleton noted, “because so many of them were never habilitated to begin with. You are creating new lives for them.” With the exception of one person who died, all the tenants remained in housing 21 months later.
Pendleton isn’t striving for prestige or fame in solving an ill that blights much of urban America. He just likes ideas that work, and he wants to see them take root, regardless of who sows the first seed. “Housing First” isn’t unique to the Beehive State, but Pendleton’s precise methods are a primary reason why Utah’s rates of chronic homelessness are so low. The fingerprints of his orderly approach can be spotted all over the 10-year plan: its clear articulation of vision, its far-reaching collaboration and its experimental pilot projects.
According to Pendleton, every action must answer this question: Does this help the homeless into housing or not? “If you don’t have a crystal-clear vision about the homeless situation, then you just muddle along. You get poor results. You’re not getting people housed,” he says.
For Utah to solve such an intractable social problem, it also had to find support beyond the traditional partnerships. Pendleton’s résumé helped win the involvement of the business community and the L.D.S. Church, one of the most influential forces in the region. Their monetary contributions and participation in programs like job placement meant even “more and more people carrying the load with the county, city and state,” Pendleton tells the Deseret News. And once the strategy had been distilled, all those agencies focused their individual expertise on a specific aspect of the problem.
Despite playing different instruments, “We have been pretty much on the same sheet of music in the symphony,” Pendleton says of the collaboration.
To meet the goal Pendleton first dreamed of a decade ago, Utah still needs to house approximately 539 chronically homeless and 200 homeless veterans, according to the latest comprehensive report — far fewer than the 1,932 chronically homeless on the streets when he first started.
Pretty good for an “encore career,” don’t you think?
READ MORE:
Part 1: Utah Set the Ambitious Goal to End Homelessness in 2015. It’s Closer Than Ever
Part 2: 13 Images of Resilient Utah Residents Who Survived Being Homeless
Part 4: Far From Finished: Utah’s 5-Step Plan to Continue Helping the Homeless
Tag: low-income families
How Old Computers Can Make a Lifelong Impact on Low-Income Kids
Between personal computers and the machines in computer labs, there are about as many computers on college campuses as students. But when these electronics become obsolete, what happens to them?
If tossed into landfills, they become a big environmental hazard. But the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) has figured out how to turn them into a solution that helps out low-income students.
The school’s program, Computers to Youth, runs camps for inner-city students, teaching them about life in college and how to refurbish old computers. At the conclusion of camp, each student takes home a computer.
Dave Newport, director of CU’s Environmental Center, tells KUSA that there are 10,000 computers on campus — all of which are regularly replaced. “We can’t give away enough of these,” he says. The program “helps protect the environment. It reduces cost. But the best part is, it empowers students.”
Basheer Mohamed, a sophomore engineering major at CU, can vouch for that. The immigrant from Sudan received a computer from Computers to Youth when he was in high school. Prior to that, his family couldn’t afford one. “Between us and more privileged kids, it was really hard to keep up with them,” he says. When he got his computer, he excelled in school, became interested in engineering and even researched and applied for the scholarships that now are funding his education.
What might he be doing if he never received that rehabbed computer? “If anything, I’d probably be going to a community college if not just working,” Mohamed says. “I don’t want to know where I would’ve been without it.”
Thanks to Computers to Youth, that’s one computer kept out of the landfill, and one mind sparked to great achievement by higher education.
MORE: How to Bridge the Digital Divide
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Utah Set the Ambitious Goal to End Homelessness in 2015. It’s Closer Than Ever
Crystal Spencer desperately needed a home for her three little girls. A single mother in her thirties, Spencer had lost her job at a Utah gas station and, in the twilight of the Great Recession, couldn’t find work elsewhere. Notices stacked up from her landlord, utility companies and bank.
“It was overwhelming. I just couldn’t keep up,” Spencer recalls. “I moved out because I knew I couldn’t do it.” She loaded her daughters — just babies at the time — into the back of her Dodge Durango and went to The Road Home, an emergency shelter just west of downtown Salt Lake City. As Utah’s largest shelter, its interior consists of a stripped-down dormitory. Plastic-covered mattresses on bunk beds can sleep more than 200 men each night, and its bathroom stalls, as a safety measure, don’t have doors. Spencer’s family had the small privilege of staying in a room closed off from the main beds, but she said it was “very uncomfortable” not having any privacy. Fearful of who was coming in and out the shelter, she never let her girls wander from her side.
In any number of American cities, Spencer would be required to jump through bureaucratic hoops — prove you’re sober, get a job, never miss a meeting — before her family would receive assistance. But in Utah, “Housing First,” an initiative to place the homeless into supportive housing without any prerequisites, now prevails. Because of it, Spencer quickly moved to a two-bedroom apartment at Palmer Court, an old hotel renovated into 200 units and opened by The Road Home in 2009. In the 13 months since, she’s caught up on all her debts and is on a waiting list for a Section 8 housing voucher. She decorated the apartment with framed pictures of her daughters — Sandra, 4, a nimble athlete fond of doing handstands on the living room recliner; Sierra, 2, a gregarious dancer and singer; and Phoenix, 1, a quiet observer — and the paintings they made at the on-site Head Start classroom.
“It was very difficult being homeless…[My kids] didn’t really understand what was going on. They still don’t,” Spencer says. “Right now, I am trying to go forward with my life, so I can move out and get a place of my own. The only thing I see myself doing is taking care of my kids. Hopefully, in my own house.”
Utah’s initiative isn’t just for hardworking moms like Spencer: it’s helping veterans haunted by war, the mentally ill, alcoholics and drug addicts. “Homelessness itself turns out to be a big barrier to all kinds of things, whether it is trying to get a job or trying to get an education or stop a drug addiction,” Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at The National Alliance To End Homelessness, tells Mic.
As the decade-long plan initiated by then-Gov. Jon Huntsman wraps up this year, the Beehive State’s “Housing First” program has already reduced chronic homelessness (those with deeper disabling conditions, like substance abuse or schizophrenia, who had been on the streets for a year or longer or four times within three years) by 72 percent and is on track to end it altogether by this time next year.
Media coverage ranging from The New Yorker to The Daily Show has pointed out that “Housing First” is a no-brainer. In reality, however, it’s been a herculean task 10 years in the making.
When the plan rolled out in 2005, Utah counted 1,932 chronically homeless adults. These individuals composed only 14 percent of the state’s total homeless population, but they were consuming the majority of agencies’ scarce resources. For instance, The Road Home found that the small group of chronically homeless used 60 percent of the shelter’s beds, according to executive director Matt Minkevitch. “Once we saw that, we really wanted to move forward.”
In Utah, a homeless person relying on shelters and soup kitchens costs the community $19,200, while the expenses of permanent housing and case management run just $7,800. For some, the price of law enforcement and medical expenses is astounding: One chronically homeless individual in Salt Lake City, for example, racked up $563,000 in emergency room charges in 2010; another had hospital bills that almost topped $1 million over three years.
Liz Buehler, Salt Lake City’s homeless services coordinator since 2013, says the state jumped into action when service providers realized they couldn’t rely on “diminishing resources” from the federal government. “If you put someone in a house, it’s half the cost of that person receiving services in the shelter. So why not put them in housing?” Buehler asks. “It’s not only giving them security, you can also help more people.”
Housing First’s backers are quick to note that they’re not giving away apartments for free: the new tenants have to abide by lease agreements (a handful have been evicted) and contribute $50 or 30 percent of their income to rent each month (whichever amount is greater).
For every 10 chronically homeless people housed through the program, eight are still in rapid rehousing units and one has moved on to other stable housing.
Minkevitch, a former hotel manager who migrated to the nonprofit sector to help “the weariest of travelers” at The Road Home, says the state’s success has taken even the most experienced caseworkers by surprise. “I know people who have been in this field for years, in this line of work for like 20 years, and as they were talking about clients, their eyes would light up like at Christmas,” he says. “They’d just laugh like it was the funniest, most beautiful joke, sitting here right under our nose all this time: we’d always known if a person has a home, they’re not homeless.”
READ MORE:
Part 2: 13 Images of Resilient Utah Residents Who Survived Being Homeless
Part 3: The Compassionate Utah Official Who Believes in Housing First, Asking Questions Later
Part 4: Far From Finished: Utah’s 5-Step Plan to Continue Helping the Homeless
Meet the ‘Entreprenurses’ Behind a Clothing Line That Benefits Low-Income Families
Two nurses working in a neonatal intensive care unit have dubbed themselves “entreprenurses.”
To help the babies and their families at the Broward Health Medical Unit in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Amanda Dubin and Kelly Meyer started a baby clothing company that helps needy families. Luc&Lou donates a onesie to a needy family for each one they sell and also supports nonprofits that benefit low-income families with newborns.
The design feature the tiny footprints of a 29-week-old infant that Dubin and Meyer cared for in the NICU. On one of the onesies, the footprints form the yellow rays of a sun and on another, a purple butterfly. “We were giving back to these little babies, and we wanted to really do it on a larger scale,” Meyer tells the Sun Sentinel.
Dubin says that they were inspired by the fighting spirit of the preemies they care for. “If they can do what they do, we can do anything.”
Now, Luc&Lou onesies go home with every “welcome to the world” package the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Broward County gives to low-income mothers of newborns. Sales from Luc&Lou products also benefit Fort Lauderdale’s Jack & Jill Children’s Center.
Meyer and Dubin have sold about 400 onesies so far and aim to expand. “We will always be nurses,” Dubin says. “That’s who we are. But we want to go bigger so we can help more people.”
MORE: How Texting Can Improve the Health of Babies Born to Low-Income Mothers
At This School, Parents and Kids Learn Side-By-Side
School is in session, but at the Briya Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., the students are certainly not who you’d expect to be roaming the hallways. Instead of just kids, there’s adults in attendance, too.
Back in 1989, Briya began as a family literacy center run by and for immigrants, but it gained charter school status in 2005, reports National Journal. Since then, the school has doubled as a place for both adults and young children to learn, as well as a day care for the adult students’ young children. While not a requirement, most students are immigrants, who attend for free.
The philosophy behind Briya? That the only way to stop the cycle of low-income families is for parents and children to have access to the same essential resources: education, health care and work skills. So Briya combines all three of those into one, offering classes for adults in English language, basic computer skills and parenting. While classes, which are held each day for two-and-a-half hours, aren’t compulsory, it’s expected that adults will attend for at least one year (some may enroll again the following year).
Through its “two-generation” approach, Briya is aiming to tackle the problem of poverty at its core: the family.
“They’re getting English classes, and someone’s going to take care of [their] kid,” Briya Executive Director Christie McKay tells National Journal. “They want [their kids] to do well in school, better than they did.”
And for many, that’s the first step to success.
MORE: Why Tony Wagner Thinks Merit Badges Should be Given Out in Every Classroom
These ‘Brothers’ Left Wall St. to Make a Difference, and Their Big Bet is Paying Off
NationSwell works to elevate solutions to national challenges both through powerful storytelling on NationSwell.com and its NationSwell Council membership network and events series. Here, we introduce you to some of the innovators who are part of the community.
Over the years, there have been some bad decisions made in the college bars of Ann Arbor, Mich. This is a story about a good one.
Sammy Politziner and Scott Thomas met while students at the University of Michigan when they lived next door to each other as freshmen. The two worked at summer camps together, and after graduation, both served as corps members of Teach for America (TFA). From there, like many of their classmates (even the most idealistic ones), they both decided to pursue careers in finance.
In 2008, nine years out of college, both worked in New York City: Politziner was a vice president at Kildare Capital, and Thomas was an analyst at Neuberger Berman. While in Ann Arbor one weekend for a football game, they got to talking about their lives as they sat before the row of taps at Ashley’s, their favorite haunt. Both decided something was missing.
It had something to do with the year. Recently, the duo had volunteered for the Obama campaign, and the feelings of hope and change that the campaign had infused in so many also struck a powerful chord with the two friends.
They spoke about the difference they hoped to make, the lives they still wanted to lead. When they thought about what they might have to offer, they wondered out loud if perhaps the business skills they had developed during those years in finance combined with classroom experience from their TFA days could help make a positive social impact.
They made a decision to find out.
“We just looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know what we’re going to do…but we have got to go back to being a part of the solution,’ ” Politziner says of the moment that led him and Thomas to found Arbor Brothers, the philanthropic organization named for their college town.
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Arbor Brothers makes grants to social entrepreneurs focused on education and employment in New York (where they are based), Connecticut and New Jersey. Politziner and Thomas support nonprofits they identify as “second stage,” organizations that have already gone through seed funding but have not yet established a track record that would give them access to larger pools of capital. These groups tend to be two to 10 years old with two to 10 staff members and a budget of less than $2 million a year.
The founders of Arbor Brothers practice the concept of engaged philanthropy, combining financial support with countless hours of consulting. Each of their current grantees receive $250,000 in funding over the course of three years, while Politziner and Thomas spend 200 to 300 hours a year working with the leaders of each organization.
“Our view, one of our guiding principles, is not that we have the answer. It’s our job to build a relationship where we can be helpful in discreet, meaningful ways along that path,” says Thomas.
After the pivotal conversation at the pub, the two returned to their finance jobs. But to learn more about the social solutions they might support, they made a commitment that each week for six months, they would have dinner with various leaders in their fields. These foundation officers, nonprofit heads and social-impact consultants revealed there was a real hole in the funding market.
The friends who would go on to form Arbor Brothers learned that members of various second-stage organizations “were doing really good work with kids, but they had never run an organization before. They had never hired somebody, let alone fired somebody; they were doing their budgets on a napkin,” Politziner recalls. “We thought, these people are so talented, and they’ve got such a great idea, and yet, they’re slowly figuring out how to run an organization. And oh, by the way, they have to spend 70 percent of their time actually going out and raising money.”
Once Politziner and Thomas determined how needed they really were, there was no turning back.
While maintaining their day jobs, the two started with a few pilot projects. They spent 100 hours with Nick Ehrmann, then a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, who founded Blue Engine, a nonprofit that places teaching assistants in public high schools in New York City. They worked with Hot Bread Kitchen, an organization that empowers women and minority entrepreneurs in culinary workforce programs, a loan package that financed a move to a full-time kitchen. Then in September 2010, they quit their jobs and focused all their efforts on Arbor Brothers.
When they first got started, Arbor Brothers raised $15,000 — Politziner and Thomas put in some of their own money, and family and friends also contributed. Last year, the public charity had a budget of over $1 million, resulting from donations from individuals, family foundations and donor-advised funds. Because the nonprofit raises its own money, Arbor Brothers has to prove its value to its donors every year in a quantitative way.
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One organization that has benefited from Arbor Brothers is the Connecticut-based All Our Kin, which empowers child-care providers as business owners, provides parents with safe and stable care for their kids and gives children a strong educational foundation before they enter kindergarten. The organization licenses people to run family child-care programs in their homes, then involves them as part of a professional development network — at no cost to participants.
From 2011 to 2014, Arbor Brothers provided All Our Kin with $190,000 in unrestricted funding (money with no strings attached). While the grant money has had an impact, it’s the guidance and knowledge of Arbor Brothers that has really made a difference. Jessica Sager, executive director of All Our Kin, says the hundreds of hours Politziner and Thomas spent with the team in New Haven, Conn., helped the organization set up systems to manage fundraising and budgeting. Arbor Brothers also helped Sager and her co-founder create a plan to expand their model to a second site, and now All Our Kin is in three cities and considering national expansion. “We are rigorous about evaluation,” Sager says, explaining how Arbor Brothers taught her how to use data to track outcomes. “We put everything on spreadsheets”
Politziner and Thomas talk about the importance of an “outcomes focused culture” and “scale of impact versus scale of number of people served” with as much enthusiasm as they talk about their other shared passion, Michigan football.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to step away, and I hope we’ll be close to these organizations,” Thomas says of the Arbor Brothers’ relationship with All Our Kin and other groups. “But unless the tools we built and the conversations we had become embedded into their organizational culture, they’re not in our view likely to be sustainable and successful over the long term.”
Over the past four years, Arbor Brothers has evaluated nearly 500 nonprofits and made site visits to at least 75. Through experience, they have become better at finding the right fits for their funding and expertise. “We made this mistake a couple of times where we would meet a young entrepreneur with a lot of passion and charisma and an exciting vision for change, but we had this nagging anxiety that they were more style than substance,” Thomas says of one of the lessons he learned the hard way. “They were great marketers, and while that is important and can raise money, if someone does not have a high internal standard for quality, those are not the people we’re equipped to help.”
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They’ve also gotten better at taking cues from the leaders of the organizations they serve, figuring out the best ways to put their analytics background to use. For instance, when Arbor Brothers assisted All Our Kin on its financial model, they worked hard to make the numbers user-friendly, later realizing that the organization’s leadership felt more at ease knowing the ins and outs — no matter the complexity.
Politziner and Thomas believe not only in the importance of learning from their mistakes, but also in promoting transparency, so they conclude each of Arbor Brothers’ quarterly newsletters with a “We Blew It!” section where they detail the ways they can improve moving forward.
In the past five years, Arbor Brothers has funded 3 percent of the 500 high-potential, second-stage organizations located in the tri-state area that work to address the root causes of poverty. While Arbor Brothers is on a path to grow (this year’s budget is likely $1.25 million), they want to remain focused on finding, funding and supporting only the most promising of the organizations that fit this description.
“The lens through which we make grants is the concept that social change is extraordinarily hard and it takes a really long time and it’s messy,” Politziner says. “Those three simple tenets inform how we think about how our small pot of capital can make the biggest difference. That means we invest in organizations that make a deep investment in people over time.”
Another way that Arbor Brothers sets itself apart from other funding groups is that they don’t believe in forcing themselves on to boards or attaching strings to their funding. “We come to understand the organization so that we’re on the same side of the table, and their success is our success,” says Thomas.
Arbor Brothers carefully tracks and reports these successes. Doing so helped the organization settle on its three-year-long funding model, which gives them enough time to get these groups to the next level while also having a time pressure in place to reach organizational targets.
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Last summer, Politziner and Thomas gathered the four organizations “graduating” from three years in their portfolio for a backyard barbecue in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It was a moment that caused me to reflect on how far we’ve come,” Thomas says.
All Our Kin celebrated its expansion to two new cities; Green City Force looked back on the long hours spent vetting and prioritizing service opportunities so they could improve placement outcomes for their corps members; and exalt now had refined performance standards in place and looked forward to doing even more for teens who have been involved in the criminal justice system. The fourth graduate, ROW New York, was able to raise more than $3 million over three years to double their program size and outfit a new boathouse — thanks in part to support Arbor Brothers provided on marketing materials and earned-income strategy.
Last fall, four new organizations joined the Arbor Brothers portfolio: New Heights, Coalition for Queens, Springboard Collaborative and OneGoal. (BRICK Academy, which is transforming failing schools in Newark, N.J., GirlTrek, which NationSwell has featured for its work mobilizing black women to walk their way to better health, and The New American Academy, which brings new models like teacher teams to New York City public schools, will continue receiving their funding.)
So far, Arbor Brothers is walking the talk of engaged philanthropy — and it’s working. “It’s a really tough balance, but they do it well, where they’re supporting the growth of an organization — talking about best practices — but they’re not imposing things,” explains Jukay Hsu, founder of Coalition for Queens, which looks to the tech ecosystem to provide economic opportunity to a diverse community.
“It’s not an outsider coming in saying, ‘Do X, Y and Z.’ … They have a unique level of human empathy and understanding and an ability to listen and digest.”
The Surprising Thing That’s Giving Low-Income Students Internet Access
In the evening, when students are supposed to be at home toiling over their homework, the school buses that carry them to school usually sit idle in a lot. But one school district in Salton City, Calif., is putting these vehicles’ downtime to good use.
How so?
By installing Wi-Fi routers inside the school buses and parking them in neighborhoods where many low-income students lack Internet access. For as long as the battery on the bus lasts, the community can use the free Wi-Fi — something that could have huge outcomes, considering that about half of the low-income students in the U.S. lack home Internet access, according to Nichole Dobo of the Hechinger Report.
The only other choice for these kids is to stay at school and use the Wi-Fi there to complete their homework. Darryl Adams, superintendent of schools of the Coachella Valley Unified District, tells Dobo, “I had kids sitting outside my office yesterday because they want to connect to the Internet at, like, 6 o’clock at night.”
When low-income students stay after hours to hop online — missing the school bus home — it creates difficulties for the parents who must come fetch them, as many of them live an hour’s drive or more away.
Thirteen-year-old Jasmine Jimenez says that she’s looking forward to the day when the district might enable Wi-Fi on the bus during its route. “It won’t be a big bug to ask your parents to pick you up,” she said.
School district officials haven’t completely worked out the kinks of the system. So far they’ve only been able to install routers in two buses out of their fleet of 90. Drivers park the two buses on lots in trailer parks and must obtain permission from the owners to do so. But the biggest problem is that the battery tends to die after only one hour of use, an energy crunch which some have suggested might be solved by installing solar panels on the buses.
Still, the Coachella district is determined to try to make the program work. “Come on. We can do better than that as a nation, especially for our low-income families and our disadvantaged families,’’ superintendent Darryl Adams says.
MORE: Every Kid Needs An Internet Connection to Thrive In School. This District Has A Plan to Make it Happen
After Enduring Homelessness Herself, This Veteran Helps Other Soldiers Find Opportunity
Looking to take advantage of the educational benefits that the military offered, Anita Pascual joined the National Guard when she was just 19 years old.
Just as she was set to deploy to Iraq, however, she found out she was pregnant, so she left the Guard only to join the Army three years later and serve in Afghanistan.
After active duty, Pascual returned home to her three kids in Fresno, Calif. and hit a bumpy road. “One day I was me, a soldier, and the next day I’m mom again,” she tells Valley Public Radio. “Mom, and sister, and daughter and I had to do all that buckle up and it was just exhausting and overwhelming sometimes.”
Pascual couldn’t pay her bills and soon received an eviction notice. She turned to the nonprofit WestCare Foundation’s housing complex for homeless vets: HomeFront. The organization welcomed her and gave her an apartment to stay in while she got back on her feet; about four years ago, she was able to leave and move into her own home.
Now Pascual works for HomeFront, helping other female vets facing homelessness find jobs, education opportunities and support.
Elle, a veteran that Pascual is helping, appreciates the extra touches HomeFront provides to help homeless service members. “It’s not just a room and that’s it. You have all the capabilities of what can help you to move forward,” Elle says. “It doesn’t make you feel like you’re sitting under a park bench anymore.”
Elle credits Pascual with helping to put her life back in order. “I’m going to get my college benefits, she put me up with a good position with being able to get a job. Seven or eight years of back and forth it took seven weeks just for Anita to help me out.”
MORE: For Female Veterans Experiencing Employment Woes, This Organization Offers Strong Advice
The Unlikely Partnership That’s Helping the Poor
When low-income patients end up in the hospital with a medical emergency, it might not only be doctors, but also lawyers who save their lives.
Many medical facilities now have onsite attorneys offering free legal aid to such patients. This service makes sense, since issues such as eviction, homelessness and difficulty attaining services for a disabled or developmentally delayed child can negatively impact a patient’s health.
This model of partnership between the medical and legal professions began in Boston in 1993, and since then, it’s expanded to 260 locations in 38 states, according to NBC News.
The Cox family of Cleveland is an example of how these programs are effective. Tony Cox had a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job. Out of work, he fell behind on his mortgage payments, and his family was on the verge of eviction when a legal services attorney stepped in and worked with the bank to renegotiate their loan. “We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,” Donna, his wife, says. “We would have been separated.”
Colleen Cotter, director of Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, tells NBC News, “When we really look at the issues in our clients’ lives, there’s almost always a health issue involved. Poverty is unhealthy, and bad health can lead to economic chaos. I see everything we do as increasing the health and communities we serve.”
Pediatrician Robert Needleman of Case Western University Medical School says, “In general, medicine does not spend much time on the parts of patients’ lives that we can’t fix.” Needleman is striving to change that, however, by instructing medical students to chat with patients about stressors in their lives and issuing referrals to free legal aid when appropriate.
Not only do these partnerships between lawyers and doctors save people from eviction and bring about other positive changes in their lives, but they also save money. In Pennsylvania, Lancaster General Hospital established a clinic for “super-utilizers” (i.e. people who come to the emergency room frequently). When they added a lawyer to the services the facility offered, the patients’ use of the health care system declined by half.
As Megan Sprecher, a Legal Aid Society of Cleveland attorney says about one client she helped avoid homelessness by obtaining a tax refund that had been lost in the mail, “It was a very simple issue, but these systems can be hard to navigate if you’re not familiar with them.”
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The Savvy People That Are Saving Prescription Drugs From Landfills and Giving Them to Needy Patients
Most of us are aware that Americans waste a lot of food, which has spurred nonprofits like the Food Recovery Network to avert some of that loss and give it to hungry people. But you may not know that Americans also toss out an astonishing amount of perfectly good prescription drugs as well. These drugs end up in landfills, flushed down the toilet or burnt in incinerators where they can harm people or the environment, keeping them from people who could use them.
Fifty percent of the Americans that the Commonwealth Fund surveyed said that they had failed to fill a prescription ordered by their doctors because of the price of the drug, and according to the CDC, 25 percent of Americans struggle with paying their medical bills.
Which is why several crusaders are working to get unused prescription drugs into the hands of people who need them. George Wang, whose Stanford, California-based nonprofit startup Sirum recovers these drugs, calculates that $700 million worth of prescriptions could be saved each year. He talked with Marketplace about “the absurdity of the waste and how gross it is, the fact that it’s raining down on families where these drugs are being burnt. It’s insane, right?”
One of the big culprits is nursing homes. Residents use a lot of prescriptions, but regulations require these facilities to toss prescriptions instead of sharing them between patients. Larry McCarty, a medical waste hauler who works for nursing homes in California describes, “brand new packages that have never been open and still have the saran over the top of them. Whole packages, just sitting in there.”
Sirum has developed software to make it simple for nursing homes to donate leftover drugs, shipping them to pharmacies that will give them to low-income people or those who don’t have insurance.
In Oklahoma, Linda Johnston, the Tulsa County Director of Social Service, heads up a program that involves retired doctors in collecting unused drugs and delivering them to the needy, saving $16 million worth of drugs so far, and countless lives. Johnston talked with Marketplace about one young man who’d received anti-depression medication from the program. “He wanted me to know he was not going to commit suicide, because he had his medication, he could take it.”
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
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