The employees at Granite Telecommunications started their week buzzing about charity — literally.
On a recent Monday, 428 workers at the Quincy, Massachusetts-based company gathered at their corporate headquarters and shaved their heads to fight cancer. Thanks to their very generous CEO and his mother, $2.1 million in proceeds went to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Yahoo! Shine reports.
According to the report, it all started when Chief Executive Officer Rob Hale dared an employee to buzz off his hair in exchange for a $10,000 charitable donation. When more and more workers caught word of the dare, it snowballed into a company-wide effort. Hale then got his mother onboard and together they each promised $5,000 per shaved head. On the day of the big cut, nearly 430 workers —comprised of two-thirds of the men at the company and about 20 women — went under the razor or donated hair to Locks of Love.
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“It speaks to a team that’s caring compassionate, bold, energetic; I hope we are all those things and I think we showed that Monday,” Hale, who lost his father to pancreatic cancer six years ago, said. “The other truth, cancer affects everybody… nearly everybody who was doing was doing it support or to memorialize someone who has fought or is fighting cancer.”
Tag: massachusetts
How One Man Is Reducing Food Waste and Cutting Grocery Bills at the Same Time
Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, is at work on a new venture that hopes to extract value from the food that grocery stores throw out.
In June, Rauch opened a new venture in Dorchester, Mass. called The Daily Table, a store that sells discounted food that’s slightly past its sell-by date.
According to Lindsay Abrams of Salon, 40 percent of the food produced each year in America is wasted, in part because supermarkets must throw it out if its sell-by date — a number that a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School found is nearly arbitrary — has passed.
Rauch and others argue that there’s nothing wrong with this food and that it could be used to solve the problems of hunger and food insecurity that many Americans face. Rauch further believes this unnecessary food waste can be turned into a profitable business venture.
Offering affordable, healthy food to the working poor — it’s a crazy enough idea that’s likely to work.
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How Nasal Spray Changed This Community’s Attitude Toward Police Forever
Opiate addiction is taking a grim toll on our country. Seven years ago in Quincy, Mass., more than 90 people died of drug overdoses during a period of 18 months. That’s when the Quincy Police Department decided to look into training its officers in the use of Naloxone, or Nasal Narcan, a drug that “separates the opiate from the receptors in the brain, and allows the individual to resume breathing,” Lt. Patrick Lynn, the Commander of the Narcotics Unit of Quincy Special Investigations told Scott Simon of NPR.
When Quincy Police officers undergo their first responder training, they learn to identify the signs of a possible overdose. When signs of a drug overdose are present, they administer a dose of the Narcan up each nostril, and the results have been striking. Quincy Police officers have administered Narcan 221 times since the fall 2011, reversing 211 overdoses.
According to The Boston Globe, since 2006, health officials in Massachusetts have been distributing Narcan to people likely to come into contact with drug users–such as family members and homeless shelter workers–and the rates of overdose have dramatically reduced. Lt. Lynn told Simon that when the Quincy Police first implemented Narcan training, the overdose death rate fell 66% in the first 18 months, and continues to hold steady at a 44% reduced rate. Perhaps more importantly, people in the community trust the police more, especially since the creation of a good Samaritan law that promises officers won’t charge overdose victims with a crime if they’re found in possession of small quantities of narcotics. “The perception of the police in the city of Quincy is dramatically changed,” Lt. Lynn said. “It’s dramatically changing throughout the state. People are now looking at us as being able to assist them, as opposed to only enforcers of the law.”
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This State May Have Discovered the Secret to Saving Tax Dollars While Doing Good
In Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick has launched a $27 million initiative that he hopes will keep at-risk youth out of jail, reduce crime, and promote safer communities. That may sound like a tall order — after all, it’s more difficult than ever to get funding for social services these days — but the government isn’t fronting the cost, and neither are the taxpayers. Instead, the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Pay for Success Initiative will be funded by organizations like Third Sector Capital Partners, New Profit Inc., Living Cities, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and Goldman Sachs, among other private and nonprofit investors, through the largest social impact bond ever created in the U.S.
Social impact bonds are a new type of philanthropy that involves a partnership among the government, nonprofit organizations and private-sector investors. Here’s how they work: a government identifies a social problem in the community and contracts with private investors who raise money to fund a solution and (hopefully) achieve a pre-determined goal. Participating nonprofits manage the project — in the case of the Massachusetts’s initiative, Third Sector Capital Partners, a nonprofit advisory firm, will serve as the project intermediary, while Roca, a local charity that aids high-risk young men, will provide the services — while a third party conducts a rigorous independent evaluation at the conclusion to determine if it achieved the desired outcome. Only then will the government (and taxpayers) pay the investors back. Therefore, Social impact bonds (otherwise known as Pay for Success initiatives) is a minimal risk to taxpayers, while allowing nonprofits to use their already-established resources to make a significant societal change.
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In Massachusetts, the new Pay for Success initiative will allow Roca to provide job training, counseling and other services to 929 at-risk young men between the ages of 17 and 23, all of whom are currently in the juvenile justice or probation system. Roca has a specific model that it uses to keep its participants out of jail and employed. Its four-year program consists of two years of intensive support from a youth worker, followed by two years of follow-up, and has a proven track record. Out of 115 young men participating in the final two years of the program, 89 percent had no new arrests, 69 percent retained employment for three months and 95 percent had no new legal violations, according to Fast Company. The social impact bond’s success will be determined by Roca’s ability to reduce the number of days participants spend in jail by 40 percent, and improve these young mens’ employment options. If Roca’s services are proven to produce these positive outcomes — in turn saving Massachusetts millions — the government will begin making “success payments” to the investors. “By working with our partners at Roca, the Pay for Success initiative will allow us to marry smart financial solutions with programs proven successful in helping high-risk youth become employed, stay employed, and break the cycle of violence,” Patrick said in a press release.
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Massachusetts recently received an $11.7 million grant — the first of its kind — from the Department of Labor to help fund this Pay for Success initiative. The additional funding will help with success payments and enable the state to extend the project, should it be successful, to an additional 391 young men, thereby serving a total of up to 1,320 young men over nine years. On a larger scale, these social impact bonds are an innovative way for governments to try to fix some of the largest social issues facing the nation, without risking taxpayer backlash. Colorado, New York, Ohio, South Carolina and other states are pursuing Pay for Success initiatives. The only question is: which state will be next?
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This Social Worker Went Above and Beyond to Give a Struggling Single Mom a Fresh Start
It was an unlikely start to a friendship. Mindy Shoestock, 31, a single mother of three, was assigned to see Aleta Monececchi, a 49-year-old social worker in North Adams, Mass., after she’d fought with another parent in an early-education program for low-income families. Life was hard for Shoestock, who had been working the night shift as a supervisor at McDonald’s for $16,000 a year. The Boston Globe even profiled her in a 2011 article about the difficulties of the poor in western Massachusetts. But Monececchi saw past her client’s past mistakes and became her friend and advocate.
Monececchi, who was inspired by Shoestock’s desire to make a better life for her children, started visiting her in her free time, and led her church in donating Christmas toys for Shoestock’s kids. Shoestock wanted to do something in return, so she started volunteering at the church’s spaghetti dinners. Next, Monececchi found Shoestock a temporary job interviewing people applying for help with fuel at the Berkshire Community Action Council. Shoestock is earning just a little more than she did at McDonald’s, but now she can work while her kids are at school, and her holidays are paid—last Thanksgiving was the first time she’d ever experienced a paid holiday from work. “I don’t go home smelling like french fries,” Shoestock told Megan Woolhouse of the Boston Globe. “I feel fantastic, like I’m moving forward.”
Can Writing Poetry Make Better Doctors?
With teaching gigs at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, you would’t think Dr. Rafael Campo would have time for much else. But he’s also a poet with six published volumes to his credit, and he’s on a mission to combine his two passions. Campo believes teaching medical students to study and write poetry can imbue their work with more compassion, balancing the emphasis he feels medical schools place on teaching students to distance themselves from their patients. Campo runs a writing workshop every week for students and residents. “Sometimes facts become all-consuming in our work as docs and we may risk losing sight of some of the truths of the experience of illness, particularly from the perspective of our patients,” Campo said in a recent workshop attended by Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour. Campo described a typical moment of loss that he witnesses in his practice: “The family is sitting by the bedside. The patient hasn’t survived the arrhythmia. Don’t we still have a role as healers there?” Poet or not, it’s hard to argue with that.
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Want to Teach Kids About Food? Make Them Grow Their Own.
In Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, community farms are giving students hands-on opportunities to learn about nutrition, biology and food production. Many of the city schools in the area have implemented school gardens, and teachers collaborate with farmers to expose students to agriculture on a larger scale. The educational programs embrace the valley’s agricultural heritage and get more local food into school cafeterias and students’ homes. Kids are not only learning to cultivate plants and understand life cycles, but also trying healthy foods they may not have eaten before. An added bonus: the experiential learning gets students physically active as they dig, weed, water and plant. Talk about a fresh idea.
How Shoveling a Little Snow Is Doing Big Things to Make This Community Better
A winter wonderland can be a beautiful backdrop for the holiday season. But when it snows, ‘tis also the season for major issues of senior safety across the nation. As the temperature falls, injury risk for older people climbs. Joseph Porcelli’s Boston Snow Crew fights back against a big piece of that risk by using online tools to connect older, ill, and disabled people with volunteers to shovel their walkways and driveways. Porcelli’s idea started as a local project but quickly spread into a far-ranging network, and the effort to make safety a little bit easier has turned into a major community-building initiative. Neighbors who were strangers are now better connected, building “extremely profound relationships on both sides of the equation,” as one leader reports. “What’s so nice about it is that it’s easy,” said one participant. “When you make it easy for people to do the right thing, things get done.”
How Tennis Helps These Boston Students Graduate High School
Tenacity was founded by Ned Eames, a management consultant and tennis pro who wanted to give more opportunities to inner-city students. The organization is built on a unique collaboration between athletics and academics. Tenacity staff work with teachers and school administrators to create individual study plans to help students in reading comprehension, vocabulary, and journaling, while the tennis program gets students active, and teaches them discipline, confidence and social skills. More than 95% of Tenacity students graduate from high school, versus Boston’s average of 70%. Also, 80% of Tenacity students go to college. In the next five years, Tenacity will serve 2,000 students, expand its academic support to math, and partner with schools to create multi-purpose spaces to increase capacity in its tennis instruction. Sound academics, life skill development, field trips and athletics is clearly a winning combination.
A 16-Year-Old Died in a Car Accident. What Happened Next Changed Hundreds of Teenagers’ Lives
After Lisa Reese’s 16-year-old son Andy was killed in a car accident in 2010, she was determined to continue his legacy of caring for the less fortunate. So she started Andy’s Attic, a nonprofit that provides clothes and shoes to low-income teenagers. The organization took off, and soon moved from Reese’s home to a warehouse, and finally to its current location at South High Community School in Worcester, Massachusetts, where 77 percent of the students are low-income.
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Students at the school volunteer to sort clothes and fulfill donation requests. Andy’s Attic provided 180 bags of items last year, including clothes that students’ parents could wear to job interviews, and dorm furnishings for needy students heading off to college. As volunteer Vincor Vasquez told the Telegram Gazette, “Andy helped me out. I came to help him.”