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: New York City
Can Food Change People’s Opinion of the Refugee Crisis?
Disappointed by the selection of hummus sold in supermarkets, Manal Kahi, a native of Lebanon, started making her own, using her grandmother’s recipe. Then, during the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, a light bulb went off in Kahi’s head: What if refugees could share their local cuisines and earn a living by doing so?
Last November, Kahi and her brother launched Eat Offbeat. Watch the video above to see how this ethnic food delivery company hires refugees from Syria, Iraq, Eritrea and Nepal who are talented home cooks and trains them to be professional chefs.
MORE: Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change If One Cooked and Served You Dinner?
Can New Tools End the AIDS Epidemic by 2020?
In 1995, Perry Halkitis watched as New York City’s AIDS crisis unfolded around him and quit his job to focus full-time on the plague killing thousands of gay men. Professionally, it probably wasn’t an advantageous move, but he never doubted that it was the right thing to do. Halkitis, who, at age 18, came out to his Greek immigrant parents in 1981, is now a professor of public health, applied psychology and medicine at New York University. Two years ago, he completed a book about HIV+ gay men who survived that era, and he’s now working on a book about the experience of coming out across generations. Speaking to NationSwell in his Greenwich Village office, Halkitis recalled the experience of witnessing two devastating decades of the AIDS epidemic and his hope of finding a cure.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I do work in gay men’s health, part of which is HIV. I emphasize that because too often people think about gay men’s health work as being synonymous with HIV. The thing that is most exciting me is that there are biomedical interventions that have been developed over the course of the last decade that provide another way to fight the epidemic. Now what do I mean that? We have something called PrEP now, which is administering an antiviral once a day to people who are HIV- that prevents them from becoming infected. It’s miraculous. We also know very clearly that HIV+ people — now living longer, fuller lives — who adhere to their treatment have viral suppression and are un-infectious. That is remarkable to me that these biomedical advances enable people to deter both acquiring and spreading the infection. We haven’t fully realized the power of these tools, and there are some challenges with them. But in the absence of a cure, it is the best thing we have.
Are these tools powerful enough that we can talk about ending the epidemic?
There are conversations about ending the epidemic. In New York, two years ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo put forward a mandate to end AIDS by 2020. By that, he meant making infections go from 3,000 to 750 a year by use of these tools. So, do I think these tools are, in and of themselves, enough to bring an end to AIDS? They can get us near the end. We know perfectly well that people don’t finish their antibiotics and that people don’t exercise regularly. Being dependent completely on administering medicine on a regular basis is challenging reality. So I’m going to say that we’re going to do a really good job at deterring new infections.
What motivates you to do this work?
My decision, about 25 years ago, to enter this field was purely directed by the loss I experienced in my life. I was trained as an applied statistician working at a testing company, and at night, I was an activist. I was in New York City; AIDS was all around me. I witnessed friends dying. I decided to merge the two: to take my skills as a researcher and combine them with my passion as an activist. I find my motivation in the memory of the people who I’ve lost. I find my motivation in making sure that a new generation is free of this disease. And I find my motivation in training my students who are going to continue the good work once I’ve finished. I want gay men to be healthy, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see that.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Don’t expect it to get easier over time. It’s going to get harder and more complicated. The more I learn and the more writing and research I do, the less I think I actually know. Which is good: it opens up more questions. I would have told myself in 1995 to be prepared for any possibility that might happen in this epidemic. I would tell myself to keep hope. I don’t think I had a lot of hope in 1995 that there was going to be an end to this epidemic. I was going to fight the battle for as long as I needed. And I would have told myself to be better about writing about my day-to-day life, which I haven’t done. It would have been an interesting story.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My book “The AIDS Generation,” where I documented the lives of 15 men who were long-term survivors. It could be the period at the end of the sentence of my career, if I did nothing else. (Surprise, I’m doing more.) I’m incredibly proud of that book, because it got a lot of attention in the popular press, and it inspired a conversation. Sean, one of the guys in the book, reminds me all of the time: “You started all of this.” I don’t really know if that’s true, but I like to think that I contributed to the beginning of the dialogue about long-term survivors.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Homepage photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
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!
Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.
1. Concert Hall
Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.
2. Primary School
Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.
3. Hospital
Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.
4. Government
Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.
5. Police Department
Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.
6. Athletic Competition
Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.
7. Military
Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.
MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
This Training Program Teaches the Skills You Really Need to Know to Land a Job in Tech
With a year’s worth of college credits and no degrees or certificates to show for it, Miguel Ponce, 28, was in a rut: living with his mom and siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx and working hourly jobs that he didn’t enjoy. “I bounced from retail job to retail job. I was making barely anything,” he says. “It always felt like it was just a gateway to something better…I was working retail until I became a computer technician or a doctor — always something else.” While employed with a delivery company, Ponce used Craigslist to find a job that would allow him to work with computers — his favorite way to spend time. One poster told him he was under-qualified for a tech job, but linked him to a website for Per Scholas, a New York City-based nonprofit that provides free, intensive I.T. job training to low-income adults in five other U.S. cities.
Along with 800 other aspiring employees who sign up every year for Per Scholas’s classes (in IT support, network engineering and cyber security, among other subject matters), Ponce enrolled in an eight-week class on software testing. The rigorous sessions, which lasted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, taught him how software works and why it might fail, then asked him to practice spotting errors in real time. After receiving additional training in “soft skills,” like communication, collaboration and problem solving in the workplace, Ponce had the skills he needed to start a career in a booming part of the tech industry. His chances were good: 80 percent of Per Scholas graduates find a job in less than a year, and most see their wages rise five-fold to more than $36,000 a year — offering a pathway to the middle class, complete with a living wage, fulfilling tasks and the prospect of career advancement.
APPLY: Per Scholas is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
Perhaps surprisingly, many tech jobs require only a high school diploma. Per Scholas, which is supported by numerous partners and organizations, including NBCUniversal Foundation, the Center for Economic Opportunity and JPMorgan Chase, among others, aims to fill those positions. Employers in the tech sector give Per Scholas direct input on the curriculum, sharpening the organization’s training beyond a generic computer science class. By doing this, participants receive skills for jobs that are available now, instead of abstract roles that might never exist. The results of the collaboration? A strong track record of placements at big firms like Bloomberg, ConEdison and TimeWarner Cable. Wayne Kunow, global head of information risk management at Barclays’s investment banking arm, says he’s “truly been impressed with the caliber and quality of talent coming from Per Scholas,” rare praise for a program located in the South Bronx.
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The organization’s impact, however, exceeds successful placement statistics. Tech companies often hire college graduates who are overqualified for entry-level jobs because other streams of talent haven’t been identified. By proving that its workers (of which 90 percent are minorities) from poor communities can competently fill these jobs, Per Scholas could change the face of the sector and open job pipelines to forgotten communities. No longer do tech titans need to think they must sacrifice quality to add diversity. Hiring a Per Scholas graduate — an asset with appropriate talent that can quickly fill a role — is a win-win.
These trailblazers who will transform the tech industry come from neighborhoods consistently left behind by economic development. Per Scholas is headquartered in the South Bronx, an area notorious for being the poorest congressional district in the country (38 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line). Plinio Ayala, Per Scholas’s president and CEO grew up in the neighborhood and says that while the physical decay may be better than it was during 1980s, the people still feel left behind. “The borough has always lacked opportunities, and the people have lacked opportunities.” Better jobs, he believes, are the only way to foment a change.
“The success of programs such as Per Scholas is vital to the future of our economy,” says Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. “We want to be the next tech hub of the world and in order to fulfill that goal, we will need qualified talent to step into those job opportunities. Per Scholas helps teach and build up our future tech geniuses that will help take our great borough to the next level.”
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A life-changing career can’t come soon enough. Poverty dogs many: A male student reported not having eaten for three days; a female student couldn’t do her homework in the homeless shelter where she lives. To solve these challenges, Per Scholas regularly signs people up for government assistance and offers advice from an in-house financial planner whose services are particularly valuable since three out of every five participants carry an average of $20,000 in outstanding debt (from prior schooling, cars, mortgages, credit cards, child support arrears or tax liens). The advisor advocates for those who are in default, helps students qualify for tax breaks and teaches them how to start saving. Thanks to regular group workshops and one-on-one counseling sessions, students collectively socked away more than $100,000 during the first three months of this year.
This financial planning is vital, especially since those enrolled are trying to leave behind retail and fast-food gigs — low-wage work with limited possibilities — to climb the career ladder. “If a crisis comes up, you can fix it,” explains Ayala. “But if you’re not making enough money at all, those problems are almost insurmountable. It creates this very yucky situation for people that don’t know how to get out.”
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Ponce, once stuck in an endless cycle of dead-end jobs, now works at a top-tier Silicon Valley firm. “Back then, [Per Scholas] was the only thing that I had going for me,” he says by phone from San Francisco. Today, he’s using his computer skills to provide recommendations on how to improve software functionality, a job that gives him immense satisfaction.
The joy of the position, he says, is that testing is like a puzzle: There’s so many ways humans might use a computer tool that he needs to consider to make sure it works. In a way, his job mirrors the role Per Scholas plays for tech companies. Without the organization, no one would give thought to how poor communities might participate in the online revolution, but thanks to its rigorous testing and training, a whole new functionality is deployed.
Per Scholas 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!
Being a Great Leader Means Being in Service to Others
It’s hard to decipher a through-line in Shaifali Puri’s 13-year career that spans the New York State Attorney General’s Office, the Empire State Development Corporation, the nonprofit Scientists Without Borders and the Nike Foundation. But look a little deeper and you’ll see that Puri has the spark of spontaneity that allows her to leap at opportunities and a core mission to improve people’s lives. Currently a visiting scholar at New York University’s journalism school, Puri is researching how technology can be harnessed to benefit the developing world. She spoke to NationSwell about the lessons she’s learned from her eclectic career.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
When I got hired at Fortune (a Time Inc. magazine), they only hired young people, and the only job you could get was to be a fact-checker. What was really great was that these kids came from [top] colleges and universities, and [the company started] them all at the bottom of the totem pole, in a job that required you to do what felt like menial work. Later, when I got a federal clerkship after law school, I was incredibly proud of myself. On day one, when the judge came into the chambers and said hello, she said she had a very important lesson to impart: the proper way to staple memos in her chambers, which was at a 45-degree angle in the top left-hand corner. Some people might say that’s crazy. But I’m grateful for having had those jobs — where you had to pay immense attention to detail — because so much of our focus today is on leadership. But it’s hard to be a great leader unless you also know how to be great at not being the leader, and how to be great in service to others in the organization.
What’s on your nightstand?
I usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going at all times. My fiction book is called “The Flamethrowers,” by Rachel Kushner. The nonfiction book I just started is called “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” Tim Wu’s book on net neutrality.
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What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Worry less about the title and much more about the skills map. What are you learning in each job? Sometimes in my career, it was learning how to be a deputy, how to manage big projects, how to be a boss. You’ll get a career in which you’re doing meaningful work. It’ll be eclectic enough to expose you to many different things, and you’ll get to learn a variety of skill sets so you can figure out which ones you truly want to run with. I wasn’t smart enough or didn’t have the foresight to plan out my career, but looking over my shoulder, I’m glad that without knowing what I was doing, I was jumping at opportunities that had something to teach me, more than I was worrying about a particular industry. Ultimately, by total chance, I think it served me better than had I tried to plan my way here.
What’s your perfect day?
One that has a lot of serendipity in it. Something that I love but don’t do enough is ramble around New York. [So I’d] get up when the mood strikes (I’m usually a pretty early riser), have that cup of coffee, read The New York Times totally unrushed and head out with my boyfriend in tow to leisurely see where the day takes us. It might involve museums, the park, just staring at the architecture through Chelsea or the West Village, checking out what endlessly new thing is happening in the Lower East Side or going through Chinatown (which is one of my favorite parts of New York). Just walking and taking it in without a plan, ending at one of my favorite, not-overrun, neighborhood West Village restaurants. Then, a perfect evening stroll back home. When I forget why I love this city, a good walk always reminds me.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I want to preface this by saying, I’ve been very lucky because I have been very privileged. I did not have to worry about financial circumstances when I came out of college. The thing I feel most proud of isn’t any individual accomplishment. I’ve really tried to build a career of purpose. When I went to Scientists Without Borders, I didn’t know the field. The New York Academy of Sciences took a chance on me, and I’m really proud of having built something. It was like being a tech startup CEO: taking a germ of an idea to a full organization. I made a lot of mistakes, and it wasn’t always clear we were going to have the funding. It felt really important to me, because the promise of what the organization could achieve: eradicating global poverty, trying to bring science and technology resources to solve the challenges of the world’s poorest people. So I’m really proud that, in the face of a tremendous amount of terror and self-doubt, I persevered. That’s been something I’ve tried to do in my career, which is take on things that have scared me and do it anyway.
What don’t most people know about you?
I was, at some point, a certified bartender. I got my certificate in college. I figured if you ever needed a fun back-up career, that was it.
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This interview has been edited and condensed.
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The Hope-Filled Program That’s Keeping One-Time Criminals from Becoming Serial Offenders
In the summer of 2015, Anthony was in a downward spiral, soaked in booze and clouded in a haze of marijuana smoke. “I saw no way out of my addiction,” the 56-year-old from Jamaica, Queens, says. He had stayed on the right side of the law since 2002, but he slipped up one day last July and found himself in handcuffs, booked on a felony charge of grand larceny. Advocates from The Fortune Society, a New York City nonprofit that provides court-approved rehabilitation, interceded on Anthony’s behalf and convinced a judge to let him try their program as an alternative to a three-year prison sentence.
The Fortune Society’s Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) is one of New York City’s most prominent pretrial release programs. With it, judges offer second chances in the courtroom and accused felons are voluntarily diverted into treatment. Enrollees remain under strict supervision — they must check in at Fortune’s offices daily — and spend their time working with a case manager to obtain stable housing, take classes to prep for the high-school equivalency test or job certifications and attend group sessions on anger management, decision-making and 12-steps to sobriety (these days, often for addictions to prescription painkillers). Those that fail to show up are remanded to court and their trial begins immediately, with little leeway from the judge; those that complete the requirements, are released without any time in lock-up. (Some receive probation or community service.) Of the 341 people who are assigned to Fortune’s ATI annually, roughly three out of every four successfully complete their court mandate, which usually means they have no new contact with law enforcement.
Counting down the days until the end of his court-ordered year in the program (which concluded on July 19), Anthony hopes to be included in that statistic. It isn’t that he is eager to leave Fortune behind; rather, he wants the external validation of the progress he’s made in 12 short months. Over a plate of ginger-poached chicken (part of the free lunch served daily) at Fortune’s headquarters in Long Island City on a recent afternoon, he spotted a journalist talking to two young guys and approached him.
Anthony located two free chairs, set his ID on the table and started talking. He credits his time in the program with transforming his criminal past into something good. “I really can’t overstate the positive difference [Fortune] had on my life,” he says. For starters, he got sober. Every one of his urine tests came back clean, and his attendance marks were high, he reported. He completed several job trainings and applied to LaGuardia Community College for next fall. He’s fully aware that employers are reluctant to hire a someone only a decade away from retirement — let alone a person that age with a criminal record — but Anthony is determined to be a nurse, a job that pays “a decent dollar.” He expected the judge would release him the following week.
“We, I think, have some of the most amazing folks walking our halls, who, because of poverty, because of race, because of lack of opportunity, are here. It’s such a criminal offense, I believe, to have somebody in our intake unit that dropped out of school in eleventh grade but tests in reading at a third grade level,” says Peggy Arroyo, ATI’s director. “That almost guarantees there is going to be a population that needs these services,” she says, adding that she “will gladly flip burgers at McDonalds” on the day when mass incarceration ends.
The quick turnaround in Anthony’s life would be an impressive accomplishment for anyone, but it’s particularly striking in comparison to the average results from New York’s correctional system. Those awaiting trial on Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail, struggle to maintain their sanity against the threats from fellow inmates and the barked orders or beatings from guards. (Last year, press attention focused on Kalief Browder, who was held on Rikers without trial for three years, much of it in solitary confinement. He committed suicide at his parent’s home in the Bronx in June. But there were also the lesser-known stories of Fabian Cruz, an inmate who killed himself on New Year’s Day, and Kenan Davis, an 18-year-old who hung himself in his cell while waiting for a psychiatrist.)
“I think if you’re arrested, you have PTSD. The mere act of somebody putting handcuffs on you: you have no control, you’re told what to do and maybe not why. I’ve never been incarcerated” — Arroyo knocks on her desk — “so I don’t know firsthand, but it seems that, for the young people who come through our program, there’s just this cloud of confusion and pain, like ‘What am I doing here?’”
But getting through New York City’s jails might be the easy part. The difficulties of obtaining an apartment or a job — all the things people need to do to “survive in this insane city,” as Arroyo puts it — can be overwhelming for someone who’s just traded in his orange jumpsuit. Committing another crime might seem like the only fix. That’s likely why close to one-third of probationers — 32.4 percent — are re-arrested within three years, according to the most recent data from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS).
It’s stats like those that explain why there’s been a national push to curb mass incarceration in state and federal prisons. New York City has long been ahead of the curve, offering the country’s first pretrial release program in 1961 and witnessing significant drops in prison population without any major legislative mandates from the state capital. Most of the change can be attributed to a small core of nonprofits: among them, Fortune Society, the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, the Osborne Association, the Women’s Prison Association and the Center for Court Innovation. Their alternatives to incarceration were designed to rehabilitate and reintegrate one-time criminals.
With the same clients cycling through courtrooms, diversion programs save money, encouraging prosecutors and judges to get on aboard, says Peggy Arroyo, ATI’s director. “It’s much less expensive to put somebody in Alternatives to Incarceration, and we believe it’s much more effective,” she explains. (DCJS is currently analyzing Fortune’s three-year recidivism rates; no data is publicly available yet.) “The higher the charge, the more of a sentence you would be facing. That’s more time we displace from prisons, and there’s a dollar figure attached to that,” she explains. Last year, ATI saved the state $2.95 million, Arroyo adds.
Among the select group of nonprofits, Fortune’s staff members say its size distinguishes their organization from others, allowing it to offer wraparound services to clients. “We’re very fortunate to be a one-stop shop,” Arroyo says. “We have everything: we have housing, mental health, substance abuse, employment services, education. We have it all.” The average day begins with educational classes — whether GED prep or vocational skills like cooking, construction and asbestos removal — from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., then several hours are spent in group therapy. Three evidence-based therapies make up those sessions: Moral Re-cognition Therapy focuses on how to make decisions that lead to a virtuous life, recognizing the errors in their previous thinking, making amends and reformulating a new process; Seeking Strength instructs how to led a healthy life, as it relates to safe sex, smoking pot and other choices; anger management classes teach participants how to defuse tense situations. Additional seminars — on parenting skills, relationships, relapse prevention — are also offered.
Those classes form the core of ATI’s programming, changing mindsets first so that men in the program choose to take advantage of Fortune’s other opportunities. They come to understand, not that they should be punished for breaking a law, but that the action they took hurt someone, the people around them and themselves. Fortune Society builds up the person, rather than the prisons, Arroyo says.
Josh, one of the boys in the lunchroom, says he never knew how to control his temper. When somebody would step on his foot on the subway or lost interest in conversation and looked away, Josh would lash out, sometimes violently. “I used to like to fight,” the 21-year-old from the Bronx admits. Initially at Fortune, he remained closed off. It wasn’t until he was remanded in January and sent back to jail that he straightened up. He hadn’t really cared whether he was in or out of prison, but he noticed that the advocates from Fortune fought for him to be released back to the program. “They went to bat for me harder than I did for myself,” he says. The judge gave him one more try. Josh stopped playing hooky, and listened more closely in the groups to older guys like Anthony, who, “have been through what I’ve seen.” Josh came to understand that he wasn’t a bad person, he “just didn’t go about it in the right way.” “I’m not innocent,” he cautions, but one day, he could be.
Arroyo says ATI helps these men realize their own potential and seize it. “By the end of the program, they realize things weren’t the way they were supposed to be. Now they have the opportunity to change that,” she explains. “We can’t undo what was done, but I hope for each individual to say, ‘No more. Not for me.’”
Fortune Society participants may not be able to change their past, but they can certainly modify the course for their future.
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The Program That Encourages Girls to Speak Out About What It’s Really Like to Be a Teenager
On a recent Saturday evening in Lower Manhattan, nearly two dozen high school girls stood next to glowing laptops, displaying projects to a milling crowd. One used the online presentation tool Prezi to click through chapters of her vampire novel-in-progress, which, she says, is a metaphor for society’s fear of African Americans. Another showed off her short film, “Stop and Smell the Roses” depicting New York City scenes about journeys: subway rides, map-reading, outdoor strolls. In voiceover narration, the filmmaker, Sharon Young, explains the uncertainty she feels about attending college in the fall: “I’m the type of person who wants to plan everything out, who wants to know what’s on the set list, if the clouds are going to be overcast, what sort of direction I’m floating in.”
Girls Write Now is largely responsible for Young’s emerging voice. Since 1998, the New York City program has paired over 5,000 underserved high school girls with established female journalists, novelists, screenwriters, bloggers and other digital media professionals. The teens (only 4 percent of whom are white) mainly come from the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx to string words into poems, try their hand at reporting a story or dream up the concept for a novel. Basic English proficiency is a challenge in many New York City high schools, so Girls Write Now helps low-income young women of color improve their communication, writing and leadership skills. With a mentor, a teenager develops a portfolio of creative work and then, during her senior year, crafts a college essay. Despite outside obstacles, every single senior who participated in Girls Write Now has gone to college — often with scholarships and accolades in tow.
As the media landscape changes rapidly, the mission of fashioning young female writers takes on a particular urgency since there’s now a chance for women of color to claim a space in a world dominated for centuries by white men. In today’s digital age, young women can control their own narrative by telling it themselves online, reaching a wide audience, says Veronica Black, a pixie-cut-sporting filmmaker, museum curator and Young’s mentor. Which is why Girls Write Now offers a special digital media program that trains teens in creative uses of the latest technology. “At the end…girls are equipped to tell a story in GIFs, write a poem in HTML, and take their words to the next level,” says Maya Nussbaum, Girls Write Now’s founder. “From narrative games to audio and animation, writing isn’t just in ink anymore.”
APPLY: Girls Write Now is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
Young’s participation in the digital media program was unplanned. (Coincidentally, so was Black’s.) Initially shy, Young, a Harlem native and recent graduate of The High School for Math, Science and Engineering, one of New York City’s nine specialized magnet schools, kept her opinions to herself, needing several meetings before really opening up to Black. Together, the pair experimented using various types of digital media before Young discovered that film best aligns with her sensibility and visual way of thinking. (She’s attracted to the freedom that comes with a multi-platform definition of writing because she doesn’t have the patience to draft sentences until they’re perfect, preferring the spontaneity of capturing unplanned beauty on camera.) Suddenly, questions about classic movies, how to write a script and what Black had learned from her own video projects flowed out of the once-quiet girl. One night, as Young worked on her vlog, she glanced up from her video-editing software and realized it was two in the morning. “I think that’s when I realized making films was something I enjoyed,” she says.
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Today, in an interview at Girls Write Now’s offices in midtown, Young displays confidence, especially with her mentor beside her. After three years together, they understand each other, laughing about inside jokes and grading each other’s metaphors. “[Black has] been very supportive of my ideas and helped me turn them into reality. She helped me to be vulnerable in my writing and take risks,” Young says, sharing that her mentor “open[ed] my eyes to the different uses of digital media.”
While many of Young’s high school classmates plan on getting STEM degrees, Girls Write Now has given her other options for next year in college (she plans to attend Hunter College, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) — including finding a way to bridge both science and art through technology. While scared of the future, she now understands the importance of being a female storyteller. “It’s taking ownership of your identity, your gender, your upbringing and not falling for society’s norms for you because you’re a girl. It’s breaking those walls down,” she says, possessing the mental clarity and confidence to articulate her feelings and share them with strangers. It’s something of a risk, she feels, but one she can’t resist. Now that she’s found her voice — and the perfect medium to share it — through Girls Write Now, there’s no sense hiding it.
Girls Write Now 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!
The Park That’s Protecting America’s Largest City, A Prosecutor Who Refused to Let Sexual Assault Victims Be Forgotten and More
N.Y.’s Clever New Park Will Weather Epic Storms and Rising Seas, Wired
In sharp contrast to New York City’s towering skyscrapers, several large, berm-like structures rise on nearby Governors Island. These unique, tree-, shrub- and grass-covered mounds not only provide green space to residents of the nearby concrete jungle, but they also have a more surprising purpose: to protect the Big Apple from rising sea levels and destructive superstorms.
11,431 Rape Kits Were Collected and Forgotten in Detroit. This Is the Story of One of Them, Elle
More than 80,000 cases pass through Wayne County, Mich., prosecutor Kym Worthy’s office each year. Despite that crushing caseload — and a bankrupt Motor City — Worthy, a sexual assault victim herself, put together a plan to process the backlog of more than 10,000 untested rape kits found in the county’s crime lab warehouse.
A New Argument for More Diverse Classrooms, The Atlantic
As a child, U.S. Education Secretary, John King, attended racially- and socioeconomically-diverse public schools. Today as an adult, he’s advocating that all American schoolchildren have access to the same thing. Why? A fully integrated educational system benefits all students — affluent and low-income alike.
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