Guess Which State Towers Over All the Others on Wind Energy?, onEarth
In a state known for caucuses and cornfields, renewable energy has taken root. More than 30 percent of Iowa’s in-state electricity generation already comes from wind — and it’s only going to increase, thanks to a new wind farm housing a turbine that’s taller than the Washington Monument.
Using Literature as a Force for Good Among Austin’s Homeless Population, CityLab
Barry Maxwell, a former resident of the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, is paying it forward. As founder of Street Lit, he collects donated books and provides a creative writing class (participants write short stories, poetry, blog posts) to create a sense of community among those living on the streets.
Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City, New York Times Magazine
More than 60 years after the monumental Brown vs. Board of Education court ruling, New York City public schools remain some of the most racially- and economically-divided in the country. So where does a middle-class African-American family enroll their daughter: A segregated, low-income public school or a “good” public or private one?
Tag: New York City
How One School System Is Fighting Back Against the Achievement Gap, A Better Way to Help the Homeless and More
What Are Massachusetts Public Schools Doing Right? The Atlantic
The Bay State may be tops when it comes to reading and math, but officials aren’t resting on their laurels. Instead, they’re directing resources towards Massachusetts’s achievement gap, which remains stubbornly high. Can a focus on social-emotional learning and childhood trauma bring disadvantaged students up to the same level as their more affluent peers?
Give Directly to the Homeless Through a New Sharing Economy App, Fast Co.Exist
Known as the “City of Goodwill,” Seattle is living up to its moniker. Thanks to one tech entrepreneur and an advocate for the homeless, residents can now use the WeCount app to donate unwanted items (think: blankets, coats, sleeping bags) directly to those most in need. With homelessness an ongoing problem in many urban areas, let’s hope this technology spreads across the country — fast.
What If Mental Health First Aid Were as Widespread as CPR? New York City’s Planning to Do It, Yes! Magazine
Often, law enforcement encounter people suffering from mental illness, yet many haven’t received the education necessary to recognize and provide assistance (instead of arrest). In response, the New York Police Department is joining forces with the National Council for Behavioral Health to provide 250,000 first responders with mental health first aid training. The ultimate goal? To prevent suicide, which currently takes 40,000 lives each year.
MORE: Dine Out, Feed the Hungry
Through the Power of Music, These Homeless Mothers Create a Lasting Bond With Their Children
Earlier this winter at Siena House, a homeless shelter for young mothers in the South Bronx, Crystal spoke softly to her five kids. “This song is for you,” she said, and began crooning a lullaby she wrote (along with the musician Daniel Levy), titled “You’re the Reason Why.”
Accompanied by a guitar and violin, she sang, “You’re the reason why I smile. You’re the reason why I sing. You’re the reason I’m alive. You’re my all, my everything.” In delicate couplets, Crystal expressed a mother’s love for her children — sentiments we often associate with a woman leaning over a crib in a baby’s bedroom, not new moms passing through homeless shelters, jails, housing projects and adult education programs who are barely able to hold their families together.
Since 2011, the Lullaby Project, a Carnegie Hall program (part of its larger Musical Connections initiative) that takes music’s transformative power outside gilded concert halls and into neglected communities throughout New York City and across the nation, has paired more than 300 homeless or incarcerated mothers with professional musicians to create a musical experience for their child. Over three sessions, new and expectant moms write, compose and record a short lullaby for their newborns. For young women who may have experienced their own difficult childhood, the project is a chance to give a name to all the raw emotions that come with motherhood: the regrets from their own lives, the bright wishes for their children and, most importantly, the bottomless affection welling up in these new mothers’ hearts.
The Lullaby Project is not simply a chance for a mom to pen something lasting and meaningful; the song also creates a vital bond that’s key for the child’s development, says Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf, a researcher evaluating the project. Singing a lullaby helps to create a secure attachment between mother and child, which studies have shown often leads to exploration, better social relations and emotional well-being in later life, Wolf says. Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project is one of the few programs that encourages that broader neonatal development, rather than society’s limited emphasis on preventing infant mortality or disease.
“When we fund maternal and infant healthcare, it’s chiefly in a disease framework: ‘How do you keep mothers from smoking, drinking, or having soda? How do you ensure that kids, postnatally, get vaccinations?’ Those are epidemiological issues. What we don’t pay any attention to, yet is no less critical, is the other side of prenatal and postnatal care: ‘How do we say to young mothers who are maybe on their own, maybe pregnant in neighborhoods that are not particularly safe or in the shelter system, that you are about to be a mother? How do we tell them you are an agent in charge of your own and this baby’s growth and development?’” Wolf asks. This initiative, she adds, is “building young people to do the job they are about to engage in.”
For a generation of children, despite all the turbulence of growing up in poverty, falling asleep in mom’s arms suddenly sounds much sweeter.
MORE: How Texting Can Improve the Health of Babies Born to Low-Income Mothers
The Power of Video Games to Heal America’s Heroes, A Surefire Way to Keep Students in School and More
How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon
U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.”
What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times
The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers.
The Bag Bill, The New Yorker
A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs?
Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags.
MORE: The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War
Dine Out, Feed the Hungry
In New York City, nearly 235 million meals are missed every year due to poverty, but one former bartender in the Bronx has a technological solution to end that.
Spare, a mobile app launched last September, allows diners to automatically round up their restaurant bill and donate extra change to one of the city’s major food banks. Developed by Andra Tomsa, a onetime cocktail waitress and financial advisor, the app has 7,000 users who are each donating an average of $15 a month through their small change. While the user base is still small, Tomsa is aggressively pursuing partnerships with restaurants to offer loyalty coupons (think: a free drink for every third donation) to get to 400,000 users — the magic number she believes can end the meal gap in the Big Apple.
“The overwhelming majority [of those who are food insecure] are working poor. They have two to three jobs, trying to support their families, the elderly and their children on a minimum wage,” Tomsa explains. “The last week of the month, they are choosing between the electricity bill and groceries. They are going to the food pantry to supplement their budget.”
As a student at Fordham University in the Bronx, Tomsa studied the “extreme poverty” of the developing world, but only later did she realize some of those living on less than $2 a day included her neighbors in New York’s poorest borough. In December 2012, she decided to focus her attention on her immediate surroundings, including the area around Yankee Stadium where she lives. Knowing “even millennials who have no money, have money to buy beer,” she started with an analog version of Spare, by collecting dollars at six bars through an extra line on the bill (in addition to tips). But with a newborn son, collecting cash from these nightlife establishments posed logistical problems.
In November 2013, on a date nonprofit workers now call the “Hunger Cliff” because federal budget cuts to food stamps resulted in more than 1 million New York City residents having less to spend at supermarkets, Tomsa’s project took on new urgency. She decided to scale her idea by going virtual. Developing an API (a for-profit venture that her nonprofit Spare leases for a small fee) that tallies donations based on a bank statement, Tomsa was able to automate the collection process.
For those who have money to spare on restaurants, the least they can do is remember those who can’t afford dinner that night.
Homepage photo by John Moore/Getty Images.
MORE: Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change If One Cooked and Served You Dinner?
For Education to Improve, Emotional Learning Must Be Emphasized
In his 20s, as a Teach for America fellow in a Washington, D.C., classroom, Nick Ehrmann, found himself reading Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Little Blue Engine,” which satirizes the well-known kid’s story of the Little Engine That Could who repeats, “I think I can, I think I can,” to power its way up a steep hill. In Silverstein’s version, instead of reaching the summit, the train slips backwards and crashes: “If the track is tough and the hill is rough, / thinking you can just ain’t enough!” the poet writes. Ehrmann took the lesson to heart and, after completing graduate work in sociology at Princeton, founded the educational nonprofit Blue Engine, its name a nod to the poem.
As CEO, Ehrmann takes the hard look at the shortcomings in our nation’s secondary schools, rejects pat inspirational messages and instead provides students with critical support to succeed in higher education. Blue Engine’s most important innovation is the introduction of teaching assistants (known as BETAs), mostly recent college grads, in the classroom. By breaking up large classes into small groups, teaching assistants personalize lessons for class performance and learning styles. With 89 BETAs in seven schools today, the program has been shown to nearly double the number of college-ready students — a 73 percent increase at three schools, according to New York’s 2013-14 Regents test data — and cut the number of failing students by one third.
On a recent weekday morning, Ehrmann, wearing a scarf against the 34-degree chill, plopped down at a table at Au Bon Pain in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. NationSwell spoke to him about rethinking the education sector, leadership and fatherhood.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
There’s an expression that we have here that we have to earn the right to do this work. I think there’s a pervasive illusion that the fact that you have good intentions is going to lead to positive outcomes. And in actuality, it can lead to feelings of entitlement and arrogance and a lack of partnerships — true partnerships — in the communities in which we work. So from the minute we step foot into the office or to a school or to a classroom and sit across the table from a young person, who are we to say that we deserve to be there? We have to earn the right to be there in the eyes of young people, teachers, parents and each other. That’s number one. It feels like that’s the most grounding way to honor the work and not lose sight of what’s most important, which is achieving results.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Number one is broadening the evidence base in how we define success, continuing to embrace academic achievement outcomes, but also incorporating measures of student growth, social-emotional learning, learning climate and the ways that schools can and must nurture the growth of young people more holistically. Students aren’t just data points. They’re people, and I think we’re seeing a really reductionist narrowing of what success means into standardized test scores at the expense of things that help young people grow and learn and develop independently in their lives. I think the pendulum is swinging back.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Dude, I have like 5,000 books. Hmm…
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
I have three boys under five [years of age]…we’re watching “Cars 2” and “Wall-E” for the 14th time, and actually, I just watched the Star Wars trilogy — the original three — with my four-year-old, and he was glued to the set. It’s just amazing.
What’s your biggest need right now?
Sleep! No, I think I’ve got it: a relaxation of the assumption individual organizations can or should scale to solve social problems alone and to encourage the essential forms of collaboration in systemic partnerships, where the most promising organizations become part of a much broader theory of change in how problems get solved. Look at Malaria No More, for example. There was no single organization that would have set themselves up to become the global malaria response. Too often, I think, entrepreneurs face pressure to scale to the size of the problem alone.
What inspires you?
Working with an incredible team. Having the chance to be part of an organization that sees the strengths in young people, instead of their weaknesses and deficits, and builds from that strength without taking credit for it. And the sliver of possibility that this work is going to have a dramatic impact on how students learn across the country.
In turn, how do you try to inspire others?
It’s easy to lose sight of what drives us and unites us as an organization, when the work itself is so hard. And part of my role is to consistently hold that vision and sense of possibility, just grounded in young people, to hold that front and center, so we can recharge.
What’s your perfect day?
I thrive on routine. I’m just going to describe my current day. A perfect day: I’d say it starts with not waking up three times in the middle of the night, step one. Step two: Cook breakfast for my boys. Get in a quick run in Central Park. It’s equal parts being in the field at schools and managing teams. Getting home in time so that Annie [my wife] and I could put the boys to bed. And eking out 36 minutes of “Homeland,” before I fall asleep on the couch. #LivingTheDream.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I was a musician for most of my life. I come from a family of musicians. I play cello, so I grew up doing classical and jazz ensemble work most of my life. I miss it. That would be part of my perfect day, if I had the time. I started around [the age of] four and put it down in my early 20s.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this work?
To not to apologize for thinking big. And to not allow caution or fear to limit people’s sense of what’s possible.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.
How a Classic Denim Company Is Greening up the Fashion Industry, Why One Judge Went out of His Way for a Convicted Criminal and More
In Its Quest to Decrease Water Use, Levi’s Is Open Sourcing Production Methods, FastCo.Exist
3,781: The number of liters of water required to produce a pair of jeans and grow the cotton they’re made with. To reduce its H2O usage, Levi’s developed a process that consumes 96 percent less water (think: transitioning from roomy boyfriend to super skinny cut). Even better? Instead of sequestering its eco-friendly methods in a top-secret lab, the producer of the classic 501 is sharing its techniques with industry competitors.
A Federal Judge’s New Model for Forgiveness, New York Times
Checking the conviction history question on a job application can make it next to impossible for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. When issuing a 15-month-long prison sentence to a woman for faking an auto accident in order to collect insurance money, New York judge John Gleeson didn’t mean to issue the lifelong punishment of unemployment. Which is why, 13 years later, he handed her something unusual: a federal certificate for rehabilitation.
The Powerful, Young Gallery Owner Shaping L.A.’s Art Scene, OZY
The Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which boasts the city’s second highest property crime rate, is also the unlikely home of Michelle Papillion’s art gallery. Showcasing the works of emerging African-American artists, Papillion is out to do more than just bring awareness to creatives that aren’t widely recognized and celebrated; she’s working to beautify the community around her.
MORE: To Reduce Drug Abuse, These Members of the Criminal Justice Community Advocate for Legalization, Not Criminalization
Meet The Educator Who Accurately Predicted Technology’s Potential to Transform Student-Driven Learning
Elisabeth Stock founded PowerMyLearning, a national nonprofit that leverages technology to transform teaching and learning in low-income communities, in 1999 — a time when the cloud was still in the sky, the search engine Google was only a year old and most still logged on via a dialup connection. Even then, Stock saw software’s potential to boost students’ learning, but she didn’t want to replace classroom teachers with lessons on a screen; instead, she wanted the technology to strengthen the learning relationships among students, teachers and families. Today, Stock points to growth in math proficiency (and great gains amongst children with learning disabilities) at PowerMyLearning partner schools across the country compared to similar schools.
NationSwell sat down with Stock at the organization’s offices in the Garment District of Midtown Manhattan and discussed her outlook on leadership, learning and racing a Chevy Impala with her dad.
What’s the best advice you’ve received on leadership?
There’s this expression of the mirror and the window. What really strong leaders do is this: when things go right, they look out the window to see who they can give credit to. And when things don’t go well, they look in the mirror, and say, “What did I do wrong?” Really lousy leaders do the reverse. When things go badly, they look through the window and ask, “Who can I blame?” And when things go really great, they say, “Oh, look at me! I’m so great!”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I’m very excited about how the technology is becoming much more user-friendly for teachers to do data-driven instruction and support student-driven learning. I also think we’re at a particularly exciting moment in time because the prevalence of cell phones and smartphones in the inner city has gotten really high, which provides the ability to combine texting with other things we’re doing to help parents stay in the game with their kids’ education.
What’s on your nightstand?
It’s depressing. You really want to hear it? I’m reading “When Breath Becomes Air,” which is a book about a young doctor [Paul Kalanithi] who gets diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer and decides he’s going to write a book before he dies. And then the other one I always have is “Thinking Fast and Slow,” [by winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daniel Kahneman].
What’s your biggest need right now?
PowerMyLearning is in the process of developing our national board. Finding people who want to get involved in our work and will bring their networks, hearts, heads and wallets — all those pieces that will help us get better — is probably our number one need.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first started this job?
The key thing is to surround yourself with good people and to surround yourself with people who really believe in what you’re doing. You may meet somebody who has the best skill set for what you’re looking for, but if that person is not super excited about what you’re doing, it’s not worth it to bring them on board. They don’t have to work the same hours as you, but they have to be as committed and passionate as you.
What inspires you?
The thing that inspires me is this really strong sense of unfairness that exists, that if you are born in a certain zip code, you have different outcomes than someone else. It just seems, to me, so wrong, and I’m very driven to change that.
What’s the accomplishment that you’re most proud of?
I think it’s two things. We’re all about developing the capacity of people, so I’m very proud of helping teachers become better teachers and helping parents know how they can be more helpful for their kids at home, and then, seeing my staff do the same thing. We have people on staff who have been here for a long time and seeing them grow and develop is just so rewarding. If you can do that, you can do anything. All these other things we’re trying to make happen (like kids having better academic outcomes and socio-emotional learning), will happen if capacity is developed.
What’s something that most people don’t know about you?
Growing up, my father was a psychiatrist, so you’d assume that he’d be this kind of quiet, docile, glasses-wearing kind of guy. As my mom described it, she married Clark Kent but got Superman. The other side of my dad was that he was really into car racing. He could not wait until I turned 16, so I could start racing with him. He started me off taking the Chevy Impala out on weekends to race around cones in a parking lot, and eventually I graduated to a real track going 100 mile per hour on the straightaways. I think that my interests in how things work physically (I studied biomechanical engineering as an undergrad), a lot of it came from my dad.
What does your perfect day look like?
Every day is a perfect day. I don’t complain a lot. I mean a perfect day is when everyone is healthy and putting in their all, including my kids and my husband. You go home and everyone’s happy, and at work, you’re strengthening your own relationships. I’m not going to say it’s a day where you hear about some big grant or we get state test results back and our kids have done well, because those are just easy days. Those aren’t necessarily the best days. The best days are when you work hard, right?
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.
This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
Moments of stability were rare during Pamela Bolnick’s childhood. She repeatedly witnessed her father beat her mother, a Venezuelan immigrant diagnosed with schizophrenia. Bolnick’s mom eventually left her abusive spouse, fleeing to the Bay Area with her two kids. When she stopped taking her medication, the county child welfare department stepped in and placed six-year-old Bolnick and her younger brother in foster care. Her mother resumed treatment for her mental illness, and for two short years, retained custody of her children. After another relapse, Bolnick and her sibling were permanently removed from their home.
Bolnick was placed with her godparents in Richmond, Calif., an East Bay city then known for its notoriously high murder rates. Toughened by her childhood, she excelled at El Cerrito High School, impressing teachers in her Advanced Placement classes and filling her schedule with softball games and dance rehearsals. By senior year, however, she felt her foster family was pressuring her to move on. “All this time, I looked at them as being my own family. I did everything that you’d expect of a child, going to school, not getting into trouble, applying to college,” Bolnick says. “I came to see it as a business transaction: them being paid [by the government] for taking care of me, and me getting the benefit of being a child in their custody.” Disgusted, she left and spent the summer living at friend’s house. Shortly afterwards, she enrolled at Holy Names University in nearby Oakland Hills.
Alone for the first time, juggling 19 credits of core classes and a full-time job overwhelmed Bolnick. Short on time and seared by her past relationships, she distanced herself from others. “I almost grew to believe that I could be this Superwoman figure,” she recalls. “It burned me out completely. I didn’t have time to enjoy my first year of college, a time that’s supposed to be so liberating. I had finally reached the only thing my mother wanted me to do, and it made me so sad knowing I wasn’t happy.” Bolnick dropped out. Her foster parents refused to take her back, and without a permanent place to go, she couch-surfed at friends’ dorms.
The foster care system is one of America’s most troublesome institutions: chronically underfunded and largely uninformed and unsuccessful at raising children much better than the parents from whom they were removed. Its primary recipients — children under the age of 18 — have no political leverage, so policy decisions are often driven by scandals. In New York City, for example, after a mother killed her daughter in 1995, thousands of kids were forcefully removed from their homes, but when troubles beset the administration in 2005, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. While the system as a whole has experienced some reforms (motivated by Victorian sensationalism, as Jill Lepore documents in The New Yorker), a subset of its population gets little attention: those who “age out” of the system.
Each year in California, several thousand youth exit foster care immediately upon turning 21 years old. (Previously emancipated at 18, youth care was extended by a 2012 state law.) Longitudinal studies by researchers from University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall Center for Children found that 24 percent of youth were homeless after exiting the system and nearly half had been incarcerated within two years. Perhaps most shockingly, 77 percent of the young women reported a pregnancy, risking another generation reentering the system.
While other children can mature gradually, relying on their parents for emotional advice or a bit of extra cash, these youth are entirely on their own. Amy Lemley, a former case manager at a group home for foster youth in Boston, remembers teenagers celebrating their 18th birthdays by stuffing their few belongings into a backpack and saying goodbye. “We kind of looked the other way and pretended that it was going to work out, but we knew that it wasn’t,” she says. Recognizing that these kids needed help transitioning into adulthood, Lemley enrolled in a public policy graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, and with her classmate and “kindred spirit” Deanne Pearn, the women founded an organization in 1999 to provide that support.
Headquartered in Oakland, Calif., First Place for Youth provides emancipated youth in five Bay Area counties and Los Angeles with their very first apartment, covering both the security deposit and the monthly rental fees. Last year, 464 youth moved into these residences. Most stay in the program for around 18 months; some kids drop in for 30 days, while others stay for three years, current First Place for Youth CEO Sam Cobbs says. Before exiting, the organization assists the young adults meet four main goals: find stable employment, locate housing that matches their income, complete two semesters of community college or a certificate program and, finally, achieve “healthy living,” which means avoiding arrests, unintended pregnancies and substance abuse.
The program’s scope wasn’t always so large. The way Lemley originally envisioned it, housing would be enough. But after realizing that some First Place participants couldn’t read, she quickly pivoted, including educational and career services as well. Targeting a group that’s significantly behind their peers, First Place’s goals are modest. “I can tell you, we don’t have anybody at Goldman Sachs,” Claudia Miller, the group’s spokeswoman says. Instead, it aims for participants to land jobs that provide a livable wage, like a paralegal, nurse or solar panel installer. A full 86 percent obtain employment, and 91 percent attend college. (The program did not provide numbers on how many complete their education.)
“This program is not a handout; it is a hand up,” Cobbs says. “What we’re doing is trying to help you understand and make choices so that you can provide for yourself. You have to meet us, if not halfway, at least 30 percent, and invest in your own future. Which I think is one of the reasons it’s such a big success: it depends on them.”
Bolnick heard about First Place for Youth through a college counselor, who advised her that the program could provide her with the financial and emotional support she needed. Feeling like she was “working to live each day,” Bolnick initially signed up for just classes. But after dropping out of Holy Names University, experiencing a brief period of homelessness and crashing with friends for a bit, she moved into housing provided by First Place.
The transition wasn’t always easy. Like in her dorm room, she shared the space (a two-bedroom apartment in San Leandro, Calif.) with another teenager, this time a foster youth who’d faced her own hardships. At first, the pair bonded, but soon Bolnick felt that her roommate began to shirk responsibilities, hanging around at home and smoking pot and cigarettes, even after she found out she was pregnant. “It literally put a flash of light in front of me, knowing there are kids out there who don’t even want to make a difference in their life,” she says. The environment became so tense that Bolnick couldn’t take it anymore and had to move to another apartment. There, Bolnick found another First Place participant who became like “a little sister to me.”
It’s a result that can’t be quantified, but Bolnick says First Place provided a community that understood her. After losing both parents (her father left the picture when the family moved to California, and her mother committed suicide) and then feeling betrayed by her foster family, Bolnick learned to distance herself from those closest to her. Before getting to First Place, she didn’t express any emotions related to her upbringing. She couldn’t tell her little brother how scared she was for fear of traumatizing him, and she kept her biological parents a secret through high school so that her friends wouldn’t pity her. Getting to know other emancipated youth at First Place helped her, Bolnick says, not because they necessarily knew the specifics of her story, but because each of them had a similar experience to share. Up until her early 20s, she says she never knew what it was like to cry. When asked what the rush of emotions feels like now, Bolnick says simply, “I appreciate it.”
Foster youth “have completely normal behavior,” Cobbs says, “and what I mean by that is, if you are moved nine times, then you probably wouldn’t establish relationships really quickly. It is normal behavior to protect yourself from building intimate relationships, because every time you get attached, you get hurt. It’s abnormal not to do that.”
Today, Bolnick pays for her own apartment near Oakland, where she bikes and reads by Lake Merritt. She’s working full-time as an assistant manager for a high-end fashion company, and she’s saved enough money to take a two-week trip to Venezuela to meet her mother’s family. Within the next year, she plans to complete her last semester of community college and apply to U.C. Berkeley, where she’s planning to major in biophysics (the next step towards her goal of practicing pediatric neurosurgery) and minor in sociology (a way to understand where she’s been and what she’s faced). She spoke to NationSwell, she confessed, partially because she wanted to hear more about the neighborhood around New York University in downtown Manhattan where she plans to go to medical school. But she also mentioned she wanted to talk because she feels she has an important story to share — one that has a brighter ending than her mother’s.
Why was Bolnick able to beat the odds? Some of the latest scientific research on trauma might call it grit or resilience — an inborn ability to overcome. In her words, “I think it has to do with seeing the light behind all the blockages that get in the way. It takes a lot mentally,” she explains. “If I keep telling myself I am a foster kid, I am a Latina woman, I live in Richmond and all of my friends are doing the same things that people expect me to do, I should just as easily do that. But I never once had that thought at all. I just wanted to make the best of what I had.” Bolnick also credits First Place for Youth for providing her with the network she needed to halt a situation that was spiraling out of control. She says the nonprofit gave her “stability, stability, stability.”
With results like that, Cobbs wants to see the model expand across the country, whether it’s run by his organization or a partner. He acknowledges specific benefits — support for transitional housing in Sacramento and a top-notch community college system statewide — that make the model work in California, but he also points to challenges, including the Golden State’s high cost of living and the fact that it is the largest foster care system in the country (largely because it hasn’t been as aggressive in returning kids to their homes, even if conditions improve, and because a flood of orphaned immigrant children keep adding to the total, he says). If replicated in just 10 more cities nationwide, Cobbs says that about 70 percent of America’s foster youth could have another option available to them.
Before Lemley founded First Place for Youth, the safety net for America’s foster youth abruptly disappeared at age 18, abandoning these vulnerable children at the most critical moment. First Place for Youth lengthens and stabilizes that transition to adulthood. Homelessness and jail-time are no longer mandatory chapters in stories about foster care. With the organization’s work, emancipated youth finally have a home to call their own.
Homepage photo courtesy of First Place for Youth
MORE: Removing Children from Abusive Situations at Home Isn’t Always the Answer. This Is
Why One Step Backwards Can Be Necessary for Progress to Occur
Shaiza Rizavi sees the world — American culture, politics and economics — from an outsider’s perspective. Raised in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, her family moved to Illinois when she was a girl. Rizavi now works as a partner at Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co., a growth equity brokerage firm where she seeks out companies with “disruptive, innovative approaches.” She also serves on the board of Acumen, which invests in strategies to end world poverty. NationSwell met up with her at a cafe in Midtown Manhattan, near the southern edge of Central Park.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I think it’s important to be able to give yourself permission to take a lot of risk and make mistakes as you go along. I learn that in my business constantly. There’s a lot of risk-taking in the stocks that I invest in and pain that goes along with that. It’s a teeter-totter that’s only in balance for a nanosecond — or not at all. Understanding that it’s going to be up and down at all moments, and it’s important to feel those moments, to live in that, to steep yourself in it, accept it and not try to avoid it.
What books are currently on your nightstand?
I was actually re-reading right now “Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World,” a book that’s written by Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen. I am also reading “Superforecasting” [co-written by Phil Tetlock]. It’s a study done over a long period of time to get a sense of who the best forecasters have been and what it takes.
I’m also reading Ron Chernow’s “Hamilton” again because I just took my kids to see the Broadway show. I think I first checked it out in 2005, but it’s been interesting to revisit, especially with this election and what’s going on in the world. It’s made me think about how sometimes we have to go backwards in order to go forward to understand that these moments of tension lead to greatness over time. It’s the same idea as having to steep in the uncomfortable sometimes — looking back we may see that this election moment is one that the country has seen many times. It’s not new; it’s part of the process.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I suppose, in a job or in life or anything, how you approach the unknown has to be done in partnerships. In looking at stocks or nonprofits or assessing whether something’s going to be successful or not, it’s always important to step out of your shell. It’s really about connecting people and trying to figure it out together. It’s a powerful way of looking at it, to see all of us being in it together. I think it helps see what the real issues are, as opposed to what your perceptions are.
What inspires you?
Well, at 4 o’clock each morning, I get a quote emailed to me. I go to a Unitarian church, All Souls, on the Upper East Side [of Manhattan], and the minister sends out a part of a poem or a quote to people who sign up. So, I have a little ritual surrounding it.
On the flip side, how do you try to inspire others?
Be true to your beliefs. Knowing what you stand for and standing by it, people actually see that’s your truth. And I also think it’s really important to be a cheerleader and not a de-constructor constantly. There’s so much dart throwing, as opposed to actually wanting to help. So many people are taking critical chances in this country. There’s so much progress, but what we hear about is the lack of it. I think it’s important to remind people — that’s one narrative, but not the only narrative.
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What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about software and faster processing speeds. I got my first computer in 1984. My mother was studying at the University of Chicago, where they had computers available for a greatly reduced price, and she brought one home. It was just such an immediate increase in productivity through technology. All my friends were using typewriters, and all of a sudden, I was writing on a word-processing machine. In college, I didn’t have to go to the computer lab like most of my friends. Eventually my machine connected to the Internet, and there was an incredible unleashing of ideas. By delivering software to so many different devices today, we’re at an inflection point. We saw the number of people connected to the Internet double since 2008. We now have over 3 billion people connected, but that’s only 40 percent of the world. Over the next five years, we may see well over 2 billion additional people come online. As a growth investor, I see this and think growth happens during the most difficult times. We don’t know what new services or inventions will be created that will benefit us all.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I think probably, in my life, I’ve been interested in understanding different perspectives, particularly of an outsider entering the country. I think we’re having a lot of that discussion on refugees: we versus them. I moved from Karachi to America, to just outside of Chicago. My family and I arrived in the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere. I experience the world around me as an outsider with fresh eyes, but I always felt like that was an opportunity, to see new perspectives in a new land that I’d never been to.
When I worked in Thailand, I tried to provide that too. I worked on a project where I asked Kodak and Fujifilm to give cameras to street children and then put on a big photo show. The perspective that gave me was really powerful. They were able to show me what they see, instead of me trying to understand from far away. I think that’s very important to me — that commitment to understand the complexities of a person or place from several sides — and I work on it as a personal accomplishment, as a way to live life. It’s fluid. It’s not something that will ever end. You hope that you continue that accomplishment on an hourly, daily basis.
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