How the Garden State Plans to Grow Energy Infrastructure

Following the costly devastation of Superstorm Sandy, the eastern seaboard has spent the last two years picking up the pieces and developing new strategies for disaster preparedness.
The damage serves as a reminder of what natural disaster can do, and the United Nations’s warning that climate change could cost trillions is forcing some states to rethink their plan for infrastructure and energy.
New Jersey joins Connecticut and New York in creating a green bank “to fund projects that will help prevent a reoccurrence of the energy disruptions and build energy resilience.” Both Connecticut (which became the first state to create such a bank in 2011) and New York fund microgrid projects, but New Jersey’s green bank will focus strictly on energy resilience for infrastructure — including water and wastewater plants, hospitals, transit systems and schools, according to Governing.
In New York and New Jersey, 75 percent of power generation is located in flood plains, which have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year, according to United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). An energy resilience bank will support new efforts to create eco-friendly, clean sources of energy that will prove to be more reliable over time. The bank plans to dole out loans and grants to fund projects such as smart grid technology, microgrids and distributed generation, which produce electricity through a variety of smaller energy sources such as solar panels.
The state plans to use $200 million from its Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery allocation from HUD, according to Greg Reinart, director of communications for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. To sustain the bank, the state hopes to attract private-sector financing to invest in new energy technologies and renewable energy.
MORE: Here’s What Happens When Communities Demand Green Energy

Playing with Purpose: Toys That Encourage Girl Power

If you want children to change the world, it makes good sense to plant inspiration in something they’re already familiar with: toys.
That’s the strategy new company IAmElemental is taking with a series of action figure toys for girls. Their debut set, which just completed a successful Kickstarter fundraising round, is centered around courage. Each of the action figures within the collection embraces a different aspect of courage, such as bravery, industry and persistence, among others. IAmElemental takes it a step further by assigning each toy an “element” logo from a courage-themed periodic table.
“Our mission is to create toys for play experiences that allow girls to envision themselves as strong, powerful and connected beings at the center of a story of their own making,” write co-founders Julie Kerwin and Dawn Nadeau on their site. “We believe that when we tap into the power that exists inside us all, the extraordinary is always possible.”
The two mothers decided to launch IAmElemental after years of being disappointed by the toy options that lined store shelves, where action heroes and trucks are often reserved for boys, while girls can choose from Barbies and miniature kitchen sets. And they’re certainly not alone: both critics and parents alike have spoken out against sexism in toys, and the manner in which toys are marketed to boys and girls. And while each toy has a character trait assigned to it, Kerwin and Nadeau hope that kids will ultimately create their own superhero storyline to go with each product, and that the toys serve as a launching pad for young children to create their own change in the world.
Kerwin and Nadeau created IAmElemental to fill a void of inspirational action figure toys for girls, but they don’t want their toys to be exclusive to young women. The company is encouraging young girls and boys to submit pictures of themselves holding signs of their own elemental power as a way to spread heroic stories and foster a sense of community around like-minded young children.
Young superheroes can share their pictures and stories here.

When Budget Cuts Closed Their Kids’ Schools, These Parents Took on the System

Last year, Sheila Armstrong’s son Skylar, 12, walked one minute from his home to William H. Harrison Elementary School in Philadelphia, where he never had more than 25 kids in a class, and every teacher knew him by name. Armstrong, a single mother, didn’t worry about her son’s safety when he was at school, and springtime simply meant more time on the playground. She knew aides would look out for him during lunch and recess, and a school nurse was there if he should need help. Simple amenities, yes. But in Philadelphia, they are a lost luxury.
When Harrison Elementary shut its doors for good at the beginning of this school year, there was literally nothing Armstrong — or any other parents, students or teachers — could do about it. Harrison Elementary was one of 24 Philadelphia schools closed by the city in 2013 in an effort to help with a $304 million budget shortfall. The move was part of a district-wide slaughter, which included slashing extracurriculars, laying off 676 teachers and nearly eliminating guidance counselors citywide.
“Gov. [Tom] Corbett visited Harrison when he first ran for governor,” says Armstrong. “He spoke to us and promised he would do anything he could do in his power to keep it open. A year and a half later the school was shut down.” What many parents viewed as mixed messaging left them feeling frustrated and powerless. Since then, education funding has become a big problem for the Republican governor — and one of the biggest talking points for those seeking to become his Democratic rival in next week’s gubernatorial primary race in Pennsylvania.
Officials from the School District of Philadelphia (PSD) said they chose to close schools like Harrison based on factors like enrollment, the age of the facilities and the quality of the educational programming. Over the past decade, PSD has lost more than 50,000 students due to a declining birth rate and the rise of charter schools and other educational opportunities in the city, resulting in many schools operating well below their capacity levels. Harrison Elementary had major enrollment declines, expensive building repairs on the horizon and was operating at only 39 percent of capacity, according to educational planner Bill Montgomery. The school also failed to pass the Adequate Yearly Progress  tests that serve as a benchmark in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
For the district, closing schools down was a way to save money fast. But what about the broken educational system that had produced these underperforming schools in the first place? Could anything be done to change it? Fortunately, Armstrong found a coalition of people who, like herself, were ready to jump in and help. POWER (Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower & Rebuild) began in the spring of 2011 with a handful of clergy and lay leaders listening to the stories of more than 1,000 people on the streets and in churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. The group identified the biggest problems affecting Philadelphians — poverty and education becoming top priorities — and set to work trying to fix them.
Today, POWER is a well-oiled interfaith community-organizing machine — with more than 40 congregations and 500 community organizers — funded by charitable foundations, some local unions, personal contributions from individual donors and congregational membership dues. The group’s successes have made national headlines: In November 2013, POWER won a new minimum wage for workers at Philadelphia International Airport in a highly publicized local win. Thanks to POWER’s lobbying, the city council will put a referendum on next week’s ballot that would expand the city’s minimum wage and benefits so that it applies to all workers, including those working for subcontractors.  Michael Nutter, Philadelphia’s mayor, has even issued an executive order raising the city’s minimum wage from $7.50 to $12 per hour starting in January 2015. The referendum will make sure that order stays put, regardless of who’s in charge.
MORE: To Change Public Education, This Nonprofit Is Hacking the System
POWER’s plan for education reform in the city was to develop one-on-one relationships with parents. Armstrong was identified as a mother with leadership potential for her outspokenness, knowledge of the education system (she works as a teacher’s aide) and fierce determination to fight for her sons’ safety. POWER representatives asked her to help organize regular meetings where parents discussed their hopes and dreams for their kids and the barriers they faced. Building on these conversations, POWER planned to take parents’ stories and ideas to principals and district leaders, changing schools individually.
“We knew to organize around education we needed to work with parents because the people closest to the students need to be the ones calling the shots,” says Cecily Harwitt, POWER’s lead organizer for education. Recruiting parents turned out to be the easy part. “As we started organizing, we’d go to the principal with ideas we got from the parents,” Harwitt says of simple requests like adding an additional lunch aide to help with crowded cafeterias. “The principal would like the idea but then say, ‘right now we don’t have money for paper, so we really can’t talk about that.'”
Armstrong told the coalition about how drastically her son’s situation had changed since Harrison Elementary closed. Skylar’s new school is a 25-minute walk across vacant lots, housing projects and a major four-lane thruway where the traffic lights sometimes go out. Crossing guards are nonexistent.
And then there’s Skylar’s asthma. At school, “he is responsible for taking care of it himself,” Armstrong says. There is no guarantee that a nurse will be there to help her son out. Since the cuts, schools are lucky to have a nurse in the building one day a week. School policy mandates that students with chronic health problems like asthma store their medications in the nurse’s office. Principals and their secretaries are responsible for administering medication. It doesn’t always work: Earlier this year, a sixth-grader died of an asthma attack that started at the William C. Bryant Elementary School in Philadelphia, where there was no nurse on duty.
Though these initial conversations got parents talking, those involved quickly realized that the situation was too extreme to fix only on a school-by-school basis. Capitalizing on parents’ desire to act, not just talk, POWER tapped into its network of congregations and was soon holding rallies in churches across the city, organizing protests that shut down major thoroughfares and calling upon the mayor to act.
The first time Armstrong spoke publicly was at a rally of more than 300 people at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church last August. She brought down the house with her emotional stories of students who were failed by Philly schools. “That rally was so much more energizing than the meetings,” Harwitt says. “This was a time when we said we’re tired of this crisis-to-crisis mentality, and we started thinking about fair funding.” POWER members realized they would have to change the system at its core by going after the very way schools get money across the state.
ALSO: Making Random Acts of Kindness Part of School Curriculums
Pennsylvania is one of only three states in the country, along with Delaware and North Carolina, without a fair funding formula, meaning that the state doles out money based on property taxes collected within each district — richer districts get more money. High poverty schools in Pennsylvania receive $3,000 less per student than wealthy ones.
Along with parents like Armstrong, POWER is fighting to make the lack of a fair funding formula the single biggest issue in the governor’s race, strategically engaging voters and holding candidates accountable. Before the Democratic primary next week, POWER plans to move 5,000 voters to the ballot by canvassing neighborhoods across the state and stocking phone banks with parent volunteers. The next planned phase will be mobilizing another 5,000 voters for the general election in November. And POWER has built a denominational network across Pennsylvania, working with interfaith organizations in Pittsburgh and Allentown to push forward the same agenda.
According to David Koppisch, a POWER fundraiser, the results have been surprising. “Nine months ago [when POWER first started engaging parents in their cause to change schools], the feeling was there was no way we could get the attention of the governor and the state legislature. Now it’s clear it’s the issue or at least tied for the top issue of the governors’ race.” In fact, every Democratic candidate has claimed to support a full fair- funding formula.
Even as the larger battles over fair funding still loom, parents in Philadelphia are counting small victories. Armstrong’s son is doing well in the sixth grade at the Spring Garden School, thanks in large part to his mom and other parents. Armstrong has helped to organize a “safe corridor” staffed by a network of parent volunteers. Every day after school, parents stand at corners along the route from Spring Garden to faraway neighborhoods along these displaced children’s commutes. They shepherd students home, keeping behavior in check and dangerous elements like rowdy teens, drug dealers and violence at bay. Parents have also started volunteering during lunch hour now that the weather is warmer so that children can have the proper supervision to get out for recess. But with the sun and warmth, Armstrong starts to worry.
“With the warmth comes chaos. Right now there is a lot of violence in the high schools, and they don’t have the staffing to make a difference,” she says. When those high schools let out, the students start to linger on the Spring Garden property, fighting with the younger kids and causing trouble. Without the resources to provide adequate staffing and supervision, Armstrong and her small army of parent volunteers have been filling in to make up that difference — for now. She hopes her efforts toward fixing the route of the problem will pay off and those resources will be restored with a fair funding formula.
“Schools don’t have the proper resources on a state level. These children are our future taxpayers. What is our future going to look like if we’re not educating them properly?” Armstrong says.
DON’T MISS: 7 Summer Supercamps You’ll Wish Were Around When You Were a Kid

Too Much Sitting Isn’t Just Bad For Your Health, It Wastes Energy

Whether it’s at home on your couch or in the office at your desk, we’ve all read about the negative health consequences of sitting for too long. But have you ever considered the amount of kinetic energy you’re wasting by staying still? Andy Wekin and Steve Blood from the startup Pedal Power in Essex, N.Y., have dreamed up a way to harness that wasted energy and transform it into power that can charge your computer or phone — or even split logs and mill grain, if you’re into that type of thing.
MORE: Music Can Change a Troubled Kid’s Life. Here’s How.
The duo has developed two products: the $2,000 Big Rig, which includes an ergonomic seat, work surface, and outlets to re-energize your devices. Think of it as a stationary bike and desk in one. They’ve also created the Pedal Genny, a $350 portable machine that can be used to pump water, sow grain or generate power in remote areas. Both inventions are open source designs, meaning the plans will be available to individuals who want to build the machines on their own.
It may seem like a radical idea, but as Wekin and Blood have pointed out, their innovation isn’t just about selling bikes. It’s about making people consider their relationship with energy. “I want to connect people to the energy they use,” Blood says. “I want people to understand how precious energy is, and how hard it is to come by.”

How a Jump Rope Could Bring Electricity to the Developing World

In many developing nations, electricity isn’t a guarantee, it’s a privilege. With this in mind, Uncharted Play, a New York-based startup, created the PULSE jump rope, a seemingly simple toy with a big mission: to bring renewable, affordable power to places where electricity is scarce. The PULSE jump rope is made of durable plastic with 3D-printed handles. With each skip of the rope, the device converts the kinetic energy from play into electricity and stores it in the handles for future use. Users can then connect and juice up cell phones, lights or other small gadgets. While the PULSE is currently in beta, with only 100 samples available from the company for $129 each, the company hopes to produce the jump rope at a more affordable price, in order for it to reach the communities it was designed to help.
MORE: $95 Device Lets You Charge Your Phone with Energy from Riding Your Bike