When bills for food, housing, and transportation consume most, if not all, of a low-income family’s money, saving for college can seem impossible. But some think that society is so convinced of poor peoples’ inability to save that they aren’t giving them a fair shot by encouraging them to do so. And that a good saving habit, once established, will help these people in college and beyond.
A new program in Arizona, AZ Earn to Learn, provides low-income families with college scholarships while rewarding them for doing their own saving for school. The program, which currently exists in all three of Arizona’s state universities, provides low-income students with a $4,000 scholarship each year. In return, the students and their families must attend financial literacy workshops and save $500 of their own money toward college each year.
So far 1,500 scholarships at Arizona State, the University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University have been funded through a $3.47 million grant from the Assets for Independence Program which the universities are matching with their own funding.
Katrina Verduzco, who is a freshman at the University of Arizona and the first in her family to attend college, told Michael Stratford of Inside Higher Ed, “I had never saved a dollar in my life,” but “If someone says they’re going to give you $4,000, you do it.” She put together the required annual $500 by working three part-time jobs. By combining this grant with Pell Grants, she’s able to attend college loan-free, saving herself from massive future debt.
Because of this important encouragement through AZ Earn to Learn, Verduzco sounds like she’s well on her way to breaking the cycle of poverty for good.
Tag: the American West
These Startups Offer Sleek Technological Innovations for the Elderly
Whether we’re talking about Snapchat, Twitter, or Uber, most start-ups focus on technologies for young folks. But Katy Fike, a 35-year-old former investment banker who holds a Ph.D. in gerontology (aka, the study of aging), thought an important opportunity to offer innovative services for the elderly was being missed.
So she, along with Stephen Johnston, who once worked in the mobile phone industry, she started Aging2.0, a start-up incubator that supports businesses working on solutions to the challenges facing the elderly. Fike told Cat Wise of the PBS NewsHour, “The past products for seniors have been what we call big, beige and boring.” The inventors and start-ups working with Aging2.0 aim to change that.
Lively is one such company, offering technology that lets family members unobtrusively check on elderly relatives who live independently. Users place sensors throughout the house that indicate when the elderly person is engaging in his or her regular routine — walking the dog, going to exercise class, and taking medications, for example. If the user misses one of the regular portions of his or her routine, the Lively website will indicate this so a remote family member can check in to see if everything is okay.
Other new technology products targeted toward the elderly include BrainAid, a web-based application that offers memory exercises, and Sabi, a company designing walking canes, pill boxes and pill splitters to be more attractive and user-friendly. Through Lift Hero, elderly people can arrange for rides from off-duty EMTs and medical professional drivers so they know they’ll arrive at their destination safely.
Aging2.0 is based in San Francisco at The Institute on Aging, a nonprofit senior center, so entrepreneurs can learn from the people they’re designing for, and get advice from seniors such as 81-year-old June Fisher, a product design lecturer at Stanford and Aging 2.0’s Chief Elder Executive. “We see real potential to bring in the technology folks, bring in the investors, bring in the designers, because I think the more smart brains we have thinking about and looking for new solutions, the better we will all be,” Fike said. Now that’s putting our elders’ wisdom to good use.
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No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shootings Steps Out of the Shadows
The violence onscreen became real life for those victims of the horrific mass shooting at the Century 16 multiplex in Aurora, Colorado back in July 2012. And for one of the wounded, the terror of the event extended beyond being injured.
As 18-year-old Alejandra Lamas lay bleeding from a gunshot wound, she worried that if she accepted medical attention, someone would discover her immigration status and if so, if she and her family would be deported. For weeks as Lamas recovered, she was afraid that the media attention to the shooting — in which 12 people died, including Alejandra’s friend, A.J. Boik — would reveal that she had been brought to this country illegally as a child.
Lamas knew that just a month before the shootings, President Obama had issued a memo authorizing deferred action on immigration charges for people like her who had been in the country since they were kids. So she continued her physical therapy and decided to head to Colorado State University as planned, despite not knowing if she’d be able to work in this country after she graduated. “I knew that my options were really limited,” she told Laura Bond of Westword, “but I had a determination to go to school, regardless of what that would mean for me financially in the future.” She was, after all, going to be the first member of her family to attend college.
Lamas contacted immigration rights groups and lawyers she felt she could trust, and learned that she could qualify for a U Visa “for victims of crimes who have suffered substantial mental or physical abuse and are willing to assist law enforcement and government officials in the investigation or prosecution of the criminal activity,” according to the Homeland Security website. Because of the trauma her family suffered, her parents and younger sister qualified for visas too, which all of them received last year.
Denver playwright and director Antonio Mercado asked Lamas if he could include her story as the opening of his new production, “Dreaming Sin Fronteras” (“Dreaming Without Borders”), which features dramatic monologues about people like Lamas who are waiting in the shadows for the long-deferred DREAM Act (which would allow for citizenship for people brought to this country as children) to be passed. Mercado told John Wenzel of the Denver Post that he found Lamas’s story striking because “she was trying to convince the paramedics not to take her to the hospital, despite the fact that she had been shot.” Lamas, who finally feels free to share her story, agreed to participate in the show.
Lamas, 20, is in her second year in college studying social work. She now pays lower tuition since last year, Colorado passed a law allowing for in-state tuition for non-citizens. “Before all this happened, I was so caught up in being ashamed of being an immigrant,” she told Bond. But now, “When I go out now, people ask me, ‘Can I see your ID?’ I’m like, ‘Why, yes, you can!” Hopefully when people learn of stories like Lamas’s, more will be convinced that the time for immigration reform is now.
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All It Took to Get This Homeless Vet an Apartment Was a Poster
Just because you have a roof over your head doesn’t mean you have a home.
When Army veteran Frank Maryn had trouble finding construction work and then lost his housing, the American Legion in Williams, Arizona took him in. He was allowed to sleep at the Legion in exchange for work that included hanging posters for programs and events. Maryn was thankful for the shelter — but it wasn’t the most comfortable home. Each night after the Legion’s bar closed, Maryn rolled out his sleeping bag on the hard floor. Eventually he got a cushion to sleep on, but the Legion post lacked a key amenity: a shower. One day Maryn hung up a poster that offered him a solution, advertising the Catholic Charities Community Services’ Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF) program.
Maryn told Marissa Freireich of Williams-Grand Canyon News that he didn’t call the SSVF program immediately after seeing the poster. “I was just going, well, I’ll land a full time job here or something and then I’ll just take care of this myself. But then I fell off a roof in November, so that was two months of not doing anything.” Maryn contacted SSVF, who set him up with a caseworker that located him an apartment. He moved in this month.
Catholic Charities received a million-dollar federal grant last October, which funds the SSVF program. Its goal is to end homelessness among veterans by providing them with up to five months rent and getting them on their feet by providing assistance with benefit paperwork and finding employment. They launched the SSVF program in December, and Maryn is the first veteran in Williams that the organization helped find a home.
Maryn told Freireich that he’s happy to be in his own apartment. “I’ve had a bed for two days, and except for when I was visiting somebody or something I’ve been on a floor, so that’s different. It’s nice. And the shower of course is great. I’m content.”
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Does Military Jargon Prevent Vets From Landing Jobs?
MP. XO. AIT. This list could go on and on.
Military communications are often full of “alphabet soup” — choked with so many acronyms that it’s virtually impossible for someone who hasn’t served in one of the branches of service to understand what’s being said. In San Diego, the unemployment rate among veterans stands at a disappointing 10 percent, and representatives of Easter Seals Southern California wonder if part of the problem has to do with vets failing to translate the military jargon on their resumes into concepts that potential employers understand.
Amita Sharma of KBPS interviewed John Funk, the director of military and veterans services for Easter Seals Southern California, about their WorkFirst Military & Family program to help vets find a good job in part by learning civilian-speak. He said, “The military speaks a different and unique language, full of acronyms. Part of the challenge with the transition of veterans is to get them to speak that language so that people can understand it.” On their resumes, vets should include “not just the direct job that they may have had while they were in the military, but they can also translate the soft skills that were associated with that — how they’re very goal-oriented, their leadership, their teamwork capability, their results-oriented approach to getting the job done.”
Funk says that Easter Seals also works with employers, advising them, “Don’t hire a veteran just because he’s a veteran. Hire a veteran because he has these great strong attributes he can bring to your organization.”
Every veteran who enters the WorkFirst Military & Family Program meets individually with Easter Seals volunteer and employees, who help them to define career goals and job-related skills. Then, vets receive assistance crafting a story about their work experience and their goals for the future using language that an employer will understand — both on their resumes and in job interviews. From there, job-seeking veterans are connected with employers.
For Tim Crisp, a Marine Corps veteran working with Funk, the help has been invaluable. He told Sharma, “John [Funk] gives me that customized experience, working with me to narrow down my focus to help me be more goal-oriented toward doing something that’s going to really fit for me…as a mentor and a coach, his experience helping others…has been very helpful.”
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When It Comes to Fostering Civic Engagement, Nothing Beats a Newspaper
As the Internet becomes more omnipresent in people’s lives, newspapers have been declining — losing ad revenue and readership, and in the case of several major publications, disappearing altogether. But besides forcing citizens of these communities to get their news fix digitally rather than the old-fashioned way, what effect does the loss of the broadsheet have? A study suggests that it causes citizens to become less engaged.
In the study “Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement,” published in the journal Political Communication, Lee Shaker of Portland State University analyzed the civic engagement data in the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey to see what happened in Seattle when its Post-Intelligencer became an online-only publication in 2009, and in Denver when its Rocky Mountain News eased publication completely in 2009. Shaker studied civic engagement as measured through such activities as participating in local groups like PTAs and neighborhood watch committees, contacting elected officials, and buying or boycotting certain products because of the values their companies espouse. He found significant declines in several of these areas in Denver and Seattle compared to 16 other cities that maintained their newspapers during the same period.
Shaker concludes, “The advent of new communication opportunities suggests that new forms of engagement will also develop. Thus far, there are many questions about the importance of place online: why should any one place matter when we may all be virtual and interconnected? And yet, our society is still geographically organized and governed. Ultimately, if we desire healthy and productive democratic communities, then the provisioning of local news — which helps tie citizens to each other and their communities — must continue.”
The New York Times, Gawker, and Salon aren’t going to report on the city council meetings in your town, which may be one reason why some digital titans have begun propping up the old-fashioned news source. So while the newspaper may be a shopworn institution, it provides a service to democracy that no other entity can so far replace.
MORE: What Are All Those Teens Doing On Their Phones? Learning About Politics, Apparently.
Can Writing Poetry Help Set Incarcerated Youth on the Right Track?
“You don’t understand what it’s like.”
“You never listen to me.”
Most teenagers make these over-the-top complaints to adults at some point during those angst-filled years. But for some troubled teens, these emotional statements aren’t hyperbolic. And those are just the kids that Richard Gold wanted to help.
When Gold left Microsoft 18 years ago, he started the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a Seattle non-profit that connects with troubled teenagers who are in jail, homeless, in the foster care system, or being treated for mental illness, and teaches them to write poetry to express themselves. Since 1992, Pongo has served 7,000 teenagers, providing them with volunteer writing mentors and publishing their work in anthologies.
Gold told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What so many of us struggle with is the unarticulated emotion in our lives, and when poetry serves that, it’s doing something essential for the person and for society.”
Through one of Pongo’s programs, writing mentors visit juvenile inmates individually for an hour, asking questions about their lives and emotions to guide them toward writing poetry about their experiences. The mentors transcribe what the inmates express, collaborate on revisions, then give the teenagers a chance to read their work aloud to the group.
Pongo volunteers do similar work at the New Horizons homeless youth center Seattle, helping homeless teens write poems, and hosting poetry reading events.
The workers in the juvenile justice system attest to the difference Pongo makes in the lives of the teens it works with. Warden Lynn Valdez at the King County Juvenile Detention Center, once an incarcerated gang member himself, said that after the teens write their poems, “the reward is, I think that they have actually released something that they have repressed inside.” King County Juvenile Court Judge Barbara Mack said that the young people she sees in her court “have never really learned how to express themselves. And Pongo gives them the opportunity to do that in a way that’s not threatening.”
It’s clear that poetry can be a powerful tool to make teenagers feel valued as they try to move past their rocky adolescences and become productive adults.
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This Novel Concept Works to Cook Up Successful Eateries
Many gifted cooks, encouraged by the praise of enthusiastic and well-fed family members, dream of starting their own restaurants. But between purchasing food, renting a commercial space, paying fees for licensing, decorating the interior, paying the waitstaff, and the countless other expenses associated with opening an eatery, it’s an understatement to say that being a restauranteur is expensive.
And for low-income people, the costs associated with getting into the food business can be prohibitive. That’s why there are now about 150 kitchen incubators across the country,” according to Melissa Pandika of Ozy Magazine.
These kitchen incubators help low-income people share their culinary gifts and navigate the complex laws and paperwork required to sell food to the public. They work much like business incubators for entrepreneurs — providing workspace, support, and mentorship to participants.
One successful kitchen incubator is La Cocina, located in the Mission District of San Francisco. La Cocina’s executive director Caleb Zigas noticed that many immigrant and low-income women were running food businesses illegally, whipping up batches of burritos or empanadas at home and selling them on street corners. Why not help them form a legitimate business, he thought, “transitioning from informal to formal,” as the motto on La Cocina’s homepage states.
La Cocina screens prospective low-income restaurateurs to help those most likely to succeed on the basis of solid business plans, enthusiasm, and delicious food. Each year, La Cocina admits 12 new businesses to begin a six-month training period, followed by a two-to-five-year period of support as the chefs get their businesses up and running. Since La Cocina started in 2005, 15 businesses have successfully launched, including Veronica Salazar’s El Hurache Loco, which employs 19 people and earned $1.2 million its first year.
Zigas told Pandika, “A program like ours really recalibrates the opportunity index. You can say to the people who live in your city, ‘It’s hard but anybody can do it.’ That’s often not true because so many opportunities require wealth and capital. We try to eliminate that.” So the next time you enjoy authentic street tacos, Ethiopian delicacies, or Vietnamese spring rolls, you might have a kitchen incubator to thank.
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Forget About Mousetraps. Can We Build a Better Toilet?
Some everyday objects are so basic that you might think they couldn’t be improved upon. Like, for example, the humble toilet.
But The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is betting that scientists can build a better toilet. In 2012, the foundation chose 16 teams to participate in its “Reinventing the Toilet Challenge,” gave them $777,000 in grant money, and sent them off to reinvent the toilet.
One of the hopefuls is a group from the University of Colorado (CU), led by environmental engineering professor Karl Linden. Their innovation? A solar-powered potty. Now, their toilet is ready for its world debut: the team shipped a functional prototype to New Delhi, India, where it will appear in the second annual Reinvent the Toilet Fair on March 22.
Linden told Elizabeth Hernandez of the Boulder Daily Camera that his team’s toilet uses solar energy to convert solid waste into “a sanitary, harmless charcoal-like material that can be used for heating or fertilizing.” Meanwhile, a “urine diverting” feature heats the feces to a temperature of 70 degrees Celsius, killing any potential pathogens and making the resulting fertilizer safe for use. “Obviously, people at fairgrounds don’t want real feces present, so we’re going to make synthetic waste products,” Linden told Hernandez.
If the CU team’s work is judged a success at the fair, they will gain additional funding that will allow them to improve the cost-effectiveness of their design and cope with the problem of generating solar power on cloudy days. “It’s a pretty incredible experience to be able to actually build something that’s physically real because a lot of the work we do in the lab is studying concepts and theories and advancing science that way,” Linden said. And if the team’s toilet lives up to its promise, it’s definitely an innovation that shouldn’t be flushed down the drain.
MORE:How San Francisco Got Its Residents to Care About Sewers
Thriving Gardens Now Grow in a Denver Food Desert
After graduating from the University of Denver in 2007, pals Joseph Teipel and Eric Kornacki headed south, to Guatemala where they participated in a service project.
Inspired by the work they did there, the two returned home to help poor communities here in the United States. Their goal is a lofty one: They want to foster self-sufficient communities nationwide that grow their own healthy food. But for now, they’re starting small by making a difference in one city.
In 2009, Teipel and Kornacki formed the non-profit, Re:Vision, and launched their first program, Re:Farm, to help low-income people living in a food desert in southwest Denver. Their first project included planting a school garden at Kepner Middle School, designing irrigated backyard gardens for seven families, teaching families how to grow their own food, and mentoring at-risk middle schoolers through gardening. In 2010, their work was rewarded with an $80,000 grant from the National Convergence Partnership to study how gardening can be used to prevent violence and implement programs. From there, they began hiring community promotoras to spread the word about healthy food and teach other people in their neighborhood how to garden.
Much like the gardens themselves, Re:Vision is growing. Last season, 200 families participated in the backyard garden program, producing 28,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables. A hundred families are on a waiting list for a garden, and the organization hopes to meet that demand this year, with the help of a $50,000 Slow Money Entrepreneur of the Year award and a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
They’re also launching a program called “Dig it Forward,” through which people who want to help can hire Re:Vision workers to design and plant gardens. The proceeds from these garden sales will pay for free gardens in low-income people’s yards. Taipel told Helen Hu of North Denver Tribune, “It’s a way of thinking outside the box. We have a lot of expertise, and if people want to start gardens and help others, it’s a win-win.”
Patricia Grado, an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, serves as one of the promatoras, told Hu, “I’ve reaffirmed my understanding about how to grow our own food, about food sustainability, nutrition, and among other things, how to help the community with my knowledge.”
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