Dealing with someone who is suicidal can have a lasting effect on a person, as Sacramento State professor Beth Erickson learned from one of her students.
When Erickson noticed that the performance of one of her “A” students, a military veteran, started to slip, she talked to him and learned that he was suffering from PTSD. “He was suicidal that day in my office,” she told Nick Janes of CBS Sacramento. She sought help for him through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and eventually, he was able to graduate. Inspired by that upsetting event, Erickson, a professor in the Department of Recreation & Parks and Tourism, decided that she wanted to help other students who happened to be veterans as well. So she started a class that’s exclusively for ex-servicemembers.
Her “Perspectives on Leisure” class has the sort of title you’d think would only appear on transcripts of students trying to coast by — but the work she’s doing with veterans is real.
The two-semester course is a part of the university’s Veterans Leadership and Mentorship Program. It focuses on writing, outdoor activities, and fostering leadership through student veterans mentoring other student veterans. Erickson told Alan Miller of Sacramento State that it’s “the most amazing course I’ve taught in 13 years…My objective is to help them translate the training and leadership they learned in the service into measurable civilian skills.”
The class includes field trips to connect with nature through whitewater rafting trips and hikes in Yosemite National Park. Erickson invites the students to reflect on their lives and experiences in their writing assignments. Upperclassmen in the course mentor students who’ve just begun their transition from the military to the civilian world to help ease their way.
Coast Guard veteran Sean Johnson, a student in Erickson’s class, said that the veterans-only approach to the course has bolstered him. “I realized these guys are my family now,” he said. “These guys are just as much as family as I had in the military.”
MORE: These Veterans Rallied to Save A Fellow Vet from the Cold
Tag: the American West
This Non-Profit Helps Paralyzed Vets Find Meaningful Jobs
“When you go to some of these interviews and you roll up in your chair, you can see it in their faces, ‘Oh, man.’”
That’s how Enrique Chavez, a paraplegic veteran from Long Beach, California, described what it’s like trying to find a job as a disabled veteran to Andrew Edwards of the Press-Telegram.
Fortunately, a program called PAVE (Paving Access for Veteran Employment) is assisting severely disabled veterans like Chavez gain employment. Over the past seven years, PAVE has helped 439 of the 2,500 veterans who joined the program find jobs. “While that number might not seem scintillating at first blush,” said Sherman Gillums of the Paralyzed Veterans of America (an organization that aids U.S. vets), “we are focusing on the hardest to place: those with severe disabilities.” Gillums, himself is a Marine corps veteran who was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in 2002, understands the unique challenges disabled vets face.
Paralyzed Veterans of America offers the PAVE program at seven locations in the United States, and makes its services available online to any veteran who wants to participate. PAVE counselors help veterans craft a resume using their military experience that will appeal to civilian employers, figure out the paperwork they need to access their benefits, learn about the differences between military and civilian culture, and recover from their wounds and psychological trauma. PAVE also reaches out to potential employers, informing them of the tax benefits they can receive from employing a veteran.
Navy vet Mike Metal fount a job with the Volunteers of America in Santa Ana, California with the assistance of the PAVE program. He told Edwards, “I love coming to work every day.” It’s clear the Paralyzed Veterans of America won’t rest until every vet they work with can say the same.
MORE: This Amazing Non-Profit Helps Wounded Vets Rebuild Their Lives
Can a Voucher Program Reduce Student Turnover Rate?
It’s no wonder that in Tacoma, Washington, educators noticed that homeless students were slipping behind. After all, these kids moved so many times, their learning was continually disrupted. So to combat this, the Tacoma Housing Authority collaborated with McCarver Elementary, the poorest school in the district, to provide families with housing vouchers that would stabilize them and allow their kids to study more continuously.
Fifty families experiencing bouts of homelessness signed up for the program, which began back in 2011. It gave them a 5-year housing voucher provided that they adhere to several rules — including making sure their kids showed up to class when the school bell rang. These families also receive assistance from caseworkers, who support them in obtaining education, certifications, and jobs. Each year, the level of support decreases by 20 percent, with the goal that by the end of the 5-year period, the family will become self-sufficient.
Tacoma’s approach seems to be working: Test scores and attendance have increased, and the families are moving around less. In 2006, McCarver Elementary’s turnover rate (the percentage of students moving in and out of the school) stood at a whopping 179 percent. It’s down to 75 percent now, with only 13 percent turnover for students enrolled in the voucher program.
According to the Seattle Times, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington is looking to extend this program beyond a single school district through the proposed Educational Success for Children and Youth Without Homes Act. Meanwhile, state senators and representatives in Washington state have supported the Homeless Children Education Act, which would provide resources to identify and serve students suffering from homelessness. Washington’s governor will soon consider it for signing.
For Mary Kamandala, a Sudenese refugee and mother of six, the housing program in Tacoma has been a life saver. “I’m from zero,” she told Ashley Stewart of the Seattle Times, “so it was a really bad situation when I came here. It was just me and them, and no one could help me.” With the help of Tacoma Housing Authority caseworkers, Kamandala earned a home-care certificate and found a job at the Korean Women’s Association, while the housing voucher provided her kids the stable home base they needed.
Meet the Paraplegic Man Who Inspires Others to Think Outside the Chair
Most of us can’t begin to imagine scaling walls of ice, let alone doing it without the use of our legs. Yet, that’s exactly what Sean O’Neill, a climber from Maine, did.
On February 26, Sean became the first paraplegic to climb the treacherous 365-foot-tall iced waterfall known as Bridal Veil Falls in Telluride, Colorado. O’Neill didn’t attempt this dangerous feat simply to get a rush. Rather, he did it to inspire other disabled people to reconsider what is possible for them to accomplish.
This is only the latest adventure for the 48-year-old Sean and his 44-year-old brother Timmy, a documentarian who captured the eight-hour ascent on film. In years past, they’ve scaled the 3,000-foot cliff of El Capitan in Yosemite and thousand-foot ice walls in the glaciers of Alaska’s Ruth Gorge. According to Rock and Ice, Sean developed special equipment that allows wheelchair-bound people to climb, using a technique he calls “sit climbing.” Timmy told Jason Blevins of the Denver Post that Sean is “the Leonardo da Vinci of aid climbing.”
It took a coordinated team effort for Sean to accomplish the feat — long considered one of the most difficult ice climbs in America. His crew used a sled to pull him to the climbing site and cleared avalanche debris off the road so he could crawl to the bottom of the waterfall. Friends set the ropes he needed and helped him position his padded seat and customized tools. “For a paraplegic to get out of their chair is really uncommon. In fact, you can not only climb out of that chair, but live outside the chair,” Timmy told Blevins.
Timmy, who co-founded Paradox Sports in Boulder, Colorado along with Army veteran DJ Skelton and others to provide adaptive sports opportunities to the disabled, hopes to premier the film about his brother’s climb — tentatively titled “Struggle” — in May at the Telluride Film Festival.
For Sean, reaching the summit was the perfect cinematic moment: “You are at the top, and it’s like I’m born as a new person,” he said.
MORE: This Documentarian is Filming Incredible Vets and Helping Them at the Same Time
While Washington Dithers Over Immigration Reform, a State Gets Down to Business
Were officials in Washington, D.C. elected to argue and name call or were they sent to our nation’s capital to get things done? In recent years, it definitely seems that they’ve been more interested in the former rather than the latter.
That’s especially true when it comes to the topic of immigration, which is something that has many people — from business owners seeking visas for highly-skilled employees, to those looking for temporary workers to harvest crops, to people who were brought to the U.S. as children and have no other country to call home — clamoring for reform.
Utah decided that it couldn’t wait on immigration reform from the Federal government, so its legislature passed two common-sense laws itself.
One law allows undocumented immigrants to stay in Utah and work legally provided that they pay a fine, demonstrate some English proficiency, and pass a background check. Another Utah law allows state residents to sponsor undocumented immigrants — giving them the legal right to live and work in the state.
According to the Deseret News, Republican Senator Curt Bramble of Provo said that these laws, “demonstrate that elected officials can come together and address in a responsible manner immigration.” The only problem? Utah passed these laws three years ago but it needs federal approval to implement them, because the U.S. government is solely responsible for immigration.
Utah has delayed implementing these laws until 2017 in the hopes they’ll see some movement on federal immigration reform by then. In the meantime, state citizens have put together The Utah Compact, a document endorsed by a wide range of people and organizations in Utah with the goal of elevating the tone of discussion around immigration reform. It reads, in part, “Immigrants are integrated into communities across Utah. We must adopt a humane approach to this reality, reflecting our unique culture, history and spirit of inclusion. The way we treat immigrants will say more about us as a free society and less about our immigrant neighbors. Utah should always be a place that welcomes people of goodwill.”
Now if only the Federal government would be as hospitable as the state of Utah.
MORE: Utah is on Track to End Homelessness by 2015 with This One Simple Idea
If You Want Your Daughter to Dream Big, Have Her Play With This Classic Toy
Walk down the aisle at your local toy store that houses Barbie, and you’re apt to see Mattel’s signature female toy dressed for all sorts of aspirational careers — from astronaut to entrepreneur. But do the job choices of the popular blonde influence girls that play with her? Two researchers wanted to answer this question.
Aurora Sherman of Oregon State University and Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz randomly assigned 37 girls between the ages of four and seven to play either with a Doctor Barbie, an identical Barbie in sexualized clothes, or a Mr. Potato Head doll for five minutes. Next, they presented the girls with pictures of the backgrounds to various occupations that did not feature any people in the image. One career depicted was gender neutral (restaurant worker), five were of jobs that a higher concentration of women work (librarian, daycare worker, teacher, nurse, and flight attendant), and five were of jobs that a higher percentage of men work (police officer, construction worker, pilot, doctor, and firefighter). After presenting each picture, the researchers asked the girls if they could do that job and if a boy could do that job.
The results, published in the journal Sex Roles, were startling: Girls that played with either Barbie (which had the same unrealistic body type, regardless of how she was dressed), saw fewer career options for themselves than boys. Girls who played with Mr. Potato Head saw about the same number of career options for themselves as boys. In an email that Sherman wrote to Megan Gannon of Live Science (a website featuring the latest in scientific news), she said, “One psychological theory indicates that adult women who are given cues of sexualization (through dress or pictures) perform worse on academic tasks. My co-author and I speculate that Barbie might work as the same kind of cue for girls, but more research is needed to fully test this speculation.”
Our guess is that now, a lot of parents are going to encourage their daughters to play with the goofy-looking spud instead of the trendy lady from Malibu.
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This Innovative Idea Brings Produce Directly to Low-Income Communities
Food desert: Urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food.
This definition, provided by the USDA, accurately describes the situation in some of Arizona’s burgeoning cities, where there are neighborhoods of low-income people that have to travel long distances — mostly via public transportation — to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables. Because of this hardship, many of the residents don’t bother to make such a trek.
Recognizing the negative impact that the lack of access to healthy food can have on a person’s health, a group of Arizona businesses and educators, including Arizona State University’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation and Chase Bank, organized the Fresh Express bus. Traveling between Phoenix and Tempe, the aisles of this renovated city bus are chockablock full of bins containing fresh fruits and vegetables — bringing nutritious produce to people at discount prices.
The Discovery Triangle, a corporation that assists developers in the triangle-shaped area between Scottsdale, Phoenix and Tempe, came up with the ingenious idea when it realized how few grocery stores existed there. Discovery Triangle president Don Keuth told Jill Galus of Good Morning Arizona that a recent study by St. Luke’s Health Initiative designated the area between downtown Tempe and downtown Phoenix as an official food desert. “Although we’re trying to help with economic development issues,” he said, “if we don’t have a healthy community, we’re not helping it reach its full potential.”
The Fresh Express bus starts making its rounds on March 25. Two days a week, the bus will make five stops — two at different public schools and three at places such as senior centers and community centers where a high concentration of low-income people gather. Accompanying services also include free health screenings provided by ASU’s College of Nursing and cooking ideas for health-conscious eating, courtesy of Fresh Express employees.
Instead of hauling bags of groceries across town on the bus, the bus now brings the groceries directly to shoppers. Talk about convenience.
MORE:An Oasis in One of America’s Largest Food Deserts: The Local Quick Mart
Here’s How an Ancient Banking Technique Can Help America’s Poor
Have you ever heard of a money pool? Until now, we hadn’t either.
A money pool is a technique that people worldwide living in poverty (or close to it) have used for centuries to save for large expenses. Here’s the way it works: Each member of the pool contributes the same amount of cash each month. Then, they each take turns receiving the lump sum.
Francisco Cervera, a resident of Phoenix, saw the effectiveness of a money pool when funds were tight and he needed a computer for school. His mother saved for it by contributing to a money pool in San Diego that she ran (she was responsible for not only reminding people to pay, but collecting their contributions, too).
While money pools are a good idea since they provide access to savings for people who can’t use banks, Cervera thought they could be improved. So as an adult, he started eMoneyPool with his brother Luis. The online tool formalizes the money pool and provides guarantees for participants in case anyone misses a payment.
New users to eMoneyPool are limited to $100 contributions, and each savings group consists of five participants. The website verifies users’ identities, and even works to establish a credit history for them through their transactions — helping them work towards being able to use a more traditional financial institution in the future. “We are creating a bridge for our users to lending institutions, but we are doing it in a way that is comfortable and familiar to them, with money pools,” said Cervera told Pop! Tech.
“Saving money by yourself is a nice idea. But when you are living at the poverty level, everything is drawing on your cash,” said Cervera. “Money pools change the idea of saving because you are saving as a team…It changes the desire to save from a want to a need. People think, ‘Now I have to put that money away because the group is counting on me.'”
MORE:Seattle Readies ‘Financial Empowerment Centers’ for Low-Income Residents
Which Celebrity Treats Wounded Vets to a Trip to Disneyland?
Two decades ago, the experience of portraying injured Vietnam vet Lieutenant Dan Taylor in the award-winning film Forrest Gump had a life-changing impact on actor Gary Sinise. And ever since, serving wounded veterans has been an important part of his life.
To help them, he started his own charity, the Gary Sinise Foundation. In February, he gave a group of 50 injured veterans the vacation of a lifetime — taking them on an all-expenses-paid trip to Disneyland and Hollywood. While at the amusement park, a Disney guide made sure that the veterans (who hailed from Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland; Virginia’s Fort Belvoir; and San Diego’s Naval Medical Center) could enjoy the rides without having to wait in any of those winding, endless lines.
Jody Nelson, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, participated in the trip. Now suffering from stage-four cancer of the lung, liver and brain, he brought his wife, Trinity — also an injured veteran — and his two-year-old son. He told ABC News, “They provided an experience that’s just unbelievable. Doctors told me I might live this many years or that many years, but I’m just going to fight it every day and every day that I’m able to spend time with my son is a miracle.”
The next day, Sinise brought the group to Paramount, where they had the special opportunity to meet Mykelti Williamson, who played Bubba in Forrest Gump, and one of the biggest movie stars in the world: Tom Hanks. “The whole purpose is to send them home smiling,” Sinise told ABC News. “They should know that they’re appreciated and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
Homelessness Didn’t Stop the Music From This Teenager
Whether it’s jazz, hip hop, or classical, music has the ability to lift a person’s mood. Seventeen year old Dominic Ellerbee, of Denver, Colorado, found that to be the truth when his family hit hard times.
Last year, Dominic was forced to live in a minivan with his mother, Madonna, and his little sister Dejaune. But Dominic had a creative outlet that enabled him to keep his spirits up: He’s a multi-instrumentalist and composer making a name for himself in the Mile High music community by playing and starring in the Denver Public Schools’ Citywide Honor Band.
Dominic, who plays the six-string bass guitar, acoustic and electric guitars, drums, the piano, the vibraphone and the recorder, also writes music for his school’s drum line and gives music lessons to other students. Of his difficult life, he told Alison Noon of the Denver Post, “It was hard sometimes, but it never really got to me because I had music and stuff.”
For months now, Dominic has moved from house to house, staying with friends and family members. But he expects his transitory life to become more settled now that his mother has found a job and they plan to move into an apartment this month. Meanwhile, he’s writing an original musical that, if completed, the school director at Denver South promised to stage next year.
Our guess is this young musical talent can finish anything he tries.
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