There’s more than a mountain of snow at ski resorts each season, as giant piles of winter coats, mittens, hats and scarves accumulate in the lost-and-found departments.
Back in 2011, two 11-year-old ski racers from the Bay Area, Corinne Hindes and Katherine Kirsebom, noticed these mountains of unclaimed winter wear at Lake Tahoe ski resorts and decided to use them to help less fortunate people.
They didn’t stop with just donating one batch of coats to homeless shelters and other charities, however. The girls founded the nonprofit Warm Winters, and to date, the organization has donated 5,000 pieces of warm clothing to help thousands of homeless people.
Even though Hindes and Kirsebom are still only teenagers, they plan to expand Warm Winters nationally with the help of a 2013 Jefferson Award, given by a foundation that describes itself as “the country’s longest standing and most prestigious organization dedicated to activating and celebrating public service.”
As part of the award, Hindes is studying leadership with the Jefferson Awards Globe Changers Leadership Program. She aims to expand Warm Winters to 10 ski-friendly states, while keeping the program a teen-led initiative as they work with the National Ski Area Association to get it off the ground at 50 or more ski resorts.
Hindes tells TalkingGood, “There was a time a few years back where I saw a homeless man in a T-shirt and jeans on a terribly cold day in winter and I was horrified by how cold he was, and the fact that he had no jacket to shield him from the cold broke my heart. That was a moment where I gained clarity about my purpose because I knew that I had to help him and others like him in any way that I could, and I had to do all that I could to make their situation better. When I gave my first coat to a homeless person, the smile on his face gave me the most rewarding feeling I had ever felt, and it still does today.”
MORE: How Does A Professional Skier Inspire Kids Toward Academic Achievement?
Tag: the American West
For Struggling Veterans, Strumming Guitars Can Help with the Healing Process
In Texas, a group of veterans at the San Antonio Military Medical Center is making beautiful music, thanks to volunteers with the Warrior Cry Music Project.
The nonprofit gives instruments — guitars, drums, trumpets and more — to injured service members, then provides them with music lessons.
Robert Henne started the organization five years ago because he believes playing instruments helped him recover from injuries he sustained in a car accident. At the time, his wife was working as an Air Force doctor at the Walter Reed Medical Center, and he wondered if the same process could help wounded veterans recover.
As the veterans work through the inevitable squawks and stumbles that come along with playing an instrument, they also learn to overcome other challenges. “It’s not just learning to play music,” Henne tells the San Antonio News-Express. “It helps reprogram what’s going on in the head.”
The former soldiers agree. Army veteran Ricardo Cesar suffers nerve damage in his fingers, but plucking the guitar is helping with his recovery. “Just parking here and knowing I’m coming in here lowers my blood pressure,” Cesar says. “This is my time. This is my therapy. Now when I’m starting to transition (to civilian life), at home, I can shut the world out and start playing my guitar, rather than, you know, drinking or doing all types of other nonsense that I don’t need to be doing.”
MORE: Meet the Musicians Helping Veterans Write Their Own Country Songs
Can Texting Help Improve Childhood Literacy?
Parents often have the best intentions to work with their young kids on the alphabet, rhyming words, and other literacy skills. But with the rush to make dinner and get the kids to bed, it can be difficult to carry through on those intentions.
In an effort to provide assistance, Stanford University researchers have developed a program that sends texts providing literacy-development tips to parents of preschoolers, and now, a new study shows that participating in the program improved the kids test scores. At a cost of less than $1 per parent, it’s an affordable intervention that catches parents at moments during the day when they just might find five minutes to squeeze in reading a book with their kids.
The researchers implemented a pilot program, called READY4K!, during the 2013-2014 school year at 31 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) preschools. These facilities that have long collaborated with Stanford as a sort of learning lab — testing the latest education techniques that the researchers develop. Of the 440 families with four-year-olds that participated in the program, half were sent literacy activity and fact texts three times a week such as, “By saying beginning word sounds, like ‘ttt’ in taco & tomato, you’re preparing your child 4 K,” or “Let your child hold the book. Ask what it is about. Follow the words with your finger as you read,” according to Motoko Rich of the New York Times. The other half received texts with school announcements and other placebo messages.
The results? Parents who received the literacy prompts spent more time engaged in reading-related activities with their kids than those in the control group did. Plus, their kids achieved higher scores on literacy tests than did kids in the control group, and that group of parents engaged with teachers more, too.
Susanna Loeb, the director of Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, tells May Wong of Phys.org, “The barrier to some of these positive parenting practices isn’t knowledge or desire, but it’s the crazy, busy lives. It’s difficult to have the time or focus to make all these choices as parents, and we’re helping parents do what they know they should do and what they want to do.” She also notes, “We know that changing parental behaviors has proven to be very difficult, so to get these positive effects from our texting program was very exciting.”
What might be even more exciting is the fact that this technique works for low-income and minority families, whose children often enter kindergarten with a significant vocabulary gap compared to higher-income peers.
“Parents really are the first teacher that a student has and are the most important teacher at that [early] age,” Loeb tells Wong. “They don’t have to do it the way teachers do it; they just have to work things in with their daily life.”
MORE: A Training Program That Improves Preschoolers’ Attention Spans
For New Americans Struggling with Paperwork, These College Students Are Helping Tackle It
Melanie Domenech Rodríguez, a multi-cultural psychology teacher at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, came up with an innovative way for her students to gain some hands-on experience with the topics they discussed in class: Every Tuesday night, students volunteer to help local refugees and immigrants at an employment and citizenship clinic they created.
Rodríguez and others initially trained the students, but now they run the clinic themselves.
Antonia Keller, a student coordinator, tells Lis Stewart of HJNews, “It’s been really exciting for me and really rewarding to meet all the people that move to Cache Valley. I think it really enriches the valley and makes it a better place to have people from all different backgrounds and experiences here.”
Keller and the other students help immigrants craft resumes, fill out job applications and complete the paperwork required for the naturalization test. While there are other organizations in the community that help immigrants study for the test, no one else was helping them handle the paperwork. “It’s really intensive,” Keller says, “and really a kind of big bureaucratic thing to tackle on your own.”
The clinic has been successful enough that Utah State students will continue to run it in the spring, surely resulting in more insights like the one college student Alecc Quezada had about how privileged he is to have grown up in the United States. “I knew that to become a citizen you had to take a test, and I knew what resumes and what jobs required, but it’s so much easier knowing the language especially and having that cultural background,” he says.
MORE: For More Than 100 Years, This House Has Been Welcoming New Americans
This Immigrant Turned Fast-Food Franchise Owner Has Been Serving Free Thanksgiving Dinner for 23 Years
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, the line out of a McDonald’s in Denver extended out the door.
The people weren’t clamoring for Big Macs, however. They were there to partake in a complimentary Thanksgiving feast that the owners of the franchise, Geta and Janice Asfaw, have been serving to the poor of their neighborhood for 23 years.
Originally, the Asfaws cooked up a meal consisting of turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing for the area’s senior citizens, but lately, they’ve become even more generous. The event now includes a presentation of scholarships to high school students and a bike giveaway for elementary schoolers.
Last year, the Asfaws distributed 250 bicycles to low-income children nominated by their teachers for academic achievement or persistence in the face of obstacles. (Through the years, the Asfaws have united with other Denver restaurant franchise owners and nonprofits to distribute 1,700 children’s bikes.) Last year, Geta told Austin Briggs of the Denver Post, “We want them to hear that it doesn’t matter where they are today, it’s where you are 20 years from now that matters.”
Geta knows a few things about how to bring about personal transformation through hard work. He left Ethiopa to attend college in America in 1972, and after a coup in 1974 made it impossible to return home, he stayed in the U.S., earned his college degree and eventually became a citizen. In 1991, he bought his first McDonald’s franchise and now owns eight of them.
Last week, Geta told the Denver Post, “We’ve always felt that as local businessmen we should give back to the community — not just take the money. That’s what we said at the start. If we’re going to (be here), we’re going to do that. Even when we didn’t have much, we always felt it was our responsibility.”
So if you ever find yourself in Denver with a hankering for French fries, we can’t think of nicer people to get your craving satisfied by.
MORE: There’s More Than Meets the Eye to This Picnic in the Park
What Happens When Veterans and Wild Horses Meet Up?
Several organizations across the country are helping veterans rebuild their lives through equine therapy, but the Texas-based Mustang Heritage Foundation offers a unique twist: the horses it uses are wild.
The therapy involves veterans training a mustang that was previously living on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and that has never had contact with humans. Over the course of the 12-week-long program, the veterans train the horse so it can then be adopted.
Program Director Byron Hogan tells the Austin American Statesman, “We started seeing this transformation not only of horses but of trainers. Time and time again we’d hear, ‘This horse changed my life.'”
Program participant and Army veteran Christina Avery says, “Honestly it was my last-ditch effort to find something that was going to work. I’ve been through a lot of counseling, I’ve been through a lot of treatments, I’ve been on a lot of pills. Nothing has compared to this…This has brought me to where I should be.”
KEYE-TV interviewed some participants from the most recent group of veteran tamers. One participant, Laura Parunak, flew Apache helicopters during two tours of Iraq. She found the training experience challenging, but rewarding. “I knew it was going to be hard, and I knew there were going to be days like this.” And yet, she says, “I don’t know that I could ever continue my life without some exposure to horses.”
Larry Howell, who was wounded during his second tour in Iraq, tells KEYE-TV that working with mustangs “teaches you patience.”
Both Howell and Parunak worked with their mustangs all summer to ready them for a September livestock auction. Parunak tried to buy her horse, but was outbid. A generous donor, however, had a surprise in store for the veterans, buying their horses for each of them, leaving Parunak with a big grin — and a new pet.
MORE: How Competing in A Horse Show Gives Disabled Veterans A Sense of Camaraderie
When the Elderly Need Help With Chores, This Concierge Service Does the Heavy Lifting
Who has time to launch a start-up while she’s still finishing her bachelor’s degree?
Somehow, 25-year-old Amanda Cavaleri of Denver, Colo. did, building on inspiration she received during a year off from school.
Six years ago, Cavaleri was torn about what to major in: classics or business? So she took some time off and worked as a server at The Academy, a Boulder, Colo. retirement community.
Cavaleri tells Claire Martin of the Denver Post that one woman at The Academy couldn’t communicate well, though she could indicate yes or no. “I was serving coffee and tea one day, and I noticed that she always had the same kind of tea. I wondered if she might be bored with it, and might want to try a new kind. So I brought over all the tea choices, so she could pick the tea she preferred. It made such a difference to her. Who knows how long she’d had to drink that same tea? And I knew I’d found my passion.”
Cavaleri began to dream up a business plan for a concierge service for the elderly — a company that would help clients with chores and errands, especially those who live far away from their family members, while connecting millennials with senior citizens.
Soon, she founded Capable Living, a start-up she runs while finishing her bachelor’s degree in business at Regis University.
Capable Living offers help to elders with day-to-day chores, post-surgery needs and travel. And Calaveri has become one of the leading lights of the eldercare industry.
As for her future plans, Calaveri tells Martin, “One of the problems we’re trying to solve is how to get high school and college grads to work with elders, at least for a couple of years, so the younger people can get the benefit of the elders’ experience…There’s such talent out there, and so much potential. How do we shift our attitude toward aging so that we, as a society, value elders’ experiences? We need a cultural paradigm shift.”
MORE: These Startups Offer Sleek Technological Innovations for the Elderly
The Challenges Facing Military Families are Unique, So This Program Gives Social Workers Specific Training
The suicide rate among veterans standing at an alarming 22 deaths each day. As if that’s not enough, military families also face the challenges of high unemployment, debt and PTSD.
So the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work decided to create a Master’s program that would train graduate students to address the needs of veterans, service members and military families.
Social workers are often on the front lines when service members return home — diagnosing their problems and helping vets find housing, jobs and stability. Part of the USC program’s emphasis is in training students how to deliver effective therapy that doesn’t drive military members and their spouses away, a problem with some counseling that results in veterans failing to get the help they need. But in the USC program, a concept called the Motivational Interviewing Learning Environment and Simulation (MILES) teaches students how to effectively manage that vital first contact with both service members and veterans.
Many of the students that have enrolled in USC’s program since its inception in 2009 have direct experience with the military themselves — either as soldiers themselves or spouses of deployed military.
Pamela and Mark Mischel recently helped endow a new scholarship program, the Yellow Ribbon Scholarship Fund, which will pay the tuition for military members and vets who want to enroll. “These young men and women have given so much, and we want to do our small part to be able to help,” Mark Mischel tells USC News.
Pamela says that when they learned that many veterans and their spouses were interested in enrolling USC’s military social work program, they decided to help. “If these people wanted to become social workers, then we wanted to help them do that,” she says. “This is our small way of giving back to them for the services they’ve done for our country.”
MORE: This Mobile App is Preventing Veteran Suicides
A Nonprofit Specializing in Second Chances Gives One to an Aurora Theater Shooting Victim
After Marcus Weaver graduated from college, he landed in jail — a bumpy start to adulthood resulting from poor choices that he came to recognize were influenced by growing up with an abusive stepfather.
Weaver became determined to turn his life around, so when he was released from jail about eight years ago, he went to live at New Genesis, a transitional housing space in Denver. “They offered me a job,” he tells Elizabeth Hernandez of the Denver Post, “and I didn’t screw it up.”
Weaver did much more than just not screw up — he began to help his fellow shelter residents find job placements, clothes for work and places to live. Through his efforts, Weaver connected with DenverWorks, a nonprofit that helps find employment for low-income people with disabilities, criminal records and past addictions. The organization found a job for Weaver: working for them as a mentor to others.
“It felt really great, like this was my purpose,” he says. “If you can give a person a job, that changes everything for them. I felt really good for the first time in my life.”
But then on July 20, 2012, Weaver decided to see the premier of the film “The Dark Knight Rises” with a friend. Chaos erupted when a gunman opened fire inside the theater, killing Weaver’s friend, Rebecca Wingo, and shooting Weaver in the arm.
The trauma of losing his friend and suffering a serious injury on that horrific night rattled him, and he was unable to continue his job. Finally he went to therapy and was diagnosed with PTSD.
Even though Weaver’s arm is still not healed — another surgery is scheduled for November — in March he felt ready to apply for jobs. He found himself back at DenverWorks and now serves as their outreach coordinator since the nonprofit believed that everything he’d been through would make him a big asset mentoring people trying to right their lives after suffering hard knocks.
“I see a lot of my former self in the people I’m helping. You see them change. Get a suit, get an interview, get the job. It’s so important,” says Weaver.
Currently finishing up a degree in nonprofit management, Weaver hopes it might lead to starting his own nonprofit. However lofty his goals, anyone familiar with Marcus Weaver’s life story knows it would be foolish to ever count him out.
MORE: No Longer Afraid: A Young Immigrant Victim of the Aurora Theater Shooting Steps Out of the Shadows
Decades Later, These Veterans Get Their Due
The widespread disdain over the Vietnam War meant that veterans returning home didn’t receive a heroes’ welcome. For some, this caused a sense of shame that worsened the difficulties that military members often face when transitioning to civilian life. And while the war ended almost 40 years ago, some service members at Joint Base Lewis McCord in Tacoma, Wash. wanted to show their appreciation to those vets that fought in Vietnam.
So they threw a big welcome-home party to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War. (According to a presidential proclamation, the 50th anniversary of this long-running conflict can be observed any time between 2012 and 2025.) More than 2,500 veterans and their families packed the JBLM parade field and retired General Barry McCaffrey spoke to the crowd, which included representatives of all branches of the military.
“It is never too late, never too late, to pay tribute to the men and women who served and continue to serve our country,” I Corps Commander Lt. Gen. Stephen Lanza tells Adam Ashton of The News Tribune.
Veteran Stephen Stribling returned from Vietnam in 1968 and was moved by the long-delayed tribute. “I’m like a baby to something like this. It’s so unreal,” he says.
Seventy-nine-year-old Magnum Tulto, an Army veteran, was similarly delighted by the honor. “When we came home as Vietnam veterans, they didn’t like us. I’m glad they like us now,” he tells Ashton.
One Army Lieutenant Colonel, Jeff Schmidt, brought his Vietnam Veteran father-in-law all the way across the country from Coral Springs, Fla. to attend the salute. “I feel it’s important to give them the welcome home that soldiers get today. They served our country just as honorably as us,” Schmidt says.
MORE: The Surprisingly Simple Actions Helping Veterans Visit the Memorials That Honor Their Service