While Gallup, New Mexico is known as the “Heart of Indian Country” because of the many nearby reservations and its sizable presence of Native Americans (who comprise 76 percent of Gallup’s McKinley County), that wasn’t always the case.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, Gallup became notorious for something else: The fact that, each year, police put 30,000 people in the drunk tank. Many of those arrested were Native Americans who flocked to Gallup since it was one of the nearest places where they could purchase alcohol, Jonathan Thompson writes for the High Country News.
But now a group of entrepreneurs, Gallup boosters, and outdoor enthusiasts are working to make the town famous for something much better (and undoubtedly, much healthier) — mountain biking.
Chuck Van Drunen, who lived near a vacant lot known as the Brickyard, contributed to the bike-centered transformation of this gritty town. Until 1960, the Brickyard held kilns for brick-making, but after that, it became a neglected piece of property where drunkards and transients hung out. Van Drunen tired of booze-addled people wandering in the alley behind his house, so he started leading bicycle trail rides over the Brickyard.
It caught on, and Gallup’s mayor Jackie McKinney convinced the owners of the Brickyard to donate or sell the land to the city. Community members hired a bike park designer to plan proper trails and enlisted the Youth Conservation Corps to clean things up. In September, the Gallup Brickyard Bike Park officially opened.
Thompson writes, “Over the last 15 years, local bike-advocates have built and designated dozens of miles of trails in the nearby desert and forests and spiffed up the old downtown.”
Various bike enthusiasts formed the nonprofit Gallup Trails 2010, working to establish trails throughout Gallup and the nearby Zuni mountains. And while no one thinks Gallup is on track to become the next Moab — Utah’s mountain biking mecca — the town now hosts mountain biking races and is beginning to attract outdoor adventure tourists.
Does the enthusiasm for mountain biking have the ability to turn around Gallup’s tough economic situation? Currently, more than a third of McKinley County’s population live below the poverty line, and its unemployment rate sits at 8.5 percent, substantially higher than New Mexico’s overall rate of 6.8 percent. Still, the bike trails and cycling-centered tourism promotion seem to be moving the city in the right direction.
Lindsay Mapes, the owner of Zia Rides, a Gallup bike-race promoter, said that when she used to tell people where she lived, she’d get a pitying or disgusted “Gallup Look.” “Now it’s like: ‘Oh, yeah, I love it there. The trails are great!’ I love it when I see locals interacting with someone in the outdoor community, boasting about the assets we have. There’s a lot of community pride.”
“Sometimes, I see it as a revolution,” she said. “This group is really using the bike as an agent of change.”
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Tag: the American West
Neighborhood Centers Provide New Immigrants an Instant Community
When moving to a new country, finding and gathering everything you need is a daunting, if not almost impossible, task. For immigrants that arrive in Texas, there’s a place that can help them with anything: Neighborhood Centers.
This nonprofit, which was founded in 1907, runs 74 centers in 60 Texas counties, offering everything a newcomer to America needs to get on his or her feet. According to the Associated Press, in 2012, Neighborhood Centers estimates that it helped 400,000 people. In Houston, it offers vital services to a city where 2.5 percent of all naturalized immigrants in America choose to make their homes, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Neighborhood Centers offer everything from after-school programs and fitness classes to job-search assistance, tax preparation and citizenship application help. One perennial favorite is its busy schedule of English classes, which include daytime courses to accommodate the needs of stay-at-home moms.
On the nonprofit’s Baker-Ripley campus in Houston sits the Promise Credit Union, which allows patrons to open bank accounts without Social Security cards or federal work permits — easing the immigrants’ distrust of financial institutions and giving them a safe place to store their money.
The nonprofit also runs a charter school and a welcome center that have been credited with revitalizing some low-income apartment complexes in southwest Houston. They run a thrift store — the Bumblebee Shop — serving as a classroom for patrons who want to find jobs in retail. Workers learn to handle the accounting, inventory, and work schedules. The shop sells items donated by the community, and it’s a good place for people to find affordable clothes for kids, too.
Neighborhood Centers host a knitting group that involves immigrant women in crafting scarves, hats, and other clothing and accessories that they can sell. One of the unifying themes of their programs? To help patrons find ways to make a living even though they don’t have a college degree or perfect English skills.
Often, immigrants start out receiving help from Neighborhood Centers, then return later on as volunteers to help the next wave of newcomers.
Bruce Katz, the vice president of the Brookings Institution, told Dug Begley of the Associated Press, “I think what places need is a vision. There is no lacking capital in the United States. None … What’s needed, and what (Neighborhood Centers) is doing, is putting vision to capital.”
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What Can Former Gang Members Teach Psychology Students?
On the first day of class, gunshots alarmingly rang out in the hallway of the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute (PCITI) in Los Angeles, where former gang members sit alongside grad students working toward their doctorates in psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Executive director Aquil Basheer soon arrived to tell the students that he had fired harmless blanks as an experiential learning technique to get the students to pay attention to their own reactions and those of others in the face of violence.
Why the seemingly extreme teaching method? It’s a way to make violence prevention lessons more authentic and more helpful in case the soon-to-be-doctors some day find themselves in truly dangerous situations.
Basheer knows what he’s talking about. After all, he was once a gang member himself. After leaving the criminal lifestyle behind, he began PCITI in 2002 to give firefighters, psychologists, and other professionals standard techniques to apply toward violence intervention. In the past, the people who live in violent neighborhoods usually wouldn’t talk to the psychologists who tried to launch violence prevention programs — but they’ll talk to Basheer.
Former gang members come to his classes to talk about what situations spark violence and the best ways to diffuse tensions. They teach the doctorate students how to control rumors, restrain people safely, hold candlelight vigils for victims of violence without prompting more shootings, help bystanders, and perform CPR.
The former gang member instructors even teach the students what body language is acceptable in poor communities. Nikko Deloney, one of the streetwise teachers, told Melissa Pandika of Ozy Magazine, “You need to know if you have a holier-than-thou look in a place where people are hopeless.”
Once the program participants have a basic understanding about how to intervene in or prevent violent situations, the teachers take them out on the streets of Los Angeles for tours of “hotspots.”
Deloney says one of the most important lessons is to observe and listen more than they preach. “We call it grandstanding for no one. ‘I have all the answers in my book.’ If you show up without your book and a little communication and integrity … you can actually help somebody.”
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The Two-Wheeler to the Rescue
Jim Turner sees the world through bicycle-shaped lenses.
He’s a two-time Motorcross National Champion who left an engineering job at Ford Motor Company to found the Boulder, Colorado-based company Optibike (which designs and manufactures electric bikes), and he’s the author of a book — The Electric Bike Book — which is about bikes (naturally).
So it’s not really a surprise that in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Cost, Turner began thinking about how electric bikes might be useful for recovery efforts.
Inspiration kicked into high gear (pun intended!) when the Colorado floods of September 2013 stranded Turner and his family. The roads to his community were washed out, and the only way to get out or bring supplies in was on foot or by bike. (Or by unicycle, as one goofy video demonstrated.)
Turner decided to turn his early ideas into a learning experience for the industrial design students at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. (David Klein, a friend of Turner’s, is a professor there.) Turner challenged students in Klein’s class to design prototypes for a Bicycle Emergency Response Trailer (or BERT). The contest had a few parameters: The trailer had to be light enough that an Optibike could pull it, it needed to run on solar power, and it had to be narrow enough to fit on a small trail.
Students came up with designs that included solar panels for charging cellphones when a community’s power is out, emergency lights, water filters, fold-out tents, and drawers for medical supplies. One team’s BERT folded out into a table that emergency crews could use for a staging area, while another doubled as a stretcher.
Turner told Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, “It reminds me of the beginning of Optibike. This is something that hasn’t been done before. There’s so much room to be creative.” He said of the student designs, “Every one of them, I see something I like.”
So in a few years, when disaster-stranded people are in need of rescue, don’t be surprised if a fleet of electric bicycles and emergency trailers are their saviors.
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A Little Birdie Told Us That a Tech Giant is Building a Nest to Help the Poor
As we’ve said, income inequality in America is perhaps nowhere more evident than in San Francisco, where a renewed tech boom has dropped the unemployment rate to 4.8 percent, compared to the 6.3 percent national rate. Meanwhile, median rents have skyrocketed to a 40 percent share of the median income, leaving the one in five Bay Area residents who live in poverty sometimes literally out in the cold.
The stark differences between the lives of the tech-employed-haves and the have-nots have led some frustrated people to stage protests near the shuttle buses that ferry workers to Google and other tech companies. In contrast, however, is the action from one of the giants in social media.
Twitter has announced it’s going to reach out to the homeless and low-income families in the Tenderloin, the long-impoverished neighborhood near its headquarters. The company plans to collaborate with Compass Family Services (CFS), a nonprofit serving 3,500 homeless families, to create and run a family learning center called the Twitter Neighborhood Nest, which is projected to open in the summer of 2015. Company executives have pledged to chip in more than $1 million to the project.
The center will provide low-income people with access to computers, Wi-Fi, and other resources; volunteers from Twitter will teach technology classes to homeless families. Erica Kisch, executive director of CFS told Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle, “This will be a major breakthrough for our families. To make it in the world today, just to make it through school, you need these skills.”
Twitter’s new nest certainly has the potential of helping low-income residents of San Francisco cross the digital divide. But we have a hunch that to be successful, they might need to use more than 140 characters.
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More Diversity Doesn’t Have to Mean Decreased Social Mobility
Not only can Salt Lake City boast of its beautiful scenery, but it can also tout that it’s one of the best places in America for a low-income child to have a chance at becoming an economically-secure adult.
The Utah city (along with San Jose, California) has a social mobility rate comparable to Denmark, a country with one of the highest rates of relative mobility in the world. Poor kids in Salt Lake City have a 10.8 percent chance of zooming from the bottom fifth in income to the top fifth. (In contrast, Atlanta and Milwaukee have lower social mobility rates than “any developed country for which data are currently available,” according to the 2013 study by economists at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.)
Salt Lake City’s secret, writes Nancy Cook for the National Journal, was “less economic segregation, a good public school system, strong family stability, a reliable social safety net, and less income inequality. Areas with less urban sprawl and less racial segregation also performed better in the rankings.”
But Salt Lake City has become a different place than the one captured in the aforementioned study, Cook notes. The majority of people in Utah’s capital city used to be Mormon, but according to the Salt Lake City Tribune, the religious group is no longer the majority. This matters because the Church of Latter-day Saints makes a point of providing a wealth of services for its members and encourages families to stay together.
City officials are working to maintain their social mobility rate even as the population becomes more diverse and income inequality rises. Rosemarie Hunter, the director of The University of Utah’s University Neighborhood Partners, says, “Thirteen years ago, the university looked at its data and realized that two ZIP codes in the city had virtually no students coming to the university. That was a huge red flag.” So Neighborhood Partners began to visit the west-side neighborhoods that weren’t sending kids to college, forging partnerships with businesses and community leaders to help get these kids on the right track toward higher education.
Additionally, the Salt Lake City School District has opened community centers serving the poor and offering dental services, medical care, and education.
Natalie Gouchnour of the University of Utah told Cook, “This state has a good network of taking care of people in need. Part of that comes from the Mormon culture, but part of it is just the ethos of the state.” Pamela Perlich of the Salt Lake Bureau of Economic and Business Research agreed with her, saying that her city has “the tradition and wherewithal to do something” to stop social mobility from decreasing.
With Utah setting an example with its housing-first program to end homelessness and its progressive attitude about immigration reform, it has a good chance of maintaining its status as a great place for people of all income levels to live.
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This Woman Proves You Don’t Have to Be A Hoodie-Wearing Male to Make It in Today’s Tech World
When Angela Benton, CEO of Black Web Media, looked around Silicon Valley, she didn’t see many faces like her own. Statistics support her observation: A survey of 150 Silicon Valley companies by the law firm Fenwick & West found that almost half of them had no female executives.
Benton would look around at the tech companies she was working for and think, “Wow, I am the only African American and the only woman in my department. It just can’t be only me!” she told Myeisha Essex of the Chicago Defender. Seeing the lack of diversity drove this 32-year-old African-American coder and entrepreneur to start Black Web 2.0 and the NewMe Accelerator.
Through Black Web 2.0, a website Benton launched along with Markus Robinson in 2007, she keeps others informed about African-Americans involved in technology and new media companies, with the goal of making people interested in these fields feel less alone. NewMe, an accelerator founded in 2011, helps women and minority entrepreneurs find the mentorship and capital needed to start new businesses. So far, NewMe has helped raise $12.9 million for the start-ups it works with.
“There are great entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily look like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world,” Benton told Essex. “I don’t think the [tech world] is behind necessarily, I think they are working on patterns. So if everyone who is successful looks like Mark Zuckerberg, they are going to continue to fund and support more things that are like that. What a lot of people think, especially when they think about entrepreneurship, it’s very risky. When you start to talk about investors and capital, people are investing in things that are most likely to succeed. So when they are doing that they are taking notes from other things that have been successful. So it’s really like this self-perpetuating problem, at least until we really break through.”
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Young Women in Technology Band Together in Texas to Succeed
Latina women have a hard road sometimes when it comes to pioneering careers in the tech industry.
They comprise only 1 percent of college students enrolled in engineering nationally, according to the Dallas Morning News. They can be outnumbered two to one by men in classes for some disciplines.
Students at the Singley Academy in Irving, Texas, take care of their own by offering a much-needed peer support group, Girls for Technology, for young women trying to make their way through the lucrative but male-dominated career path.
The club is a model for how banding together could help girls break into the ranks of science and tech careers — and demonstrate the different, and valuable, viewpoints young women bring to the table.
Singley Academy’s Assistant Principal Kacy Barton, who helped start Girls of Technology, told Avi Selk of the Dallas Morning News, “Females think differently. The guys get wrapped up in the technical side. ‘How are we going to make this work?’ Girls tend to respond to things they see changing the world around them.”
Lesly Hernandez, a senior, wants to work for NASA someday. Hernandez spent part of her childhood in Mexico while her parents worked in the United States. She now lives with her single mother, a food court manager, and a 6-year-old brother she looks after while her mom works. She’s also her household’s repairwoman.
Another club member, Rubi Garcia, showed early signs of science prowess when she smashed her Barbie radio — and then repaired it.
Supporting each other has given the young women confidence as they prepare for college. Women are essential, Barton says, because they think differently.
A man might say, “‘Let’s …do something else.’ And one of the girls reaches over and says, ‘If we just do these two steps, we’ll get this accomplished.'”
Leave it to a young woman to figure out how to engineer something simply.
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People, Not Stocks, Are What This Special Nonprofit Invests In
We’ve all heard of investing in companies, but what about investing in individual people? Perhaps, the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.
After all, that’s the model of the Albuquerque-based nonprofit Prosperity Works. Ona Porter, the president and CEO of the organization told Kevin Robinson-Avilia of the Albuquerque Journal, “We believe in the concept that income gets you by, but assets get you ahead. Asset building creates a safety net for people to leverage more opportunities. It seeds dreams.”
So who’s eligible to enroll? People who earn up to 200 percent of the federal poverty rate — that’s $42,000 for a family of four — can build assets in three ways: personal, financial, and social. (Those earning more than that aren’t disqualified completely; they can still take free classes.)
The financial portion of the program involves free financial literacy and management classes, as well as Individual Development Accounts, or IDAs, through which participants can save money and receive dollar-for-dollar matching funds (up to $4,000) encouraging them to save. Once their goal is met, the participant can tap into the money to pay for education, fund a business, or put a down payment on a home.
Participants also build personal assets through gaining additional education or certifications and develop social assets by learning what resources are available to them in their communities. Porter describes the program as, “a coach-based empowerment model that helps people build financial stability and create opportunities for themselves.”
The unique approach seems to be working. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provides grants for programs running IDAs — $20 million worth in 2013. According to the HHS, since 1999, 84,000 people have participated in IDAs, saving more than $76 million in income.
One success story is Rick Noland, who used his matching funds to expand his bike rental business. He started The BikeSmith in 2010 with 16 bicycles. Now, he has his own 800-square-foot shop near Old Town Albuquerque and recently hired his first employee. Noland said that the Prosperity Works program was a life-changer. “It forced me to take a comprehensive look at all my finances, put things into perspective and create a new plan for the future. It helped me better control and manage things, and now, several years later, I’ve become essentially debt free.”
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This Innovative Business Keeps Open Land and Western Traditions Alive
Rent grassland, save the cowboys.
That’s the aim of a new Colorado program creatively circumventing the staggeringly high price of real estate to stave off development and keep a traditional lifestyle alive — and creating a foodie favorite so in demand that Whole Foods can’t keep the shelves stocked.
The solution started, as solutions often do, with a problem. Tai Jacober saw his family’s land divided and sold after his grandfather died. And he and his brothers couldn’t afford to buy a ranch.
“You can’t buy ag land in Colorado,” Jacober, a third-generation rancher, told Kelly Bastone of 5280. The cost of maintaining undeveloped pasturelands has become too high for many ranching families in Colorado. What used to be open acreage now holds second homes and resorts.
Since he couldn’t buy, Jacober decided to rent.
Crystal River Meats of Carbondale, Colo., leases pasture land on a large scale. It’s a win-win — Jacober and ranchers like him get to keep their livelihood, while landowners get to support traditional ranching culture and snag agricultural tax credits without having to run cattle themselves.
Farmers and ranchers have leased land before, but Crystal River Meats does it wholesale, renting 250,000 acres dotted throughout various communities. And their local, humanely-produced beef flies off the Whole Foods shelves.
Jacober has big dreams for his rental business, dreams that stretch far beyond Carbondale’s cows. He wants Crystal River Meats to serve as a blueprint for other communities across the state to preserve that Western ideal of open land and cattlemen, especially near the state’s popular ski towns.
“There’s a cultural benefit to having a viable ag operation that preserves the rural look — and the cowboys that come with that,” Jacober says.
Thanks to projects like Jacober’s, the open vistas of the West might just have a chance.
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