When David Denny walks the U Street corridor of Washington, D.C., it doesn’t take much to remind him of the 1968 riots, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led to looting and arson that left the city in flames. “We saw people throwing bricks and bottles, and breaking windows: All hell was breaking loose,” Denny recalled. “You’d see stuff burning everywhere.” Today, he walks around the same neighborhood, pointing out the African American–owned businesses that survived the looting. “A lot of innocent people got caught up in this whole fray, me being one of the innocent people. I had a gun trained on me at the age of 13.”
Fifty years later, U Street is a thriving commercial corridor, but the riots are still fresh in Denny’s mind. For years, he coped by using drugs and alcohol, and he spent some time in prison. For a time, he called an abandoned building in southeast D.C., roughly a 15-minute drive from where the riots took place, home. He busied himself by writing poems in his head about his experiences, to keep his mind active and spirits up. Nights were spent sleeping atop a flattened box, a makeshift bed in a sea of milk crates, broken glass and empty cans.
Denny would be the first to admit that his current life looks quite different from the one he worked hard to escape. As a contributor at Street Sense — a biweekly, volunteer-run newspaper whose vendors are part of the homeless community — Denny spends three days each week in his blue Street Sense vest, a stack of papers in hand, selling copies to D.C. residents. A portion of the sales goes towards the paper’s production costs; the reporters tasked with selling copies keep any remaining earnings. Other days, Denny facilitates orientations for new vendors in Street Sense Media’s office.
It’s a business model that’s worked well for the company, which has expanded from an initial print run of 5,000 newspapers in 2003 to a thriving media center, where staff members can use various media platforms — including film, theater, audio, photography or illustration — to tell their stories. “When I first found Street Sense Media, I was sleeping on the street, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and coming home from prison,” Denny said. “I wanted to find a way to be productive in society.”
While the first street paper, the now-defunct Street News, was founded in New York City in 1989, there are currently over 40 other street papers in circulation in the U.S., including Nashville’s The Contributor and Portland’s Street Roots. In 1994, the International Network of Street Papers was founded in Glasgow, Scotland, taking the movement worldwide. Today, there are more than 100 street papers in 35 countries, employing about 21,000 vendors annually and reaching over 4.6 million readers.
In an era where the circulation of print newspapers has been steadily declining, the existence of Street Sheets might seem like an anomaly. However, their power as an advocacy tool has enabled some papers to fund themselves through grants, though the amount each one receives can vary widely, according to Megan Hustings, Director at the National Coalition for the Homeless. “Grants are a one-time thing, and you get lucky if you receive them more than once,” she said. “While we’ve seen some papers ebb and flow, others have gotten well set up.”
While the cost of each paper varies by city and publication — according to Jeff Gray, Street Sense Media’s sales and communications manager, most cost $1 or $2 per issue, with monthly magazines costing slightly more — the business model for all papers is the same. Vendors purchase papers at a discount, and sell each issue for a slightly higher price, keeping any profits. “It’s entrepreneurial for the vendors,” Hustings said.
The majority of Street Sense Media’s operating budget comes from private donations. “We get grant money from private foundations, and generate some income from sales of the papers,” Gray said. Vendors purchase their papers for 50 cents an issue, which goes towards the paper’s operating costs, and each issue is sold for a suggested donation.
But before they’re able to sell papers, vendors must train to earn their license to sell. At Street Sense Media, the training is up to a month long. “We ask that they come in for an hour-long training once a week,” Gray said. “Once they leave, they have a checklist to complete [which includes] attending multimedia workshops and meeting staff members.” The workshops are held twice a week, and are led by volunteer professionals in their field, Gray said. “We have a theater workshop hosted by a nonprofit theater company, a filmmaking cooperative and a writer’s group run by a local professor.”
It might sound like school, but none of the workshops are mandatory, and none of the vendors have deadlines. They’re given writing prompts and are encouraged to create art based on feedback from instructors. “The amount of time spent selling the paper and participating in workshops varies from vendor to vendor. We don’t have any requirements,” Gray said. “Some vendors sell the papers seven days a week and don’t participate in workshops; some come to workshops and rarely sell the newspaper.”
Denny found Street Sense Media through a former vendor, and he was inspired to use the paper as an outlet for poems he wrote while in prison. “I only create poetry; I can’t draw or sing,” said Denny. “But I had a ton of poems in my head, and I submitted one of them every time a new issue came out.”
One of the entries Denny’s most proud of is Commentary to a Black Man, which caught the attention of former President Barack Obama after one of Denny’s most regular readers sent it to him after its publication in 2013. Nine months after the poem was published, Obama responded with a letter, reflecting on its depictions of the African-American community and the need for a commitment to change. “We need to change the statistics for young men and boys of color — not just for their sake, but for the sake of America’s future,” Obama said in the letter. “We will start a different cycle, and this country will be richer and stronger for it for generations to come.”
One of the biggest benefits to vendors at Street Sense Media is the full-time case managers they have on staff, who play a key role in helping vendors connect to services that will help them find permanent housing. “Affordable housing in D.C. is [still] incredibly expensive,” says Colleen Cosgriff, Street Sense Media’s on-staff case manager. “It can be a long and frustrating process for someone to wait, and there are a lot of unknowns. But we try to work ahead of those things so when the opportunity arises, we’re ready to go.”
Among the complications that make it a time-consuming process: In order to get into permanent housing, the list of items vendors need to provide varies by program. The most important item to recover is the person’s ID — which can be a driver’s license, social security card, birth certificate or immigration documents. “When someone is homeless, it is common for their belongings to be stolen or thrown away while they are on the streets or in a shelter,” Cosgriff said. “It’s important for someone to have all of their IDs because some programs require this.” Once these items are found, the vendor can apply for a housing voucher.
She added: “One of the great things about Street Sense Media is while I’m working on a lot of tangible needs, like housing, benefits and healthcare, we have artistic workshops and opportunities for people to express themselves and tell their own stories.”
The most important part of Cosgriff’s work with Denny was playing a part in rebuilding his day-to-day life. “He’s an amazing writer, and being able to share that in a paper was really important to him,” she said. “One of the things we had to work on is the concept that there’s something better out there for everyone,” she added. “People don’t deserve to be homeless. They don’t deserve to live in this type of poverty. But when you’re in there for years and years and that becomes your life, you’re surviving day to day.”
While Cosgriff hasn’t known Denny as long as some of the other vendors, she admits that working with him was more than just a weekly check-in. “David and I didn’t sit down and say, ‘It could be better,’ and that was it,” she said. “We talked about housing, life and art. He’s a poet, and I also really appreciate poetry, so we were able to have a conversation around things that were important to him. It’s amazing to see customers interacting with him, and to hear him doing his pitch and to see people responding to him.”
Cosgriff says her work with each vendor is important, as is the bigger picture of what Street Sense Media hopes to accomplish in their local community. “We have the opportunity to help someone get the tangible needs met,” Cosgriff said. “To get the food, to get the healthcare, to get the home. But then we also have these amazing workshops, and this community for people to rebuild the other side of their lives — to respect themselves in a way they maybe haven’t in a while.”
To hear David’s story and to learn more about Street Sense Media, watch this video.
See More: Denver Pays Homeless Residents to Help Clean Up the City
Tag: Washington D.C.
Building a Better City Through Big Data
In the nation’s capital, 28 percent of children live in a household that’s below the federal poverty line, and another 20 percent grow up barely above it. As executive director of DC Action for Children, NationSwell Council member HyeSook Chung studied exactly where this deprivation could be found and, more importantly, why. “What are we doing that’s not working, and why are we investing in it?” she asks repeatedly. Unlike the ideological think tanks that populate D.C.’s corridors, she’s a relentless empiricist who searches for answers in data. At DC Action, she partnered with DataKind and joined the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count community to publicly post a number of visuals about the city online, graphically comparing, say, youth unemployment, Medicaid enrollment or the number of parks in every D.C. neighborhood. Last month, Chung accepted a new role as D.C.’s deputy mayor for health and human services. As she makes the transition, NationSwell caught up with her to discuss the data-driven accomplishments at her last job and reflect on what her new role means for the city.
How does better data guide decision-making in Washington, D.C.?
At DC Action, we were the first ones to really look at the neighborhood level. Looking at wards — the equivalent of a county level — was too broad. As a parent, I live in D.C. and my kids go to DCPS, and I wanted to know why parents in certain areas were able to move the needle, despite the lack of support from the city’s administrative offices. With neighborhood data, we could question why a cluster of a few elementary schools were doing better than all the others in that ward. It could be race or income, but I wanted to know exactly why.
That led to visual analysis and asset-mapping that we can show a council member. “Look at grocery stores and the lack of fresh produce in Wards 7 and 8. Look at the poverty in Wards 1, 4 and 5 that’s starting to kick up.” We were able to have a different conversation with city leaders. Some of the big fights in the city are about state representation and all the things happening on the Hill, so I don’t think they were ready for an organization to show up with data on the neighborhood level. Because then, the solutions are really localized solutions, not these macro, citywide policies. That’s a different way of thinking: One solution is not going to meet the needs of all 108,000 kids under 18.
There’s been a lot of debate about how data can be misused. How do you avoid trusting misleading figures or building biased algorithms?
Data is not so black and white, especially in human resources. People dealing with people is very subjective. How can you have an automated evaluation for hiring or firing? In public education, there’s this drive for outcomes in test scores that need to be improved if the teacher is to be effective. I heard from one teacher who scored 6 percent [in his evaluations] one year, then 97 percent the next. The educator said that nothing changed; the calculations were just different those two times. Their salaries, pensions, even their jobs are determined by these equations some person is putting together. That is one thing about open data about which we have to be conscientious.
As the repository for Kids Count at DC Action, we focused on making sure we had the most up-to-date, reliable, unbiased data out there, but we also kept track of how that data is used. We all have biases that data can further or can debunk. We took our role very seriously to be as unbiased as we could, to give as much context as we could, then let the data speak for itself.
How can service providers change their operations to keep better track of their data?
I was training a few of the intake coordinators at one community-based organization, and I walked them through why everything they do is so important to track. I referenced Amazon: As a user, every movement, every click is tracked to give me popups based on what I might like. For nonprofits, the only difference is you meet families and children every day, and you have all these interactions and conversations. But none of that is being recorded or tracked. One of the pitfalls of social finance data is that we’re very great about tracking quantities and caseloads, like how many families you served or how many kids graduated, but we’re not so good about tracking progress or the quality of services. That’s been something I’ve been pushing recently: It shouldn’t be about how many preschool slots we have, because we have to narrow down how many of those are quality. They’re not all equal. We’re trying to set a new bar. Caseloads are not enough information to show progress.
DC Action, in making public data widely available, is really just scratching the surface on the reams of information agencies could collect. What does the future look like if the public sector fully embraces this tool?
Can you imagine what the impact would be on the social-service sector if we had real-time data? It’s profound: Netflix and Amazon are able to adjust, in a matter of seconds, based on consumer knowledge. At nonprofits, we have a long way to go to embrace that and redefine accountability. Of course, it’s not truly transferrable from the private sector, but our decisions about service delivery could be much more engaged and responsive to live information from a family. We have to be careful; we don’t want to profile. But how do we translate, with these ethical and business questions in mind, those insights to the social sector to be more effective for families? That’s my interest. I want to get to a place where we can say, “Because of this investment here, we had this result.” It’s not about money; it’s about how we use the resources we have. If a program is not improving outcomes, have the courage and the data to adapt it. We’re not quick enough, and that’s frustrating to me. I just don’t know why we are in this rut of not giving our kids what they deserve.
How do you define leadership?
Two words come to mind: integrity and resiliency. Being an executive director is really hard work. I’ve made decisions, I’ve dealt with funding changes, I’ve let go of friends and fired people. At the end of the day, if my integrity is intact, I can go to bed, knowing I did the best I could. There were plenty of times I cried a lot and had to make hard decisions. But the work continues, because the bottom line is kids need us. The mission keeps us moving.
Why did you decided to take a new job in city administration?
At DC Action, we were called upon by the mayor’s executive offices to help make data-informed decisions. In many ways, we were partners in an advisory capacity helping departments achieve results and made decisions based on outcomes, not simply compliance. After meeting with Mayor Muriel Bowser, I knew [this job] was another wonderful opportunity to push our starting principles to a much larger scale. The mayor invited me into the administration to help highlight the critical importance of data-driven work for some of the toughest challenges we have before us as a city: homelessness and reform of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. As a public servant, I am thrilled to be asked to think more strategically and systematically about how we can truly make a difference in the lives of our residents in need.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
The Foreign Policy Expert Who’s Helping Americans Better Understand the Muslim World
In August 2013, scholar and author Shadi Hamid wrapped up the research he was doing in Egypt and left the country. Two days later, security forces slaughtered at least 800 protesters who supported the first democratically elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, who had just been ousted in a military coup. To Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, the event marked an end to the promise of the Arab Spring. Where democracies once seemed possible in Egypt, Syria, Libya and elsewhere, civil wars dragged on, religious factions stifled dissent or lost power in coups, and extremist groups like the Islamic State filled power vacuums. The question he ponders now is how to decipher what role religion plays today in Middle Eastern politics. NationSwell spoke to Hamid from his home in Washington, D.C.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
Believing in something is very important. That sounds banal, in the sense that it should go without saying. But as someone who lives in Washington, one thing that bothers me about this town is when people lose sight of why they do what they do. Sometimes the passion is lacking, and people get stuck in a routine. You don’t want to ever lose sense of why you set out to do something.
Speaking for myself, I want to do what I can to improve US policy toward the Middle East. I have strong beliefs about America’s role in the world. We, as Americans, have a moral responsibility to try to live up to our own ideals when it comes to our foreign policy. Ultimately, we need to be inspired by something — whatever that happens to be — and not lose sight of that as we get stuck in endless careerism.
What’s the one book that you’d recommend to someone who wants to better understand the Arab world today?
“Misquoting Mohammad” by Jonathan Brown. It covers politics, history and theology, so it provides a good overview of how Islam, as a religion, has evolved over time and interacted with different political environments. A big focus of the book is on Islam’s encounter with modernity, and it helps challenge a lot of the Western-centric assumptions about the role of religion in public life.
What developments in the Middle East are you most excited about right now?
To be honest, very little. Watching Tunisia’s evolution gives me some optimism, though excitement is probably not the right word. Here is a country where Islamists and secularists might hate each other, but they’ve agreed to hate each other within the democratic process. The goal is not to get the other person to agree with you and come to your side; it’s to accept and respect those differences peacefully. Tunisia is an example of what that might look like in practice.
One other thing that gave me a brief jolt of optimism was the images coming from Turkey during the failed coup attempt in July. Yes, [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian in cracking down on his opponents, but in that moment — and that moment will matter for the foreseeable future — ordinary Turks took to the street to oppose a military coup. You had people who were unarmed facing off against tanks, and usually in the Middle East, people-power doesn’t work. This was one of the only times in recent years where the tanks didn’t win out. That, to me, was a powerful moment to watch.
Given the negative outlook, where do you find the motivation to continue your research?
What keeps it interesting for me is that I like to challenge myself in my own research. In my new book, “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World,” it started out as one thing and ended up as something else, because through the process of research and writing, I found my own ideas evolving and even changing in ways that I was slightly uncomfortable with. Some of them are controversial, not just to other people, but also to me. But as a researcher, you have to be faithful to your findings, even if you’re not super-happy with them. But that’s also exciting, because it feels like I haven’t been stationary in my own work and that I’ve evolved based on what I’ve seen in the region and spending time in the field. I hope that in the coming years, my views will continue to evolve, and I’ll be challenged by world events that will force me and others to reassess opinions.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish someone told me about taking work-life balance more seriously. Really, for the past 10 years, I’ve constantly had an overarching, almost all-consuming project to worry about. First was my Ph.D. dissertation, then it was my first book, then it was my second book. There wasn’t much of a gap between any of them. That’s 10 years where, in the back of my mind, I’ve been like, “I’ve gotta be working on this.” I wish, in retrospect, I had spent more time thinking about my priorities, finding that balance and having more perspective about what’s ultimately important. You worry sometimes that your work almost becomes a vehicle for contentment. Yes, that’s a part of what makes us happy, but when it’s so intertwined with your identity it’s not always super-healthy.
What does a perfect day look like to you?
I love exploring new beaches. So being in front of the water, having a really good book, taking a nap and not worrying about work. Presumably, I wouldn’t be there all by myself, but with friends. And if I’m in D.C., I really enjoy binge-watching my favorite TV shows for, like, five hours straight and totally diving into a character-driven series.
What accomplishment are you most proud of?
My new book is probably what I’m most proud of, because in some ways, it’s more personal. Every day, I grappled with the ideas, and I wasn’t really sure what the end product was going to be. There was a lot of uncertainty: Would I be able to do this, given that the vision in the beginning wasn’t as clear? But there came a point where I was able to let it go and to be happy with it. It may not be perfect, but in this moment, it’s perfect for me and I’m ready to have other people read it and, hopefully, enjoy it.
Beyond Big Unions: How One Labor-Rights Advocate Envisions the Future for Workers
Carmen Rojas’s parents immigrated to the U.S. as teenagers. Her father drove trucks, and her mother filed papers at a bank. Neither had finished middle school. A generation later, their daughter had graduated with a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and traveled to Venezuela on a Fulbright scholarship. Today, Rojas heads The Workers Lab, a Bay Area accelerator that backs early-stage, labor-focused ventures. When Rojas thinks about her family’s upward mobility, she’s both pleased and disturbed: “It kills me to imagine that I might be part of the last generation in this country to benefit from an economy and a government that saw opportunity as core to its existence,” she says.
“We have a reached a moment where we can no longer deliver on the promise of what work is,” says Rojas over lunch at a Thai restaurant in midtown Manhattan. To live in New York City, for example, even a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t cover the expenses of raising two kids: At minimum, each parent needs to earn $18.97 hourly to adequately support their family. Yet only a tenth of American workers are unionized, about half of what it was in 1983. “The 20th-century labor movement as we imagined it — the labor union, collective bargaining — is no longer in a position to protect and create opportunity for the vast majority of workers.”
Those shortcomings have led people to second-guess traditional institutions, as the rise of Donald Trump suggests. Capitalizing on the hot-button issue of income inequality highlighted by Occupy Wall Street and Fight for 15, The Workers Lab is trying to reimagine what the future could be. “That’s why we exist,” Rojas tells NationSwell, “to jump-start the next-generation workers’ movement.” She shared five current initiatives that illustrate what that future might look like.
1. CLEAN Carwash Campaign, California
Cooperatives place businesses back in the hands of workers, where they share in profits and decision-making. They can be a tool for advancement, nurturing professional skills among blue-collar laborers. The CLEAN Carwash Campaign, which fought legal battles on behalf of Los Angeles’s largely undocumented force of carwasheros, tested whether they could open a worker-owned car wash in South L.A. The model has prompted Rojas to start looking for opportunities elsewhere, including a farm in the Coachella Valley. If that co-op, owned by 7,500 workers, actually gets off the ground, it will be the largest in the country. No small feat for an industry that’s known for some of the worst working conditions in this country, says Rojas. “This farm conversion — and the fact that we’re even talking about cooperatives outside of Vermont or Maine — is awesome.”
2. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Florida
With the rise of the conscious consumer — the person who reads labels and researches brands online — certification has become one of the easiest ways to push businesses into compliance. In South Florida, which produces most of the nation’s tomato supply during winter, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers created a powerful set of standards for tomato-pickers to ensure they get paid on time, have a voice in the workplace, aren’t subjugated to sexual harassment, and can safely submit complaints without retaliation. They then brought these guidelines straight to buyers like McDonald’s and Yum Brands (Taco Bell and Pizza Hut’s owner), rather than the farms’ managers. Fast-food companies and supermarkets agreed to buy tomatoes only from companies that met certifications, forcing the industry as a whole to catch up. “The coalition was so good at creating the standard,” says Rojas.
3. Worker Defense Project, Texas
With just two OSHA inspectors for the entire state, Texas’s construction sites might as well be unregulated, says Rojas. “Employers aren’t required to pay workers’ compensation, and Texas has the highest rate of mortality in construction in the whole country.” For five years, the Worker Defense Project, an immigrant workers’ rights organization, had been advocating for policy change. They won concessions from some high-profile projects, but the sector as a whole wouldn’t budge. So rather than shaming those who wouldn’t get on board, the group launched its Build It Better campaign, which offered incentives instead. “Their idea was to create a certification for developers’ construction projects,” explains Rojas. For adding on-site monitors and training, the Workers Defense Project in turn would work to fast-track permits and reduce the insurance rate. As Rojas points out, “If people aren’t dying on your projects because they’re being trained, then you don’t need as much insurance.”
4. Coworker, District of Columbia
Rojas is still trying to figure out if digital tools are simply an offshoot of old-school worker organizing or something different entirely. But she is clear about which online project is her current favorite: Coworker, which is a petitioning platform that allows disparate workers to make collective grievances about hyper-specific issues known to employers, without the huge undertaking of forming a union. “For instance, they have 25,000 Starbucks baristas who have all signed different types of petitions and that Starbucks has responded to,” Rojas says of Coworker’s impact. “Often, there is no way for you as a barista in one of hundreds of stores in Manhattan to unify your voice with other baristas around scheduling, wages or appearance. Coworker created that way.”
5. Universal Basic Income, California
While the movement toward a universal basic income has yet to be realized (aside from a small pilot project in Oakland), Rojas is intrigued by the idea. Advocating this policy, which guarantees every family a minimum wage regardless of whether they work, might have gotten you laughed out of a room as a “crazy communist” in the past, but it’s now gaining traction. “The appeal of a basic income — a kind of Social Security for everyone — is easy to understand,” The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki wrote this summer. “It’s easy to administer; it avoids the paternalism of social-welfare programs that tell people what they can and cannot buy with the money they’re given; and, if it’s truly universal, it could help destigmatize government assistance.” Adds Rojas, “I’m interested in what it means for somebody who has spent his entire life in the labor movement to imagine non-labor institution solutions for the issues facing workers.”
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
The Newspaper That Tells Tales of Homelessness, How to Help the Poor Build Credit and More
On the Streets with a Newspaper Vendor Trying to Sell His Story, CityLab
It can be uncomfortable shelling out change to a beggar living on the street, but would you be willing to pay $2 for a newspaper about homelessness and poverty? Robert Williams, a Marine Corps veteran who writes for Street Sense, a biweekly broadsheet in Washington, D.C., hopes so. For every copy he sells, he keeps 75 percent, his only source of income.
Banking on Justice, YES! Magazine
In the impoverished Mississippi Delta region, most locals can’t borrow from large banks such as Citibank, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase because small loans don’t make enough interest to be worthwhile. Instead, residents are increasingly turning to Community Development Financial Institutions, known as CDFIs, which receive federal assistance in exchange for making capital available in low-income areas.
When Teachers Take A Breath, Students Can Bloom, NPR
Educators have it rough. If keeping up with children’s energy levels for six hours isn’t enough, they also need to help students cope with difficulties outside the classroom and meet the rigors of state testing and federal standards. That can lead to a lot of stress, which is why CARE for Teachers trains educators in meditation techniques proven to reduce anxiety and burnout.
MORE: Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.
1. Concert Hall
Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.
2. Primary School
Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.
3. Hospital
Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.
4. Government
Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.
5. Police Department
Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.
6. Athletic Competition
Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.
7. Military
Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.
MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
When Treatment Makes Kids Feel Sicker Than the Illness Itself, This Program Offers Healing, Nutritious Bites
Danielle Cook’s oldest son was only 11 years old when he was diagnosed with stage three Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the immune system. “There was a huge sense of powerlessness and great sadness,” remembers Cook, a mother of three who worked for years as a cooking demonstration instructor in the Washington, D.C., area.
Cook, who now also works as a holistic nutritionist, relentlessly looked for answers in food. After months of making special recipes, she saw her son go from a “worn, depressed, tired kid to a healthy adolescent,” she says. Drawing from her experience, she founded Happily Hungry, a program that consists of cooking workshops geared towards hospitalized kids battling cancer and other illnesses.
Watch the video above to see how Cook helps patients and families deal with some of the negative side effects that accompany various medical treatments.
How Do You Get Millennials Focused on the Issues Facing Americans Today?
Kasey Saeturn, a 20-year-old journalist, got the idea for her most recent reporting project while attempting to grab take-out in Oakland’s Chinatown. That summer afternoon, she and other reporters left the Youth Radio headquarters to find cheap eats. Most returned empty-handed, unable to find anything affordable in the gentrified neighborhood. The situation prompted Saeturn, a first-generation Mien-American whose family came from Laos, to think about urban renewal, wondering: Was a lack of affordable cuisine unique to the Easy Bay or did kids across the country choose between an empty stomach and an empty wallet?
To answer her question, Saeturn built a map and used Facebook and Twitter to collect responses from across the country to fill it. Last month, her story (which was produced by Youth Radio) appeared before a national audience on NPR’s website. “I wouldn’t have even found out if I liked [storytelling] if I didn’t join Youth Radio. I never saw myself as a journalist,” Saeturn, a college student with a second job at a ramen shop, says.
With kids manning the mics, Youth Radio, a public radio station, launched from Berkeley, Calif., in the 1990s. As shootings ravaged low-income neighborhoods, its founder, Ellin O’Leary, hoped to end the prevailing news narrative that all teens were violent gangbangers or victims by giving minority, low-income youths the opportunity to explain their lives for themselves. That mission continues today at bureaus in L.A., Atlanta and Washington, D.C., as Millennials — burdened with college debt and unemployment — create stories about living in a hashtag-centric world. Keeping up with the times, Youth Radio now also streams its content online and in 2009, started its Innovation Lab, a digital storytelling platform, where young people design interactive mobile apps that give a fresh take on the news in a format that’s relevant to their peers.
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“There’s multiple ways to tell a story,” says Asha Richardson, a Youth Radio alum who now manages the Innovation Lab. Richardson, the station’s former tech journalist, wanted her reporting to go beyond the reels and was intrigued how technology — video, music, graphic design, coding — and new platforms that appealed to her peers enhanced reach and storytelling impact. Students in the program (80 percent come from low-income homes) receive real-world tech skills, learning not only how to use a recording device, set levels and mix their audio, but also how to design and code, says Lissa Soep, a senior producer who cooked up the Innovation Lab with Richardson.
APPLY: Youth Radio is an NBCUniversal 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program here.
Youth Radio’s apps transform the century-old two-minute radio story and make it better by allowing a reader to spend as much time with a story as she desires (the same way a listener could binge on Serial). A series of interviews about gentrification in five Oakland neighborhoods, for example, allows a visitor to turn about the city through an online map, visiting schools and playgrounds, a Disneyesque theme park, grand old hotels and new high-rise condos. Richardson’s Bucket Hustle app combines trivia questions about California’s drought with an arcade-style game of collecting falling water drops in a bucket. And another online interactive, Double Charged, lets a viewer follow three people through the juvenile justice system and watch as thousands of dollars in fees pile up throughout the process.
Youth Radio’s multi-platform approach extends young people’s voices far beyond their Twitter feeds and Tumblr accounts. So far, its stories have reached more than 28 million users and the digital tools created in its Innovation Lab have an active user base of more than 3 million people worldwide.
That ability to reach a diverse audience changed the way Saeturn thinks about her own life and how much she’s willing to share on the radio. When she sits down to brainstorm, she asks herself, “What’s going on in my life that other people can relate to?” Knowing her words will be shared justifies “putting all the thought and feeling and heart” into each story, hoping her experience helps another young person listening on the web.
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More than any hackathon or a media studies class, Youth Radio allows young people to express themselves and connect with listeners. By telling stories, Saeturn feels like she’s finally found her voice. Not in the sense that it gave her thoughts and opinions she didn’t hold before, but that it gives her a platform to stand on.
“A lot of adults, they don’t really care for what children have to say. To them, it’s whatever we say goes. They forget that the youth is our next generation. They forget that we have the same thoughts and opinions as you do. We have worries as well,” Saeturn says. “That’s the biggest thing: we’ve been silent for so long, forced to believe that nobody cares.” With Youth Radio as their outlet, they’re finding people that are willing to listen. Online, they’re able to reach more of them than ever before.
Youth Radio is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
Go Inside the Mission That’s Bringing the Federal Government into the Digital Age
Eight years after President Barack Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, there’s not much evidence of a new era of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. His administration, however, has brought an antiquated, disjointed and inflexible bureaucratic system into the tech age. With a team of 153 people working across agencies, the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) retooled and modernized online applications for student loans, veteran’s healthcare and immigration visas. NationSwell spoke with Haley Van Dyck, a San Francisco native who co-founded the initiative, about running the federal government’s in-house startup.
The President asked you personally to change the government’s online systems. Why did you say yes?
Well, the president is a pretty hard guy to say no to! Honestly, why I’m here is because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. Government is, I think, an overlooked platform for creating change in people’s lives. When you take a platform the size and scale of the United States government and you combine it with the transformative power of technology to create change, it can be a force multiplier for good.
What specifically are you integrating into government operations?
Our team is focused on how we can bring in the best technology talent across the country and pair it with the innovators in government to focus more on the underlying systems. There are services that government provides every single day that are utterly life changing for Americans, and whatever we can do to bring what Silicon Valley has learned about providing planetary-scale digital services that work into services that are in desperate need of upgrades is an incredibly appealing mission.
The federal government currently spends $86 billion on IT projects, but nearly all these projects go over budget or miss deadlines. Two out of every five are shut down. What’s getting in the way?
There are a lot of factors that go into it, so there’s no easy answer. Government still builds software the same way it builds battleships: very expensive, long planning cycles. That is simply not the way that Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large has become one of the most innovative sectors, because it’s found ways to take very, very large projects and break them up into smaller pieces where they’re more approachable and [easier to] deliver results on a much faster, much less risky surface area. I think that is one of the big problems of government — it’s structured to do these large projects, and that’s what it continues to do.
Another problem we run into is just outdated technology. You will still find COBOL [a 1959 computer programming language] alive and well in parts of the United States government, because doing these kinds of technology upgrades are hard and complicated and challenging, and it takes a lot of work. So those two — the mentality as well as the existing technology — combine together make a very, very hard problem to solve. That’s basically what our team is targeting, right?
The rollout of healthcare.gov, by anyone’s assessment, was a logistical disaster and a political nightmare. Did that failure mark a turning point in how the government does its business?
There was obviously a ton of work underway long before healthcare.gov happened to solve this problem. But absolutely, I do think healthcare.gov was an incredibly critical turning point in two big ways. The first and most important one is that the rescue effort of healthcare.gov was one of the first times that many people with technology and engineering backgrounds were able to see how their skill-sets could truly help benefit a large number of their fellow Americans. It really shone a light onto the pathway for public service. The second way in which it was a defining moment was internally across government (for everyone from the White House down) it showed that the status quo right now is the riskiest option. The way the government goes about building software today is not successful and needed to change. That was a critical piece of energy and momentum that we needed to break the inertia and look at the problem from a different perspective.
Tell us a little bit about your first project with “boots on the ground,” where a team streamlined the transfer of health records from the Department of Defense to the Veterans Administration. Why start with such a huge bureaucracy?
If we were filtering for where the easy problems were, we wouldn’t have a ton of business. We ended up very excited and eager to work with the VA because we believe that veterans deserve a world-class experience when applying for the benefits after all they’ve done in service of their country. So it was an incredibly motivating mission.
Where does that project stand now?
We’re really excited because the team is making a ton of traction even in one of the largest, most entrenched bureaucracies in government. We’ve found incredible partners and supporters inside the VA who are really doing the heavy lifting and the hard work of creating culture change inside the agency, as they’re looking at how to improve services for veterans from all angles. The team is focused on two areas. First, how do we improve the experience for the veterans? Right now there are hundreds of websites, all intending to help veterans get access to their benefits. The work being done is streamlining all those service offerings and websites into a single place, where veterans can get better information and access to the benefits. Vets.gov is the new website that we’re building. It’s in beta and it’s launched for education and health benefits, and we continue to add services to it regularly.
The second big areas we spend a lot of time working is on the tools for the dedicated civil servants inside the VA to make it as easy as possible for them to complete their job of providing services to the vets. We just launched a product we’re excited about called Caseflow, which was designed with adjudicators inside the VA. It’s focused on streamlining and improving application processing. We realize that by helping upgrade the outdated systems that a lot of employees were using, we’re able to help the vets themselves.
In what ways is USDS similar to your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech startup? And in what ways would you notice a difference?
We’re in incredible scrappy, bootstrap office spaces, with people running around in jeans, Post-It notes everywhere, tons of white boards and big discussions happening left and right. In many ways it looks and feels very, very similar to many of the startups you see across the country. But a couple of ways that it’s different, we’re actually quite proud of. For example, we have a very diverse team and are over 50 percent women, which I think makes different from a lot of companies in the Valley.
You’ve mentioned that USDS is easing arduous applications and centralizing contact information in one website. How does that work actually benefit the most vulnerable Americans?
I don’t want to pontificate too much on the status of our tech industry, but as you see various tech companies create change across the industry, they’re simplifying and improving the lives of Americans and really taking out a lot of the biggest inconveniences that we have. It is absolutely imperative that our government makes that same jump to providing services the same way that the rest of the industry does. The internet is obviously a huge conduit for that. In order to make sure that divide doesn’t become larger, between the people who are benefiting from the tech revolution and those who aren’t, government should make sure that we are also modernizing our services for the primary platform where people are looking to do business and communicate.
Now, that doesn’t mean it’s the only channel. We, as the government, do not have the luxury of segmenting our audiences the way that most companies do. We can’t just care about people on the internet. We have to care about those who don’t have access. But by the work we’re doing through actual user-centered design and modern technology stacks, we are able to do things like design for mobile, which is also addressing a huge percentage of Americans who now have access to internet only through smartphones and not through broadband. So I think that it’s an incredibly important part of the conversation, but it’s also not the entire conversation.
MORE: This Is a Smart, Nonpartisan Way to Improve Local Government
How Encouraging People to Move on Sparks Innovation
As the host of the “TED Radio Hour” on NPR, Guy Raz examines what it means to be a human being (or “an upright, advanced primate,” as he puts it): how we love, grieve, judge, create, imagine, and empathize. The approach stems from his experience as a journalist, during which he served as a foreign correspondent covering political conflicts across the globe, a defense correspondent reporting on the Pentagon and as host of “All Things Considered.” After witnessing an intense focus on differentiating people, Raz uses his radio show to create a community of individuals who believe in possibility and the desire to do better. He spoke with NationSwell at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of NPR.
What is the best advice that you’ve received on being a leader?
When you’re starting out as a journalist, it’s really hard. There’s a lot of failure and a lot of uncertainty because no one takes you seriously and most of your work gets rejected. There were moments when I was starting my career when I would write something and somebody here at NPR would see it. Maybe they wouldn’t read it, but they would see my byline, and they would say “Hey, great job. You’re doing great work.” And that meant the world to me. I really think about that a lot as somebody who’s been doing this for 18 years. When I see people starting out, I make an effort to acknowledge and recognize their work — to help them and to give them advice. Leadership is about passing it on — it’s as simple as that.
What do you wish someone would’ve told you when you first started your career that they didn’t?
I wish that someone would’ve told me that there’s so much uncertainty and combining it with being young and feeling vulnerable will mean that you will have some very tough times. Your whole life there’s a safety net, and everyone is encouraging you. Then you go out into the world and no one gives a shit because they don’t know anything about you. You’re just another 20-something in the city. The combination of that and the uncertainty of your future often causes periods of depression and anxiety.
When I was younger, I experienced anxiety and depression like I had never experienced in my life. I had gone from thinking I was relatively emotionally stable to being in a spiral in my early 20s. I wish I knew to expect that because it was so disorienting when it happened. It was a long time before I sought help. I think we do a disservice to young people, even more so now, because we don’t prepare them. We encourage them, and then that day is over and we send them out in the world. I don’t know what the answer is, but one step would be to have a conversation about it and understand that we set a lot of people up for a period of difficulty and disappointment.
How do you as a leader inspire others?
By helping people to realize their potential and what they want to do. I’ve always tried to be the kind of leader that encourages people to move on. Very rarely have I worked with the same people for more than three years. When the best, best, best people that work with me come and say that they want to try something new, of course, my first instinct is “I can’t lose this person,” but I’ve got to do it. So I always say, “let’s figure out how we can make that happen.”
What is your idea of a perfect day?
A day spent with my children and my wife. I know it’s a lame and clichéd answer, but I love being around them. I love watching my boys interact. They fight. They get along. They play. They hit each other. I just love being together with them. There’s nothing more meaningful than being around family.
What’s on your nightstand right now?
“Originals” by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg, which is about original thinkers and how ideas form. “Presence” by Amy Cuddy; she’s a friend of mine and I love her TED talk about faking it ’til you become it. I’m reading “Napoleon” by Andrew Roberts, which is really great. [Napoleon was] an amazing guy. He created an apparatus that’s still in place in all of Europe — the school systems, the civil justice system, the criminal court system, the bureaucracy, the progressive nature of Europe. You could call him a dictator or an authoritarian. But by our standards, even today, he was incredibly progressive.
What is your all-time favorite book?
As a journalist, the most important book has been “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell. The reason why it’s so important isn’t because of the story, but because of what it represents. Orwell was a young communist and he went to Spain to fight with the communists. He grew to be incredibly disillusioned with them…and was still sympathetic to the ideals, but while most communists would’ve hid those feelings, he wrote in a very transparent way about the flaws of the movement that he believed in. And that, to me, is the mark of a great journalist — a person who is able to fight against their own biases and write something that is real and meaningful and truthful. He represents integrity as a writer that is unmatched.
The novel that’s really stuck with me is “Atonement” by Ian McEwan. It’s beautifully written. In recent years, I haven’t kept up with novels as best as I should, but I still think Ian McEwan is one of the greatest living writers.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
To create two human beings. I always say that I’ve been really lucky. NPR has sent me to report from more than 45 countries. I’ve seen incredible things. I’ve been in remote villages of Afghanistan where I’m the first foreigner they’ve ever seen and a goat is slaughtered in my honor. [I’ve visited] tiny villages in Kosovo and places in Pakistan. I’ve been all over Iraq, and I’ve met incredible people, but there hasn’t been anything more interesting than watching my kids grow up. You see elements of yourself in them, and you try to correct it because you don’t want them to have your craziness. They’re the 2.0 version of you. You know your own flaws, but then you see your kids, and they’re just better at dealing with things. They’re more advanced versions of you, and it’s just cool.
What is something that people should know about you but don’t?
A few things. My wife and I did not have a wedding. We got married alone. I am really into making stuff at home. I make Kombucha. It’s very NPR of me. And I make a lot of plant milk. Today, I brought a bottle of Kombucha, a jar of vanilla hemp milk and a jar of vanilla oat milk to work. I do a kids news show every Friday, which is one the most fun things I do.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.