August 2017

When Taylor Porco's brother, Jordan, died by suicide during his freshman year of college in February 2011, people told her to be strong for her parents, who were incapacitated by their grief. Hardly anyone seemed to notice that Porco, only 14 at the time, was suffering and suicidal. "I was really depressed and in such extreme pain. Nothing, literally, mattered to me after he died. All I wanted was my brother back. I never loved someone as much as I loved him," she says. [For more of this...

H ealthcare in the US may be ridiculously expensive but, hey, at least there’s Doctor Google. Diagnosing yourself via Google is quick, free and often extremely alarming. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discovered that what I suspected might be a hangover is actually a very rare terminal illness. According to my various Google diagnoses I should be dead several times over by now, leading me to suspect that I may be a medical miracle. I’m not the only one self-diagnosing via search.

Our nation has a long history of presidents standing up to bigotry and hate. But President Trump did the opposite in response to the largest gathering of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members in more than a decade. The bigotry-fueled violence led to the death of an innocent woman and two state troopers, dozens injured, and a deeply rattled country. The events in Charlottesville are just the latest time in recent memory where we have seen an escalation of a hatred and bigotry in...

Cries of “Nazis, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” filled the air as Angela King and Tony McAleer stood with other counterprotesters at the “free speech” rally in Boston last weekend. They didn’t join the shouting. Their sign spoke for them: “There is life after hate.” They know because McAleer and King were once young extremists themselves, before they co-founded the nonprofit Life After Hate to help former white supremacists restart their lives. To hear them talk about their pasts hints at...

Eline’s children feared going to sleep in the closet of their studio apartment, but it was the only place they would be safe from the rats. Covered in blankets from neck to toe, Eline would keep an eye on the kitchen entrance and followed the sounds of the rodents rummaging in the cupboards. I represented Eline (I can’t disclose her real name), a mother of two, in Bronx Family Court when she was charged with neglect. Her younger son had been deemed undernourished because of faltering weight.

This article has been updated with additional items. President Trump has repeatedly argued that he’s done more than any other recent president. That’s not true, as measured by the amount of legislation he’s been able to sign. It is true, though, that Trump has undone a lot of things that were put into place by his predecessors, including President Barack Obama. Since Jan. 20, Trump’s administration has enthusiastically and systematically undone or uprooted rules, policies and tools that...

Sunlight fills every corridor, the exit visible even from the opposite end of the apartment building. Its 60 bedrooms have no doors to shut, but, instead, window-sized wall cutouts to see through to the living room. And the “safe courtyard,” filled with deep-pink rose bushes and shade umbrellas, is open to the sky yet fenced off to prevent outside entry from Federal Boulevard. [For more of this story, written by Jennifer Brown, go to ...

Ebony Stewart doing spoken word about her father and her mother and childhood from an adult perspective. Ebony Stewart doing spoken word about adverse childhood experiences and adverse community experiences as lived. Ebony Stewart speaking about speaking up and silence and using her voice and the experience of being threatened and silenced. Too often, when we talk about ACEs we aren't speaking in first person or about the complexity of real-life experiences. Often, we're speaking in general...

Three in ten semi-truck trailers have no graphics on their sides. Just 53 feet of blank white space. This is because they are owned by leasing companies and owner/operators who don't have a business or product to promote. Now imagine these parenting tips and forty-four others on the sides of these trailers crisscrossing the United States!!! This is one of Advancing Parenting's goals. AP will partner with the Advertising Council and manufacturers so trailers role off the assembly line with a...

This piece is about how big data can be a service provider -- and there can be a warm handoff. We can use data and technology to improve education and healthcare and many other fields.

Sunlight fills every corridor, the exit visible even from the opposite end of the apartment building. Its 60 bedrooms have no doors to shut, but, instead, window-sized wall cutouts to see through to the living room. And the “safe courtyard,” filled with deep-pink rose bushes and shade umbrellas, is open to the sky yet fenced off to prevent outside entry from Federal Boulevard. The design is unique in Colorado and rare nationally, a “trauma-informed” apartment building that soon will house...

“Trauma-informed care” is a common theme in impact work. But after therapist Meagan Corrado completed her MSW degree, she looked for programs that could clearly explain how to help people share their “trauma narratives” and found none. So, in 2015, she made one herself . What she came up with is Storiez , an intervention that helps inner-city youth “reflect on their past experiences, positive and negative” and “creatively express them,” she said. The end goal is for the program participants...