April 2018

Last week, Slack, the company whose popular, plaid-themed messaging app has simplified office communications and introduced custom fox emoji into our daily routines, quietly released its 2017 diversity report . Diversity reports, which list statistics like the percentage of women in management and underrepresented minorities in technical jobs, have become something of an annual rite of passage among Silicon Valley tech companies. As public concern about gender and racial inequities in tech...

LOUISVILLE — The single, formerly homeless mothers living in Family Scholar House apartments are used to seeing faces drawn down with pity or judgment when they tell their stories. Pregnant at 15. Bruised and beaten by a boyfriend. Kicked out of school. Living in a car or a windowless basement with an infant. But when these women speak about their lives, their eyes rarely fall to the floor, and their faces do not mirror that unspoken expectation of shame. It may be the 3.0 GPA they’re...

Most American kids don’t spend large chunks of their day catching salamanders and poking sticks into piles of fox poop. In a nation moving toward greater standardization of its public-education system , programs centered around getting kids outside to explore aren’t normal. But that’s precisely what students do at the Nature Preschool at Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills, Maryland. There, every day, dozens of children ages 3 to 5 come to have adventures on Irvine’s more than 200 acres of...

How do we as nurses contribute to the greater good? This is an important question in our polarized world. Nurses can use our leverage as the most trusted profession to frame complex social issues from a nursing perspective. But do we? How can we amplify our voices even more? One example would be standing up for common sense gun laws. The Parkland shootings have activated healthcare providers across the country to speak up, and out, about the public health epidemic of gun violence. Tackling...

“I am a woman on a mission,” Dr. @Nadine Burke Harris told a packed Campbell Hall at UCSB on Monday night — the talk so well attended that it started 15 minutes late and was video streamed to three adjacent classrooms — “and that mission is to get every pediatrician in America to screen for adverse childhood experiences.” In the arena of pediatric medicine, Burke Harris, founder and CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness and author of The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of...

Two documentaries premiering at this week’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York—Madeleine Sackler’s “It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It” and Marilyn Ness’s “Charm City”—address issues of criminal justice, but they do so in vastly different ways. In Sackler’s film, 13 Indiana prison inmates, many of whom have been convicted of murder or attempted murder, are given cameras to record each other’s reflections. In “Charm City,” Ness takes a more traditional documentary approach as she explores tensions...

One memory comes to me like a photo. It’s a snapshot of my mom’s kitchen, the lights dimmed with just the glow of the stove in the background. A line of women, covered in flour, gather together: my grandmas, great-aunts, family from all backgrounds. They read a recipe card from my paternal grandma, mix and roll dough, then pass it down the line to the pierogi molds. My aunt alternates between sauerkraut, potato and cheese, and prune fillings. My maternal grandma seals the dough pockets on a...

Because of known differences in health care experiences and outcomes by race and ethnicity, researchers in Toronto tested the effectiveness of a Housing First program enhanced with antiracism and antioppression practices. The main principles of the antiracism and antioppression services delivered include empowerment, education, alliance building, language use, and advocacy. In addition, whenever possible, case managers were fluent in participants’ primary language and representative of the...

A lifetime ago, Anne Frank’s family applied for visas to the United States to escape Hitler, but we rejected the Franks and other desperate Jewish refugees. We thought: This is Europe’s problem, not ours, and we don’t want to be overrun by “those people.” Today President Trump is again slamming the door on desperate refugees. Indeed, the Trump administration is going a step further by wrenching children from the arms of asylum-seekers, apparently as a way of inflicting gratuitous cruelty to...

LGBT homeless youth are significantly more likely to face violence, sexual exploitation and early death than their straight peers, according to new research released Wednesday. The study, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago , was based on a phone survey of 26,161 young people nationwide about their housing status and in-depth interviews with 215 homeless young people ages 13 to 25 who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. It’s part of the Voices of Youth Count, an...

The image of a hard-charging prosecutor imploring a jury to throw the book at a defendant is a familiar scene that has played out in the country’s courtrooms—not to mention on its television screens—for decades. But today, that picture is changing as prosecutors and the public are increasingly recognizing the role these lawyers can play in bringing about a fairer and more equitable criminal justice system. Here we examine legislation and policies that have been introduced, and in some cases...

Californian streets lay witness to 25 percent of the country’s total homeless population, with 42 percent of those being chronically homeless — federally defined as a homeless individual with a disabling condition who has been homeless for over a year or having at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. From 2016 to 2017, the state also saw the largest increase in the number of residents who are homeless — more than 16,000 people. While homelessness in San Francisco is a...