July 2018

When Dorothy Paugh was 9, her father bought a pistol and started talking openly about ending his life. Her mother was terrified but didn't know what to do. "She called our priest and called his best friend," Paugh recalled. "They came and talked to him, and they didn't ask to take his gun away." Her father was 51 when he shot himself to death. [For more on this story by BRIAN MANN, go to...

This story was produced in collaboration with the Hechinger Report . It's not uncommon for college students to work to save money for everything from books to spring break vacations. But schools generally don't require students to work—unless they are work colleges. There are nine federally designated work colleges, in which all residential students are required to work; school leaders track their performance at work just as they do in academic classes. There are evaluations, performance...

Under International law (Human Rights Treaty, International Treaty on Children’s Rights (art. 3:1), we have to provide a stable living situation for children. Tough we fail to do so also with refugee children and children who are exploited and maltreated, I want to draw your attention to those children who are placed out-of-home in our countries. Many of these children end up in foster care and orphanages or even (secure) youthcare institutions but these placements are often far from stable.

Five years ago, I remember Googling phrases like "Am I in an abusive relationship?" or "Can an abusive boyfriend ever change?" Now, as a journalist who has been using past personal trauma as a motivator to report on misconceptions surrounding intimate partner violence, I've learned about the soul-sucking process known by psychological experts as the "cycle of abuse." At the start of the cycle, an abuser might use "love," in the form of charm and nice gestures, as a smokescreen to control...

It’s been a little more than five months since the Family First Prevention Services Act, one of the biggest shifts in the history of federal child welfare financing, was shoehorned into a stopgap spending bill. The law’s two main provisions – reimbursement for services aimed at preventing the use of foster care, and limitations on federal funds for congregate care placements – take effect in October of 2019. This week Jerry Milner, associate commissioner of the Children’s Bureau (CB) and one...

Earlier this summer, the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University released its annual report on the state of housing affordability in America. The findings aren’t pretty. According to the study, the percentage of cost-burdened renters—households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing—continues to rise, as rents have risen 12 times faster than income over the last half century. What’s a policymaker to do? As housing advocates howl for more construction and...

The cover story of the New York Times Magazine on April 11 garnered more attention for a problem that is increasingly becoming news but is not new: Black women and babies die at alarmingly high rates during pregnancy and childbirth. But the article advanced the conversation in two important ways: first, by acknowledging that racism is to blame for these disparities, and second, by elevating the role of doulas as a potential intervention for Black mothers and babies. The author, Linda...

Tess Henry’s family paid $12,000 for 30 days of rehab from opioid addiction. She had done two more cycles of treatment without achieving sobriety. So her family agreed to pay $20,000 for 28 days of more rehab. But they never got the chance. A few days after assuring her mother that she planned to fly to Virginia to resume treatment, Ms. Henry was murdered. The tragic end of Ms. Henry’s six-year struggle to recover from an opioid addiction that began with a prescription for cough syrup was...

For the past six months the Institute for People, Place, and Possibility (IP3), the organization that stewards Community Commons, has furiously worked behind the scenes to help launch Well Being Legacy , in partnership with Well Being Trust , Community Initiatives and T he Rippel Foundation/Rethink Health . Well Being Legacy, a new national initiative, has big ambitions to shape wellbeing for future generations. It seeks to lift up a living agenda that brings together the most promising...

American politics, especially in the Donald Trump era, increasingly resembles a slow-motion civil war between the nation’s past and its future. One of the best places to track the state of battle is the federal budget. Federal spending is steadily tilting toward the preponderantly white senior population and away from the increasingly diverse youth population. Put another way, precisely as the racial diversity of America’s youngest cohorts is rising, the level of federal investment in...

With plans to turn conversation into meaningful action, over 100 officials from the Sacramento region convened last week in Del Paso Heights to begin talks about the impact of trauma in the community. Local experts discussed the effective, meaningful work that can be done to process trauma of various forms. The event, which was organized by the national health care insurance provider Health Net, took place Friday at the Greater Sacramento Urban League. It featured a panel of local experts...

For a long time in the popular imagination, prison rape was, quite literally, a joke. Most cop shows could be counted on for a biting aside or two about dropping soap in a jail shower. But in Washington, some prisoner advocates took the problem seriously, pushing for the passage of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003. Almost a decade later, in 2012, the Justice Department issued its first set of national standards requiring that detention facilities not only give inmates multiple...