Blog

By Sarah Holder, Photo: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, June 22, 2022 As cities and states increasingly respond to unsheltered homelessness with encampment sweeps and laws criminalizing outdoor sleeping, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is pushing communities to invest in other solutions. HUD announced a package of funding on Wednesday designed to shrink the unsheltered homelessness population in the US by directing assistance to those who sleep outside, in...

By Hannah Seo, Photo: Getty Images, The New York Times, June 17, 2022 By now, most people know that stress can take a serious toll on mental and physical health. And when that stress is prolonged, studies suggest, it can increase the risk of certain health conditions like asthma , ulcers , heart attack and stroke . Now, new research suggests that certain types of stress can even age your immune system. Using an existing body of data, researchers looked at survey responses from a nationally...

By Norm Ornstein and Steve Leifman, Image: Getty Images, The Atlantic, May 30, 2022 Mental illness has touched nearly every family in America in one way or another. Recent reports suggest that the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated this situation, particularly for young people and children , as well as for health-care workers . Despite the ubiquity of mental illness, our ability to help those who have behavioral disorders recoup lives interrupted by them is deeply inadequate . One of...

Show Delight It’s important for caregivers to show delight in their children. Noticing that their parents or loved ones enjoy their company, delight in their presence, or take pleasure from their actions, helps to build a strong parent-child relationship and the foundation for healthy development in the future.

By Allison Stephens and Bob Sege Many people, especially those who work in the child welfare system, expected a dramatic increase in child abuse when COVID-19 hit. After all, everything was disrupted, children and their parents were out of school and work, and people were physically isolated from each other. As far as we can tell, there was not a child abuse epidemic. Perhaps the emergency supports offered during the pandemic worked. If so, we can learn from our success. The HOPE framework,...

So much has happened in the two short weeks since this event on June 10, 2022! We now have a path forward with the first bipartisan gun violence prevention legislation in 30 years. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is a breakthrough bill with strong support to move swiftly through the Senate and the House. I spent a day like no other with a group of gun violence survivors and victims' families gathered together to demand that the Senate take meaningful legislative action on gun violence...

It's been bad, really bad. We thought 2020-2021 was bad, that was a walk in the park on a windy day in comparison to this miserable year. So, goodbye and good riddance to a school year that most of us would like to forget. I know there are those who may feel differently, but for the majority of the school nurses that have crossed my path, this one will be in the top worst school years list. It may have made us more resilient, but at what cost? Why must we wear resilience as a badge of...

By Heove ve 'keso (Yellowbird) and Chief Phillip Whiteman Jr (traditional Northern Cheyenne chief), Photo: Chief Phillip Whiteman Jr., The Guardian, June 17, 2022 At the Battle of the Little Bighorn , 146 years ago, my ancestors defeated the US army’s Seventh Cavalry led by George Armstrong Custer, who had previously massacred Cheyenne people. This 25 June, on the anniversary, I will make a call to end genocide to protect diversity. I do not make this call lightly. Rather, I am speaking with...

By Lew Daly and Sylvia Chi, Photo: Unsplash, Roosevelt Institute, June 2022 INTRODUCTION The growing recognition that climate policy is deeply interconnected with racial justice has been one of the most important progressive developments in recent years. The rising national influence of environmental justice leaders and new policies such as the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative illustrate how the climate debate increasingly centers around race and communities of color (Daly 2022;...

By Maxine Joselow, Photo: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, June 20, 2022 The Biden administration has reached a historic agreement to give five Native American tribes more say over the day-to-day management of a national monument in Utah, marking a new chapter in the federal government’s often-fraught relationship with tribes. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service signed the cooperative agreement on Saturday with five tribes...

By Peter Yeung, The 74, June 20, 2022 In 2004, Maxence Arcy moved with his family to Bellefontaine, a poor suburb of the French city of Toulouse. Limited by what he could afford, the father of six bought a place on a sprawling housing estate in the neighborhood which had catchment schools with the worst educational record in the region. “At the time, there were only Mahgrebians and Africans living on the estate and going to these schools,” says Arcy, who originally migrated from Morocco in...

By Usha Lee McFarling, Photo: Michael Starghill/STAT, STAT, June 20, 2022 R osandra Daywalker had always excelled. The daughter of Haitian and Jamaican parents in Miami — one an auto parts clerk, the other a nurse — she’d received a nearly perfect score on the SAT, earned a full academic scholarship to the University of Miami, graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse Medical School, and was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. Then came the icing on the...