The Solutions Story Tracker® is a curated database of rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. We collect and tag every story, providing you with the ability to find coverage of effective or promising ideas and approaches— by issue, location, journalist, and success factor (strategic insights that emerge as patterns).
https://bitterrootmag.com/2020/07/10/how-bears-ears-activists-advanced-navajo-voting-rights-in-utah?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Ross Coyle
Bitterroot
10 July 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
In 2016, court ordered redistricting gave Navajo nation residents in San Juan County fairer representation and required in-person polling locations and translation assistance. Shortly after, the Bear Ears National Monument was reduced by 85% by the Trump administration, which motivated a huge get-out-the-vote campaign among Navajo people. WIth the help of nonprofits, 1,600 Navajo nation members updated their voter information or registered for the first time. This helped elect the first Navajo-majority commission in the county in 2018, which gave Native Americans a political voice they haven't had before.
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/10/889743843/denver-school-principal-on-how-students-led-swift-changes-to-black-history-curri?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Jonaki Mehta
Ailsa Chang
NPR
10 July 2020
Multi-Media / 800-1500 Words
After an emotionally intense visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., students from the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College in Denver realized their history curriculum was overdue for a drastic overhaul. Black students expressed the need to see themselves reflected in their own history lessons, and after the trip, convinced their history teachers to visit the museum and see for themselves. The teachers revised the curriculum to include specific units on the "slave trade in the Western Hemisphere and its ties to Western geography and economics."
https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2020/07/08/westside-hotel-gives-clevelands-homeless-a-place-to-rest-their-heads-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Rachel Dissell
Ginger Christ
Cleveland Scene
8 July 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
When COVID-19 emergency plans by Cleveland agencies to reduce crowding in homeless shelters excluded people still living on the streets, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless developed a plan to house people in hotel rooms. Raising money for the plan on the fly, the organization arranged for daily health screenings, meals, and other services for residents. After private donations got the program up and running, Cuyahoga County and federal agencies joined private funders to pay to house more than 380 people.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-07/police-protests-latina-moms-sons-eastside?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Esmeralda Bermudez
Los Angeles Times
7 July 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Mothers of young Latino men killed by sheriff’s deputies in East Los Angeles have struggled to pry information from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but along the way they have formed a network of support groups helping fellow survivors cope with their grief and trauma. The loosely organized groups, populated mainly by women who hardly consider themselves activists, respond to the scenes of police shootings and engage with the mothers of victims in the weeks and months afterward. They have formed a sort of accountability watchdog brigade for a department that resists oversight.
https://www.wtkr.com/news/chesapeake-teacher-students-create-virtual-orchestra-during-covid-19-pandemic?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Zak Dahlheimer
WTKR
7 July 2020
Broadcast TV News / Under 800 Words
Although the pandemic is keeping students and teachers apart, an orchestra teacher in Chesapeake, Virginia found a way to bring his students together through a virtual concert. Crestwood Middle School Orchestra Director Orion Burke recorded himself playing the song to a metronome, and students each recorded their parts individually to perform their last concert of the school year.
https://www.thetrace.org/2020/07/baltimore-hits-pause-on-gun-violence-command-centers?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
J. Brian Charles
The Trace
6 July 2020
Text / 800-1500 Words
A strategy to improve the intelligence that steers policing and violence-intervention efforts has worked in Chicago and shown promising early signs in Baltimore. But plans to expand Strategic Decision Support Centers in Baltimore ran into political opposition, based on sentiment in favor of diverting police resources to other strategies. Chicago’s SDSC program is credited with a much greater reduction in shootings than in untargeted areas of the city. Baltimore likewise has seen homicides decline where SDSCs help police and violence interrupters decide where and on whom to focus their interventions.
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/paradise-lockdown?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Nina Milhaud
Asia Sentinel
6 July 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
Despite devastating economic consequences, Thailand’s quick and hardline response to early signs of COVID-19 spread contained the virus and within weeks limited the country’s infections to just over 3,000 as of July 1, a far better record than nearby countries. Tourism-dependent Phuket Island was Thailand’s only province to impose a total lockdown for more than one month. Thanks to aggressive travel restrictions, contact tracing, and quarantines of possibly infected residents and travelers, the stringent measures paid off as restaurants and shops began reopening in early May.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/07/06/vietnam-has-0-coronavirus-deaths-heres-why.html?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Timothyna Duncan
CNBC
6 July 2020
Broadcast TV News / 5-15 Minutes
Vietnam reacted swiftly to the approaching pandemic, screening travelers from Wuhan, then banning all visitors from China, mandating masks, producing a catchy hand-washing video, and conducting extensive testing, with mandatory quarantines of infected people. The country of 97 million had just a few hundred cases and no deaths in the pandemic's first six months, even though its public health system is not regarded as extraordinary. As a result of its success at containment, Vietnam was one of the first in the region to relax social distancing and reopen its economy.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/07/beach-cleanups-prove-popular-and-purposeful-during-pandemic?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Claire Caulfield
Honolulu Civil Beat
6 July 2020
Text / Under 800 Words
Since single-use plastic usage has increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations in Hawaii are planning beach cleanup events to pick up the plastic waste. Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii’s first beach cleanup event since the start of the pandemic drew 150 registrations in less than a day. 808 Cleanups is growing its adopt-a-site program where households identify a beach, waterway, or trail they’d like to regularly clean up. Coordinating a large number of volunteers while maintaining social distancing guidelines has been difficult to navigate.
https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-as-the-coronavirus-drives-students-apart-one-college-devises-a-course-to-keep-them-together?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Amy Bass
The Hechinger Report
6 July 2020
Text / Under 800 Words
In order to offset the lack of in-person community building that is often part of the college experience for incoming freshmen, an interdisciplinary team of professors at Manhattanville College in New York developed a special online course. The 4-week course integrates and requires students to add to the cultural history of living through the pandemic by submitting found artifacts and focuses modules on helping "students understand their roles in creating what will be the history of this moment."
https://hechingerreport.org/black-at-instagram-accounts-put-campus-racism-on-display?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Delece Smith-Barrow
The Hechinger Report
6 July 2020
Text / 800-1500 Words
Students at colleges across the U.S. are taking to social media to confront racism and biases at their campuses. Over 40 "Black at" Instagram accounts were launched in June on which students share their personal stories of racism on campus, educate interested parties through reading lists, and share resources for those wanting to confront their biases and be actively antiracist. Many of the accounts have garnered large followings, and some have even raised thousands of dollars to support defense funds and community centers.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/us/cahoots-replace-police-mental-health-trnd/index.html?utm_source=Solutions+Story+Tracker
Scottie Andrew
CNN
5 July 2020
Text / 1500-3000 Words
The CAHOOTS crisis-response program saves its city money and its people living on the streets a great deal of unwanted police contact – contact that in other places is a common cause of excessive force and arrests that solve nothing. And, while less than 1% of its calls require police backup, the resource-thin agency cautions that it is a partner with police, not an antagonistic replacement, and that its model cannot simply be copied wholesale regardless of where it's used.
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Ra'ed Qutena, 段 文慶, Fabio Campo, City Clock Magazine, Justin Norman, scarlatti2004, Gary Simmons, Kathryn McCallum, and Nearsoft Inc
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