Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • NYC's free pandemic child care program promised to prioritize students with disabilities. Why were so many turned away?

    When the coronavirus pandemic shut down school buildings and led to many people working from home in New York City, a city child care program was launched to give children a place to go while they were learning from home. However, the program failed to accommodate children with disabilities who required the assistance of a paraprofessional. After realizing the gap in care, the city is now working to increase access.

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  • How new technology is helping to identify human rights abuses in the seafood industry

    A growing number of governments, companies, and nonprofit organizations are working together with new technology and data to identify fishing vessels that are breaking laws and engaging in human rights violations. Using satellite imagery and tracking signals, for example, a philanthropic company and a nonprofit worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to help the Ghanian navy arrest four vessels for illegal fishing practices. Technology by itself won’t stop forced labor and unregulated ships, but it can be helpful for cash-strapped governments looking to increase oversight of their fisheries.

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  • Baking Homemade Bread Becomes a Public Good

    A community effort to help provide food to those who are food insecure during the pandemic has brought together local bakers to bake bread for food banks. The initiative, known as Community Loaves, has amassed 700 volunteers and donated 15,000 loaves to 11 food pantries across the Seattle area, and is now also gaining momentum in Oregon.

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  • This seaweed can fight climate change

    Symbrosia, a clean-tech startup in Hawaii, is taking seaweed from the ocean and turning it into a powder that can be used to feed livestock to reduce the amount of methane they produce — a key contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The company worked with an organic farm in Upstate New York to test the product and found that sheep given a high dosage of the supplement had up to 70 percent reduction in methane emission. Creating the powder takes weeks and a lot of steps, but the startup is hopeful the product can become a mass-produced commodity.

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  • Removing Obstacles to Mental Health Care — Over the Phone

    StrongMinds Zambia began offering teletherapy, in part due to COVID-19 related restrictions, but also to address the many new stressors that came with the pandemic. Counselors hold group calls with five people twice a week for five weeks. Clients are not charged for treatment or the calling costs. Some of the 1,500 women and about 100 men treated via teletherapy express the benefit of anonymity that speaking over the phone brings in a therapy setting. Without fear of being identified, clients feel more comfortable talking freely, especially given existing stigmas surrounding mental health issues.

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  • Foreign-born doctors fill physician shortages in the West

    A program known as Conrad 30 is helping some foreign-born doctors gain the ability to practice medicine in the U.S. by waiving the need for a visa. Although there are concerns about tying a visa to a job, many doctors have been able to obtain their citizenship and continue practicing in the U.S. independent of the program.

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  • How this Queens community built $1,000 college savings accounts for all its kids

    A nonprofit in New York is helping communities provide economically disadvantaged children with a financial pathway to college. Kids in school district 30 are given $1000 each in a college-saving fund with initial money invested by the nonprofit and much of it raised through community members and businesses. The initiative was started to help bridge the racial wealth gap in the city.

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  • New city program tackles big trash problem in Philly: clothing and electronics waste Audio icon

    A residential recycling program in Philadelphia is picking up electronics and clothing from homes for a fee. Retrievr has already prevented 100,000 pounds of waste from ending up in landfills. The program was implemented through the city’s Pitch & Pilot program which put out call for “solutions to reduce waste and increase waste diversion” in a bid to achieve Philadelphia’s goal of Zero Waste by 2035.

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  • How NYC Is Stopping Textile Waste With Low-Tech Donation Bins

    RefashionNYC provides bins for commercial and residential buildings with more than 10 units, though the Department of Sanitation, to recycle clothes and textiles. When full, the contents are sorted by Housing Works, who either sells donations in their thrift shops, sends them to other nonprofit second-hand stores, or exports them to overseas markets. Clothing that is too damaged to be donated is sold to companies that reprocess them as rags or seat padding. 1,300 bins have been installed and over 12,200 tons of clothing and textiles have been diverted from landfills.

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  • How does Portland's Street Response Team compare with a similar program in Denver?

    Although Eugene, Oregon's long-running, successful CAHOOTS program serves as one model for the new Portland Street Response, a more relevant model can be found in Denver's STAR program. Like CAHOOTS, STAR responds to mental-health and other crisis calls with medics and counselors rather than police officers. But Denver's size, demographics, and homelessness make it much more analogous to Portland. In STAR's first six months, it handled nearly 750 calls without a single arrest. Both STAR and PSR are starting small, so more resources are needed if the pilot projects succeed.

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