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  • What Philly can learn about smarter policing from Volusia County, Florida Audio icon

    July 15, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Daytona Beach, Florida

    Since he took over the Volusia County, Florida, Sheriff's Office in 2016, Philadelphia police veteran Mike Chitwood changed many of his department's personnel and put the entire 1,000-employee department through de-escalation training. By 2019, the reforms were credited with cutting deputies' use of force in half, all while crime dropped by 40% and arrests by 30%. A core piece of the training, inspired by Scottish police, is the Police Executive Research Forum's ICAT program, which emphasizes critical thinking and communication skills over the threat of deadly force.

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  • Mosaic Development Partners works to bring people of color into the real estate market

    July 08, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    Mosaic Development Partners (MDP) seeks to create wealth for the black community in Philadelphia by providing affordable housing and creating opportunities in neighborhoods that are considered risky investments for typical real estate companies. The black-owned company has created housing as well as retail opportunities for minority and women-owned businesses who historically have a harder time accessing capital and loans. The company is mission-driven but operates on a for-profit model, finding economic solutions for systemic problems that have kept black communities from creating generational wealth.

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  • RIP Medical Debt helps poor Americans eliminate medical bills

    June 30, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, New York

    Two former debt collectors have teamed up to put their experience and expertise to use paying off medical debts for Americans below the poverty line. RIP Medical Debt is a nonprofit that buys debt in bulk at reduced rates from hospitals. Within five years, $2 billion dollars of debt have been eliminated. The nonprofit has also launched projects researching systemic issues within healthcare and how to solve them.

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  • This is how the Police Advisory Commission should work in Philadelphia

    June 10, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    Truly independent citizen review boards can serve as an effective check on police misconduct if they are structured properly, but too many cities are like Philadelphia, where a lack of power and resources means they serve mainly as window dressing. The history of the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission shows how initial efforts by community groups to establish real oversight fizzled through political gamesmanship and limits on the panel’s power to investigate and discipline. More promising models exist in Phoenix, Denver, and St. Louis.

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  • Europe offers creative ways to fight domestic violence during Covid-19. Why not bring them to Philadelphia?

    June 09, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    Philadelphia’s domestic violence shelters filled during the pandemic, emergency funding ran dry, and officials offered victims little recourse if they were trapped at home with their abusers. These gaps in protection could be remedied by copying what has been done in Spain and France, where pharmacists were enlisted to turn coded language – a request for a particular kind of mask – into a call for help, and pop-up counseling centers at supermarkets and funding for emergency shelter and counseling organizations expanded to keep pace with a spike in incidents.

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  • Philly police should adopt this ethics program that reformed NOLA force

    June 04, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, New Orleans, Louisiana

    Eight years after the New Orleans Police Department served as a model of how not to police, its Ethical Policing Is Courageous (EPIC) program has done more to dismantle the “blue wall of silence” than any other reforms. Citizen complaints and horrific examples of brutality have gone down while citizen satisfaction has risen. Now the training of officers in “peer intervention” is spreading nationwide, empowering street officers schooled in the use of peer pressure to stand up to misconduct without fear of retaliation.

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  • Swarthmore alums use their tech skills to deliver PPE to health care workers across the U.S.

    June 03, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    A group of tech-savy Swarthmore College alumni are helping to get a surplus of personal protective equipment into the hands of the medical professionals who need it most. Tapping into communities where it's not uncommon to have spare PPE due to environmental reasons such as wildfires, the group created a database that pairs donors with recipients. The process has allowed for more than 666,000 masks transferred to health care workers nationwide.

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  • PA should follow California's lead and mail ballots to every registered voter in the state

    May 15, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, Pennsylvania

    Governor Gavin Newsome in California ordered vote-from-home ballots be sent to all registered voters for the November 2020 election due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While some states allow people to vote by mail for any reason, a ballot is usually obtained only by request, which evidence shows does not lead to the same increased voter turnout as automatically receiving a ballot. Absentee voters do tend to be white and upper-middle class, but some voter-rights organizations such as Committee of Seventy have shifted priorities to getting everyone who is eligible to request a vote-from-home ballot.

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  • Dumplings Against Hate Audio icon

    April 20, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    1500-3000 Words

    Response Location: United States, New York, New York

    The NYC-based campaign, Dumplings Against Hate, has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Asian Americans for Equality’s Emergency Small Business Relief Fund by bringing together a virtual community of support. As the COVID-19 pandemic picked up in early 2020, Chinatown restaurants and businesses saw a decrease in revenue because of xenophobia and racism, inspiring the group’s creation. Since then, it’s acted as a model for similar groups across the country, and is creating a toolkit for cities to create their own campaigns.

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  • The Precisionists pairs people with autism in jobs in which they'll thrive

    April 06, 2020 |

    The Philadelphia Citizen |

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    800-1500 Words

    Response Location: United States, Wilmington, Delaware

    A technology service company based in Wilmington, DE hires neurodiverse employees, people with developmental disabilities, to fulfill roles that they may typically be overlooked for despite their skillsets. TPI avoids the typical hiring practices that include interviews, small talk, or eye contact. Instead, they are tested through complicated LEGO kits, allowing potential employees to shine within their comfort zones. TPI's hiring practices have been so successful that they are in the process of scaling their business to other cities in order to tap into this typically overlooked pool of candidates.

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