Tomato pickers have spent more than 20 years on a campaign for dignity and fair pay. The workers have succeeded, against incredible odds, in getting some of the biggest corporations in the country to recognize their plight.

Two years after his election, the mayor of New York created a universal preschool program. In Boston, progress has been much slower.

Filling gaps in prisoner re-entry and transitional housing is the goal of a 14-month-old Fairbanks organization. Southside Reentry Center offers 10 to 15 beds, depending on the season, for people exiting the correctional system, and helps address issues like alcoholism.

Formerly a motel, Karluk Manor is Alaska’s original Housing First facility, a new approach to solving homelessness that focuses first and foremost on providing housing to people in need, and then later addressing problems such as health concerns and economic dependence.

El Paso Water Utilities is designing an advanced-purification plant in which water will be scrubbed through five additional steps before going into the city's water supply.

Despite years of change, African Americans feel ostracized from the medical care community that is dominated mainly by white people, especially when it comes to hospices. Some are trying to remove the stigma of hospice care as well as make health care systems more fair.

Renovating and furnishing a home can be hugely expensive. Homeowners who are renovating on a budget, and want to do so in a way that is evironmentally friendly, can find recycled luxury kitchens and other lightly used fixtures at stores like Green Demolitions.

2014 was a year marked nationwide by activism and unprecedented federal attention to the issue of campus sexual assault. The University of Texas system is putting $1.7 million into a comprehensive, multi-year effort to combat sexual assault on campus.

South Dakota’s “24/7 Sobriety” initiative breathalyzers tens of thousands of people every day in an effort to curb drunk driving. Rather than legislation that takes penalizes offenders by taking away their license, the state addresses the behavioral issue instead. In counties that use the “24/7 Sobriety,” they’ve seen a 12% decrease in repeat drunken-driving arrests.

Patients' last years of life are the most expensive for the health care system. For a fifth of the cost, a Zen hospice program, in San Francisco, is helping those who are dying improve their quality of death by enjoying the present.

Prisons in the United States are overcrowded with many non-violent offenders and the cost to keep them in jail consumes public budgets. Criminal justice reform has attracted bipartisan interest with diverse proposals to aid adjust the incarceration rate. The Urban Institute has developed an interactive “prison population forecaster,” which helps citizens to assess the impact of different policies.

Neighborhood Centers, a Houston anti-poverty program has a simple philosophy: “The people are the asset, the source of potential solutions, not the problem.” The non-profit has scaled nationally, employing its bottom-up approach to disburse funds in poor communities.

Freedom Summer Camp allows for convicted young men to find a sense of community allowing them to connect to the world and fuel greater desires for achievement.

Due to recent brain development research, educators are working to add more math education into pre-school and kindergarten classes. Studies show that children of this age are actually extremely receptive to numbers and learning geometry.

Wolves in western America were once hunted to near-extinction but have now been reintroduced into certain territories with notable success. More wolves often means more attacks on ranchers' livestock, however, so cowboys are working to track wolf packs by computer to reduce conflicts.

Expecting mothers, especially young ones, can often feel scared and unprepared about the pregnancy process. Maternity meeting groups help them gain more support and knowledge about their future pregnancies.

After a rampant problem of violence among youths, Minneapolis enacted a violence-prevention plan which focused on collective action and stemming the causes at their source, resulting in nonfatal shootings involving youths drop by 72%. Now, other cities with similar problems are trying to follow suit.

The life-saving vitamin folic acid is added to flour in the United States, but Hispanics tend to eat little flour. Adding folic acid to corn flour would reduce birth defects in Hispanic women in the U.S.

Colorado causes a large decline in teen pregnancy and abortions by implementing free, long-term birth control to prevent pregnancy. While demonstrating massive success, its continuity is in the air considering the ongoing fight over health insurance at the federal level.

As institutions look for ways to fight climate change, the College of the Atlantic has made the search for solutions a central part of its curriculum.

In a county in California, federal agencies are implementing a model known as Housing First which gets homeless people safe, secure housing before tackling root causes of homelessness.

Researchers from Yale and MIT conducted a poverty study across various countries and found that aid can relieve poverty if it is comprehensive and gives people a productive asset.

An in-depth study of Texas youth crime records helped them find a path forward on juvenile criminal justice reform, but they still struggle with limited resources and a culture stuck on incarceration.

When a heart attack happens, the time of care and treatment is of utmost importance. Many people die of heart attacks every year because too much time passes between the care of emergency staff and the hospital cardiologists. New protocols, and new technology that transmits the EKG of a patient to the hospital before arrival, enable medical professionals to quickly and efficiently treat patients, thus saving lives.

Operation Exit, a program in Boston, offers vocational training to ex-offenders and people with a high risk of offending, giving them the motivation and tools to better their situation.

Silence can be hard to come by for students at New York City schools, contributing to increased stress. Some schools in New York are incorporating meditation to give their students time to relax and calm their inner minds after studying all day.

As American classrooms have focused on raising test scores in math and reading, an outgrowth of the federal No Child Left Behind law and interpretations of the new Common Core standards, even the youngest students have been affected, with more formal lessons and less time in sandboxes. Washington and Minnesota are beginning to train teachers around the state on the importance of so-called purposeful play — when teachers subtly guide children to learning goals through games, art and general fun.

Eastern Correctional Institution is just one of the nation's prisons that's using gardening and agriculture as a way both to improve prison and community food systems, and to give inmates a sense of worth.

The lack of access to healthy food has always been a problem for the financially unstable. Food stamps can now be used to buy fresh produce at farmers markets, but greater success could be achieved by getting grocery stores involved.

Over the last five years, while other cities in Texas have come under intense scrutiny for truancy policies that subject children as young as 12 to adult criminal charges, and turn their convictions into a revenue stream without having much effect on attendance rates, San Antonio has been in the middle of a bold experiment to find a better way. Working with the city government and school districts, the municipal court in this booming, young, largely Latino metropolis has changed its truancy policies to keep kids out of court.

A nonprofit organization, the Internationals Network for Public Schools, delivers a first-class education to the children of illegal immigrants, helping to break the cycle of poverty and provide them a path to advance in life.

Millions of families of arrested individuals do not know what to do to help, how to obtain a lawyer, or what the process entails in the court system. Created by Albert Cobarrubius Justice Project, participatory defense is a type of community organizing that teaches and empowers people who face criminal charges. Individuals know how to work with attorneys in order to navigate the system and ultimately feel equipped to become drivers of their own change.

Mental health care often requires a human touch and a personal connection. Tucked quietly in an office park in Grafton, volunteers at the COPE Hotline field nearly 23,000 calls a year from all over the Milwaukee area and some points beyond.

Police in California have begun using body cameras to record their daily interactions with the public, decreasing altercations and misconduct by both officers and citizens.

Researchers are investigating how in a world of technology and social media, people feel more alone then ever and isolated from society. But millennials are creating a landscape of new institutions to meet their needs for community, purpose and, in some cases, spiritual experience.

Two cities in California are facing increasing threat of drought. In addition to raising the basic cost of water, the heaviest users of water pay more for the water they consume.

The war on drugs has put millions in jail and fails to curb illegal drug use. Tactics that focus on helping addicts are far more successful, such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) and other decriminalization/community-partnership programs.

Research shows that successful addiction recovery requires a comprehensive approach and multiple types of support. Ohio is in the midst of shifting its approach to vocational rehabilitation to an evidence-based approach focusing on providing close employment support, rapid job search and placement services, and emphasizes that "work is not the result of treatment and recovery but integral to both."

Since the 1960s, New York City has run the nation’s largest publicly managed summer jobs program. Nearly 50,000 14- to 24-four-year-olds spend six weeks working, not only in publicly funded day care centers, summer camps, hospitals and city agencies, but also high-tech firms and Fortune 500 companies. The summer jobs help at-risk kids keep from dropping out of school.

Thirty-five percent of Americans will never own their home and risk a rent increase or eviction. Owned Communities USA enables working-class families to become home owners through manufactured homes, loans, and legal aid.

Kids raised in environments full of economic, emotional and psychological turmoil are less likely to succeed in school or at the workplace, and are more likely to run afoul of the law or experience a variety of mental and physical health problems. Child First works to improve family relationships in order to help kids have a better and more successful future.

Turnaround for Children, an organization founded to address mental health issues and their repercussions in the classroom, focuses on preparing teachers and schools to structure classroom environments in a constructive way. They create opportunities for learning in rigorous ways with high expectations so that children thrive and are well cared for, helping them to thrive both academically and emotionally.

Public health, and large amounts of data behind it, is changing in today's world. The Global Burden of Disease Report, involving hundreds of scientists over the course of many years, aims to find out what makes humans sick and disabled.

Yonkers Partners in Education offers free SAT test prep and college guidance counselors in Yonker's high schools. The program aims to increase college enrollment rates for low-income students who lack the same access to expensive tutors and courses as their afluent peers.

There are many reasons why a student might leave university without graduating. Match Beyond helps students who dropped out of college finally receive their degree through personal counselors who make sure that the students are fulfilling all the necessary things in order to graduate.

Rampant misconduct by judicial systems across the country brought to light a crippling practice of debtors' prisons—where disadvantaged individuals unable to pay fines and fees were continually and wrongfully imprisoned, creating a vicious cycle. The American Civil Liberties Union stepped in to work with governments and private companies to increase transparency, eliminate abuse, and reeducate law enforcement officials. The state of Ohio has emerged as a leader in reforming debtors' prisons, though there is still work to do.

The health care system in the United States is not only expensive, but also its social inequities and infrastructure fail to aid patients’ individual needs. Iora Primary Care in Seattle offers a monthly stipend for physicians as well as a financial bonus for how much money is saved on avoiding expensive care. Iora’s model of care also prides itself on health coaches, who offer support for dietary needs and day to day living necessities.

Tulsa Public Schools drew on expertise across many sectors and extensive neighborhood input to address the issue of thousands of empty seats in local schools. Through a community-focused process, they were able to mindfully close under-utilized schools and better maximize the community's resources for students.

Middle School 88 in Brooklyn is part of a broad evolution in teaching math, employing technology through a non-profit called School for One (Teach for One) to provide each student with a personalized lesson generated and monitored by computers to match their learning level.

Richmond, California ranked among the highest homicide rates in the country. The city created the Office of Neighborhood Safety to engage the community in the effort to curb gun violence and prevent homicides. ONS works directly with the young people who are at risk and have succeeded in reducing the homicide rate.

A program in Philadelphia is pioneering new ways to treat the urban wounded. By seeing it as PTSD, and not pointing fingers, the city is using mental health tools to decrease violence and heal communities.

500,000 young people drop out of high school each year; they feel disengaged and uninspired; they fail to see how school is relevant in their lives. An educational program called Build makes it possible for low-income students, as part of their high school studies, to work in teams, conceiving, testing, and ultimately operating their own small businesses. In the process, they discover — often to their surprise — their potential to deal with unexpected problems, persist through failure, and create something that the world values.

People need a place to sleep and eat, they need privacy, but they also need community. Seattle had a recent boom in micro-housing which offers a community living model where individuals have a personal tiny room and bathroom but share a kitchen.

America loses about 31 percent of its food to waste. Driven by environmental, social and economic pressure, more and more cities are starting mandatory compost programs.