Milwaukee’s 414LIFE program is treating violence like a public health issue, seeking to interrupt and prevent its spread. The pilot program is a collaboration between the city’s Office of Violence Prevention, local nonprofits, and hospitals and healthcare networks. The initiative works closely with victims of violence to make sure they have the support and resources they need to prevent violent retaliation and employs people who are from the communities they’re responding to in an effort to take a hyper-local response.

The Kansas City neighborhood of Ivanhoe was once plagued by blight, illegal dumping, drug trade, gun violence, and neglect; neighbors lived in fear or moved away. Inspired by one compassionate and proactive family, the Youngs, the community stepped up, partnering with the local university and a charitable foundation to map out a tangible blueprint for sustainable change. They are working with police and the city council to tackle the blight and revive their neighborhood through affordable housing, park space, and a renewed sense of community.

With climate change on the horizon, Los Angeles is rushing to pull water from surprising sources. The goal: aqueous independence.

Tucson has slashed its per capita water consumption by more than a third, and one of the more startling ways it's done that is by reusing water after it's flushed down the toilet or run through a washing machine.

Water was scarce in the Moroccan Ait Baamrane tribal region, which meant women and children often had to travel great distances to fetch water from wells. A new technology that harvests water from fog, however, has changed their way of life by generating enough clean drinking water for the entire region.

The Bard prison initiative, in New York, allows inmates at correctional facilities to take liberal arts classes and improve their opportunities to find work upon release.

Children with disabilities often feel excluded in amusement parks where they are prevented from going on rides, and they don't feel included with the other children. Morgan's Wonderland amusement park and Morgan's Inspiration island water park are designed for children or adults with disabilities but can also be used by able-bodied individuals.

In order to tackle opioid addiction, the state of Virginia found a way to make drug treatment accessible to people with medicaid by boosting “reimbursement rates to addiction treatment providers.” Historically, drug treatment hasn’t been covered by health insurance. Virginia is changing that. Already, “the percent of Medicaid members with an opioid use disorder who received treatment went up by 29 percent from April to December 2017 compared to the same period the previous year.”

Black American mothers are about 3.5 times more likely to die from complications related to childbirth than white American mothers. A program called Pregnancy Medical Home in North Carolina has contributed to successfully eliminating this disparity by targeting low-income mothers and focusing on risk factors that contribute to poor maternal outcomes. The program is funded by Medicaid and mothers who are identified as being high risk are paired with a care manager who helps them to achieve the health plans set forth by their doctors.

When the population in need of a new dug is very poor, the private sector has little incentive to create and test new drugs. Through product development partnership, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative keeps the costs of drug development down. For example, the non-profit pays for and runs clinical trials under the name of the drug company, helping their image, in return the drug company doesn’t patent the drug and sells it to the people in need for a much a cheaper price.

Hospitals in Colorado are changing their approach to opioid crisis by treating patients that come in as emergent cases and rushing them into medication-assisted addiction treatment. The model has proved so successful that doctors are now looking to expand this approach to methamphetamine users as well.

Cities that invest in multi-faceted opioid addiction treatment programs succeed in lowering overdose deaths. In Little Falls, Minnesota, the idea of “medication-assisted treatment” includes combining the traditional use of drugs like Suboxone to wean heavy opioid dependency with additional measures, including hospital oversight to reduce excess prescriptions and the coordination of care between social workers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and even law enforcement. Cities with successful public health programs treating opioid addiction rely on federal and state grants as well as donations.

As climate change worsens, species such as coral reefs have been impacted at a detrimental rate. As the reefs begin to die off, so do the species that rely on them. In Florida, however, scientists have found success by replanting corals on fibreglass and PVC trees.

Record heat is killing coral reefs throughout the world. Recent research in Australia however has lead to the piloting of a coral fertility treatment known as Coral IVF that is showing promising signs of healing damaged parts of the Great Barrier Reef.

In the Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood of California, one neighborhood was designed and built to protect homes from wildfires. Included in the design were certain regulations, like regulating weeds, brush, and mulch, and installing noncombustible siding and roofs. Because of climate change, the strength and frequency of wildfires have increased across the state, prompting residents, firefighting professionals, and legislators to become more resilience- and prevention-oriented.

Berea College is unique for a number of reasons - in the South, it was the first integrated, co-educational college. But perhaps Berea is best known for its tuition-free structure, made possible by endowment investment earnings and a universal work-study program. Without Berea's unique history, can other schools successfully adopt this model?

Boosting trust in vaccines requires rebuilding confidence in the health system. In France, where as many as one in three people express skepticism regarding vaccinations, health officials have undertaken proactive social media campaigns against disinformation in addition to increasing mandatory vaccine requirements for children. The lag in vaccinations among the French follows decades where several high profile failures of the health system led to widespread distrust and harmful long-term effects on vaccination rates.

Increasing the availability of naloxone reduces the number of deaths from opioid overdose. In Colorado, the Naloxone for Life initiative, which began in 2016, has distributed thousands of kits to emergency first responders and has also made the medication available without a prescription. As a result, paramedics have used the medication to reverse several hundred overdoses in Colorado, administering over 700 doses in Denver in 2018 alone.

By prioritizing treatment over law enforcement, Switzerland dramatically reduced its drug problem. In 1994, the country adopted a progressive policy to treat heroin addiction as a public health crisis, focusing on harm reduction, treatment, and prevention in addition to traditional law enforcement. The policy, which embraces medicated-assisted treatment and universal access to services, helped greatly reduce issues such as the incidence of HIV, drug overdoses, and deaths over the long-term.

Unlike other countries suffering with an impoverished population, Costa Rica has not destroyed the environment while modernizing its economy. Costa Rica has created a coffee alliance, a collective effort between the government and local farmers to grow and cultivate sustainable coffee agriculture through public policy and land distribution. The coffee alliance has given economic empowerment to the people, while being environmentally green.

To reduce the rate of suicides in Oregon, a Washington County epidemiologist formed an unlikely collaboration with the county's death investigators in order to build a comprehensive pool of data about where and why suicides were taking place. The outcome was a better understanding of prevention tactics that included partnering with "motel clerks and housekeepers, animal shelter workers, pain clinic staffers and more" to teach warning signs and ways to respond.