Seeking a Home for His Parents, a Son Built a Community

The law often traps offenders in a cycle of lawbreaking. LEAD allows for drug users to become committed to a program that helps them through the quitting process instead of throwing them into prison and isolating them from the help they need.

Poor neighborhoods in the United States lack quality play spaces for children, also known as play deserts. An organization is enabling communities across the nation to build their own playground.

Civic leaders in the U.S. struggle to effectively help their distressed neighborhoods. East Lake, Atlanta, created a replicable model that mixes residents of differing socio-economic status, and focuses on education and health in the area.

In Memphis, a creative blight-reduction initiative called 25 Square Blocks broke down the city into blocks. Inspectors were able to quickly identify all the violations and fix them, using the same amount of funding, but less time, as the old call-and-respond model.

Native American student graduation rates are much lower than that of any other demographic. The Red Cloud school teaches students on a reservation in South Dakota about the Lakota history to empower the kids and encourage resilience.

Through the Burbank Senior Artists Colony - a community created by EngAGE - low-income seniors learn how to become artists. The recreational classes hosted by the community keep people feeling phsyically and mentally young, allowing them to focus on recreation instead of financial hardship.

The U.S. prison population is aging, which is costly because older inmates need more care. Some states have responded by creating special wards, having the young inmates care for the old, or building nursing homes.

Alleys in Seattle were once places of illicit, illegal, and unsanitary activity. The International Sustainability Institute in Seattle began organizing music and art events to bring in people, which, in turn, cleaned-up the crime and garbage. As an urban development strategy, adjacent vacant storefronts re-opened for business and beautification could be seen in new gardens.

African American boys were being treated less-than-equally by the Oakland Unified School District – a change of culture was implemented and the playing field leveled. Now, Minnesota is looking to adopt the same system that was started in Oakland by creating schools that are exclusively for African American males in hopes to help them reach higher standards of achievement.

Boston professors visit countries and homes of foreign students to better understand their culture and gain insights about how to better teach them. The goal is to reach across cultural divides to help a big part of the student population — emigres from faraway lands — that is plagued with low standardized test scores and high dropout rates. Accompanying photojournalism: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2015/09/12/seeking-cultural-connections/L3mIQAQM3v9YT9A2K4JliL/story.html