June 2021

By Arelis R. Hernández and Griff Witte , June 2, 2021, for the Washington Post Not long after George Floyd was murdered on a Minneapolis street last Memorial Day, Meghan Dougherty felt an awakening in her suburban Texas school district. Teachers received training in the role that race had played in creating the United States’ vast inequalities. Students, parents and faculty members spent their summers studying and debating how to combat generations of systemic racism. Some crafted a plan to...

By Antonia Juhasz, May 27, 2021, for Rolling Stone In a ruling designed to have far-reaching effects on the world’s largest oil companies, a Dutch court has held Royal Dutch Shell liable for its contributions to climate change , finding the massive energy company’s ongoing fossil-fuel operations undermine basic guaranteed human rights. The court ordered the company to act immediately to reduce those harms by slashing its global carbon-dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030. The ruling from...

By Alex Daniels , June 3, 2021, for the Chronicles of Philanthropy News about the police killing of George Floyd was everywhere. Officials at the Berkeley, Calif., school, where Perfecta Oxholm’s son attended kindergarten last year, decided not to talk directly about the death with the students. That didn’t stop the children from asking questions. Over the next year, an anti-racism group started by Oxholm delved into ways parents could answer those questions and discuss race with their...

By Bruno V. Manno , Summer 2021 , for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Philanthropic support for the K-12 education reform movement is not immune to the institutional dysfunction and gridlock emblematic of American politics. This impasse disbanded the long-standing bipartisan K-12 reform coalition that advanced accountability in schools, which led to notable improvements in student achievement scores, especially for disadvantaged students. The coalition’s demise has affected education...

New fresh episode Monday June 7th, 1 PM pacific time on VoiceAmerica’s Health and Wellness! During a two-year period in Santa Maria, California -a city of 103,000- there were 23 murders within 17 months. This epidemic had many contributing factors, including gun violence. As the community reeled and came together, one factor that arose was the need for accessible mental health services. Fighting Back Santa Maria Valley (FBSMV) was asked during this time to develop a violence reduction...

We are going into our sixth year providing yoga teacher training programs in NC and beyond. Our programs are trauma-informed meaning that we teach soon-to-be teachers to understand that this is a people-focused practice. We don't subscribe to a certain methodology, but instead, one that recognizes actual humans in the room who have likely experienced some type of trauma in their lives. We believe in training yoga teachers in scope of practice, reminding them that they are not therapists...

By The HOPE National Resource Center, 6/3/21, positiveexperience.org/blog A new framework developed by a network of leaders at the Center for Community-Engaged Medicine at Tufts Medical Center is showing how the effects of ACEs can be mitigated and even healed through positive experiences. Titled Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences , or HOPE, the framework seeks to broaden our focus beyond ACEs and create a new paradigm that highlights the positive experiences that support children’s...

Hi everyone. We hope you're taking care of your spiritual, physical and mental health, wherever you are in the world. This has been a sombre week with the news of the discovery of the bodies of 215 precious children on the grounds of a residential school in Canada. Words cannot express the incredible pain those families must have felt for years, knowing nothing of the whereabouts of their babies. To have the revelation come at this time, during all that the world is experiencing and with the...

By Emma Knight | June 1, 2021, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Supporters of the juvenile justice status quo wrongly claim that community-based organizations are not yet strong enough to serve all youth who may otherwise cycle through juvenile courts, detention centers and on and off parole rosters. Ideally, opponents to reform say, youth would be served by nonprofits close to home, but that cannot happen until enough suitable nonprofits are available. This line of thinking ignores...

By Alexandra Lange, for Bloomberg CityLab, May 28th, 2021 When the playscape Swing Time popped up in Boston in 2014, visitors started having too much fun. The 20 hoop-shaped swings suspended from a white shade structure light up when in use, glowing purple with vigorous motion. Its creators at Höweler + Yoon Architecture had imagined people would swing in ones and twos. Instead groups tried to pile on together, hoping to share the sway and have a conversation. Susannah Walker, co-founder of...

By Julie Reynolds Martinez, for The Imprint, May 20, 2021 Each weekday, Corey Glassman greets clients seeking help for drug addiction at an unassuming building in downtown Berkeley, California. There are walk-ins and people with appointments, and these days, they all must be screened for symptoms of COVID-19 before Glassman, a certified substance use disorder counselor, can begin intake. His work as admissions manager at Options Recovery Services is rewarding but consuming, often tying him...

By George Yancy , Truthout , June 1, 2021 There is so much grieving that Black people have yet to do. The grammar of our suffering from anti-Black racism has yet to be fully created. As we currently deal with the pervasiveness of Black suffering, mourning and grief related to anti-Black racism, there has been a great deal of media coverage acknowledging that this year marks 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, where roughly 300 people — predominantly Black people — were killed; Black...