July 2018

Dr. Elliot Tapper has treated a lot of patients, but this one stood out. "His whole body was yellow," Tapper remembers. "He could hardly move. It was difficult for him to breathe, and he wasn't eating anything." The patient was suffering from chronic liver disease. After years of alcohol use, his liver had stopped filtering his blood. Bilirubin, a yellowish waste compound, was building up in his body and changing his skin color. [For more on this story by PAUL CHISHOLM, go to...

As Bill Gates famously said in his book, “ The Road Ahead ” (1996), “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” At the Department of Juvenile Justice in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal and his leadership team have seen remarkable change in half that time. In 2013, the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice (GA DJJ) was identified by Gov. Deal as a department where change was possible and reform was...

Johnson City to co-host forum on community-wide systems of care On Sept. 5, the City of Johnson City will co-host a forum entitled Moving from Understanding to Implementing Trauma-Responsive Services in conjunction with the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA). The forum will address SAMHSA recommendations for communities to treat trauma as a component of effective behavioral health service delivery. Statistics recently released from the Tennessee Department of...

Forgiveness has been monumental in my healing journey. In learning to forgive myself and others, particularly my transgressors, I have set myself free. Here are ways you can incorporate forgiveness into your life:

In a report published last week , Jen Mishory , a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, sheds some light on an oft-debated topic in education circles: Do the benefits of "free college" programs outweigh the costs? There has been a proliferation of state-level "free college" programs in recent years. In 2014, Tennessee rolled out its Tennessee Promise initiative, which covers tuition and fees for all recent high school graduates at state community colleges and technical schools. Since...

You wouldn’t bring in a brain surgeon to treat a head cold , nor would you make a nutritionist singularly responsible for someone with a heart condition. And yet our approach to addressing youth violence in the city too often provides generic and isolated responses where tailored and collaborative ones would be more effective. Investments aimed at violence prevention efforts are spread across youth development programs that serve low-income youth who, while in need of robust programs and...

In 2017, 70 percent of low-income households in America had some kind of civil legal problem, ranging from divorce to a housing dispute, according to the nonprofit Legal Services Corporation. But in the civil system, there is no guaranteed right to representation. That means families living near the poverty line handle the vast majority of those cases — 86 percent — with little or no professional legal help to guide them. This civil legal system “crisis”, as advocates call it, has sent...

Decades ago, Detroit was known for a strong middle class with good manufacturing and blue-collar jobs. The city’s combined economic and housing strengths endured shocks as local manufacturing employment declined and subprime lending fueled a rise in foreclosures. During the foreclosure crisis, media outlets such as the Nation and the Detroit News reported that Detroit lost as much as $1.3 billion in personal wealth, and more than 100,000 Detroit homes fell into foreclosure . As Detroit...

This first study , from Loma Linda University, looked at centenarians and seniors, many of whom were “well on their way to becoming centenarians,” in the Loma Linda, CA community. This area is one of the five “blue zones”—areas around the world where people live extraordinarily long lives—outlined in the book of the same title by Dan Buettner. The authors interviewed community members about their early life experiences, and found that they were more often than not peppered with adverse...

Is homelessness in America surging or ebbing? It depends not only upon where you are, but who you ask—and what, precisely, you’re looking for. Should you live in a big, high-cost city like Los Angeles , San Francisco , or Seattle , you’d be forgiven for assuming that the number of people living in homelessness is exploding: In those metros, tent cities full of those priced out by soaring housing costs have created a major crisis for local leaders. Overall national figures from the U.S.

Yesterday, the New York City Council made New York the first jurisdiction in the country to make telephone calls from its prisons and jails free . The city will not only give up the commission it currently makes on phone calls – it is going a step further and making the phone calls themselves free. This change will save the poorest families in the City of New York more than $8 million a year. In many prisons and jails, calls home from jail are very expensive, costing up to $1/minute .

Please sit back and enjoy our "conversation between friends" with the director of volunteers, Michael Weinberg, and volunteer extraordinaire, Mark Dorsey, as they discuss the role of The Ronald McDonald House Charities in helping critically ill children and their families navigate their way through an adverse childhood experience. The support they offer is crucial for helping build resilience in the patients, their siblings and caregivers.