September 2021

By Katie Surma, Inside Climate News, September 19, 2021 For Chuck O’Neal, a lifelong outdoorsman and environmentalist, the moment of truth came on election night 2020, as results rolled in from perhaps the most partisan campaign season in American history. He wasn’t watching Trump or Biden. O’Neal had spent the past two years running a campaign in Orange County, Florida, based on an unorthodox legal doctrine that holds that rivers, mountains and forests should have legal rights, just like...

By Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post, September 26, 2021 Adriana Bottino-Poage is 6 years old, with cherub cheeks and curls that bounce when she laughs. She likes soccer, art and visiting the library. She dreams of being a scientist and inventing a robot that can pull pollution out of the air. She wants to become the kind of grown-up who can help the world. Yet human actions have made the world a far more dangerous place for Adriana to grow up, according to a first-of-its-kind study of the...

By Rose Hackman, The Guardian, September 26, 2021 T he last week of July, as Gabby Petito and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, posted Instagram photos of themselves hiking barefoot in Utah’s Canyonlands national park, bronzed skin matching apricot-colored rocks, the body of Jerri Winters was discovered in Clinton Township, Michigan. Her boyfriend, Matthew Lewinski, immediately admitted to the police he strangled her last December, keeping her mutilated body in the basement of the home they shared...

By Anna Russell, The New Yorker, September 27, 2021 B efore the pandemic, Jane Goodall travelled three hundred days a year to speak to audiences about the climate crisis. “I used to do, like, three days in the Netherlands, three days in Belgium, three days in France,” Goodall, who is eighty-seven, recalled recently. In China or Australia, “it would be, like, two weeks, where they’d spread me through their country.” Everywhere she went, she met young people who were “angry, depressed, or just...

September 15-October 15 is National Hispanic Heritage Month . View a collection of Hispanic and Latino Heritage Events in the Commonwealth via the Governor's website . You can read about the history of the month and the importance of considerations of language, equity and justice during this month and beyond, as well as peruse a collection of resources , on NPR. Longstanding racism and the harms caused by the COVID-19 pandemic create significant strains on mental wellbeing. The pandemic has...

The pandemic is far from over but crucial COVID-19 protections and benefits are gone. When the Supreme Court struck down the CDC eviction moratorium in August, nearly 6 million renters — roughly 14% — were behind on rent, about 1 million faced the imminent threat of losing their homes, and landlords across the country were still waiting for federal rental assistance promised last spring. Some local or state moratoriums and assistance programs offer renters protection — for now. But in many...

NOW Innovation Forum Newsletter September 24, 2021 Powered by Vital Village “There are words your ears need to hear for the liberation of your soul” - Dr. Ken Hardy Welcome to the September 2021 edition of the NOW Innovation Forum Newsletter . We are so excited to share and announce new opportunities, tools, and resources. In this edition of the newsletter you will find new resources that have just been added to the NOW Resource Library along with the full archive of all of the publicly...

It’s back-to-school time and I am so happy to see all the teachers and students back in their classrooms doing what they do best: teaching, learning, and choosing love! September kicked off the start of the school year and thankfully I’ve been able to travel, in person, to visit schools in seven states around the U.S. who are using the Choose Love For Schools program, and to also virtually check in with many more. It made my heart happy to see all those classrooms bustling with activity.

Please join the California School-Based Health Alliance for the release of the Student Health Index— the first comprehensive statewide analysis to show where strategic investments in school-based health centers (SBHC) will have the greatest impact on improving student health and education. Join our conversation on Wed., Oct. 6, 12 Pacific: https://bit.ly/ StudentHealthIndex100621 Learn more: https://www. schoolhealthcenters.org/ school-based-health/school- health-index/ The twin pandemics of...

A webinar offered by the Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (CTIPP) Thursday, September 30, 1:30 - 3:00 pm EDT Register today . Addressing the mental health needs of child care providers and children in care is vital in the face of the pandemic, a population-level traumatic event. CTIPP is offering a "plug and play" framework to ease the process of developing a continuum of training, reflective coaching, and consultation to build the capacity for supporting relational health...

By John Blake, CNN Politics, September 25, 2021 Critics often describe the wave of voter restriction laws sweeping the nation as a new version of Jim Crow, the 19th century minstrel figure whose stage name became the symbol of a brutal era of Black oppression. But if you want to understand how these new voter restriction laws also oppress White people, it's more useful to invoke another cultural figure: Wile E. Coyote . Wile E. Coyote is the Looney Tunes cartoon character whose obsessive...

By Kaila Yu, The New York Times, September 23, 2021 Tara Blair Ball, a relationship coach in Memphis, met her ex on Match.com. They instantly clicked. “He felt like my soulmate. It was the little things; we both talked about the differences in the old Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire and the comic book. A lot of people didn’t know about these details, and it just felt like this bonding experience.” On their first phone call, they talked for eight hours — so long that Ms. Ball came late to...