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An act of gratitude is a living whole. In any process, we can distinguish a beginning, a middle, and an end. To be awake, aware, and alert are the beginning, middle, and end of gratitude. Step One: Wake Up To begin with, we never start to be grateful unless we wake up. Wake up to what? To surprise. As long as nothing surprises us, we walk through life in a daze. Step Two: Be Aware of Opportunities You will find that most of the time, the opportunity that a given moment offers you is an...

When I first listened to “The New Norm,” the première episode of the second season of the NPR radio show “Invisibilia,” I had to turn it off for my own safety. “Invisibilia” is about the unseen forces that shape our lives; this unseen force, a podcast, was shaping mine. I was walking down East Seventh Street—construction, bright sunshine, skateboarders, traffic cones, TV-shoot electrical cords, more construction—and listening to a story about an oil rig so harrowing that I had to pause it. I...

A proposed federal grant program aims to encourage cooperation between states’ juvenile justice and child welfare agencies, to help youth who encounter both systems. The Childhood Outcomes Need New Efficient Community Teams (CONNECT) Act would authorize grants for collecting data on and developing policies to help so-called dual status youth. “We need more information about who these young people are and the challenges they face so they have a fair shot at a path to success,” said Sen. Gary...

When Roger and Susan Elandt foster a child, they foster the whole family. “We open our home to the birth parents,” she said. They invite them to go along when the child has a doctor appointment. Susan even gets permission before arranging a haircut for a foster child. “We work together. We involve them,” she said. “We want to empower the parents. We run things past them. They’re still the parents. We’re just keeping the kids safe, happy and healthy until they can return, resume the...

Perhaps you have heard about it by now? There’s a movement spreading across the country when it comes to ministry settings: becoming trauma-informed . The topic concerns churches that are interested in missional engagement with the culture because there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that if we can break the cycle of adversity in childhood we can help everyone experience “life to the full” as Jesus intended (John 10:10). In the first post in the series , I focused only the first...

In this turbulent time of political changes, women’s rights, social, racial, gender and economic inequality, global conflicts, cultural instability, reproductive choice/health care issues, and environmental challenges of overconsumption and resource scarcity–how do we effect positive change through art? In the exhibition “ Vision: An Artists Perspective ,” self-identified women artists responded to this question. Read full article by Juliette Luini here .

Each year, California prosecutors charge hundreds of youth in the adult criminal justice system through a power called “ direct file .” Prosecutors make the decision to direct file behind closed doors without considering a youth’s background, mental health, trauma history, degree of participation in the offense or potential for rehabilitation. Direct file also does not allow for many due process protections — for example, no hearing before a judge and no right to appeal. Prosecutors in...

In 1997, the state of Wisconsin decided to experiment with the way it handled child support payments made to welfare recipients. In previous years, under the Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) program, recipients who also received child support payments from a non-custodial parent were required to relinquish the bulk of what they received in child support to the state — states only “passed through” the first $50 of child support in a given month. The federal welfare-reform bill...

In discussing the current wave of public demonstrations against police violence overtaking city downtowns and highways, some law-and-order absolutists have attempted to derail productive conversation in a number of ways. One person who’s been trying to keep the conversation on track is the University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld , who is considered an expert on matters of urban violence . Rosenfeld has written dozens of books and studies on this topic, dating...

Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3 —but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid’s exposure to vocabulary. By the time she’s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words. This disparity is well-documented. It’s the subject of myriad news...

Gaspar Marcos stepped off the 720 bus into early-morning darkness in MacArthur Park after the end of an eight-hour shift of scrubbing dishes in a Westwood restaurant. He walked toward his apartment, past laundromats fortified with iron bars and scrawled with graffiti, shuttered stores that sold knockoffs and a cook staffing a taco cart in eerie desolation. Around 3 a.m., he collapsed into a twin bed in a room he rents from a family. Five hours later, he slid into his desk at Belmont High...

More perhaps than any place in the world, the New York metropolitan region is known for its urban form—its physical layout and design. From the Manhattan skyline to the neon lights and tourist-packed streets of Times Square to the rolling hills and winding paths of Central Park, New York’s built and natural environment is part of what makes it such a vibrant, dynamic place to live. The distinctive form also has important health impacts. But, as discussed in a new report, State of the...