Blog

For nearly a decade, Child Trends has been tracking how states fund child welfare activities . I love talking about child welfare funding, but I’ve noticed others’ eyes glaze over when I announce, for example, that states spent over $28.2 billion on child welfare activities in state fiscal year 2012 (the latest data available). Numbers are so abstract. Those funds meant something major, though, to the 678,932 children who were victims of maltreatment in federal fiscal year...

When you walk into the office of the 28-year-old mayor of Ithaca, New York, you get an instant taste of what it means to have a young person running your city. An LED display mounted above the couch in his office flashes text messages that are sent directly to the mayor, Svante Myrick. The messages aren’t censored and are posted instantly for anyone within eyesight to read. Share Photo by Blake Fall-Conroy, used with permission. "Could you please pave James St.? The holes are really...

Close to 40% (38%) of formerly suicidal Canadians have reached a state of complete mental health, not only being free of symptoms of mental illness, suicidal thoughts or substance abuse in the preceding year, but also reporting almost daily happiness or life satisfaction, and social and psychological wellbeing according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto. The study will appear online this month in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. "We found that...

W e live in the era of, “yes, I can”. We tell ourselves that whatever we want to achieve, if we work hard enough, we can do it. Achieve more, be the best, push to the top, reach your goals, have no limits. Yes, you can! But sometimes all this “yes, I can” results in something very different indeed: a severe case of “no. I really, really can’t”. And when you really, really can’t, you have probably burned out. Burnout is a big problem in the UK...

On Monday night, DeRay Mckesson stopped by "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." The activist and organizer best known for his work within the Black Lives Matter movement was on to discuss Campaign Zero , an anti-police brutality initiative started last year. While there, Mckesson did a rundown of where we're at as a country on race and gave a quick primer on privilege. Race can be a really tricky thing to discuss. It's one of those issues that immediately puts people on the defensive and...

One of the primary goals of Los Angeles County’s child welfare system is keeping kids out of lock-up. But in this pursuit, the county took a surprising step: It used a predictive analytics tool as part of a program to identify which specific kids might end up behind bars. The process wasn’t incredibly complicated: It involved administering and assessing a questionnaire about a child’s family, arrests, drug use, academic success, and abuse history. But the goal was...

I just heard a story that I adore. It comes from  Ali Raza Khan , an  Ashoka  social entrepreneur and education reformer in Pakistan. Last year, he challenged 6,000 poor students across 74 charity government vocational schools to create ventures within a month. He went to them and said, "I believe in you. You can all start businesses and citizen groups and you can all succeed." He said this to all the students in all the schools, none coming from privilege. [For more of this...

Each year, tens of thousands of American students are still paddled, spanked or otherwise struck by school faculty as corporal punishment, finds a new report by the Brooking Institute . Federal data shows 166,807 students received corporal punishment in the 2011-2012 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. Of those, 28,569 were in Texas. The Brookings Institute report, released Thursday, also finds a dramatic racial disparity in the application of corporal punishment,...

In 2014, almost one in seven Americans received nutritional benefits, popularly known as "food stamps," through the Supplemental Nutrition Access Program. The program, which lifted 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2014, is one of the only federal assistance programs available to healthy adults without dependents, and the evidence increasingly indicates that it was a crucial stabilizer during the Great Recession, when many states actually dropped needy families from the welfare rolls. But...

Consider the following scenario. A policeman is on patrol, maybe he's quite new to working in the field. He sees a suspicious young man and decides to follow him. He turns the corner and sees that the man has drawn a gun from his pocket. In a snap second – almost too fast to think twice – he takes out his own gun and shoots the man dead. Only the man didn't have a gun at all, it was a mobile phone. Sadly, it's a familiar story. An incident exactly like it occurred only last week ...

Five-year-old Batoul has large cheeks and saucer-sized eyes that dart from side to side while she and the other Syrian children perform songs in Arabic and English. She's learning from caregivers while living in an orphanage known as Bayti ("home" in Arabic) in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli, where the Syrian refugee population has topped tens of thousands in the past few years. The classrooms on the first floor are colorfully decorated and the dormitories upstairs are neat. From the...

In an effort to help the area's more than 4,000 homeless residents, the Harris County Sheriff's Office has started a new outreach program. The Homeless Outreach Team provides transportation to transitional housing or doctor's appointments and offers food, water, clothing, bedding and hygiene kits. The team's primary goal is to help the homeless find housing. "Typically, our day revolves around helping people who cannot help themselves," sheriff's Lt. Robert Henry said. "We help people in...