Blog

A number of years ago, I asked Fran Ulmer, Chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission (USARC), to facilitate a conversation among Chugachmiut (the organization I was leading), with the University of Alaska and the Alaska Native Tribal Health...

  About 13,000 people on public assistance tumble into homelessness every month in Los Angeles County, according to a new study that experts say provides the clearest picture yet of extreme poverty in the region. Although many quickly find work...

  The San Antonio Express-News ( http://bit.ly/1Eixf8Q  ) reports her introduction to the challenges — and sorrow — of mental health problems started when she was young, the daughter of a minister who also was a counselor. She...

  Question: Though the city is out of the schools business, city government has a role in the lives of its younger citizens. What would you do to enhance the lives of young people? Leo Awgowhat:  Teach children to Just say “no”...

  In the early 1980s, Dr. Vincent Felliti began noticing that many of his patients who were having extreme illnesses in their adult years had adverse childhood experiences. Much of his research is outlined in “ Childhood Disrupted: How Your...

  When Alaska Health and Social Services Commissioner  Valerie Davidson  parked her car in downtown Anchorage Monday and walked to the swanky Hotel Captain Cook for a meeting with prominent policymakers, she did what she always...

  Libraries are increasingly a sanctuary for people who are homeless or mentally ill. We wondered how libraries function on the front lines of social service provision. Prevalence of homelessness in the United States On any given night in 2014,...

  Jamaica High School, in Queens, was once the largest high school in the United States. For most of its history, it occupied a majestic Georgian Revival building on Gothic Drive, designed in the nineteen-twenties by William H. Gompert, who had...

  It's obvious that jail isn’t good for the jailed. It may be particularly bad for people accused of minor crimes, who are confined not because they are likely to be dangerous but because, under our cash-bail system, they can’t afford...

  Looking at Danielle Barcheers, it's impossible to imagine her as a killer.   The perky 34-year-old often wears a smile and makes repeated apologies for the "mess" in her spotless cell. She comes off like a beam of light amid the 1,640...

  T HE TIP CAME IN  at about 7 p.m. on Monday, July 27. It was an email from a woman named Patricia Cronan, a banker who lived next door to a group home in Long Beach, California. She said the home, run by a nonprofit called Bayfront Youth...

  Paramedic Jacob Modglin parks on a palm-lined street in Oxnard and jumps out of his ambulance. He is prepared for any kind of emergency. But his patient is standing in the driveway of a one-story house, holding a thermos, and smiling. It's time...