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New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio is big on fairness . In an address last year, he laid out ambitious plans to make New York “the fairest big city in America.” The city’s jails , schools , hospitals and even its waste facilities have all adopted strategies during his tenure to reduce inequities for historically disadvantaged communities. Now, the foster care system is expanding its efforts to address longstanding disparities, especially for black children whose presence in the system is...

This month the Green New Deal was introduced in the U.S. Congress with much fanfare, and its opponents quickly mobilized. The resolution is more than a set of specific legislative proposals. It is a framework for an ambitious commitment to address climate change through eliminating fossil fuels and reducing agricultural emissions while also reducing inequality, creating well-paying green jobs, and providing people the skills to fill them. Given the threat the climate crisis poses to the...

From 1971 to 1983, former Hogg Foundation program officer Bert Kruger Smith hosted The Human Condition , a radio show that, across a span of 400 episodes, engaged a variety of notable guests in wide-ranging conversations on the things that make us human. In recognition of Black History Month, this episode of our Into the Fold podcast takes us back into The Human Condition’s archives with a 1974 broadcast featuring the late African American psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, whose innovative...

The federal bill reauthorizing and strengthening the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) set new standards for jurisdictions to treat youth in ways appropriate for their age, to reduce discrimination and disparate outcomes for youth of color and to provide a continuum of services, support and opportunities. Here are five changes in the new version of JJDPA practitioners should understand: 1. New standards for jurisdictions to treat youth in age-appropriate ways Each state...

There are more than a million and a half nonprofit organizations in the United States, and more are being born every day. But for all the writing about how nonprofits can be founded and scaled, almost no one publicly interrogates the other end of the life cycle: What happens when a nonprofit dies? The Nonprofit Quarterly reports that, although data on nonprofit closings are notoriously difficult to confirm through the Internal Revenue Service, the most likely age of organizational death is...

Foster parents, tasked with the 24-7 care of often-traumatized children, show up for parent-teacher meetings, ferry their charges to doctor’s appointments, supervise homework and serve up cuddles. Many work closely with struggling biological parents in hopes of an eventual reunion. These days, many foster parents are being asked to do even more, as an increasing number of children enter the foster care system with serious behavioral and mental health issues — issues that require a deft hand...

In the United States today approximately 12.8 million students—or 27 percent of all those in school—attend school in a district in which over 75 percent of students are non-white. In a new report , researchers at EdBuild , a non-profit that analyzes school-funding issues, calculate that these students are getting dramatically shortchanged on the school-funding front. The majority of racially concentrated, non-white districts are also low-income. Poor, non-white districts educate about 20...

What if far more women experience postpartum depression than we think? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 11 percent of women experience symptoms of depression after their baby is born. But that’s starting to look like a huge underestimate. [For more on this story by Adam Wolfberg, go to https://www.centerforhealthjournalism.org/2019/02/21/are-we-hugely-underestimating-how-many-women-have-postpartum-depression? ]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/04/689747637/if-youre-often-angry-or-irritable-you-may-be-depressed My response to the above article from NPR: Depression is the word people use when they feel bad. What people in this piece are struggling to understand is that depression is not one thing or in fact “a thing” at all. It’s certainly not a useful diagnosis. DSM diagnosis constricts our understanding rather than enhancing it. Here they are struggling to understand states of...

Me: "So how would you diagnose him?" Him: Laughing briefly and ruefully, "I don't think there is a diagnosis." Although in a way this may be uniquely true for our international patient, I want to suggest that it is always true. We are never treating anything so discreet as a singular mental illness. The brain does not parcel its problems that way. It struggles with its origins, its developmental impacts and errors, its many discontents, but these are manifest as problems in circuitry, in...

The power of social media connected me to the work of AFFIRM Research and Dr. Megan Ranney . Through months of tweeting and sharing resources, a relationship was forged that somehow broke through the anonymity of the internet and created a professional and also a personal connection. In the spring of 2018, I was asked to contribute a guest blog to the AFFIRM Research site. Here is a link to the blog: No More Empty Desks I am a school nurse being welcomed into a physician-driven organization.

When Kate Green calculated her health care costs last year, it just didn’t add up for her to stay insured. The 30-year-old worker in a real estate referral company had signed up for the lowest-cost plan possible, but it came with high out-of-pocket costs. Premiums ate up money Green had planned on spending to pay off car and college loans. The final straw: a $1,200 doctor bill for a minor knee injury. Green dropped her coverage in late 2018, and the tax penalty for not having insurance...