Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • How one African American mom tackles racism head-on

    As a reaction to police shootings of Black people in Missouri, one mom created a group called "Touchy Topics Tuesday" to invite White people and people of color to have frank conversations about race. By building trust and personal relationships, this group facilitates tough yet critical conversations surrounding race and racism in America and creates more empathy, support, and acceptance in the community.

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  • How a 276-person town in Kansas is turning an empty school into a business incubator

    When the city of Hanston, Kansas had to shut down the local middle/high school, residents refused to let the school sit vacant; instead, the building now houses a town-owned business incubator called Elk Plaza. Uses of the transformed building include the town's only commercial kitchen and movie theatre, a flexible event space, and office space for local entrepreneurs.

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  • "Pop-up Park" Blooms in ABQ's International District

    The Nature Conservancy in New Mexico and the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps joined together to transform a dirt lot into a pop-up park, created and maintained by surrounding neighborhoods. Community members work together to build planters and green space to encourage community engagement and interaction in an otherwise vacant lot.

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  • South Mountain HS cross-country team pushing for electric school buses

    Because of a collaborative effort between a high school cross country team and Chispa, an environmental advocacy group, Arizona’s Phoenix Union High School District has bought its first electric school bus. While nearly three times more expensive than a regular school bus, the school district considered the long-term sustainability, not just in terms of fuel and maintenance costs, but in regards to larger, environmental efforts as well.

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  • Former Juvenile Inmates Are Earning Double Minimum Wage to Grow Crops — and Business Skills

    For young adults leaving prison in Atlanta, they have the opportunity to participate in Gangstas to Growers, a local nonprofit that provides job skills training and personal development. The program, created in 2016, gives participants the opportunity to learn skills like farming, gardening, and how to run a business, and supplementary knowledge like financial literacy and environmental sustainability. Even more, Gangstas to Growers pays participants working on black-owned farms $15 per hour, which is almost twice the minimum wage.

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  • Creating a Sustainable Energy Future

    Tribal colleges in North Dakota and Minnesota are shifting to renewable energy practices as a means of lessening their energy footprint. According to the facilities manager at North Dakota's Turtle Mountain Community College, “It goes into our culture. We don’t want to hurt the environment.” The shift to sustainable energy has resulted in financial savings and provided classroom lessons for students.

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  • Post-Soviet Co-ops: Mongolian Herders Borrow a Tool From the Recent Past

    Members of Post-Soviet Mongolian tribes return to a co-op way of life in order to survive - but this time, the co-ops are community run, rather than state-run. Because climate change has degraded the quality of soil and made it difficult for pasture-raised animals to survive, these tribes have banded together to manage pastureland more efficiently and sell their products, as a group, to national companies.

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  • How One City Saved $5 Million by Routing School Buses with an Algorithm

    A well-designed algorithm can help increase the efficiency of complex, and troublesome, transportation systems. In 2017, Boston Public Schools hosted a competition to redesign its complicated bussing system. The selected proposal, an algorithm created by PhD students, increased efficiency by 20% overall, helping BPD cut tons of carbon emissions and ease budget constraints. The savings will allow BPD to reinvest in its schools.

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  • The complicated legacy of ‘broken windows' policing

    "Broken windows policing" evolved into destructive, heavy-handed tactics because its original notions of solving minor problems before they contribute to an atmosphere conducive to serious crimes became misused and distorted. Instead of a focus on high numbers of arrests and "zero tolerance" for any and all perceived misbehavior, this theory of policing was meant to be paired with community-building and problem-solving strategies. When that connection wasn't made, it became synonymous with the kinds of racially disparate enforcement alienating neighborhoods from police.

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  • Improving our own environment

    Pennsylvania’s Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy has built a grassroots base of volunteers that help clean up the local environment. Through education at schools and summer workshops, outreach projects, and asking volunteers to recruit new people, the Conservancy saw over 1,000 volunteers at its annual stream cleanup event. While the organization is still trying to figure out how to retain volunteers for long-term projects, the response to immediate projects has been overwhelming.

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