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

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  • Grounded by the pandemic, community groups are working to save Cleveland's Census

    With 75 micro-grants totaling $200,000, community organizations in Cleveland encourage people to complete the census in innovative ways. The Cleveland Caravan, or La Caravana, is a collaborative effort where trucks play looped messages in English and Spanish over a loud speaker with information on how to fill out the Census, vote, and stay safe during the pandemic. Asian Services in Action and Us Together, a refugee and immigrant services group, conduct outreach and have helped 1,190 and 700 people complete the Census respectively. Despite these efforts, the city's response rate is comparatively low.

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  • Can Prosecutors Be Taught to Avoid Jail Sentences?

    A nonprofit consulting firm, Prosecutor Impact, advances the cause of reducing incarceration and related reforms by helping reform-minded elected district attorneys confront one of the greatest obstacles to change: their own staff's opposition. In Columbus, a two-week curriculum educated front-line prosecutors about local services that can serve as problem-solving alternatives to punishment. It also taught them about poverty's challenges and engaged them in dialogue with prisoners, to make them more open to alternative approaches, which a local defense lawyer says was successful.

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  • To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along

    To combat wildfires in California, Native American tribal leaders and government officials are coming together to facilitate “cultural burnings” or controlled burns. Regularly burning the landscape prevents thick, dried out vegetation from catching fire and causing massive wildfires. Tribal groups used to perform this ritual in the 1800s, but as settlers moved West, many of them prevented Native Americans from doing these cultural burnings. While controlled burns can be challenging in places where there’s too much underbrush, these partnerships can bring together indigenous knowledge and wildfire management.

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  • Many COVID Test-Seekers Lost in Translation at City-Run Testing Sites, Say Staff

    In the run-up to the start of the 2020-21 school year, New York City Health + Hospitals ran COVID testing sites that each were supposed to provide telephone links to language interpreters in more than 200 languages. More than 40% of all NYC school students live in homes where English is not the primary language. In many cases, the test site staffs could not make use of the translation service, either because the phones were inaccessible or the service took too long to gain access to.

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  • Black Artists Find Ways to Make Their Voices Heard in Portland

    A burst of creativity is helping Portland confront its racist histories. From murals appearing on boarded-up buildings, protest art on exhibit at art centers, and artists gathering downtown to display their work depicting clashes between protestors and federal troops, new opportunities have been created for the city's Black artists. Community groups are also connecting artists with affordable housing resources and memorializing displaced Black communities using murals, photography, and oral histories. While a good start, more work is needed to bring about structural changes.

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  • ‘It's like paradise for us': the Cree Nation's fight to save the Broadback Forest

    Canopy works to preserve the untouched Broadback Forest, which stores twice as much carbon as the Amazon and is central to the Cree Nation. The nonprofit works with 750 corporations, including fashion brands, commercial printers, and publishers to reduce the amount of packaging they use and eliminate sourcing from biodiverse, ancient, and endangered forests. They help source waste from grain and other food harvests for packaging, paper, and fabric production and enlist companies’ support of conservation initiatives. They also partner with other groups to lobby the government to protect the Broadback forest.

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  • How Teenage Activists Are Talking to Family About Racial Injustice

    Young people are using social media as an effective way to engage in conversations with their families about racism, police violence, and Black Lives Matters protests. Many share their conversations on social media and find support from other young people struggling with talking about racial justice with family members. Social media is also being used to elevate and circulate images and videos of violence, which some point to as powerful ways to transform the attitudes and beliefs. On the other hand, some young people’s posts exacerbate tensions with family members.

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  • Amazon ‘women warriors' show gender equality, forest conservation go hand in hand

    Women “warriors” of the indigenous Guajajara people in Brazil use drones to patrol their territory of the Amazon rainforest in an effort to prevent deforestation. Because of their work, they have been able to cut deforestation down to just 63 hectares in 2018 compared with 2,000 hectares in 2016. While the work can be dangerous and difficult at times, the women are committed to protecting the forests as a way to combat climate change. “If we don’t act, there would be no forest standing,” says one of the women warriors.

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  • Why did 77 Ohio prisoners die of COVID-19, but just 10 in Pennsylvania?

    Pennsylvania prisons' relatively uncrowded conditions and approach to releasing people early when the pandemic hit have limited deaths in its prisons, making people incarcerated in Pennsylvania less than half as likely to die of COVID-19 as free Pennsylvanians. In neighboring Ohio, where COVID cases appeared simultaneously, the prison death rate has been nearly seven times higher than Pennsylvania's. Ohio's prisons are far more crowded, they rely much more on dorm-style housing, and their early-release rules were much more restrictive.

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  • Minnesota Freedom Fund Bails Out Those Who Can't Afford It

    The Minnesota Freedom Fund spent its first four years as a modestly funded nonprofit that used donations to bail people out of jail, as a means of countering a cash bail system that critics see as unfair to people living in poverty and people of color. From 2016 to early 2020, it had a budget of $100,000 per year and bailed out 563 people. Protests against Minneapolis police misconduct produced a windfall of $30 million in donations. The fund has excess funds, beyond what's needed to bail out protesters, and faces some criticism that it has freed people accused of violence.

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