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

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  • Charlotte may have cracked the code on affordable housing. Here's how

    A real estate investor has led the charge in creating a Housing Impact Fund in Charlotte, NC, to preserve affordable housing. The housing it seeks to preserve is not considered public housing but it does serve those who make less than the area’s median income. This type of housing is known as Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) and can be profitable over a longer period of time while simultaneously providing a service for the rapidly growing city.

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  • 2 Years After Legalizing Cannabis, Has Canada Kept Its Promises?

    Since Canada legalized recreational use of marijuana two years ago, prosecutions for possession of small amounts of the drug have all but disappeared, erasing a major racial disparity in Canadian law enforcement. But other aspects of the country's plan for racial equity to flow from legalization have yet to be realized. Few of the estimated 500,000 people with possession convictions on their record have managed the daunting process of getting their records cleared. Illegal sales still flourish, and Black and indigenous people have not found much success in the growing legal side of the business.

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  • In pursuit of self-determined development, Borneo's indigenous tribes turn to homegrown renewables

    An indigenous-led nonprofit group called Tonibung installed a micro-hydro electrical system for a village deep in Borneo’s rainforests. The project not only supplied much-needed energy for the villagers of Kampung Buayan, but it is also protecting the surrounding ecosystems, creating jobs for people, and encouraging youth to get involved. “We want to advocate for native rights to self-determination and empower indigenous groups to choose the kind of development that meets the aspirations of their people,” says the founder of the organization.

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  • Still Can't Breathe: How NYPD Officers Continue to Use Chokeholds on Civilians

    New York Police Department banned chokeholds in 1993, to prevent unnecessary injury and death. The practice has been scrutinized especially closely since the 2014 death of Eric Garner. But despite hundreds of complaints alleging the forbidden use of chokeholds, no NYPD officer has been fired for using a chokehold since 2014, nor have any complaints yielded more than some lost vacation time as a penalty. The failure of the policy stems from many causes, including ambiguity in the policy and its enforcement and lack of respect for investigative findings of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

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  • Zoom Funerals, Outdoor Classes: Jails and Prisons Evolve Amid the Pandemic

    When the pandemic forced jails and prisons to ban educational classes and cut off visits between outsiders and their loved ones behind bars, some jailers opened their facilities to remote-learning and -visiting tools. The result is a boom in the use of video conferencing for literacy classes, vocational training, family visits, and even to enable incarcerated people to attend family funerals. Some advocates for the incarcerated worry that in-person interactions could permanently be replaced by video, even after the risk of viral infection has eased.

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  • How Asian Canadians Are Fighting Racism During the Pandemic

    By establishing online platforms to make anonymous reports of anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, two Canadian organizations elicited hundreds of stories that help victims to process their experiences. The first platform, Elimin8hate, was the creation of a filmmaker who understands the therapeutic value of storytelling as means of coping with trauma. Her Vancouver group's alliance with a Toronto organization attracted funding to train discussion leaders who will lead anti-racism discussions in government and businesses.

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  • In the age of social distancing, Sudanese open their homes to Ethiopian refugees

    Tens of thousands of Ethiopian refugees fleeing to Sudan to escape the war in their home region ended up in the border town of Hamdiyet, where a refugee camp and its supplies were quickly overwhelmed. So local residents, despite the pandemic, opened their homes to the refugees, housing and feeding at least 16,000 in the town of 6,000 over a two-month period. So far, COVID-19 has remained under control. Even though thousands of refugees have eventually transferred to camps elsewhere, hundreds more arrive every day.

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  • A Thin Green Line With Global Impact

    For over a decade, environmentalists, Indigenous tribes, ranchers, politicians, scientists, and fishers in the Pacific Northwest have been able to defeat more than 20 proposals from coal and oil firms to ship fossil fuels from their ports. Through protests, public hearings, and petitions to government agencies, activists blacked almost every fossil fuel effort in the region between 2004 and 2017.

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  • Plantation tours bypass the ‘big house' to focus on the enslaved

    In an effort to combat racial injustice, former plantations are shifting the narrative typically given on tours to focus on the lives of the enslaved who once lived there instead of enslavers who owned the plantations. The initiative sprung from a need to accurately portray the history of slavery and better “inform the present.”

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  • Cooperation and Chocolate: The Story of One Colombian Community's Quest for Peace

    Plagued by an internal war, a group of villages in Colombia created a “Peace Community,” declaring themselves neutral in the conflict and focusing their efforts on cultivating the 150 hectares of cacao trees in collectively owned plots to sell to global markets. While villagers still experience violence, the earnings from their crops go into a collective pot and the community decides together how to distribute the funds. “To them, this is actually a very profound act of transcending traditional capitalist society models and building something together,” says an anthropologist who has studied the community.

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