Blog

By Tik Root, The Washington Post, August 4, 2021 Tens of millions of people have been moving into flood zones around the world. The influx is as much as 10 times more than previously thought, and if the trend continues on its current trajectory millions more could suffer the impacts of flooding, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature . “People die and lose their homes and livelihood,” said Beth Tellman, a human-environmental geographer at the University of Arizona and...

By Xenia Shih Bion, California Health Care Foundation, August 5, 2021 When Kimberly Seals Allers delivered her first child at a top-rated New York City hospital 21 years ago, her wishes were ignored by doctors and nurses. Feeling disrespected and voiceless, she decided to confront the causes and to advocate for equity in pregnancy and childbirth for Black mothers and birthing people.* A journalist by trade, Seals Allers is author of three books on pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding; a...

By Rob Lieber, The New York Times, August 6, 2021 For struggling homeowners in the pandemic’s first year, there was hope early on that these hard times would not put people with mortgages out in the street. Thanks to quick governmental action, homeowners quickly got word that most of them could put off monthly payments for as much as 18 months — and even have the option to make them up as much as 40 years later. Renters weren’t so lucky. Sure, there were federal and regional eviction...

By Jody Heyman, Aleta Sprague, Alison Earle, et al., Health Affairs, July 26, 2021 Abstract Research has demonstrated that paid sick leave reduces spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases and improves preventive care and access to treatment across a wide range of conditions. However, the U.S. has no national paid sick leave policy, and even unpaid FMLA leave—often viewed as a foundation for new paid leave legislation—is often inaccessible. We analyzed a nationally representative...

Q&A — Psychologist Seth Pollak Studying poverty through a child’s eyes Research on early-life adversity should pay more attention to the perspective of children themselves By Alla Katsnelson 8.4.2021 Poverty affects nearly one in seven American children — about 10.5 million kids in total — and it has a long reach. Children living in poverty experience more stressors that can hinder healthy emotional and cognitive development and contribute to well-documented disparities in education,...

By Greg Breining, All About Birds, June 25, 2021 Jim Nugent grows cherries on his 40-acre orchard in Michigan’s Lee­lanau County, an idyllic peninsula of dunes and tree-covered hills jutting into vast blue Lake Michigan. The sur­rounding water moderates the worst of the frigid winters here, and the rolling topography drains cold air from the upland orchards. Cherries thrive in the sandy soil. “The fruit belt in Michigan is pretty tight to the coastline of Lake Michigan,” says Nugent. In that...

By Shane Dixon Kavanaugh, Oregon Live, July 28, 2021 A city of Portland drive to spend $114 million in federal coronavirus aid to help struggling residents last year overwhelmingly assisted Black Portlanders as well as other communities of color, according to an analysis released Tuesday. The sweeping set of initiatives approved by the Portland City Council included providing everything from Chromebooks to those with limited digital resources to food boxes and direct cash payments to...

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker, August 6, 2021 O n June 1st last year, a week after George Floyd was murdered, more than three hundred fires blazed across Philadelphia, according to police. In the previous days, there had been reports of two hundred commercial burglaries—otherwise known as looting—and more than a hundred and fifty acts of vandalism. Four hundred people had been arrested, and the National Guard was on the way. By that Saturday, June 6th, tens of thousands of...

By Emma Hall and Charlotte West, Cal Matters, August 5, 2021 Victoria Chubb was supposed to study photography at a college in New Mexico after graduating from high school in Riverside County, but was afraid of being far away from home. “I really did just chicken out to leave my reservation and to leave California,” said Chubb, a member of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. She tried to go back to art school in San Bernadino a few years later, but dropped out to care for her mother, who was...

In my speaking, consulting, and advocacy work, I’ve been focusing on three keys to better leadership: trauma, trust, and hope. I believe representativeness heuristic is what we do when we take mental shortcuts in order to process information quickly. Often, that can be helpful in a world with so much information. However, as we’ve discussed before when it comes to neuroscience and bias, how we see the world is often not how the world really is.

Leaving no one behind Indigenous peoples and the call for a new social contract There are over 476 million indigenous peoples living in 90 countries across the world, accounting for 6.2 per cent of the global population. Indigenous peoples are the holders of a vast diversity of unique cultures, traditions, languages and knowledge systems. They have a special relationship with their lands and hold diverse concepts of development based on their own worldviews and priorities. Although numerous...

Following the vision of Oklahoma’s First Lady, Sarah Stitt, the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) is proud to be the first state agency to become a Hope Centered and Trauma-Informed organization. We know that individuals, families and communities across our state face adversity and trauma. But we also know that Oklahomans can overcome adversity.