Category Archives: Intentional Communities

As more and more people get vaccinated, the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths are finally declining. We know this pandemic wont last forever.

But what happens next? Do we just pick up where we left off in March 2020? Or have things changed in a fundamental way?

We asked 10 people to imagine life after the pandemic.

What will work look like after COVID? What about parenting? Friendship? Faith? Will our understanding of public health change, as epidemiologists race to get ahead of the next pandemic?

The truth is, nobody knows exactly what comes next. Uncertainty continues to reign. But for the first time in a long time, it feels like we can reasonably contemplate the future we are no longer locked in the perpetual present.

Read through each contributor's short essay below, or jump around to different topics using this navigation:

In the beginning, we had Zoom, and it was fine: virtual happy hours and online game nights that kept friendships alive when we had to be physically apart. But the pandemic separation couldnt last.

In late spring, I took my first illicit walk with friends; we wore masks and glanced sideways to see if wed be shamed. By summer, we were venting our frustrations during walks around a pond, holding birthday dinners outdoors, taking socially-distanced selfies with the timers on our phones. When winter came, we layered up like ice fishermen and huddled around fire pits on 30-degree nights.

I want to double-dip in the guacamole. I want to sip your cocktail to see if I like it, too.

Weve needed each other, and thats good to know. One of the hardest things about COVID has been the way it rendered friendship dangerous so many transmissions springing from in-person gatherings, as friends came together despite the directives. You can condemn all of those people as cavalier about public health. Or you could see their lapses as a feature of humanity.

Weve learned, this past year, that connection isnt the same when its remote. And while many of us have broken the rules at least once or twice, we should acknowledge the lengths weve gone to see each other in relative safety.

When the COVID threat is gone, I predict that well double down on the joys of physical friendship. I want to live dangerously with my besties. I want to double-dip in the guacamole. I want to sip your cocktail to see if I like it, too. I want to scream together into a karaoke microphone. Ill pick the first song: With a Little Help From My Friends. --Joanna Weiss,Editor, Northeastern University'sExperience magazine

In some ways, COVID-19 will be remembered as a triumph of biomedical science. We developed safe and effective vaccines something that usually takes a decade or more in less than a year. And, despite a number of stumbles, improved therapeutics reduced mortality from the virus in hospitals more than fourfold in a matter of months.

But COVID-19 provided, even more memorably, a terrifying and revealing view of our failure to create a world that generates health.

Once this pandemic ends, well undoubtedly be having more conversations about how to prevent future pandemics, and ensure a healthier future. But will we be thinking about health in a bigger sense?

Fundamentally, health is not health care.

Fundamentally, health is not health care.Decades of underinvestment in healthy environments, adequate education, safe workspaces and livable wages resulted in a country that was unhealthy and vulnerable to the ravages of a novel virus. The U.S. has had the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infections throughout the pandemic.

This moment should teach us that avoiding the next pandemic will require us to rethink how we approach health, so there are no haves and have nots. Its recognition that we cannot be healthy, unless we build a world with safe housing, good schools, livable wages, gender and racial equity, clean air, drinkable water, a fair economy.

Its time to change how we think about health. --Sandro Galea,Dean, Boston University, School Of Public Health

My husband and I are in our late 60s. Fed, housed, and able to freelance, weve weathered the past year with gratitude and relative ease. But like many of our peers, the pandemic has intensified our feelings about how we want to live the rest of our lives, in intentional community. Our choices feel quite personal, but they are representative of emerging trends.

In a post-pandemic future, we can expect to see the biggest change in where and with whom the elderly live. With 40% of all fatalities, the viruss impact on residents of nursing homes has been earth-shaking, fueling peoples desire to age in place or live in settings where mutual aid is the norm. Stunned by the isolation of the pandemic, most of the new recruits to our co-housing community have been people over 60. Local programs supporting in-home care are on the rise, and state and federal programs paying family caregivers are also likely to expand.

Technological advances will also pave the way for aging in place. Telehealth is more widely accepted, and devices like smart speakers will soon notify loved ones if you call out for help. Indeed, the pandemic has highlighted our intergenerational interdependence. With schools and daycares closed, working parents have moved in with their parents so that they can help mind the kids, and many adult children, having been deprived of the ability to see their quarantined loved ones, are determined to pre-empt that scenario in the future.

Dont take your family and friends for granted. Protect your health. Accept that youre going to die and live accordingly.

Will market volatility make it less likely that people will retire? Or will the COVID-induced knowledge of our own vulnerability fuel our urgency to pursue what we value versus what were paid for? I dont know. But I do know that COVID has deepened the lessons that aging inevitably bestows: Dont take your family and friends for granted. Protect your health. Accept that youre going to die and live accordingly. --Julie Wittes Schlack, Writer

I never harbored any illusions about living in a culture that values mothers. From day one, my experience as a mom has been peppered with moments of rage and periods of existential crisis. I love the love of motherhood, but the work of mothering is mostly unsupported and un-respected. The nonstop parenting, teaching, cooking, cleaning that mothering has entailed during the pandemic has confirmed that this type of labor is also, for me, largely a drag.

Although the beauty of motherhood is widely celebrated on Instagram and elsewhere, our primary value lies in our ability to raise the next generation of workers and consumers. As the pandemic has shown, mothers needs dont really seem to matter. Our needs dont impact the bottom line.

The pandemic calcified my fury that mothers are expected to hold up the whole of a very broken system, while being given nothing in return.

The pandemic calcified my fury that mothers are expected to hold up the whole of a very broken system, while being given nothing in return. In the past year, weve seen a flurry of essays and reporting showing that women and mothers have been disproportionately burdened with the impossible task of keeping society afloat (the latest New York Times series is appropriately titled, The Primal Scream.) The coverage is affirming and necessary, but not a single mother I know has been surprised about any of the awful statistics or heartbreaking personal stories.

When this is over, Im looking forward to no longer being the sole provider of all things to my kids. But I also wonder if the tidal wave of momentum inspired by the pandemic will carry us through to something better than think-pieces.

We need equal and fair pay for mothers. We need humane prenatal and postnatal care, and paid parental leave legislation. We need to reform our racist health care system that has led to countless Black mothers deaths. We need to end the debate on whether womens reproductive rights are actual rights. And we need to radically rethink our capitalist system, which uses mothers and other care workers to uphold the primary concerns of buying and selling, while denying them adequate compensation or even cultural respect for their indispensable work.

I wonder if womens rage will coalesce into action. I hope so. --Sara Petersen, Writer

I spent many nights in the last year contemplating Gods wisdom and purpose, while fielding the despair and weariness of many Muslims who sought my counsel. They wanted to know, was COVID a pandemic or the plague, and what was the difference? Was it Gods wrath or Gods cleansing? Was there a collective spiritual remedy to make it all go away?

As we begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel, I wonder if and how our faith as Americans has changed.

It was no coincidence that the height of the pandemic in Massachusetts last spring struck during the Holy days of all three Abrahamic faiths. Easter, Passover and Ramadan came and went in our homes. We had to learn to celebrate without the pomp of public worship. People who attended church, temple and mosque but never took it upon themselves to utter their own personal prayers were forced to petition God themselves.

God forced us to stop our schedules to give us a moment to take faith into our own hands...

I watched my own teenage children reluctantly read the Quran aloud at home for the Eid Holidays (without the help of the entire mosque). As life returns to normal, I suspect well have a deeper appreciation for our respective worship-communities and the spaces of comfort they provide us.

I also think the goals of the American faithful have shifted slightly. We want a little less of the world now, and more authentic connections with real people. God forced us to stop our schedules to give us a moment to take faith into our own hands and for the most part we did.

Now I believe God will allow us to embrace one another again, both literally and figuratively. --Taymullah Abdul-Rahman, Imam, Massachusetts Department of Correction

My greatest fear is that K-12 education in a post-COVID world will not change enough. As an 8th grade teacher, the past 12 months have completely changed how I approach my work.

In-person, Ms. Avashia was all about urgency and rigor and content, content, content. Pandemic-teaching Ms. Avashia moves much more slowly with her students.

Now, I focus my efforts on deep learning, instead of coverage of pages of standards. Each day, we work through one meaningful task, instead of trying to speed through three or four. We play more in class using riddles or visual puzzles, telling jokes in the chat, changing our Zoom profile pictures, to make each other laugh. Ive even dressed up in costumes multiple times this year just to bring kids some moments of humor.

Teaching during the pandemic has pushed me to be so much more human with my students, and to teach into their humanity. And that, at its core, is completely different from how education has traditionally been structured in our society.

I believe deeply in the democratic cornerstone of public education. But we have never succeeded in fulfilling its promise for all of our students, particularly those students most impacted by racial and economic injustice in our country.

Our school buildings have been sites of over-policing of students bodies, of adultifying and criminalizing adolescent behavior, of reducing student learning down to what can be demonstrated on standardized tests.

We have an opportunity to walk away from those practices forever. To build educational settings that are grounded in students humanity, and designed with their voices, needs and interests at the center. To ensure that our schools are structured and staffed to prioritize relationship-building, robust mental health services and targeted academic supports. We can affirm the notion that schools are cornerstones of both our democracy and our communities, by fully funding the work that we as a society are asking them to do.

We can affirm the notion that schools are cornerstones of both our democracy and our communities...

We can do all of this. We should do all of this. The question is: Will we? --Neema Avashia, Teacher, McCormack Middle School

The culture of time at many companies wasnt healthy before the pandemic. Some organizations were trying to address bad habits (no time to think, everything-gets-done-by-meetings culture), before new problems like Zoom fatigue and FOLO (Fear Of Logging Off) took hold.

The pandemic accelerated a comeuppance about how the workplace can and should evolve. I think the lessons we learned this year will almost certainly lead to greater flexibility in the long term.

This year proved that a lot of work can be done remotely. It also made clear the handful of things better done in person bonding, mentoring and new relationship building. Companies will need to bring people together regularly to ensure the kismet that happens in 3D.

The pandemic accelerated a comeuppance about how the workplace can and should evolve.

Every worker needs time and space for quiet work, time and space for meetings, and time and space for informal and more casual communication. This was true pre-pandemic, and its still true. Future workspaces are likely to reflect these needs: large library-like areas where people can go to do their thinking (like the quiet car on a train); lots of formal and informal meeting areas; and administrative spaces to deal with email and chat with coworkers.

Back-to-back meetings 7 to 10 Zooms a day is not an effective way to work. It leaves no time to think, or to actually do the work generated in those meetings.

Companies seem to have finally learned that their employees are whole people. Work is part of their lives, and their lives beyond work are essential and valuable to their well-being. In our post-COVID world, I suspect the role of chief people officer and chief wellness officer will evolve, and be seen as a critical role for a healthy organization.

COVID forced organizations to change. It forced them to be more flexible, and that experience highlighted what went missing in a 100% remote environment. The job of leaders is now to stop, reflect and embrace what we discovered in the last year, and consciously build workplaces and workspaces that harness those lessons, to enable companies to achieve their goals and workers to feel fulfilled. --Julie Morgenstern, Productivity Expert, Author

Ive lived in Chelsea my whole life, but I dont remember my community ever being in the news as much as it was during the first peak of the pandemic. With the highest infection rate in Massachusetts and blocks long lines of people waiting for food Chelsea was on display for the world to see. Even my family in Argentina saw news reports of our city being slammed by the raging pandemic.

During those difficult days, people opened up their hearts for the residents of our community. Those of us involved in addressing the coronavirus pandemic in Chelsea, received an outpouring of support through donations, volunteering, well wishes and prayers for recovery and hope.

Other low-income, ethnically and racially diverse communities like Chelsea faced the same wrath. Years of structural oppression and racism leading to health, environmental and economic disparities, have made the effects of COVID-19 so much more pronounced.

My post-pandemic hope is that the hearts and minds of those outside of these cities remember how much communities like Chelsea have sacrificed. Will you remember us in six months? Six years? Sixteen years from now?

Will the people of Massachusetts continue to have communities like Chelsea in their hearts and minds?

Will the people of Massachusetts continue to have communities like Chelsea in their hearts and minds? Will you reflect on our disproportionate environmental and industrial burdens, poor public transportation, food insecurity, housing instability and low wages for essential workers? Will others say, We can shoulder a little bit of the burden, so its not all on the backs of low-income communities of color?

We must learn from the past year, and from the reasons for Chelseas soaring infection rates. We must pass laws to protect environmental justice communities. We must say no to new toxic facilities. We must prioritize the health and well-being of all people, but particularly those who have faced oppression, discrimination and racism, which caused these health disparities. --Roseann Bongiovanni, Executive Director, GreenRoots

Im sitting behind my screen, fractured from the world.

I dont feel the need to see other people as much as I did earlier in the pandemic. Has something happened to me on a molecular level? Is the isolation hitting other writers and artists the way its hitting me?

We already live in a world of separate platforms. News broadcasts spin the same events in different ways for different people. The platforms dictate what we see based on what the platforms think we want to see. They strut the arrogance of knowing us better than we do. And now the pandemic has further alienated all of us.

I hope the isolation weve endured this year wont stunt our ability to connect to each other.

This worries me, because I love when artists create the specific thats felt universally. I wrote a book about a boy and his family in rural Jamaica. So far it has resonated in other parts of the world. But if we continue to be so isolated will we be too separated to partake in varied experiences?

It was only a short while ago when some Hollywood execs deemed a movie like Black Panther was too ethnic to have widespread appeal. They doubted that the specific had universality. The film proved them wrong, but what if we continue to grow apart, divided? Will some art be discarded as irrelevant because large swaths of people cant relate, cant see the universality?

I believe in art as a unifying force, as a medium that reveals our commonalities and reasons to strive together. I hope the isolation weve endured this year wont stunt our ability to connect to each other. --Desmond Hall, Author, Visual Artist

With more than half a million lives lost in the U.S., the COVID crisis has yielded a sobering lesson about human resistance to change, even in the face of devastating consequences.

Wearing masks in public? A no-brainer. Avoiding large indoor gatherings? Ditto. Yet when official directives and common sense have impinged on individual choice, too often they have collided with indifference, indignation and defiance.

Some wonder if there are lessons to be learned from the pandemic as we seek to avert the worst ravages of climate change. With many working remotely rather than traveling daily to their offices, reduced commuting has doubtless contributed to the past years drop of more than 10% in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Its a pretty sure bet, though, that commuters will refill our highways, with more people than ever traveling by car for fear of infection on public transit.

Air travel, too, is likely to rebound as business trips come back into vogue and leisure travelers take to the skies.

The COVID crisis has yielded a sobering lesson about human resistance to change, even in the face of devastating consequences

Rather than placing our bets on behavioral change, we need to demand of government and industry what we cannot expect of ourselves. All levels of government must require a true gearing-up of renewable energy as our primary electricity source.

In addition, the federal government must mandate a shift to cleaner, leaner motor vehicles a challenge bigger than simply electrifying the behemoths that now roll off our production lines. And governing bodies at all levels must embrace an unprecedented commitment to energy justice, making it possible for low-income people to make their homes more efficient, buy energy-efficient appliances, and install solar power on their rooftops and in their communities.

It would be folly to rely on new patterns of human behavior emerging from the COVID catastrophe to address climate change. We need to make an all-out investment in retooling the engines of our society. --Philip Warburg, Senior Fellow, Boston University Institute Of Sustainable Energy

Amy Gorel, Lisa Creamer and Kathleen Burge helped with the production of this piece. The audio essay was was produced by Cloe Axelson, with help from David Greene; it was mixed by Michael Garth.

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We Asked 10 People To Imagine Life After The Pandemic. Here's What They Said - WBUR

By Jenny Englerth

In early February the Biden administration announced an important Community Health Center Vaccination Program to guarantee greater access to vaccines for underserved communities through Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC).

This plan affirms the importance of FQHCs, also known as Community Health Centers, often located in underserved regions of our state providing accessible care to populations most affected by COVID-19. A recognized leader in comprehensive primary and preventive care to patients of all ages in urban and rural areas, we accept every patient, regardless of their ability to pay.

As the President and CEO of Family First Health, serving 25,000 patients every year, I believe the federal governments decision to focus vaccine distribution though the FQHC network recognizes the important role our health centers play in helping to solve the massive divide in access to quality care, even beyond the vaccine.

Bridging the expansive levels of disparity in care in our country requires intentional focus on how healthcare should be reflective of our changing communities in order to provide care through the lens of the unique needs of our growing diverse populations. We must meet our patients where they are in their health journey in order to build trust to motivate patients to put themselves first with routine care.

Now is the time to have serious conversations about how access to quality care affects every corner of every community. According to a Columbia University study, the number of Americans living in poverty grew by eight million in a six-month span in 2020 amid the pandemic. That means the care FQHCs deliver is in even greater demand than just 12 months ago.

Throughout COVID, national headlines have continued to draw our attention to the disparities in health outcomes within communities of color. National data shows that Black and Hispanic populations represent the highest at-risk individuals with the greatest challenges to accessing health care services.

Im proud to say that Family First Health, like many FQHCs, has assumed an essential frontline role in establishing care models designed around the realities of our communities. And were making a felt difference at a time when the need is growing at rapid pace. Our goal is to build trust as a fundamental aspect of our relationship.

We understand that for decades minority communities have struggled to build relationships with health care organizations who fail to understand their needs. FQHCs are the exception to this history of mistrust.

We are truly a health center that looks and sounds like the community we serve. From Spanish-speaking providers, to accessible and diverse health care professionals and health care facilities actually located in their local neighborhoods, we are the quality health care home of the community.

Our team has taken on the necessity to be innovative in how we deliver care most recently expanding the reach of our health center at Hannah Penn K-8 School in York City.

Through a $2 million multi-year grant from the United Health Foundation, we are taking care into the school to reach students while deploying community health workers into the school community and surrounding neighborhoods to build trusting relationships with the families living in the Hannah Penn area.

By establishing a true school-based health care model, were tearing down barriers and building healthier futures for our children. Our organization was not willing to accept the declining health of our communitys youth and we rose to the occasion.

The Hannah Penn Center is now the countys only school-based health center with medical services also available to community residents. This facility which already provides access to health care, preventative care and mental health services, will now help those living within that community to seek out and receive more accessible care, including COVID vaccinations, from a trusted facility, where patients and local residents feel most at ease.

This level of familiarity is important to how we care, and we must absolutely continue to evaluate how we continue to innovate with a constant lens of our changing patient. This will be especially important as we take on the post COVID care environment. Patients, of very diverse backgrounds, are able to manage their health due to constant fear of infection and numerous other pressures. How we develop care models in the midst of this massive shift in consistent care will require a level of understanding like weve never faced before.

Community Health Centers will meet this need and play a more vital role than ever before. Our knowledge of our community will be a key factor in how we foster community health.

Family First Health and the other FQHCs throughout Pennsylvania will be the difference in supporting the advancement of the health of our broader community through our established roots within the most vulnerable communities. Our ability to provide primary and integrated healthcare services is essential to our communities and our economies recovering from this pandemic.

We look forward to caring for you and your community.

Jenny Englerth is President/CEO for Family First Health.

Originally posted here:

Community health centers are helping to get vaccines to people who need it most | Opinion - pennlive.com

A West Allis woman is facing attempted homicide charges after police say she exchanged gunfire withpolice officers following a night of excessive drinking and drug use.

Brandi Bacon, 33, was charged Thursday in Milwaukee County Circuit Court with two counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide, both felonies. Police shot and injured her March 13 during a confrontation in the 5800 block of South Pennsylvania Avenue.

If convicted on both counts, Bacon could face a maximum of 120 years in prison.

According to the criminal complaint:

A caller told police about 8 p.m. that Bacon, while intoxicated,had fired a shot into the air.

When officers arrived, they found Bacon sitting in a bush outside aresidence holding a handgun. She fired at them once after they told her to drop the gun telling them to "leave her alone" then continued firing after the officerstook cover behind a nearby van. At least one officer returned fire.

Bacon moved toward the van while shooting and eventually shot at one officer from point blank range but missed, then took aim at the other. Both officers shot at her; at least one bullet struck Bacon in the abdomenand knocked her to the ground.

In a subsequent interview with police Bacon said she had no recollection of the shootout. She said that earlier that night she drank multiple bottles of wine and used both cocaine and marijuana.

Online court records indicate Bacon made her initial court appearance Friday. She was ordered held on a $200,000 cash bond. Her preliminary hearing is scheduled for April 7.

Contact Steve Martinezat (262) 650-3182or steve.martinez@jrn.com. Followhimon Twitter at @stjmartinez.

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

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A West Allis woman was high on drugs when she repeatedly shot at police in Cudahy, complaint says - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Mon, 03/15/2021 - 19:50pm | By: Van Arnold

Jaborius Ball came bouncing into his new position two months ago within the office of Student Affairs at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and has been on a determined roll ever since.

Ball, a native of Foxworth, Miss., was named the Universitys new Director of Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement in January after previously serving as Coordinator of African-American Student Affairs at the University of Arizona.

To say he is appreciative of this new challenge is a bit like saying a basketball is round.

Being intentional, I was seeking an opportunity to serve students back in my home state, said Ball. Ive had the good fortune of working in the State of Michigan and State of Arizona, but never in the state that made me who I am today. So, I wanted to do just that.

As part of its ongoing mission, USMs Office of Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement promotes the holistic development of multicultural students through leadership development, educational programming and collaboration with University departments. The office strives to increase recruitment and retention of multicultural students by creating a strong sense of campus community and assisting students in becoming successful graduates.

Mr. Ball is an outstanding addition to the Division of Student Affairs and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to our campus. We are very excited to have him as part of our team as we strive to develop healthy, connected, learning focused students and communities, said Dr. Dee Dee Anderson, Vice President for Student Affairs at USM.

Ball has already outlined some specific objectives for the office moving forward:

Ensure that all facets of USM students, organizations and communities are engaged in diversity and inclusiveness

Educate the campus-at-large with training on inclusivity and diversity, diversifying faculty and staff, representation, social justice, microaggressions and implicit bias

Cross-campus and community collaboration in creating a more inclusive campus climate

Support historically underserved student communities to improve their experiences and success at a PWI (Predominantly White Institution)

Ball earned his undergraduate degree in secondary education social studies and geography comprehensive from Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in 2015. Three years later he completed his masters degree in educational leadership higher education student affairs at Eastern Michigan.

He stayed on at his alma mater to become EMU Opportunity Program Assistant before moving on to his role in Student Affairs at Arizona.

Balls USM office staff includes two professional staff members, Tegi Jenkins-Rimmer and Nneka Ayozie; and graduate assistants Roshanna Stalling and Stepfon Green. Amyah Banin serves in the office as a student worker.

Given the volatile social climate that has prevailed in the U.S. over the past several years, Ball emphasizes the importance of multicultural engagement. Never more so than on the campuses of predominantly white institutions of higher learning.

In lieu of the racially charged incidents that occurred in the last year, institutions have gone above and beyond to change the climate of their campuses, he said. Campuses are reflective of the communities surrounding them and with the push to support marginalized communities, it is challenging universities to re-examine their rhetoric and practices.

Ball credits his grandparents for paving the way toward his academic achievements and professional development. Neither graduated from high school, but Ball says they encouraged family members to seek higher education opportunities.

Coming from a small town in Mississippi, I did not grow up with a lot; however, my family embedded the importance of education in me at an early age, said Ball. My grandmother used to say, Get your lesson, because they cant take away what you have up here (head).

Ball highlights a moment from his time as a graduate student at Eastern Michigan to illustrate his passion for helping students reach their full potential. The hallmark occurred while he served in the EMU Opportunity Program, designed to help students who did not perform their best in high school make a smooth transition into college life.

He noted that one student in particular, with whom he had met weekly as her academic coach, expressed at the programs end-of-year celebration: I want to be the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I believe I can because Jaborius said I could.

Ball said the declaration brought him to tears. I vowed on that day that at any point in my professional career, I would not take on any position if it didnt feel like that situation, and ironically, that one moment brought me home to Mississippi.

To learn more about USMs Office of Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement, call 601.266.5724 or visit: https://www.usm.edu/student-affairs/office-inclusion-multicultural-engagement.php.

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USM's New Director of Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement Eager to Help Underserved Students Excel - Southern Miss Now

There have always been health inequities in certain communities, but the Covid-19 epidemic has exacerbated many of them and brought them to the forefront of the public's mind over the past year.

Why so many Black patients distrust Covid-19 vaccines (and 3 ways to rebuild their trust)

In this episode of Radio Advisory, host Rachel Woods sits down with Fred Cerise, CEO of Parkland Health and Hospital System, and Steve Miff, president and CEO of Parkland's Center for Clinical Innovation, to talk about why the health system stepped in to address inequities in Covid-19 vaccination rates, and how the organization is doing it.

Read a lightly edited version of the interview below, or download the episode to hear the conversation.

Rachel Woods: Over the last year, there has been a real reckoning with the inequities that exist here in the United States, inequities that result in dramatic differences in health outcomes for people of color. As white people continue to receive the majority of lifesaving coronavirus vaccines, there is real potential for the health equity divide to get a lot worse.

So, I wanted to bring an organization to this podcast to talk about its proactive efforts and share what it's doing to reduce inequities, to combat legitimate hesitancy, and to build trust with communities of color. To do that, I've brought two leaders from Parkland Health and Hospital System: the CEO, Fred Cerise, and the president and CEO of Parklands Center for Clinical Innovation, Steve Miff.

Now, I want to start at the high level because there is so much that organizations can do to focus on reducing inequities. What led you and ultimately Parkland to focus on inequities in Covid-19 vaccinations specifically?

Fred Cerise: Inequities is a big part of the work we do with a public hospital, with the public health system in Dallas County. Looking at access to care and outcomes and those types of things, it's part of what we do.

We know that at times of crisis, those disparities become exacerbated. We've seen that happen over and over again. We knew that that was coming. With the onset of Covid-19, whether it was testing or treatment, or now vaccinations, we knew it was something we're going to have to be intentional about focusing on.

Woods: Steve, why vaccines?

Steve Miff: Even from a data perspective, it's part of everything that we do. Leveraging social determinants of health and leveraging data science to understand somebody's life challenges, is basically embedded into how we analyze and look at everything.

With vaccines, it's been equally important to really understand those factors, understand the vulnerability, understand who's at highest risk, and be able to use that to prioritize or target things in a very equitable way.

Woods: Fred, I want to come back to something that you just saidParkland takes on a public health role in the community. But I don't know that every other health system or hospital leader actually thinks that way. In fact, I've had folks specifically say to me, "That is not our job. Our job is not to do what the public health agencies do." What do you say to that pushback?

Cerise: First of all, Parkland is a little different, because we are the county hospital, and about a third of our budget comes from the county. We do have more of a role there than others. But I would push back to the other hospitals in general and say, health care consumes almost a fifth of the economy in the country, and hospitals are about 30% of that.

There's a lot of investment in our systems, and there's a lot of resources that we have. If you look at the public health system, those things are generally narrowly funded, they're pretty lean, they don't have the capacity to surge the way hospitals, with the scale that we have, can turn things on at times of a crisis.

I would push back and say it is the hospital. We can't ignore the fact that we exist in a bigger ecosystem, and the communities have invested quite a bit of money, trust in our systems. So, I do think we have a responsibility to reach beyond our traditional roles, particularly in a time of crisis.

Woods: When it comes to inequities in vaccination, there's a ton that leaders can do, but my understanding is that Parkland decided to start first on building community trust. Why was that so important?

Cerise: We know we're going to have enough vaccine at some point to vaccinate everybody who wants to be vaccinated. The limiting factor is going to be acceptance of vaccines. If we're going to reach herd immunity, we need 70%, 80% of the people to accept vaccination. We also know that there's a history of mistrust among minority communities, some of that very well founded, understandable.

So the limiting factor is not going to be the availability of vaccine, but it's going to be acceptance of the population. We can't ignore that fact.

On the one hand, if you didn't care about community mistrust in that piece, you still need to do that from a public health perspective to reach herd immunity. We do care about that other piece, and we think it's important that we address the historic mistrust that's well founded.

Woods: I appreciate the fact that you said that this mistrust is legitimate. There are well documented reasons throughout history, up until right now, for why Black, Hispanic, Latino populations would be hesitant to use the health system, period, let alone receive a vaccine that's only gotten emergency use authorization.

Let's talk about what Parkland did. You have described this as a little bit of a push, and a little bit of a poll. What do you mean by that?

Cerise: The push piece will come a bit later, actually, and that is people who are already coming to our system, that are accessing services, when they come, we will be able to push the vaccine out as they come in to access clinical services.

Right now, the effort is to pull, and that is doing outreach to people who are not showing up at clinic for an appointment. But we're reaching out to them to say you're at risk, we know you're at risk for these reasons. So, trying to pull them in to our vaccination sites right now.

Woods: The pull, is I'm guessing where it matters a ton to look at data, which Steve is, I think, where you come in.

Miff: That's exactly right. What we've tried to do is really understand the individuals, the neighborhoods, the communities most vulnerable for Covid by combining a number of different data setsnot only the key elements from CDC, such as age comorbidities, but also incorporate into that factors such as mobility and social determinants of health.

By doing that, by understanding who's most vulnerable, we can then target more specifically those neighborhoods and understand the ethnic racial makeup of those communities. So any outreach can be done in a very cultural sensitive way, in a very targeted way.

Woods: Yeah, and Steve, your team put this together as a, I think it's called a vulnerability index, is that right?

Miff: That's correct.

Woods: It gets down to, I want to say it's block by block level data that you can use then for targeted outreach.

Miff: That's exactly right, we've been doing it at the block level to get really hyper localized and very specific. Then for some of the vaccination privatization work, we've actually taken that even to an individual level.

Woods: An individual patient or person level?

Miff: Correct. Because if the data is available, we know the age, the comorbidities based on their medical history. Then we can apply some of the other factors relative to the socio-economic status, and the level of mobility that occurs in their neighborhood, and combine those to be able to get a much more granular understanding of their environment, and also understand they live in an area that is a hotspot at that particular moment in time for Covid.

Woods: I've been curious, as you've built this vulnerability index, you've mentioned a ton of different inputs. Are there any that stick out as ones that maybe other organizations aren't prioritizing right now? The most obvious inputs are things like age, demographic, health status, do you have comorbidities? But because this is so robust, are there any inputs that you want to put on the radar for other clinical leaders to make sure they're incorporating?

Miff: The key learning for us was that incorporating the social determinants of health dataa combination of income level, education, housing situation, transportation needs, food needs, really looking comprehensively at all those factors in aggregate, and using that in a way to understand also vulnerability.

What we've noticed by doing the retrospective analysis is that when you combine all these different factors together, there's an 87% correlation to both infections and Covid-like illness presentation. So, they're very highly correlated, when you combine them.

Woods: High vulnerability index, high risk of disease and ultimately death from Covid-19. So, let's prioritize getting those people the vaccines first.

Miff: That's exactly right. Then one of the other things that we've learned is because as you mentioned earlier, Covid has impacted different racial ethnic groups, some a lot more than others. One of the other things that we wanted to make sure that we do is understand what's driving some of that? The key learning for us has been that by incorporating the social determinants of health, that has been, to some extent, the equalizer across different racial and ethnic groups.

For the point to the need to take that into account, not only particularly now for Covid-19, but a lot of the other clinically related things that we've done in the past and we'll continue to do in the future.

Woods: You used the word equalizer just now, which is, I think, incredibly important in this moment where a lot of people are anxious and eager to get this vaccine, particularly white people, white people who can take time off work, who can sit on their computer ready to refresh the page. I think there is a lot of concern and question about how do you balance appropriate prioritization with playing favorites, or maybe creating downstream effects that you didn't predict? Is that something that Parkland has had to deal with?

Miff: I would say almost daily, because you want to make sure that as you put this information out there, it's first of all, very data driven. It's guided and driven by science. Also, that's very transparent, this cannot be a black box, so you have to be very transparent of how inputs are, what outputs are, so folks at all different levels can understand how it's being done.

Woods: Fred, I wonder if you can give an example of how this kind of daily challenge of balancing appropriate prioritization and playing favorites has actually played out at Parkland.

Cerise: Probably about a month and a half or so ago, we knew that there would be a weekend, where we did not have people scheduled, to a large extent for infections. We're still in our ramp up phase, and we knew the county sites were seeing what you described earlier, and that is a disproportionate number of white individuals who had gotten onto the registration sites early and quick, and were getting vaccinated at the county site.

We did some outreach to some of the communities that we know are heavily represented by minorities, that we know were not getting vaccinated at the county sites. Did some outreach to churches and did some outreach to community centers and whatnot, and said, "Listen, we're going to have some walk-up availability on Saturday and Sunday from these hours."

Well, I got blowback from people almost immediately about having a secret vaccination event

There was nothing secret about it, it was all over social media. We had a line of people, probably four blocks long before five o'clock in the morning. So, it was definitely not a secret. But just by trying to do some targeted outreach to some areas that we knew were not getting in, generated that sort of backlash. Now, we're trying to get people registered at a site, and then with that registration, apply the criteria that Steve's group has been able to develop, to prioritize once people get on the site.

I'm maybe the 100,000th person to register on a site, but based on my risk, I'm going to get an invitation to get a vaccine in the next week, because by objective criteria, I'm a higher-risk person.

Woods: This is really important. Everyone that I know personally, and professionally has an online registration system for vaccines. That's where you hear the stories of more affluent people with more control over their schedule, blocking their calendar so they can just refresh the page over and over again.

That doesn't even account for access to broadband issues, and do you have a computer and things like that. Have you stuck with this online registration system, or have you pivoted to other ways of registering more vulnerable populations for the vaccine?

Cerise: It's both. We have stuck with you online, but recognizing what you just said, we've had to do more outreach so that we can help people sign up, we can help people that don't have access to computers, partnering with community organizations that then can get people in and enroll people.

Once they get on the registration list, then you can apply prioritization, based on objective criteria, but it is a challenge to get on that list. We've had to do a lot of individual outreach that doesn't involve being able to refresh, refresh, to get them top of the list.

Woods: There's of course the challenge of prioritizing the people who you want to engage. But now there are a heck of a lot more vaccines on the market. We've got Johnson & Johnson's (J&J) one dose vaccine. We've got Pfizer, we've got Moderna. Have you made a decision as an organization about how you will prioritize specific vaccines for specific communities?

Cerise: We're in the midst of that right now, as you know, because the J&J vaccine just got released. So, we expect to get some of that this week. We're doing like a lot of organizations, you're looking at your populations that may be tougher to track to get back for a second dose, and that's who we're going to target with our J&J vaccines initially.

We have a homeless health care program. That program will take the vaccines to homeless shelters into the sites that they visit around town. We have a jail health program, we'll take that vaccine to the jail to administer that way.

One of the things that, I think everybody's looking at there, and you hear the conversation now is, okay, are you going to give a better vaccine to this group or that group?

We just don't have the data to say we have a better vaccine. That's the honest truth.

Woods: Is that something people understand? Because there's a difference between reality and perception. We started off this conversation by talking about inequities more broadly, we haven't even talked about things like access and how difficult it can be to get somebody into health care, period, if they're working two jobs or don't have transportation, et cetera, which is a huge benefit of the J&J vaccine.

The thing that keeps me up at night is, would those same vulnerable populations, those largely minority populations think, I'm getting the short end of the stick here. How do you combat that?

Cerise: It's a real issue. We've struggled with that too, as we're developing our strategy. But the truth of the matter is, we don't know that one is better than the other, they have not been tested head-to-head at the same time. You've got the J&J that's been tested later, where you've got varying strains, you're not taking into account how many people will show up for the second dose or miss the second dose, and what the impact of that's going to be.

With the best data we have, and listening to the experts that dedicate their lives to this, you got people like Dr. Anthony Fauci who are saying, take the vaccine that's in front of you, and then I really not the science to say one is better than the other right now.

Woods: I couldn't agree more. I'm thinking if I'm spending my time arguing with my friends over Zoom happy hours and telling them, "No, you've got to get any vaccine you can." I can only imagine how difficult it is when you extrapolate that out to the rest of the population.

Steve, you spend a ton of time on building out this robust data set, this process, this ultra-specialized way of prioritizing folks for the vaccine. I have to imagine that it hasn't always been a perfect process. What are some of the big hiccups or barriers that you've hit, and what did you learn from that, that you want to make sure our listeners know about?

Miff: You're absolutely right, it's a learning process, and the best we can do is adapt. I think there are two key things that come to mind. One is the amount of time and energy that we spend every day cleaning the data and making that actionable. What I mean by that is something that you actually alluded to earlier on folks registering again, and again and again, because if I do it 50 times, chances are maybe better than I'm going to get higher on the list. So, you have a lot of duplications of registrations.

Then the second one is to be able to actually proactively know if somebody on the list has already received the vaccine, because it's not always easy or convenient for somebody who is on the list to call back and say, "By the way, take me off the list because I received the vaccine."

Woods: Steve, I got to tell you, my parents literally went through that themselves, where my mom was able to get a vaccine appointment, my dad wasn't. They ended up going to the same appointment anyway, saying, "Please, please, can he get a dose?" He was able to get a dose, and then my mom spent two hours on the phone trying to cancel his appointment for the following week.

Miff: No, that's exactly right, and it's a very dynamic process. So, you'd have to do this daily. Because then once you provide the outreach teams with that list, their success rate for contact with somebody registering, you want it to be as high as possible. If too many folks have even multiple times on the list, and they're calling the same people if they've already received somewhere else, it's a little bit of a waste of their time.

One of them is really just that blocking and tackling to make sure that you use the information that's most curated and accurate. But the second one, you also alluded to, and there was a miss.

When I think back, it's like, boy, it makes so much sense, why do we miss this? But we've described, we use this very data-driven, scientific way to rank folks based on their risk.

Well, by doing that, what we've noticed is that you end up having families in which one spouse might be 65 with no comorbidity and somebody else who is 74 with a comorbidity, and they might end up several hundred spots away from each other on the list, and hence, they're being scheduled at different times to different locations, which is not that convenient for them by any stretch.

Key lesson was, as we create these lists, let's make sure that we identify if you have folks who are together within the same criteria and categories, but bring them in a way that they can be scheduled at the same time.

Woods: So far, we've been talking about the pull part of your strategy, the proactive data-driven outreach that health systems can do to engage the communities who are in the most need of protection, not even the communities, the people, down to that very, very specific level. But the other side of the initiative that you described is more of a push. What does that entail?

Cerise: The push is more for the people who are coming to the doctor for other things, but you're taking advantage of that opportunity to get the vaccine to them. As we think about the mistrust that we talked about earlier, the one place that is consistently ranked highest among people in further source of medical information is their physician's office. They trust their doctor to give them a message. We want to take advantage of that.

Also, from a convenience standpoint, a lot of the patients who we see, a day to the doctors means a day off of work, it may involve child care and transportation challenges. To the extent that we can push that vaccine at the time that we have people in the office, it's going to be a big advantage to us and to the people that we take care of.

Right now, what we're doing is routing down from the office, because it's not a disseminated vaccination site strategy at this point, you're still in hubs.

We're capturing the office and then directing them to the vaccination site. But what we hope at some point, when we have a more disseminated strategy is to catch everybody when they're coming through the office and do their education there. While their visit for whatever, they're going to get the vaccine at the same time.

Woods: I love this comment, because it's such an easy thing to do. Even if you don't have the data and analytics to build this robust index, what you can easily do is make sure every time patients are showing up for their doctor's appointment anyways, that you're assessing their risk, addressing their concerns, and pushing them to an immunization. Ideally, that moment that they've already taken off work and etc., if you can. I love that approach.

Cerise: So much of what we do is structured around the health system and the convenience of the health system. As we look for more opportunities to be more patient centric, how can we make things easier for the patients? That's just one small example of that.

Woods: We were just talking about using existing appointments as an opportunity to address concerns about the vaccine. This is another area where I will admit, I start to feel uneasy very quickly, because I hear a lot of well-intentioned folks focusing on education, and I'm afraid they might be missing the point.

They're talking about how we need to educate people of color; we need to educate Black communities about the benefits of the vaccine, etc. But that assumes that these groups are uninformed and uneducated, when, in my experience, they're actually ultra-informed about the history of medical abuse and experimentation on their people. Again, that gets back to legitimate mistrust.

When it comes to community outreach and this kind of push, how do you see the difference between education and a campaign aimed at building trust?

Cerise: I think that is a great distinction, because like you said, a lot of times the problem is not education, but sometimes it is. I think the approach has to be both.

I'll give you an example, I talked to one of our housekeepers at the hospital a few months ago, and asked her if she had gotten vaccinated, she had not. I asked her what her concern was? She said she was afraid she would get Covid-19 from the vaccine.

In fact, when you look at the data, about half of Blacks who are vaccine hesitant list that as one of their concerns that you actually get Covid-19. There's a pretty straightforward educational opportunity there around how the vaccine works.

I was able to have that conversation because I know the person and we already have a rapport, and she ultimately got vaccinated. But at a community level, that's probably a message that may be difficult for me to deliver, and it's going to be better received from somebody who has established trust in the community.

One of the things that we're working with is, who are those community members whom people know and trust, and how can they help us deliver not just some of the FAQs, the educational pieces, but also, deliver a message, from a trusted person perspective, that the vaccine is safe and effective?

Woods: Who are those people whom you've maybe identified in the community?

Cerise: We've had a series of calls with community leaders, city councilmen, commissioners, church leaders, leaders of community-based organizations, and one of the cool things our team has done is when one of those individuals will come to the drive thru to get vaccinated, they'll do a video and capture the vaccination on video, that person can deliver a message, and then they will get a package, an educational package, a toolkit that's got their video in it, and it's got FAQs, and information about the vaccine that they can then take to say their congregation and use that to educate people about it. They'll get their little education pack, and then they go on and they're ambassadors for the vaccine.

Woods: I love that term, ambassadors for the vaccine, and your role, the role of the health system is to provide the material to make it easier for them to be an ambassador in their community.

Cerise: Well put, it's exactly what we're trying to do. We try to establish trust, and it comes by showing up over and over and over again.

But the reality is, there are people who are embedded in those communities who have been there forever, and people know them, they trust them, and they're going to be a better messenger than somebody from the hospital.

Woods: Yeah, exactly. You two have been at the forefront of creating this really robust campaign. We've talked about the proactive, data-driven outreach, making sure that you're connecting patients to vaccinations when they're already interacting with the health system, and then using community ambassadors to establish some trust in the community. What's the next step for this campaign?

Cerise: One of the things that we were working on before Covid that really has applicability now, as well, and particularly as the vaccine becomes more widely available, is working through community groups that again, already have some established trust to help us get those health messages out. We have a group of high school students who have an interest in health care, that we've been working with as health ambassadors.

During flu season, they helped us create a flu message that was done in English and in Spanish, was promoted in their school areas, and were able to get, one day and a half over the weekend, between 1,500 and 2,000 people vaccinated for the flu, many of whom had never been vaccinated for the flu before.

So to try to create some momentum there, building on programs like that, where we're using the community assets to help provide some information, and then they can carry that message forward in their own community.

Woods: I love that example, because I think it's obvious to look towards ambassadors who are leaders in the community; the religious leaders, the City Council people, etc. But what you're talking about is the fact that you can establish some trust and you can create ambassadors with kids, with trusted kids in the community, in the high school.

Cerise: It was great too. Our high school student workers, they were able to deliver a message on Spanish-speaking radio, so they became famous among their peers because they were on radio, and they were giving a message of why the flu shot's important. People in the community were hearing from people they knew, and it pulls people in, again that may have an interest in public health and gets at an early age shows what an impact they can make.

Miff: Rachel, what I will add here from more of a blocking and tackling perspectivewe're tracking the administration of the vaccines at a very granular level, to really understand where and who's getting the vaccines. Are they coming back for that second dose?

Because while we look across the whole county, across the whole city, it's how this plays out within certain neighborhoods. So, make sure that as we track those elements, we're able to target better or better understand where the uptick is lower, etc., because we're only going to get there by bringing the whole community up together.

Some communities, and some neighborhoods are falling behind, we then can understand why and double down there to make sure that we're able to elevate them concurrently.

Woods: You're also right, that some of the most important work that you can do is not the sexy stuff. It is the blocking and tackling and continuously going back to the data and figuring out what works and what didn't and fill the gaps, that really is going to make a difference here.

Read more here:

How Parkland is vaccinating Dallas Countyand reducing health inequity - The Daily Briefing

To advance its mission to inspire conservation action, the Woodland Park Zoo developed a research-backed method of instilling empathy in visitors. Photo credit: Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Woodland Park Zoo

Any cultural institution can benefit from understanding and fostering meaningful, emotional experiences for our audiences, especially those whose missions emphasize individual, community, or societal change. For zoos and aquariums, this often means our goal of motivating guests to act to conserve wildlife can be achieved through instilling empathy for animals. At Woodland Park Zoo, we aim to turn empathy into a social movement for conservation, with a series of initiatives all based on a carefully developed framework we call the Empathy Bridge.

When infusing empathy into our outcomes and integrating it into our programming, its important to understand its foundations in social science research. Through the Measuring Empathy Collaborative Assessment Project (MECAP), a collaboration with Seattle Aquarium and Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, we developed our foundational understanding and a definition of empathy.

Empathy is a stimulated emotional state that relies on the ability to perceive, understand, and care about the experiences or perspectives of another person or animal.

There are three main types of empathy we consider:

While all three are important, providing experiences that encourage and reinforce feelings of motivational empathy is at the core of our practice aiming to inspire our guests to take action on behalf of animals, both in the zoo and in the wild.

At Woodland Park Zoo, all employees contribute to our guests experience and are an important part of fostering empathy. Building from preliminary program observations, interviews with expert advisors in the field of conservation psychology, and a literature review conducted by Seattle Aquarium, we developed and implemented a framework, the Empathy Bridge, which outlines how we integrate empathy throughout our entire guest experience. We use this framework as the foundation to our staff training, encouraging consistent and intentional use of effective empathy-building practices.

The Empathy Bridge has become a keystone for staff to collectively understand how and why we foster empathy at Woodland Park Zoo. It organizes a set of tools and practices that cultivate empathy for animals and ultimately motivate the social outcomes we seek.

Our bridge starts by laying the foundation for empathy development in ensuring guests are aware that we provide the highest quality of animal care. We establish trust and confidence in our animal welfare as it is core to our mission, and it enables our empathy work to build off of one of our organizational foundations.

Next, when we introduce our animals, we use their names and tell stories about their personalities and preferences, so that our guests can build connections to them as individuals. In turn, people can see the link between the individual animals living at Woodland Park Zoo, their wild counterparts, and the ecosystems that support them.

We use storytelling and animal interactions to inform our audience about what the animals need, explain the possible meaning behind their behaviors, and illustrate their autonomy and individual agency. In doing this, we can help our guests build knowledge about our animals natural history and context. Knowledge alone is not a strong motivator for pro-conservation or pro-social action, but in tandem with our empathy practices and storytelling, it can increase our impact.

With this context in place, we activate our guests imaginations through intentional perspective-taking, where we encourage them to consider how they would make decisions and react as an animal.

Lastly, we empower caring actions for individual species, the ecosystems that support them, and the environment overall. Beyond fulfilling our mission, enabling a pathway for action can be a necessary outlet for recently strengthened empathy, as empathy without action can lead to burnout and disengagement. We encourage people to channel their empathy into action with the ultimate goal of creating lasting social change. Once motivated, that social change can be anything from small changes to large lifestyle and community impacts, all rooted in pro-environmental behavior.

While elements of our empathy bridge framework are largely translatable across a variety of institutions, anthropomorphism is an important consideration in our framework. Historically, anthropomorphism has been discouraged as an educational tool by zoo and aquarium professionals because, when used without perspective taking and informed empathy, it can quickly become anthropocentrism, inaccurately projecting human characteristics or needs onto animals. However, once a foundational connection through the empathy bridge is built, anthropomorphism can become a valuable tool in our framework to help strengthen an emotional connection with animals that are less familiar or dissimilar from humans. Combining anthropomorphism with the disruption of anthropocentrism can not only help guests relate appropriately to an animal, but turn that understanding into meaningful empathy.

To train staff in using the Empathy Bridge, the zoos empathy team joined department conversations and hosted trainings tailored to individual teams. This way, each department could understand why we are fostering empathy and how it relates to their roles. After our initial year of customized empathy training, we now introduce new team members to the Empathy Bridge in their onboarding. That onboarding, in combination with the newly ingrained culture of empathy, allows our teams to perpetually keep empathy front-of-mind.

In addition to training our staff using the Empathy Bridge, we made changes to the way we interact with many of our animals during our ambassador animal programs. Ambassador animals star in many of Woodland Park Zoos educational programs, including up-close experiences at the zoos theaters, Zoom calls during virtual programs such as Call of the Wild, and through other programs across the zoo. Through interactions with our ambassador animals, we consciously provide choice and agency to our animals. Rather than holding or moving them, our animal keepers allow our ambassador animals to decide when they are ready to participate in programs. During a program, animals have the option to go back to their carrier or to not participate in a touch opportunity with guests. When out on a program, we provide our animals with opportunities to exhibit natural behaviors, while we use messaging informed by our Empathy Bridge.

Our Empathy Bridge is rooted in social science literature, but we also wanted to learn about our guests perceptions of these changes, so we conducted a study of how our empathy practices inform their experience. In a series of on-site interviews and an online survey, guests recounted experiences that left lasting impressions, often in seeing animals up close or watching them exhibiting agency and clearly making their own choices.

We learned two important lessons from this. In the online survey, which asked participants to view a series of recorded animal programs that varied in the use of animal-handling techniques and the use of empathy-based messaging, we found participants who saw animals making choices had positive changes in empathy and perceptions of animal welfare, regardless of whether empathy-based messaging was used or not. We also learned that if the animals are perceived to have less autonomy (for example, they are held or moved during a program), the use of empathy messaging from the Empathy Bridge can increase a guests empathy and positive perception of animal welfare. In other words, our Empathy Bridges messaging works, but our actions speak even louder than our words.

Through our implementation of empathy practices at Woodland Park Zoo, we began to realize how much there was still to learn. We knew there were other institutions working to achieve their missions through empathy, and we recognized an opportunity for sector-wide growth by convening these organizations. By providing opportunities for these organizations to come together, we started the Advancing Conservation through Empathy (ACE) for Wildlife. ACE for Wildlife, which includes 20 AZA-accredited institutions in a seven-state region from Alaska to Wisconsin, creates and shares effective practices to foster empathy for animals and people. As a network, we can learn more and go further into our empathy work together than any one organization could alone. We value the diversity in our network, from organization size and location, to audience, and the types of animals in our care.

To continue the momentum of sector-wide empathy growth and address the barriers to the implementation and evaluation of empathy programming, in 2020 we launched a grant program designed to build the capacity of AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums to foster empathy for wildlife. This grant program supports a variety of projects, from innovative new endeavors to the expansion of existing projects. We recognize that empathy practices do not look the same for every organization and applicants know their needs best. We have worked to build an adaptable program that supports projects that are tailored to each given context and audience.

ACE for Wildlife is now two years old, and the first cohort of capacity-building grantees completed their projects in late 2020. As we celebrate these milestones, we are committed to the continued facilitation of ACE for Wildlife and the expansion of the capacity-building granting program. We see these two arms as mutually supporting pathways to increase the ability of our partner organizations to achieve meaningful and lasting empathy-based impacts. With individual capacity building grants, we support organizations to build skills, programming, and knowledge. Championing ACE for Wildlife, we are building connections for peers to learn and grow together. Through this two-pronged approach, we are excited to see how the growth of these 20 organizations can push the informal education field forward.

With the help of our partners, Woodland Park Zoo continues to deepen our understanding of fostering empathy for animals, and we have maintained the use of the Empathy Bridge across our institution. As we have moved to virtual programming in response to the pandemic, empathy and emotional connection have become more important than ever. The future of our empathy initiatives lives in sector-wide capacity-building and knowledge-sharing. This network-based approach allows us to integrate culturally responsive approaches to building empathy-informed relationships between our diverse audiences and wildlife.

When we teach our staff about empathy, we explain that empathy is a tool, but it is neither rigid nor the only tool available to us. Its a piece of the puzzle alongside our animal care, exhibit design, and inclusive guest experiences. As a tool, empathy is flexible, can be adapted to different audiences, and can be used in culturally responsive and informed ways. As we connect guests to our mission, empathy is a powerful motivator to encourage people to make conservation a priority in their lives. As museums and cultural organizations rethink the relationships between our missions and our communities, empathy is more important than ever for bridging that connection.

Dr. Laurie Stuart is Director of Impact at Woodland Park Zoo (@woodlandparkzoo), overseeing the assessment of the zoo's strategic outcomes, research on emerging educational practices, and engagement strategies that foster a culture of conservation. Daniel Rother is the Empathy Network Specialist, coordinating development and growth of the ACE for Wildlife program on behalf of Woodland Park Zoo. Laurel Abbotts is the Project Manager for Woodland Park Zoos empathy initiatives and Acting Coordinator of Woodland Park Zoos capacity building granting program. Mary Jackson is Woodland Park Zoos Audience Research & Evaluation Manager and an original participant in the MECAP partnership.

For more information and resources you can use to learn more about fostering empathy for wildlife, visit zoo.org/empathy or reach out to empathy@zoo.org

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An Empathy Bridge Helps the Woodland Park Zoo Drive Social Change - aam-us.org

Heres a suggestion for fire scientists, environmentalists and anybody else who enjoys the vast outdoor landscapes of Southern California: When youre out in the field or on the trail, look out for those who have preceded you and pay attention to any clues they have left behind. Not only those just a few yards in front of you, but those far, far ahead those who traveled this way hundreds or thousands of years ago and those who continue to follow the same paths today. Look not only into the beautiful, natural setting that surrounds you, but into the complex history of peoples interactions with their surroundings. Look into what has been a human-created cultural landscape for uncountable years since time immemorial. Assume the land was full and abundant in the past, and that it could be again.

Theres a common tendency to think of the settlement of California as a discrete historical event that took place a couple of centuries ago and is now over. I would suggest its more accurate to think of settlement as a process that takes a thousand years or so to complete. Indigenous people were already settled (and had been settled for a long, long time) when Junipero Serra first set foot here in 1769. Those groups of people who have been here for less than a millennium in what is now known as California are still in the process of settling we are settlers. Note the active voice folded into the word settler: settlement is not a thing of the past, it is an active, ongoing process today whereby settlers ignore, erase, displace, murder and replace Indigenous people.

As you are out on your walk on the trail, envision the scene of the time prior to Serras arrival as filled with settled and yet highly mobile, proudly multilingual, Indigenous people. Assume Natives traveled widely, that their diverse languages and their sundry approaches to burning, harvesting, hunting and other dynamic interactions with the land marked distinctions among peoples but also crosscut the borders that divided them leading to conflicts at times but often to kinship and reciprocal economic relations with one another.

Take it as a given that the time prior to the late 18th century was one of significant anthropogenic impact on the land in what we now know as California. It was a time of people creating endless spatial variation with their fires and gathering practices, something new to see and experience around each bend in the trail. Burning was widespread and diversified, leading to what many refer to as a finely grained, mosaic-like pattern of plant communities and animal habitats on the land. Over the long run, these mosaics no doubt shifted, sometimes dramatically. If a satellite had been in orbit to record the transformations, the resulting time-lapse film would resemble the patterns seen inside a twisting kaleidoscope more than a static arrangement of tiles. The trail you walk today may seem remote, a trek through an almost forbidding wilderness, but all of these lands were easily accessible to lots and lots of people for thousands of years. Assume that their fires helped to foster diverse communities of plants, water and animals, and that they could do so again today.

Cultural Burning

In what we now call Southern California, fire was an everyday tool for Indigenous people for thousands of years used not only to care for the land but for the promotion of personal health (as with smudge fires to ward away insects), the preparation of food, the processing of raw materials into tools and musical instruments and for warmth. As anyone who has heated their home with wood knows, the amount of fuelwood required can be huge. When settlers suppressed fires and replaced wood with fossil fuels as the energy source for home cooking and heating, the resulting buildup of uncut, unburned fuels on the land was correspondingly huge. In the absence of periodic burns, grasslands converted to impenetrable chaparral. In the absence of wood gathering and regular burning, open shrublands, woodlands and forests transformed into dense thickets of shrubs and trees. It is possible to find many of the locations of former grasslands and open woodlands. Not all of them are covered in concrete. They could be restored along with the Indigenous practices that sustained them.

Unlike in forests, the tree-ring and burn-scar records that scientists depend upon to construct fire histories are few and far between in grasslands and chaparral. However, Indigenous records stories, songs, verbs and the structure of language itself, and the records embodied by Indigenous people and the practices they sustain the history they enact combine with scientifically analyzed records of charcoal and pollen deposits to indicate that fire frequencies have decreased over much of Southern California.

Large-scale, catastrophic wildfires like the Thomas and Woolsey fires are increasing in frequency. Meanwhile, the smaller scale, less intense fires that, for example, encourage the straight, strong growth of plant shoots for basket materials or that keep the oak woodlands open and accessible for acorn harvests, have almost disappeared. While those smaller-scale, frequent Indigenous burns may not prevent a catastrophic fire from igniting and spreading to peoples homes during an extreme Santa Wind event, they would most definitely prepare Indigenous peoples homelands for wildfire. Small, intentional fires would make those homelands and the plants and animals that populate them more resilient in the face of destructive wildfires. Indigenous fire reduced hazardous conditions around villages for thousands of years, but the principal role of Indigenous fire is to create a landscape resilient to the wind-driven fires that will always spread rapidly in diverse Southern California fuel types. In areas that have been prepared with cultural burns or hand cutting, wildfires will burn through without permanently damaging cultural resources such as oaks and elderberry.

Prior to 1769, people Indigenous to the region thrived throughout their histories. Their fires cultivated whole suites of resources and maintained habitat for a host of animals such as deer and grizzly bears. Today, in addition to the good cultural fire work being done in Northern and Central California in forests and foothills, similar work could be done in Southern California in chaparral. Under relatively cool, humid conditions and high fuel moistures, deliberate fire could be safely applied. Broad swaths of the region could regenerate if the land is allowed to interact with Indigenous people as it has for millennia. The transformation and regeneration could be swift. A cultural landscape evolves over a much briefer time period than the eons over which individual species of flora and fauna evolve.

Large fires have always occurred in Southern California, and they will continue to start and spread, especially during Santa Ana wind episodes. What could be re-created in those burned areas would be time-tested Indigenous responses to large fires, like getting back into the areas with frequent cultural burns. One of the challenges of applying deliberate fire in the region has been the likelihood that with too-frequent fire, even more flammable, invasive plants have tended to replace native species. However, when practitioners read the landscape accurately and apply cultural fire at the right frequency, seasonality and scale, they can protect and enhance native biodiversity. It is true that in the chaparral of Southern California, wildfires are burning far more frequently than they once did. The landscape needs less frequent wildfire. It is also true that carefully planned, well-timed, appropriately scaled, deliberate, cultural fires are far too infrequent in Southern California chaparral.

In fact, Indigenous people have always burned for many purposes throughout their homelands. Purposes that are as valid today as in the past, such as: increased production of fruits and seeds, enhanced animal habitat, increased water resources, pathogen control, reduced fire hazard, the creation of open areas to allow light and water to reach the earth and therefore allow room for growth of oak seedlings, etc.

More About Indigenous Fire

If youre an ecologist, landowner or land manager, find ways to work with Indigenous people, for practitioners to come gather the deergrass or the rosehips on your land. Look at native plants as more than fire hazards and more than inviolable, fragile, untouchable nature. Wherever you are in Southern California, from the Channel Islands to downtown Los Angeles, from Big Bear Lake to the Algodones Dunes, you are on Indigenous homelands, and the Indigenous people of every location maintain interrelationships with the land.

If you are a settler, you may think of yourself as being located in house or a facility that needs protection from fire or you may think of yourself as a visitor out in the environment, in the wilderness, but you are also taking up space within someones homeland. These Indigenous people may be interested in gathering together in their homeland to tell stories, exchange ideas and practices, conduct ceremonies and, perhaps, to ignite fires a fire as small as a hand-held smudge or a cooking fire, or one as large as a broadcast burn.

So, if you are a landowner or land manager, when Indigenous people request access, open the gate. When they request financial support for their work, open the coffers. Try to think of doing so not as a charitable gesture but as paying a fee for professional services. For too long, settlers have ignored and neglected Indigenous peoples land stewardship an ignorance and neglect motivated by the need to minimize Indigenous land tenure, to see the land as an empty, natural wilderness and therefore open to settlement and development; or on the other hand, ignorance and neglect motivated by a detached, scientific system of environmental preservation, when in fact the land has been settled and nurtured since time immemorial. It is time to attend to and listen to Indigenous cultural practitioners, to cherish them, to pay them.

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This Land is Their Land: A Future for Indigenous Fire in Southern California - KCET

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS The 2020 Steamboat Springs community survey found a high satisfaction rate among most Steamboat residents who responded, and public safety, locals housing, climate action and open space were among the top priorities they listed.

The survey, which was mailed to 2,500 households and received a 36% response rate, asked residents about inclusivity, government performance, public safety, general quality of life and community priorities.

Theres always a lot of conjecture and a lot of opinions that you hear on the street. You read the blogs, and you try and form opinions as to which direction the city should go, City Manager Gary Suiter said. When cities do this (survey residents), it provides a statistically valid response to City Council upon which they can form their policy decisions.

Surveys were sent out to 2,000 full-time and 500 part-time residents in November 2020, and responses were compared with responses from previous years as well as other resort communities of similar size.

Residents reported higher satisfaction levels this year than in previous years in several areas: animal control, street repair, public information and communication services, city recreation facilities, municipal court, city recreation programs, economic development efforts, overall customer service by city employees, police services, Financial support of nonprofit organizations, crime prevention, storm drainage and overall quality of life.

A lot of the communities saw similar positive responses for government performances due to COVID, said Laurie Urban, director of client success at Polco, an online platform aimed at helping connect local governments and communities. Many people were satisfied with the way local governments handled COVID and that helped instill trust in local governments.

Urban also said Steamboats results ranked higher than those comparable communities.

These improvements are very intentional, Suiter said.

However, many Steamboat Springs City Council members said council should try and focus on where improvements are needed, rather than spending too much time applauding the positive results.

We can talk about all the good things, but I like to look at where we need to improve, council member Kathi Meyer said.

When asked to rank their top priority, 47% of respondents said maintaining police, fire and EMS services, 44% said supporting new community housing for locals, 34% said climate action and resiliency and 29% said maintaining wildlife habitat and open space acquisition.

I appreciate the fact that the community considers public safety services at the highest level of importance, council member Robin Crossan said.

When asked about the citys parks and recreation opportunities, 55% of respondents said they wanted to maintain facilities at their current level with no new tax or fee, 22% wanted to pay a new sales tax to improve and enhance the maintenance of current amenities, 16% wanted a property tax to improve and maintain amenities, and 7% wanted to pay higher fees for amenities.

Council members said they needed to unpopular but important discussions about needing more funds to maintain and improve city parks and amenities.

At some point in the future, well have to have an interesting conversation about parks and rec, because people want their facilities maintained at the current levels, but they dont want taxes put into place to help that, Crossan said. That, to me, is one of those balancing acts we need to figure out.

While the city is deep into discussions about putting a property tax on the November ballot, survey respondents had varied reactions to the topic. Forty-six percent were in support of a property tax for public safety departments, 34% were in support for essential city services, such as infrastructure and snow plowing, 25% were in support for parks and amenities, and 18% were in support for local and regional transit.

As for a tax on recreational substances, such as alcohol, tobacco and marijuana, 53% were in support of such a tax if it went to mental health services, 43% for supporting public safety departments, 35% for improving parks and amenities, 29% for improving transit and 23% for general fund expenditures.

To reach Alison Berg, call 970-871-4229 or email aberg@SteamboatPilot.com.

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Community survey finds residents more satisfied with city in 2020 - Steamboat Pilot and Today

An intentional community in rural Uganda is drawing on green technology, local resources, and old-school philosophy to create a thriving village.

Okere Mom-Kok was destroyed during the Ugandan Civil War in the 1980s, but is now being rebuilt into a sustainable community thats home to 4,000 people.

Okere City is based around sustainable principles like renewable energy and the sustainable harvesting of natural resources.

The village has a clinic, church, school, a nightclub that doubles as a community center, markets, bars, and a bank. Electricity generated through solar energy is available to everyone, and clean waterthanks to modern boreholemethodskeeps the all-too-normal cholera outbreaks in the region at bay.

An expert in international development and graduate of the London School of Economics, Ojok Okello started the project with a $54,000 investment from his own pocket. The village of Okere Mom-Kok was where he had some extended family, and it was during a visit that he decided to put what he learned in university to action.

I dont want this project to be at the mercy of some white people, Okello told The Guardian, explaining how he had seen many NGO-funded projects on the continent fail by not involving the very communities they were helping.

I want us to have business conversations with partners. I want us to be responsible for shaping the destiny and the future of the project.

While the Okere City project might conjure images of an equitable utopia, theres a lot of business and banking knowledge that Mr. Okello utilized to ensure the community could survive and grow.

All businesses in the town pay for themselvesfor example, the school allows pupils to pay up to half their tuition in sugar, beans, firewood, or other commodities, while the clinic has flexible installment-billing policies. An Okere City investment club runs a sort of credit union by taking members dues and offering them as loans to those in the community who need themoften to develop local resources.

MORE: One Way To Help Endangered Chimpanzees? Uganda is Planting 3 Million Trees

Once the loans are repaid, the money is loaned out again, a style of banking locals describe as uniquely African.

However, the defining fiscal characteristic of Okere City is its shea trees.

RELATED: Traps That Once Snared Ugandas Wildlife Are Turned into Intricate Art With Snares to Wares

I looked at [the shea tree] and realized that we have this important natural resource and we were not harnessing it, Okello told The Guardian. And I thought about [Marvel Cinemas] Wakanda and Black Panther, they had vibranium, this shea tree could be our vibranium.

CHECK OUT:Designer Works to Erect First Modern Village to Generate its Own Electricityand Foodin 100% Sustainable Loop

So I am like: Damn, Im going to invest everything within my means to tap this resource, to protect [it], and to use it to emancipate my community.

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Inspired by Marvel's Mythical 'Wakanda', Ugandan Village is Built on Shea Butter and Solar Power - Good News Network

by Daniel Kushner, Jackie Ratner, and Jeff Schlegelmilch|March 10, 2021

Photo: iStock

What does it mean to be resilient? Although the definition may vary slightly when referring to a specific kind of resilience, the foundational premise is the same: resilience is sustained stability and the ability to rebound in the face of adversity.

This question is the foundation of a partnership between Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, and the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) at Columbia University. The partnership will take a deep look at the kinds of vulnerabilities that exist in communities across our nation, and examine how interdisciplinary partnerships, particularly between industry and academia, can work together to build community resilience.

As part of the partnership, this post kicks off a series about the resilient grid of the future and new ways electric utilities can address vulnerabilities to climate and disaster by making intentional changes to infrastructure beyond structural components alone, and engendering an economic and social ecosystem of resilience. For this first post, well be focusing on the potential of microgrids.

While the traditional electric grid is one of humanitys greatest innovations, new resilience-building technologies are allowing us to enhance that foundational system, providing the capability to leverage distributed energy resources (that is, small-scale power generation and energy storage) and improve energy resilience through microgrids and other innovations. Electric utilities all over the world are addressing community vulnerabilities to climate change and related disasters by investing in microgrid technology, a unique energy system that can provide power to a community by operating in conjunction with the grid or independently.

As electric utilities begin to focus on resilience at the local level, academic institutions like NCDP are researching the complexities and vulnerabilities that put communities at risk from major disasters, focusing on system readiness across the United States. From a national lens, the community microgrid model is of particular interest, demonstrating how attention to local energy resilience builds capacity for regional response and recovery.

The microgrid ComEd is installing in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, the Bronzeville Community Microgrid, is part of the first utility-operated microgrid cluster in the nation, and it is demonstrating what increased energy resilience looks like for a community and nearby areas. The Bronzeville microgrid is projected to provide more than 1,000 residences, businesses, and public institutions with a new layer of defense when it comes to storm-related power outages. Not only that, keeping the power on in Bronzeville means that surrounding areas can utilize the neighborhood as an oasis in times of great need, extending the benefits of energy resilience.

Enhanced energy resilience can have direct and indirect impacts on a communitys economic health as well. Although investment in microgrid technology can be costly, microgrids often result in lower energy costs for customers and businesses due to their efficiency in managing energy supply and the access they provide to the energy market. Solar panels installed as part of the Bronzeville Community Microgrid at nearby Dearborn Homes public housing development in 2019 serve as an opportunity to demonstrate future economic resilience. As a Chicago Housing Authority property, Dearborn Homes is now part of a solution to drive decarbonization in the neighborhood and fuel economic growth through the green jobs that come with installation and maintenance, and lower energy costs for residents.

In addition, the economic benefits of microgrid technology and distributed energy resources can extend far beyond energy costs. For example, the Bronzeville Community Microgrid deployment provided the opportunity for workforce training in solar panel installation, a trade that is projected to increase by 63% before 2028. When more green, sustainable, and resilient energy technology is deployed within a community, more jobs are created to install and maintain it.

Indirect economic impacts of increased energy resilience also include changes to household spending as higher efficiency can result in lower energy costs. These can be more challenging to measure, but data on economic resilience and its connections to energy will continue to emerge as these systems grow increasingly interconnected.

Community interdependencies are significant: a disruptive event in one location or within a demographic segment can dramatically affect those adjacent. This is a vulnerability that requires close attention to how populations, communities, and their energy systems are connected to one another. In order to best support connected systems and communities, our infrastructure must be strategically linked as well.

Interconnectedness is an important measure in resilience research. The resilience of a community reflects that of its individual components, a truth that becomes increasingly evident as climate and disaster science gathers data on communities affected by catastrophes. It is important that baseline resilience indicators including community capital are assessed in tandem with other indicators like infrastructure, recognizing that all parts of our complex societal systems are interconnected, and therefore no single stakeholder can address vulnerabilities in isolation.

All communities should benefit from innovative technology and clean energy resources, especially communities who have historically experienced disinvestment. Whats more, it is time to take a closer look at how fixing conditions at a local level can enhance not only a specific neighborhood, but all the areas connected to it.

NCDP and ComEd are continuing to expand our understanding of how investments in energy will continue to build resilience. With expanding collaborations with the Columbias Center on Global Energy Policy, this partnership is looking ahead, utilizing a growing evidence base on the health and environmental benefits of reimagining our electric grid, to foster resilience rather than patch vulnerabilities.

Paradigm change starts with thought leadership and connecting the dots across various fields of electrical engineering, disaster research, and energy policy. This ongoing partnership will continue to broaden the discussion on the intersection of diverse fields, and share lessons, insights, and future visions to help foster the development of a resilient grid of the future.

_________________

Daniel Kushner is manager of Smart Grid Programs at Commonwealth Edison. He leads the development and strategic planning for grid- of-the-future initiatives, including external communication and content development on emerging technologies, energy storage, microgrids, and smart city deployments. Daniel has produced articles on topics ranging from smart cities to smart grids for such publications as IEEE Smart City, T&D World, and Asian Survey. He holds a BA degree in history from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in political science from Brown University.

Jackie Ratner is a senior project manager at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. Her advocacy for public access to disaster-specific knowledge has been recognized in awards for science outreach, and she has spoken at the annual conferences of the American Geophysical Union and the European Geophysical Union, as well as numerous smaller conferences. Her BS with honors in environmental geology was awarded by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she was accepted to the earth science doctoral program at the University of Oxford.

Jeff Schlegelmilch is a research scholar and the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Universitys Earth Institute. His areas of expertise include public health preparedness, community resilience and the integration of private and public sector capabilities. He is the author of Rethinking Readiness: A Brief Guide to 21st- Century Megadisasters (Columbia University Press). He holds a masters degree in public health from UMASS Amherst in health policy and management, and a masters degree in business administration from Quinnipiac University.

Learn more about the role of energy utilities in fostering climate and disaster resilience at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness website.

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How to Build a More Resilient Energy Grid for the Future: Part 1 - State of the Planet