Guiding Families to a Fair Day in Court

In a rapidly gentrifying Mexico City neighborhood, two artists refurbished an icon and set up an altar for Santa Mari La Juaricua, a saint to protect residents from eviction. The saint raises awareness and acts as a reminder about housing issues and the icon has been taken up by the residents and has been used in processions and protests.

Production agriculture has put many small town, local farmers out of business, changing the landscape of the communities they've been pushed out of. One town in Missouri is fighting against this by joining together to preserve the importance of local control by nurturing a tradition of canning tomatoes.

A pilot program in Connecticut for young offenders matches them with older inmates as mentors who help them confront their pasts and the underlying reasons they’re in prison. They learn new life skills and personal money management as part of a growing trend to use neuroscience to inform incarceration of young adults. The program is based on prisons in Germany and two other states are setting up similar pilots, but no data is yet available on whether the approach reduces recidivism.

Jane Cavarozzi, an entrepreneur and activist, started Dirty Girl coffee to “support economic development and women’s advancement in the small, depressed villages around Appalachian Ohio.” She lives in the town of Glouster and is respected for living local and working local, as opposed to being an outsider problem-solver. Though her coffee company is just one small step forward, she works closely with community groups to move economic development initiatives for the region forward.

Getting away from daily publishing helps local newspapers focus on serving their audience. The Quoddy Tides, a family-owned newspaper in Eastport, Maine, publishes only twice monthly. Publishing less frequently allows the newspaper to include more local stories, which are of interest to their community of readers, many of whom either live in, or have ties to the community. By avoiding the 24-hour news cycle, the newspaper can focus on local discourse and civic engagement.

The Women’s Collective is a nonprofit that works with more than 10,000 subsistence farmers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to promote food security using millets, a crop resilient to drought and climate change. For Pavitra, one of those farmers, she began cultivating the ancient grains in 2015 and now has more than enough food to feed her family year-round. However, there’s a lack of public investment in millet production and machinery. And there’s no unified effort to create demand for millets: Some state governments lead the charge and in other states, it’s led by grassroots organizations.

A New York-based nonprofit called Students for a Free Tibet is training Tibetans in "how to stage nonviolent protests." This effort, in conjunction with other Tibetan NGOs, has helped activists in Dharamsala, India to become "more organized, media savvy and technologically sophisticated," which in turn has increased the number of people who have come together to participate in the nonviolent protests.

Domestic abuse of the staff in the households of the 1% is often overlooked or ignored. But foreign missions in the US that abuse their domestic staff are finally being held accountable.

Volunteer citizen seismologists in Haiti are collecting data on earthquakes and aftershocks with equipment provided by researchers to better understand seismic hazards and fault locations in the country.

The Prisoner Correspondence Project connects LGBTQ2S+ people who are incarcerated in the United States and Canada with pen pals who are not incarcerated. The consistent communication helps combat isolation and improve mental health and rehabilitation outcomes.