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Jun 17

Jonathan Hanson: Charleston And A Fragile Forgiveness

A year later, we remember. On June 17, 2015, a young white supremacist walked into a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. He stayed for an hour of bible study with 12 church members, then opened fire on them with a concealed handgun, killing nine. Just two days later, the victims’ families started offering words of forgiveness to the murderer at his bond hearing — one year later, photographer Jonathan Hanson visits the town of Charleston to see how the families and survivors are progressing through their journeys of forgiveness, grief, and resilience.

In his photo essay, to accompany an article written by Bob Smietana for Christianity Today, Jonathan wanted to explore questions of forgiveness.

What does forgiveness mean and how is it shaped by their faith/identity? What are the lasting impressions and how did the shooting affect the current state of race relations in a city decorated with racist symbols?

Jonathan was found by the photo editor for the piece through his coverage of the Black Lives Matter activists surrounding protests in Baltimore. The photo editor, Alecia Sharp, remembered these photographs of Jonathan’s and reached out to him this year, asking if he could do this shoot in a similar style to his street portraits in Baltimore. Again, his task was to take portraits of the people that somehow honored their pain and humanity, while showing their strength and voice. Jonathan made two trips out to Charleston with writer Bob Smietana so that they could get time with the survivors, family members, and community members.

During the first trip, Jonathan and Bob only worked on meeting people and gaining trust. Jonathan explains that because people in the town were so media-weary, they needed to take time to do this. They worked through the community to find voices that may not have already been publicly heard.

Most of the stories out there touch on what happened the night of the shooting, so after we gathered the facts, we spent time talking through how we could tell the story beyond the headlines.

On the second trip, Jonathan photographed, using a Hasselblad film camera. He says this camera is a great ice-breaker because people haven’t usually seen a camera like this and are curious about it. Throughout this whole project, he was able to talk to the people who the photo series was about and really learn from them.

Jonathan says that one of the most powerful lessons he got came from Nadine Collier, daughter of one of the women killed, and the first person to offer forgiveness to the shooter.

After I photographed her we were talking and she said to me, “Forgiveness is power.” She further explained that forgiveness allows you to take power back and not let others control you. It’s something I’m trying to implement in my life.

The complete photo series can be viewed on jhansonphoto.com.

Wonderful Machine is a production company with a network of over 700 photographers around the world, and we love to share their stories. Check out more cool projects on the Wonderful Machine Blog!

If you’re interested in this story for your blog or publication, contact anna@wonderfulmachine.com or call (610)260-0200.

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Jun 17

Priced Out Of Dying In California

Posted in: Today's Chili

by Ravi B. Parikh, MD, MPP and Joanne Lynn, MD, MA, MS

On June 9th, 2016, California became the latest state to allow physician-assisted suicide. For all of the recent debate over legalizing physician-assisted suicide, one point often fails to be mentioned: Americans who choose to take lethal drugs will be unable to afford it. In February, Canada-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals purchased rights to secobarbital, the medication most used for prescription aid in dying (PAD; more commonly known as physician-assisted suicide) in the United States. Shortly after, Valeant doubled the price of secobarbital to $3,000 per lethal dose.

Lack of effective alternatives and inconsistent insurance coverage contributed to secobarbital’s price increase, just as they do for other generic medications. However, three unique factors complicate any response to high prices of drugs used in PAD: the public divide over its acceptability, existing socioeconomic disparities in its use, and the historical ties to drugs used in the death penalty. Unless policymakers address these factors, individuals hoping to access legal prescription aid in dying may be unable to do so.

Authorization, use, and support of PAD are increasing. PAD is currently authorized by statute or court opinion in five U.S. states: Oregon (since 1994), Washington (2008), Montana (2009), Vermont (2013), and, most recently, California (2015). Most of these states authorize PAD for adults who submit a series of oral and written requests and who are certified by physicians to be mentally capable and have a terminal illness with estimated prognosis of six months or less. In Oregon, PAD is increasing in frequency as more people become aware of the practice and more physicians are willing to participate. Between 2011 and 2015, the number of prescriptions (114 to 218) and deaths from PAD (71 to 132) nearly doubled.

In the U.S., PAD requires patients to self-administer lethal drugs orally. Before 2015 in Oregon and Washington, most PAD cases used secobarbital (54 percent in Oregon; 64 percent in Washington) or pentobarbital (45 percent and 36 percent, respectively). Years of experience helped determine optimal doses of these drugs for PAD and other uses. Secobarbital’s original patent was in 1934 to treat sleep disorders, and it is currently only available in an oral form. Pentobarbital has been used for many years as an anti-seizure medication. However, pentobarbital also has an intravenous form; in this form, it has been the drug most used for death penalty executions in the U.S. and physician-administered voluntary euthanasia in Europe.

This association with the death penalty has had important implications for access to PAD. In 2011, the Danish manufacturer of pentobarbital, Lundbeck, stopped manufacturing pentobarbital in the United States over concerns that it was used in lethal executions for prisoners, which is illegal and condemned in much of Europe. The subsequent drug shortage caused the price per lethal dose to rise from $500 in 2012 to over $15,000. As a result, pentobarbital essentially stopped being used for PAD in Oregon in 2015, with over 80 percent of PAD patients relying on secobarbital. An alternative three-drug cocktail of a long-acting barbiturate, a hypnotic, and an opioid — reported to cost approximately $400 per lethal dose — began to be used in 2015 in Oregon and accounted for 20 percent of PAD cases that year. However, only a few willing specialized compounding pharmacies can supply this cocktail. Furthermore, the effectiveness and safety of this new cocktail are less well established.

No drugs have been approved safe and effective in PAD. This is in part because of a 1985 Supreme Court opinion in Heckler v Chaney, stipulating that the Food and Drug Administration is not required to regulate drugs used for lethal injection or PAD. As more medications or formulations enter the field, states could require evidence of safety and efficacy by mandating the reporting of doses, adverse effects before death, and time to death. However, no states yet require this, and layperson witnesses to the death might find reporting these measures to be difficult.

Public sensitivities regarding PAD also yield uneven and sometimes uncertain insurance coverage of PAD drugs. The Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act of 1997 prohibited federal program coverage — including Medicare, the federal component of Medicaid, and the Veterans’ Health Administration. Insurance coverage has thus been left to individual state Medicaid or commercial plans. A recent bill in California proposes to mandate Medicaid coverage for drugs used in PAD, but state Medicaid and commercial insurance coverage remains unpredictable.

Insurance coverage for PAD would protect patients from costs by distributing risk to a large population, but it would not reduce the costs of lethal medications. To actually reduce the cost will require developing PAD drugs that are reliably effective and inexpensive. Perhaps the three-drug cocktail will accomplish this, as experience, use, and availability grows. However, this could take years — over which time many more states are expected to legalize PAD. Furthermore, a serious initiative to control the price of PAD drugs could be more difficult than similar efforts to cut costs of other drugs, since such a negotiation will reopen the fractious debate on PAD itself.

Further escalation in PAD drug costs may exacerbate existing disparities in its use. In Oregon, of those who died via PAD, 71 percent had some college education or more, compared to 58 percent of the national population. These deaths were also more likely to be older white males dying from cancer. Fears of institutionalization or impoverishment could drive resource-poor individuals to want to accelerate the timing of death. However, inconsistent insurance coverage and higher prescription costs may make PAD unaffordable for poor people. Ironically, high costs for lethal medications might balance the effects of coercive financial situations, though long-term care costs still overwhelm the costs of PAD drugs.

Research to develop other PAD drugs that can only be ingested orally might engender competition and bring down prices. Currently, the number of individuals utilizing PAD is far too low to incentivize new drug alternatives. However, public support for PAD could spur demand to develop alternatives. Importantly, none of this would affect the price and availability challenges affecting death penalty cases, since those require injectable drugs.

Making secobarbital a focus of drug company profits is unsettling, even for those who have opposed legalization of PAD (including one of us). One would reasonably want people to live well as long as they can and to have little cause for seeking an earlier death. But in states where PAD is authorized, one would also reasonably want people to make choices about treatment and survival without being pressured by the high costs of PAD or of long-term assistance. This debate is vigorous enough when considering ethics and emotions. Drug pricing should not play a role in it.

Dr. Parikh is a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Lynn is Director of the Center for Elder Care and Advanced Illness at the Altarum Institute.

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Jun 17

Progress Worth Noting: Congress Strengthens The Freedom Of Information Act And The Public's Right To Know

Posted in: Today's Chili

In a gloomy news week dominated by the slaughter of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. and its aftermath, it is understandable that Congressional approval of unrelated legislation easing access to government records has not garnered tons of public attention. But Monday’s House passage of the bipartisan Freedom of Information Improvement Act previously approved by the Senate (also by a unanimous vote) now sends to the White House a major FOIA reform bill and blast against Washington’s culture of unwarranted government secrecy. President Obama has said he’ll sign the measure — a fitting way to mark the 50th anniversary of the nation’s premier transparency law this July 4th.

The bill’s foremost accomplishment is that it will embed in federal law a “presumption of openness,” making it clear that “sunshine, not secrecy, is the default setting of our government” and “government information belongs in the hands of the people,” as Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Senate’s foremost Democratic champion of the legislation puts it.

Other key players in the multi-year reform effort included Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and House members Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Darrell Issa of California, both Republicans, and Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland. In all, an impressive example of productive bipartisan cooperation. The legislation was also pressed by a coalition of nine media groups, including the Associated Press, the American Society of News Editors, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Society of Professional Journalists.

The idea is to make it harder for agency officials deny release of government information sought under the FOIA. The “presumption of openness” was first laid out as executive branch policy by President Bill Clinton, only to be reversed by his successor, President George W. Bush. President Obama reinstated it in 2009 as one of his first acts upon taking office, but his administration has been criticized for straying from the commitment to openness in practice, even lobbying against a similar version of the legislation that nearly passed both houses of Congress two years ago.

On top of putting the force of law behind the presumption of openness, another noteworthy provision will impose a 25-year sunset on the withholding of documents under a much-overused FOIA exception covering the government’s deliberative process in reaching decisions. A quarter of a century is a long time for the public to wait to know the truthful background of their government’s actions, but it is better than keeping citizens in the dark forever, as current law allows regarding many documents revealing of the government’s decision-making process.

Another key advance requires creation of an online portal for submitting FOIA requests, which are now handled differently by separate agencies. Frequently requested records must be posted online.

Only time will tell how well the new changes work and there are some needed fixes to the FOIA the legislation omits. Work on strengthening the FOIA and protecting hard-won gains needs to continue.

Most immediately, Senator Leahy cautions, the Senate Armed Services Committees has included broadly-drafted language in its version of the defense authorization bill that could carve-out the Defense Department from the regular disclosure regimen, potentially, for example, allowing the Pentagon to withhold documents regarding civilian deaths at the hand of U.S. forces, shedding light on the military’s sexual assault problem, or the legal justifications for drone strikes against American citizens. This lurch toward greater secrecy must be resisted.

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Jun 17

Four Inappropriate Questions With Lea DeLaria

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Jun 17

10 Things You Need To Know Before Starting A Blog

Posted in: Today's Chili

Image credit: Caio Resende/StockSnap.

So you want to start a blog?

Nowadays anyone can create a blog in a few simple steps. Blogging is an incredible marketing tool and can even become a great source of income. However, if you would like to build a successful and profitable blog, you need to set yourself on the right path.

Here are ten things you should know before you jump into blogging.

Blogging takes time and effort

Before getting started, ask yourself why you want to start a blog. If your goal is just to make money online, honestly blogging might not be the best choice for you. There are hundreds of ways of making money online and blogging is one of the harder ones.

It requires a lot of hard work and takes a long time to grow your audience. It is pretty disappointing if you publish your first post and nobody reads it, but you need to undergo these awkward moments. Do not expect the results immediately.

Successful bloggers are patient enough to keep working on their blogs for a long time. It’s tough, but they know it’s worth it.

Blogging is not free

WordPress.com, Blogger, Medium and Tumblr, these blogging platforms are all free and very easy to use. However, as long as you go for a free blog you do not own your blog, which means there are some limitations and lack of control.

If you want a cool web address, more design flexibility, larger storage or more monetization opportunities, a self-hosted WordPress blog is still the best bet. You can start a self-hosted blog by buying a hosting, domain name and installing WordPress. All of it will cost you around $50-150/year. Jamie Spencer wrote a comprehensive guide on how to start a blog including choosing a domain name, hosting and installing WordPress.

Once started, you might need to spend more money on other things to get more traffic and increase engagement. Below are some of the investments you can make for your blog.

Design customization

Custom development

Ads, marketing promotions

Better web hosting

Hiring other writers

A/B testing

Software

Identify your niche

It is crucial to decide what you write about and stay focused on that niche. There are already a lot of blogs. You’ll have to figure out how to make your blog stand out from the crowd. Choose a topic you are passionate about and do not expand it too broadly.

Define your target audience. Get a clear answer to the following question. Who is going to read your blog? Identify their needs, interests and concerns. It will help you come up with good topics to write about.

Content is King

Content marketers and pro bloggers are often faced with an argument ‘Quality vs Quantity‘. Quantity matters to increase and maintain your traffic, but you should still focus on quality over quantity.

If your readers get value from the information in your articles, they will engage and become your regular audience. On the other hand, nobody will like your blog if you publish shallow and uninformative articles.

Get social

It is not enough to write a great post and wait for people to find it. While your blog is new, nobody will find your articles through search engines. Then how can you get traffic? You need to be proactive.

One of the best ways to get noticed is to use social media to promote your posts. You can even buy traffic by creating ads on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

It is OK to share the same content more than once, which is one of the easiest ways to drive more traffic. But just be careful not to be a spammer. Kissmetric mentions great tips about how to increase your traffic through social media.

Learn basic HTML

Thanks to the powerful blogging platforms, HTML and CSS knowledge is no longer necessary for everyone. It is possible to customize themes and plugins without having a look at any code.

Still, a basic understanding of HTML (and CSS if possible) can surely help professional bloggers and non-tech marketers. Once you are familiar with these skills, you will be able to edit the appearance of your articles by hand or even fix simple errors on the blog.

You can easily start learning online for free. For instance, Codecademy, Code School and Khan Academy are offering free video courses about HTML fundamentals.

Learn basic SEO

Learning basic search engine optimization (SEO) is a fundamental and very effective way to drive traffic to your blog. Traffic from search engines is the key to growth. SEO is very complicated but even knowing a few tips can make a huge difference in the long run.

Moz offers great articles about SEO, you can check their beginner’s guide here.

Learn about copyright issues

What do you do when someone steals your content without permission? It can happen to anyone at any time.

You should learn how to protect your articles and images. At the same time it is critical to educate yourself to prevent becoming a “content thief” unintentionally.

Here is a useful article on WordPress.com about how to reduce the risk of content theft.

Good design is a must

The blog design can influence how readers perceive your content. It can seriously make or break the first impression. If your blog is ugly and hard to read, then sure nobody will read it.

Google’s algorithms are prioritizing mobile-friendly sites. Research by Smart Insights reveals that people are now spending more time on mobile devices. Make your blog mobile-friendly and responsive to ensure you create a pleasurable reading experience for your audience and reap low-hanging SEO fruits.

Be authentic

Always be yourself. By being authentic and real, you can build trust with your audience. People buy from people they trust. It takes years to build trust and just a matter of minutes to ruin it. Be open and interact with your readers. Be the first one to admit mistakes and apologize.

Conclusion

Today, anyone can start a blog. However, it’s not for everyone. Most of the new bloggers give up too early.

At first writing might be painful and will take a lot of time to finish just one article. But if you keep writing content you are passionate about; you will gradually get used to it.

I hope you find this article helpful to prepare yourself before taking the first step starting a blog.

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Jun 17

Arline Isaacson Talks LGBT Grieving And Survival (AUDIO)

Posted in: Today's Chili

This week in the aftermath of the worst mass killing in American history at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida I talked with Arline Isaacson, Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus and one of the architects of marriage equality in this country. Isaacson is a brilliant and dedicated lobbyist who has fought successfully for decades for our LGBT community. I asked Arline for her spin on this national and global tragedy and to shed some light on where we are now and the future for LGBTQ civil rights in this country especially during a presidential race with a shameful republican candidate who is still spewing hate and with over 200 state discriminatory bills still pending against our LGBTQ community. This is a time when we need to come together to console our sorrow and begin the healing progress from the devastation of this horrific attack on our LGBTQ community and move forward in solidarity as a nation.
LISTEN:

When asked what she would like to see happen for LGBT equality in the next few years
Isaacson stated:

The good news that we have to remind ourselves is that we are on a trajectory that’s very positive and very good for our community. That there will always be bumps in the road and this is hardly a bump, this is a chasm that’s a total earthquake road-breaking chasm that just happened in Orlando but we need to remember that we can build a bridge across that chasm. We will build a bridge across that chasm and because we are LGBT it will be the most fabulous bridge anyone has ever built anywhere in the world. It will be the most beautiful bridge anyone ever built and it will be strong and it will be enduring and it will be gorgeous and we have to remind ourselves it’s just going to take some time and it’s going to take some work and you can’t stop building the bridge in the middle, you got to keep going until you get to the other side.
The other thing we need to remind ourselves is very important in my mind is that we have to remember to use this horrible tragedy as a lesson for what we must not do to others, culturally and politically. Let this remind us that as we gain our equality and as we move up the ladder so to speak culturally of acceptance or politically of acceptance, or politically in equality, we have to make sure we pull others up behind us, that we don’t dis other communities and groups whether they’re based on their religion or their race or their immigrant status or economic status. We have to fight religious extremists and even if you’re anti abortion you have to condemn people who shoot up abortion clinics and shoot up abortion doctors. We have to apply the lessons we wish to have applied to ourselves. We have to remember the importance of applying them to someone else and then when one group in our nation is disenfranchised, when one group in our nation is discriminated against, when one group is treated unequally, we are ultimately all unequal.

Arline Isaacson co-chair’s Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political Caucus with Gary Daffin. MGLPC is the most experienced and respected lobbying operation on Beacon Hill in Massachusetts working for LGBTQ equal rights. Founded in 1973 MGLPC has had enormous success advocating with professional lobbyists for the interests and needs of our LGBT community. MGLPC continues to fight for LGBT civil rights especially transgender equality, AIDS-related issues and more. It is a totally volunteer effort and your support is needed especially in these difficult times.
For More Info: mglpc.org
To Help Orlando Victims: weareorlando.org

Listen to more LGBT Leaders, Allies & Celebrity Interviews: OUTTAKE VOICES™
Download Interviews on iTunes

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Jun 17

GUNS. AGAIN.

Posted in: Today's Chili

I remember where I was when I heard about Sandy Hook, one of the most horrifying occurrences in this country in my lifetime. And I remember the panic I felt thinking of my son, Sam, who was six and sitting in his first grade classroom. And I remember lingering at his school for days afterwards when I would drop him off, barely able to let him go. I realized that the issue of guns would be one I would spend the rest of my life working on.

When pretty much anyone can get a military-style assault weapon with ease, including home grown terrorists and individuals with an agenda of hate so severe they kill, the horror of gun violence doesn’t end, even as the public becomes more and more desperate that it does.

And Wisconsinites are desperate that gun violence end and common sense measures be adopted. In a January Marquette poll, 85.3% of Wisconsinites indicated they support universal background checks for gun purchases, with strong support in every corner of our state. And 65% of Wisconsinites want to keep concealed guns off school grounds.

Yet in Wisconsin, Republican legislators wouldn’t even allow a vote on my resolution to honor the children and staff killed at Sandy Hook Elementary. Instead, in the five years they have been in charge, Republicans have repealed our 48 hour waiting period for handgun purchases, legalized concealed guns, which research from Stanford University shows has increased instances of violent crime, and tried but thankfully failed to allow more guns in our elementary schools and college classes. They will try again next session.

Republican policy makers insist that guns make us safer. If that were the case, the U.S., with the most civilian gun ownership in the world, would be the safest country among industrialized nations. Instead, we are the most deadly by far. And a gun owner has a far bigger risk that their gun will accidently kill someone they love than ever save a life. As Stanford gun researcher John Donohue has stated, “A loaded, unsecured gun in the home is like an insurance policy that fails to deliver at least 95% of the time you need it. . .”

But Democrats in the state legislature have to get more courage too. Perhaps if we talked more about creating safe communities and keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals through waiting periods, comprehensive background checks and no buy fly laws, we might start winning elections.

On the day that U.S. Senator Chris Murphy concluded his 15 hour filibuster, I began preparing a resolution for the victims in Orlando, almost exclusively LGBTQ members and people of color who have been killed, and tortured and abused throughout a shameful history of discrimination which continues to present day. Orlando was a hate crime that turned into a hate massacre because of the guns used. Next session, will Assembly Republicans block this resolution from even being considered? What about a reinstatement of the 48 hour waiting period for handgun purchases? Or universal background checks?

The question to ask now, is what are our elected officials going to do to curb this epidemic of gun violence? Praying for the devastated families isn’t enough. It’s not enough when gun violence claims 88 lives every day in our country. It’s not enough when 52 women each month are gunned down by their intimate partners. It’s not enough when 7 children lose their lives daily. It’s not enough when there has been 186 school shootings on school campuses since Sandy Hook.

Enough talk. It’s time for action.

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Jun 17

Kerry Washington Discusses Abortion, Politics and Pregnancy

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Jun 17

Without A Pulse

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When a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama in September of 1963 taking with it the lives of four young Black girls, it was not attack on our nations children. It was an attack on their skin color. It was a crime motivated and carried out by white supremacy. It was a crime fueled by our nations allowance of treating brown bodies like they are disposable; no matter their age.

When Pulse nightclub in Orlando rang out with hundreds of bullets in the early morning hours of June 11th 2016 killing 49 it was not an attack on nightlife, or “our religious freedom”, it was actually religious freedom personified. It was an attack on the brown queer community. A community that religion and government goes out of its way to erase. It was an attack fueled by aggressive religious rhetoric. It was an attack that we as Americans need to hold our government responsible for.

We do not need to look overseas and condemn ISIS. We need to go into our courtrooms and condemn those who represent us. Those who are by the day passing more and more laws that restrict the basic human rights of LGBTQ people. Half of our government is homophobic and transphobic. We must stop using Islam as an escape for rhetoric the GOP and far right conservative Christians have been spewing for years. We must hold them accountable. We must not allow them to use our tragedy as a means to start a war against more brown skinned folks. Hate crimes against the LGBTQ community happen every day in America; in our court rooms, in state houses, and in congress.

Was it not only a month ago that we saw people posting photos of themselves standing outside of bathrooms with guns, threatening to “stop” trans people from using the facilities? Are we supposed to ignore that these people are a very real part of our American fabric? They aren’t in a cave in the Middle East as our government would like us to believe; they are in line behind us at the grocery store mumbling under their breath and calling us faggots as we shop with our lovers.

When you feed and feed and feed a fire and allow people to truly believe that they are above other citizens death happens. It has happened. It will continue to happen. And no religion is to blame here; except for the zealous Republican who has utilized the bible and fear mongering mixed with lax gun laws to further not just an agenda but an entirely sound and reasonable way of behaving and existing as a “God-loving Christian”.

All I ever wanted was to be 21. I wanted to get in where I actually fit in. Young and gay and figuring it out. 18+ nights were sought after, fake ID’s were currency. How could I get in? How could I be? How could I release? Every single week I went to Tilt in Rochester. I would rush to the bathrooms and wash off the X’s on my hands, and then I would join the chorus. My family. We were all in that moment strangers that could very well become best friends or lovers. And we did. It didn’t matter much if you were shy, you had something to talk about with every single person in that room. You shared common ground with both the bartender and the drag queen. You all had a rainbow thread sewn into your heart.

When I finally did turn 21 I found my sanctuary in New York City nightlife. Every single week, I went to Cubby Hole in Manhattan. Every single week I played “Dancing On My Own” by Robyn. I fell in love in that bar; I would many times over the years. Both with friends and partners. I grew up there. I became who I am. This past year I stood at the bar in Lexington Club in San Francisco as hundreds came to say goodbye to an institution. I cried with them because I imagined what it would feel like to watch Cubby Hole shutter. Like your parents moving out of your childhood home. Yes, we would relocate but it wouldn’t be the same. It never could be. I thought that night I was seeing death. I thought that was the closest I would come in nightlife to witnessing grief over a space. But then I woke up Sunday morning, and everything I knew to be “the worst” was turned on its head.

I fight every day to be able to breathe as a POC person. As a queer person. As a trans person. It is on dance floors that many of us forget all of the “others” that we are. We rightfully lose ourselves. We need to. The name Pulse makes so much sense for a gay bar. Our bodies pulsate through the doors. Our heartbeats speed up as we see our crush. They sync to the beat of our favorite DJ. We do not imagine that there in that space that feels like home we would cease to feel a pulse. That is an unimaginable idea. An inconceivable thought. And yet due to our countries preposterous gun laws it has become reality. The music has stopped. And this time, not even the pulse remains.

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Jun 17

Community Transformation: The Ripple Effect

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Every picture tells a story. This photo was taken in April this year, but the story started in January 2012.

At the start of each training we encourage people to do a number of things. One of these is to share the training with at least 20 people in the community within the next month; another is that they would start a project that benefited their community. In January 2012 we ran our first pilot in Kenya. In the audience were two mothers whose jobs were to pack vegetables as fast as they could to be sold in European supermarkets. Each evening they returned to Dandora, their home community, built on the very edges of the City refuse dump. The difference on this January day, was that the two ladies returned home seeing themselves as leaders, story writers, ladies who now had the pen to create a different story within their own lives and the lives of those around them. Thy looked around the community wondering who they could teach and what community project they could do. Right in front of their eyes were youth – many, many youth – unemployed, angry, hopeless, drug and alcohol numbed youths. Youths that were making the community unsafe for the very young and old.

So that is where the ladies began. Courageously, fearlessly, they began to share what they had learned with these youth and to everyone’s amazement the youth listened. They liked what they were hearing. It was waking them up; it was giving them a taste of hope rather than the future of an early death that they knew was the fate. They wanted to hear more, so each evening they were taught more.

Over the next 12 months the lives of the youth began to change in fundamental ways and the community of Dandora changed with them. The unemployed got themselves back to education or set up business to generate income. Community projects were initiated around urban agriculture, community security and arts. Up to this point there was one rape or death each night in Dandora Phase 4. Now, three years on, there’s only one a month at most.

But it didn’t stop there. Amongst this youth group (now called The Dandora Uprising), was a young man called Peter who confessed to me recently that if it hadn’t been for the Emerging Leaders training he would have been dead by now, like many other youth in the area. In September 2013 we invited Peter, one of the founder members of the youth group to attend a week long Train The Trainer. From there Peter started training other youths. As of the end of April 2016 Peter has now trained 1500 people himself. His training has an estimated impact on the lives of up to 9000 people. The wider impact of the training that Peter and his friends have carried out has reached over 20,000 people.
• 203 of the youth are sustaining their lives from revenue collected from the community through projects
• 20,100 community members enjoy safe and secure environment
• 1,200 people have increase saving
• More than 5 Million Kenyan Shillings (just under $50,000) have been saved through table banking
• 25 youth have gone back to university and colleges, including Peter
• Initiation of more than 100 small scale businesses,
• Improved livelihoods due to additional income because of youth leading their finance
• A clean environment, safe for children to play
• Increase in enrollment of children in school
• Increased trust between youth groups and government institutions
• Creativity and innovation – people want to start leading their own projects like the Uprising Library (see below)

In Peters words “this would never had been possible if Leadership for Life had not been introduced to Dandora”

I once asked Peter ,”What is the legacy you want to leave with your life”. He asked for time to think about it. A few months later he said, “I have the answer to your question. I want to build a library in Dandora because there isn’t one. Children have no safe, lit place to go and do homework after school“. At that time there was nothing. Now there is Dandora’s first ever community library that he and his team have created, with over 500 books and a few computers, with 25 children attending each evening.

So, what about the picture at the start of this blog? In the centre is the only male, Peter. This was his April 2016 group. All unemployed women. They came in hopelessness. They told Peter that they found their food each day by picking over the City rubbish dump nearby and they simply waited to die because they saw absolutely no hope for their lives. Peter started with 35 women and this soon became 50 women as word spread of the hope the training was bringing. By the end of April, 6 of them had started businesses to create their own income. Peter pointed out to me the smiles on their faces. “There were no smiles when they started. They now have hope”

Stephen (in the green shirt) also trained as a trainer and here is is with a gang of ex criminals he trained in Leadership, now all in jobs or back in education.

It doesn’t matter who your name is, when one person starts to lead their own lives the world around them changes.

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Hasta La Gadget!

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