In conjunction with the public television broadcast this fall of Waging a Living, a documentary that illustrates the financial struggles of low-wage workers, several community groups in Rhode Island will launch a campaign to assist the working poor. With funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the campaign will feature discussion forums to raise awareness of issues of poverty as well as workshops and seminars about avoiding predatory lending, building financial assets, and other matters affecting low-income earners.

In Onondaga County, New York, a partnership has been formed between the Sheriff's Office, University Hospital, and Western Area Volunteer Emergency Services (WAVES). A paramedic from WAVES now accompanies members of the sheriff's office as they make daily patrols in a customized helicopter. The life-saving arrangement allows for shorter response time to the scene of an accident and on-board medical care.

To combat truancy, Columbia County, South Carolina, is implementing a strict attendance policy. The school board mandates that only five parent-excused absences will be accepted each semester, with any more requiring a note from a medical professional. Additionally, the policy allows only three unexcused absences in a semester before a pupil is reported as truant to the Sheriff's Office; parents of truant children could face fines as high as $100 and even jail time.

New York City wants to be famous for its "green" cabs, not just its yellow ones, and it wants to ensure that no disabled citizen is "left behind." This year, the city will offer specially designated medallions in order to triple the number of wheelchair accessible taxis and more than quadruple the number of alternative fuel taxis. Supporters applaud the effort, citing the potential to both improve the accessibility of New York's taxi fleet and reduce air pollution in the city.

Pennsylvania's Allegheny County has launched HumanServices.net to help members of the community access information on a broad range of services available to them. The site employs a sophisticated database that enables providers from different public agencies and nonprofit organizations to share, update, and modify a common pool of nonproprietary information. Citizens can efficiently sift through data on 3,000 agencies and 10,000 programs, and funders and planners can use the site to identify gaps and redundancies in coverage. Eventually, the site could become part of a greater database that would provide complementary information about home values, income and crime levels, educational data, and recreational offerings by neighborhood. The technology could be copied nationwide in the next few years.

The city of Plano, Texas, and the law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski are partnering to augment the city's prosecution resources while providing valuable training to new lawyers at the firm. The Loaner Lawyer Program provides rookie lawyers with an opportunity to hone their litigation and public speaking skills as they learn the basics of arguing motions, selecting juries, and examining witnesses. As their skills strengthen, they help take pressure off city attorneys by handling some of their caseload. The program's success has spawned similar endeavors in other cities.

Officials in Genesee County, Wisconsin, have found a way to combine waste management with erosion control. Yard waste, estimated to be 15% of all waste in the county, is used as a substitute for expensive prepared topsoil to reclaim pits previously mined for gravel. A dozen county municipalities will now have an inexpensive, centralized site to drop off the bio-material, and the improved land will allow the eventual development of a business park.

For anyone looking to bypass time-consuming directory searches when navigating local, state, and federal websites, Google has released Google U.S. Government Search. Unlike the company's previous feature to conduct searches about the government, the new portal-like tool helps users keep up-to-date about government news by allowing homepage customization, providing government-specific news content from both official and commercial outlets. The tool will allow users to quickly focus their searches, restricting results to specific pages within agency sites, and allow content feeds in RSS formats.

Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) 2010's Diabetes Coalition, directed by the Medical University of South Carolina, has won several awards in recognition of its pioneering efforts to fight against the deadly blood sugar disease. REACH is credited with improving the health of thousands of minorities dealing with the disease. Over the past six years, the program has helped more people get tested, linked more patients with assistance programs to help them pay for treatment, and reduced the rate of diabetic amputations in the Charleston area by 50%. The program has the potential to serve as a model for other states.

GUYS READ, a nonprofit literacy initiative supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts, encourages educators to connect boys to texts that appeal to them. Research suggests that boys want to read nonfiction, newspapers, humor, and reference works, while girls are generally attracted to fiction. Another program that encourges boys to read, MENtors in Lyncourt School, New York, invites older male students and men to serve as literacy role models by reading to pupils in kindergarten through fifth grade.


Newsletter produced by: Brendan St. Amant and Vanessa Ruget (researchers and writers); Joellen Secondo (editor).