Nobel Peace Prize Winner Meets With Kalamazoo Area Students

Hundreds of area students heard a message of how their individual actions can change the world Friday from a 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner who is in Kalamazoo this weekend for the annual PeaceJam program.

When Rigoberta Menchu Tum was young, her father was accused of being a part of a guerrilla organization in her home country of Guatemala and was arrested and tortured until he was eventually killed. Soon after, the army arrested her brother and tortured and killed him. Eventually, Menchu Tum's mother was imprisoned and repeatedly raped and tortured until she died in prison.


http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2012/04/nobel_peace_price_winner_speak.html#incart_hbx

More Diversity Needed in K-12 Classrooms and Administration Offices

Leslie Fenwick, Dean of College of Education at Howard University discusses at the National Urban League conference the need to diversify the body of America's teachers, principals, and superintendents:

Where fresh foods are scarce, so is good health: Scientific American

Even within the borders of one of the world’s top agricultural countries, healthy food can be hard to come by. Many Americans reside in food deserts—communities where retailers offering fresh food are scarce but fast-food restaurants and convenience stores selling prepared foods can abound...


Scientists are still exploring the links between food deserts and health by investigating how the nonavailability of fresh food may spur obesity, diabetes and other diet-related conditions. One 2006 study found an association between the presence of supermarkets and lower obesity rates. Convenience stores, on the other hand, were associated with higher rates.


(Note:  Click on the chart above for a larger more readable set of charts.)


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=high-and-dry-in-the-food

Living on Less Than $600 per Month

Reporter:  What are your dreams?

Young man:  Right now, I have none.

Hungry quietly try to get by with less

Hungry people generally don't announce themselves.

They form silent lines at food pantries. They pay quietly with Bridge cards. They do not like to tell their stories in public, which is why you have read so few of them.

Anna Calhoun, though, has gotten to the point where disbelief outweighs any sense of embarrassment. And as "Unity 2012" — a national summit of food banks — converges on Detroit today, she finds herself grappling with the latest in a sequence of setbacks she and her husband have faced since losing their jobs during Michigan's decade-long economic winter.

Last month, in one of the deaths from a thousand cuts she's experienced, Calhoun received a brief letter from the state, informing her that the $94 a month in food assistance the state had been providing was no more. Three months before that, the food assistance for her, her husband, her son and stepdaughter had been cut from $232 a month.

The caseworker couldn't explain the basis, but Calhoun got on a computer and looked up the code: As full-time students, the Calhouns no longer qualified for food assistance.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120417/OPINION03/204170371#ixzz1sJjgJU4C

Big Brothers Big Sisters in Calhoun County Holds Its Biggest Fund Raiser of the Year April 21

You’re never too old to make a difference in the life of a young person. That’s Richard Schlatter’s firm belief.


“I can’t rescue a hundred kids, but I can make a difference in the life of one,” said Schlatter, 67, a graphic design consultant who for several years ran Schlatter Design in Battle Creek.


Schlatter is busily helping to raise money for Big Brothers Big Sisters in Calhoun County through its Bowl for Kids’ Sake event this month.


A lot of money.


Schlatter and his “little brother,” David Smith, a 16-year-old student at Battle Creek Central High School, hope to get pledges worth $1,000.


The double event April 21 will be at 10:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. at M-66 Bowl, 19794 N.E. Capital Ave. The two fundraisers are among 15 Bowl for Kids’ Sake events that Big Brothers Big Sisters will hold this spring throughout the organization’s five-county region. It’s one of the agency’s biggest annual activities.


http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20120415/NEWS01/304130017/Helping-out-sometimes-means-thinking-big

Michigan's foreclosure activity down, but still 7th highest foreclosure rate in nation

Michigan’s foreclosure activity slowed in the first quarter of 2012, but the housing market still has a ways to go before fully recovering.

“The housing market has gotten through this really bad batch of loans that triggered the foreclosure crisis in the first place,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrack Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based foreclosure data firm. “Many of those loans have been either modified or foreclosed on over the last five years in Michigan.”

There were 27,934 foreclosure-related filings in Michigan during the first three months of 2012...

http://www.mlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/04/michigans_foreclosure_filings.html#incart_river_default

Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit

Perhaps no law in the past generation has drawn more praise than the drive to “end welfare as we know it,” which joined the late-’90s economic boom to send caseloads plunging, employment rates rising and officials of both parties hailing the virtues of tough love.


But the distress of the last four years has added a cautionary postscript: much as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged...


The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/us/welfare-limits-left-poor-adrift-as-recession-hit.html

Struggling to survive after state cuts to assistance

Eleven thousand Michigan families were cut from welfare cash assistance late last year. Cash assistance is the $500 a month or so that helps the poorest families pay their bills and rent.  The Department of Human Services says the state can’t afford the cost.  So, the agency cut off those who’d been on welfare the longest. Advocates for the poor say there’s no need for those cuts… there’s plenty of federal money to pay for the benefits.

While the agency and advocates argue and maneuver in court, thousands of families are in trouble. Here's one family's story (as reported on Michigan Radio):

www.michiganradio.org/post/struggling-survive-after-state-cuts-assistance

The Poor Among You

They gather at dawn at day-labor centers or designated parking lots where contractors hire workers. Some stop on their way to pick up a cheap breakfast taco at a convenience store, buying their meal from an employee earning minimum wage. At the store, they wait in line with members of a crew purchasing gas for the mowers and trimmers they will use to cut the grass of other people's lawns.

They are the working poor—people who may work more hours a week than the average salaried employee, but they do it at a cobbled-together assortment of part-time jobs without benefits. Some find themselves trapped in the situation because they lack the education or technical skills to find a better job. Others lost salaried positions due to economic recession and are working part-time or temporary jobs to try to make ends meet.

Living in poverty

Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, sees that situation—coupled with the United States' deficit and a growing gap between the rich and poor—as a justice crisis.

"Minimum wage doesn't get a person even close to the poverty level. People ought to be able to work their way out of poverty," Sider, professor at Palmer Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., said in an interview.

But more Americans live in poverty today than at any time in more than 50 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"The richest nation in human history now has the highest poverty level of any Western industrialized nation," Sider writes in his new book, Fixing the Moral Deficit:  A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget. 

www.bread.org/media/coverage/news/the-poor-among-you.html