Pediatric surgeon Dr. Dana Suskind, who specializes in cochlear implants and has authored books on brain development and early childhood development, founded the research initiative that would evolve into the in 2010 after observing the degree to which differences in her patients’ early language exposure led to inequalities in their ability to learn and thrive. These disparities often fell along socio-economic lines. Parents across the board want to help their children get the best possible start in life, Suskind knew, but she saw that they often lack basic knowledge about how to foster early learning. Envisioning a population-level shift in parents’ and caregivers’ knowledge and behavior, Suskind and her team created an asset-based, parent-centered curriculum — Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns — also known as the .Ìę

The program has been in existence long enough now for researchers to study its long-term effectiveness. The conclusion? It works, and it keeps on working.Ìę

When Parents Know More, They Do More

shows that frequent conversational exchanges with adult caregivers promotes children’s language and vocabulary skills, cognitive performance, brain function and even the . A by researchers with the LENA Foundation (Language ENvironment Analysis), for example, confirmed that the number of two-way conversations with adults that babies experience in their first three years is related to their verbal abilities and IQ in .Ìę

While all families communicate with their children, studies have shown that children in low-income families generally hear fewer words, shorter sentences and phrases, and are less likely to have books in their homes, setting up disparities that lead to later deficits in academic and social achievement. There’s a lack of consensus around this “word gap” though. Some researchers have the validity of these findings, while call for more exploration of them, but encourage the idea of supporting families with specialized programs to help their children develop early language skills — which is what Suskind and her team are doing.

The TMW Center has been focused on developing resources and programs to help parents and caregivers understand more about brain development — and the 3Ts have been core. There’s a 3T curriculum for families, a 3T curriculum centered on home visiting, and an online professional development course for educators who want to engage with families about the science of brain development, which are all free to use.Ìę

These resources provide parents and adult caregivers evidence-based information about how their kids’ brains are developing, and the vital role caregivers play in their child’s cognitive and language development.Ìę

The 3Ts Home Visiting (3Ts-HV) curriculum, for example, is a six-month program for caregivers of 13- to 16-month-old toddlers from low-income families that coaches parents in their homes through 12 tutoring modules. One module discusses executive function and presents strategies for using talk to regulate children’s behavior, particularly during tantrums — and offers guidance to help parents recognize their own emotions and tone of voice. Another addresses the difference between issuing directives versus using explanations to foster young children’s ability to think things through. (Think: “Don’t throw the football in the house because you might break something,” rather than “Don’t throw the #$%$# football in the house” — though the latter is a communication style to which any parent can relate.) Other modules discuss how caregivers can use encouragement, storytelling, numbers and patterns when engaging with babies and toddlers.

Through relatable videos (featuring beyond-adorable infants), parents learn that their young children’s brains are like sponges, soaking up words and ideas, then using them to make billions of neural connections. One lesson describes their verbal interactions like a piggy bank, with every word like a penny in their account. “The more you invest now, the richer they’ll be later.” Parents are encouraged to be in the moment with their child and to talk about what they’re focused on and to look for opportunities to talk and interact. The subtext: language learning isn’t something that exists in isolation, but rather it’s a part of daily life. Everything a child sees and hears shapes their experience, and caregivers are the facilitators who help make that happen.

Evaluating the 3Ts Curriculum

A 2018 study published in the evaluated the 3Ts-HV curriculum and found that caregivers who participated in the twice-monthly visits were significantly more knowledgeable about early childhood development and engaged more with their children in the conversational turn-taking that builds language. These caregivers praised and encouraged their children more, explained more, asked more open-ended questions, and used less critical language and physical control in their interactions with their children.

The initial study showed the effectiveness of the 3Ts-HV intervention in fostering changes in parents’ interactions with their children within six months of their participation. A recent published in October in the Journal of Academic Pediatrics shows that the program not only improves children’s language learning in their toddler years, but offersÌęsustained benefits to their vocabulary and literacy skills when they reach kindergarten and beyond.

According to Christy Leung, the TMW Center’s director of research who co-authored the most recent study with Suskind, this simple intervention with a group of families increased parental knowledge when the child was 26 months old, contributed to more frequent parent-child conversational turns at 38 months, and promoted children’s language skills at 50 months. The study provides empirical evidence that increasing parents’ knowledge and enriching parent-child linguistic interactions during their toddler years promotes language development at preschool age. Mothers who received the intervention continued to provide their young children with enriched language input without showing significant declines even after the intervention’s “honeymoon phase” ended, Leung says.

When designing the curriculum, Leung notes, “We wanted to emphasize that the parent is the best person to educate their small children. They struggled to realize that they are their child’s first teacher, and they don’t have to wait until their child goes to school [for them] to start learning.”Ìę

One of the hardest things, Leung says, is to change parents’ minds about the idea that educational TV is better than they are at teaching their children, especially at an early age. They think they don’t have a good enough vocabulary or education to do so.Ìę

Leung adds: “But we emphasized that they are exactly the best resource for their children, and they know their child best. Once they saw that their child learns best from a real person — and that they’re learning all the time, even if they may not be verbal yet — that was a big realization for them.”

Simply put: What parents know matters, and it shows up in their children’s learning readiness.Ìę

Prevent, Don’t Remediate

Brain development research has shown that the first years of life are when the brain is growing and developing most rapidly and that the . Early deficits in language learning often accumulate and can affect the entire trajectory of a child’s life. We know this. But that knowledge doesn’t jibe with what the U.S. , to help develop those brains.Ìę

Prevention, rather than remediation, is the battle cry for Suskind and her team at the TMW Center, who view parents as an untapped resource in this equation. Their studies point to a doable and easily replicated way of using the to support families in building the healthy foundations for lifelong learning. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines the public health approach as one rooted in the scientific method that strives to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people.)

According to the TMW Center, 3Ts programs are on course to reach 15,000 families across the U.S. by the end of 2024. Communities and individuals can sign up on the and receive free resources to implement the curriculum in their schools, museums, libraries, community centers and other organizations.Ìę

“We’ve gotten such positive feedback from the parents, who say having this experience is unique and valuable,” Leung says. “We heard from our curriculum team that one of the moms receiving the intervention saw another mom in the laundromat and said, ‘This is something you really should sign up for. It changed my life.’”

“That touches us so much it brings us to tears,” she says. “It also gives us another idea for how we can spread the word.”

This past January, after service in and 18 years on its staff, Rountree became the first Black female to lead the literacy tutoring nonprofit in its 30-year history.

“Crystal Rountree has all of the key qualities of a transformative leader,” says Jumpstart board member Dr. Michael H. Levine.Ìę“She is a brilliant listener, a brave risk-taker and a visionary field builder.ÌęJumpstart has accomplished much in its three decades of innovative work to advance young children’s literacy.ÌęUnder Crystal’s leadership, I am confident the organization will take two-generation learning and professional advancement programs to a whole new level.”

Here’s what Early Learning Nation learned from talking to Rountree.

“Point to the destination.” This is the title of the chapter that features Rountree (when her name was Crystal Jones) in “,” the bestselling management book by Chip and Dan Heath. The book touts the power of setting ambitious goals.

As a Teach for America corps member in Atlanta from 2003 to 2005, Rountree was educating first graders who reminded her of herself in many ways. “Most of my students had single parents who fit into the category of lower income,” she recalls. The parents’ economic struggles prevented many from taking advantage of Georgia’s universal pre-K program, and at the start of the year, many of the first-graders were struggling with basic alphabetic awareness. By the end of the year, 90% were reading at the third-grade level, and the other 10% were on a second-grade level.

“We had set the goals to be third graders, and I just remember being so excited when we made it,” Rountree says, adding that while her students were brilliant, “so many other kids in that building and across the city and the country were just as brilliant.”

Today, the mother of a rising second grader is applying the lessons from teaching to her executive role, using the joy of learning to set the course for Jumpstart. “I feel really proud that I get to steward us into this next chapter,” she says.

Supportive relationships drive literacy. In 14 states and Washington, D.C., 2000 Jumpstart corps members, most of whom are recent college students, volunteer to work on a semi-weekly basis with small groups of 3 to 5-year-olds over the course of a school year — a total of 200-300 hours. (There’s also a summer version, where programming is spread out over the course of the week.)

Because the model is rooted in relationships, the volunteers stick with the same children throughout the program. The relationships, Rountree explains, are central to Jumpstart’s social-emotional skill development—which has become more crucial since the pandemic—as well as the literacy goals.

College students are an untapped resource. Financial and systemic issues are pushing too many early childhood educators out of the field, forcing child care centers across the country to close. The nation’s 18 million college students might represent part of the solution. Rountree, who graduated from Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black College, counts preparing college graduates for the workforce as an objective that’s just as critical as the early-literacy one.

Nearly three of four corps members are people of color; they come from large state schools, public and private institutions and community colleges. ”Jumpstart changes their hearts and minds,” she says. Naturally, many corps members go on to become teachers, and Jumpstart recently launched an Accelerated Workforce Program in Massachusetts as a jobs pipeline, with plans for expanding into other areas of the country where educators can make a livable wage. Participants will gain career supports and will be able to count their service as credit toward degrees and certifications. Alumni who go into other fields carry with them the experience of working with children. Rountree recently met two pre-med students planning to choose pediatrics as their specialty.

Storybooks spark learning. When a tutor and a child read a book together, they are co-adventurers in new worlds, but the magic doesn’t always happen immediately. Rountree describes the experience of Wendy, a tutor assigned to a Head Start classroom in Worcester, Mass. Three of the four students were engrossed in the book she was reading, but Christopher remained off to the side. “Wendy tried all the teacher tricks and strategies to try to draw him in,” Rountree says, “but nothing really worked.”

Wendy started experimenting with different books during the 15 minutes before pickup, and after a few weeks, Christopher began seeking her out at the end of the day to see what special book that she had for him. He began to ask more questions and to express his feelings more. Wendy is now interested and is going to become an early childhood teacher.

“I am thrilled and grateful that Jumpstart has chosen ‘Piper Chen Sings,’” says Soo (best known for originating the role of Eliza Hamilton in the musical Hamilton on Broadway). “This book comes straight from the heart and is inspired by my own life and experiences — a little girl who loves to sing but is overwhelmed with nervousness about singing in front of others. Maris and I hope Piper gives comfort to readers who may be navigating their own complicated feelings, and inspires them to pursue the things in life that give them joy.”

Brain science points to new opportunities. Advances in neuroscience make it possible to nurture bright young minds more effectively during critical development phases. As scientific knowledge and best practices evolve, so does Jumpstart’s curriculum, which now emphasizes “conversational turns” —Ìę interactive exchanges between adults and children.

It is partnering with organizations like to explore ways of increasing the frequency and quality of conversational turns. “By integrating these scientifically backed approaches,” Rountree says, “we foster environments that support immediate educational outcomes and set the stage for long-term success.”

The meaning of “readiness” is changing. “Being a new CEO,” Rountree reflects, “is like having a buffet before you. It all looks delicious, but how do you prioritize? How are you mindful of what you take on first?” She says her priority for now comes down to defining Jumpstart’s impact. “We’ve got this incredible vision that every child will enter kindergarten ready to succeed,” she says, but there are other considerations as well, including “getting schools ready for kids,” “getting schools ready for the future” and “getting students ready for a changing ·ÉŽÇ°ù±ô»ć.”

Some of the models used to educate kids, she says, aren’t going to work into the future. She envisions language, literacy and social emotional skills all figuring into the mix for 2024 and beyond.

“We’re going to shape the future of early childhood,” Rountree says — pointing to a new destination.

Born in a suburb of Pittsburgh in 1932, Michals is best known for his photographic portraits, but he has worked in a wide variety of media. In each of them he seeks “surprise and contradiction,” following his curiosity and immersing himself in what he calls “the pleasure of chaos.”

, curator of the 2014 exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh: “Michals often poses big questions that have no easy answers. His images provide a pathway to our own thoughts and fears, our own recollections of growing up, our own dreams and desires, our own concerns about the passage of time and death. He takes us to places we hadn’t planned on visiting; yet when we go there with him, the surroundings are strangely familiar.”

For Michals, art and poetry are “forms of intimacy, the ability to say a secret out loud.” His first artistic heroes were illustrator Rockwell Kent and surrealist painters Giorgio de Chirico and RenĂ© Magritte, all of whom he met and photographed.

“Art cannot simply be show-off expensive paintings in Park Avenue apartments,” he argues. “It has to be for people. It must get down to the neighborhood.” (Speaking of neighborhoods, as in “It’s a beautiful day in the
,” Michals is a great admirer of another Pittsburgh figure from his generation, Mister Rogers, about whom he says, “Entertainer is the least of his importance. He set a standard of connection between grownups and children.”)

5 Lessons from Michals:

1. It all started in Pittsburgh. “I have this very strange passion for Pittsburgh,” he says. “I don’t know why, but it’s one of the most beautiful cities in the country. Most people who become successful in New York don’t remember where they’re from.” (Here he might be referring to Andy Warhol, whom he photographed with Warhol’s mother.)

Michals remembers German rye bread wrapped in white paper, which his grandmother — who raised him until he was five or six — would save so he could draw on it. His father was a steel worker in Duquesne; his mother worked at Kaufmann’s department store; and one uncle drove the number 6 trolley (another echo of Mister Rogers).

“We had no credentials of any value,” Michals says. “We never belonged to the country club. I grew up on the only dirt street in McKeesport. Believe me, we were poor. And I loved it.”

2. Fairy tales reach children’s hearts. Mysterious, frightening and sometimes a bit violent, this form of children’s literature has a much longer history and goes far deeper than Dr. Seuss. As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote in “The Uses of Enchantment”Ìę in 1976: “The fairy tale proceeds in a manner which conforms to the way a child thinks and experiences the world; this is why the fairy tale is so convincing to him. He can gain much better solace from a fairy tale than he can from an effort to comfort him based on adult reasoning and viewpoints.”

One of Michals’s current projects, The McKeesport Pipe Palace Folly, proposes evoking fairy tales through series of structures spread around his hometown. He conjures the scene: “Imagine going to grandmother’s house. Along the way, you encounter this little miniature house with the name of somebody who once lived there. And then you go further. There’s a big one, it’s five feet tall, and there’s a frame of a house with another name. And then there’s another one, which is even bigger.”

(The New York Times)

3. Leave room for silliness. Nonsense, as practiced by the 17th-century French playwright Moliùre and Edward Lear, among others, animates Michals’ work and his conversation. “I can’t stand common sense,” he contends. “The best defense against common sense is nonsense.”

Science has its place and time, but the artist prefers sticking with his own illogical explanations for how the world works. “If you’re very serious,” he says, “You have to be very foolish to the same degree.”

Perhaps, specialists in early learning underestimate the value of silliness, but as Marilee Hartling of Early Childhood Development Associates , “Kids learn most effectively when things are joyful. Engaging in silly play with your children to ‘lighten things up’ is a great way to facilitate learning and help your child’s future success, no matter how you define it.

4. Mistakes make us human. Michals would rather giggle at his own mistakes than analyze one his artworks. “If you already know what you’re going to do, then you’re not being creative, you’re just regurgitating,” he says. “You should never do the same thing twice, and you should never take the same photograph twice.

If you know what you’re doing, then where’s the discovery? Where’s the mistake? Mistakes are very important.” Unintentionally, the artist is echoing Jessica Lahey’s “,” which argues, “The setbacks, mistakes, miscalculations and failures we have shoved out of our children’s way are the very experiences that teach them how to be resourceful, persistent, innovative and resilient citizens of this ·ÉŽÇ°ù±ô»ć.”

5. Astonished people astonish people. Michals tells this story about the French artist and stage designer Jean Cocteau: “As a young man, Cocteau was like the Andy Warhol of his time. Summoned by the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, he asked, ‘What do you expect from me? What do you want?’ And Diaghilev said, ‘Astound me.’”

Whether you’re an artist, a teacher or a parent, Michals encourages you to “free yourself to go where you’ve not gone before.” Your sense of astonishment will carry over to the children and other living things around you. “It’s the opposite of being cool or bored and asking how much things sell for,” Michals says. “It has nothing to do with money.”

“This is so me,” Thurston responds to Wang, an author and technology entrepreneur. “I love to fix things. I literally fixed computers to help pay for college, and I’m always jumping to solutions in the face of almost any problem, even when the people around me don’t want me to come up with a solution.”

“How to Citizen” is all about how to fix democracy, something that many Americans feel is deeply if not permanently broken. Early Learning Nation interviewed Thurston, who also hosts “” on PBS, and gained insight into how he thinks about interpersonal and global issues alike. Here’s what we learned:

Humor is a tool. Thurston started his career with “The Onion” and “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah, as well as performing standup. “In comedy,” he says, “There’s this language of punching up and punching down — which, if you really examine it, is very violent. Why is anybody getting punched? Maybe it could be tickling up or tickling down.”

He finds a range of purposes for different kinds of comedy. When it comes to children, learning to make fun of yourself is an important developmental stage that comes later or never for some people. An inside joke, or comedy within a trusted circle, is another. When in doubt about what to make fun of, Thurston recommends animals, a topic that allows the imagination to run wild. “There are so many ways to explore the what-ifs,” he says, “and you can train young people to flex that muscle, practicing it on themselves. Mash-ups and remixes are natural fodder. What would happen if you drank a banana?”

Change requires risk. In the chapter of Thurston’s 2012 book “” called “How to Be the Angry Negro,” Thurston addresses the reader: “You are compelled to say what others won’t. They remain quiet, not because they doubt the truth of their perceptions but because they lack the courage to risk being ostracized… Rage is your cape. Self-confidence is your mask. Truth is your sword.”

While Thurston’s humor rarely comes across as out-and-out angry, there is often an edge so sharp you don’t immediately feel the laceration. “Comedy challenges established narratives and surprises us,” he says. “In surprise, in challenge, there is risk, and risk doesn’t always pay off positively — whether it’s an investment risk or a career risk or even a food risk.”

The riskiness of stand-up comedy isn’t for everyone, but Thurston sees a unique thrill in telling jokes to strangers, saying, “You try to emotionally connect with them so deeply that you trigger an involuntary physiological response known as laughter. It’s like one of the most confident things a person without confidence could do.”

Nature helps us heal from history. Thurston credits his mother for nurturing his love of the outdoors. “Whoever said Black folk don’t go camping forgot to tell Arnita Thurston,” he writes in “How to Be Black.” His enthusiasm for America and the outdoors is on full display in America Outdoors.

Asked which parts of the country have surprised him most, he seizes upon the terrain of Arkansas as well as certain outdoor recreational pursuits. “Ultramarathons, for example, are just more marathon than a marathon,” he laughs, “and that’s already too much for me. Without being conscripted into it, people are signing up to run 100 miles!”

He also mentions the rich and vibrant indigenous culture. “We read a lot about Native Americans in a historical context,” he says, “but they’re still here, and they’re not all the same, with a range of ecologies and ways of living.”

Another surprise: sharks. “They’re not out to get us. They’ve been shamed in the media. The deeper surprise is how often they’re right next to us and we don’t even know it.”

Finally, he notes his surprise at how emotional the show is for him, in terms of people’s struggles individually, as well as our collective national struggles with our history and how the outdoors has played a part in the struggle, and also in the healing from it.

One episode uses brain science to explore the power of nature to bring us back into equilibrium. “For his experiment,” he recalls, “they got me really riled up and then had me walk in a park and measured my brain during the process. I not only recovered from the stress; I was in a better place than before the stress started, so I was higher than baseline. It was a supercharge, not just a recharge.”

Applying this insight to early educators, Thurston says, “Teachers are not only dealing with their littles, but with the bigs who created them. The parents can often be more challenging than the students. So, if you’ve got some parent all up in your business, have that parent-teacher conference while walking through a park. It’s a naturally soothing environment. Scientists are looking at how nature affects our ability to recover from stress and help us heal. The short answer is, spoiler alert, massively.

Invest in your relationship with yourself. Thurston’s podcast and his TV show both address the eternal, yet increasingly relevant, themes of how to get along with others and the planet around us, which both tie back to the same place. “Relationship with yourself is such an underappreciated concept,” he reflects. “We need to ask ourselves how we feel, not just what we think. We need to develop a vocabulary for our emotions as well as our physical feelings.”

The maxim You are what you eat, he says, also applies to what we take in through our eyes and ears. “The stories that we eat,” he explains, “tell us that we’re capable or incapable, that we’re smart or dumb, so it’s important to consume stories that remind us of our power.”

We all have power. Each episode of “How to Citizen” explores power dynamics in one way or another, and while some of the topics it covers are too complex for young listeners, he is so interested in how children develop ideas about power that educational spinoffs are a possibility. “Even a very small person can be sensitive to who’s got influence,” he says.“Even in this tiny body, I have the power of my attention. (Will I listen to the teacher or not?) The power of my smile, who will I give that to? The power of my presence, the power of gathering with other people, the power of sharing ideas and information, whether good or bad.”

He encourages adults to ask children where they have power. “They might answer, ‘I refused to eat the pasta last night. It made my mom really upset. I guess I have the power to make my mom upset.’ I think it’s really good for people to recognize that.”

From individual power, it’s a short jump to collective power. “You and your best friend are a unit,” he imagines explaining to a child. “When have you thought about you and your friend, not just yourself? When have you thought about you and this whole classroom or this whole school or your whole family? Have you ever done anything for we and not just for me?”

Power can arise from formally establishing systems in our communities, but there are other ways of practicing power together. “We are all very powerful,” he asserts. “We all have the ability to gain and lose power. It’s this ebbing and flowing thing, and it increases when we work with others.”

UchĂ© Blackstock didn’t plan to become a radical physician, but the pain and death she witnessed at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn radicalized her. After “Jordan,” a young man who looked even younger, died of sickle cell anemia, she contemplated how racism in research, medical education and society has failed to help patients with this painful hereditary disease. His case was far from unique. “My time at Kings County,” Blackstock writes in her new book , “marked the beginning of my reeducation as a physician.”

Early Learning Nation magazine recently talked to Blackstock, founder of , a nonprofit dedicated to redressing the root causes of what she terms “medical apartheid” — which she defines as “a two-tiered system 
 that contributes to bad outcomes for our most vulnerable patients and ends up costing us more in the long run.”

As with the other Community Cultivators we have featured, her insights apply beyond her own specialty and should resonate with educators of and advocates for young children.

Here’s what we learned from Blackstock:

The title of her book works on many levels. There are many kinds of legacies, and one is familial: when Blackstock enrolled in Harvard Medical School, she was following in the footsteps of her mother, who graduated from the august institution in 1976. The elder Blackstock also worked at Kings County Hospital. Her mother’s accomplishment and determination inspired her, but the quality that stood out most was compassion. In part because she herself had overcome a stutter, she “developed a particular kind of empathy for those who are struggling,” the author says. Twin sister Oni Blackstock also became a physician and founder of a nonprofit , which offers training and coaching to promote organizational equity.

Will UchĂ© Blackstock’s two children follow in their mother’s, aunt’s and grandmother’s footsteps? It’s too soon to tell — they’re only 7 and 9. For now, she says, “Parenting is probably my hardest role, and it’s so funny because you don’t even get any training. It’s on-the-job training.”

Medical education has come a long way, and has a long way to go. Simply put, race is a social construct, with no basis in science. There is no blood test to determine someone’s race, and yet Blackstock’s book chronicles a number of moments in medical school when textbooks and professors alike cited myths about anatomical differences between Black and white patients as if they were objective fact. “I now realize that this so‑called objectivity was anything but,” she writes.

As with any curriculum, she stresses, what gets left out matters as much as what’s included. “So in the past, there was this emphasis on what happens within the exam room, but now we’re acknowledging that when you’re talking to your patient, everyone else in their community is in the room with you.” Their family, their job, their living conditions, their education all contribute to health and disease. Blackstock believes all medical students should study public health in order to understand how their patients fit into community and population factors.

Trust is a matter of life and death. Having a doctor who looks like you — or who at least cares about who you are — can mean the difference between living a full life and dying prematurely. Blackstock cites a that finds mortality rates sharply lower for Black newborns cared for by Black physicians.”

More broadly, Legacy details the hazards of “institutional untrustworthiness,” which occurs when major systemic and minor interpersonal failures accumulate to the point that patients justifiably feel that the institutions designed to help them are not worth the risk. The book argues that it is up to these institutions to win back the trust of the Black community, and Blackstock’s prescription includes listening and understanding. “The pandemic,” she says, “revealed all these deep fissures within multiple systems, especially our health care system.” To counter the health risks posed by racist laws and norms, the medical establishment has an obligation to improve its capacity to see these factors clearly and to respond forcefully and empathetically.

Physicians can be advocates. “Health is not just about individual choices,” Blackstock notes. Doctors can recite advice about eating healthy and getting exercise until they’re blue in the face, but these behavioral changes constitute only 20% of what makes someone healthy. The other 80% comprises systemic factors beyond the individual’s control, such as the quality of the air, the affordability of housing, the availability of healthy food choices.

What good is writing a prescription for a patient when there aren’t any pharmacies in the neighborhood? What does it mean to treat bullet wounds without confronting the ubiquity of firearms or the economic factors that lead to gun violence?

Physicians need to recognize their roles as advocates. When Blackstock writes op-eds or testifies before Congress, she’s drawing upon her medical education to improve the health of people she will never meet in person. “I’m not saying physicians need to save the world,” she says, “but we need a system where we do more than just prescribe medications and tell them not to drink and smoke.

The emergency room is in a state of emergency. A dysfunctional and chronically underfunded health care system places an unsustainable burden on the site that should be the last resort for patients. Legacy lays it on the line, calling the American emergency room “the place where the United States’ social problems come home to roost.”

Blackstock says she originally chose emergency medicine as a specialty because it meant being able to serve everyone who walked through (or was rolled through) the doors. “I knew I’d be able to take care of all comers, regardless of socioeconomic status,” she says. “But I didn’t recognize that so many people used the emergency department for primary care services.” Investments in social services, public health and primary prevention — as well as comprehensive health coverage — would eliminate many or even most emergency room visits, she says, allowing ERs to function better for the cases they were intended to serve.

Many of the issues Blackstock highlights in Legacy boil down to the social determinants of health. The book, she says, was conceived as way of helping readers connect the dots between the world around us and the state and fate of our bodies.

“Kim’s dedication and experience serving the Boston community is well documented, but what may be lesser known is her incredible ability as a leader to bring different groups and perspectives together to get things done, said D’Arcy Goldman, chair of EMPath’s board of directors.

As EMPath prepares to celebrate its bicentennial, Early Learning Nation magazine spoke to Janey about the organization’s present and future. Here’s what we learned:

The fight against poverty has evolved. A sharp difference between 19th- and 21st-century strategies is the value EMPath places on the experience, wisdom and strengths of participants. “We meet them where they are,” said Janey, who took the helm of EMPath in June 2022, after serving as mayor of Boston in 2021, “or as one participant said, where they dream. We help participants to self-assess, and then our coaches strategize with them to identify goals and to remove barriers that pop up. They have regular meetings to ensure that progress is happening.”

pairs participants with EMPath mentors to collaborate on setting and achieving goals that might include family stability, well-being, education and training. For participants who start the process while living in a shelter, the support continues after they find housing. “We work with them through our stabilization program,” she said. “We continue to check in, to see if the habits stick.”

Participants drive the organization. Just as businesses survey their customers, EMPath solicits feedback from the people who use its services. Janey cites one comment: “The unique support and opportunities that you and your colleagues have extended to me and my loved ones leave me with immense gratitude, and I would wholeheartedly recommend your organization to any individuals in similar circumstances.”

“Participants are the experts on their lives,” she says. “So we value that kind of feedback as much as the economic indicators.” Goldman says, “Kim understands and appreciates the value of collaboration among EMPath’s program participants, mentors and other staff to tackle the challenge of disrupting poverty, particularly in partnership with local and state leaders.”

Because studies show marked increases in earnings, credit scores and other measures — as well as what Janey calls “finding their voice and power” — the approach is spreading beyond the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts. A robust global learning network called the is reaching communities across the country and includes a growing cohort of international nongovernmental organizations. The network also includes dozens of early childhood programs that are integrating EMPath’s coaching model to support families to move ahead.

Advocacy complements the mentoring. Janey maintained that poverty happens not because of individual choices but because of history and the systems into which people are born. She recalls a recent conference of social workers where a sizable portion of the room expressed surprise that the issues they tackled had more to do with structural issues than personal decisions.

“Some of us understood that a long time ago,” she shrugged, before emphasizing the great potential for eradicating local, state and federal barriers that prevent participants from acquiring assets and building wealth for themselves. Baby Bonds and supports for entrepreneurship and home ownership are on her list of solutions “that allow them to take greater control of their lives and push back on some of those systemic issues.”

Empathy means drawing upon personal history. Janey’s experience as Boston’s first female and first Black mayor during a particularly challenging moment (and, before that, on the city council) gives her valuable insight into the barriers to economic mobility. Perhaps more importantly, she also connects with EMPath’s participants on a personal level — as someone who benefited from the organization’s programs as a teen mother. “That experience was life-changing,” she says. “It helped prepare me for the path that led to the mayor’s office.” During the 1970s and 1980s, when buildings in Roxbury were boarded up and fights over busing students like her were tearing the city apart, she recalls deriving strength from the neighborhood’s people, culture and history.

Everyone needs support. Once a scared, pregnant teenager, Janey is now a grandmother of a college student who sometimes needs reminders to ask for advice when he needs it. The President of the United States, she reminds him, has special advisors. CEOs have people to check their thinking, particularly if they’re trying to make an important decision.

“Part of what ails us as a society is that we believe in the fairy tale that everyone has done this on their own,” she says. “It’s just not true. Social networks have always mattered.”

EMPath normalizes the idea that all of us, not just teen moms or individuals struggling with homelessness, need someone to talk to. Recently named an , she is looking forward to “having 19 mentors that I can talk to and see what they’re experiencing, and how they overcome this, and what was their strategy around that.”

found the median net worth for white households in Greater Boston was $247,500 dollars, compared to a mere $8 for Black households. Just last month, revealed that less than half of Massachusetts’s third graders are proficient in reading. EMPath will continue to combat these grim statistics for the next 200 years, or as long as it takes.

Single mothers brought up all these luminaries, but it’s probably a mistake to assume they did it all by themselves. They had relatives, friends, neighbors — in other words, a village — to parent these future all-stars.

, and while all of them have great potential, it’s no secret that these families face great challenges, too. Founded in 1993, , (JP) forges connections among single mothers in nine cities and energizes them individually and collectively. JP President and CEO Chastity Lord joined JP at a critical moment, just six months before the pandemic hit.

“Chastity’s remarkable personal journey and visionary leadership are what JP needed to drive transformative change,” says Ethelind Kaba, executive director of the Ann Bancroft Foundation and secretary of the JP National Governing Board (and inaugural JP Alumni Fellow). “She inspires me and the other JP moms to wield power in our personal stories on our own journeys to self-sufficiency.”

Early Learning Nation magazine caught up with Lord and learned a few things about the resilience, dignity and ambitions of America’s single mothers and the ways to make it safer for them to bet on themselves.

Experience counts. Besides LeBron, Obama and A-Rod, you know who else was brought up by a single mom? Chastity Lord. “I would’ve been a JP kid,” she acknowledges. “My mom would’ve been a JP mom, and that’s why I say to our moms, ‘I am your child. I am proof of what can happen in a generation.’” Her leadership of JP draws upon her personal story and the travails and triumphs of her own single mother. “I know what it means to be housing unstable,” she says. “I know what it means to be without. We were nomadic, which is just a euphemism for being poor. I benefited from Section 8 [housing], reduced lunch, arts in schools, Pell Grants and Perkins [student] Loans.”

JP encourages beneficiaries of public programs to advocate for more robust investments and for colleges to do more to make higher education affordable. For American mothers living in poverty, Lord observes, the point in life when they’re the most economically vulnerable coincides with the most vulnerable moment in their children’s lives. The same dilemma that threatens to hold them back is what makes them so effective in their advocacy, whether it’s in front of policymakers or in the workplace.

She urges single moms to bring their full identities into every situation. That means she can call in sick when her baby’s sick. It means she can tell a story about something her child said without being afraid of her supervisor’s prying questions or assumptions about her commitment to the job.

Come together. JP works best when moms of different talents and abilities, and from different backgrounds, share their visions and aspirations. Lord compares the effect to the Transformers — the toy, the movie, etc., whose slogan is “More Than Meets the Eye.” They come apart and reassemble themselves into new shapes, with new powers.

JP actively engages with 66% of its alumni, adding up to a large and growing nationwide community. Last March, the organization held its first in-person summit in Austin, Texas, with 300 single moms and alumni in attendance. “There’s something beautiful and healing about being in a room of other people with that shared experience,” Lord says. “We intentionally set out to extend this sisterhood to make it beneficial for the space, the industry and, ultimately, for the people we serve.”

Seize the moment. The pandemic was especially devastating for the population served by JP., “the challenges that single parents faced prior to the pandemic generally magnified after the arrival of COVID-19. In April 2020, one in four single parents was unemployed, and unemployment rates recovered more slowly for single parents throughout 2021.”

Lord recalls urging her board to act swiftly and boldly. “We can’t tread water,” she wrote in an email, “because there is no water.” Switching to a hockey metaphor, she told them: “We can skate to where the puck is, we can skate to where the puck is going—or, better still, we can try to influence the direction of the puck.”

Lord’s first priority was retaining staff and operations across the country, including five child development centers. Beyond that, she recognized that the disruption presented an historic opportunity to address policies and systems in ways that wouldn’t have been possible previously. That determination persists in the post-pandemic era, especially around the issues that the mothers in the network care most about: the criminal justice system, early childhood education and career opportunities.

Money matters. Society often judges single moms for poor financial choices when the reality is that expenses often pile up due to factors beyond their control — even when (or especially when) they’re trying to improve their lives.

Stable housing is the foundation of making a home, but the financial obstacles are often insurmountable. “Try and come up with first month’s rent, last month’s rent and security deposit when you are living paycheck to paycheck,” she says. “If you’re lucky enough to have emergency money in the bank, that’s going right to the landlord, and then you don’t have emergency money anymore.”

On the subject of higher education, a well-known pathway out of poverty, Lord says many colleges still haven’t made commonsense adjustments to welcome students who happen to have young children. “Their financial aid award letters include housing, transportation, books,” she notes. “But you know what it doesn’t have? It doesn’t have child care, which is one of the biggest chunks of a single mom’s budget.” Lord commends Daria J. Willis at Howard Community College in Maryland for creating a student- parent section of the library.

It takes two (generations). “You can’t talk about generational poverty in this country without talking about gender and race,” asserts Lord, who sees the wisdom of the two-generation approach and has experienced it firsthand.

Efforts to improve the lives of American women are bound to fail if they leave motherhood out of the equation. “We lose a generation when we don’t think of them as a unit,” she says. A national advisor of the, she praises the Aspen Institute for “creating the space to facilitate conversations around centering the complete identity of a family unit and says it has brought her into a circle with other Black female leaders — including Michelle Rhone Collins (), Aisha Nyandoro () and Nicole Lynn Lewis (). “I sit here because of people who are willing to be in community,” she says. “It takes a constellation of stars — not a supernova.”

Although she never forgets about the systemic challenges that exist for single mothers, the possibilities for remaking those systems give her energy. “It’s an incredible opportunity,” she says, “waking up every morning, thinking about how to reimagine the whole framework for making our network more powerful.”

One of the first of the many trips she’s taken as CEO brought her to Hawaii in July, where she met a little boy who announced he was getting ready for the holidays.

The holidays? In July? Her young friend was talking about Halloween, and he presented her with a drawing he’d made of the jack-o’-lantern he was planning.

Erhardt Preitauer, CEO of CareSource and a member of the Easterseals national board of directors, praises Davenport’s leadership and her energy, saying, “Kendra is somebody to be reckoned with. She’s got a wonderful leadership quality, and she clearly has passion for serving people with disabilities.”

Here are some of the ways Davenport is honoring Easterseals’ legacy and retooling systems to increase impact.

Early intervention. According to the , 6% of children age 3-17 have a diagnosed developmental disability. The number grows every year, leaving parents and caregivers stressed and often unprepared. Easterseals’ helps them track the development of children from birth through five. Davenport says that the free, comprehensive and confidential online screening tool can reassure nervous first-time parents who wonder if their infants and toddlers are developing appropriately, meeting critical milestones during the important first five years. ÌęEasterseals is there as soon as developmental issues arise—which is the optimal time to intervene. “We were still in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit,” recalls triplet mom Shana Fryar, “when one of the nurses mentioned getting them into developmental therapies early, and she said that Easterseals Arkansas was a fabulous facility.”

Inclusive learning. In addition to receiving therapy services through the , the Fryars also enrolled Ryan, Alexa and Jacob in , which is designed to educate children with and without disabilities. (As an added bonus, the triplets’ therapy sessions are integrated right into their preschool days.)

As Davenport explains, integrating children of all abilities “removes barriers, unconscious bias and stigma while increasing the quality of care. It’s what I’d want for my own children.”

Experts agree: “Inclusive preschool classrooms are in the best interest of all young children,” . “Including children with disabilities results in greater empathy and acceptance of differences among all children and in improved academic, social and behavioral outcomes for children with disabilities.”Ìę That is the philosophy behind .

Bridging generations. S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has sounded the alarm about the “loneliness epidemic,” to that of tobacco, obesity and substance use disorders. Undoubtedly, seniors are among the loneliest Americans.

Nina Blachman, director of the geriatrics fellowship program at NYU Langone Health, that loneliness “can play a role in worsening all of [an older adult’s] conditions. It’s associated with an increased risk of dementia, an increased risk of stroke. And of course, an increased risk of depression.”

Davenport understands that young children can be part of the solution. Her mother, who passed away recently, used to leave her grandchildren’s handprints all over the sliding glass patio doors of her home because they reminded her of their presence.

Many of Easterseals’ child care sites, including the one I visited in Silver Spring, Md., are co-located with senior centers so that the oldest and youngest can see each other and interact.

Forging connections for military families. finds only 0.5% of today’s American adults has served in the armed forces, noting “With the shrinking size of the military in recent decades there are now fewer connections between the military and the civilian ·ÉŽÇ°ù±ô»ć.”

Davenport’s father and husband served, and she has empathy for the challenges faced by active-duty families, especially those with special-needs children. In the D.C. area, for example, provides scholarships and other services for children of wounded warriors.

Other programs serve veterans in need of training or help in marketing themselves to find meaningful work. “The life skills you gain in the military definitely translate to civilian life,” she says. “But a lot of people need help with that transition, and a lot of it comes down to relationships.”

“Each Affiliate comes with its own budget, its own challenges and opportunities,” says Davenport. “We work with each of them to ensure that children and adults become full and equal participants in society.

Dignity features in each and every way to work toward that goal.” This value has always been a part of the Easterseals story and takes center stage in the organization’s first national TV commercial, premiering in September. Rather than putting a celebrity face on the screen, the spots show families and program beneficiaries telling their own stories. Ideally, the commercials will also help the public recognize the full scope of Easterseals’ work, and not just those stamps.

In April 2020, just a few weeks into the pandemic, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha that said: “To expect resilience without justice is simply to indifferently accept the status quo.” With the imminent launch of , an ambitious program to eradicate child poverty in Flint, Michigan, the pediatrician aims to show the country and the world how to build a resilient community at a systems level. The program will scale up the promise of unconditional cash allowances as well as establishing new child care centers, expanding home visiting and partnering with groups like and .

Early Learning Nation magazine caught up with Hanna-Attisha, associate dean for public health in the MSU College of Human Medicine and director of the Michigan State University-Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, to learn more about her new organization, her thinking and what drives her.

Transformative change is possible. Hanna-Attisha came to national prominence in 2015 by calling attention to the dangerous levels of lead in Flint’s drinking water. It was a long struggle, but she persisted and organized and eventually, she won over the skeptics and brought about reform. “We all would love to see overnight change,” she admits, “and it can get frustrating when that doesn’t happen, but in this work, it’s important to recognize the long game.”

After she testified before Congress on the dangers to children of the more than , Congress dedicatedin the 2022 National Infrastructure Act. As another example, she points to the that is now part of the U.S. Farm Bill. “If we can do it with water and nutrition,” she says, “we can do it with democracy and community building. It just takes a different way of looking at things.”

If things can change in Flint, they can change anywhere. Hanna-Attisha’s outspoken advocacy on the Flint water crisis prompted the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control to create the to monitor how residents are doing after the water crisis.

The emblem of the initiative is the Sankofa, the mythical African bird that’s flying forward but looking back and holding an egg in its mouth. “That’s what Flint is,” she says.Ìę “We are determined not to be defined by the crisis, but rather to be defined by what we can do next.”

It’s not just about Flint. The city where and where, she says, the middle class was born, . The lead crisis was only the latest in a series of man-made disasters to befall Flint.

Hanna-Attisha describes Rx Kids as “a society-wide hug for an entire city.Ìę We’re saying, ‘We see you, we hear you’.” And yet she maintains that the project goes beyond the residents of Flint and extends to reframing the narrative on poverty at a scale that hasn’t been tried before. “This is not about one city,” she contends. “It’s about shining a spotlight on how we could do better for all children.”

It’s not just about the cash, either. Inspired by the success of guaranteed income experiments like the and the Abundant Birth Project, Rx Kids will “prescribe” Flint families $7,500 in cash, including a one-time $1,500 payment to expectant mothers.

“It’s going to be coupled,” she says, “with arts and humanities and storytelling. And joy, as much as possible.” By running the program in a values-driven way, she aspires to rebuild the social contract and to have an impact on things like civic engagement, voting, crime, violence and trust in government.

Social entrepreneurship runs on trust. Top-down leadership has abused minority communities in Flint and around the world. That’s why everything Rx Kids does goes hand in hand with community. “We’re trying to do things in a way that restores self-determination and participatory democracy,” Hanna-Attisha says, citing a recent design retreat conducted with the participation of a mothers advisory panel. “They share their lived experiences of how hard it is to make ends meet, how hard it is to raise a family with limited resources,” she recalls.

She’s also building common cause with those she terms unlikely partners, including lawyers and CEOs. “When we break down silos,” she says, we find, ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea this person cared about early childhood, about economic justice.’ When we make that tent bigger with partners who share our same passion, it allows us to advance this work.”

Immigrants make America healthy. Along with , Hanna-Attisha was born in another country. Her family, she notes, fled the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “We came for the American dream, and I grew up grateful every day, but also cognizant of what bad people in power can do to vulnerable populations,” she says.

Her 2017 New York Times editorial, “” excoriated President Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim countries to the United States. Needless to say, the Covid pandemic raised awareness of—and appreciation of—immigrants working in health care. In the process, she hopes that the country will rethink its immigration policies and attitudes toward immigrants.

Reading recharges. When the pediatrician/activist/author/entrepreneur needs to recharge her batteries, she reaches for a book. “Reading is my escape,” she says. “It’s my source of knowledge that I didn’t get in school, and it’s also how I am able to see and appreciate the world. Literature and the humanities help us develop our empathy. We can step into the shoes of others.”

The page on her personal website includes books on Michigan history, Arab-Americans, the environment and the Spanish Civil War, among other subjects. Recent favorites include Matthew Desmond’s and T.J. Klune’s (two very different titles).

Young patients still give her life meaning. Despite her growing responsibilities with Rx Kids, Hanna-Attisha still sees patients once a week. “My clinical time is joy,” she says. “Hanging out with kiddos is what grounds me. It gives me the drive to do the policy stuff and the population-level stuff.”

The main character of her children’s book is a toy instrument, a banjolele (half-banjo, half-ukulele) named Baby. With illustrations by Marcela Avelar, came out this past November, but its journey began six years earlier. June was taking part in the Kennedy Center’s program, founded by Michelle Obama, which sends artists and creators into schools throughout the nation. Students loved her story about Baby, and Turnaround Art’s Kathy Fletcher encouraged her to turn it into a book. “When I heard Valerie tell the enchanting story,” Fletcher told me. “I knew it would be an immediate favorite as a children’s book. I’m so happy that this beautiful book, with its positive, inspiring message is out and reaching children everywhere.”

When not , June lives in Humboldt, Tennessee, and Early Learning Nation magazine caught up with her for a brief but intense call. Here’s what we learned.

1. Anything can be creative. Last month at South by Southwest, June and gave a talk together about creativity. Her message to people who don’t think they’re creative is: Think again. You may not play an instrument or write poetry, but any pursuit can take a creative form, if you think of it that way. “Maybe you like to design your nails,” she says, “Or maybe you love to cook. It’s about the tone of things. It’s the way you do it.”

As a struggling musician, she worked as a house cleaner, and there were lots of times during those seven years that she hated the drudgery and counted the minutes until she could get out of there. “There were other days,” she notes, “when I saw myself as a domestic artist, and I was ready to go make other people’s homes beautiful and to have it be a sanctuary for them when they came back.” June and Ayers urged their SXSW audience to think of creativity as an antidote to overwork, media oversaturation and all the toxic elements of our society. “There is a revolutionary power in creativity,” she asserts, “and in the communities that it builds.”

2. At first, all it takes is 10 minutes a day. Although banjolele is one of the easier instruments to learn, June confesses that, unlike singing, not every part of music comes naturally to her. “I never doubted my ability to belt out a song,” she says, recalling the time she sang “This Land Is Your Land” in Mr. Wallace’s fourth-grade class. “Instruments, that was the hard part. And keeping time,” she adds, thinking back on the girls on the playground who mastered elaborate hand-clapping games. “I couldn’t keep the rhythm at all. It was very embarrassing. So I decided, Why not become a musician for a living? I like a challenge.”

Learning anything new can be frustrating, but her rule is to start with 10 minutes a day. “I get mad at the instrument and sometimes have to walk away,” she says. “But it’s still there waiting for me the next day.” With practice, the 10 minutes stretches out to a half-hour and then an hour or more. And before you know it, people like and start noticing. Her 2021 album The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, Rolling Stone magazine declared, “ultimately feels like a record about perseverance, survival and acceptance, about turning one’s gaze from scars to nighttime stars.”

3. Different is good. As a singer, June always knew she didn’t sound like other singers. Her tone is a bit scratchy and sometimes nasal and won’t remind anyone of her 80s idols, Whitney Houston and Tracy Chapman. The word idiosyncratic comes up a lot. “Her voice is at once grounded and cosmic, earthy yet divine,” . June admits, “I always used to ask myself, Why am I doing this? And the answer was always, I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it because I love it, for my joy.” She’s grateful for the growing audience that does connect to her music. For those who don’t — it’s simple: “Not everything’s for everybody.”

4. Yoga means unity. The word yoga, June explains, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning to join or unite. “The ultimate goal is union,” she says. “Which is the point of anything that gets you out of the ego and the self and all the things not helping people to grow and build community.”

Her forthcoming publication, , concerns, in her words, manifesting dreams. It’s not just about working on yourself, she says, referring to a theme common to many wellness titles. Whether readers are connecting to nature or to their communities, the aim is overcoming the forces constantly trying to divide us, based on race, class and status. “I don’t think everybody has to be volunteering for everything at every meeting of their neighborhood association,” she says. “You could be a hermit and create a harmonious world by aspiring to unity.”

5. Kindness takes a little extra effort. The years she spent cleaning houses, among other memories, help June to try a little harder when people are less than pleasant. “Think about the neighbor that you just don’t get along with,” she says, “or the person at the coffee shop who’s grumpy all the time who clearly doesn’t like you. How do you build a community and keep love in action with them?” That person’s stress is not yours to take on, she counsels, but there’s a lot of darkness in the world, and you just have to remember a lot of us are worried and frightened and don’t always remember to smile.

There’s something good waiting at the other side of fear. According to June, the lesson of her book is this: “There’s a little voice inside you that says, I’m scared and I’m terrified, but I really, really, really see myself one day able to make it through a song.”

Sanjit Sethi, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, calls Ogbu “one of the most powerful voices in the terrain of culture, equity and the built environment. She articulates the urgent need for not merely creating more equitable communities but for this to occur by addressing both intergenerational and immediate trauma and for decolonizing the methodologies that drive this work. Liz is at once storyteller, planner, poet and designer and leads with empathy and joy in equal measure.”

Ogbu spoke to Early Learning Nation magazine from her office in Oakland, California. Here are some pieces of wisdom gathered from the conversation:

Spatial justice is racial justice. “Justice has a geography,” Ogbu says. Some neighborhoods have far more access to resources and opportunities than others. In any given city, she explains, there’s an area with gleaming office towers, a transit station, and pricey apartments and shops. And there are other areas where the homes are run down, the bus routes are insufficient and vacant lots are accumulating trash. “When you overlay demographics onto those maps, guess where Black, Indigenous, brown and the poor traditionally wind up.” She has devoted her career to erasing these artificial borders and eradicating these real differences in the name of a unified society where everyone has an opportunity to thrive.

Racist systems were set up intentionally. We must be just as intentional about dismantling them. From East New York, Brooklyn; to East St. Louis, Illinois; to East Palo Alto, California, the history of racism, segregation, poverty and devastation has played out in much the same way. How did American cities come to follow this pattern? It wasn’t an inevitable or natural process. Ogbu points to , and other racist real estate practices that enabled landlords to profit from slums and people of color to remain mired in them.

Her work on the Woodland Park Project in East Palo Alto demonstrates how to start undoing the damage. She calls the community “an oasis of poverty in the Silicon Valley. If you’re a cleaner at Facebook, East Palo Alto is probably the only nearby city you can afford to live in.”

When the 1800 units of Woodland Park came under new ownership in 2017, she was brought on to try to figure out what community building and community improvement would look like. The first and most important step was listening. “I serve two clients,” she says. “The people who pay me, and the people who have to live with what I’ve created.”

Architecture is more than just designing buildings. Ogbu often has to explain that her job transcends what is normally thought of as design and architecture. As she says in a popular TED Talk, “I design opportunities for impact.” Seen this way, the profession is less about standing at her desk and sketching the “best” house and more about engaging with residents — the real experts on the neighborhood.

“I try to learn what people’s lives are like,” she says. “I listen to find out what they need to fulfill their dreams and aspirations.” Organizing house parties with groups of 10 to 12 residents, she discovered a lot of anger. “There was a lot of yelling,” she said. “And some people shy away from that or dismiss it as the outpouring of agitators, but I think of the poet Nayyirah Waheed, who called anger ‘grief that has been silent for too long.’” Having no control over their environment, she realized, would make anyone angry.

Building trust started with finding small things that showed she was listening. In Woodland Park, she and her collaborators worked with the property manager to address a backlist of repairs, and they also built a park and initiated a partnership with the YMCA to bring classes and activities. The thing is, nobody had requested a park. “This is where the design part comes in,” she says. “I listen to what you say is hard or what is challenging, and then I think about what is a physical response that I can create.”

Children will tell you what they need — if you listen. “Whatever we build affects kids,” Ogbu says. “But we often don’t treat them as stakeholders who have a perspective.” Over the course of 10 years of programming on the site of a former power plant in Hunters Point, which has been described as she and her collaborators on that project made sure to do focus groups with young people and include them at the engagement stations set up at the annual circus and other events. “These kids had a tremendous amount of ideas,” she says. “Some were better than what the adults came up with. They just needed a platform to share it and for us to actually take it as real data.”

Among the feedback she received was the message: “We want a dinosaur park,” and while this request wasn’t literally fulfilled, Ogbu and her collaborators (the design firms Envelope A+D and RHAA) seized on the idea of “being interactive with nature” as a design principle, which came into existence as a shoreline park.

Children think like architects. Ogbu’s 4-year-old niece has become a big influence on her work. “I’m practicing being in her land of make believe and creativity,” she says. “It’s a joy to watch her try to shape the spaces that she’s in.” Ogbu believes the more people are informed about the places that they live in—and their ability to have an impact on it — the better our spaces can be overall.

Seeing and understanding space, she argues, shouldn’t be an activity limited to trained architects. “Everyone can do that, but we just have sort of squashed it out of people. So part of my work is teasing out, like, ‘Oh, you actually know a lot. I’m just helping you understand what that is.’”

Perry is best known as the co-author, with Oprah Winfrey, of the bestseller . The book, however, is just one highlight of a 30+ year career as teacher, clinician and researcher in neuroscience and children’s mental health. His research and clinical experience show the importance of the first years — and in particular, the first few months — and he has been a steadfast champion of early education.

“Perry’s work,” says Dr. Kristie Brandt, director of the University of California Davis , “has advanced the early childhood field to new levels. He has revolutionized our understanding of the importance of the first months, without adopting a fatalist position in the event of early trauma. He champions truly personalized care with greater potential for helping and healing.”

After seeing him deliver a powerful keynote address at a Children’s Movement of Florida webinar this past October, I sought him out to probe his views further and to find out more about the — the virtual community he founded.

1. Human beings are born curious. Children and other members of our species want to explore the world, and exploration gives us great pleasure. Perry, who grew up in North Dakota, credits his family for his own lifelong appetite for acquiring knowledge. “My dad and mom were both really curious people,” he recalls. “Both read a lot, and my brother taught me a lot about animal behavior when we went hunting and fishing. He knew the birds of our neighborhood and showed me how to be quiet and observe. So, I learned about the predictability inherent in biological systems, that if you observe them and take enough time, things that seemed completely random really made complete sense.”

Basic child development tells us that if children feel safe, they go explore the world and then come back to the parent or caregiver to get regulated, and then go explore again. When the adults in a child’s life nurture this tendency, as the child grows up, it can blossom into a willingness to travel, to learn new languages, to sample different foods and so on.  Curiosity about other humans, Perry says, is a powerful antidote to the fearfulness poisoning society. “When we’re curious,” he says, “we become more accepting and aware of the power of diversity.” Diversity is a sign of health in any biological system, he stresses.

2. Human beings are healthiest in community. Perry harks back to early human society, when we lived in clans of 80 or so. Evolutionarily speaking, this is the optimal number of close relationships for brain development, and the health of the community, then and now, largely determines the health of the individual. “Human beings are really such social creatures,” he says, “that the most meaningful way to look at and solve problems really is on a systemic basis.” In contrast, the way society is currently constructed, we tend to focus on people as individuals, resulting in “well-intended efforts that fail.”

The child care workforce is a case in point. Citing the widespread burnout in the field, Perry says, the default assumption is to promote self-care. “Yet that only gets you so far,” warns Perry. “Early Care providers could have the best self-care model in the world, but if every day you go into a system that grinds you down, doesn’t pay a fair wage, uses ratios that make it hard to meet the developmental needs of each child, it just isn’t going to work. We have to approach these problems in a different way, taking into account the relationship between economic policy and early childhood, as well as the relationship between historical structures that are inherently racist and the impact that has on physical health.”

Shifting the culture so that early educators feel valued is a project that will take years. To that end, the comprises organizations and individuals — including educators, parents, policymakers, social workers and students (including middle and high schoolers) — who study neurodevelopment and make use of the latest research. “We try to operationalize these concepts,” he says. “And we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how many people have found this to be a powerful way to understand issues.” The network operates in more than 30 countries and includes several hundred thousand people.

3. Stress changes the biology of the brain. In 1973, during his freshman year at Stanford University, Perry enrolled in a seminar taught by Seymour Levine, a pioneer of research into stress hormones. Epigenetics as “the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work,” was still in its infancy (so to speak). He recalls being struck by the fact that a very brief experience on day three of a rat’s life could have a lifelong impact. “From that point forward,” he says, “I was studying it one way or another.”

Thanks to the popularity of books like What Happened to You? and Bessel van der Kolk’s , post-traumatic stress disorder is a commonly understood phenomenon, but Perry notes that 30 years ago, even many clinicians in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, along with many other leading institutions, failed to recognize it as a legitimate diagnosis. “The field is evolving,” he remarks, “so I’m hopeful about that.”

Although science has repeatedly confirmed the importance of early brain development across species, Perry remains amazed by the simple fact that if children are safe and regulated during their first couple months, it acts as a kind of inoculation against bad things happening later in life. On the other hand, those whose lives start out rough but then have consistent, predictable, nurturing experiences—they tend to struggle. “It’s one of those things that clinicians see every day,” Perry says, “and it has such powerful implications for policy. It’s such a logical place for us to put a lot of our attention and efforts. It just makes sense to take care of the adults who work with young kids. We just have not done it very well.”

A father of five and grandfather of four, Perry reflects that he was lucky to have become a parent before he became a clinician. “My kids taught me a lot more about development than my formal training did,” he acknowledges.

4. Touch is good for the brain. The fancy term is the somatosensory system, as the “network of neurons that help humans recognize objects, discriminate textures, generate sensory-motor feedback and exchange social cues.” Nonsexual hugging and touching are natural and physiologically healthy, Perry contends. “Toddlers need to be held. They like to be rocked. They like to push. They like that heavy press of a hug.”

In What Happened to You? “touch-starved” is the haunting term he uses to describe many children in our society. Whether it’s an over-reliance on screens and technology or misguided prohibitions against any physical contact with students, American society is betraying our own somatosensory systems.

“We need to figure out our relationship with touch in our society,” Perry says. We need to figure out ways to incorporate it more.”

5. ‘Resilience’ is misunderstood. Because resilience is such an incredibly powerful concept, it’s important that we comprehend what it is — and what it isn’t. As he clarifies in What Happened to You?: “We often use our belief in another person’s ‘resilience’ as an emotional shield
 We see the same rationalization and avoidance in the face of large-scale or community trauma — war, famine, natural disasters, school shootings, the transgenerational impact of slavery.”

Relying on resilience as a silver bullet, Perry, worries, leads to schools in high-poverty neighborhoods to declare that it’s focusing on this magical quality and then to assign a book on the subject or hold a webinar without taking the necessary steps to address the underlying socioeconomic issues. “It’s a weird form of toxic positivity,” he says.

“Real resilience,” explains Perry, “is built from stress, but it has to be predictable, controllable stress.” He cites the example of a teacher who requires students to get up in front of class every Wednesday to recite a poem, which is different from a situation where students are episodically put on the spot and asked to do something beyond their capabilities.

The common thread of all these lessons is the need for nuance — a quality sorely lacking in many of today’s debates. “Human beings love simple, linear explanations,” Perry observes. “But development is complex. We still have a lot to learn.”

Here are five principles Dutta-Gupta keeps in mind while leading an anti-poverty organization dedicated to ensuring that policies, programs and practices advance racial equity.

1. Early learning sets the stage. In 1986, when he was three-and-a-half years old, Dutta-Gupta’s family emigrated from India to Atlanta with $80 to their name. “I ate a lot of the same meals over and over,” he recalls, “Eggs, potatoes, eggs, potatoes.” While his mother completed her PhD, his father worked a variety of jobs, including bank teller and hotel front desk night manager. There were many afternoons when his sleeping father was the only adult in the house, and the only permissible activity was quietly playing Legos on the bed beside him.

“One of the most important things my father did,” Dutta-Gupta says, “was he somehow got me off of a wait list for a local Presbyterian church preschool. That changed our lives.” In addition to starting him on his ABCs and 123s, this arrangement allowed his mother to continue her education and his father to pursue his career ambitions. Today, Dutta-Gupta and his wife have a six-year-old and a 10-year-old. Washington, D.C.’s robust helped keep them from moving to the suburbs with lower housing costs.

2. Families benefit from a holistic policy mindset. Dutta-Gupta is proud of CLASP’s history of thinking in a cross-disciplinary way about how to support young children and their families. That is, while they conduct research and make recommendations for , they also focus on , among other issues. “Improving job quality for early educators can be quite helpful for child development outcomes,” he contends. “And we have the potential here at CLASP to bring together these disparate areas of expertise, which in real life are not at all disparate because children and families interact with our systems, services and support.”

High-quality jobs and high-quality care matter for working-class and middle-class Americans alike. Similarly, the climate crisis doesn’t seem related, but . “Just the pollution itself,” he marvels. “Never mind what it will do otherwise.” In developing policy agendas and recommendations, all of CLASP’s teams aim to engage leaders and communities with recent or current experience. The Child Care and Early Education team, led by Stephanie Schmit, has a formal partnership with (UPLAN) where they provide support for the UPLAN parents on federal early childhood developments and strategy, but also benefit tremendously from their knowledge and deep expertise.

3. Implementation is how policy realizes its promise. And conversely, botched implementation can ruin the most brilliant and innovative policy. plays an integral part in what Dutta-Gupta calls a virtuous cycle: “Implementation at the state or local level promotes analysis, which can inform the advocacy that then shapes policy development.” This effect is critical since most programs are not actually run by the federal government. Block grants and other mechanisms devolve authority to states, localities and community-based organizations.

4. Democracy is good for children. “Our theories of change,” Dutta-Gupta explains, “depend on a meaningful sense of democracy.” He notes that some policies and programs can have an indirect but considerable impact on democracy. To illustrate this point, he cites that unions increase voter participation among union members as well as the people around them (“an effect that is lasting, that goes well beyond a single election”) and Jamila Michener’s , which focuses on how people’s experiences with Medicaid affect even their voting rates. As midterm elections approach, CLASP is engaged in scenario planning to anticipate potential shifts in power at the federal and state levels, while simultaneously acknowledging that neither the Right nor the Left is monolithic. “There’s lots of disagreement, even among like-minded folks,” he acknowledges. “We’re all humans; we’re not robots.”

5. Relationships keep us together. Within and across partisan divides, human connections keep the social fabric from unraveling. In the policy world, allies may have different ideas about strategy, or different ways of saying it.  When people on the same side get in heated discussions, how do you keep it productive? “The more that we can actually build those meaningful relationships,” Dutta-Gupta counsels, “and I would go so far as to say actual friendships, the more we can work together.”

Making the world better for families and children is a group project, and advocates must be honest with each other and have what he calls “constructive disagreements” in order to move forward. It comes down to shared beliefs in structure, systems and processes. “It’s hugely important to be clear about values and goals,” he says. “We’re part of a larger ecosystem, and everyone has a useful role to play. I’m big on building teams that are more complementary rather than people with similar knowledge or personality.

“Whenever you’re pushing for social change,” Dutta-Gupta continues, “There’s inevitably going to be losses, heartbreak, grief. These are things people dedicate their lives to, and deeply and passionately believe in. We’re much more resilient and more likely to regroup and change tactics and strategies together when we are more meaningfully connected with each other.”

St. Andrew distributed 46 million pounds of food in 2021, about half of which is gleaned, or recovered after the first harvest. With operations in 22 states, the four-decades-old organization specializes in doing good locally. According to Johnson, more than half of the recovered food makes it someone’s table the same night that it’s gleaned, often within just a few miles of the field where it was grown. “It’s really a neighbor-helping-neighbor model of addressing hunger,” she says.

Here are 5 lessons from Johnson about cultivating literally and figuratively.

1. The Good Book is a good place to start. “The staff and I,” Johnson says, “come to this work because we feel called to it.” The nonprofit is named for the apostle Andrew, who spoke to the boy who offered to share his five loaves and two fish with Jesus — who then fed thousands by multiplying this offering. Johnson explains that the Bible commands followers “to care for the people who did not have land on which to grow food. The poor are allowed to harvest the corners of every field.”

Similarly, farmers can harvest a field once, but the poor are granted the second harvest. She explains, “We’ve adapted that principle for use today. We send volunteers in the fields to pick, dig or gather whatever’s left over after commercial harvest.” That food — the gleanings — are distributed to agencies nearby that feed hungry people.

2. No farms, no food. Most of us don’t know or think about where our food comes from. Food systems are designed to keep consumers happily oblivious. As an example, Johnson notes that junk food is often very heavily subsidized. “Someone who’s hungry can go buy a Twinkie for $0.79 or an apple for $0.79, and while the apple is better for them, it has only 70 calories and isn’t going to fill them up, and the Twinkie will have 300 calories and they can go to bed and sleep tonight.”

St. Andrew fights hunger in part by reacquainting volunteers with the farmers who grow our potatoes, broccoli and green beans.  Many of its farmer partnerships go back decades, enduring good times and bad. “It’s about that feeling deep down inside, doing what you know is right,” says Brent Barbee of Barbee Farms in North Carolina.

farms account for 21% of all food waste in the United States. You know who hates that statistic the most? “Farmers don’t want the food to rot in the field,” Johnson says. That’s their worst nightmare, because they’ve used the land, they’ve used their resources, their time and everything else to grow that food.”

St. Andrew provides a service by collecting food that that the farmer would not be able to sell otherwise. Farmers can get a federal tax credit for the food that they give the organization.

3. Volunteers make it work. In an average, non-COVID year, 30,000 volunteers give about 90,000 volunteer hours through St. Andrew. (After a sudden steep decline at the start of the pandemic, numbers are climbing back up.) a day or two ahead of time.

“Gleaning with St. Andrew,” Johnson says, “is one of the few things that I know of in current society that the whole family can do together in a meaningful way. We have kids as young as, well as infants, strapped to their parents’ backs gleaning with us, and certainly at 1 or 2 actively taking part in the gleaning.”

Johnson says that volunteers report eating differently and seeing food differently after their experience. “Farmers are getting just 4% or 8% of what they pay at the grocery store for food,” she explains, “whereas if they’re buying it directly from the farmer, the farmer’s getting 100%.”

Volunteers might start shopping at farmer’s markets and farm stands more often. “After they’ve gleaned with us, they actually talk to farmers like they’re real people,” she laughs. Moreover, volunteers who unload food might discover a food pantry or soup kitchen, becoming activists in the campaign against hunger. “You can’t truly appreciate the weight, the importance, or the accessibility of gleaning, until you do it,” says Jim, a volunteer in Ohio.

4. Go for you dream job, but be patient. Johnson has been with St. Andrew a little over 12 years, with nearly half of that time in the executive director role, but the organization was on her radar long before that. In 1986, while working as a church educator in South Carolina, she read a magazine article about St. Andrew’s retreat, which educates participants about hunger, introduces them to gleaning and encourages them to commit to serving others. The story stayed with her. And wouldn’t let go.

“For 30 years, whenever I got really tired of my job, I’d go to the website and see if there was a  job I could afford to take. My children got so tired of me talking about how much I wanted to work there. Then one day the opportunity came up, and here I am.”

5. Look out for curve balls. Shortly after starting at St. Andrew, Johnson learned that her son, a second-year law student, had a brain tumor. “Everybody’s struggling with something,” she observes, saying she spent most of this period worrying from afar.

Today, Jake Patterson, 29, is a practicing attorney. Johnson’s daughter, 26, is a wildland firefighter in Northern Calif., and her youngest is 21. He’s in the army stationed in Tacoma, Wash. The pandemic, of course, was another kind of nasty surprise. You can’t glean by Zoom, but Johnson and her team quickly adapted. Because of their participation in the program (now discontinued), they distributed more pounds of food than ever in 2020 and 2021.

For the farmers, the volunteers and, especially, the 18.6 million people who eat the food their efforts makes available, Lynette Johnson and the Society of St. Andrew are truly making a difference.

“What happens when we grow up?” asks Douglas Wolk in his . “We may try to put away childish things, but we can’t, or shouldn’t. The best thing that can happen is that we turn those things into something bigger and more beautiful.” Sal Khan exemplifies this hope. More than 280 U.S. school districts and people in more than 190 countries use Khan Academy. As founder of the organization and its nonprofit offshoots , Khan Lab School and Khan World School, he has built a planet-changing education powerhouse that touches millions.

Science fiction and fantasy planted the seeds.

“I always wanted to be a Dumbledore-type figure,” he admits, referring to the headmaster wizard from the Harry Potter series. “When I worked at a hedge fund, I used to tell my friends, ‘I’m only doing this until I have enough money to start a school on my own terms.’” Before he made the first of the bite-sized videos that gave rise to his empire, he wrote educational software that family members could use. “I would always alternate between grandiose ambitions — Maybe one day, this could be used by millions, and — Sal, calm down. You know how unlikely that is,” he recalls. The example set by nudged him onto the nonprofit road rather than the presumably more lucrative “ed tech” route.

Before long, he started getting thank you letters from people he’d never met. Someone would write to say his educational platform “changed my view of myself.” Another wrote, “This is what gives me the confidence to become an engineer.” Another: “This helped my kids with learning disabilities.” The letters, Khan says, gave him permission to dream a little bigger. And those bigger dreams originated in the comic books and science fiction novels he had devoured when he was young: Hari Seldon, protagonist of Isaac Asimov’s , aspires to shorten a 30,000-year dark age to a mere millennium by collecting the world’s knowledge. Orson Scott Card’s traces a plan for training precocious children to protect the Earth from an alien attack. Neal Stephenson’s —well, it’s complicated, but it involves a colony of orphan girls obtaining information that the nobility wants to deny them. Outlandish plotlines converged around the vital role of learning.

Great Expectations

Born and reared in Metairie, Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, Khan belonged to an early wave of south Asian immigrants from the 1970s. In a culture where divorce was practically unheard of, his physician father left when Sal was 18 months old. The family struggled financially, but a network of uncles gave him a sense of belonging. “Even though things weren’t optimal,” he says, “I had a nurturing, supportive family structure. We still were part of that community.”

He also had the “high educational aspirations and expectations” and showed academic promise, though admittedly not as much as his big sister. “Everyone was saying, ‘Farah’s going to be President of the United States, and Sal, let’s hope he stays out of trouble’,” he laughs.

Today, married and father of three children, he’s acutely conscious of the privileges they enjoy, compared to children around the world. “My kids go on field trips and engage in Socratic dialogue and gardening, and all the wonderful things that we can do in these types of schools. But how do you create a great school anywhere? With Khan Academy and (free online tutoring) all it takes is a satellite, a shipping container and a teacher to potentially create a far better experience than what kids would otherwise have.”

Khan firmly believes anyone can learn anything. It just takes a — a concept pioneered by Carol Dweck that distinguishes between praising students for their intelligence and praising hard work and effort. He still regrets the headline that somebody else gave his essay on the subject. “That’s when I learned about clickbait,” he grins.

A Tale of Two Technology Cities

The Khan Academy journey has illustrated the potential of technology to transform education. Khan says it recalls the dominance of television during his youth: “TV had a lot of time-wasting things on it, but it had public television, too, and the kids would learn a lot.”

“Unfortunately,” Khan says, “It’s been a little bit of a Tale of Two Cities. Much of the world still lacks the tools that have been proven to unlock human potential. I think of a young girl born to a prostitute in Calcutta,” he says. “She could cure cancer; she could solve the next problem in physics, but without some type of a lifeline, she has a hard road ahead and the odds are stacked against her. Khan Academy becomes almost the shadow safety net school system for the world. That’s one of my dreams.” He stresses that the ideal remains a supportive social environment, a classroom with great teachers and great parental support.

Not all distance education is perfect, he acknowledges, but the pandemic confirmed his faith in the Khan Academy model.

To convey his vision of “an institution for the world that could last well beyond me,” he invokes a comic book analogy. “Obviously there aren’t people who can fly and spray ice out of their fingers. But there are these incredibly high-potential kids all over the planet, and like the X-Men, they risk becoming marginalized because of their potential. But if they’re able to tap into their gifts properly, they’re going to save the ·ÉŽÇ°ù±ô»ć.”

It’s the play part that motivates Gordon Hartman, founder of Morgan’s Wonderland in San Antonio, Texas. Named for his daughter, the first “Ultra-Accessible” theme park in the world, and other fully inclusive ventures, offers experiences for everybody.

“At Morgan’s Wonderland Camp, an outgrowth of , you can go on a zipline that’s 11 stories high, even if you’re in a wheelchair or on a breathing tube or on a feeding tube,” Hartman promises. “You can go on a challenge course 22 feet above the ground, even if you’re blind or have cognitive delay or if you’re in a wheelchair.”

Morgan’s Wonderland and the next-door Morgan’s Inspiration Island splash park offer free admission to people with disabilities, but the adventure is for anyone and everyone ready for fun. “They’re not special-needs parks,” insists Hartman. “They’re parks of inclusion, and that makes a big difference.”

Hartman’s vision for ultra-accessibility is growing beyond the attractions of Morgan’s Wonderland. This fall, his Morgan’s Inclusion Initiative, which is the planning and coordinating organization for the entire Morgan’s Wonderland “family” of endeavors, will cut the ribbon on a new kind of facility to bring a multitude of services under one roof for those with special needs. It’s called the Multi-Assistance Center at Morgan’s Wonderland, or The MAC. And he’s reaffirming a commitment to amplifying the voices of the community he’s dedicated to serving.

“They’re not at the table enough,” he says. “They don’t have enough of a voice and that’s what we’re working on very hard to change.”

San Antonio Roots

“This has always been my town,” Hartman says. Born in 1964, he grew up across the street from a Catholic church, becoming an altar boy and attending Catholic grade school and a high school seminary. A product of the , he developed a lifelong dedication to serving others. He also had a passion for business, and starting at 18, he worked as a builder and a land developer, later adding insurance, mortgages and titles to his portfolio.

About 12 months after he and his wife Maggie had their first child, Morgan, it became clear that Morgan wasn’t meeting cognitive and physical development milestones. And then one day while on vacation at a hotel swimming pool, Morgan approached two other children to play with them and their ball, but she was upset when the kids grabbed the ball and left her behind.

“That’s when we started thinking, Where can we take Morgan that would be a place where she would feel acceptance, and could play and do other things like everybody else?,” Hartman recalls. “What if we did something where those with and without special needs could join together and play?”

He sold his homebuilding business and poured the proceeds—as well as two decades of building experience—into Morgan’s Wonderland, which has welcomed over 2 million guests in its 12 years of operation. The park’s success is constantly spurring new attractions, most recently the splash park, a sports complex and a camp that offers summer-camp-like experiences year-round. Morgan herself, now 28 years old, loves all of it. “I get up early in the morning,” Hartman declares. “I work until late at night, and I love every moment of it. I have more desire and more energy now than I’ve ever had.”

The Next Wonder

As Morgan’s Wonderland grows and welcomes more guests each year from all over the world, Hartman expresses appreciation for the way San Antonio has supported his vision. “This community came together,” he says. “I didn’t do it by myself.”

As the opening of The MAC approaches, he recognizes that the community’s engagement matters more than ever. Over 30 community-based organizations will be housed (rent-free) under one roof, all coordinating electronically and collaborating in real life to help children and adults with special needs.

As Hartman explains, The MAC will conduct intake interviews and then assign clients to a navigator, who will focus not only on therapeutic issues but also the social determinants of health. (Disabled people are disproportionately affected by food and housing insecurity, among other .) Using a specially developed electronic platform, the navigators will help MAC clients connect to the right services.

Hartman describes a hypothetical mother of three, including one autistic child. “She needs help maneuvering through the insurance issues and Medicaid and so on. Well, if she has to tell her story over and over, if she has to take many days off of work and can’t do it all in one place, then the opportunity for her child to get the help they need is going to be very limited. And many times, she’s going to give up. So what we’re going to try to do is make that as efficient and seamless as possible.”

Once The MAC is fully operational, it will serve thousands with physical and cognitive special needs.

“For too long,” Hartman states, “disabled people have been set to the side and denied the full opportunity to thrive. Given that opportunity, they can and will do so much more.”

Today, McDaniels, 57, is exercising his education muscle with a vocabulary-building series from called “What’s the Word?” as well as a children’s book, Darryl’s Dream, a semi-autobiographical story that focuses on social-emotional topics like how to deal with stress and confusion. “Once you get to rehab and therapy,” he says, “you discover that all those things existed when you were little; it’s just that nobody addressed it.”

In an interview, McDaniels and Makeda Mays Green, vice president at Nickelodeon, share about their collaboration on “What’s the Word?” and advice on how to make literacy fun for early learners. Here are five literacy lessons from the conversation:

1. Music drives literacy. In McDaniels’s succinct formulation: “You put a rhythm to it, you learn it.” Over Zoom, he demonstrates for me why the ABCs is “one of the best raps in history” and Dr. Seuss is “the best rapper ever.” Mays Green cites Schoolhouse Rock as one of the new series’ inspirations. “We’re using music to teach kids the meaning of the words they’re singing,” she says. “We know from a number of studies that kids have the innate ability to grasp messaging when it comes through the vehicle of music.”

Partnering with a musical legend beloved by parents (and, let’s face it, grandparents) makes it more likely that an adult will enjoy the program alongside the young audience. “Darryl embodies a love of learning and the value of literacy,” she continues. “That means listening, speaking, reading and writing.”

2. Comic books are good reading tools. McDaniels originally learned his ABCs so he could keep up with the exploits of Spider-Man and Iron Man. “Something in there was so powerful,” he recalls. “It made me want to learn to read, so I could understand what was going on.” With his thick, square glasses, the protagonist of Darryl’s Dream was more of an awkward Clark Kent than a Superman, and that double-identity, too, captured the appeal of comics. (Among favorites more likely to be found in the children’s section of the library, he names Sounder, Curious George, Charlotte’s Web and, above all, Pippi Longstocking. He was bowled over when a recent episode of the revisionist superhero series The Boys acknowledged Pippi’s superpowers.)

Later in life, when he rapped about such personal struggles as discovering he was adopted, he made sense of it all through his first literary love: “I’m a superhero in the comic books / My make believe is your reality / I’m everything I pretend to be / Everything I need is inside of me / And anything else is the enemy.”

3. Hip-Hop brings down barriers. Run-DMC helped U.S. audiences discover a whole new musical vocabulary — not to mention the emerging hip-hop culture, fashion and attitude — but they also provided an opportunity for fans around the world to learn English. “I was just in Austin for the South by Southwest conference,” the artist says, “and a guy from Guatemala introduced himself by saying, ‘You know how I learned English? Listening to RUN-DMC on the radio!”

For many fans, the signature moment in the band’s career occurred in the “Walk This Way” video, when Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler used his microphone stand to break through a wall separating rap and rock. Mays Green of Noggin says children continue to respond to this penchant for literal and figurative barrier breaking—just as he rapped in “King of Rock”: “Now we crash through walls / cut through floors / Bust through ceilings and knock down doors.” For some reluctant readers, watching a rule breaker pick up a book can be inspiring.

4. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” McDaniels loves this quote from Albert Einstein, explicating, “He didn’t say knowledge wasn’t necessary. He knows that if you put imagination with knowledge, nothing is impossible.”

For McDaniels, imagination starts with coloring books, arts and crafts and storytelling, and it continues through envisioning your future. Kids should aim high, but the higher they aim, the more discipline it will take. School is where dreams and discipline come together. “Showing up on time, getting in line when the bell rings, if you can’t do that, I’m not going to hire you for my million-dollar company. School is preparation if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, entertainer, whatever.”

5. “Let the kids tell you who they are.” In recent years, McDaniels has appeared at countless school assemblies, and he sees a lot of reason for hope as well as concern. “The kids need the permission to discover their purpose,” he says. “That’s the whole key to empowerment. A lot of curricula and techniques don’t allow that.”

Maybe the reason adults don’t ask open-ended questions is that they’re afraid of the answers, but McDaniels urges, “You’ve got to give them a minute where you can ask them, ‘What is your journey? What do you want to be? What do you see yourself doing?’” If they know you’re really listening, they’ll have a lot to say.  â€œKids discover who they are by exploring and learning more about the world, other people and the many possibilities that exist for them,” says Mays Green. “And early literacy is key to that learning and self-discovery.”

McDaniels is thrilled about teaching early learners literacy skills with “What’s the Word?” because he still loves watching cartoons, and being a cartoon that kids relate to and learn from is even better. ”Reading prepares you for your destiny. Literacy sets you up for a dream coming true.”

In normal times, auditions for ’s new original early learning series would have taken place in-person, but in October 2020, candidates were invited to record their demo reels at home. “I had just gotten home at 1:30 a.m. from taping a virtual benefit for the Keep Indy Creating Relief Fund,” Carter recalls, “and I saw this invitation, and I was like, I cannot miss this opportunity.

So I had my family all shuffle into another room, because it was going to get loud, and I recorded the audition from 2:00 to 6:00 a.m.” With no time to research spiders or even to write lyrics down, he simply improvised on the spot.

He felt he was onto something when he showed his wife the recording. “She started crying,” he says, “and through her teary eyes, she said, ‘You are going to change the world.’ And it’s really true: these types of shows changed my ·ÉŽÇ°ù±ô»ć.”

Sean Farrell, senior vice president of content and strategy at Noggin, noted that not only was Carter right for the part, but his audition inspired changes to the program’s format to incorporate much more singing and dancing into the show that became known as Noggin Knows. “There is no barrier between Emmanuel and the viewer. He has a unique ability to reach through the screen and make you feel like he is talking just to you. With our little-kid audience, this direct and personal connection is so important. We see kids talking back to Emmanuel while watching episodes as if he is right there with them. It’s a wonderful gift.”

mixes education and entertainment. Carter describes it as “a virtual preschool classroom that helps kids learn readiness skills through a series of themed lessons alongside their favorite Nick Jr. characters and me as their teacher.”

Inspiration

When it comes to getting up in front of a camera, Carter cites the influence of three legendary hosts: “[Reading Rainbow host] LeVar Burton, who taught you the wonders of books; Bill Nye the Science Guy, who taught you the wonders of the world; Mr. Rogers, who taught you the wonders of yourself. Those three shows together built up the way I saw the ·ÉŽÇ°ù±ô»ć.”

Musically, Carter is also the product of his influences—and then some. “I grew up listening to my mother and my grandma sing gospel all the time,” he says. “On cleaning days, they would blast gospel music all throughout the house.” Disney soundtracks, with their lyrics about following your dreams, were the next big phase in his development. “That’s where I got an ear for orchestration,” he observes. And then came the King of Pop. Carter grew up idolizing fellow Hoosier State icon Michael Jackson. “He changed my entire perspective of music. Seeing what he could do, I knew that it was possible to be able to do what I wanted to do in the entertainment industry, no matter where I was from.”

Beyond TV and musical inspirations, one person stands out as Carter’s greatest source of motivation—his mother, Cindy Carter. He never met his father, and he and his two younger siblings grew up in a household with their mother and grandmother. “Mother didn’t have a lot growing up,” he states, “so she taught us to value what we have and to value who we are.”

Religion played a big part in his upbringing, and the family went to church every Sunday. A poster bought in a religious bookstore hung on his wall with the message: You Are an Original. Just Ask Your Creator.

“I grew up,” Carter says, “with this with deep-seated idea that there was nobody like me. And that’s the idea that my mother put inside of me.” Carter and his wife have three sons: Aidyn Storm (9), Avalon Rain (5) and Axel Thunder (1), and he strives as a father to instill in them the same degree of confidence. “They take up a great deal of my time,” he says, “but the way they take it up is one of the most wonderful uses of my time ever, because I love watching these little guys grow into these charismatic, loving young dudes.”

Education

Although we’ve all learned a lot about teleconferencing in the past few years, a preschool show isn’t a classroom, but it can certainly spark something, and as Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” For Carter, it’s all about conveying a sense of wonder. “Everything is still so amazing to a child,” he says. “Everything is still exciting. Everything is still magical.”

Buckle your seatbelts, kids, because Noggin Knows is taking you on a trip around the U.S. to discover science, nature and other cultures. Your travel companions include such familiar faces from Nick Jr. as Molly from the Bubble Guppies, Skye from PAW Patrol and Santiago from Santiago of the Seas. In the course of detonating what he describes as “an explosion of awe” (take that, W. B. Yeats), Carter also focuses on social emotional lessons. “We’re not just learning about dinosaurs and space,” he says. “We really want to be all in on inclusivity. As a Black man, I am so grateful to be inspiring all those children who might feel underrepresented to go out and be the person that they know that they can be.” In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he says, this mission took on added urgency.

Another perk of the job is gaining knowledge that he can share with his children. “The more you teach, the more you learn about what you’re teaching.”

Connection

June 2021 was an extraordinary moment to launch a new show for kids. The education component matters, of course, but we’re all asking ourselves what “normal” early learning means anymore. Families are stressed, and their children feel it, whether or not they understand what a pandemic is. Noggin Knows has an added responsibility of connecting the kids who aren’t experiencing the world the way they’re supposed to.

Carter says this responsibility permeates everything about the show. “We’re putting something that’s trustworthy on the screen for children who are missing out on anything that they would’ve had in school socially or emotionally,” he says.

His warmth and enthusiasm jump out of the screen, and the children are eating it up. “I get so many messages on Instagram,” he says. “Parents send me videos of their children following the lessons and dancing along.”

In an uncertain and sometimes frightening world, Carter might be the high-energy host children need today. “If I’m on the screen,” he says, “and I’m showing you this wonderful world, then I think I’ve done my job. Because the world is only as scary as we let the children believe it is.”

“We were in the car,” Yamaguchi recalls. “My older daughter was having one of her toddler moments and just wouldn’t calm down and wouldn’t accept my explanation of why we were doing what we were doing. I kept warning her, ‘You need to stop. We can’t listen to this in the car. You’re screaming.’”

And yet the “toddler moment” continued. That’s when Mom got tough: “Finally I said, ‘If you’re going to keep screaming, you’re going to have to get out of the car.’ And kids will just test you, right? So I pulled over to the side, and she kind of looked at me, gave that look of, Wait, what? What are you doing? And I said, ‘I told you, you need to stop or you have to get out the car.’”

There was no audience or television cameras to capture this showdown, but according to Yamaguchi, her daughter stopped crying and remained quiet the rest of the trip. “I called her bluff,” Yamaguchi says, acknowledging that this victory was bittersweet. “It was really hard,” she admits, “because obviously I was not going to let her get out of the car. Sometimes that tough love is hard for us to do, but it has an effect.”

Now that her daughters are 18 and 16, Yamaguchi is philosophical about the challenges of parenting toddlers. “You think you have it figured out with the first kid,” she says, “and the second one comes along who is totally different and needs a totally different approach to however you parented the first one. You’re just constantly adjusting and always feeling like you’re trying to figure things out.”

As the 2022 Winter Olympics get under way, Yamaguchi’s 1992 accomplishment continues to reverberate — especially, perhaps, for Asian American women. Artist and speaker Philippa Hughes says, “We didn’t have many role models back then. [TV journalist] Connie Chung was around, but she was behind a desk. Yamaguchi was so powerful and artistic.”

Five insights emerged from my conversation with Yamaguchi:

1. Family — and family history — set the stage. During World War II, the U.S. interned Japanese Americans on the suspicion that they might be working for the enemy. Both of the skater’s parents were interned with their families — her mom in in Amache, Colorado, while her father , fighting alongside white soldiers in Germany and France. (Discover the online exhibit .) “We would hear snippets here and there,” Yamaguchi recalls, “but it wasn’t something that was often talked about, especially when my grandparents were alive. It was really the later generations that really started to ask more questions about it, learn about it and want to tell that story more.” Reflecting on this episode in American history, she says she’s in awe of the Japanese Americans who endured it — and grateful for their sacrifice. “It’s hard to fathom how they felt, and how were able to move forward with their lives without some bitterness.”

2. Follow your idols, and you might just become one. When Yamaguchi started skating at 6 years old, she worshipped Dorothy Hamill and used to perch a Dorothy doll at the edge of the rink to watch her twirl on the ice. In 1992, at age 20, she became the first American woman’s figure skater to win Olympic gold since Hamill in 1976. These days, the former idolizer is the idol (not to mention a 2008 Dancing with the Stars champion). Chief among her fans is Olympian Karen Chen, who, like Yamaguchi, hails from Fremont, Calif. “We share the same hometown,” Yamaguchi says, “And so there’s always been a special relationship. I met her when she was 12 and have been just a huge fan of hers since then.”

3. Mentors and coaches guide you in and out of the rink. From the start of her skating career, Bay Area skaters took Yamaguchi under their wing. She describes Brian Boitano, whose Olympic moment came in 1988, as a huge mentor. “He was so encouraging and a very positive role model,” she says. Of Christy Ness, her coach from the age of 9 years old, Yamaguchi says, “She was probably one of the most influential people in my life, besides my parents. That relationship goes way beyond skating. There were so many lessons she taught me that I’ve carried with me.”

4. Athletics are about the head as much as the body. Yamaguchi will never forget the intensity of training with Ness. “Obviously,” she says, “it is imperative for success to be able to be prepared, put the training in.” Dealing with pressure from fans, competition and the media was just as important.

“Christy did not cut us any slack in practice and even created pressure-filled situations in practice even so that we could push ourselves and then realize, Okay, if I can get through my program with that amount of nervousness and practice, I could do it in competition.” This degree of preparation also counted after the Olympics, in the face of attention and acclaim far beyond what most 20-year-olds ever experience.Ìę

5. Giving back is an obligation. I’m so grateful for the opportunities I’ve had,” Yamaguchi says, adding that her mom always used to ask her about giving back. She took up this challenge as soon as her career allowed it, on a tour with Stars on Ice, which benefited the Make-A-Wish Foundation. “It was the first time I had worked hands-on with a nonprofit, and it was completely eye-opening for me,” she recalls, “and it gave me feeling of purpose and of doing something beyond just focusing on my own career.”

Yamaguchi launched in 1997. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the organization provides age-appropriate books and reading technology, along with family engagement support to create literacy-rich home environments. She recalls a dad who raised his hand at a recent event, describing how his five-year-old son had never previously gotten into books, but the Always Dream tablet with e-books changed everything. Especially the one about the moon. “The dad was just so proud,” Yamaguchi says, “and now his son wants to be an astronaut. Books are the gateway to anything your imagination can dream up.”

Today, Carter is building life-giving places around the country, with a particular focus on low-status communities — a term she prefers to poor or low-income. Her new book Reclaiming Your Community describes a journey from South Bronx during the neighborhood’s most difficult era, through a successful but sometimes controversial nonprofit career, up to and including the formation of the for-profit venture, , with its ambitious mission: low-status community members experiencing a great community that meets their needs as well as their aspirations while they are ever more successful in it. Though laced with personal anecdotes, it’s less a memoir than a manifesto about unleashing community potential.

She wrote the book because, while the community-wealth-building tools it describes have been in place since the formation of this country, they aren’t nearly well known enough. She marvels, “Nobody, and I mean nobody, is looking at those neighborhoods from the perspective of local people who need a little bit of extra help in order to be agents of change for themselves.”

Ilana Preuss, founder and CEO of , says, “Our low-status communities are filled with people launching and growing businesses, amazing storefronts to be filled and endless opportunities to build wealth. The question is: What is each community or neighborhood going to do about it? Reclaiming Your Community is how we get there.”

The best way to read the book is in the company of neighbors, whether or not you agree on issues like gentrification and economic development. “I hope it gives people an excuse to talk more with each other,” she says.

Majora Carter’s Top Recommendations for Reclaiming Community:

Hold on to what you’ve got, part I: Property. Reclaiming Your Community poignantly recounts how Carter’s family sold the house she grew up in, only to see it triple in value. “My family personally lost about half a million dollars’ worth of wealth,” she laments. “We all need to identify and seize opportunities for wealth creation through real estate and business development.”

Home ownership and family stability go hand in hand. A , the former CEO of Freddie Mac, states, “Homeownership is regarded as causing an improvement in the quality of life of a typical family. It is the most common method for such a family to build wealth… Homeownership is validly seen as a source of family stability.” For some, this argument runs counter to the demand for affordable housing, but Carter dismisses such objections: “We’re conditioned to think, ‘Oh, let’s just build affordable housing for more poor people because that’s basically all we’re ever going to be.’ And it’s true if we make it true, but why does it have to be the only truth?”

Hold on to what you’ve got, part II: People. Carter’s book asks, “What if we designed low-status communities to encourage the talent born and raised there to remain, similar to the way companies try to retain their talent?” She admits that the phrase “gentrifying in place” hasn’t always gone over so well, but her experience in South Bronx and beyond confirms her belief that neighborhoods already have the brains and resources needed to nourish residents. “For communities, it means we’ve got this, everything we really need. We really do,” Carter explains. Nurturing talent starts early. She reflects on how her first grade teacher spotted her abilities: “Ms. Transport was probably the first person who told me outright that my creativity was something that I should just accept and share, which was really beautiful.”

Dare to think differently. Carter is one of those people who refuse to accept reality the way she’s been told it exists. “When somebody tells me things have to be one way,” she says, “I’m going to think about other ways of doing it, and I’m going to ask why.” As a loner in her formative years, she says, she spent a lot of time observing. “It was just like, ‘Well, why not this?’” she recalls. The instinct didn’t necessarily endear to the philanthropic community. On one hand, after establishing Sustainable South Bronx in 2001, she won numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. On the other, some funders and philanthropists didn’t appreciate her direct style. In her words, “I was just like, ‘I am not their girl,’ and so there’s no reason for me not to just speak my truth.”

Learn from business (and not from nonprofits). Carter remains disillusioned with what she calls the nonprofit industrial complex. “It has been inflicting unnecessary collateral damage on our communities for decades,” she maintains, “entrenched in a sad cycle of diminishing returns despite ever-increasing spending. The culture addresses symptoms without offering, let alone implementing, a cure.”

Rather than collaborating, nonprofits act like they’re in competition with each other, and the philanthropic sector doesn’t really respect the work being done on the ground, and as a result a “plantation mentality” predominates. Her prescription: “Philanthropy should be the risk capital. Instead of letting predatory speculators buy our property, there needs to be patient capital to allow those communities to flourish.” Her shift from running a nonprofit to running a business reflects a belief that the latter is the lever for real change.

Increase density and diversity. Carter has always been a builder. As a child, she took private creative writing lessons with a friend of the family. The only story she remembers from that era featured a runt whale named Willie. The other whales bully him, but then Willie and his parents build a kind of underwater playground—“a nice place for everybody to hang out and be happy together,” she recalls.

The qualities that support an underwater ecosystem can do the same for an urban neighborhood. Dense, diverse communities foster dynamic relationships full of promise and possibility. The goal, she says, is a “circular economy,” where the same dollar will circulate up to 14 times within the community, rather than being siphoned off by a chain store. The Majora Carter Group pushes for greater housing density allowances for new development, including space for early education.

Carter took an unconventional path to the real estate business, and while she admits her lack of formal training led to mistakes along the way, the fact that she’s doing it proves it can be done. “I hope others see what I’m doing,” she says, “and try their hand at being the developers of their own communities.”

In truth, John Ireland was a Liverpool-born union organizer who worked alongside CĂ©sar ChĂĄvez and Dolores Huerta for the rights of grape pickers in California. His wife, Barbara Ireland, had a housecleaning business and sold clothes that she sewed herself; eventually she became a nurse and founded a fundraising walk in honor of a friend who died of breast cancer.

When the kindergartener finally blurted out that her dad worked for labor unions, the news was greeted with a collective shrug. “It was so boring,” she laughs. “They didn’t get it.”

Ireland went on to become a world-famous fashion model, gracing the covers of Vogue, Cosmopolitan and, most famously, Sports Illustrated, and she followed that act with an even more impressive executive encore. As CEO of kathy ireland Worldwide (kiWW)—listed as the 15th most powerful brand in the world by License Global, the highest ranking ever for a woman-owned company—she oversees an extensive array of products including fashion for women, men and children; intimate apparel; accessories; fine jewelry; weddings and resorts as well as publishing, film, television, music, artist and athlete management. Alongside these ventures, she is a consistent advocate for human rights and religious freedom, with philanthropic commitments including the war on sex trafficking, improved access to medical care, recovery from addiction for men, women and children, and honoring America’s brave military members and their families.

Married 33 years and a new grandmother, Ireland recently caught Early Learning Nation’s attention on social media because of her enthusiastic participation in the #ClearTheList campaign, helping teachers obtain school supplies. “We’re sending thousands of products into schools,” she says. “Some of them are from our own collections; others we’re purchasing.”

For Ireland, the campaign was an obvious way to express herself philanthropically. “Teaching, like nursing, is one of the most underappreciated life commitments anyone could possibly make,” she says. “They are already overworked. Why should they spend their own money on school supplies, when they need it for their own families?” She credits singers Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.—a married couple who first got together while in the group the Fifth Dimension—with bringing the campaign to her attention. (Ireland’s new label, EE1, put out their latest album, Blackbird: Lennon-McCartney Icons, which hit No. 1 on the album charts)

Here are Ireland’s 5 top tips for leaving the world a better place than how you found it.

1. Figure out what your gifts are. “I encourage people to really figure out their strengths and to focus on what makes them thrive,” she says. “Even if it’s pulling your mask down to give a smile.” Ireland celebrates acts of kindness that give children hope and encouragement. “We can all do our part to remove fear.”

When it comes to parenting, she says, “I can’t think of anything harder or more important than raising children. Being a mom, being a dad, does not get the type of respect that it deserves because there’s no paycheck attached. I often think of the Loretta Lynn song, ‘One’s On the Way.’”

2. Know your priorities. Nobody can do everything. Ireland notes that many parents today are caring for aging relatives, often on top of professional responsibilities. “I was 40 before I learned that ‘No,’ is a complete sentence,” she admits. “My personal priorities are my faith, my family and being of service through my work. When I don’t honor that, I’m a disaster, not effective. I’m not as well equipped to deal with whatever’s going to hit me throughout the day.”

3. Get acquainted with the gift of rejection. “When I was four,” Ireland recounts, “my very first job was a combination of business and design that was a solid indicator of what my life’s work would be. I sold painted rocks with my sister, from my wagon, door to door.” Not everybody bought a rock, even after she slashed prices. Later, she had a paper route and encountered more rejection. Despite her success in modeling, she also remembers all the magazine covers she didn’t get, but the sense stayed with her that she could still believe in herself and persist in spite of rejection.

4. Use your voice. This piece of advice was the hardest for Ireland herself—someone whose former job description was, in her words, “shut up and pose”—to follow. “It took many years for me to come out of that shy and selfish shell,” she admits. “Now I recognize that there are needs and opportunities so much greater than me. If sharing what we’ve been through can benefit someone else—our struggles or failures, successes, all of it—I recognize… I recognize that comfort is irrelevant. There’s a lot of work to be done.”

5. Stand up for the vulnerable. When kiWW launched 28 years ago, the first product off the assembly line was a pair of socks. Surprise factory inspections were always a part of the manufacturing process. “You can have a beautiful product,” she says, “but how does it come to market? Anybody can clean up if they know you’re coming. That commitment continues to this day,” and it stems directly from her father’s devotion to workers’ rights. Ireland recalls him fighting to get outhouses placed in the field so farm workers could relieve themselves with dignity. He also campaigned to equip the workers with long hoes, which were easier on their backs, even though the owners wanted them to work with short hoes, which supposedly helped the profit margins.

Ireland wasn’t born wealthy, but her entrepreneurial instincts have served her well over the years, and she is now the name that other models regularly invoke when they envision their post-fashion careers. She never forgets her father’s insistence on appreciating what they had. “We used to take trips across the border, and Dad would always point out the housing conditions of the people who lived there, houses literally made out of cardboard,” she says.

If her father’s example of gratitude has stayed with her, it’s her granddaughter, Daisy, who helps her stay grounded today. “No matter what’s going on in your day,” Ireland says, “when you look in Daisy’s eyes and she gives you that big smile, it’s like, ‘What? What was I bothered by?’”

The “stuff” Mitchell’s referring to encompasses a journey from illiteracy to authorship, from poverty to stability and from fame on the sports field to nonprofit leadership.

Mitchell played just one season as wide receiver with the New England Patriots, but what a season it was, culminating in a Super Bowl victory in February 2017. After the game, in which he caught five passes in the fourth quarter, , “Everybody had confidence to have Malcolm in those spots if he got it. He proved everybody right because he came up with the plays.”

A knee injury ended Mitchell’s football career, but unlike many athletes who get lost without a ball in their hands, he threw himself into a cause close to his heart. He had struggled to read as a child and profoundly understood how severely limited life’s options can be if you can’t read. As a student-athlete at University of Georgia he had started Read with Malcolm LLC in order to publish his own children’s books, and soon after retirement he built upon this platform with a new nonprofit, the Share the Magic Foundation. The Atlanta-based organization promotes reading and diverse representation, partnering with Raising A Reader and other nonprofits and corporate sponsors to promote literacy and to get books into the hands of children who need them.

Mitchell offers these five tips for teachers, parents and advocates who want to make a difference.

1. Start Them Young

What keeps Mitchell up at night? “The idea that ČčČÔČâŽÇČÔ±đ’s potential is capped based on a start they never asked for.” The start matters. Mitchell’s life story reinforces this philosophy with poignancy and punch. His single mother worked at a call center for several years before going back to school for her master’s degree. They moved frequently, as more affordable duplexes became available in assorted small cities in northern Florida. Violence was a near-constant background presence, along with other hazards of growing up poor. “We were so proud my sister graduated from high school without a child,” he says. “That was a glorious achievement, though we didn’t celebrate it out loud.”

As a writer twice named Children’s Author of the Year by the Georgia Writers Association and as a father of a 1 1/2-year-old son, Mitchell recognizes the importance of building an early relationship with books. Similarly, he’s glad his son is growing up around guitars, even if he’s not playing them. “Just introducing things at an early age is my biggest focus,” says Mitchell. “We’ll worry about the details later.”

2. Find Someone Who Believes in You

For Mitchell, those people include his mother, his grandmother and his high school football coach. “When I was in fourth grade,” he recalls, “my mom taught me Psalm 23, ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I will fear no evil for God is with me.’ And then she looked at me said, ‘You’ll do great things in life. I believe in you.’”

He describes his grandmother, who raised seven children, as “impeccable, hard-nosed and tough. She was sweet to her grandkids, but she applied a tremendous amount of pressure on her kids. I think that old saying, ‘Pressure either busts pipes or makes diamonds,’ is true.”

Mitchell credits Valdosta Wildcats coach Rance Gillespie for sitting him down and talking to him about how best to take advantage of the opportunities that colleges were offering him. “Not only was he a great coach who made me a better football player,” Mitchell explains. “He was a mentor for all of us. He was the guidance counselor and the administrative assistant. For a lot of us who grew up in that community, we didn’t have fathers either, so he was instilling some intangibles that we could use off the field. Responsibility, accountability, hard work, determination, relentlessness, the will to never quit.”

3. Share the Magic

The name of Mitchell’s nonprofit is also its credo. Again, his mother’s example drives him: “I’ve watched my mom her entire life, even through her financial challenges, sacrifice herself for the well-being of others.” He views it as his duty to ensure others have what they need to get ahead—especially kids who, like he did, are growing up with single moms. “How can I willingly and knowingly letting someone else suffer when they don’t have to?” he asks.

His answer lies in writing children’s books that inspire generosity and good deeds, running the organization and joining forces with others in the service. He takes inspiration from another football great, Warrick Dunn, whose campaign provides down payment assistance, furnishings and more to single-parent families. Though they’ve never met, Mitchell says, “The idea that there’s someone out there that’s supporting women like my mother is extraordinary.”

4. Be Present

If you want to help your community, Mitchell advises, you can’t phone it in. You have to be there in person. Attendance counts, whether you’ve got a Super Bowl ring on your finger or you’re just an ordinary human being with something to offer. Showing up will help you to find your voice and to determine where it fits and how it can be deployed for the greatest impact. “People forget the most important rule of leadership,” he says. “You have to lead people who want to be led.”

5. Know Your Stuff

Mitchell believes in learning all about a subject before speaking about it—and then sticking to your areas of expertise. “I know books and literacy rates,” he says. “It’s rare to hear me talk about anything else.” (When I try to lure him to opine on social media contributing to the spread of uninformed opinions about things like vaccination or climate change, he responds deftly, as if eluding a cornerback: “That’s something I can’t talk much about, because I don’t know.”)

As someone who has experienced poverty and who has researched the subject, Mitchell stands on solid ground when he describes the vicious circle of poverty and illiteracy. When he was young, he says, “Academic achievement wasn’t the highest priority. The highest priority was survival. So why wasn’t I reader or why aren’t many young African American boys reading? Because it hasn’t been introduced in a way that forces it to be a priority over daily survival.”

The five tips here might be further boiled down to the lesson of Mitchell’s 2020 book My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World: “Sometimes the best stories can be found inside ourselves.”

Food is powerful. Food can trigger memories. It can bring families close together and it can help us connect to other cultures. That, in a nutshell (or a filo puff), is the story of Krieger’s decades-long crusade to help America learn to love healthy food. “Food can open doors to relationships and to understanding people better,” says the registered dietitian and nutritionist, best-selling cookbook author and host of public television’s . “It is a very natural portal to community.”

When Krieger talks nutrition, she often encounters deeply rooted food anxieties, some of which she has experienced firsthand, but her resolute faith in vegetables—coupled with a refreshing lack of judgment—helps families to discover healthy meals together.

Here are her five tips for parents and caregivers looking to achieve or restore food sanity:

1. Erase the idea of a children’s menu. Krieger understands that different people have different taste preferences. “We’re born with likes and dislikes,” she acknowledges, “but a lot of it has to do with exposure.” Parents often reflect on their own histories with food and jump to conclusions about what their children will enjoy. One conclusion to avoid is labeling certain dishes as appropriate or inappropriate for the little ones.

“If I could,” she says, “I would take an eraser and erase the children’s option off every restaurant menu. We really have invented this ‘kid food’ thing. Historically, and if you look at different cultures around the world, kids are eating what the rest of the family is eating.” She adds that the children’s dishes might be slightly less seasoned or a softer texture, depending on their age. (Also, for the record, she has nothing against chicken fingers.)

2. Don’t give up on picky eaters. The home version of the children’s menu is the nightly plate of plain noodles with butter. How do you introduce variety? Krieger recommends remembering what it’s like to be two years old: “When you’re that age,” she says, “You don’t really have much control over your life. Imagine if someone could pick you up and move you. But they cannot force you to swallow something, so that is one thing that you can control.”

Don’t fall into the trap of begging or tricking children into eating a dish they’re refusing; that just fuels the power struggle. Krieger’s daughter, now a college student, has always disliked chicken, and when she used to refuse any of the many chicken dishes Krieger cooked, she was allowed to eat whatever else was on the table or, at most, Krieger would open up a can of chickpeas to accommodate her. Her daughter still doesn’t like chicken, but along the way she has developed an appetite for diverse flavors.

“Try looking at taste as something that is dynamic, not set in stone,” Krieger advises. “They might not like mushrooms or asparagus the first time, but then they might like it the fifth time. There’s research that shows it takes up to 12 exposures.”

3. Visit the farmer’s market. The produce section of the grocery store can be full of wonders, but there’s something magical about the local farmer’s market, where the growers are often right there displaying the products of their labor. Krieger goes weekly. “I have a conversation with my farmer and find out what’s there, what’s coming up, what he’s growing now.”

Her favorite farmer’s market remained open—with precautions—throughout the pandemic, and she calls it “one of my tethers of happiness.” And here’s where Krieger reveals a truth that might be unsurprising but nonetheless caught me off guard: “I often think of myself as a vegetable marketer,” she says. “It might appear like I’m talking about a fabulous, easy-to-make recipe, but secretly I’m doing it as a way to get people to eat vegetables.”

4. Entertain—without wearing yourself out. Krieger’s demeanor on TV is upbeat and confident, but she confesses that, like many driven people, it’s “sort of that duck thing, that the duck is just gliding along the water, but underneath they’re paddling like crazy. So there’s definitely a part of me that feels not always calm and not always soothed but actually sort of harried and sometimes insecure about everything.”

She’s learning to balance her ambitions and her need to unwind. When it comes to having company over, she tries to go easy on herself. “If you’re feeling stressed, like you’re having to do a million last-minute items, then you’re not going to be able to really engage with guests in the way that you’re hoping to.” Her suggestion: laying out the fixings for a home “taco night” or grain bowl, which can be sorted ahead of time. It’s festive and fun and healthy and has the added advantage of letting people assemble their own dishes according to dietary preferences or food allergies.

5. Organize a food festival in your community. Asked about how she chose to study nutrition in college and graduate school, Krieger initially makes it sound simple: “I always just loved eating.” But when she adds, “And in my family, food was love, and I was very well loved,” she acknowledges early struggles to with overeating, undereating and disordered eating. “I found a place where I could love food in a healthy way.”

By the time she had a family of her own, she wanted to share what she’d learned—not just on TV but in her neighborhood. She started a wellness committee in her daughter’s public school, recruiting some other parents to join her. “One of our initiatives was a tasting experience for the kids in the lunchroom. We roasted cauliflower and served it before the school lunch.” More than bestselling cookbooks or hosting a popular series, she seems especially proud that, years later, one of the participants approached her on the street to thank her for the cauliflower.

Krieger’s approachability onscreen and off spills over into her vibrant online presence. On and , she solicits cooking suggestions and perspectives, which she then incorporates into her show and books. “I’m always learning from people,” she says. “I try to approach every single day and every moment as a learner.”

“Our philosophy of change,” Saujani explains, “is that if you can teach the hardest-to-reach girls, the students that everybody has counted out, you can teach anybody.”

There was no WiFi at the camp, so Saujani and her team were trying to teach refugee girls the fundamentals of computer science through dance. Religious structures forbidding dance threatened to block off this methodology, but then Saujani noticed the girls closing the blinds. “And they just started dancing like I have never seen. In that moment, they were just free,” she recalls.

Schaumburg, Illinois, in 1987, was an unlikely place and time to launch a social movement. Homogeneity defined the decade and the Chicago suburbs where I grew up.

Saujani, the daughter of Indian refugees from Uganda, had other plans. At 12 years old, she started an after-school club called Prejudice Reduction Interested Students Movement—PRISM for short—and led a march to reduce racism in the school and the community. “Growing up brown in a white town had a profound effect on me,” she recalls. “I was so mad that my parents named me Reshma. Nobody could pronounce it. I would think, ‘Why didn’t you name me Rebecca or Rachel or something that would be on one of the little key chains at Kmart?’”

Her classmates teased and bullied her, and xenophobic vandals targeted her house. “I remember just watching my dad quietly wiping off the words with Clorox. He seemed to regard such ordeals as social tax to being in this country. And I very much remember looking at him thinking, I will never be like that.”

Looking back, she sees these experiences as a gift, “because they really helped me find my voice, and it galvanized my passion for fighting for racial equality, racial justice and the underdog.” Her father’s quiet tolerance in the face of having his home vandalized may have disappointed her, but he also inspired her through books. She remembers him reading aloud from “these little Reader’s Digest books that were about Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi and other change makers. I was just inspired by those stories. Since I was a little girl, I felt very much like that was my dharma. That is what I was put on this earth to do, to make a difference.”

The passion to build and sustain Girls Who Code started with a vision. “Girls are changemakers,” insists Saujani. “Girls will heal us, save us and lead us. If they’re going to solve COVID, cancer and climate, they’re going to need technology and coding in their arsenal.”

Saujani describes nearly 10 years of organizational growth as the story of discovering girls who hear about the vision and say, “Yes, that’s me,” as well as parents who say, “Yes, I want to support my daughter with that” and teachers who say, “Yes, I have this student who is in the library all day long, and she would be great for that movement.” Under the leadership of CEO Dr. Tarika Barrett, the organization reaches students all over the world through clubs, immersion programs and remote learning.

Girls Who Code, Saujani often notes, is about more than expanding the female workforce in the technology sector. Since technology is changing every industry, these girls are destined to leave an impact on education, government, the arts, business—you name it.

During the global pandemic, the same determination and entrepreneurial spirit that ignited the creation of Girls Who Code, also took Saujani in a new direction “Droves of moms were being forced to leave the workforce because schools were closed,” she recalls, “or they were in jobs that weren’t pandemic-proof. Moms were really asked to be these perfect martyrs and not to complain and to just do everything.” Moms, especially moms of color, suffered disproportionately during the pandemic.

Saujani decided the time was ripe for a new movement. calls for U.S. mothers to be adequately compensated for their unseen labor. She says it’s about calling attention to longstanding assumptions—and daring to imagine alternatives to treating mothers as America’s social safety net—as much as it is about passing legislation.

and Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tammy Duckworth, the Marshall Plan for Moms has gained endorsements from a wide range of national leaders. “The problem has been simmering beneath the surface for a long time, but we’re at the point where we require bold and decisive action,” stated Kimberly Churches, CEO of the American Association of University Women.

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director and CEO of MomsRising, said, “This resolution should be a blueprint for lawmakers working to help moms, families and our country recover.” Celebrities and activists including Julianne Moore, Amy Schumer and Gabrielle Union have signed on to the plan.

“The big revelation that I’ve had after this past year,” Saujani says, “is that you can’t get gender justice in the workplace, unless you have gender justice at home.” After decades of feminism, she notes, the majority of housework is still done by mothers. It’s still deeply American to believe that’s just the way it is.

Saujani says Girls Who Code and Marshall Plan for Moms were both conceived as movements. “In both cases,” she says, “there’s a bigger vision to galvanize people and get them to be a part of it.” Like many women leaders, Saujani has found that sharing personal stories is a way of inspiring others and mobilizing action. “I’ve had lots of life challenges,” she says. “I probably talk to a woman who’s struggling with infertility, every day. The ability to help heal other people by discussing your own pain can be really powerful.”

Eustis has spent his career chasing that feeling and similarly electrifying, unforgettable moments for theater audiences. Since 2005, he has been Artistic Director at New York’s Public Theater, one of the nation’s first nonprofit theaters, bringing groundbreaking and thought-provoking productions onstage. For example:

• Addressing the AIDS crisis in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes in 1991
• Casting BIPOC actors in the Founding Father roles in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical in 2015
• Casting hundreds of New Yorkers from the five boroughs alongside professional actors in the annual pageant from 2012 to the present

And then it ends up making so much sense it seems inevitable. In the process, it changes our ideas about theater—and America.

The writer and activist Stevie Walker-Webb says, “Oskar is a storyteller
. He wields words like a warrior swings a scythe, and weaves stories like an artisan stitches together a complex quilt. He does this in service of the world he’s building, one of equality, opportunity and access. Oskar is a space-maker where others might gate-keep; he’s a wedge in the door of exclusion. He will champion the work of an unknown playwright and director because he believes in the progress and challenge new perspectives bring, and in the midst of his busyness can pause to advocate for a wrongfully incarcerated person’s rights. I call him my story guru, but beyond all of this, he’s simply my friend.”

(Stevie Walker-Webb. Remember that name. Eustis says he has “a combination of artistic and spiritual vision that makes him very rare.”)

Laurie Woolery, director of Public Works, says, “Oskar passionately believes that the arts are an essential part of everyone’s lives. He is a rare leader who places community central to the Public’s core artistic programming, and that investment of time, attention, resources and love has had a ripple effect not only to our program but has deepened the relationships we have with our community. Public Works is the beautiful manifestation of Oskar’s belief in full bloom.”

Discovering Bohemia

Not long after his West Side Story epiphany, 6-year-old Oskar developed a crush on a girl from Texas named Kris Sheldon. (If you’re reading this, Kris
), and a thought occurred to him that shows he already understood that life is short but art is long: “Even if I become really famous and somebody writes my biography, they’re not going to write about Kris Sheldon. They’re not going to know. The only way that, that’s going to be important is if I make a work of art out of it.”

Given this atypical sixth-grade sentiment, it isn’t all that surprising that a 15-year-old Eustis, having graduated high school early, bypassed college and made his way to New York City. Living the artistic life in Soho was, he points out, a million times more affordable than it is today. The scene in the 1970s, he admits, was “self-involved, but it succeeded in doing the most important thing about a Bohemia, which is allowing people to secede from the dominant culture and have a space where they could try some new things.” Furthermore, the open-armed acceptance of the bohemian life was incredibly important to a teen he describes as “too loud and too impulsive—and boy, did I cry too easily.” Looking back on these years, he’s come to see both “a runaway kid who climbs the ladder and ultimately turns his life into a success story” and simultaneously “the cisgender, white, straight male son of university professors, riding on a sea of privilege.”

Bohemia may seem like a quaint and outdated concept, but for Eustis, “that impulse to just not be part of the dominant culture is terribly important. I hope both New York and the rest of the country find ways to nurture that and provide those spaces of freedom and alternative thinking because the whole culture benefits from it.” These creative exchanges happen best in real time, in real life. “We’re suffering terribly from the internet having replaced real communities,” he says.

The Stage Is All the World

The Public Theater develops deep partnerships with nonprofit organizations all over New York City through its Public Works program, which engages with these community groups over the long haul. It nurtures and provides classes to communities, invites them to attend performances and to join in the creation of ambitious works of participatory theater alongside professional actors.

The model has started to catch on. London’s National Theater has now based a program on Public Works, and seven affiliate theaters across the country have joined the movement that combines a social justice mission with what he calls “a spiritual mission about how we treat each other.”

The hour-long documentary Under the Greenwood Tree chronicles a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the joy it brings to the entire cast as well as the audience.

The most famous line of the play, “All the world’s a stage,” is effectively reversed by the creation of an onstage world that looks and feels more like our world than most theatrical productions would dare.

Lear deBessonet, now Artistic Director with City Center, founded Public Works, a program of the Public Theater, in 2013. “Lear said it was based on the divine spark in every human soul,” he notes. “That brought chills the first time she said it.”

Public Works constantly surprises Eustis. “Knowing that participating in theater was good for you, I was fairly confident that it would be a positive experience for everybody involved. What I had no idea of is that it would result in the best art I’ve seen in theater. There is something that has proven aesthetically explosive.”

Empathy and Democracy

During this long and unwelcome pandemic pause from live performance, Eustis has had time to reflect on high points and the low points. Not surprisingly, he is eager to raise the curtain on the post-pandemic era: “This could be a time where the theater can really reach deeper into communities and more varied communities,” he says.

Eustis has hopes for a golden age of theater in general and the Public in particular. “We are providing something that people desperately need,” he says, “and I think people are going to be ready to hear the message that we have to bring.” That message, he continues, extends beyond the plot unspooling onstage. It has to do with what happens when people laugh and cry together, and it transforms the audience from a bunch of isolated consumers into a collective body. “Our core identity isn’t private,” he asserts. “It’s social. Gathering strangers together to go through meaningful collective experiences is the thing we’ve been missing for the last year.”

Eustis prefers to turn the storytelling over to the people whose stories haven’t yet been heard and let them be the center of the story. In his words, “We say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s take those feelings seriously and elevate them.’ “

Theater asks actors and audiences alike to put ourselves in somebody’s shoes. For Eustis, “To imagine that you’re somebody different, to project your feelings onto somebody else and to understand how they might feel”—otherwise known as empathy—is the core of both theater and democracy.

By elevating it and ennobling both the language and the people who spoke it, he envisioned them as heroes. Like Shakespeare, he tells the story of his country to his country. Shakespeare emphasized a set of values that defined what it meant to be English. And Lin-Manuel is defining what it means to be an American.”