Californians have less access to employer-sponsored retirement benefits than the rest of the nation. If something isn’t done to address retirement insecurity in California, a significant number of today’s workers are at risk for serious economic hardship in retirement.
San Diego has joined the urban agriculture movement. What started as a nonprofit group’s entanglement with bureaucracy while trying to plow a community garden in an impoverished neighborhood has ended with California’s second-largest city relaxing its rules on farmers’ markets and making it easier to grow crops and keep chickens and goats in residential areas.
Pension retirement plans once cushioned lower-income workers by pooling risk and requiring payments into a retirement plan. Today, both low-income and middle-income workers have a significant chance of retiring in poverty.
Brian Warth was behind the wheel in a drive-by shooting in 1992. At 16 years old, he was tried as an adult and spent 16 years in prison. He made the most of his life on the inside, taking college and trade classes and spending 10 years as a prison pastor. Today, he’s also advocating for the California Fair Sentencing for Youth Act, which would give prisoners who were sentenced as juveniles to life without parole a small chance of release.
The House of Peace opened a year ago and has 13 residents as well as four house coordinators who live together in a community. To be accepted into the home, residents who are formerly homeless have to volunteer five days a week for about 20 hours a week. Residents have to pass a drug test to show that they are not using, complete a background check that looks for sexually-related crimes and they agree to follow the house rules peacefully. When a room opens up, the residents vote on which applicants to accept into their community.
By Clare Noonan
On a beautiful winter Sunday, the street in front of Merced Lao Family Community Inc. was full of wondrous sound. Atonal yet haunting tunes were coming from the curved reeds of the qeej (pronounced “kang”) played by 25 boys and young men of Hmong ancestry.
The Alliance for California Traditional Arts, based in Fresno, thinks that practicing such traditions is a big part of community health – and they commissioned a study from UC Davis that suggests they are correct.
Every once in a while a report comes out that’s a game-changer, it makes you look at an issue in a different way . . . or at least it offers the opportunity to do so. Falling Behind: The Impact of the Great Recession and the Budget Crisis on California’s Women and their Families is such a report, released Wednesday by the California Budget Project (CBP), along with the study’s funder, the Women’s Foundation of California.
By Mary Flynn
The city of Richmond is attempting to pass a proposal that’s failed in big cities including New York City and Philadelphia – and if they succeed, their plan could encourage statewide changes in California.
Armed with mounting research linking social isolation to illness, technology firms are marketing electronic solutions aimed at older adults in senior living facilities with two goals: network them socially, and monitor their health continuously. This new electronic wave – loosely termed eCare – is speeding electronic adoption by older adults with a robust set of features that integrate social interaction with health monitoring.
Salinas is a small city with high rates of violence. Local leaders came together in 2009 to develop a comprehensive plan to save the lives lost from gang violence – and at the end of the process, found themselves without funds to put their plan into action. Now the city is pooling whatever resources they have to implement their violence-reduction strategies one neighborhood at a time.