Deborah De Santis: Keeping Families Together Matters. Many of our public systems have embraced supportive housing for their highest need populations. And now child welfare agencies are poised to incorporate supportive housing into the range of services they offer to families in need as well. As we end National Child Abuse Prevention Month, I want to turn a spotlight on the very vulnerable families in our communities, and think about how supportive housing can make a difference for the children who are a part of them. We've learned that there is a subset of families in which parents face deep-rooted, intractable challenges like extreme poverty, homelessness, behavioral health issues and social isolation.
Regardless of their intentions, those parents cannot provide a stable home for their children if those issues are unaddressed. The result? Our child protective system must choose between two terrible options: removing children from their home or allow them to remain living in an unstable environment. Pairing social service with housing saves money, improves lives - CommonWealth Magazine. April 30, 2012 It is a rare and precious thing in government when “doing good deeds” coincides with sound fiscal responsibility and actually saves money. Just in the last few weeks Beacon Hill legislators unanimously approved and Gov. Deval Patrick signed a bill that will help the Commonwealth’s most vulnerable populations meet their housing needs and avoid moving to places where the care they need is even more expensive.
Massachusetts’ elected leaders have long recognized that we are at a crossroads concerning the availability of housing options to meet the specific needs of low-income elders, the homeless, and people with disabilities. The numbers of those individuals experiencing distress in finding appropriate housing have grown significantly in recent years. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, nearly two-thirds of Massachusetts renters pay an excessive rent burden – defined as needing to pay over one-third of their income on housing costs. Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works. I remember fondly the days when we were all tickled pink by our elected officials’ struggle to understand how the internet works. Whether it was George W. Bush referring to “the internets” or Senator Ted Stevens describing said internets as “a series of tubes,” we would sit back and chortle at our well-meaning but horribly uninformed representatives, confident that the right people would eventually steer them back on course.
Well I have news for members of Congress: Those days are over. • See also: What Are Our Free Speech Fail-safes If SOPA Passes? We get it. Some background: Since its introduction, SOPA and its Senate twin PROTECT-IP have been staunchly condemned by countless engineers, technologists and lawyers intimately familiar with the inner functioning of the internet. The only problem: Key members of the House Judiciary Committee still don’t understand how the internet works, and worse yet, it’s not clear whether they even want to. When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works.
Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works Dec 19, 2011 Clay Johnson This weekend I read a post titled "Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works. " The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it's not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are "not nerds" is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can't tell a server from a waiter. And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue. But the problem is that that post won't do any good. Few if any members of Congress will read it, and those that might certainly won't read it and decide that it's time for them to brush up on understanding how the Internet works as well as a professional that works on the Internet. The fact is, Congress isn't the only group in this equation that needs to get a clue.
Five Questions for Elizabeth Boris. Elizabeth Boris, coauthor of “Human Service Nonprofits and Government Collaboration: Findings from the 2010 National Survey of Nonprofit Government Contracting and Grants,” answers five questions about flaws in government contracting with human service nonprofits—and how these problems have intensified the recession’s toll on those organizations. November 5, 2010 1. How significant are government contracts and grants with human service nonprofits? In 2009, human service nonprofits held roughly 200,000 government contracts and grants totaling more than $100 billion.
Nearly 33,000 human service nonprofits contracted with local, state, and federal governments—and for 60 percent of them, government contracts were the single largest source of revenue. So it’s a big chunk of money that quite a few organizations depend on. For this study, a collaboration with the National Council of Nonprofits, we looked only at a sliver of the pie—specifically human service nonprofits, not all nonprofits. 2. 3. Tale_of_Two_Islands-AER.