I met 16-year-old Faith Qin at the Innovations in Climate Resilience conference hosted by Battelle Memorial Institute. Among hundreds of scientists, researchers, and representative from organizations and companies focused on climate change resilience, Faith presented her work on oyster restoration and shoreline rehabilitation. Faith was Battelle’s Youth Climate Challenge award winner, besting hundreds of entries […]
Avery Kalafatas is on a mission. When her cousin died in 2020 from an accidental fentanyl overdose, Avery channeled her grief into action. She founded Project One Life (project1life.org), a non-profit dedicated to promoting education about the drug and reducing deaths by drug overdose and accidental fentanyl poisoning. Through her site, she recruits and trains […]
One in three kids in the United States suffers from obesity. Although our country likes to blame the people for their health situations, the truth is the environment we live in contributes mightily to our health. There are personal choices we can make to improve our health, but there are other factors we have less […]
So back in 2020, my son was 15 and we bumbled into online learning, along with all the other high school students across the country. At the time, I was working with the Job Corps program and helping try to connect all those Job Corps teenagers into online learning (not to mention support our teachers […]
We live in a country more polarized than ever before. Over the last five years, we’ve seen a sharp decline in our ability to talk about differing political opinions because this divide is so deep there seems to be no way to reach across it. People must be given rules regarding conversational subject matter before […]
I’ve never been super adventurous, myself, and I’ve never set any records. I did, however, hoola hoop in in my driveway for three hours one time. I’d been practicing each day to prepare myself to set the record. I figured my mother could throw me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to sustain me. That was […]
I live with a family of gamers. Board games, video games, D&D, Magic the Gathering – all of it. Although I was never into video games growing up (unless you count a frustrating addiction to “Space Invaders” played on a TI-99 – in case you were wondering how old I am), my husband always played […]
In my work with young adults in the Job Corps program, I’ve become well-aware of the disparities among our young people. While some are born into families with supportive, stable, loving parents, others aren’t so lucky. Those young adults not only have to work harder to obtain the opportunities they need to make a better […]
Dasia Taylor, a teenager in Iowa, likes beets. She may or may not like to eat them, but she likes to use them to save lives. When her high school chemistry teacher encouraged the students to enter a state-wide science fair, Dasia got to work on her beets. Now I usually just use beets to […]
When Marley Dias was an 11-year-old voracious reader, but she was disturbed that most of the books for her age group didn’t have main characters that looked like her. In fact, she thought most of them were about white boys and their dogs. Now, as much as I love a good Henry and Ribsy book, […]