Staring into her son’s eyes in front of the U.S. Capitol, Jacklyn from Niagara Falls, New York explained why including support for child care in the reconciliation package is crucial for her family’s success. Jacklyn lives in a rural community where child care is highly inaccessible. The options are limited – there are more children who need spots than spots available in the child care programs. “Even if we could get a spot off the waitlists, there is no way we could afford it with its very high costs,” she said.
Archives: Voices
We’ll all need home care some day
My son JJ has cerebral palsy. He’s unable to speak or use his arms and legs. But he’s remarkable. He communicates by using his nose to type on a keyboard attached to his wheelchair. His mind is sharp, and he’s passionate about advocating for people with disabilities and their families. We live in Florida. We’ve been on the waiting list for in-home health care assistance since JJ was 3 years old. He’s now 18.
CHN’s COVID-19 Watch: Tracking Hardship, June 3, 2022
The our-nation-is-not-well edition. Omicron subvariants continue to surge throughout the country. The average number of new daily cases now exceeds 100,000 – a number we have not seen since February. Things could get worse. In California, two highly contagious subvariants that recently swept through South Africa have been detected. The newly discovered BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are more transmissible than the nation’s current dominant subvariants – BA.2 and BA.2.12.1.
200 members of Congress voted against baby formula. That’s an outrage.
My 8-month-old daughter, Jayde, was born with a growth restriction. She weighs just 13 pounds — no more than a 3-month-old. She sees a pediatric nutritionist and eats a specialized formula that provides 30 calories per ounce in hopes of getting her on the elusive growth curve. Jayde was crawling steadily towards this goal — until all of a sudden, we couldn’t find her formula anywhere. We spent hours scouring the internet, social media, and stores. As the national shortage took hold, none could be found.
White House forum explores growing youth mental health crisis
Eva Long’s mother was overseas when she got a call saying her daughter had committed suicide while away at college. “I was just in shock. I said, ‘This can’t be real. This can’t be true,'” Long said. “That cry of a mother when they’ve lost their child is a pretty wicked one, and I couldn’t stop it.”
How the American Rescue Plan created a more just America
The Biden Administration this week released a detailed report laying out not just how the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) helped the country recover from the coronavirus pandemic and the pandemic-related recession, but also took historic steps to promote racial and income equity.
Survivors, children’s advocates speak out about abuse in youth treatment settings
Alex was just 13 years old when he was transported at 4:23 a.m. to wilderness therapy, having no clue where he was going, or who was bringing him. The child believed he was kidnapped. At the simplest definition of the term, he was. Following the “abduction” as Alex calls it, he did not have access to a shower for 27 days. He was stripped of his basic human rights and humiliated: put into isolation for lashing out. He was a hurting child who needed love, instead, he got traumatized.
CHN’s COVID-19 Watch: Tracking Hardship, May 20, 2022
The million deaths edition. This week, the United States surpassed one million officially recorded deaths from COVID-19. So many people died from COVID-19 that a disease that didn’t even exist three years ago has become the third leading cause of death in this country, behind heart disease and cancer. This toll does not take into account so much additional pain and hardship – isolation, depression, job loss, homelessness, drug or alcohol addiction, millions of kids falling behind in school or dropping out altogether. The list goes on and on and on.
Disarm hatred.
At the Tops market in Buffalo, New York on May 14, people were doing ordinary things. Picking up groceries after visiting a husband in a nursing home; buying a birthday cake for a son. We don’t often think about the ordinary people around us, about how they enrich the life of our communities. But in that viciously cruel moment at the Tops market, ten important lives were ended – people whose days were filled with support for their families and communities.
White House: ‘High-speed internet service is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity’
Rook Bazinet, at just 18 years old, experienced homelessness for the first time while working as a partner at a Starbucks in Massachusetts. The recent high school graduate would arrive at all of his Starbucks shifts between two and three hours early and stay between two and three hours late to sit in the cafe, his only opportunity for reliable internet access. Rook is one of many Americans who experience unreliable internet connection, something which the Biden Administration has begun to tackle.
‘A new generation of housing advocates have been born out of this time.’ Here’s one.
In August of 2021, George Washington University law student Dylan Basescu, along with 50 or so other protesters, staged a sit-in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol protesting the end of the CDC’s moratorium on evictions. Four months later, he was evicted right in the midst of his law school finals. Dylan is among the new generation of housing advocates inspired by the growing inequality and housing crisis in this country.
New report: CTC payments helped lower reliance on risky financial services
For some time now, we’ve known about many of the ways expanded, monthly Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments helped families most in need. A new Brookings Institute report now informs us of other ways families with low incomes benefited. In short: they were less likely to pursue costly, alternative financial services such as payday loans, pawn shops, and even such measures as selling blood plasma in order to survive.