Change city zoning laws to ban new construction of fossil fuel projects
In the coming months and years, cities will move to the forefront of the climate change movement. Portland, Oregon took a bold step in ...
Free copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in American hotels
On December 10, we commemorate Human Rights Day: the anniversary of the day in 1948 when the nation members of the United Nations ...
The Loyal Opposition in America should form a Shadow Cabinet
In the United Kingdom, major political parties that are out of power in parliament aren’t entirely erased out of the ...
“Safe days” for domestic violence survivors
Abuse from one’s partner takes a terrible toll on victims — physically, emotionally, and socially. Domestic violence, which ...
Build more Green Walls: Get cities to plant a crazy number of trees
Verdant greenery captures more than the eye and enhance more than the beautiful scenery around town. Trees are also good for public ...
Sue the big banks to make them pay for the foreclosure crisis
Nearly a decade later, major banking institutions have recovered from the Great Recession they helped precipitate but many communities ...
Build up your savings—and get a chance to win a lottery jackpot
Economists and anti-poverty advocates have long warned that playing the lottery can be a money trap for low-income Americans, given the ...
Another path to owning your own home and building wealth: community land trusts
For many families, owning their own home is still a pillar of the American Dream. Thanks to a new model for affordable homeownership, ...
Pool housing funds from different agencies to build more affordable housing
Like so many other metropolitan areas across the country, Chicago long faced a thorny dilemma: how best to ensure affordable housing ...
Law clinics for green-collar worker-run businesses
The Green-Collar Communities Clinic (CG3) is the first and only law school clinic of its kind in the country: free legal, business, and ...
Create LGBTQ units inside police departments
It’s dangerous to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer in America. As numerous statistics warn us, LGBTQ people in ...
Win a prize for simply applying to college
The barriers facing low-income young people with dreams of college aren’t limited to family money troubles, little encouragement ...
How to make dark alleys safer: invite everyone in by throwing parties
“If you treat it as a place where nobody goes, then you’re inviting illicit activity and you’re inviting people not to respect ...
Charge extractive industries a severance fee for the damage they leave behind
Extractive companies come and go, but the damage stays. When local communities welcome oil, gas, and mining business interests into ...
A new intergenerational movement to bring the young and the aging together
Today’s youngest will grow up experiencing a new phenomenon in human history: being alive at the same time as four to five ...
Hawaii’s novel way of selecting judges
In our idealized view of the American legal system, judges are supposed to be dispassionate arbiters of the law who are freed to focus ...
Raise wages by banning employers from asking salary history
Due to the declining power of ordinary workers against powerful employers in general, unfairly low compensation is the unfortunate ...
Why doctors should prescribe legal aid for their patients
Ask doctors who’ve practiced in underserved communities and they can testify that what happens to their patients can hinge on the ...
Hire dogs to help struggling students and promote learning
The power of a friendly dog to comfort traumatized people is already well-known, if not to pet owners, then to those who’ve heard ...
To help homeless panhandlers, let them be city workers for the day
While many other cities are moving to ban panhandling by homeless people or push them further out to the outskirts, the city of ...
These moveable “pop up” preschools for underserved communities are a hit
High-quality preschool helps ensure that young children are ready to learn, academically and socially, on the first day of ...
For a healthier climate and community, cities should stop requiring so much parking
In order to combat climate change, we need to encourage people to use to mass transit rather than driving individual vehicles that run ...
To curb human trafficking, clean up the foreign labor recruitment process
This summer, a new law went into effect in California that protects international workers from human trafficking and abuse by ...
Smart ways for shelters for homeless dogs and cats to achieve “no kill”
Not all homes deserve a dog or cat, but all dogs and cats deserve a loving home. Unfortunately, with nearly 3 million homeless ...
Open food pantries inside local schools
When children come to school hungry because their family can’t afford food, they struggle to learn and concentrate in class. ...
Give all new renters a voter registration form when they move in
Being a voter just got a bit easier in the city of Minneapolis. In March, a new local ordinance went into effect that requires ...
In a country of second chances, college for ex-prisoners returning to society
America aspires to be a country of second chances. In terms of the numbers, most incarcerated people do eventually return to society on ...
How one city made its domestic violence rate plummet
About a decade ago, the city of High Point found itself struggling with an alarmingly high rate of domestic violence—the worst in the ...
The Next Einstein Project: Easy steps to help first-generation college students fit in and finish
Even for the most talented and determined among them, young people who grew up in a disadvantaged family face enormous barriers to ...
Send more American students to study abroad
Given the increasing interdependence of nations and complexity of America’s role in an interconnected world, it’s more ...
Modernize Unemployment Insurance systems so you can keep benefits while launching a new business start-up
The rate of new business start-ups is in a long decline in the United States, raising concerns about this crucial source of job ...
Reward cleaner air with free public Wi-Fi Internet
In Amsterdam, a start-up is testing out a new air pollution monitoring device that triggers on to provide free and secure Internet ...
Require pharmaceutical companies to justify their price hikes
The level of profiteering and price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry can be downright scandalous, as former drug company CEO ...
The Next Einstein Project: How this low-income public high school graduates 100% of its Black students
Who will emerge as the next Albert Einsteins—uncommon genius to join the pantheon of humanity’s greatest theorists, scientists, ...
Electric car-sharing programs for impoverished neighborhoods
For Americans who aren’t rich, simply traveling to work, school, or the grocery store can be an expensive, time-consuming hassle. ...
Talk to an American Muslim over free donuts & coffee
After the recent surges in bigoted attacks on American Muslims, Mona Haydar and her husband Sebastian Robins responded in a ...
Big Pharma would hate this simple solution to curbing $3 billion wasted per year on expensive medicines
Did you know that the United States throws away $3 billion worth of perfectly good, unused cancer drugs annually—because they’re ...
Spread the Providence model to close the 30 million “words gap” for poorer children
By age 3, children in impoverished households already face a stunning disparity in their language development compared to children with ...
Seattle is rethinking policing by putting social workers on the daily beat
The city of Seattle is trying out an unconventional way of policing: team up social workers with police officers to walk the beat ...
The public option for banking: Create city banks for and by the public
In the United States, state and city governments rely on the same private sector banks used by individual consumers for ...
To bring fresh fruit and veggies to food deserts, turn old buses into mobile food markets
A promising program in Toronto, Canada is bringing fruits and veggies to impoverished communities in an unusual way: through a grocery ...
To break the cycle of violence, embed violence intervention teams in hospitals
Some hospitals are taking an unusual approach to stop the street violence that’s driving the same victims to cycle in and out ...
Require housing rentals to be free of toxic lead paint
The lead poisoning crisis isn’t just limited to Flint, Michigan. It’s a scourge across the country, causing irreparable ...
The right to know if global companies are profiting off human rights abuses in their supply chains
Modern day slavery, sex trafficking, and forced child labor aren’t just festering in the shadows in far-flung locales. These ...
Ban corporate “non-compete” agreements that trap low-wage workers
A newly emerging issue is on the radars of pro-worker advocates, corporate accountability watchdogs, and economists: the ...
Bring in the voters with food trucks and pop-up parties
Voting in elections is a civic duty of all Americans, but making it part of an enjoyable social experience could entice more voters to ...
Children are taking climate change to the courts
The judiciary is familiar battleground for veteran climate activists, but today, it’s kids who are pioneering a new strategy in ...
Build all new buildings with green roofs—with solar panels or rooftop gardens
The core idea behind “green roofs” is simple: use building rooftops to grow plants or generate clean energy with solar ...
Panama Papers: The Response
By now, chances are that readers of this website have heard of the Panama Papers. So let’s get right to the point: what should be ...
Why Norwegian parents send their kids to simulated refugee camps
For the refugees worldwide who’ve fled their home countries due to war and persecution, life in a refugee camp is often brutally ...
Urban Warriors: connecting combat veterans to teens in high-violence neighborhoods
A promising program in Chicago is bringing combat veterans and teenagers in high-violence neighborhoods together. The premise behind it ...
Barbershops that turn out Black men to vote
For men, the local barbershop can be the proverbial community water cooler where they let down their guard and ...
A different way to police: catch kids doing good and give “positive tickets”
Police officers typically show up in kids’ lives after they or someone they know get in trouble with the law. So it was no ...
Showers and bathrooms on bus wheels for the homeless
In San Francisco, decommissioned city buses are now bringing something to homeless people that everyone else often takes for granted: ...
The promise this inspiring teacher has been keeping to his students for four decades
Retired high school teacher Bruce Farrer turned an unusual writing assignment for his students into an unusual promise—and the 72-year ...
The unusual way Denmark reins in reckless corporate greed
It’s a common refrain: corporate executives in the U.S. are too short-sighted and myopic in their time horizon, controlled by the ...
Voting guides for citizens by citizens, Oregon-style
Could voting guides created for citizens by citizens encourage more people to participate in the electoral process and increase their ...
The cutest book club: children reading to orphaned dogs at animal shelters
A new idea is spreading to instill a love of reading in kids and help shelter animals find their forever families. The Humane Society ...
Put solar panels on our national highways
Here’s a simple but powerful idea to help accelerate the clean energy revolution: put solar panels on our roads. Why let all that ...
Train a new corps of activists on how to convert businesses into worker-owned cooperatives
Worker coops aren’t the standard way of running a business in America. That’s a big reason why they’re catching on. ...
Re-imagine public libraries—through exchanges with art museums
Our public libraries are more than just repositories of books and media. They are institutional anchors that make information ...
Shorten the work week and lengthen vacations—it’ll create jobs!
Spend fewer hours at work, use your paid days off, and take longer vacations — and at the same time, help put other Americans back to ...
Spread Project Fatherhood to more of America’s toughest communities
If you don’t have the experience of growing up with a father involved in your life, what do you draw on to be a good father and ...
Make everyone’s tax returns public
Whoa, what? You read that right: let’s put every American’s tax return in the online public domain—after anonymizing it to ...
Amazing things happen when we put preschools and nursing homes together
The Intergenerational Learning Center in Seattle is unlike any preschool or senior living facility that most Americans have seen, ...
Push American companies overseas to adopt a Code of Conduct for gender equality
For women around the world, discrimination and hardship based alone on their identity as women is a daily reality that’s ...
A big idea for better science: a Wikipedia for software code
Whether the field is physics, biology, or neuroscience, chances are that the scientific breakthroughs making headlines today ...
Calling all cities: commit to ending the cradle-to-prison pipeline
Seattle’s City Council recently passed a resolution that endorses the goal of zero-percent detention of youth and calls for ...
Law students + citizens barred from voting = organizing for democracy
Americans who’ve finished their time in prison should be able to fully rejoin society and undertake one of the most important ...
Make it impossible for a CEO to ignore the workers: put them on the corporate board
Current law requires all publicly traded companies to have a board of directors, which hold major responsibilities and powers over the ...
Clever but underused progressive tax ideas for urban inequality
Although much of the public debate on inequality focuses on national policies, there’s an impressive array of state and local ...
Bring Finland’s baby starter box to America
Here’s how we can help ensure that all children in America get a strong and equal start in life, no matter the wealth of the ...
50% discount for Arabs & Jews dining together
One family-style restaurant in Israel is inviting Arabs and Jews to eat together there—and offering them a 50% discount on creamy ...
Label Gas Pumps: “WARNING: Use of this fossil fuel contributes to climate change”
Gas pumps should come with warning labels, just like tobacco products. That’s the proposal under debate in the city of North ...
Buy factories that are closing and hand them to the workers
It’s already happening, workers are buying closing factories, so there are models to replicate. See New Era Windows for one ...
Buy Vacant Buildings Cooperatively
A group of neighbors in Minneapolis started the Northeast Investment Cooperative to pool money to buy vacant buildings and rent them to ...
Reverse Canvassing
Knock every door in transient communities (students, low-income, renters) to register and ID EVERY RESIDENT, not just known voters ...
Student Power Networks
Florida’s Dream Defenders, Ohio Student Association, and Virginia Student Power Network are three examples of an exciting new ...
Spread the Vermont universal healthcare model
National Economic Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) is partnering with groups in PA, ME, and MD to spread the VT universal healthcare ...