Business and Community Partners

America’s massive governmental aid to Israel, which began in 1949, is, I believe, underappreciated. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 1949 to 2010, official aid totaled over $150 billion, with more than half comprising military grants. That amounts to about two-thirds of Israel’s current annual Gross Domestic Product. At present, Israel receives $2.8 b. yearly in US foreign aid, all of it military.

Right now, it would be just and logical if the direction of the aid were reversed. While America struggles with deficits, joblessness and weak economic growth, Israel’s October unemployment rate was five percent, lowest since 1978, and nearly four percent lower than America’s. But how could Israel possibly help America?

Why not bring “Silicon Wadi,” the nickname given to Israel’s hightech start-ups, derived from America’s Silicon Valley, to “Silicon City” − which is what New York City, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, aspires to become? Why not bring “start-up nation” to help create “start-up city”? Bloomberg made a stunning announcement at a December 19 press conference. “Thanks to this outstanding partnership and groundbreaking proposal from Cornell and the Technion,” Bloomberg declared, “New York City’s goal of becoming the global leader in technological innovation is now within sight.”

The partnership Bloomberg referred to was the creation of a new applied sciences and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens, to be called NYCTech Campus. Against all odds, and in the face of fierce competition, the Haifa Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Cornell University together had won a highly competitive bidding contest to build the campus, defeating such giants as Stanford University, the heart and brains of Silicon Valley.

“Of all the applications we received,” Bloomberg said, “Cornell and Technion’s was the boldest and most ambitious. In a word, this project will be transformative.”

Last March, led by Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, New York City called for bids to build a new graduate school of applied sciences. The City of New York would provide 11 acres of land and $100 m. for infrastructure. In return, the winner would create a two million square-foot science campus that would generate new technology, and start-ups and jobs based on it. Some 18 universities tossed their hats into the ring. Technion was specifically invited to participate.

Bloomberg, now in his third mayoral term, had a vision. He saw NYCTech Campus creating 600 spinoff companies and $23 b. in economic activity, generating $1.4 b. in added tax revenue along with 20,000 construction jobs and 8,000 permanent jobs. New York City badly needs those jobs, with 8.8 percent unemployment, well above the New York State’s overall 7.9 percent, and with Wall St. rapidly shedding workers.

Eventually NYCTech will have 2,500 students and 280 professors. It will offer a dual Technion-Cornell Master of Applied Science degree, ultimately boosting the number of full-time graduate engineering students in NYC by 70 percent. The new campus will not have old-fashioned faculties but rather “hubs,” built around three interdisciplinary areas: Connective Media, Healthier Life and the Built Environment.

How did Technion and Cornell win the project? Some serious cloakand- dagger was employed. Cornell and Technion leaders met secretly in March, in Beijing, and then in Manhattan, in July. The alliance was announced publicly only on October 18, 10 days before the deadline for submitting proposals.

From the start, there were major synergies between the two universities and between their presidents, Cornell’s David Skorton and Technion’s Peretz Lavie. Both Skorton and Lavie have medical backgrounds. Lavie is a world-famous expert in sleep disorders. Skorton, an electrical engineer, is an expert in medical imaging. Cornell brings deep financial resources, a top-10 engineering school, and a strong New York presence. Technion brings, in Lavie’s words, “our experience in educating generations of engineers who are also entrepreneurs and have changed the Israeli economy.” At his press conference, Bloomberg mentioned that Israel has 121 companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, more than all of Europe combined, half of them founded and/or led by Technion graduates.

On December 3, when the five competing teams presented their proposals to Bloomberg and his team, Technion-Cornell presented last. Skorton ended the presentation with a surprise. “We have a $350 m. gift,” he announced, to fund the project. The gift came from billionaire Cornell alumnus Charles Feeney, founder of Duty Free Shoppers.

Bloomberg is now completing his third and last term as NYC Mayor. He is America’s 12th wealthiest person, with a fortune estimated at $19.5 b. Most of his wealth came from the namesake company he founded, after being fired by investment bank Salomon Bros., to supply high-quality business information. He still owns 88 percent of its shares. Unlike most politicians, Bloomberg is eager to create visionary long-term programs like NYCTech whose fruits will ripen long after he leaves office.

IF NYCTech is transformative for New York, it is equally for Technion a game-changer, instantly changing it from an Israeli university to a global one. But there is a nagging question. If NYCTech is so positive for New York City – why in the world is it not equally appealing to create a similar new campus in Israel to remedy a growing shortage of electronics and software engineers?

If a new “start-up nation” campus is so attractive for the world’s greatest city, why not build a new one in Israel, too?

The writer is senior research fellow, at the S. Neaman Institute, Technion.

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Rahm's "College To Careers" speech @ U.S. Conference of Mayors - Lynn Sweet

2012-01-21T09:12:00.001-08:00

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2012/01/rahm_2.html

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'Red Tails': History, George Lucas-Style - Atlantic Mobile

2012-01-21T01:43:00.001-08:00

http://m.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/red-tails-history-george-lucas-style/251618/?google_editors_picks=true

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Emanuel touts City Colleges plan - chicagotribune.com

2012-01-21T01:28:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-rahm-emanuel-speech-0121-20120121,0,7958481.story

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Black America Paralyzed, Powerless, Irrelevant: Year 4 of the Obama Era | Black Agenda Report

2012-01-19T04:56:00.001-08:00

http://blackagendareport.com/content/black-america-paralyzed-powerless-irrelevant-year-4-obama-era

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Salon.com » GOP crowd uses Juan Williams as an Obama stand-in Mobile

2012-01-19T04:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/17/juan_williams_stands_in_for_obama_at_fox_debate/singleton/?mobile.html

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American Ertharin Cousin to head World Food Program | Agricultural Commodities | Reuters

2012-01-18T20:19:00.001-08:00

Link: http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL1E8CHBNR20120117 (sent via Shareaholic)

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Celebrating one of the nation's, City of Chicago and North Lawndale's finest: Ambassador Ertharin Cousin

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NYT: 49ers' Harbaugh Makes Switch t

2012-01-16T10:05:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/xTI7gg

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Parents’ fight for integration failed, but paved way for change - Chicago Sun-Times

2012-01-16T09:45:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/x7HqbU

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How Mayor Daley Outfoxed Martin Luther King | NBC Chicago

2012-01-16T08:53:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/How-Mayor-Daley-Outfoxed-Martin-Luther-King-113881699.html (sent via Shareaholic)

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U.S. Homicides Hit Lowest Since 1962

2012-01-11T17:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-11/u-s-life-expectancy-climbs-as-homicide-cancer-deaths-decline.html

U.S. Homicides Hit Lowest Since 1962
By Molly Peterson - Jan 11, 2012

U.S. life expectancy climbed to a new high in 2010 as fewer people died from heart disease and cancer, and homicide was no longer among the 15 leading causes of death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Homicides fell 3.6 percent in 2010, dropping off the CDC’s tally of leading causes of death and other vital U.S. statistics for the first time in 45 years, according to preliminary data released today by the agency. Life expectancy increased to about 78.7 years.

The homicide rate in 2010 was “the lowest it’s been since 1962,” accounting for 5.3 cases for every 100,000 people, Sherry Murphy, the report’s lead author, said today in a telephone interview. Killings have been among the top 15 causes of death since 1965.

Pneumonitis, an inflammation of the lungs caused by airborne irritants, chemotherapy or radiation therapy, replaced homicide as the 15th biggest cause of death in 2010, according to the report. While heart disease and cancer remained the top two leading killers, accounting for 47 percent of fatalities, deaths from heart disease declined 2.4 percent to 179 per 100,000 people, while cancer-related deaths dropped 0.6 percent to 173 per 100,000, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Living Longer

Almost 2.46 million people died in the U.S. in 2010, a 1.2 percent increase from the previous year, according to data compiled from death certificates provided by all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Children born in 2010 can expect to live 37 days longer than those who entered the world just a year earlier, the CDC said.

The homicide findings aren’t a surprise because murders in the U.S. have been declining since the early 1990s, said John Eck, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati.

“It is a surprise to those who cling to the notion that bad economic times cause crime to go up,” Eck said today in an e-mail. “But the evidence for this has been weak at best and this idea has probably always been more of a myth than a reality.”

It’s a “a sign of the times” that homicide is no longer among the nation’s 15 top causes of death, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of thePolice Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit in Washington.

“I don’t think it’s possible to point to any one factor, but I do think we have seen major changes in how police and how the community respond to crime” over the past decade, Wexler said today in an interview.

Homicide Prevention

Los Angeles and Chicago are among cities where police now focus “not only on who did some crime, but on how they can prevent the next crime,” such as retaliation for a gang-related murder, Wexler said.

The national mortality rate, calculated according to 2010 census data, declined to a record low of 746.2 deaths for every 100,000 people, from 749.6 in 2009.

In addition to declines for heart disease and cancer, death rates dropped for five other leading causes of death. Influenza and pneumonia-related fatalities dropped by a combined 8.5 percent, while deaths from blood infections dropped 3.6 percent. Fatal respiratory diseases, strokes and accidents also declined.

Mortality rates increased for five leading causes of death, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s

Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease rose 3.3 percent in 2010 to 25 fatalities per 100,000 people, while Parkinson’s-related mortality increased 4.6 percent to 7 deaths for every 100,000 people, according to the report. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s retained their rankings from the previous year as the nation’s 6th and 14th leading causes of death.

The increase in deaths from Alzheimer’s may be partly a result of “changes in terminology” on death certificates that specify the disease instead of a “more generic dementia term,” Murphy said.

The mortality rate from Parkinson’s has been “trending up” in recent years, “but we can’t really say why that’s happening,” she said.

Suicide also kept its spot as the 10th leading cause of death in 2010, as the number of Americans who took their own lives rose 2.4 percent to 37,793 from 36,909 in 2009.

While the CDC had previously reported that there were 36,547 suicides in the U.S. in 2009, and 741 deaths for every 100,000 people, the agency revised its 2009 mortality rates in today’s report based on population data from the 2010 census.

To contact the reporter on this story: Molly Peterson in Washington at mpeterson9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Adriel Bettelheim at abettelheim@bloomberg.net

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Mitchell: What’s the fuss over the new Obama book? - Chicago Sun-Times

2012-01-10T14:18:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/A79jCh

One black woman's take on new book about Obamas

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Paying a Price, Long After the Crime

2012-01-10T12:26:00.001-08:00

From: Ron Tonn, COO, North Lawndale Employment Network

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/paying-a-price-long-after-the-crime.html

January 9, 2012

Paying a Price, Long After the Crime

By ALFRED BLUMSTEIN and KIMINORI NAKAMURA

IN 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.

A stunning number of young people are arrested for crimes in this country, and those crimes can haunt them for the rest of their lives. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Crime Commission found that about half of American males could expect to be arrested for a nontraffic offense some time in their lives, mostly in their late teens and early 20s. An article just published in the journal Pediatrics shows how the arrest rate has grown — by age 23, 30 percent of Americans have been arrested, compared with 22 percent in 1967. The increase reflects in part the considerable growth in arrests for drug offenses and domestic violence.

The impact of these arrests is felt for years. The ubiquity of criminal-background checks and the efficiency of information technology in maintaining those records and making them widely available, have meant that millions of Americans — even those who served probation or parole but were never incarcerated — continue to pay a price long after the crime. In November the American Bar Association released a database identifying more than 38,000 punitive provisions that apply to people convicted of crimes, pertaining to everything from public housing to welfare assistance to occupational licenses. More than two-thirds of the states allow hiring and professional-licensing decisions to be made on the basis of an arrest alone.

Employers understandably want to protect their employees and customers from risk. Yet at the same time, there is a growing public interest in facilitating job opportunities for those who have stayed crime-free for a reasonable period of time. The weak economy and a rethinking of the logic of mass incarceration — driven in large part by budget pressures — have also brought attention to the situations of ex-offenders like Mr. Langdon, who face the collateral consequences of conviction long after their involvement with the criminal justice system has ended. Federal authorities are beginning to pay attention. Last April, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urged state attorneys general to review laws and policies “to determine whether those that impose burdens on individuals convicted of crimes without increasing public safety should be eliminated.”

It is well established that the risk of recidivism drops steadily with time, but there is still the question of how long is long enough. By looking at data for more than 88,000 people who had their first arrest in New York State in 1980, and tracking their subsequent criminal histories over the next 25 years, we estimate the “redemption time” — the time it takes for an individual’s likelihood of being arrested to be close to that of individuals with no criminal records — to be about 10 to 13 years. We also found that about 30 percent of the first-time offenders in 1980 were never arrested again, in New York or anywhere else.

Employers could apply their own judgments around those estimates, but the real problem is the state and local rules — often embedded in statutes — that restrict employment or licensing for the rest of the individual’s life. In New York, former offenders can be forever denied licenses for certain jobs, ranging from beer distributor to real estate broker. Such “forever rules” — which fall heavily on minorities, who are particularly likely to be arrested — are inherently unfair.

We propose that the “forever rules” be replaced by rules that provide for the expiration of a criminal record. We believe it is unreasonable for someone to be hounded by a single arrest or conviction that happened more than 20 years earlier — and for many kinds of crimes, the records should be sealed even sooner. The state, as well as private employers, should face a heavy burden to demonstrate the need for any rule that imposes consequences on someone who has remained crime-free decades after a single offense. Yes, there are legitimate exceptions for high-security positions in law enforcement and national security — and there can be exemptions in particular cases; banks cannot afford to hire someone convicted of financial fraud.

A number of states have placed limits on the availability of stale criminal records. Under a law that will take effect in May, Massachusetts will limit employers’ access to information about convictions to 5 years for misdemeanors and 10 years for felonies. And the new law will protect employers from due-diligence liability suits if someone they hire in accord with these restrictions commits a further offense.

Policies that encourage employers to hire people who made a mistake in the past but have since rebuilt their lives would not only help those people, but also our economy and our society. With unemployment so high, we need to make it easier, not harder, for people to find jobs. And by embracing the principle that having paid the price for crime, there should be a limit on the time they are made to suffer, we would be giving true meaning to the ideals of rehabilitation and redemption.

Alfred Blumstein is a professor of urban systems and operations research at Carnegie Mellon University. Kiminori Nakamura is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ron Tonn
r.tonn@yahoo.com

"Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is."

- Francis Bacon -

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NYT: Building the 'Watson' Team of Scientists

2012-01-08T11:27:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/xmRAUd

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NBC Chicago : Rahm Emanuel, Heat Miser

2012-01-07T15:55:00.001-08:00

http://m.nbcchicago.com/nbcchicago/pm_107733/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=zU7o9kRX

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NYT: Illinois Public Officials Aid Relatives Lobbying

2012-01-07T15:41:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/xPqvn2

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Michelle Obama’s Evolution as First Lady - NYTimes.com

2012-01-07T07:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/07/us/politics/michelle-obamas-evolution-as-first-lady.html?_r=2&smid=fb-nytimes&pagewanted=all

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LA Times - Mexicans confront racism with white, black doll video

2012-01-01T13:51:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/t37Cjq

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CBA reality: Drafting a star gets you seven years

2011-12-27T17:05:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/vXzaXr

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Fw: Illinois is the exception in the pattern of declining prison populations

2011-12-27T09:11:00.001-08:00

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/press/p10cpus10pr.cfm

WASHINGTON – The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported today that the number of offenders under adult correctional supervision in the U.S. declined 1.3 percent in 2010, the second consecutive year of decline since BJS began reporting on this population in 1980. At yearend 2010, about 7.1 million people, or 1 in 33 adults, were under the supervision of adult correctional authorities in the U.S.

In addition, the total U.S. prison population fell to 1.6 million at yearend 2010, a decline of 0.6 percent during the year, the first decline in the total prison population in nearly four decades. This decline was due to a decrease of 10,881 in the number of state prisoners, which fell to just under 1.4 million persons and was the largest yearly decrease since 1977. The federal prison population grew by 0.8 percent (1,653 prisoners) to reach 209,771, the smallest percentage increase since 1980.

Most offenders under correctional supervision (about 7 in 10 persons or nearly 4.9 million people) were supervised in the community on probation or parole at yearend 2010. About 3 in 10 (or nearly 2.3 million people) were incarcerated in state or federal prisons or local jails. The decline in the total correctional population during 2010 was mainly due to a decrease in the number of probationers during the year (down 69,500 persons) and a decrease in the number of inmates incarcerated in local jails (down 18,700 persons).

During 2010, prison releases (708,677) exceeded prison admissions (703,798). The decrease in commitments into state prison, especially the 3.3 percent decrease in the number committed from the courts on a new sentence, was responsible for the decline in the state prison population. The time that offenders entering state prison could expect to serve on a commitment, about 2 years, remained relatively stable between 2009 and 2010, which indicates that the decline in the state prison population during the year was the result of a decrease in admissions.

Half of state departments of corrections reported decreases in their prison population during 2010. California (down 6,213) and Georgia (down 4,207) reported the largest decreases, followed by New York (down 2,031) and Michigan (down 1,365). Illinois (up 3,257) reported the largest increase, followed by Texas (up 2,400) and Arkansas (up 996).

In 2010, the U.S. imprisonment rate dropped to 497 inmates per 100,000 residents, continuing a decline since 2007, when the imprisonment rates peaked at 506 inmates per 100,000 residents. The national imprisonment rate for males (938 per 100,000 male U.S. residents) was about 14 times the imprisonment rate for females (67 per 100,000 female U.S. residents).

Among offender age groups, about 3.1 percent of black males in the nation were in state or federal prison, compared to just under 0.5 percent of white males and 1.3 percent of Hispanic males. Also, an estimated 7.3 percent of all black males ages 30 to 34 were incarcerated with a sentence of more than 1 year.

States held 2,295 inmates under age 18 in custody at midyear 2010, down from 2,779 at midyear 2009. At midyear 2010, states held 95,977 persons in custody who were not U.S. citizens, down slightly from midyear 2009 when they held 97,133.

The report, Correctional Population in the United States , 2010 (NCJ 236319), was written by BJS statistician Lauren E. Glaze. Prisoners in 2010 (NCJ 236096) was written by BJS statisticians Paul Guerino, Paige M. Harrison, and William J. Sabol. Following publication, both reports can be found at http://www.bjs.gov.

For additional information about the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ statistical reports and programs, please visit the BJS website at http://www.bjs.gov/.

Ron Tonn

Chief Operating Officer

North Lawndale Employment Network

3726 West Flournoy Street

Chicago, Illinois 60624

773.265.7948

ron@nlen.org

"Our mission is to improve the earnings potential of the North Lawndale community through innovative employment initiatives that lead to economic advancement and an improved quality of life for residents"

www.nlen.org

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Merry Christmas from the Reader to the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago City Council | Bleader

2011-12-25T15:49:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/12/25/merry-christmas-from-the-reader-to-the-chicago-bulls-and-the-chicago-city-council

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Chicago Tribune - For public safety, it's a golden age

2011-12-25T11:22:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/uSlL3B

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Google Alert - "Mayor Rahm Emanuel"

2011-12-25T09:07:00.001-08:00

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Date: Dec 25, 2011 10:25 AM
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News

1 new result for "Mayor Rahm Emanuel"

Emanuel invites trouble with plan for NATO, G8
Chicago Sun-Times
By Don Rose December 24, 2011 4:16PM Presumably as part of his long-term plan to run for president, Mayor Rahm Emanuel managed to bring the unique but risky combination of the international G8 and NATO summit meetings to Chicago next May. ...
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NYT: Edgar Kendricks Is Maestro of Gospel Music in Harlem

2011-12-24T22:56:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/sgZkL4

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Chicago Tribune - Remarkable Woman: June Porter

2011-12-24T06:58:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/sVv5pd

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Vick: Panthers’ Newton will revolutionize the game | Blogs | NFL.com

2011-12-23T09:56:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/s01zm5

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Braylon Edwards gave 79 students $10,000 for college - Shutdown Corner - NFL Blog - Yahoo! Sports

2011-12-22T20:44:00.001-08:00

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/Braylon-Edwards-gave-79-students-10-000-for-col?urn=nfl-wp14415

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The Santa Claus Test | The Nation

2011-12-22T19:59:00.001-08:00

http://www.thenation.com/article/165304/santa-claus-test

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Toni Preckwinkle's plan to shrink the jail population | Bleader

2011-12-22T19:05:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/uI5GUL

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A roster of great basketball books

2011-12-22T19:03:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/uYh1Zt

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'Magical' program ignored by schools - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

2011-12-22T18:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/columns/vanaski/s_773155.html

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First lady sacrificed her life for youth - Chicago CIty Hall | Examiner.com

2011-12-22T10:19:00.001-08:00

http://www.examiner.com/city-hall-in-chicago/first-lady-sacrificed-her-life-for-youth?CID=examiner_alerts_article

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NYT editorial celebrates victory against prison-based gerrymandering

2011-12-22T10:14:00.001-08:00

Prisoners of the Census news
for the week of December 22

The 2010 Census counted more than
2 million people in the wrong place.
How will your vote suffer?

Thanks to you!

As today's New York Times editorial shows (below), we are continuing to make great progress against prison-based gerrymandering. Four states have passed laws ending the practice, and the first legal challenge to these civil rights victories has been dismissed.

Your support has helped to make these victories possible. You know how important the work of the Prison Policy Initiative is to the movement. We need your help to defend our victories, expand to other states and, finally, to convince the Census Bureau that the fairest and most accurate way to count incarcerated people is at home.

Can you make a tax deductible contribution to support our work today?

--Peter

Prisons and Redistricting

By the New York Times editorial board
Published December 22, 2011

A New York State court rightly upheld a state law requiring that prison inmates be counted in their home communities rather than where they are incarcerated. The law, passed in 2010, put an end to prison-based gerrymandering, which counted nonvoting prison inmates as “residents” to increase the population of some legislative districts. That practice artificially inflated the political power of voting residents in prison districts and diluted the voting strength of voters elsewhere.

Under state law, inmates are denied the right to vote and cannot participate in the political processes of the communities where the prisons are located. Their voting rights are automatically restored when their sentences are completed and most return to their home communities, far from the prison towns.

Many counties with large prisons within their borders have rejected the practice of counting inmates as “residents” when they saw how doing so allowed lightly populated towns near prisons to hijack a disproportionate share of political power while diminishing the power of towns that did not have prisons.

Legislators from upstate districts who challenged the law are well aware of what goes on at the county level. But they were desperate to hold on to a process that apportions political power based not on real constituents but on sleight of hand.

In his ruling, Justice Eugene Devine of the State Supreme Court said the plaintiffs had failed to show that the state law was “anything other than rationally based and constitutionally sound.” The plaintiffs, who are appealing, harm the political process by fighting a law that ensures fairer representation.

In this issue
Thanks to you!
Prisons and Redistricting

Other news
Virginia bill would help counties avoid prison-based gerrymandering

HB13 will give any county faced with drawing a district that would be more than 12% incarcerated the option of choosing to not include the prison populations when redistricting.

Baltimore Sun op-ed supports Maryland’s No Representation Without Population act

Great op-ed explains how Maryland's law ending prison-based gerrymandering protects minority voting power.

Forward to a friend

Prison Policy Initiative, PO Box 127, Northampton, Mass. 01027
http://www.prisonpolicy.org http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org
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Black lawmakers converge on Chicago to discuss solutions - Chicago CIty Hall | Examiner.com

2011-12-22T05:31:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.examiner.com/city-hall-in-chicago/black-lawmakers-converge-on-chicago-to-discuss-solutions?CID=examiner_alerts_article (sent via Shareaholic)

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Example of how national lawmakers groups are advocating for workforce development policies and earmarking:

"The Urban Jobs Act of 2011 amends the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to authorize the U.S. Secretary of Labor to make grants to the National Urban League, a civil rights, non-profit organization, and to operate, through local affiliates, an Urban Jobs Program to provide job training, education and support services and activities for young adults age 18 to 24 to prepare them for entry into the workforce."

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Federal program teaches youth about money - Chicago CIty Hall | Examiner.com

2011-12-22T05:26:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.examiner.com/city-hall-in-chicago/federal-program-teaches-youth-about-money?CID=examiner_alerts_article (sent via Shareaholic)

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Matt Damon Slams Obama, Democrats: 'One Term President With Some Balls Would Have Been Better'

2011-12-22T05:17:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/21/matt-damon-slams-obama-democrats-one-term-balls_n_1162511.html?igoogle=1 (sent via Shareaholic)

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Grandmother reaching out to help youth - Chicago CIty Hall | Examiner.com

2011-12-21T19:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.examiner.com/city-hall-in-chicago/grandmother-reaching-out-to-help-youth?do_not_mobile_redirect=1

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Now That the Factories Are Closed, It’s Tee Time in Benton Harbor, Mich. (NYTimes)

2011-12-21T07:08:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/magazine/benton-harbor.html?pagewanted=2&hpw

December 15, 2011

Now That the Factories Are Closed, It’s Tee Time in Benton Harbor, Mich.

By JONATHAN MAHLER

On the northern edge of Benton Harbor, just beyond the grim grid of housing projects, shuttered storefronts, boarded-up homes and junk-laden yards that dominate much of the town, sits an emerald oasis known as Harbor Shores. As the name suggests, Harbor Shores is a resort development. At its heart is a pristine Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course that meanders along a river and creek; through woods and wetlands; and, most striking, across tall, white sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan.

The golf course was built largely on fallow, polluted land that was once crowded with factories: holes No. 4 and No. 5 were the slag pit for a company that made automobile brakes. Holes No. 14 and 15 were a former Superfund site once occupied by a company that used radium and mercury to manufacture components for fighter planes.

Metaphorically speaking, Harbor Shores is supposed to have a similarly salutary effect on the poor, overwhelmingly black town that surrounds it. No mere resort, it was envisioned by its developers as a “single, signature project to drive economic development and bring social change to Benton Harbor,” in the words of one promotional video.

In late August, I played the course with a foursome of hackers that included Marcus Robinson, who helped lead the effort to build the resort. A heavy African-American man, Robinson wore khaki shorts, an orange Harbor Shores golf shirt and matching Harbor Shores straw hat. It was a sticky day, and he guzzled Gatorade as he liberated large chunks of turf that on more than one occasion outflew his ball. “It’s such a beautiful property,” he said as he bent over to fill a large divot with grass seed. “It’s a shame to duff it up.”

Robinson is president of the Consortium for Community Development. The consortium is one of several local nonprofits partly financed by the Whirlpool Corporation, which is based in Benton Harbor, to help encourage the redevelopment of the town. He took up golf at the urging of his girlfriend two years ago, just after construction began on Harbor Shores. “She was like, ‘You don’t want to be out here on opening day and have the ball go two inches in front of you at the first tee,’ ” he told me. “Of course, that’s exactly what happened. On my first drive, the ball didn’t even go out of the tee box.”

Robinson, who is 53, went to graduate school for hypnotherapy, the art of inducing trances to change behavioral patterns, before becoming a corporate consultant in Rochester, N.Y. He was brought to Benton Harbor by Whirlpool as a “diversity consultant” in early 2001. His assignment was to work with community leaders, businesspeople and other local residents to come up with ways to address some of the ever-worsening problems — poverty, violence, white flight, racial strife — that had been plaguing the city for years and were making it increasingly difficult for Whirlpool to attract executive talent to the area. The discussions helped birth Harbor Shores, a notion that had been kicking around a long while.

Given Benton Harbor’s unfavorable history and demographics, no private developer would likely be willing to take on such an ambitious project there. But there was another way: Robinson’s group, along with other nonprofits supported by Whirlpool, could secure enough federal and state grant money to help remediate the land, build the golf course and at least get Harbor Shores off the ground. The project’s complicated financing deal closed in May 2008, right around the time that the national real-estate market crashed.

On the Thursday morning that we played Harbor Shores, the course looked virtually empty. The blueprints call for the 530-acre resort to include high-end hotels and shops and quaint marinas, but as of now it’s basically just a golf course. The first of hundreds of planned houses are going up on cul de sacs with names like Golden Bear Court.

Robinson stopped our cart in front of one half-finished development called the Hideaways. Like all of the homes in Harbor Shores, the houses under construction here are being built in an architectural style known as Coastal Shingle. The development will have its own swimming pool, fire pit and clubhouse. A sign advertised lots priced from the $300,000s to the $600,000s. Robinson told me that 27 of the Hideaways’ 58 sites have already been purchased, with the completed homes selling for as much as half a million dollars.

Watching carpenters hammer preweathered wood shingles onto homes that wouldn’t look out of place in East Hampton, Long Island, I felt almost as if I were at a resort in a third-world Caribbean country: beyond the boundaries of Harbor Shores is the poorest city in all of Michigan.

The contrast is deliberate, part of a strategy of social engineering that’s central to the plan to save Benton Harbor. “The intermingling that shifts a culture, makes it more upwardly mobile and creates more striving-type sensibilities naturally occurs when you bring people of different races and classes together,” Robinson said as we rode off toward the next tee. “It creates a mentality of inclusion.”

A few holes later, as Robinson vainly poked a 6-iron around in some tall grass beside the fairway looking for one of his balls, he conjured a vision of Benton Harbor’s future. “This could be a model for African-American towns,” he told me. “I want to see this turned into a great place to live, work and play and have it be predominantly black. A great place to play golf, go to the beach, with great schools, a place that turns out scholars, athletes and artists. A place that’s banging, as they say.”

During its heyday as a racially mixed, economically vibrant manufacturing center through the 1960s, Benton Harbor grew into a home to more than 20,000 people. Today its population is closer to 10,000, about 90 percent of whom are black. The per capita income of its residents is roughly $10,000; about 60 percent of its population is on some form of public assistance.

The scale of poverty in Benton Harbor is extreme, but in a general sense, the town’s woes are hardly unique for Michigan, which has been especially hard hit by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in America. The state’s decline has been slow and steady. In the 1950s, its per capita income was 13 percent above the national average; today, it’s 7 percent below it. Michigan is the only state whose population has decreased since 2000. With the nation in the midst of a historic joblessness crisis that has left a record number of Americans living below the poverty line, only Nevada and California have higher rates of unemployment.

All over Michigan, counties are scrambling to find ways to reinvent their outdated economies. Two recurring themes in this effort have been attracting tourism and retaining corporations. Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, a former venture capitalist, recently signed an overhaul of the state tax code that cuts business taxes by $1.7 billion, while committing $25 million to the “Pure Michigan” advertising campaign, which features local celebrities like Tim Allen urging people to visit the state.

In this context, the goings-on in Benton Harbor make a certain kind of sense — not just Harbor Shores, which was intended to lure weekenders from Chicago, roughly two hours away by car, but the other major construction project under way in town: a new, heavily tax-incentivized, $68 million, 270,000-square-foot corporate campus for Whirlpool.

The juxtaposition of Benton Harbor’s impoverished population and its two rising monuments to wealth — all wedged into a little more than four square miles — make it almost a caricature of economic disparity in America. But at the same time, it offers a window into one possible future for towns across the country, places that can no longer support their own economies or take care of their citizens and may ultimately have no choice but to turn their fate over to private industry and nonprofits. The way things are going, more and more states may start to look like Michigan, and more and more towns may start to look like Benton Harbor.

Benton Harbor’s City Hall, a sturdy-looking, red-brick structure on the fringe of its small downtown, was built by the federal government as part of a wave of public-works projects underwritten by the New Deal to help lift the country out of the Depression. A dedication plaque dated 1937 still hangs in the building’s small, sour-smelling lobby, surrounded by mundane symbols of the city’s decline: an “Out of Order” sign taped to a water fountain, an empty job-postings board, a case containing municipal-sports-league trophies, several of whose figurines are missing limbs.

I was greeted there one morning by the man who now runs Benton Harbor, a 67-year-old African-American man with a salt-and-pepper mustache named Joseph Harris. “Life is beautiful, isn’t it?” Harris said, smiling widely as he led me up the stairs to an empty office that he had just repossessed from the mayor.

Harris is Benton Harbor’s “emergency manager.” He was first sent to the town in April 2010 under a law that provided the state with limited authority to intervene in the financial affairs of failing cities. His power grew exponentially last spring when Governor Snyder and the state’s Republican Legislature passed Public Act 4, which allows emergency managers to renegotiate or terminate contracts, change collective-bargaining agreements, even dissolve local governments (subject to the governor’s approval). They have almost unfettered control over their respective cities. This approach to governing is still in its infancy, but if it proves successful in Benton Harbor and elsewhere, emergency managers could be dispatched to troubled municipalities across the state. Snyder has even made it clear that Detroit is a strong candidate for takeover.

There are emergency managers now ensconced in four cities and one school district in Michigan. All have taken some aggressive measures, but none have made as public an impact as Harris. He has fired numerous city administrators and employees and merged Benton Harbor’s police and fire departments. He didn’t just kick the mayor and city commissioners out of their offices; he also issued a directive prohibiting them from doing anything other than call meetings to order, record their minutes and adjourn them.

Benton Harbor has since become an unlikely cause for Rachel Maddow, who has railed repeatedly against the state’s seizure of the town — “Ground Zero for American politics,” as she calls it. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has taken up the cause, too, comparing Benton Harbor to Selma, circa 1965, because of the disenfranchisement of its largely black electorate. Stephen Colbert, for his part, offered a mock tribute to Harris: “I say good for him, because the people of Benton Harbor brought this on themselves. . . . Benton Harbor’s elected officials are incompetent, therefore, by electing them, the voters are incompetent. So they should lose their democracy.”

If all of this sounds like yet more negative attention for Benton Harbor, Harris, the former chief financial officer for the city of Detroit, doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by it. Blissfully free of the checks and balances of democratic governments, he is living the dream of every frustrated city administrator. “I believed I could fix Detroit,” Harris told me. “But almost every time I made a recommendation to the mayor, politics got in the way. Here, I don’t have to worry about whether the politicians or union leaders like what I’m doing. I have to worry about whether it’s the right thing to do. That’s the only thing that should matter. I love this job.”

Having neutered the city’s elected officials (“I am the mayor and the commission, and I don’t need them”), fired the city’s finance director (“I’d been told she was incompetent, but she really didn’t have a clue”) and city manager (“He was smart and articulate, but he just wasn’t doing anything that I couldn’t do”), Harris, a former accounting professor, is pretty much single-handedly running Benton Harbor. Small, balding and relentlessly upbeat, he balances the books, negotiates the contracts and cheerfully presides over sparsely attended Town Hall meetings, rolling out his latest cost-saving measures, his reading glasses invariably dangling around his neck. Over the summer, I saw him introduce Benton Harbor’s new “quick response vehicles” — essentially pickup trucks outfitted with fire-retardant-foam-releasing contraptions that require a lot less money and manpower to operate than traditional fire trucks.

After we talked for a while, Harris and I walked out for lunch. He was eager to show me around the Arts District, a quaint, upscale enclave several blocks from City Hall where he is renting a loft apartment in a converted warehouse. “You can’t fully appreciate what’s going on here until you look around,” he said as we crossed over into the neighborhood from Benton Harbor’s bleak downtown.

The contrast was stark. The streets and sidewalks were freshly paved and lined with trees, planters and retro lampposts, courtesy of $2.3 million in grant money and donations. The Arts District, which encompasses just a few blocks, abuts Harbor Shores; the city’s master plan, partly underwritten by Whirlpool a couple of years ago, calls for the two to eventually be connected via a series of footpaths.

After lunch in a crowded cafe, Harris bought a cup of vanilla-bean gelato to eat as he led me through some artists’ studios, prodding a jewelry maker to tell me about the revival of the neighborhood.

We left the Arts District, and City Hall came back into view, a state-subsidized high-rise — Harbor Towers — looming behind it. Poking his finger into a new planter to make sure it had been watered, Harris told me excitedly about his latest brainstorm: “I ♥ Benton Harbor” souvenirs, including T-shirts, bumper stickers and shot glasses. The idea, he explained, is to take advantage of Benton Harbor’s unflattering appearances on Rachel Maddow’s show and “The Colbert Report” — “to make lemonade out of lemons,” as he put it. “We have, as you know, some national notoriety now,” Harris said. “I want to take that notoriety and build on it. I want people to walk away from Benton Harbor saying, ‘I’ve been to Benton Harbor.’ ”

The merger of Benton Harbor’s police, building inspection and fire departments resulted in the creation of a single Department of Public Safety run by the city’s chief of police, Roger Lange. When I first met Lange, a big, barrel-chested man, he was speaking at one of Harris’s Town Hall meetings, assuring residents that their safety would not be compromised by the cost-saving measures being undertaken. “Benton Harbor is going to come back,” he told the small crowd. “We are coming back. Failure is not an option.”

Later that night, I rode around with Lange as he patrolled the city in a black Dodge Durango. He picked me up just after dark in front of City Hall, and we headed straight into Benton Harbor’s decaying residential neighborhoods. “I normally like to start by visiting one of our more problematic areas,” Lange said, pulling up in front of an abandoned wood-frame house at the intersection of a liquor-store parking lot and a narrow residential street. Before he had even slowed to a stop, the group of young men who were hanging out on the stoop spotted him and were scattering.

In many ways, Benton Harbor is a miniature version of Detroit, albeit one improbably located along a corridor of bucolic and generally much more affluent lakefront towns. It boomed during World War II, when local plants were transformed into F.D.R.’s so-called arsenal of democracy. (Whirlpool’s factories manufactured components for fighter planes.)

As was the case with Detroit, the job opportunities made Benton Harbor a popular destination for blacks coming north as part of what would become known as the Great Migration. For many years, the town was informally segregated, with most blacks crowding into an area of ramshackle homes known as the Flats. In the 1960s and ’70s, the jobs started disappearing, and the white flight to neighboring towns began, accelerated by the razing of the Flats, which drove many black residents into formerly white neighborhoods. By 1980, Benton Harbor was overwhelmingly black and poor, with a steadily rising crime rate. And that was before crack. Situated between Chicago and Detroit, Benton Harbor became a hub for the Midwest crack trade beginning in the mid-1980s.

During the 1990s, Benton Harbor was one of the most violent places in the state. Crime rates have ebbed and flowed since then. At least in terms of murders and assaults, the past year and a half has been relatively quiet, though break-ins have been on the rise lately. Harris’s budget cuts have cost Lange about a third of his full-time officers, reducing the total number to fewer than 20, though he has been able to replace them with nearly a dozen part-timers. (All of the city’s remaining full-time police officers are being cross-trained as firefighters.) The fire chief of the neighboring town of St. Joseph, whose population is a little bit smaller than Benton Harbor’s, recently expressed concern about the rising number of calls his men have had to make to the town to assist its firefighters.

Lange grew up in Benton Harbor. He worked a variety of jobs before deciding to become a police officer in his early 30s, when, he says, his ex-wife disappeared with their son and he spent eight months tracking them down in California. “After that investigation, I thought, You know, I think I can do this,” he told me.

After starting as a patrolman in Benton Harbor, Lange spent most of his career in the county sheriff’s office. He returned to Benton Harbor’s police force a couple of years ago after a corruption scandal further damaged the already fragile relationship between the town’s largely black population and its largely white police department. Two local police officers were ultimately sent to jail, including the head of the narcotics unit, for violating the civil rights of the town’s inhabitants by falsifying search warrants, stealing money and property from residents and embezzling from the department.

Benton Harbor’s recent success at curtailing violent crime is partly a tribute to Lange, who leaves the station at 8 o’clock every night after a full day of administrative work to patrol the streets until 2 or 3 in the morning with his deputy director, Robert O’Brien. He is basically carrying out his own version of the “broken windows” approach to policing, enforcing previously overlooked laws against quality-of-life crimes like loitering, gambling and public urination.

Over the course of the night, Lange circled the various hotspots — parks, parking lots, stoops — where people tend to collect to play dice or buy and sell drugs (generally crack, heroin or cocaine) and dispersed the gathering crowds. “I’ve found that this has cut down on a lot of the violent crime,” he told me. “When people gamble, they’re going to get mad.” He stopped frequently to move small children out of the streets and back into their homes: “How you doin’? Where’s your parents?”

It was a hot night, and scores of teenage boys — because of Benton Harbor’s high teenage-pregnancy rate, more than 35 percent of its population is under 18 — were riding around shirtless on bikes. (Nonprofits donate secondhand bikes to the city by the dozens.) “This house right here has caught fire twice now and was just condemned,” Lange said, pointing at the burned-out shell of a home, one of more than 100 houses and possibly an old hospital slated to be demolished with grant money from HUD.

Benton Harbor’s cityscape shifts from detached homes in serious disrepair — in some cases, all of the siding has been ripped off; in others, there are no windows, just bedsheets covering empty holes — to every sort of federally financed housing project imaginable, from high-rise towers to scatter-site homes to barracks-style apartment complexes. Failed attempts at urban renewal are everywhere, often to darkly comic effect. A sign in an empty, overgrown lot reads: “Project Funded by American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” A new, HUD-subsidized housing development called Harbor Town — “The Future of Benton Harbor,” says a sign advertising property-tax-free lots for $7,500 — is a vast, empty site save for three side-by-side homes. There has been a strong push to encourage homeownership in Benton Harbor, an effort that has included generous grants from both the Michigan State Housing Development Authority and HUD, and a Habitat for Humanity building blitz supported by Jimmy Carter. Nevertheless, nearly 70 percent of its population are renters.

For the first couple of hours of Lange’s patrol, the grimness of the surroundings seemed endless. But as the night wore on, the streets started to become familiar. Unlike many areas of Detroit, where the decay spreads out for mile after mile across a sprawling metropolis, in Benton Harbor it’s relatively small and self-contained. A lot of grant money has always poured into Benton Harbor, and this is no doubt one of the reasons. Its small size makes its big-city problems seem somehow solvable. “Everybody thinks they know what to do with Benton Harbor, but not even anyone here knows what to do with Benton Harbor,” a veteran teacher at Benton Harbor High School told me.

Lange seemed at times like a small-town cop, an African-American Andy Griffith in a Mayberry turned upside-down. At one point, he bantered in a liquor-store parking lot with a local man he called Bulldog.

“Man, give me $2 for a drink,” Bulldog said.

“Bulldog,” Lange replied, “why would I support what I’m trying to get you out of?”

“I’m trying to keep your paperwork down, because if I don’t get that $2 I’m gonna go back to breaking into houses,” Bulldog said.

“You know what, Bulldog? If you break into houses, I’m gonna arrest you.”

“You’re not going to catch me. I’m a professional. I can get in there with a credit card — my food stamp card, as a matter of fact,” Bulldog said.

“Then I’ll make sure you lose your food stamps and lose your freedom,” Lange said.

Benton Harbor’s problems begin and end with the city’s chronic joblessness, which has not only crushed the spirit of generations of residents but also destroyed the town’s tax base. Delinquency is also a major issue in Benton Harbor: at least 20 percent of its residents can’t, or don’t, pay their city bills. Harris recently combined the town’s trash and water bills in the hope that residents will pay their garbage bills to avoid having their water shut off.

Making matters worse, two of the town’s key income sources are drying up. A state revenue-sharing program dating back to the 1930s is being decimated by ongoing state budget cuts, while a neighboring town that has long purchased its water from Benton Harbor — accounting for half of its water revenues — just finished building its own water-treatment facility. To offset the loss of at least some of these revenues, Harris is planning to raise water rates as much as 40 percent for Benton Harbor residents.

But the erosion of Benton Harbor’s underlying finances has been accompanied by a history of almost farcical mismanagement. Between 2000 and 2010, no fewer than five city administrators filed whistleblower lawsuits against the city, claiming that they had lost their jobs after raising questions about how the elected officials were running the government. Most were settled out of court, costing the city — or its insurers, anyway — a total of more than $2 million.

The latest plaintiff was Richard Marsh, Benton Harbor’s city manager from March 2008 to September 2009, who claimed that the city commission had declined to renew his contract after he went public with the findings of an independent internal audit and requested an F.B.I. investigation of the government’s management of the city. Marsh settled with Benton Harbor for $192,000, but the state subsequently sent its own financial review team to the town, which in turn led to Harris’s appointment in April 2010.

That the town’s finances were a mess when he arrived is beyond dispute. Benton Harbor was incurring overdraft fees of as much as $100,000 a year. It owed the Internal Revenue Service $678,000 in back taxes and HUD more than $1 million for a loan that had been distributed to three local businesses, all of which had gone bankrupt, leaving the city on the hook for the money.

Harris has paid off the I.R.S. and set up a payment plan with HUD, while cutting Benton Harbor’s annual expenses from $8 million to $6 million through a combination of layoffs, new contracts with the police and fire unions and the outsourcing of city services. Broadly speaking, his approach was ripped right from the pages of the conservative playbook: shrink the government and clear the path for private development. One of the first moves Harris made when the state enhanced his powers last spring was to reconfigure the city’s planning commission and the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority, which oversee the development of the town. “The city government has got to provide essential services — clean the streets, keep the public safe,” he says. “But if we provide the essential services, and maybe fix up the streets, guess what, more revenue will come in because of the golf course and Whirlpool’s headquarters. Developers are going to come.”

One hundred years ago, an insurance salesman named Lou Upton took the blueprints for a manually operated washing machine to an uncle in Benton Harbor, who quickly figured out how to electrify it. The Upton Machine Company was soon supplying the first washing machines with “motorized agitation” to Sears, Roebuck & Company. Before long, this small family business would become the Whirlpool Corporation, the world’s largest producer of major home appliances.

For decades, Whirlpool did much of its manufacturing in Benton Harbor, but in the 1980s, it started closing its factories in the city to cut labor costs. The company shut down its last assembly plant in Benton Harbor in 1987. It still has some 4,000 employees in the area, but they are predominantly “knowledge workers” — executives, engineers, analysts.

In a sense, it’s surprising that Whirlpool hasn’t relocated these employees too. The closest international airports are in Grand Rapids and Chicago, both more than 80 miles away. (There is an old commuter airport in Benton Harbor, closed to commercial traffic for years, that can accommodate Whirlpool’s corporate jets.) Then there’s the problem of Benton Harbor itself. There can’t be too many major international corporations building $68 million campuses across the street from the site of a recently condemned and demolished low-rent motel.

Whirlpool says it is deeply committed to Benton Harbor. “We’re part of the community,” Jeffrey Noel, Whirlpool’s vice president for corporate communications, told me. “You can’t go to a school-board meeting, or a not-for-profit meeting, or a local Little League game where you don’t see Whirlpool employees volunteering.”

Whirlpool’s logo is affixed to signs all over Benton Harbor, from the Habitat for Humanity homes that its employees helped build to the construction site for a new Benton Harbor Boys and Girls Club that has received several hundred thousand dollars from the Whirlpool Foundation. Benton Harbor’s public school system has also been the beneficiary of Whirlpool largess. The Whirlpool Foundation and the foundations of two of the company’s former chief executives, including the Upton Foundation, have donated more than $1.5 million this year toward reforming the city’s schools, which are among the lowest-achieving in the state. “The goal is over 10 years to make this one of the premier school districts in the region,” Marcus Robinson of the Consortium for Community Development told me.

According to Noel, who also serves as the president of Harbor Shores Community Redevelopment, this is all part of a unified strategy to increase Benton Harbor’s ability to attract employers, tourists and new homeowners. Shortly before starting construction on the golf course, Harbor Shores issued a report detailing some of its proposals for bringing change to Benton Harbor. They included a free 10-week course, “Bridges Out of Poverty,” designed to prepare residents culturally to join the middle class. “Moving out of the culture of poverty requires more than an increase in financial means . . . and accepting achievement as the driving force in one’s life,” the course description read. “It will require one to learn and use middle-class language and behaviors.”

Of course, golf is integral to the plan. A national golf program for underprivileged youth will have a state-of-the-art training facility at Harbor Shores, and the high-school golf team is using Harbor Shores as its home course. (A member of the girls’ team hit one of the first holes-in-one there.) Harbor Shores will also host the 2012 and 2014 Senior P.G.A. Tour Championships, which are expected to bring 10,000 to 15,000 visitors a day to Benton Harbor. “Hopefully, when they get off the course, they’ll come over here and party with us,” a real-estate agent who sells Harbor Shores homes told me one afternoon in the Arts District.

The narrative of the redevelopment of Benton Harbor has been distilled into a multimedia exhibit in a sleek, modern-looking office on Main Street called the Transformation Center. There’s a scale model of Harbor Shores and photographs of a happy, diverse community in full bloom. A promotional video tells the story of Benton Harbor’s rebirth. “Leaving poverty behind, that’s what we’re going to do,” the narration concludes.

There’s no question that a transformation is under way in Benton Harbor. The city’s downtown may still be deserted, but the Arts District isn’t. At night, you can invariably find a large crowd gathered at the Livery, a microbrewery in a former stable.

“When we moved here, this area was a dump,” one of the Livery’s owners, Leslie Pickell, told me one evening at the bar. Along with two other friends, Pickell, who is 50, and her significant other, Michael Gardner — the two met at a Grateful Dead concert in California in the early 1990s — bought the vacant building for $25,000 in 2003. They closed on the property two weeks before Benton Harbor broke out into race riots (locals prefer the term “civil disturbance”). The microbrewery opened in August 2005, and business has grown steadily ever since.

It’s hard not to admire Pickell’s pioneering spirit. But it’s also hard not to wonder what the transformation of Benton Harbor will mean for the vast majority of the town’s population. You don’t see many black faces in the Arts District, and apart from high-school golfers, how many locals are going to be turning up at Harbor Shores — even with the discounted greens fees of $40 available to town residents who are up to date on their city bills?

Marcus Muhammad is a basketball legend in Benton Harbor. As a student at the high school in the early 1990s, he led his team to two straight appearances in the Michigan state finals. Photographs of him still line the wall outside the school gym, along with those of other local basketball greats, including Wilson Chandler, who played last year in the N.B.A.

Then known as Marcus Singer, Muhammad set the career 3-point scoring record at DePaul University and might have played professionally had his interest in basketball not been overtaken by his growing involvement with the Nation of Islam. After graduating from DePaul, he changed his last name and took a job teaching at the Nation of Islam’s school in Chicago.

Muhammad was drawn back to Benton Harbor in 2003, in the wake of the crack epidemic. “It was like a hurricane had blown through here,” he told me. “I could see the carnage, economically, politically, socially.”

Muhammad works as a counselor at the high school and coaches the varsity basketball team, which gives him the local stature of a high-school football coach in Texas. He is also one of the town’s nine city commissioners. At 6-foot-6, with the muscular build of an elite athlete, he cuts an unmistakable figure in Benton Harbor. He is always carrying a book — I saw him with a Bobby Fischer biography on one occasion and Robert A. Caro’s “Power Broker” on another — and dresses in French-cuffed shirts, three-piece suits and ties.

Inside his office at the high school, where a GQ magazine cover of President Obama is prominently displayed, I asked Muhammad what he thought about Harbor Shores. “You’re rebuilding and redeveloping Benton Harbor, but toward what end, what’s the aim?” he replied. “They’re going to have to show us that their ultimate goal isn’t gentrification.”

This is the competing narrative of what’s going on in Benton Harbor: It’s being converted into a resort town for wealthy weekenders and Whirlpool employees — that, when all is said and done, its struggling black population will either be driven out by the development or reduced to low-wage jobs cleaning hotel rooms, carrying golf bags or cutting grass.

According to this counternarrative, Whirlpool decided years ago to re-engineer the town for its own purposes and has since used a variety of local nonprofits to purchase land from the cash-starved city and to tap into the stream of federal and state grant money that flows into Benton Harbor. By this telling, the state was complicit in the plot, taking over Benton Harbor in what Muhammad calls “a coup d’état” not because of its financial condition — there are plenty of nearly broke towns in Michigan — but to ensure that Harbor Shores would proceed without any interference from the local government. “This was not a one-night stand,” Muhammad told me, referring to the takeover and redevelopment of Benton Harbor. “It was orchestrated, methodical.”

Hearing Muhammad and others in Benton Harbor who share his point of view, it’s easy to feel as if you’re in the presence of conspiracy theorists. Still, there’s no doubt that the state, which put millions into Harbor Shores and is providing Whirlpool with as much as $19 million in tax credits to build its new campus on a brownfield site, has a lot invested in the redevelopment of Benton Harbor. In this sense at least, Benton Harbor is by no means just another struggling Michigan town.

To skeptics of the redevelopment of Benton Harbor, Whirlpool looks less like a good corporate citizen than another company manipulating the system, leveraging its power to maximize its tax breaks and taking advantage of the town’s access to federal and state grant money. (It’s worth noting that Whirlpool hasn’t paid any federal corporate income taxes in the United States for the last three years, partly, the company says, because of losses due to the recession.)

More to the point, imagine that you live in a city where generations of residents have struggled to find work, a city that has stubbornly resisted decades worth of attempts to reverse its fortunes. Then imagine being told, without a hint of irony, that the answer to your problems is a $500 million, high-end golf resort. Oh, and also, an unelected state appointee will be running your city until further notice.

Between the almost-delusional optimism of those who support the redevelopment of Benton Harbor and the almost-paranoid mistrust of those who don’t, spending time in the town can be a profoundly disorienting experience. If there is a single symbol of these colliding perspectives, a Benton Harbor Rorschach test, it’s holes 7 though 9 of Harbor Shores, which stretch out across the dunes overlooking Lake Michigan. They were built on the edge of 22 acres of a public beachfront park that Benton Harbor’s cash-strapped government agreed to lease to Harbor Shores for 105 years starting at $35,000 a year. Depending on your point of view, they represent either the constructive repurposing of a poorly maintained, underutilized stretch of lakefront property, or an unconscionable violation of the public trust.

One of the biggest challenges facing Benton Harbor is the city’s staggering level of political disengagement, which has made it almost impossible to know what residents want from their representatives. In last month’s citywide election, only about 1,400 of Benton Harbor’s citizens voted; in 2009, the turnout was less than half that. Democracy has now officially been suspended in Benton Harbor; unofficially, it was suspended years ago.

Benton Harbor’s elected city commissioners are unpaid. (The state’s emergency-manager act eliminated what had been a largely symbolic salary.) Most of them have full-time jobs and don’t spend much time in City Hall. The exception is Commissioner Dennis Knowles. Gaunt, manic and missing several teeth, Knowles, who is unemployed, can invariably be found behind an old desktop computer in a narrow, musty office in City Hall scrutinizing Harris’s actions.

Knowles is commissioner of Benton Harbor’s Fourth Ward, which, in addition to Harbor Shores, encompasses some of the town’s poorest streets. He was elected in 2009 with 84 votes. “This is a side note, but he sleeps in the building,” Harris told me one morning last summer at City Hall. “We have cameras so we can tell the times of day when he goes out to use the restroom.”

Harris now says Knowles no longer sleeps at City Hall. Knowles insi

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Africa’s Bill Gates is angry – Stephen Pritchard – The Kernel

2011-12-21T07:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.kernelmag.com/features/interview/2011/12/africas-bill-gates-is-angry/

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IBM Predicts Top 5 Technological Developments of Next 5 Years: Energy, Biometrics, Mind Reading, Mobile, Junk Mail - ABC News

2011-12-21T06:49:00.001-08:00

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ibm-predicts-top-technological-developments-years-energy-biometrics/story?id=15200309#all

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Message from Khan Academy- MIT is developing an online educational platform that will be open-source, largely free, and let users outside of MIT earn certificates

2011-12-19T17:20:00.001-08:00

Khan Academy:
very exciting http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N59/mitx.html

(Sent via Seesmic http://www.seesmic.com)

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NYT: Al Haymon Quietly Shakes Up Bo

2011-12-18T07:37:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/sGb0Nj

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Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D. - NYTimes.com

2011-12-17T15:04:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/young-black-and-frisked-by-the-nypd.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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NBC Chicago : The Old Gringos

2011-12-16T14:50:00.001-08:00

http://m.nbcchicago.com/nbcchicago/pm_108799/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=O4CO8pbA

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Holder to Signal Tough Stance on New Voting Laws - NYTimes.com

2011-12-13T11:28:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/us/politics/in-speech-holder-to-critique-new-voting-laws.html?partner=rss&emc=rss (sent via Shareaholic)

----

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Economic Club names Canning chairman - chicagotribune.com

2011-12-13T11:08:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-economic-club-canning-madison-dearborn-20111212,0,7101777.story

"Emanuel said that Malcolm X College would focus its classes on healthcare sciences, while Olive Harvey College would train students for work in transportation and logistics. Four more community colleges will join the program in the next two years, he said.

"Like the rest of the country, Chicago has a skills gap," the mayor said.

Emanuel said there were about 100,000 job openings in the Chicago area, where the unemployment rate is about 10 percent -- a mismatch that he said was "unconscionable."

The answer, he said was a community college program that prepares students with the skills they need to secure a job."

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City Colleges adds partners to fill job-skills gaps - Chicago Sun-Times

2011-12-12T03:43:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/uqs09H

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Warren: When Privilege Trumps Justice - Chicago News Cooperative

2011-12-11T20:06:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagonewscoop.org/warren-when-privilege-trumps-justice/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=warren-when-privilege-trumps-justice

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Chris Hayes: The Curious Case of Plan B | Crooks and Liars

2011-12-11T19:38:00.001-08:00

http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/chris-hayes-curious-case-plan-b

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NASA's latest stunning images of sun (photos) | Full Frame - CNET News

2011-12-11T18:29:00.001-08:00

http://cnet.co/vsD9Rv

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Mother of 2 develops startup business board game - chicagotribune.com

2011-12-11T08:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-mi-boardgame-detroit,0,7750723.story

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If I had a Trillion Dollars

2011-12-11T05:39:00.001-08:00

http://brianlbanks.com/if-i-had-a-trillion-dollars

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If I had a Trillion Dollars

2011-12-11T05:35:00.001-08:00

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Editorial: Preckwinkle’s excellent start - Chicago Sun-Times

2011-12-10T09:31:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/tdLf3Y

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Thousands Sterilized, North Carolina Weighs Restitution - NYTimes.com

2011-12-10T08:26:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced-sterilizations-in-north-carolina.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

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Sister Rosemary talks, politicians listen - chicagotribune.com

2011-12-10T07:55:00.001-08:00

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-schmich-1211-20111211,0,1325536.column

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Chicago Tribune - Study details societal ramifications for high school dropouts

2011-12-07T21:25:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/rXnvab

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Meet MacArthur Genius Bill Strickland on December 14, in Chicago

2011-12-06T13:33:00.001-08:00

BTC leave behind 2.docx Download this file

Kim Jackson, Executive Director, Lawndale Christian Development Corporation (lcdc.net) asked me to invite you on behalf of Alderman Michael Chandler (24th Ward), St. Anthony's Hospital and LCDC to meet with Bill Strickland, MacArthur fellow, member of President Barack Obamas' White House Council for Community Solutions, who recently lit up Chicago Ideas Week talking about how he has been rebuilding hope and reconnecting Pittsburgh's inner city to the regional economy. On December 14, Bill is meeting with key Chicago business, political and community leaders to talk about replicating his successful youth arts and technology training program, in North Lawndale, with LCDC.

Leading companies, community leaders and entrepreneurs like Pixar, Cleveland Clinic, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Jeffery Skoll, E-Bay and Participant Media; James Hackett, Steelcase; Carlton Highsmith, Paperworks and SPG; and Michael Dell, Dell Computers are working with Bill to replicate his 40 year-old Manchester Bidwell Corporation in San Francisco, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Boston, Vancouver, Grand Rapids, Austin, and New Haven, Connecticut.

MBC is a nationally accredited career training center that offers seven majors in: 1) Specialized Technology Chemical Laboratory Technician, 2) Culinary Arts, 3) eMA: Electronic Record Medical Assistant, 4) Horticulture Technology, 5) Medical Claims Processor, 6) Medical Coder Office Technology, and 7) Pharmacy Technician. These programs enjoy a 68% completion rate and 73% placement rate.

Strickland has been honored with numerous prestigious awards for his contributions to the arts and the community including the 2011, Goi Peace Prize by the Tokyo Goi Peace Foundation. In 1996, he received with the MacArthur “Genius” Award for leadership and ingenuity in the arts.

LCDC is a ministry of Lawndale Community Church, that develops affordable housing in Chicago's North Lawndale community. Since 1987, it has developed $80 million in affordable housing, provided computer training and access for residents, and engaged in community organizing with local block clubs, faith-based and community-based organizations.

Please give me a call or email for more information.

Thanks,

Brian

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"If I Had a Trillion Dollars" Westside Youth Leaders Teach-in

2011-12-06T13:28:00.001-08:00

Colleagues, attached are flyers for the December 12, 2011 youth event.

Thanks to all who have been participating in conversations about organizing a youth summit, in North Lawndale. Getting to know each of you and your organization I'm happy to be working with you to increase support for youth. This is critical because this community is part of a census area that has the highest youth unemployment and 7th highest overall unemployment, in the nation. Once the manufacturing hub for the region, North Lawndale and surrounding communities have lost 150,000 manufacturing jobs; and North Lawndale alone has lost 100,000 residents, since the early 1970s. Efforts to revitalize the community must include employment, including youth employment. To succeed in the future, our youth need more skills and education to compete with youth in a global economy that is increasingly connected by digital technology.

Many of you are training young people how to use digital technology. On December 12, 2011 we would like to invite interested youth and teachers to a "teach-in" about how public resources for youth employment, community violence and other issues of concern to youth are allocated and how youth can use their digital skills to attract more resources for these issues. The agenda:

4:00-5:15 Erin Polley, American Friends Service Committee will discuss the federal budgeting process and the 2nd annual "If I had a $Trillion" video contest whose deadline for submissions is January 15. Youth from around the country will submit short videos (3 minutes) about how they would use a trillion dollars to address youth employment, community violence and other issues of concern to youth. Winners will have the videos shown in Washington DC and will have the opportunity to meet with members of Congress to discuss their ideas.

5:15-5:30 Break
5:30-6:00pm Guest speakers from labor, universities and the community talk about how the city budget affects local schools and community
6:00-7:00 Youth discussions around what they've heard and solutions

Food (pizza, chips, soda, water) will be provided
Place:
Robert Crown Auditorium @ Family Focus, 3517 W. Arthington Street

Looking forward to working with you. The information from this teach-in will help young people participate in a meeting with State Legislators, including State Representative LaShawn Ford, who is sponsoring youth employment legislation and has asked us to join his efforts, starting with a meeting in Springfield, in late January. If you saw or heard about the "Waiting for Superman", documentary you know there is no Superman and we can't wait. Joining together to increase our skills and power; helping youth to become better advocates for themselves by learning and using digitial technology, is part of how we are going to revitalize the North Lawndale, and increase it's visibility in government and corporate offices that literally don't know where we are.

Brian

--
Brian Banks
BAC Partners
312 985-7715
brianlbanks@gmail.com

See the full gallery on Posterous

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NYT: Power in Numbers: China Aims f

2011-12-06T11:04:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/tGCP2z

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NYT: The Wonky Liberal

2011-12-06T10:14:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/umai4o

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Husky Puppy Learns To Lie Down (VIDEO)

2011-12-05T09:02:00.001-08:00

via huffingtonpost.com

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Newt Gingrich’s disgusting remarks about ‘really poor children’ - PostPartisan - The Washington Post

2011-12-01T18:29:00.001-08:00

http://wapo.st/tVpaWi

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My Man Newt

2011-11-30T12:55:00.001-08:00

Check out this website I found at nytimes.com

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NYT: The Age of the Superfluous Worker

2011-11-26T13:51:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/txDFAZ

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Remembering: Bryan Hearsey was the mastermind behind Lebanon Valley College actuarial science program | PennLive.com

2011-11-25T18:54:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/uqxGnH

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Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims Of Violent Crime

2011-11-25T18:21:00.001-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blackberry/p.html?id=1105701

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Bill McKibben, Keystone XL, and Barack Obama : The New Yorker

2011-11-23T10:54:00.001-08:00

http://m.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/11/28/111128taco_talk_mayer

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NYC Stimulus Tracker E-Newsletter - Nov 2011 Edition

2011-11-23T09:34:00.001-08:00

Stim Tracker E-Newsletter Issue 14_FINAL.pdf Download this file

You can look at types of projects federal stimulus funded in your area and associated jobs. I'm interested in how this very useful info could help your research, fundraising and advocacy.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Light, Michelle" <LightM@omb.nyc.gov>
Date: Nov 23, 2011 10:49 AM
Subject: NYC Stimulus Tracker E-Newsletter - Nov 2011 Edition
To: "Light, Michelle" <LightM@omb.nyc.gov>

Friends and Colleagues:

As you may be aware, the ninth round of stimulus data, as mandated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), was made available to the public on October 30, 2011.

The federal government, via Recovery.gov, offers a snapshot of all the contracts, grants and loans to prime and sub-recipients across the country, such as states, municipalities, non-profit organizations, businesses, hospitals, and universities.

Here in New York City, we continue to update our Stimulus Tracker website as our City continues to benefit from ARRA funds. Our goal is enhance transparency, share key statistics, and engage our citizens, so that you can see our progress with these grants. I have attached the latest edition of our Stimulus Tracker E-Newsletter, which was circulated earlier this week. You can sign up to receive these “Stimulus Tracker Updates” on our website.

In September 2011, we also launched a new Tumblr site to help tell the story of ARRA in New York City. Follow us. There will be new posts for you to check out on a weekly basis.

Hope that you find this information useful. Please feel free to share with others who may be interested. The next quarterly reporting period for all ARRA recipients begins January 1, 2012.

Enjoy a happy Thanksgiving.

Michelle

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The Charlotte Observer : Fifth-grader caught with gun in Charlotte school

2011-11-22T20:13:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/u9LJzf

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I :-) Al Sharpton's Blueberry Pie Ad - Gotcha Media

2011-11-22T18:39:00.001-08:00

http://www.gotchamediablog.com/2011/11/msnbc-al-sharptons-blueberry-pie-ad.html

I lov

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Ore. gov. halts all executions while in office – USATODAY.com

2011-11-22T16:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-11-22/oregon-execution/51355922/1

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RT from Michael Dawson The White Party - NYTimes.com

2011-11-22T15:59:00.001-08:00

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/the-white-party/

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Message from Roland Martin

2011-11-22T13:09:00.001-08:00

Roland Martin:
My house, my 65-inch TV, my satellite. You touch that remote, you're paying this month's bill. Are we crystal clear? #RolandsRules

(Sent via Seesmic http://www.seesmic.com)

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2nd Annual If I Had a Trillion Dollars (IHTD) Youth Film Festival | American Friends Service Committee

2011-11-21T12:14:00.001-08:00

http://www.afsc.org/resource/2nd-annual-if-i-had-trillion-dollars-ihtd-youth-video-festival

I'm working in a census area that has the highest youth unemployment and 7th highest overall unemployment, in the nation, according to the Chicago Reporter. Any suggestions for how a trillion could help communities like this?

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“Stick Together” Obama Tells Black Misleadership Class At White House Conference | Black Agenda Report

2011-11-21T10:53:00.001-08:00

http://blackagendareport.com/content/%E2%80%9Cstick-together%E2%80%9D-obama-tells-black-misleadership-class-white-house-conference

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Emanuel Reflects On Time With Clinton, Obama White Houses « CBS Chicago

2011-11-21T08:47:00.001-08:00

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/11/20/emanuel-reflects-on-time-with-clinton-obama-white-houses/

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Daley nephew was biggest guy at Koschman scene — but not lineup - Chicago Sun-Times

2011-11-21T06:23:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/vTzbo8

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Apps for Metro Chicago News from MCIC

2011-11-21T06:05:00.001-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Metro Chicago Information Center" <kauerbach@mcic.org>
Date: Nov 21, 2011 4:32 AM
Subject: Apps for Metro Chicago News from MCIC
To: <brianlbanks@ameritech.net>

Having trouble viewing this email? Click here

Metro Chicago Information Center

In This Issue

Sustain Apps

Inspiring Technology

Energizing Developers

New Crime Data

Building Community

Important Links

New Special Awards

More About A4MC

Donate to MCIC!

Sustain Apps

Help MCIC continue with open data and civic apps initiatives! Invest in Chicago's tech start up company, help us build long term bonds between developers and community organizations, and support open data.

Donate today and sustain Apps!

Civic Cultivator, Connector & Curator :
MCIC & Apps 4 Metro Chicago IL-
Past Present & Future

Launched in June of 2011, Apps for Metro Chicago Illinois (A4MC) is a competition designed and facilitated by Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC). Its mission is to inspire the development of software applications that benefit Metro Chicagoans.

But A4MC is unlike any other apps competition. MCIC has taken the unique role of fostering relationships between civic organizations, Chicago residents and apps developers. Through A4MC, MCIC has been instrumental in helping developers and start ups, creating bonds between community organizations and technological experts, and pushing for greater availability of public data.

Now in the Grand Challenge, the third and final round of the competition, draws to a close,the Competition has already created collaborations and applications whose depth, dimension and potential have surpassed not only previous open data civic app efforts but also MCIC and the A4MC Team's own expectations!! However, your help is critical to enuring these groundbreaking advances in community innovation continue beyond the Competition! Click here to donate and help MCIC continue with its open data and civic apps initiatives.

Read on to learn more about A4MC's successes.

Community Finalist IFindit Chicago's Story

A4MC Creating Inspirational Technology

"It's not technology at the core; it's people," says Elizabeth Park, the newbie Android developer whose app won first prize in A4MC's community round.

Park's app, iFindIt Chicago, is an android app that is designed to help low income and homeless residents connect with critical resources such as medical clinics, food pantries, and shelters. Park was inspired to put together the app and make a team after hearing Apps for Metro Chicgao Illinois speak at Tech Week.

A vital part of that team was Matt Peron, treasurer of the IL Hunger Coalition. Together, Park and Peron were part of an MCIC-facilitated collaboration for the Community round of the Apps for Metro Chicago competition. A4MC has aimed to bridge the tech and nonprofit communities, and Park's and Peron's relationship shows how these two groups of people, with their entirely different vocabularies, talk to one another.

Park and Peron designed a project beyond what either of them originally had in mind, and brought their strengths to bear on the award-winning app. Peron understood the population, and Park saw the difficulties in the data. Together they made something that Peron correctly predicted has "all reason to be a huge success."

Watch the video to hear Park talk more about creating her team and building iFindIt Chicago.

Check out the award winning iFindIt Chicago app here.

Apps 4 Metro Chicago IL Rd 1 Winner Spot Hero- Secrets to Success

A4MC Energizes Chicago's Developer Community

One of A4MC's goals has been to energize Chicago's growing tech and development company. In this video, Jeremy, developer of SpotHero, talks about how winning first place in the Transportation Round of A4MC has helped him with his app and business and gives advice to future finalists.

A4MC Makes Use of Ten Years of City Crime Data

Over the course of A4MC competition, MCIC's partners have released over 250 data sets. Recently, the City of Chicago released 10 years of crime data as part of an unprecedented open data initiative. To show what this date can be used for, MCIC and Rutter Design collaborated to create the Chicago Motor Vehicle Visualization, a visual demonstration of a time series analysis of reported motor vehicle theft throughout Chicago.

"This type of data is in very high demand from community organizations, and this will forever change lives of the people working in neighborhoods to combat crime because they can target interventions in ways they couldn't before, down to the block and down to the individual crime" said MCIC's President Virginia Carlson.

MCIC and Rutter Design hope their auto theft visualization example will help Chicago residents begin to understand invaluable program and advocacy resource provided by the City of Chicago's Data Portal.

Check out the motor theft crime data visualization!

Developing Smarts Team up with Environmental Justice

MiParque is a bilingual participatory placemaking web and smartphone application that helps residents of the community contribute and share their vision for the future of Little Village's new park. It encourages community involvement and was created by an all women team in collaboration with the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO).

MiParque won second prize and the MPC placemaking prize in round 2. They donated all $5,500 of their winnings to their community partner LVEJO.

Watch the video to hear more from the developers. And check out this link to learn more about the app and Little Village's fight for a park.

A4MC is only one of many exciting projects conducted by MCIC. Founded in 1990, The Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC) is a nonprofit (501C(3))research, consulting and information resource that is deeply rooted in the community. Our mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate valuable data. Our partners are philanthropic organizations, businesses, civic institutions, local governments, and national agencies and our work extends across a broad range of issues. The breadth and depth of our experience leads us to creative solutions in data sourcing, preparation, and visualization. We give individuals and institutions digestible and useful information that empowers them to make informed individual, agency and social policy decisions. Simply put: We turn data into action.

Sincerely,

Kathryn Auerbach
Metro Chicago Information Center

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Message from Joe Lake

2011-11-20T16:20:00.001-08:00

Joe Lake:

(Sent via Seesmic http://www.seesmic.com)

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Recession hitting young men hardest: 1 in 5 now back at home - Chicago Sun-Times

2011-11-20T15:07:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/trcK2b

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Oprah Winfrey Network Orders More Episodes of "Welcome To Sweetie Pie's"

2011-11-20T07:25:00.001-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "William Massey" <wmassey@princeton.edu>
Date: Nov 20, 2011 12:53 AM
Subject: Oprah Winfrey Network Orders More Episodes of "Welcome To Sweetie Pies"

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/oprah-winfrey-network-orders-more-episodes-of-welcome-to-sweetie-pies

SAY WHAT? OWN finally has a hit show? I'm referring to their reality program "Welcome to Sweetie Pie's" and being grateful, the network has ordered an addtional 10 more episodes of the show, bringing the total to 18 episodes to date. The new episodes start shooting next month to air in the spring.

The show follows the lives, loves and struggles of Robbie Montgomery and her family, who run the well knownSweetie Pie's soul food restaurant in St. Louis. The network claims that the show "made ratings waves," up73 percent from a year earlier, and the most recent episode was the high rated show ever.

According to Sheri Salata, co-president of OWN: "We've all fallen in love with the Montgomery family. You never know what they'll do or say next. We couldn't be more pleased viewers are tuning in to enjoy all the fun."

Just goes to show what people have been saying all along - just put some black people on OWN and watch viewers tune in.

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