Blog
Delivering Meaningful Impact with For-Profit Social Enterprise
Follow @MekaeliaD Up until last year, I was President & COO of the apparel company, American MoJo, a for-profit social enterprise (FPSE) based in Lowell, Massachusetts. My brothers and I co-founded the business in 2010 to provide mobility opportunities to single mothers in the US. We were raised by a single mother and were very…
Giving Voice to Young Children
Follow @MekaeliaD I remember watching “Kids Say The Darnest Things” with my mother and enjoying fits of laughter as young children had ‘serious’ conversations with Bill Cosby. The television show created a space for my mother and me to talk about anything, as the candor of young children gave me the will power to…
Living on the Smallest Paychecks: An Ascend Analysis
Follow @SarahCHaight Can you live on the minimum wage? The New York Times recently posed this question on its website, noting that more than 4.8 million workers now earn the lowest legal pay. The Times presented a calculator for a single childless worker, showing the hard choices that have to be made living on the…
Six Word Essays: Are You Up to the Challenge?
Is it possible to encapsulate a hope, a feeling, a story in a mere six words? Inspired by Six-Word Memoirs from SMITH Magazine, the Early Childhood Colorado Partnership took the challenge. In six words, partners described what it would take to buffer the impact of toxic stress in the earliest years. The essays were incorporated at…
Turning Strengths Into Stories
Follow @SarahCHaight Above, National Crittenton Foundation President Jeannette Pai-Espinosa at a 2013 conference on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Last month, I participated in a convening co-hosted by the National Crittenton Foundation (TNCF) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focused on generating solutions for marginalized young American women. “Fostering Girls’ Strengths,” the meeting’s title, is an…
You’ve Got Chocolate in My Peanut Butter!
Remember that old commercial, “You’ve got chocolate in my peanut butter! You’ve got peanut butter in my chocolate?” Put aside the unlikely ways peanut butter and chocolate “got into” each other in those 1980s ads, and the gist was clear: two great things are even better together. That’s what two-generation strategies are all about. Recently,…