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    Volunteers Build Beds for Homeless People at Boston Latin

    Hundreds came out in single digit weather to attend the 13th annual Boston Cares’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, held at the Boston Latin School for the third year in a row, on Monday, Jan. 21. Among them were many news faces who took to various service programs throughout the school, which included…

    Uninsured Rate Up 50 Percent for Massachusetts’ Children

    Across the country, the number of children without health insurance rose in 2017 for the first time in eight years, according to a new report from the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. The research found no state made progress to get more children insured between 2016 and 2017, including Massachusetts. The Commonwealth saw…

    Volunteers Build Beds for Homeless People at Boston Latin

    Hundreds came out in single digit weather to attend the 13th annual Boston Cares’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, held at the Boston Latin School for the third year in a row, on Monday, Jan. 21. Among them were many news faces who took to various service programs throughout the school, which included…

    The True Cost of Food

    How much would you expect to pay for the most basic plate of food? The kind of thing you might whip up at home – nothing fancy, just enough to fill you up and meet a third of today’s calorie needs. A soup, maybe, or a simple stew – some beans or lentils, a handful…

    Volunteers Build Beds for Homeless People at Boston Latin

    Hundreds came out in single digit weather to attend the 13th annual Boston Cares’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, held at the Boston Latin School for the third year in a row, on Monday, Jan. 21. Among them were many news faces who took to various service programs throughout the school, which included…

    Photo: Zengzheng Wang

    Boston sees continued success housing the homeless, but still more work to do

    Mayor Marty Walsh at the 2014 opening of Southampton Street Shelter. Photo: Zengzheng Wang. On Thursday, Boston officials announced that their push to end chronic individual homelessness has resulted in housing 301 individuals since the start of 2016. This is in addition to the 846 veterans they have housed since 2015. The new numbers reflect…

    Federal workers protest government shutdown

    Senator Ed Markey gives a speech about standing with the people to end the shutdown. Dozens of federal employees rallied at Boston’s Post Office Square in protest of the government shutdown on Friday Jan. 11,  the first day that thousands of federal workers did not receive their paychecks. In December, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously…

    Horace Seldon: Fighting Injustice, Celebrating Civil Disobedience

    Horace Seldon was happily lying on his back, waving his hands and feet in the air the first time Shay Stewart-Bouley saw him. Shay was just starting out as Executive Director of Community Change, Inc., the anti-racism non-profit Horace founded in 1968, and she was at the organization’s forty-fifth anniversary party. It also happened to…

    Arts & Culture

    Bill Murray chats about his late-career dive into music

    Bill Murray and Jan Vogler Bill Murray is on the road. Calling from Charlotte, North Carolina, where it’s well after midnight, he and classical cellist Jan Vogler are winding down after a performance on their unusual tour, which sees the famously quirky movie star singing – yes, singing – and reciting literature with a chamber…

    ‘Friends’ Star Inspired to Action by Friend’s Homelessness

    David Schwimmer, former star of “Friends,” turned his artistic talent to telling stories that highlight the struggle of homeless people after discovering that his friend had been living on Skid Row, hiding his homelessness even from those who knew him best. Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons “I had a friend who was homeless for two…

    She’s the Boss: Alyssa Milano Talks #Metoo, Acting, and Mental Health

    Photo – Wiki Media Commons Alyssa Milano used her celebrity for good when a Tweet she sent last October helped bring attention to Tarana Burke’s #MeToo campaign, transforming it into a global social media movement. She was also a vocal opponent to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. But the actor has been…

    Columns

    Fifteen-Year-Old Activist Tells Humanity to Step Up

    The temperature is soaring. In the Northeast, water tables are going crazy from all the rain we’ve had. The sun, like a malevolent eye, glows hot in a hazy sky as the world’s thermometer climbs; mercury like spinal fluid rising, rising, then bursting through our heads, our brains exploding under pressure. Humans pack the city…

    Bizarre Boston: Raising Hell at Harvard

    When I think about college students raising hell, I picture kegs of beer, red plastic Solo cups and loud music. Oh, and maybe a beer funnel or two. In my mind, the phrase “raising hell” is just a metaphor for having a wild time. However, maybe it’s not always just a metaphor. For some Harvard…

    Letter From Utuado, Puerto Rico

    You once said “My reward for this life will be a thousand pounds of dirt shoveled in my face.” You were wrong.   You are seven pounds of ashes in a box; a Puerto Rican flag wrapped around you next to a red brick from the house in Utuado where you were born, all crammed…

    LAST WORD: Christina Sukghian Houle

    About a month ago, an artist called Christina Sukhgian Houle dropped into the Spare Change News’ headquarters to meet with some of the vendors. Christina has joined forces with the newspaper’s co-founder, James Shearer, with the goal of making a documentary on homelessness in the Boston area. Christina is a relatively recent transplant to Greater…

    Fifteen-Year-Old Activist Tells Humanity to Step Up

    The temperature is soaring. In the Northeast, water tables are going crazy from all the rain we’ve had. The sun, like a malevolent eye, glows hot in a hazy sky as the world’s thermometer climbs; mercury like spinal fluid rising, rising, then bursting through our heads, our brains exploding under pressure. Humans pack the city…

    Vendor Fred Boykin: Life in Dorchester, life with cancer

    This is for all the victims of the world, all the people like me: we were not born with cancer, but it still chose us. You can be young or old, it still picks you. I had lung cancer at first, at the end of 2015. The hospital, Boston Medical Center, wanted to take a…

    The Avoidable Crisis

    Stanley Forman: 40 Years After the Soiling of Old Glory

    The photo was chilling. Before a crowd of onlookers, a white man appears to be attempting to stab a black man with the tip of a flagpole. “It really showed racism,” said photographer Stanley Forman 40 years after he took the Pulitzer Prize-winning snapshot of an anti-busing protest that had turned violent. “It was whites…

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