Spare Change News

Author: Noelle Swan

  • The Costs of Coal

    Camilo Viviero grew up in Somerset, Mass., in the shadow of two coal-fired power plants. “For years growing up, you would hear around midnight this air horn. That’s when they would send out the plumes of toxins. In the middle of the night, while we were sleeping,” he says. One of those plants was decommissioned…

  • Chronic National Shortage of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists Takes Heaviest Toll on Low Income Families

    “I don’t know exactly what happened to drive that young man in Aurora to shoot those people, but I do know that many people like him suffer while undiagnosed and untreated,” said Jess Shatkin, an associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University. July 20 marks one year since James Eagan Holmes…

  • Risky Business: Turning to Sex for Survival

    When Travis turned his first trick, he still had an apartment in Roslindale and a job as a retail clerk. He was doing “well enough” financially until January 2010, when his shifts were cut to just five hours per week. His housemate helped him pay his rent for as long as she could. He looked…

  • Urban College of Boston Offers Hope to Some Unlikely Students

    BOSTON, Massachusetts—When Cecelia Young enrolled in her first course at Urban College of Boston (UBC), she didn’t know who would watch her youngest son while she was in class. Young was homeless at the time. Each night, she had been piling her 12- and 15-year-old boys into the car and driving to a friend or…

  • Are Female Veterans Being Left Out In The Cold?

    After leaving the U.S. Air Force, Staff Sergeant Barbara Barnes spent years living in fear of stray shadows and sudden noises that could trigger flashbacks to trauma from her days of military service. Barnes never served abroad or saw combat. She served as an administrative officer from 1984 to 1990, processing legal documents on military…

  • Earth's Evangelist: Bill McKibben

    “Poor people are not something that we talk about too much or pay much attention to in our world,” Bill McKibben said, sipping a glass of sparkling water to nurse a throat hoarse from a weekend of meetings and rallies. McKibben knows something about poverty. In the early 1980s he helped to start a 15-bed…

  • Where Waste Meets Want

    The first time Ashley Stanley walked into the back room of her local grocery store in search of discarded food, she found towers of eggplants, tomatoes, and potatoes rising up around her. The produce was not spoiled or rotten; it simply no longer fit on the display shelves and had been moved off the floor…

  • Strike Up the Chorus

    “Who wants to read a poem?” Saul Williams asked the audience. The crowd gathered at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston, Mass., was small, just a couple hundred people, but it appeared to be made up of devout fans. Many people clutched dog-eared copies of Williams’ books of poetry to their chests. The audience froze…

  • Young Adult Unemployment Rate at 12.7 Percent in August

    GENERATION OPPORTUNITY New Poll Shows Millennials Continue to Alter Daily Life and Future Plans Due to High Unemployment and Poor Economy Generation Opportunity encourages young Americans to call the White House and demand an end to policies that limit opportunities forcing delayed dreams and plans for the future through no fault of their own Washington,…

  • Empty Condos Hold Opportunity in U.S. Housing Crunch

    Matthew Cardinale IPS Large cities like New York and Chicago, which have been grappling with a lack of affordable apartments combined with an abundance of vacant, unaffordable condos, are now trying to turn some of those empty condo units into rentals, with varying levels of affordability. Recent changes in the U.S. economy and the housing…