How one Mansfield church offers friendship and support to the unhoused

Assertive community treatment teams working through outreach-centered programs in Maricopa County have become an industry standard for treating those with persistent and severe mental illnesses who have recently been incarcerated. They provide a long-term approach, aiming to halt a cycle of incarceration and hospitalization by focusing on underlying issues such as what caused the police interaction and incarceration.

The United States has rising childhood obesity and schools deal with kids who are picky. Through innovative school gardens and kid taste testing food, entrepreneurs across the nation are getting children to eat vegetables at school and love it.

Activists in Berkeley, California, are filling in what they say is a gap in homeless services during the coronavirus outbreak. Volunteers are safely delivering food and other supplies to those without shelter.

As an alternative to traditional courts, community courts provide resources to those experiencing homelessness. Fines and jail time are often the punishment in traditional courts for those charged with trespassing or loitering, but community courts provide services that help people find housing, jobs, health care, and even offer mobile showers, food stamp assistance, and mental health care. While the long-term data are lacking and don't offer a clear picture of recidivism rates, community courts do provide a better quality of life for those living on the streets.

The New Leaf project ran a controlled trial to test the power of direct cash transfers with people experiencing homelessness. Fifty people were given a one-time cash payment of $7,500, which roughly equaled the sum of government income assistance spread out across the year. The impact was measured over 12 months and found that people in the cash group moved into stable housing faster, spent fewer days homeless, and saved more money. The organization found the lump sum, rather than monthly increments, allowed people to make decisions about how they could move their lives forward aimed at stabilization.

The Women’s Collective is a nonprofit that works with more than 10,000 subsistence farmers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to promote food security using millets, a crop resilient to drought and climate change. For Pavitra, one of those farmers, she began cultivating the ancient grains in 2015 and now has more than enough food to feed her family year-round. However, there’s a lack of public investment in millet production and machinery. And there’s no unified effort to create demand for millets: Some state governments lead the charge and in other states, it’s led by grassroots organizations.

After years of drought and land-clearing that left Niger with few trees left, the country now boasts about 200 million trees, which have mostly been reestablished naturally. While the effects of climate change could threaten the future of these trees, this method has also increased crop yields in villages. This model of letting trees grow back with little human influence could be implemented in other countries.

Want to help fight food insecurity? There’s an app for that. Food Rescue Hero helps connect extra food with those who need it. Volunteers use the app to see if any food is available and when it is, they pickup and deliver the donation to a pre-approved recipient, all through the app.

A Mumbai school located in a remodeled shipping container meets kids on the street where they are at. Signal School results from a collaborative effort between the city and a non-profit, and focuses on bringing education to migrant children, so that they are less likely to be forced into child labor or street begging. Signal School does more than just teach, it also provides meals, works with families to change the cultural perspective that education is an amenity for the privileged, and helps migrant families find permanent housing.

Cornerstone Baptist Church is spearheading the redevelopment of Struggs’ Cornerstone Heights Neighborhood. In 2019, the church opened a laundromat and bike shop and last year the Cornerstone Community Kitchen began serving free hot meals to locals experiencing homelessness. The Church is soon launching a community market where local residents can access fresh, affordable food.