If you die early, how will your children remember you?

One in six boys in the United States has experienced sexual abuse before turning 18. With few recovery options in real life, more of them are going online for support.

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.

To address the food insecurity problem among its low-income students, Columbia University launched Swipes, a meal sharing app in which students with a surplus of “meal swipes” could donate them to students in need. But when that app struggled to function and roll out properly, Columbia looked downtown to New York University, where student Jon Chin launched a similarly purposed but more effectively designed app, Share Meals. So far, the app has enabled over a thousand meal donations, and is hoping to work with Columbia to share its code and expand its donor services.

Though homelessness is an entrenched and complex problem, small solutions can make a difference in the daily life of homeless individuals. Lockers for overnight cell phone storage in a homeless shelter in Chicago are significant: people can wake up with a sense of security, knowing their phones will be available to help find jobs or stay in touch with loved ones. This is part of the Chicago Youth Storage Initiative, which as since funded 755 storage unites at homeless shelters across Chicago.

Based out of the city of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, a live radio show is tackling the stigma around mental health care by combining their platform with those in the mental health care field. Not only does the radio show discuss psychological issues on air, but it also offers free and reduced-cost mental health services to those that serve as guests on the show.

Crime-tracking mobile apps give millions of Brazilians crowdsourced data on urban violence, alerting people to dangerous places and filling gaps in government data on shootings, robberies, and other risks. But apps such as Fogo Cruzado (“Crossfire”) and Onde Tem Tiroteio (“Where There's a Shooting”) offer statistically crude glimpses of crime, distorted by media and racial biases that one expert blames for myths about the risks people actually face.

An initiative on the Moscow metro system has posters on the train featuring cats and dogs that are looking for a home. Known as the “Tails and Paws” train, these animals come from 13 animal shelters in the city and riders can use their phone to scan the poster to learn more about the animals up for adoption. “It’s about forming a new culture of responsible attitude to animals,” says one of the workers at a shelter.

Two insurance companies, Discovery and Dialdirect, implemented a smartphone app for drivers to report potholes in their city. The companies then fill the potholes and brand them with their logos.

The Save the Boys Initiative provides counseling, group and family therapy, programming around mentorship and leadership, and other forms of assistance for boys who have experienced sexual abuse.

The Mental Health Intervention Team at Salina Public Schools makes mental health care more accessible by using grant money to hire school liaisons to assist and provide mental health services to students at school. Within the 2022-2023 academic year alone, 635 students were served and 76% of them improved their school attendance, while 65% saw improvement in their academic performance.