Using a Mobile Phone Survey to Investigate South Sudan's Conflict

In Prince George's County School system, two schools have offered international schools, which have a different curriculum for immigrants new to the USA. This has caused complaints and difficulties with the other students, the after school band program has helped bring the two groups together to socialize and form friendships.

Since July 2019, New Zealand has held gun buybacks across the country and collected over 10,000 firearms. After a mass shooting at Christchurch mosque, the government rushed through legislation to ban semi-automatic and automatic firearms, offering owners of such weapons cash and a no-questions-asked policy. Such legislation has been implemented in other countries as well, including Australia, who in 1996 collected over 600,000 weapons.

In 2017, German newsroom Suddeutsche Zeitung began reporting election polling numbers in such a way that the uncertainty of the poll—caused by a limited sample size or respondents lying to pollsters—was visualized in the reporting. Through this method, information is conveyed to readers but in such a way that doesn’t erase uncertainty and doubt about the results.

Readers on the BBC website can now find out more about select stories through “Appy Helper,” a module that provides background about an ongoing, complex story. The module works through both a chat-style interface that readers navigate via prompts or a more linear timeline display.

Sheroes’ Hangout is a cafe entirely run by acid attack survivors in Agra, India. Acid attacks are unfortunately still prevalent worldwide, usually as a result of a woman turning down a man's advances, but punishment for committing these crimes is still lackadaisical. This cafe, founded in 2006 by an activist organization called Stop Acid Attacks, allows women to not cover their faces, talk openly about their attacks, and just be comfortable with themselves.

LGBTQ asylum seekers face a unique set of problems coming to the United States, often from places where gender expression and sexuality are strictly regulated. Four organizations across the US, Mexico, and Canada are filling this unique niche. For example, AsylumConnect created an app of resources on how to apply for asylum and a catalogue of LGBTQ-friendly services and organizations in the US for them to learn about. All four aim to validate LGBTQ asylum seekers and keep them safe.

Getting away from daily publishing helps local newspapers focus on serving their audience. The Quoddy Tides, a family-owned newspaper in Eastport, Maine, publishes only twice monthly. Publishing less frequently allows the newspaper to include more local stories, which are of interest to their community of readers, many of whom either live in, or have ties to the community. By avoiding the 24-hour news cycle, the newspaper can focus on local discourse and civic engagement.

Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee created a special show for displaced Syrian children conducted entirely in Arabic. The show teaches children lessons like counting and the alphabet, but it also teaches them emotional coping skills, which is very important for refugee children. The show is accompanied by trained early childhood development facilitators who visit homes and interact with the children playing games or reading books.

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.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a white mob killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed the thriving neighborhood of Greenwood, the Centennial Commission supported a number of initiatives to learn from the past and build a better future. At the base of an ancient elm tree that witnessed the massacre, Up With Trees distributed 100 elm seedlings to children to plant around Tulsa. The commission convinced state education officials to develop a new curriculum on the massacre for K-12 students.