Tag Archives: ProjectDoBetter

US Health Care Policy is Humiliating: We Can Really Do Better

       We could Do Better if we cared.  This is why Public health care is a key part of Phase I of #ProjectDoBetter:

Many people don’t know that we are in a maternal and infant health crisis in… Our country is currently the least safe to give birth and be born in among industrialized countries, and…not having access to high-quality maternity care…

(from NPR By Rachel Treisman…)

     While these are difficult problems to solve, maternal health care and the long held biases that lead to these outcomes, the problems can be solved.  But, working together across issue interest divides to connect all of our work together is crucial:
  cropped-dobettercover.jpg
     We really can Do Better

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Thoughtful Readers, share your ideas for health care solutions, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment here, that uses those thoughts.

*****************

Click here for:

Learning through story:

                                                   Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin,  La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews

Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about Phase I of #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Climate Change Policy: Brookings is Right, We CAN Do Better

     Reparations in various forms can address climate change and the needed cultural changes which must come before and during these redressments.   This is precisely what Project Do Better advocates, particularly during Phases II and III, although communities may opt to edit their editions of the Do Better manual, freely available in editable form from me, to start that phase of the Project sooner.  Any community may decide to update their own Project Do Better community manual,  as distinct and derived from the current #ProjectDoBetter manual, which  starts by emphasizing free forms of intensive community and self-education, in Phase I, before emphasizing greater housing, reparations, and land-related advocacy in Phase II:

A reparative stance for climate change policy begins with granting reparations for Black Americans and advancing land reclamation for Native Americans as a moral responsibility to minimize climate change impacts for the most vulnerable…”

ManannanAD and Perry

(from The Brookings Institute …)

     While not all of our problems can be fixed immediately, education and collaborative advocacy are the common denominators for solving them,  and working together across issue interest divides to connect all of our work together is crucial:
  cropped-dobettercover.jpg
     We really can Do Better

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Thoughtful Readers, share your ideas for long term climate change related solutions, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment here, that uses those thoughts.

*****************

Click here for:

Learning through story:

                                                   Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin,  La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews

Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Black Maternal Health: We Could Do Better if We CAREd…

     This is why Project Do Better starts by emphasizing public health care and self-education for advocacy, starting now, in Phase I:

“Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications compared to white women.”

(from NPR’s April Dembosky, and others at NPR, several times since October…)

And it’s preventable…
       While not all of our problems can be fixed immediately, education is the common denominator for solving them, which is why independent and learner-led education forms the bedrock of Project Do Better’s Public Health Care advocacy:
cropped-dobettercover.jpg
starting in Phase I, particularly via the free Holistic High School and college algebra lesson plans linked below, and then becoming even more personalized during Phase II.  Health care, education, and other key infrastructure issues all come to bear on one another in an interconnected way.
povertyhealth
     We really can Do Better

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Dear Readers, share your thoughts on long term problem-solving solutions, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts.

*****************

Click here for:

Learning through story:

                                                   Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin,  La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews

Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Repost of Day 54/67: Five Month GED, Equations of a Line, Bee lines — Project Do Better, Phase I

So, why do you think that equations of a straight line, aka linear equations, may be related to bees, transportation, (especially Public Transportation) and bee lines?  And why do they call it a bee line, when bees never seem to move in a straight line, or do they?  Today’s reading comes from a well-known source that is citing […]

Day 54/67: Five Month GED, Equations of a Line, and Making a Bee line to Save The Bees — Context, Critical Thinking, Continuous Learning: Project Do Better

Financial Self-defense Saturdays Repost & Service Adulthood: Project Do Better Phase II

Adults are expected to be able to take care of themselves, and to accept responsibilities that we associate with adulthood. #ProjectDoBetter has updated some of these proposals on Adulthood: What do you think?  One of these responsibilities is voting, which is meant to give each citizen a voice on decision-making for the common good.  Another such responsibility is financial self-defense, and of course, paying one’s bills, avoiding scams, and honoring contracts, including the […]

Thoughtful Thursdays, emotional and financial self-defense, and Phase II: Adulthood — Context, Critical Thinking, Continuous Learning: Project Do Better

Housing Policy: We Can Do Better

     This is why Project Do Better starts by emphasizing free forms of intensive community and self-education, in Phase I:

“In 2020, the federal government spent more than $193 billion on subsidies for homeowners — “most families who enjoy this benefit have six-figure incomes and are white” — but just $53 billion on direct housing assistance for low-income families. That’s not for lack of need. Because of chronic federal underinvestment, only 1 in 4 extremely low-income Americans who qualify for housing aid get it.”

(from NPR, this morning…)

     While not all of our problems can be fixed immediately, education is the common denominator for solving them, which is why independent and learner-led education forms the bedrock of Project Do Better’s  cropped-dobettercover.jpg
starting in Phase I, particularly via the free Holistic High School and college algebra lesson plans linked below, and then becoming even more personalized during Phase II.
Featured Image -- 22025
     We really can Do Better

Shira

Action Items:

1.) Dear Readers, share your thoughts on long term problem-solving solutions, please.

2.) Write a story, post or comment that uses those thoughts.

*****************

Click here for:

Learning through story:

                                                   Babylon5, Hakan: Muhafiz/The Protector, Sihirli AnnemLupin,  La Casa de Papel/Money Heist, or El Ministerio del Tiempo Reviews

Learning via Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.  This work is my personal way (as opposed to founding the Project, overall) of contributing to building tools that can help increase empathy and compassion in our world.  Story, as part of how we see our world, helps us make sense of and define our actions in this world.  And remember how important story is also as part of this project. Let’s Do Better.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

ShiraDest

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Repost of Day 53/67: Five Month GED, The Water Cycle, and Adulting —Phase II of Project Do Better

So, as citizens of a republic, why do you think that the water cycle may be related to Adulting? ProjectDoBetter proposes a free long term plan…  Middle of week 14/18 Day 53, Week 14 Grammar: Prepositional Phrases review Math: Combining like terms review Science and history: Who were the Anasazi, and what was their relationship with water? Please see the Lesson plan […]

Day 53/67: Five Month GED, The Water Cycle, and Adulting — Context, Critical Thinking, Continuous Learning: Project Do Better

SoL Saturdays Update, Context, PTSD, Homelessness & Debt: Project Do Better

What we still need our children to prove, for recognition of Service Adulthood (Phase II of Project Do Better…), is not their prowess in battle or the hunt, not their virility, not their adeptness at social maneuvering, but their ability to contribute meaningfully to society by teaching another person, from level 0, how to do something that is both difficult and absolutely necessary in our society today. By requiring our pre-adults to teach some other person a needed life skill, over the course of at least a year, that pre-adult shows persistence, perseverance, discernment, and of course, the skill in question.

Thus we provide an esteem building exercise and respect building accomplishment which we then reward with full adult status, whatever the age of the pre-adult in question. This obviously assumes that the person has had opportunity to prove his or her good judgement in other ways as well, prior to seeking adulthood recognition. This might help as one step of a series of steps implemented by and through local communities which could lead to more long-term thinking in society at large, given a critical mass and good faith in the ability of humankind to rise above our instincts, and learn to cooperate.  Certain pre-requisites should apply: knowledge of emotional, financial and physical self-defense.

Tying into emotional challenges like PTSD, pre-adults must learn how to communicate non-violently, manage their own emotions and prevent emotional manipulation, which eases the recognition and treatment of difficult past traumatic disorders.   Homelessness and debt both relate to issues of financial self-defense, by which I mean the ability not only to balance a check book and write up a home budget, but also to avoid falling victim to scams of all sorts, as well as the ability to plan for long-range problems like job-loss, or illness, etc.
Hence the post I mentioned developing the idea of an Adulthood Rite of Passage:

 

Then the prerequisites which are essentially being able to defend oneself physically, financially, and emotionally:

 

(A useful side effect of this idea is that it would effectively increase the number of available tutors, and also lead to every adult in our society coming away with an understanding of the challenges involved in teaching anyone anything non-trivial.)

ShiraDest
May 7th, 12017 HE  cropped-dobettercover.jpg  

1.1.12018 update:  and scans of my long-term project (The Adulthood Challenge project) to build a movement in 4 parts toward Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms…) replaced with above link to Project Do Better book (free downloads in multiple formats).   Here is some of how I conceptualized Phase II, the Service Adulthood Challenge:    ConceptualizingAdulthoodChlg  

 

 

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Click here to read about:

Learning Empathy Through Film and TV Reviews,

Independent or Classroom Learning via Holistic High School and College Algebra Lesson Plans,

           or Learning With Long Range Plans, & Historical Fiction Serial Writing

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BsCs

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Repost of Day 52/67: Five Month GED, Water, and Public Health for Project Do Better

So, how would you figure out how much water is currently in your local aquifer, say, if you live in Albuquerque, New Mexico?  So, what does ground water have to do with all of our health, and why do we need to understand this, as citizens of a republic? #ProjectDoBetter works to explain, and share, in the  Middle of week 14/18 Lesson Plan […]

Day 52/67: Five Month GED, Water, and Health — Inspiring Critical Thinking and Community via Books, Lessons, and Story

Updated Adult Goals and SoL Saturdays: Bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps

I still have a vision, for which many have called me a hopeless dreamer, of one possible way our society could look, maybe in 70 years, or maybe even sooner, DoBetterCover  if we all wanted it to happen.  It involves four main phases, broken down into smaller goals, with the ultimate hope being to build a world as safe and free for creative human endeavor as possible.  For every human being on this planet.  This post is mostly about a small part of Phase I, but other posts have begun, and will continue, to explain the remaining phases and the overall idea.  (

We begin our Statues of Limitations Saturdays with this early post outlining the idea of ‘Financial Self-Defense’ here, which became part of #ProjectDoBetter’s Phase I section: Public Financial Knowledge Infrastructure  statutes-of-limitations
S. Destinie

)

The first phase involves building empathy, and bringing each one of us to see each one of our fellow human beings as … a human being.  Each one meriting humane treatment, and human dignity.

That empathy building phase was Phase 0 (yes, I’m a computer scientist by first training, so I start with 0…).  Phase I is meant to go from the years 2015 to 2030, building a movement to strengthen some of our most crucial and obviously key pieces of our social infrastructure, which are in the public domain.  During this period, one of the ways that we can both build conceptual support and also literally build our physical infrastructure that needs support, is by borrowing an idea from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which worked during the Great Depression to create jobs while educating young (white) men at the same time.  What we want to do now, is to educate, facilitate service, and build a community-service frame of reference, while also upgrading our public infrastructure, just as FDR did in the 1930’s via his program.

Bringing back an updated version of FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), or Roosevelt’s Tree Army, as it was popularly known, could provide a stepping stone between the empathy-building work that must always be on-going, and the support-building work of bringing our society to a consensus on the needed support for the most basic of our public social infrastructure institutions, like Public Libraries, Public Transportation, Public Education (especially in the financial and legal areas, where so many consumers fall prey to financial predators, and end up in debt due to lack of knowledge), and Public Health.  These four systems under gird our entire societal structure, and need support perhaps the most urgently, in return for which we potentially get the most payback for all members of society.  While we do the difficult work of building the necessary consensus to get there from here, a simpler step might be to bring back some form of the CCC, updated to be far more inclusive, and used as both a means of providing employment to young people, and also to educate them, much like the Gap Year in Europe.  But instead of having our new high school graduates backpack around the country, they could be sent to work in urban public library branches, light-rail and subway/Metro stations, local urban public schools, or inner city health clinics.  As they rotate from one part of the country to another, say, monthly, they learn first-hand of the conditions in places they are not from and have not lived, while serving communities they have never met, working alongside peers from different walks of life, and seeing a side of their native land that they did not grow up with.  In short, learning the realities, and different perspectives, of this large and diverse nation of ours.

The rest of the ideas are here, with a warning that they will be rearranged and better explained in future posts: (My hope, in 2014, was that the precautions/programs described below, particularly the TinyHouse/Bedsit on an acre/person, would prevent child abuse, by giving all human beings at any age once capable of reaching the stove and cooking an egg, permission and power to get the hell out of Dodge if necessary…)

The Adulthood Challenge  is Phase II of a four phase program of Equality and Health for All, which I’ve been modifying since 2014.

Action Items:

1.)   Share your findings after you look up the CCC, preferably finding two different sources;

2.)    Find your Senator’s local office address;

3.)    Write a letter to your Senator, email it, and then snail-mail it to the local office;

Gratefully,

Let’s #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness, & #EndMoneyBail and support these four key parts of our #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19:
1. #libraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write, Ranked Choice Voting and Housing for ALL!!!!, Walk !

ShiraDest

September, 12020 HE

…  More:

The Goals (allowing each person to contribute fully)for Pre-Adulthood, Adults, and a new Rite of Passage to bridge the two:

2. Each person, as a Pre-Adult, must learn to swim, or to find water, if in the desert,
3. Each Pre-Adult must learn self-defense (emotional, physical, and financial self-defense),

4.  Map and compass-based navigation, and thus reading, writing, and mathematics up to trigonometry, should be taught, in spite of GPS, so that each person is at least familiar with them.

1. Every infant, world-wide, at birth receives half a hectare of land, non-alienable. He or she may rent, lend or swap the land, but always remains the owner. Where ever the location, it should have a well or a spring on the parcel of land, and be arable (to grow luxury fruits to supplement the free basic beans, rice & greens rations).
4. Fresh water for ever person (free!)
5. Each family should have a book in the local public library, containing the autobiography of every person in the family (which means that each person needs free time and the means to write his or her autobiography).

—-

A New Rite of Passage

We need a new rite of passage in which every teenager must voluntarily teach someone, from start to finish, a usable and important skill. It must be a skill which the person has to use in the real world, such as moving from the alphabet to reading chapter books, or from counting numbers up to multiplication tables, or from writing a sentence to writing an essay, or from no English to conversational or passable workplace English in the United States.

This needs to be a project which requires a serious investment of time (preferably meeting for two or three hours each weekday) for about one year. That way the young person can look back with pride on a serious accomplishment and justifiably claim his or her status as an adult. Along the way, several problems in our modern society can be solved at the same time :

-The increasing lack of self-discipline, civility and respect for learning among the young.

-The shortage of teachers combined with the budgetary shortfalls in most states would be somewhat mitigated by adding the numbers of teenage students needing to finish their “Adulthood Project” to the number of classroom aides and volunteers.

-The need for challenges and self-testing during the adolescent stage of life which is left unfulfilled by modern society´s unsatisfyingly arbirary definition of adulthood.

I would propose that implementing such an idea should begin with involving the local community by having the adolescent (or if still in his/her 20´s, the “pre-adult”) bring a person to meet with the community to show the starting point of the teaching process. After the learning objective has been attained, the pre-adult and the learner would return to meet again with the community to assess the effectiveness of teaching and to award the pre-adult his or her status as an Adult, with the full rights and responsibilities expected of an adult, including such cultural norms as civility, courtesy, and even graciousness.

In this way we may move from a society where rudeness is the norm to one in which graciousness is valued. For example, a friend tells of an incident where a lady´s dog snarled at her, and the lady apologized, which was the civil thing to do, and then even offered to call a cab for her, which was the gracious thing to do. A society in which graciousness is valued will be both a more compassionate society and a more creative one. I leave these thoughts for contemplation, debate, and action.

Perhaps these precautions would prevent child sexual abuse?

Partial translation, to be re-written, my apologies, time is lacking:

Un programa de Igualdad y Salud para Todos

Las Metas (para que todos pueden contribuir lo mejor):

1. Cada quien, de niño, debe aprender nadar
2. Que cada quien de niño aprende defenderse
3. Que cada bebe, al nacer, recibe .5 hectarios de terreno, que

nunca se puede desprender. Se lo puede alquilar o prestar,

pero siempre sigue esta persona como dueño o dueña del

terreno. Que sea donde sea, será con un poso de agua y

capaz de agricolar.
4. Agua potable para cada persona
5. Que cada familia tenga un libro en la biblioteca publica,

con resumen del autobiografía de cada persona de la familia

(eso quiere decir que cada quien tenga el tiempo libre y los

recursos para escribir su autobiografia)

#languagelearn

Read, Write, Run, Teach !

Un programa de Igualdad y Salud para Todos

Perhaps these precautions would prevent child sexual abuse?

New book on Community Cooperation to Share
Mar. 24th, 2014 03:57 pm
“At the turn of the century, both communities developed similar ways of evading White discrimination. Both communities built their own institutions, … ” which “… deepens the connection between them. Cooperation in other areas built ties that would eventually lead to the well-known actions of the later Civil Rights era in the 1960´s.”

–Excerpt : (p. 17, 18) of “Stayed on Freedom’s Call: Cooperation Between Jewish And African-American Communities In Washington, DC” is a contribution to the shared history of Black and Jewish Washington, DC that should be shared among all communities, in every city. This story of cooperation is the story of humanity, which shows that Dr. King’s Dream, Gandhi’s ideals, and our potential, indeed can overcome.

La Coopération pour la guerre à la guerre avec Le Corps Civil de Protection de l’Environnement
Mar. 17th, 2014 03:59 pm
meowdate: (Default)
Pourquoi nous avons besoin, aux États-Unis, de reconstituer le Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC, Corps Civil de Protection de l’Environnement) ?

Parce que nous avons besoin de défis. Bien-sûr, notre société a beaucoup de défis. La guerre semble être le plus grand pourvoyeur de défis. Mais la guerre est évitable si nous choisissons trouver les moyens de coopérer les uns avec les autres.
William James a dit, dans son essai de 1910 L’équivalent Moral de la Guerre que : « La guerre à la guerre ne sera pas une partie de plaisir. »

Il avait raison bien-sûr. Albert Einstein était d’accord. Son « Plan de deux pour-cents » admet que ce n’est pas facile à convaincre ne serait-ce que deux pour-cents de militaires à jeter les armes. Mais un ersatz pour ce besoin de défis pour notre société pourrait venir d’ailleurs, comme nous l’avons vu au cours de la Grande Dépression : que des gens ordinaires travaillant ensemble aient une discipline militaire.

« Nous devons créer de nouvelles énergies pour canaliser la virilité à laquelle l’esprit militaire s’accroche si fidèlement. Les vertus martiales doivent être le ciment durable, l’intrépidité, la faculté de vivre de manière spartiate, l’abandon de l’intérêt privé, l’obéissance à … »

Une nouvelle conscription pour le CCC permettrait de d’offrir un tel débouché. Le défi, la discipline, la coopération et l’infrastructure pour résoudre les problèmes profonds et de division qui conduisent à la guerre.