Tag Archives: PublicDomainInfrastructure

Language Learning, Local Education, and lots of Ideas, Project Do Better

Spanish has always been my favorite language, especially after moving to the bilingual South West. Technically, I was hired for my experience in Unix which led to my MAT in mathematics, but on the ground, my love of learning languages proved to be more important in the classroom. As an adult education instructor at the Continuing Education division of the San Diego Community College District, my fluency proved helpful for many of my students, and also, of course, the ESL classes help our students from many nations contribute in the USA.

Every local educational institution has room for improvement, particularly when seen from both faculty and student perspectives. I posed some questions recently about ideas for implementing low-cost projects that would have been helpful to our students when I taught in North campus involving

1.) a small library or study area,
2.) workshops by CA Promise Program graduates,
3.) an on-site nurse paid for by medi-Cal, and
4.) access to public transportation:

1.) Many of my students told me they didn’t have a quiet place to study.  While I know that space is in very short supply on the North campus, I wonder if a small area, possibly in the multipurpose room when it’s not being used, could be set aside with cubicles or movable small desks and a small movable lending library like the tiny libraries?

2.)   I wonder, on the assumption of course that having graduated and started a new career as a professional with a bachelor’s degree anyone can be found who will have time, if any students having graduated with a bachelor’s degree after getting their first two years of community college paid for through the California promise program or with the San Diego promise program, could be persuaded to come back either as tutors, mentors, or even just to give workshops in the areas in which they got their educations?  Particularly accounting majors or paralegal/pre-law majors who could give small workshops on dealing with debt in California including, California statutes of limitations, or financial planning workshops or how to do your own taxes if you only need to do the 1040EZ, etc?  One-on-one tutoring, and also mentoring,  that supportive help, especially for our high school equivalency students, could be both useful and inspiring.  Seeing successfully graduated professionals with a bachelor’s degree who came through the community college system and are willing to spend individual time with them, even if only a couple of hours a week, could make a difference.  Could interns or SCORE volunteers put a program like this together?  Do we track or stay in touch with students who finish the California or San Diego promise program once they finish their bachelor’s degrees?

3.) Many of my students worked two jobs or for other reasons never had time to see a doctor even when they were ill. I wonder if it is possible to pay, through the Medi-Cal system, for a nurse to be on-site, perhaps based out of the office  of each campus, a couple of days/evenings a week?

4.)  One of the biggest problem areas that I saw for my car-free students was that neither the Continuing Education division, nor the CE faculty Union was able to get the transit authority to enforce acceptance of CE student IDs for the monthly bus and rail pass discount.  In planning for post-#Covid-19 classes, will we have any resources to address public transportation discount and access issues?

I imagine that some of these ideas may be a little overwhelming, because I understand that time and resources are extremely limited, but once in a while, as Dr. Rivera-Lacey noted: we do have to dream.

Please share your ideas for improving local education, or for supporting any other parts of our critical Public Domain Social Infrastructure!

Let’s #EndPoverty , #EndHomelessness,  starting by improving these four parts of our good #PublicDomainInfrastructure 4:
1. #libraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransportation


#PublicDomainInfrastructure, and Please Learn (as Project Do Better urges, and builds tools to help…) Why Everyone Should #StopSmoking At Least for CCOVID-19
ShiraDest

May, 12020 HE

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.

Update: Invisible Children vulnerable to invisible debts: Action Items to help

Update from Project Do Better (Phase I, Financial Self-defense…)

  1.   Identity theft precautions, 
  2.  Validation of a debt to ensure that it was actually contracted by the person being pursued by the collector

(many people receive bills for debts they don’t owe, ignore them, and then end up wrongfully sued and even hit with default judgments because they didn’t reply to the court summons, or demand that the collector validate the debt).

Orphans like Çilek deserve protection, especially if they cannot do magic to protect themselves!

(from free book Invisible Children, KARA:)

“In your Child Protection System is there a volunteer program from a local law school that assigns a volunteer attorney to an abused child? I’ve met some well- meaning and bright attorneys who genuinely care for their clients this way. If not, are there adequate public legal representation for abandoned children?”

Kids who grow up ‘invisible,’ especially those without stable and functional families who protect and give them middle class cultural capital, like dinner table discussion of financial laws and mutual funds, are especially vulnerable to predatory lenders and debt collectors.

Until there are enough pro bono lawyers giving free legal and financial clinics, the rest of us can help in these ways:

1.)  ask local community colleges to offer free legal and financial clinics on your state’s statutes of limitations, contract and debt related laws, and consumer protection laws.

2.)  ask your law-makers to prohibit law suits on expired (aka Time Barred) debts.

3.)   ask your law-makers to lower the Statutes of Limitations on verbal and written contracts, which are often how kids unknowingly get into debt and end up in collections.

4.)  Write your own story (or novel) showing a world where kids get the protection they need, in multiple ways…

Please share your ideas for increasing Legal and Financial Literacy and opportunity for ALL of us!

This post is dedicated to my Great Great grandparents Wayne Anthony, murdered for succeeding, and his wife Maude Eleanor West Manzilla, who never gave up her legal suit to clear his name of the suicide charge by the life insurance company, and worked valiantly to keep her family together. Their descendants continue their work.

Quotes for a related post came from a recent ProPublica article co-published with The New Yorker.

Let’s #EndPoverty, and #EndHomelessness,  starting by improving these four parts of our good #PublicDomainInfrastructure 4:
1. #libraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
Read, Write, Ranked Choice Voting and Housing for ALL!!!!, Walk !

#PublicDomainInfrastructure #StopSmoking for CCOVID-19
ShiraDest

originally posted in September, 12020 HE

Shira

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

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, HakanMuhafiz/The ProtectorSihirli Annem, Lupin, or La Casa de Papel/Money Heist Reviews

Holistic College Algebra & GED/High School Lesson Plans,

           or Long Range Nonfiction, or Historical Fiction Writing

Thoughtful Readers, please consider reading about #ProjectDoBetter.

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira


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

Public Financial Knowledge Infrastructure: Is Your Debt Time-barred?

   This basic post is meant to be useful for anyone wishing to give a 5-minute seminar at the Metro/Trolley/Bus stop.
Please share widely.
Now that we know what a Statute of Limitations
is,  statutes-of-limitations and how to get the  information  on your debt, if it is Valid, you have the information that a legal expert needs to figure out if your debt is still enforceable in your state (or DC).
You should also look at your credit report, since debts are often listed by type there, as well.
1.  revolving  or open, is credit card;
2.  written contract is an apartment lease, for example;
3.  verbal contract;
4.  promissory notes.
        Again, many web sites list the various SoLs by state, but be sure to compare the SoL in your state with the online legal code of your state, and be sure that it is up to date (ask a law student if you are not sure, at a free legal clinic).
    Now that you have all of the dates from your last payment, check your state law to see how soon after that the SoL for that type of debt kicks in, and count the years.  If it is too old, then the debt is not enforceable, but you need to tell them that.  In writing.  There is a lot of advice online about this, but you probably want to get a Pro-Bono lawyer or law school student to help you, just to be sure.
   Remember to always respond to a letter about debt, after checking with a legal person.
Don’t wait  until_debt_tear_us_apart_28unsplash29
      More on getting our state legislators to change this situation in a couple of weeks.

Shira

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

Click here to read, if you like:

Shira

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

Public Financial Knowledge Infrastructure: What is Validating a Debt?

    Here is another very basic post, meant to be useful for anyone wishing to give a 5-minute seminar at the Metro/Trolley/Bus stop.  Please feel free to print, handout, repost, and share widely.
statutes-of-limitations
   Last week, we defined the phrase Statute of Limitations for four types of debt.
    We mentioned that a crucial point to remember is that in most states, the clock can restart on an old debt if you promise to pay, or make even a token payment on an old or expired debt, which is why it is very important to be careful in dealing with debt collectors of any type, even if the debt has  been validated.
   Validated?
     Validating a debt is the process of sending you certain required information that proves you to be the person owing a certain debt.
    Federal law requires certain information, so be careful to get all of the details:  this site, for instance (unless I missed it in the fine print), neglects to mention the ‘tear-off’ that collectors must send you, right?
      Details matter.
     So, if you know someone being called by debt collectors, let that person know that they should ask, preferably in writing,  that the collector Validate the Alleged Debt.  Lots of sample debt validation letters are available online.
   Please share widely, and we’d love links here to some great sample letters you find or write!
      Using this information now, if your debt is valid, you can get help finding out if it is Time-barred, yet.  printable_yearly_2020_calendar
      More, after that, on how to help change this by mailing your state legislators in another week or so.

Shira

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

Click here to read, if you like:

Shira

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

Public Financial Knowledge Infrastructure: What is an SoL?

    Since no one seems to be jumping up and down to get this part of the Project started, I am beginning with a very basic post, meant to be useful for anyone wishing to give a 5-minute seminar at the Metro/Trolley/Bus stop.
   SoL  ==  Statute of Limitations
   Statutes of Limitations are time limits on the enforcement of laws, basically.  The kinds of SoLs that Project Do Better focuses on, in Phase I, are those related to debt.  Every state has a different set of SoLs for each of the 4 kinds of debts:
  1.   revolving  or open, is credit card;
  2.   written contract;
  3.   verbal contract;
  4.   promissory notes
        Many web sites list the various SoLs by state, but be sure to compare the SoL in your state with the online legal code of your state.
  statutes-of-limitations
    Another crucial point to remember is that in most states, the clock can restart on an old debt if you promise to pay, or make even a token payment on an old or expired debt.  That is why it is very important to be careful in dealing with debt collectors of any type, even if the debt has  been validated.
  until_debt_tear_us_apart_28unsplash29
 And
a week or so after that…
  printable_yearly_2020_calendar
  And then, you can determine whether that debt, if valid, is time-barred.

Shira

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

Click here to read, if you like:

Shira

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

Astérix: Learn a Language to Build Housing…

In Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, the Druid Panoramix, of that unconquerable village shared with Astérix the Gaul, came away with a scroll from the Library of Alexandria. Could it have contained what we see in the image above? Unlike Queen Cleopatra, we do not have to speak ten languages, but studying at least two or three can help widening one’s perspective, and build empathy.

FDR’s Four Freedoms, particularly freedom from fear, are echoed in this funny, but informative French film. From fear of being fed to Sacred Crocodiles to fear of losing face, languages and learning play a key role in this film, as in our real world today. Languages and libraries can also play a key role in moving us from our current world situation to one in which every human being is free from fear. Here is one proposal for how I hope we could move on, from #publicdomaininfrastructure as phase I, to phase IV’s #freeRoomAndRice for every person.

Phase I, already coming into motion, involves both humanizing all people in the eyes of one another, and building up existing infrastructure that contribute most directly to our long-term democratic institutions. The arts and media have been effective, historically, in sculpting ways of seeing the world, and in bearing witness to events. This is important for building empathy. Films like Astérix..Cléopatre, books like the Harry Potter series, and TV series like Babylon 5 all help. But our institutions also need support, in order to support us over the long haul.

Events over the last four years have shown us all the importance of 1.) both public education and also of adult education in the local community, as well as ongoing availability of 2.) free legal and financial advice. These sets of needs all come together in 3.) the institution of the Public Library system, as does one other: 4.) the public health system. Public health relies heavily on the assumption that both basic health education and current information are accessible to the entire population. Thus, all four parts of our infrastructure: transport, libraries and early education, adult continuing education (especially free financial and legal), and access to health care, impact all of us at all income levels. So, the hashtag #publicdomaininfrastructure was created to pull together those specific issues as a way to focus on a reduced set of areas that could have a higher impact on the lives of many people. In doing so, energy and time are freed up to allow more constructive solution sets to be created to all of our problems. Once transportation and knowledge are established in support of general health, ways of funding our remaining critical policy needs can be found, starting with reducing the needless and crushing collections burden many face for medical and student debt. Once reduced, these burdens then allow time and energy for more apprenticeships, tutoring, and ways of educating ourselves that allow for far more cooperation and community building.

Phase II can then begin to lay the groundwork for new ways of seeing ourselves and our responsibilities toward one another. More to come on Phase II soon (in about 10 years or so)…

More ways of supporting the requisite empathy, which must exist first in order for our society to care enough to pull together in mutual aid, include books, film, and other forms of media, like comic books, aka graphic novels, and music. All of these media have a strong effect on ways that people view the world, and so, here are some Action Items in support of #PublicDomainInfrastructure that artists can take over the next ten years or so:

1.) Write a novel that both tells a good story, and makes a difference. I’m working on that through my historical fantasy #WiP, #WhoByFireIWill. Once published, donate one or more copies to your local public library, as I intend to do.

2.) Write blog posts pointing folks to non-profits that offer pro Bono legal aid and free financial education for those most needing it, such as The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, in South Carolina.

3.) Draw or caligraph something in favor of Universal Health Care.

4.) Write songs or music that get people thinking about public transportation, like the song ‘Walkin to New Orleans’ by Fats Domino

Other ideas welcome on how to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness, & #EndMoneyBail, starting with improving these four parts of our good #PublicDomainInfrastructure:

1. #libraries,

2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,

3. #UniversalHealthCare, and

4. good #publictransport

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

Click here to read, if you like:

B5, The Protector, Lupin, & Money Heist Reviews…

Holistic High School Lessons,

           or Long Term Nonfiction Writing or Historical Fiction prose

Thoughtful Readers, if you are on Twitter, please consider following   #Project Do Better  on Twitter.

Stop Black Land Loss via Language Learning, and ProBono Legal Education

Some languages help us communicate, while other languages help us make things run smoothly. Computer languages and legal language are examples of the latter. To understand computer languages, one studies computer science, and to understand legal language, one studies the law and policies active in the state of residence. But not all of us have the opportunity to study the crucial legal language that governs much of our existence, and the consequences of that unequal knowledge can be devastating.

Lynching once occurred physically, but now happens financially, through the court system all across the South, and make no mistake, it is just as murderous, and just as racist:

“…42% of the cases involved black families, despite the fact that only 6% of Carteret’s population is black. Heirs not only regularly lose their land; they are also required to pay the legal fees of those who bring the partition cases. In 2008, Janice Dyer, a research associate at Auburn University, published a study of these actions in Macon County, Alabama. She told me that the lack of secure ownership locks black families out of the wealth in their property. ”

That is, land that is owned by their families.

Historically separate and highly unequal educational systems have also contributed to this system:

“A former state politician named Thomas Limehouse, who owned a luxury hotel nearby, bought Reed’s property at a tax sale for $2,000, about an eighth of its value. Reed had a year to redeem her property, but, when she tried to pay her debt, officials told her that she couldn’t get the land back, because she wasn’t officially listed as her grandmother’s heir; she’d have to go through probate court. Here she faced another obstacle: heirs in South Carolina have 10 years to probate an estate after the death of the owner, and” you can only do that if you know how to probate an estate, which you can only do if you know what it means to probate an estate.

Like my 2xs Great Grandfather Wayne Anthony Manzilla, many Black men were killed “between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.”

The problem with land law is that it is often “co-opted by big business. One lawyer said that people saw it as a scheme ‘whereby rich men could seize the lands of the poor.’ Even lawyer Nelson Taylor acknowledged that it was abused… his own grandfather had lost a 50-acre plot to (the) Torrens (law). ‘First time he knew anything about it was when somebody told him that he didn’t own it anymore,’ Taylor said. ‘That was happening more often than it ever should have.’ ”

And it should never happen.

“The leading cause of Black involuntary land loss,’ heirs’ property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land — 3.5 million acres, worth more than $28 billion. These landowners are vulnerable to laws and loopholes that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. Black families watch as their land is auctioned on courthouse steps or forced into a sale against their will.”

So, what can we do about this? Well, several things. To help stop this injustice, at least 4 Action Items spring to mind:
1.)    Please consider giving your time, your cash, or your attention by sharing via your social and personal or business networks to The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, in South Carolina, and:
2.)   Please consider reading and sharing publications by ProPublica, a non-profit that spreads the word on these matters together with potential solutions, and

then:
3.)   Please read, review, and share Dr. Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, because “42% of the cases involved black families, despite the fact that only 6% of Carteret’s population is black.” so, it really is about race.

4.)   OR:  Simply search for the term “Statute of Limitations” on Google, or your favorite search engine, to see how states like SC prevent heirs like Ms. Reed from probating their property.  If you have the energy, please share your findings with someone, over FaceBook, Twitter, or the phone.

Please share your ideas for increasing Legal and Financial Literacy and opportunity for ALL of us!

This post is dedicated to my Great Great grandparents Wayne Anthony, murdered for succeeding, and his wife Maude Eleanor West Manzilla, who never gave up her legal suit to clear his name of the suicide charge by the life insurance company, and worked valiantly to keep her family together.  MargarFelixManzilla-4Their descendants continue their work.

Quotes for this post came from a recent ProPublica article co-published with The New Yorker.

Originally posted in December, 12020 HE

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

Click here to read, if you like:

Science Fiction/Fantasy Shows,  Lupin, or Money Heist

Holistic High School Lessons,

Thoughtful Readers, if you are on Twitter, please consider following   #Project Do Better  on Twitter.

Shira

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

Wondering Wednesdays, Do Better, Chapter 8, section I: Introducing a map for the early years of Phase II

This post is the start of the rough draft of  Chapter 8 of my non-fiction WiP, Do Better fka Baby Floors.   This chapter will begin the early years of mapping out a path to get there for Phase II, with a potential new adulthood rite of passage.

The overall objective remains that of putting a floor on poverty so that each and every baby born can have a safe childhood.

Outlines for chapter 8 will attempt to match with each section, at the bottom of each post.

(Side note:  I’m still trying to figure out how to find reference on the Tsalagi exchange with the Gentleman of South Carolina, colonial era.  Cherokee leader was Onacasta (or Ocanasta), maybe of the Middle Towns,  around or just before the Ango-Cherokee war sparked by Virginia colonists, or perhaps the Tuscarora War, but the Cherokee sent 4 kids to a white College, and they came back “useless” because they couldn’t run well, or withstand cold or hunger.   The leader’s comment was ‘send us some of yours,’ and “we will make them men.”  Paraphrasing him except for the make them men, that part I remember quite clearly.

Once again, by way of disclaimer, the overall goal is now to explain why we need both equ. + justice, & why in 4 phases.  This chapter is part of showing what Phases I-IV could look like as potential roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us.  This vision is laid out in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met, without taking anything from anyone, and without violence, intimidation, nor coercion of any kind. 

(Chapter 7, section III. D. was last week  ) :

Chapter 8, Introductory section I.

Chapter 8 Introduction (500 wds):  Phase II

I.

A(329/250).

In the early years of Phase II, after the hard work of Phase I, and building up our physical infrastructure while starting a new system for continuous rotation of upgraded financial legal learning, this new stage may at first appear a bit esoteric.  The prerequisite education needed, in these early stages of Phase II, merely to see why a new type of education is necessary in our country, may be lacking for many, if not most people.  the tools for measuring the kind of progress we plan to make during this second phase may also need to be created nearly from scratch, while being shown to be of practical use.  The declaration of intention to undergo the Adulthood challenge rite of passage may appear to have little practical use, in these early stages, as might the Challenge itself.  Nevertheless, there is a strong practical and symbolic value in proving ones worth to the community, and to oneself.  The usefulness in multiple ways of this new rite of passage will have to be proven early on, during these first years of Phase II, by a group of dedicated volunteers, some of whom are hopefully intent upon undergoing the Challenge ourselves.  These early years will need to see decisions around prerequisites, declaring sincere intent to take on The Challenge, sorting out the reasons for which each candidate wishes to undergo this Challenge, and then of course, creating some appropriate form of modern ritual  to then confer recognition of success upon those candidates who manage to meet all of the requirements.  That may be a lot to ask in just 5-7 years, considering that this will be an entirely new concept, the idea of having more than just the turning of 18 years of age, to determine who is an adult in our society.  While the consequences of passing or failing The Challenge may not carry great weight yet, the need is clear, and the benefits will also become clear, with time.

B (325/250 wds).

Immediately we come upon the first problem with creating this Challenge: to whom should it apply, and by whom should it be created, evaluated, and recognized.  Who will be the volunteers in which communities to start this process of creating a new adulthood rite of passage, and from where will these volunteers draw inspiration, knowledge, and the courage to dare to create something new for our modern world, from an ancient human need, and an ancient human response.  The implementation stage, at the middle to later years of Phase II, will need to have answered these questions sufficiently satisfactorily to move forward with the work of setting any prerequisite requirements in motion, in communities where this has been decided to be the case.  Communities who choose to allow candidates to move forward without meeting any prerequisite requirements may need to coordinate this with other communities who have decided differently.  The declaration of intention and reasons for attempting the Challenge are also, likewise, left up to the individual community to keep or to dispense with, as the needs of any given locality or community of non-geographical type may decide is best in keeping with their needs.  But again, this may encounter translation difficulties, so to speak, as candidates who have been recognized  as having passed the Challenge in one community seek to enter or have dealings with another community whose criteria may be different enough to be incompatible with their sense of adulthood.A bit like the Tsalagi, and the gentlemen of South Carolina.  By the later years of Phase II, the work of education, advocacy, and also lobbying, will have to have begun around changing the way our education system recognizes the ability of any given person to accomplish any given task.  The knowledge and skills that each adult citizen of a republic must have in order to make logical informed decisions is really what this new rite of passage is about.  Critical thinking with empathy, and the rest are details.  We move to those details now.

 

— (Next Wednesday: Chapter 8, section II. A. )

 

I’m considering this Rough Draft as the block of clay from which my book will eventually emerge, obviously, and some ideas for phases III and IV are still becoming more  fixed in my mind as I write, so the final version will likely look pretty different from this Rough Draft, and will need updating once I get to the very end.

 

And once again, yeayyy( !!)with regard to audience, I may have at least a couple of comps:  Walden Two meets The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective (by Dr.s Jean and Edgar Cahn, 1964).  I know that lots of people consider Skinner’s writing to be stilted, but I like the tilt of most reviewers, in that the idea is that a community should keep trying policies that members agree upon until they find what works for all of them.

As for genre, I’m still wondering:  clearly part of  Non-fiction.

  

Maybe also: System Change, Causes, maybe even Inspirational, but I doubt it.

Action Items:

1.) Consider some ideas you may have on how our society can solve homelessness and child abuse, starting right now,

2.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

      Ok, JYP, this is for you!   

🙂

 

Chapter 8 ch8hghLvl  intro. outlines (sometimes I wing the transition paragraphs…)

 **********************

   Thoughtful Readers, if you are on Twitter, please share our key #Project Do Better  tweets:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport

*****************Click these links if you like: Narrative or Historical  Nonfiction,

                                                                                            High School Lesson Plans,

                                                                                         or Historical Fiction Story

Shira

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

Working Wednesdays, Do Better, Chapter 7, section III: D, a map for the later years of Phase I, 4/4

This post is the start of the rough draft of  Chapter 7, section III, part D, for my non-fiction WiP, Do Better, fka Baby Floors.   This section will complete the early years of mapping out a path to get there for Phase I, with our Public Domain Social Infrastructure.   It is here for future comparison, and for me to weep over what I’ve removed, with the book, once published.  This WiP is done, and I am still looking for  Readers

     Once I publish it on the Internet Archive, I will list it as in the Public Domain (non-commercial: if anyone makes any money off of my work, somehow, I’d like my fair share, please), and the text (rft) will be here and on the (when someone creates a better one than this one, please) Project site, as well, so that communities can modify the book to suit their own guidelines for this process.

Putting a floor on poverty so that each and every baby born can have a safe childhood.

Outlines for chapter 7 are already at the bottom of section II’s posts.

Once again, by way of disclaimer, the overall goal is now to explain why we need both equ. + justice, & why in 4 phases.  This chapter is part of showing what Phases I-IV could look like as potential roadmap for a fully inclusive society for all of us.  This vision is laid out in the hope that All HumanKind  will eventually have each person’s basic needs  met, without taking anything from anyone, and without violence, intimidation, nor coercion of any kind. 

(Chapter 7, section III. C.  was last week) :

III. D.

III.  D (x/1000wd).

1. (324/250 wds)

Finally, the more nebulous, perhaps, system of free or pro-bono legal financial financial-legal public education, as we reach the mid-point of this phase, must be built up, partly from scratch, to fit the purpose for which the project wishes to build this part of our crucial yet often unseen public domain social infrastructure.  These free and freeing activities, from walks to workshops, on financial legal ongoing education, advocate in and of themselves for democracy.  Now will be the time to check on the timeline, and also to begin pushing harder on legal avenues, from letters to lawmakers, to lawsuits, if and when necessary, just as used by the NAACP in their coordinated campaigns with the SCLC to end segregation and bring about economic as well as civil justice.  This new system is teh last part of phase I, and the first of a set of new systems we will introduce during this project.  This one is an integral part of the #PublicDomainInfrastructure movement as education for democracy.  By this time, between the middle and the end of our first phase in the project, there should be daily ReTweeting of posts, comments, articles, and workshop schedules on SoLs by volunteers in each state.  There should also, by this point, be daily article reposts and discussions on social media, blogs, and in person, between volunteers and the general public, in each community, around how medical debt in particular is related to creating and prolonging the experience of homelessness by two years or more, in some places.  Advocacy, especially by law students, should be paid for, in anything from local currencies to student loan forgiveness, to free food, as they give their time to present seminars and workshops in each community, in every state.  Finally, lobbying to update all SoLs and remove the practice of requiring accused debtors to defend themselves in court, especially on Time-barred debts (if indeed validated), should become especially intense at this time.

 

2. (325/250 wds)

At this time, also, measurements should be looked at to determine whether teh milestones for this part of the first phase will be met, and whether this, in conjunction with other parts of Phase I, merits extending the time period for this first phase of the project by up to 5 years.  By the end of phase I, which will be decided by each community for themselves, and thus may result in overlapping phases, by location, there should be weekly seminars being given on the soL for that state, in each major city of all 50 states in the union, DC, and territories.  By the end of Phase I, each week, there should be at least one report on debt collection activities, and on the outcomes of these activities for those pursued by the collection agencies or creditors, by county, in each of the 50 states, and in the District of Columbia, with comparisons to nearby counties by SES level and court paper filing requirements for that jurisdiction.  By the 14th year of this project, weekly library ‘How to Reply’ seminars should be in place, in every branch library, in every city of every state and territory in the USA.  These seminars require, it will be reminded, no money nor payment, only willing hands to do the labor.  Likewise, weekly seminars disclosing the state of pre-trial diversion or intervention in each jurisdiction, as well as the legality of body attachments, cash or money bail, and any other priorities which the local community may deem to be most important, should be held in easily accessible locations for the public, with handouts to take home and share.  Finally, pre trial interventions, body attachment, and cash bail should be either ended, or in the process of being ended, in all states and territories across the country, with strong lobbying of lawmakers, legal proceedings, and other forms of non-violent direct action, if necessary, as agreed upon within each community.

 

 

3. (263/250 wds)

At this point, we will have passed the mid-way point of Phase I.  The tools and activities which have been developed for other parts of this phase, like public libraries, thus far, can also be applied to this part of Phase I.  The 1-minute activities and other tools should now be joined with campaigns to get the attention and agreement of lawmakers, including lawsuits, brought by organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP, if needed, as partners in this work.  Weekly criminal justice reform reposts, retweets, articles, workshops and handouts should, by this time, be being presented in every major city, in each state and territory of the US.  In like manner, workshops and seminars with free handouts to share on debt law as it has changed, as well as ongoing activities like “Free Walks for Freedom from Debt” and letters to lawmakers regarding, in particular, medical debt as a problem to be solved alongside increasing support for a truly robust public health care system, should be happening in every community, in every major city, and in every state and territory of the US, on at least a weekly basis.  Other 1-minute activities, letter writing and delivery campaigns, education, advocacy, and lobbying tools should be developed by committees of volunteers in each community, based on the needs and assets, abilities and unique strengths found within those communities.  As these tools are developed, they should be shared, in the context of the problem being solved , the particulars of the solution, and the community for which the solution worked, with other communities, far and near.

 

4. (387/250 wds)

It should be remembered, first of all, that the very act of giving or attending, or discussing later, a free financial legal seminar or workshop is both practical and symbolic.  It is clearly practical in that a set of people are learning a very important set of connected peices of information that we all need in our daily lives, and symbolic in that there is no more powerful symbol of democracy than sharing the rules of how our law works, especially our laws in relation to money, and how it affects the demos, or the people.  Ending the scourge of having to pay for pre-trial interventions or diversion, the permitting of body attachments, and the requirement of cash money to make bail, is a crucial act of equity, and also a symbol of hope, and of the earnestness of society to make good on that promise “that all men are created equal.”  Or at least, to make a real start on making good on that promise.  Any citizen in fear of unjust treatment is bad for both the rule of law, and for our democracy.  Therefore, continued walks, use of social media and other tools for education and advocacy, and lobbying of lawmakers for support of free workshops for changes in the criminal justice system tie in with the need for solid library systems, just as they connect to the need for robust public health and transportation systems.  Some will ask how we can possibly afford to pay for all of this, which is a fair question, looking at it from where we currently sit, in 2021 CE.  But, it should be remembered that not all of this actually needs to be paid for.  What it will take is an army of volunteers dedicated to working for peace, democracy, and empathetic education, and willing to do the learning required to then help teach others how to learn, and how to pass that learning on, so as to create a ripple effect down the years and generations.  Finding the Willing Workers On Original Formats to create the structures that new tools will fill to help all of us build a better, kinder, safer Democracy, that does not take money, but time, effort, and the faith that it is possible, and worth doing.  That, we can certainly pay for.

 

As we leave chapter 7, and it’s vision for how we might get to the potential of a set of public systems of infrastructure that can help build up our democracy, we look ahead to the concept of adulthood, in the dominant society.  Having the space that a good public health care, transport system, library system, and ongoing system of updated legal financial learning can provide gives every citizen the space, at this point, to breath, and to reflect.  Reflection is a key skill in the constituents of a republic, and a more robust conception of adulthood can help us learn to think more rationally, and to evolve a habit of reflection, free of the existential fears of not having health care or transportation, and not knowing how to access them.  Thus, all members of our society will at have become more able to contribute, and more likely to find the best way that they can contribute.  After all, it takes finding the best in ourselves and in others, and nurturing those better angels, in order to become the excellent society that we can be.  We shall see a road map for arriving in the place within another 20 years, as we move through chapter 8, coming up next.

 

— (Next Wednesday: Chapter 8, section I. )

 

I’m considering this Rough Draft as the block of clay from which my book will eventually emerge, obviously, and some ideas for phases III and IV are still becoming more  fixed in my mind as I write, so the final version will likely look pretty different from this Rough Draft, and will need updating once I get to the very end.

 

And once again, yeayyy( !!)with regard to audience, I may have at least a couple of comps:  Walden Two meets The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective (by Dr.s Jean and Edgar Cahn, 1964).  I know that lots of people consider Skinner’s writing to be stilted, but I like the tilt of most reviewers, in that the idea is that a community should keep trying policies that members agree upon until they find what works for all of them.

As for genre, I’m still wondering:  clearly part of  Non-fiction.

  Many thanks to Dr. Garland for suggesting Philosophy

Maybe also: System Change, Causes, maybe even Inspirational, but I doubt it.

Action Prompts:

1.) Share some ideas you may have on how our society can solve homelessness and child abuse, starting right now,

2.) Write a story, post or tweet that uses those sources and your thoughts.

Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness,  #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?

Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure  & #StopSmoking at LEAST for CCOVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport

-we can learn from the past via Stayed on Freedom’s Call,

       by Teaching and Learning (Lesson Plan List) in the present, to

                                                                            help build a kinder future:  Project Do Better

 

  Our society can Do Better to build Peace…    

Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS

Shira

the year, 2022 CE = year 12022 HE

(5 month GED lesson 22 of 67 plans…), and

Babylon 5 review posts from a fictional Minbari Ranger’s point of view, and my historical fiction serial Ann&Anna,  escaping slaves’ learning to read…

Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(freehttps://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.

Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.

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