IMPACT

Nonprofits serving or led by people of color get less funding than similar groups led by white executive directors. Nonprofits that serve people of color or are led by nonwhite executive directors have a harder time getting the funding they need than other organizations, increasing their financial hardships. That’s what we found when we surveyed more than 200 social services and arts nonprofits across the U.S. that focus on the needs of particular racial and ethnic groups. We researched three kinds of organizations: those helping meet immigrants’ needs; those promoting different cultural heritages or preserving the traditions of particular ethnic groups; and folk arts nonprofits. About one-third of those surveyed serve mainly white communities such as Irish Americans or Polish Americans, ...

Understanding mass incarceration in the US is the first step to reducing a swollen prison population. The incarceration rate in the United States fell in 2021 to its lowest levels since 1995 – but the U.S. continues to imprison a higher percentage of its population than almost every other country. The U.S. incarcerates 530 people for every 100,000 in its population, making it one of the world’s biggest jailers – just below El Salvador, Rwanda and Turkmenistan. The U.S. actually had the greatest percentage of its population imprisoned until 2019. This followed steady growth in prison and jail populations in the 1970s, after a wave of “tough on crime” laws and policies swept the nation. While there has been a growing recognition of the need to reduce mass incarceration, experts do not agr...

Shirley Chisholm was a trailblazer: the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black candidate and the first woman candidate for a major-party nomination for president of the United States. Still, despite her tremendous influence on American politics, biographies of Chisholm have been immensely hard to come across. With her recently released book, “Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics,” Anastasia C. Curwood, a professor and interim chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky, hopes to alleviate this gap. A cradle-to-grave biography as Curwood calls it, the book gives insight into who Chisholm was as a person and how Chisolm’s many lived experiences and multiple identities shaped who she was. In the book, Curwood coins the term “Bl...

Would you think it weird if I refused to travel on Sundays that fall on the 22nd day of the month? How about if I lobbied the homeowner association in my high-rise condo to skip the 22nd floor, jumping from the 21st to 23rd? It’s highly unusual to fear 22 – so, yes, it would be appropriate to see me as a bit odd. But what if, in just my country alone, more than 40 million people shared the same baseless aversion? That’s how many Americans admit it would bother them to stay on one particular floor in high-rise hotels: the 13th. According to the Otis Elevator Co., for every building with a floor numbered “13,” six other buildings pretend to not have one, skipping right to 14. Many Westerners alter their behaviors on Friday the 13th. Of course bad things do sometimes happen on that date,...