A Cultural Collapse

A comprehensive study of newspapers in the United States found that 516 rural newspapers closed or merged from 2004 to 2018. In metropolitan areas, 1,294 newspapers were shuttered during the period, making a national total of 1,810 papers that ceased publication. 

Arrested in January 2018 for illegally harboring and transporting undocumented immigrants, Dr. Scott Warren, a volunteer with No More Deaths (also known as No Más Muertes), stood trial on three felony counts in early June. He faced 20 years in prison for his efforts to provide food, water and other essential items to migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert near Ajo, Arizona, an area of the border that is considered particularly dangerous. About 250 migrants die there each year. On June 11, 2019, a Tucson jury, with an 8 to 4 vote, failed to convict Dr. Warren.

When you operate a non-profit that deals with clients’ health information, you need to be careful to keep your organization HIPAA compliant. You might follow computer etiquette and train your employees well, but in the middle of a hectic day, one of your caseworkers could inadvertently create a HIPAA violation, if they’re not careful.

Despite low unemployment rates and a fairly strong economy, the number of homeless and food insecure continue to rise. According to the recently released State of the Homeless 2019 report, as of January, in New York City alone, an all-time record number (63,839) of men, women and children slept in shelters each night. And, according to Feeding America, 40-million people struggle with hunger in the U.S., including more than 12-million children.

If you run a shelter or food bank, chances are you have more to do and more to process every day. That’s where having the right social services software can help you focus more on providing food and shelter and less on paperwork and processes.

At a recent college career day, this troubling question was asked repeatedly; “What do social workers do?” The question was troubling because it came with the realization that most college age students have no clear idea what social workers do. They are, therefore, less inclined to pick social work as a career choice.

I recently read an article in Forbes about how Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are broken. And while some of the points they made were appalling, they weren’t surprising – at least, not to me. We’ve known about the limitations of the government approved EHRs for some time now.

The United States has the highest costs for healthcare of any industrialized nation and some of the worst health outcomes. The traditional fee-for-service model of delivery and payment is now seen as an ineffective model in terms of health and well-being. It is considered part of the reason the United States has such a poor healthcare ranking.

Memorial Day was this last Monday. We don't often think about the meaning behind the holiday. But, sometimes you get a good reminder of what Memorial Day is all about. A colleague of ours, Frank Bennett, wanted to share a personal story about his experience this Memorial Day and what it lead him to uncover.

One of our nonprofit clients recently found themselves on the horns of this dilemma:

A long-term faithful donor had been indicted for bank fraud. Should the nonprofit return his most recent donation, and should they take his name off the scholarship he had been funding to educate young girls from Malawi out of the circle of poverty?

A troubling trend is beginning to emerge from the current political discussion: “Isn’t it time to look at taxing many tax-exempt organizations?”