There are more than 1.6 million homeless children living in the United States, says The National Center on Family Homelessness. That’s one in every 45 American kids who goes to sleep at night without a bed to call their own. Families with young children now account for about one third of the homeless population. And in case you are wondering why, the recession caused a 50 percent jump in the number of students identified as homeless in school districts throughout the country.

Here are seven things about being a homeless kid that you probably didn’t know:

1. Making friends is harder when you’re homeless.
Carey Fuller, who lives in her car with her 11-year-old daughter Maggie Warner in the Pacific Northwest, said she “cringed” when she recently took Maggie out to play in a park. Things were going fine until “someone asked her where she lived,” Fuller explained. It’s the death knell question, the one that throws the wet blanket on the playdate and it’s usually just a matter of seconds before the other kid takes off in the direction of someone else.

“Maggie smiled and I changed the subject and off they went to play until it was time to go just […]

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In 10th century Japan a ‘pillow book” was a form of diary, a place to gather notes, lists and other scraps of paper and reflect upon them before retiring to bed. A ‘court lady” to the Empress used hers to depict life in the royal household, and today ‘The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon” is considered an invaluable record of a pampered and long-vanished Imperial court’s customs and beliefs.

Someday we may look at former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s memoir ‘Stress Test” the same way.

Imagine for a moment you’re Tim Geithner. You’re intelligent, competent, and hard-working. Your friends like you. Your bosses appreciate you. You’re a good family man. You worked under extraordinary pressure to save the financial system. And all you get for it is grief. Naturally you want to write a book to set the record straight.

It’s all perfectly understandable, at least from Geithner’s point of view.

Now imagine that you’re a middle-class wage earner who’s worked hard all your life. You bought a house, perhaps sometime in the 1990s. The talking heads on TV said it was a great investment, your bank’s assessor said the house was valuable, and politicians from both parties had been telling you for decades […]

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Back when Gwen Clements worked at the Perdue chicken plant in Beaver Dam, Kentucky, she stood beside a conveyor belt blanketed in chicken parts for eight hours each day. Usually she packed drumsticks, but whichever part of the bird she happened to be packing on a given shift, the smell was as constant as it was noxious: a combination of raw poultry and chlorine, the latter emanating from the pathogen-killing chemical bath that the carcasses-often contaminated with fecal matter-would receive during processing. Every one-and-a-half seconds or so, Clements would grab a piece of meat with her gloved hands and layer it between sheets of plastic inside a box that could hold up to 40 pounds of chicken parts. By the time she left her job in January of 2014, roughly two years after she had started, she had developed carpal tunnel syndrome and bronchitis, both of which she now attributes to her time at Perdue.

When I spoke with Clements over the phone recently, she recalled how the line at Perdue would get backed up whenever it wasn’t fully staffed. These backups, she told me, frequently resulted in the raw meat spilling onto the factory floor. Not surprisingly, given her experience […]

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No longer dominated by the traditional ‘Big Green” groups that were taking big donations from corporate polluters, the new environmental movement is broader, more assertive and more creative. With extreme energy extraction and climate change bearing down on the world, environmental justice advocates are taking bold actions to stop extreme energy extraction and create new solutions to save the planet. These “fresh greens’ often work locally, but also connect through national and international actions.

The recent national climate assessment explains why the movement is deepening, broadening and getting more militant. The nation’s experts concluded that climate change is impacting us in serious ways right now. It is no longer a question of whether climate change is real – the evidence is apparent in chaotic seasonal weather; floods caused by heavier downpours of rain and deeper droughts; more severe wildfires in the West; the economic impacts of rising insurance rates, as well as challenges for farming, maple syrup production, and finding seafood in the oceans, among many others.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued its third report. The world’s scientists found that taking action now to mitigate climate change is less expensive than doing nothing. German economist […]

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Even if you don’t think society has a moral obligation to care for the least among us, a new study underscores that we have a financial obligation to do so.

Late last week, the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness released a new study showing that, when accounting for a variety of public expenses, Florida residents pay $31,065 per chronically homeless person every year they live on the streets.

The study, conducted by Creative Housing Solutions, an Oklahoma-based consultant group, tracked public expenses accrued by 107 chronically homeless individuals in central Florida. These ranged from criminalization and incarceration costs to medical treatment and emergency room intakes that the patient was unable to afford.

Andrae Bailey, CEO of the commission that released the study, noted to the Orlando Sentinel that most chronically homeless people have a physical or mental disability, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. ‘These are not people who are just going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job,” he said. ‘They’re never going to get off the streets on their own.”

The most recent count found 1,577 chronically homeless individuals living in three central Florida counties – Osceola, Seminole, and Orange, which includes Orlando. As a result, the region is […]

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