UPenn

In March of this year, the national Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities released its 150-page final report. The President and party leaders from both the House and Senate appointed this 12-member group in 2012 and tasked them with bringing forth recommendations for eliminating abuse- and neglect-related child deaths in America.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are well utilized in politics, city planning, environmental science, landscape architecture, business and public health. Increasingly, GIS is being utilized to better assess, understand and respond to various social challenges such as food deserts, housing instability and other social needs.

Recent changes to eligibility requirements for the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, SNAP, threaten to increase food insecurity for thousands of Americans who rely on these benefits, according to the USDA Food and Nutrition Service which released a memo to all regional directors of SNAP on June 26, 2015.

Researchers found that just six Los Angeles County agencies spent nearly $1 billion in 2015 on services for single adults experiencing homelessness, according to a report released in January 2016. Despite this staggering figure, the number of individuals experiencing homelessness continues to rise.

Child welfare funding may have been blue-lined in December, but organizations across Pennsylvania are still in the red. “Releasing the funds is putting a Band-Aid on a problem that’s not quite sticking on both sides.

If you walk into the small pizza shop at 25 South 11 Street in Center City Philadelphia, you might be stunned  by the mosaic of color filling every inch of its walls.

A federal law that went into effect last year promotes the idea that foster youth need to be engaged in the everyday activities that all other young people enjoy to improve their outcomes as adults.

The Higher Education Access and Success for Homeless and Foster Youth Act, re-introduced late last year, would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to focus on homeless and foster youth, bringing changes that would address ongoing barriers to higher education for this population.

Robert Putnam proclaimed in his 2005 book Bowling Alone that social capital is dying. One of his leading examples is the steady decline in bowling league membership since the 1980s. According to Putnam, this decline signifies a loss of community as well as a loss of social interaction facilitated by involvement in sports.