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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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AV’s Evan Mintz, director of communications, writes this week about Juneteenth and efforts to achieve racial justice:
This weekend the nation celebrates Juneteenth, a commemoration of emancipation and an opportunity to reflect on the continuing fight for liberty and the unfinished work of racial justice. Perhaps nowhere is this work more pressing than in the criminal justice system, where activists are centering the cause of racial justice at the core of the reform movement.
In New Jersey, Equal Justice USA is building partnerships with more than 20 community-based organizations to help mediate conflicts and offer services, as well as engage with police and public officials on issues of crime and violence.
“We’re so divided in so many ways across this country,” says EJUSA Executive Director Jamila Hodge. “The problems we face are so big, and we’re not going to solve them in our silos. We have to create a space where police and communities can come together.”
Also in the Garden State, Salvation and Social Justice is emphasizing Black faith traditions to help organize against an overly punitive criminal justice system. The organization has successfully advocated for a new statewide use-of-force policy and the implementation of different first-responder models for nonviolent issues when police aren't necessary.
“We're pushing for alternatives,” says the Rev. Charles Boyer, founding director of Salvation and Social Justice. “You don't always need a guy with a gun showing up when someone is going through a mental health crisis.”
Live Free works in California's Bay Area and other sites across the country, helping communities build a stronger role in shaping how the criminal justice system functions and offering a more holistic vision of creating public safety.
“There’s a hunger to imagine a different way to secure public safety, not on the backs of the poor, the traumatized, and the hurting,” says Pastor Mike McBride, the organization’s executive director.
Read the story >
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When Journalism Rewrites Laws
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By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, journalism grants manager
Decades of disruption in the news media have spurred a new generation of nonprofit news outlets that are seeking to fill critical reporting gaps — and as these newsrooms mature and grow, they are producing consequential journalism that is holding the powerful to account and driving systems-level change.
What’s Happening: Take the Carolina Public Press, for example. A tiny but mighty nonprofit newsroom based in Asheville, North Carolina, the CPP produced a series of stories about a severe shortage of specialized nurses trained to aid sexual assault survivors in the aftermath of attacks. While the series focused on the shortage of Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners — also known as SANE nurses — in the rural and tribal areas of North Carolina, the investigation resonated far beyond North Carolina's borders. Inspired by the reporting, U.S. Rep. Deborah Ross, above, fought for more funding nationwide to boost training and access for SANE nurses, and in March, President Biden signed a bill that will provide $30 million more per year in federal funding to solve the problem. "The fact that our reporting impacted legislation on the federal level is just incredible,” said Angie Newsome, the founder and executive director of CPP, an AV grantee.
Why it Matters: The news about the news business is often grim: plummeting ad revenues and strained budgets have forced dramatic downsizing and cutbacks in newsrooms across the U.S., leaving fewer reporters in an increasingly complex world. But this new cadre of nonprofit news organizations — fueled by a mission to provide independent investigative reporting and beat reporting that dives deep — is an encouraging sign not only for the future of journalism, but for democracy as a whole.
“At a time when we are swamped in misinformation and disinformation spread on social media and promoted on national television cable networks, people need trusted, reliable reporting and information produced in the public interest more than ever,” said Jennifer Preston, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Read the story > |
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By Juliana Keeping, communications manager
The Wall Street Journal reported (free link) this week that Arnold Ventures is using another tactic in its long-running battle against hospital consolidation, a huge driver of high and rising health care prices: litigation. AV is helping to fund Fairmark Partners — a group pursuing antitrust lawsuits against hospital behemoths in Wisconsin, Connecticut, and North Carolina. (AV will not benefit financially from these cases).
What’s Happening: The suits allege these hospital systems use their market power to crush competitors and illegally inflate health care prices, the WSJ reported. Excessive health care prices in turn lead to high and rising health care costs for consumers, employers, and taxpayers.
Why it Matters: Big hospital systems are aggressively acquiring smaller hospitals and physician practices, consolidating the market and crushing the competition. Today, about 90% of metropolitan hospital markets in the U.S. are highly concentrated, and more than one in three physicians works directly for a hospital or a practice at least partially owned by a hospital. Many regions are dominated by a single system. These dominant systems then charge more, threatening access because patients are afraid of unaffordable bills or forcing families into debt outright when they seek necessary care.
What’s Next: Lawsuits are just one tool stakeholders and policymakers are using to address health care prices and to lower health care costs, and momentum continues to build, with growing interest from the FTC and DOJ, in Congress, across the states and in the data transparency space.
“Health care ultimately needs to be affordable to those who pay for it: taxpayers, employers, and households,” says Mark E. Miller, executive vice president of health care for Arnold Ventures.
Read the story > |
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Data Dive:
Sick and Struggling to Pay
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100 Million
That's the shocking number of people who are saddled with medical debt in America, as reported in a new multimedia investigative journalism series by KHN and NPR that launched this week. Numbers only tell part of the story. The piece is full of gut-wrenching tales from everyday Americans in medical debt — like a New York couple sued by a hospital for $10,000 following a husband’s amputation, and the sexual assault victim pursued by creditors for years over a $130.68 bill.
According to AV grantee Urban Institute, which analyzed credit card records and demographic data on health status, race, and poverty for the series, the link between sickness and debt is “a defining feature of American health care.” That analysis and polling KFF conducted for the series showed Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than white Americans to experience medical debt, which is also more prevalent in the South.
For more on the impact of medical debt, view AV's video, “Less Money in Our Wallet and Deeper in Debt,” the latest in our series on health care affordability. And for a deeper dive, read related research from the Urban Institute.
Read more patient stories from the investigation here.
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Criminal Justice
- As a bipartisan group of lawmakers hash out a deal to address gun violence, The New York Times examines the landscape of donors and groups working to address the crisis, including AV. “So much more needs to be done,” Walter Katz, AV vice president of criminal justice, tells the paper. “There’s so much work to go around.” (free link)
- See which states have passed gun legislation in response to mass shootings in this Washington Post analysis of data compiled by RAND. (free link)
- A new report from The Sentencing Project examines data showing violence among youth has not spiked in the pandemic. It explains why calls for get-tough youth justice policies are misguided and based on a false narrative — and what actually works to prevent delinquency and promote success.
- A newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program went unused by nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies in 2021, leaving a massive gap in information that is poised to be exploited in an election year, writes The Marshall Project.
- How can cities turn around a spike in violent crime? A new report by Equal Justice USA shows how a partnership between the system and community in Newark helped to develop a “public safety ecosystem” that helped reduce homicides by 50%. Read more about Newark's success in The Crime Report.
Health
- Two hospitals that have failed to publicize previously secret prices under new federal rules have been hit with fines, The Wall Street Journal reports. (free link)
- The Texas Tribune covers the issues opioid harm-reduction groups face in conservative states. “Both Republican- and Democratic-led states have legalized aspects of harm reduction, but many remain resistant.”
Contraceptive Choice and Access
- The second lady of Pennsylvania, Gisele Barreto Fetterman, calls for increased Title X funding and contraceptive access, especially in the contraceptive deserts of Appalachia, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- The New York Times talks to clinics and patients around the country about contraceptive access in light of potential future legal changes. “…nearly six decades after the Supreme Court guaranteed the right to use contraception, and more than 10 years after the Affordable Care Act mandated that private insurers cover it, many American women still have a hard time getting access.” (free link)
- Family planning health care via Medicaid is growing in importance, according to two preliminary research reports (here and here) by George Washington University, summarized in Health Affairs.
- Contraceptive Access Initiative outlines the FDA process, status, and concerns for approval of over-the-counter birth control.
Higher Education
Democracy
- In Newsweek, Jeremy Gruber makes a case for open primaries in light of Georgia’s recent Republican primary results.
Climate
- The New York Times proposes that nuclear energy will have a role in bridging the gap in energy transition. Andrés Gluski, chief executive of the energy company AES, sees nuclear power as “part of the solution because of its ability to provide capacity.” (free link)
- Environment and Energy Leader reports on a new coalition formed between Princeton, Google, GE and ClearPath Energy to advance clean energy technology.
- Read this New York Times profile of Jennifer Wilcox, head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, and an expert on carbon capture and storage. (free link)
Immigration
- With DACA’s future in jeopardy, Americans across the political spectrum continue to demand a permanent solution from Congress for Dreamers. About 80% of voters, including 76% of Republicans, support immigration reforms. Learn more about Dreamers in this fact sheet.
- A group of GOP business leaders say bipartisan immigration reform protecting Dreamers would help ease inflation and labor shortages and reduce food prices, reports Politico.
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In “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” civil rights attorney Jeffery Robinson is on a mission to open your eyes to the ways white supremacy has been explicitly and unabashedly ingrained into our country since the beginning. Based on a town hall talk Robinson gave on Juneteenth in 2018, the film weaves together Robinson’s personal story and an American history lesson that draws a direct line from slavery to the systems in place today that perpetuate anti-Black racism. “The biases and prejudices about race in America are so deep in our DNA that sometimes we don’t even recognize that they’re there,” Robinson says. He asks a simple question: What are we going to do about it?
Robinson’s interactive and thought-provoking lecture anchor the film, and elsewhere the viewer follows him on location to the places where this legacy endures: the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, South Carolina; Staten Island to talk with Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner (say his name); the ditch in Alabama where Elmore Bolling, lynched in 1947, was found by his family; Confederate statues built decades after arms were laid down. Among the most visceral of the site visits are the “steps of no return,” which lead to row after row of now-empty lots, a haunting reminder of the lives and prosperity lost in the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Powerful clips of Martin Luther King Jr. punctuate Robinson’s points.
Robinson wants viewers to understand that the past is not in the past — we are still deeply ensconced in the architecture of white supremacy upon which this country was built. He is not seeking to blame Americans for the sins of their ancestors, but rather urging them to take collective responsibility for the present and future. The film is streaming on Netflix and other platforms.
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On The Daily, host Michael Barbaro and New York Times political reporter Astead W. Herndon dissect the ousting of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and what it means for the progressive prosecutor movement. Their thoughtful and nuanced discussion puts in perspective the role messaging and politics played in the recall and what it means for the justice reform movement writ large.
Related: Marc Levin of the Council on Criminal Justice writes in Reason that the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin demands a rethinking of the "progressive prosecutor" brand.
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Have an evidence-based week,
– Stephanie
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Stephanie DiCapua Getman develops and executes Arnold Ventures' digital communications strategy with a focus on multimedia storytelling and audience engagement and oversees daily editorial operations and design.
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