Next City

Four in 10 students report persistent sadness or hopelessness, and a new KABOOM! report says remedies start with simply listening to young people.

In the first of a two-part sponsored series with KABOOM!, we delve into the “State of Our Kids,” a new report on the youth mental health crisis built with a youth editorial board that pushed back on adult assumptions and centered lived experience alongside statistics. 

Lysa Ratliff, CEO of KABOOM!, and Amy Meuers, CEO of the National Youth Leadership Council, say most conversations about youth mental health happen without kids in the room. Or, adults tokenize young people. “A lot of times, as adults, we'll invite young people to share their opinion, and then we turn away from them,” says Meuers.  

In its approach to the report, KABOOM! drew upon its 30-year history of treating youth as designers and experts during its efforts to close the gap in playspace equity.

“When you're 5 years old, you know how to build a playground more than a 50-year-old, right?” says Ratliff. “When you're 15 years old, you know what's going on with young people who are overscheduled or trying to get into college or dealing with things in their community more than a 35-year-old.”

Ratliff describes a generation growing up with a tablet by age 2, offered more distracting technologies than opportunities to play.

“It became really important to us at KABOOM! to expand the conversation beyond playground design and playspace design,” says Ratliff, explaining what led to the new report. “We started tuning into statistics that made us really worried and concerned about the wellness and mental health of our young.”

Read the full report at kaboom.org/sook. 

This October, Next City is launching Not My Narrative, a new podcast and essay series about the stories we tell ourselves that are mistaken for facts and the people proving them wrong.

Public art projects use poems across Philadelphia to help residents process loss, gun violence and grief together.

A group is working to ensure that the closure of Hester Street in New York City doesn't mean the loss of its wisdom as a trusted facilitator of processes that authentically engaged the community in development projects.

Next City is on a brief hiatus for the summer. We'll be back at the end of July. Thank you for listening to Next City. Together we can spread good ideas from one city to the next city.

We are creating a podcast episode about these three episodes related to the Planners With A Purpose conference that Next City sponsored.

The Next City podcast debuted in November 2021 and has now recorded 150 episodes, with hundreds of interviews about solutions with changemakers. Host Lucas Grindley and Editorial Director Deonna Anderson look back on some of the biggest takeaways after more than 75 hours worth of journalism.

Sponsored podcast: From Chelsea to the Berkshires, these organizations do the frontline work of caring for their community when federal policy turns hostile. 

When ICE raids and hostile federal policies destabilize entire communities, frontline organizations in cities and rural counties alike are answering with door-knocking, theater, wellness programs, and the slow work of building power from within.

In this sponsored episode with The Culture & Community Power Fund, two Massachusetts organizations respond to the mounting pressures facing immigrant and refugee communities. 

The organizations they support are responding to the moment, said Erik Takeshita, Director of The Culture & Community Power Fund. "It was already really hard work, and now it's like you have to add another layer of creativity and ingenuity to really be able to reach out to people,” said Takeshita.

La Colaborativa in Chelsea turns organizing and door-knocking into power in so many ways, including policy wins, arts and wellness programming, and a full continuum of youth services. Norieliz DeJesus is the Director of Youth Programs for La Colaborativa, but she first came to the organization as a teen participant. Today, she knows many neighbors who also went through the program and work as nurses, police officers, and community leaders. She considers them part of“ the safety net that this community has created over the years.”

 “It makes it easier for the community to trust when they can see that the person in those seats of power are people who lived and experienced this community,” said DeJesus, who is a member of the city council.

Meanwhile on the other end of the state in Berkshire County, the team at Multicultural BRIDGE—including Gwendolyn VanSant, CEO and founding director, and Dr. Lina Polo, the physician who leads its public health programs—host culturally specific wellness days, support groups, food distribution, and coordinate the county's Community Health Improvement Plan all as ways of addressing isolation, healthcare gaps, and belonging in a predominantly white rural region. "If you treat the least healthy and the person with the least access, it's going to improve things unseen," said VanSant on the need for solidarity. 

This sponsored series is created in partnership with ⁠The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF)⁠, a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. ⁠Read the complete series.⁠

This sponsored series is created in partnership with The Culture & Community Power Fund (C&CPF), a national funders’ collaborative advancing the role of culture in building identity, agency, and collective power. This series explores the cultural ecosystem—the traditions, stories, rituals, and spaces that sustain frontline communities—and what it takes to support and strengthen it. Read the complete series.

Boston’s Chinatown has for many years faced incredible pressures of displacement, but a network of nonprofits has turned art, storytelling, and organizing into a strategy to empower the community to fight back. 

In this sponsored episode with The Culture & Community Power Fund, leaders of three community organizations explain how the Chinatown Cultural Plan gives their coalition a shared roadmap for collaboration. 

"Embarking on this cultural plan allowed us an opportunity to step back, talk to many organizations, community members, see what people are doing, and see how our work complements each other and strengthens each other," said Cynthia Woo, director of the Pao Arts Center at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. 

The center is among a network of community organizations working on the plan that received unrestricted funding from C&CPF, a national funders’ collaborative that supports organizations working on the front lines in communities impacted by systemic oppression. Erik Takeshita, director of C&CPF, says the philanthropic sector will too often “focus on the organization as a unit, not necessarily as the community, as the unit of change and intervention. As a result, you end up with these fractured communities.” 

In Boston’s Chinatown, the network they’re supporting also includes the Asian Community Development Corporation and the Chinatown Community Land Trust. 

Angie Liou, executive director of ACDC, explains their “anchor strategy,” which uses arts and culture as an anti-displacement tool “and a tool to strengthen Chinatown's boundaries and sense of identity and belonging.”

Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinatown CLT, explains how art and storytelling drive their organizing and even helped the land trust acquire its first permanently affordable homes. 

"Sharing stories is a really important part of strengthening our power,” said Lowe. “Because we want every generation to be grounded in that history and to know that there are struggles that happened before us and we can win and we can make a difference."

Today, we're learning about the effort to ensure public school buildings continue serving neighborhoods even after they close.