This is Kameel Stanley's inaugural article for St. Louis Public Radio's We Live Here project. We asked her to introduce herself. Here is what she wrote:...

This week's We Live Here podcast is something a little different. Recently, we've been looking at health and the way that toxic stress can impact...

A year after Michael Brown’s death, is the landscape around racial and economic disparities in St. Louis and beyond starting to shift? Can some changes already be seen?

A single school can tell us a lot about the health of the community in which it exists. It can also tell us a lot about how systemic problems with transportation, food, housing and crime adversely impact impoverished communities and the health of the people who live there.

Given that treating people is already a challenging task, imagine the extra challenge that comes from treating people who experience toxic stress — the stress that comes from constant exposure to poor housing conditions, lack of quality food or exposure to violence.

While most people think of the "Delmar Divide," as simply a line that separates a mostly white community to the south and a mostly black community to the north, the reality is that the divide represents huge disparities in health.

A sliver of the 1.5 million people in federal and state prisons will remain in prison for life. But the vast majority are released at some point. How does someone adjust to life outside after spending years behind bars?

Even pleading guilty to a misdemeanor can come with some other penalties. These are called collateral consequences, and they're the focus of this episode of We Live Here.

In this episode of We Live Here, we explore the price and perils of our public defender system.

On this episode of We Live Here we introduce you to four police officers who discuss not only what life is like during the day-to-day grind of work, but also the question of whether or not race makes a difference for African-American officers in majority white police departments.