Alternative Educational Resources

Boundless, the free alternative to textbooks

https://www.boundless.com/textbooks/textbooks

Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology,chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow.

Measuring the greatness of our Nation

Excerpt from a Philadelphia Inquirer article:

"Florida Gov. Rick Scott offered a glint of hope last week, embracing the expansion with a statement centering on people as much as on finances and recalling his mother's struggles getting care for an ailing brother.

Scott says he learned that our greatness as a nation depends in large part on "how we value the weakest among us." "

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20130224_Jeff_Gelles__Corbett__Christie_s_approach_to_Medicaid_plan_is_wrong.html#ixzz2Loi9Za8t 

Final Report on Partners’ Exemplars Project

Launched with support from the William Penn Foundation, the Exemplars Project sought to identify, spotlight, and build awareness of congregation-based programs and social services that are particularly innovative, affordable, and effective. This initiative, which was piloted in Philadelphia and presents opportunities for replication nationwide, offers new evidence of the centrality of sacred places in community life.

Link to the report:

http://www.sacredplaces.org/what-we-do/research-and-public-policy/exemplars-report/

Friends of Chester Eastside / Stakeholders - Next Meeting March 9th

Please remember that our next Friends of Chester Eastside / Stakeholders meeting will be Saturday, MARCH 9, 2013 at 10:00 AM at Chester Eastside to review progress since the February 9th meeting.

"You Hold the Key" Initiative

http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2012/10/04/opinion/doc506e524b04847179604028.txt

To the Times:

Often the good characters of the city of Chester are left unmentioned. I would like to take the time to acknowledge the Chester Eastside Ministries for the phenomenal job they did in operating a two-week camp for about twenty plus youth of our city. The camp provided leadership skills along with fine arts to the youth. Their theme was “You Hold the Key”. They also had the opportunity to learn first hand, about South Africa and their culture as one of the counselors actually flew from her native land to be a part of the camp program. The counselors discussed the importance of making the right choices particularly in today’s society where they are plagued with so many social ills.

This group of youth from different areas of Chester came together with unity, harmony, respect, and a love for each other and in two weeks time they put together a play and wrote a song depicting what can happen if you allow the world to dictate your future.

The talent of these youth was remarkable. As a parent of one of the youth I must state that what these young folks accomplished in two weeks was amazing. The program really blessed my spirit. A program of this magnitude should receive the funding it needs to afford more youth in our community this same opportunity.
The children of Chester need more positive traits to ensure their future as well as our future. Chester Eastside Ministries, thanks so much for providing our youth the chance to enhance their lives. To the city of Chester please support organizations such as this: Our children are worth it!

PAMELA DANNER

Chester

Why Chester Eastside's food outreach is needed

http://articles.philly.com/2010-12-23/news/26356068_1_food-desert-local-foods-supermarket-food

Poverty puts Chester into a food desert

December 23, 2010|By Alfred Lubrano, Inquirer Staff Writer

First graders (from left) E'myah Herring, Mya Nicholson, and Ja'Niyah… (see link)

One in an occasional series.

Eyeing a potato at Frederick Douglass Christian School in Chester one day in the fall, a first grader called it a "tomato." Another said he wasn't sure he'd ever seen one before.

"How do you spell 'nasty?' " asked Ja'Niyah Van, 6, tasting a baked sweet potato for the first time.

No one can blame the pupils for not recognizing or appreciating fresh food. There isn't a single supermarket in Chester. A person could travel end to end in the city of 30,000 people and find just two stores that sell potatoes or any other fresh foods.

These days, the students learn what produce looks like from Greener Partners, a Malvern nonprofit whose experts come in regularly to teach about seasonal and local foods. As a result, the children can now speak with their families about potatoes, arugula, fresh spinach, and the bounty of the earth.

What most of them can't do is buy or eat any of the food.

Chester is part of the First Congressional District, the second-hungriest in the United States behind the Bronx and the poorest place in Pennsylvania, according to a national poll, one of the largest ever taken. The city is at the western edge of the oddly drawn district, which snakes east along the Delaware River into parts of Northeast Philadelphia.

Once a bustling center of U.S. shipbuilding, and renowned as the city where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to seminary, Chester lost industry and half its population in the years after World War II.

Without work, the city imploded. As in other postindustrial Pennsylvania cities, jobs disappeared while urban pathologies accrued.

When poverty increased, many businesses moved away, including supermarkets. Chester has become a so-called supermarket desert, Sahara-like in its dearth of Acmes, Genuardis, and ShopRites.

Such stores, generally 60,000 to 100,000 square feet, require a volume of traffic that can't be generated in Chester, said James Turner, director of economic development for the Chester Economic Development Authority.

Instead, Chester has about 100 corner and convenience stores, takeout places, bars and grills, and one or two sit-down restaurants within its approximately five square miles, according to a survey by Marina Barnett and Chad Freed of Widener University in Chester. The investigators created a food map of the city to catalogue resources.

Effectiveness of Chester Eastside Programs

Programs have been documented as having solid, positive impact on participants.

o CEM Program Coordinator and Board Member have worked as part of Widener
     University team to evaluate programs.

o Detailed scholarly works have been compiled for publication.

•   Parents First has strengthened parents involvement with their children and their schools. After completing Parents First, the parents and guardians spent more time reading with their children. They became more involved in the school system. One parent joined the PTO and another said that her child's teacher shared her home phone number so that they could communicate better. Parents felt more comfortable contacting teachers, obtained more information about children's schools and education, and reported fewer barriers when participating in school activities. Parents also showed more affection toward their children and became less frustrated with misbehavior.
  
  
•   In the after school homework program, overall behavior, self-esteem, work habits, positive social behavior, feelings of belonging, and how much the kids liked the program all increased. These are almost all the categories we measured! They also steadily improved the longer they were in the program. (They got better scores in each evaluation session than they did in the one before). The kids' grades also improved over the course of the program - no one had less than a B by the end 
  

Impoverished Chester

The City of Chester, 20 miles from downtown Philadelphia, is one of the poorest municipalities in the country.   45% of children under age 5 live below the poverty line.  Unemployment is three times that of Delaware County as a whole.  Chester’s schools are among the most distressed in Pennsylvania. Half the students who start 9th grade don’t graduate from high school.  For too many children, violence is not just a statistic, it’s a daily reality 

From The State of the Union

	The White House (@whitehouse)
2/12/13, 10:01 PM "Progress in the impoverished parts of our world enriches us all. " —President Obama in#SOTU

Friends of Chester Eastside Group meeting 2/9/13

On Saturday 2/9,  people and organizations that have been Friends and Supporters of Chester Eastside over the years met to review Chester Eastside's current "Fiscal cliff" situation and help CEM determine a way forward.

Organizations with members present included Wayne Presbyterian, Thomas M. Thomas Presbyterian, Widner University, Collenbrook United, Chester Upland School District, New Hope United Baptist Church, Swathmore Presbyterian, Wallingford Presbyterian, Aston Presbyterian, Middletown Presbyterian, Chambers Memorial Presbyterian, Princeton Presbyterian.  Several individuals from Chester also attended and provided their input and ideas.  After the 2 plus hour session, the group went away with several ideas to investigate, action items to address, and areas to consider.  They will reconvene in early March to continue their efforts to help Chester Eastside.

Welcome to Chester Eastside News blog

Hi and welcome.  Chester Eastside is moving further into the Information Age to expand it 's circle of friends and supporters.

Video: Overview of Chester Eastside