Overcoming inequality by improving Internet access - Harvard School of Public Health

July 22, 2014 — Health and wealth are intimately connected. In the United States, people with lower incomes and less education are more likely to smoke, to be overweight, and to be less healthy. One reason for this may be the divide between the ways in which people from different classes access and are exposed to health-related information.

“If you are in a higher socioeconomic position, you are more likely to know about and better understand health risk factors, and to have the capacity to act on this information,” said K. “Vish” Viswanath, professor of health communication at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), in a July 15, 2014 “Hot Topics” lecture.

Lower income people have less access to all types of media, Viswanath said, and greater exposure to advertising for unhealthy products such as tobacco and fast food. This information environment can affect their health in a variety of ways, such as influencing their beliefs about healthy behavior and limiting their ability to make informed decisions about medical treatments.
Viswanath identified a potential way to bridge the health information divide: Treat access to the Internet as a right and provide subsidies for those unable to pay. Despite the seeming ubiquity of smartphones, only 70% of low-income people have Internet access, Viswanath said, and even that number may be an overstatement. Poor people who get online are often unable to keep up with the bill and are cut off— losing access to a key tool for participating in modern life.

Earlier this year, Viswanath co-authored a study that analyzed how the poor use the Internet when they are provided with access. The Click to Connect intervention, the first randomized controlled trial to examine this issue, provided participants with free Internet access and training, and tracked their online activities. Many received their first email address through the project, and told Viswanath that the experience was life-changing.

Viswanath bristled at the attitude that he once heard from a reporter, who said that the poor would only use increased Internet access for frivolous purposes. “Of course they use it for entertainment. They are just like the rest of us,” he said. But he found that the more they used the Internet for any purpose, the more likely they were to search for health-related information.

Viswanath and his colleagues also identified barriers that marginalized people—including the elderly, non-native English speakers, and people with disabilities or lower education—face online, such as navigating the complicated structures of some websites.

“If we are serious about addressing health inequalities, we cannot afford to ignore the poor,” Viswanath said, observing that tobacco and junk food companies certainly don’t. “There are opportunities to engage with them if you provide the right context.”

He called for efforts to be made to improve the Internet literacy of low-income people and to pass policies that improve access. “Otherwise, we will continue to perpetuate an inequality in relation to something that is considered a necessity in the 21^st century,” Viswanath said. “That is unconscionable to think about.”

—Amy Roeder

Photo: iStockphoto/OlgaMiltsova

Article link: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/overcoming-inequality-by-improving-internet-access/

Shift to 'Food Insecurity' Creates Startling New Picture of Hunger in America - National Geographic

Millions of working Americans are "food insecure."

A woman in Osage, Iowa, cans homegrown vegetables to supplement what her family, classified as "food insecure," receives from the local food bank.

Photograph by Amy Toensing, National Geographic Creative

 

Tracie McMillan

National Geographic

Published July 16, 2014

 

Her face was small and pitiful: a brown-eyed, blond-curled toddler, eyes darting, lying on a doctor's table. First we saw her belly, rounder than her skinny legs would suggest, prodded by a physician. And then the camera pulled back, showing the filthy, caked bottoms of her feet.

The year was 1968, and the child was a subject of "Hunger in America," a CBS Reports documentary that aired amid President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. Other scenes showed sharecropper families with rat-infested bedding, and Mexican-Americans too hungry to move.

That was the face of American hunger in 1968. The girl was one of ten million Americans considered hungry, a number equivalent to 5 percent of the population. Most of the hungry lacked jobs, and the unemployment rate of 4 percent nearly tracked the rate of hunger. But however dire that hunger was, it was marginal, with 1 in 20 Americans going without food.

Today, nearly 50 years later, hunger in America looks very different. (Related Graphic: $10 Meals—Fresh Food vs. Fast Food.)

It's a Different Hunger

The biggest difference between hunger in 1968 and today may well be sheer numbers: In 2012, 49 million Americans struggled with hunger, according to the USDA. That's 16 percent of the population, nearly double the then unemployment rate.

For the sake of comparison, that translates to 1 in 6 Americans. Much of that, say experts, can be attributed to a change in how we measure hunger.

In 2006 the USDA traded the term "hunger" for "food insecurity," shifting the focus from whether people were literally starving to whether staying fed was a problem. Researchers had traditionally measured hunger through physical symptoms, like stunted growth and being underweight. Now they began asking Americans whether they were ever actually hungry: Had they missed meals, worried about running out of food, or gone to bed hungry?

Related Graphic: How Subsidized Crops
Affect Diet

Measuring food insecurity rather than hunger has led to a startling new picture of America, says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at Hunter College whose recently re-released Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat explores the link between hunger and agricultural policy.

When it comes to America's hungry, says Poppendieck, "they're not hungry all the time; they just can't count on not being hungry."

The Hungry Have Stuff—and Jobs

In New York City's Bronx borough, more than one-third of the residents and nearly half the children are food insecure. Even so, the people who show up at food assistance programs there may surprise you, says Christopher Bean, executive director of Part of the Solution, a nonprofit that runs a soup kitchen and food pantry in the borough.

"The most common misperception comes back to the idea that the individuals ... who are food insecure are ... street homeless," says Bean. Part of the Solution sees those people, he says, but its clientele "is families, it is mothers with baby strollers, it's people with cell phones."

Today the hungry are almost always employed, a sea change since the 1960s. In 2012, 60 percent of all food-insecure Americans lived in households with a full-time worker; another 15 percent lived in households with a part-time worker.

It is now so common for people to be both employed and hungry, says Bean, that in 2011 Part of the Solution added Saturday hours to its pantry in hopes of serving more working families.

This year the nonprofit decided to expand into evenings and possibly Sundays for the same reason. "We've seen the trend of more and more working people struggling with hunger," says Bean. "We're changing our program delivery model to accommodate them."

See how a rural Arkansas food bank works to feed every hungry mouth.

Hunger Becoming a Problem of Wages

At its base, modern hunger is a problem of income, says Christian Gregory, an economist with the USDA's Economic Research Service.

In June, Gregory and two colleagues published a report about food insecurity in postrecession America, listing the three biggest predictors. The first was unemployment and a sheer lack of income: If you don't have a job, you're more likely to lack food.

But the next two predictors of food insecurity were variations on the theme of low wages. One was inflation, which in this context means the failure of wages to keep up with the cost of living. The other was rising food prices. Indeed, even though more people had jobs, food prices rose enough that they couldn't necessarily buy more food with their wages.

And that too is a significant difference from 1968. Today the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. In nominal terms, that's a huge raise over the $1.60 on offer in 1968. But adjust for inflation—for rising health and housing costs, for the skyrocketing cost of education—and 1968 looks much better. That minimum wage, today, would equal $10.94.

When it comes to hunger, said Gregory, "it really matters how much income is available to people."

Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

Article link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140716-hunger-america-food-poverty-nutrition-diet/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20140717news-hungerpics&utm_campaign=Content&sf3747666=1

Pictures from Memorial to the Lost - June 21st 2014

Thanks so much to all our volunteers – many hands made light work of putting up t-shirt holders to commemorate lives lost to gun violence in Delaware county.  Passers-by stopped to look, ask questions, find a child’s name, a child’s friend’s name.  A Mom asked if we could add her son’s name, killed in late April (after our list cut off).  Pastor Anita’s daughters, aged 7 and 8, ran back and forth.

 

http://chesterdelcoheedinggodscall.blogspot.com/2014/06/memorial-to-lives-lost-to-gun-violence.html

Memorial serves as stark reminder of gun violence - Delco Times

 By LORETTA RODGERS, Times Correspondent, @LorettaRodgers1

Sunday, June 22, 2014

CHESTER — One hundred forty four tee shirts bearing the names of city residents who lost their lives to gun violence since 2009 made for an emotional and overwhelming sight for those traveling down ninth street this past weekend.
 

Erected Saturday on the grounds of Chester Eastside Ministries at Ninth and Upland streets, the dedication of the “Memorial to Lives Lost to Gun Violence” took place Sunday and featured a host of speakers.
 

“This is not a happy occasion,” said Chester Eastside Ministries Pastor the Rev. Bernice Warren. “These T-shirts represent human lives. We are really glad that the community has come out for this somber occasion. Look at these T-shirts and you realize the tragedy of it all. They are our mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers, grandchildren and friends. They are all our children. This madness has to stop.”
 

Sponsored by the Chester Delaware County Chapter of Heeding God’s Call, the event was co-organized by Pastor Anita Littleton of Chester’s Refuge in Christ Church and Fran Stier of the Ohev Shalom Synagogue in Wallingford.
 

“We are very pleased at the turnout today,” said Stier. “It is time people realize that there is a great need for gun control. Do you know that the city of Chester has more murders in one year than the entire country of Ireland? It is because the gun laws in the state of Pennsylvania are too lax. There are not enough controls in place to stop straw purchases.”
 

Standing with tears streaming down her face, Chester resident Delores Banks Strand, spoke of her three sons, who were all lost to gun violence on the streets of Chester. Her oldest son, Calvin Banks, was shot and killed at the age of 17 in 1993; her middle son, Duane Banks, was killed in 2006 at the age of 31; and her youngest son, Marckus Banks, was murdered in 2013 at the age of 32.
 

“I struggle every day,” Strand said. “I only had three children and they are all gone. I wake up every morning with them on my mind and there is nothing I can do. They are right here with me and I’m still standing.”
 

Heeding God’s Call member Yancy Harrell, who lost his son to gun violence, told those in attendance that they should ask themselves what they are going to do to get involved.
 

“This is your neighborhood, your people,” Yancy said. “The names on these shirts might be those of your son or daughter, or the only child of someone you know. These people will never have a graduation, wedding or children of their own. Think about that before it crosses your doorstep.”

Terry Rumsey of Delaware County United for Sensible Gun Policy, expressed appreciation and congratulated the Chester Chapter of Heeding God’s Call for installing a visual reminder of gun violence.
 

“All the stats in the world cannot measure up to what they have put out here on the lawn of Chester Eastside Ministries,” Rumsey said. “This will remind each and every person who drives by here and all the political officials of what we need to do going into the future.”
 

Rumsey said his group is dedicated to changing gun laws. He added that a walk and rally for universal background checks will begin 10 a.m. Saturday at the Calvary Baptist Church, 1616 W. Second Street, go down Ninth Street to the memorial at Chester Eastside and on to the Providence Friends Meeting House in Media.
 

Littleton said the creation of the display has been exceptionally overwhelming for her. She added that a school teacher stopped to see the display and said several of her students names were on the shirts.

“I wrote out 60 of these T-shirts and out of that 60 there were 29 that I had to cry through, pause, get up and stop because they were all under the age of 19 years old,” Littleton said. “Chester City, it is past time for a change ... We have to be the change we want to see. Change has to begin with us first. It is not the will of God that mother’s bury their children.”

Article link: http://www.delcotimes.com/general-news/20140622/memorial-serves-as-stark-reminder-of-gun-violence