Poised in her EMS Corps shirt, it's hard to believe 25-year-old Shandra Lora ever shrank from herself. Today, she is EMS-certified and on her way to becoming a Newark firefighter. In her own quiet way, she is building the version of herself that her eight-year-old self once needed.Arriving in Newark from Canada as the daughter of Dominican immigrants, she navigated new school environments in French, Spanish, and English before middle school, but didn't feel like she was where she needed to be. S...

Matthew almost stopped going. At a certain point during his time at LEAD Charter School, the educational partner of YouthBuild Newark, he had convinced himself there was no reason to be there. “If I’m not getting money, I shouldn’t be here,” he remembers thinking. He left to find work. Then his teachers called him back.“Just try it out,” they told him. So he did.That pattern of drifting, being called back, and taking the second chance offered, showing that the process of transformation isn’t alw...

At 22, Angie Rosa found herself in a hotel room with her newborn daughter, trying to figure out how to build a life from nothing. She had left an abusive relationship, cycled through unstable housing situations, and was battling severe depression. Her daily routine consisted of the basics: “making sure the baby ate, making sure she had her diaper changed, making sure she was clean.” Beyond caring for her daughter, she struggled to see a better future.“I was very depressed,” Angie remembers. “I d...

Shaka’s path to this moment was far from straightforward. At seventeen, he dropped out of school and started selling drugs. A year later, he was shot in a dispute in front of his mother’s house. “I used to think I was going to die,” he recalls. “After I got shot, I didn’t care what happened to me.”But a mentor of his saw something different—potential waiting to be unlocked. He signed Shaka up for YouthBuild Newark, an initiative of Opportunity Youth Network (OYN) that gives young people who’ve l...

The shift from being served by programs to shaping them didn’t happen overnight. Yaneliz’s transfor
mation started with a friend who introduced her to LEAD Charter School, New Jersey’s only disconnection prevention and recovery charter school. An initiative of Newark Opportunity Youth Network, LEAD is designed specifically to serve opportunity youth ages 16-21 who have prematurely left traditional systems.Her leadership started with something that comes naturally to her: speaking without a filter...

Across the country, concerns over voting rights and the integrity of the electoral process have led to a surge in legal actions ahead of Election Day 2024. Fueled by the false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, lawmakers in multiple states enacted laws restricting voter eligibility and changing voting procedures.

In response, civil rights organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the NAACP filed lawsuits nationwide, alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits discrimination in voting nationwide on the basis of race or being a member of a language minority group. These legal challenges are rapidly reshaping the voting rights landscape, with the potential to significantly impact state, local, and national elections.

Seeing Taylor Swift live with thousands of other “Swifties” wasn’t supposed to be impossible. In November 2022, when tickets for Swift’s “Eras” tour went on sale, Ticketmaster customers encountered website crashes, sparse availability, unusable presale access codes, and outrageous prices.

Many fans, locked out of Ticketmaster, flocked to secondary sites to find tickets as high as $22,700 each, according to an article in The Guardian. After a flood of complaints, in January 2023 more than 300 fans (at last count) signed on to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court against Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company. The plaintiffs allege the company engages in anti-competitive actions and predatory consumer practices, in violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law, which prohibits false advertising and illegal business practices. They are seeking $2,500 in damages for each violation of the California law.

Instagram and its parent company, Facebook Inc., rebranded as Meta, have faced increasing calls to rein in social media practices that promote hate speech and online bullying. Additionally, documents obtained and published by The Wall Street Journal demonstrate that Facebook continues to pursue younger Instagram users despite internal data showing the platform’s detrimental effects on teenagers. These effects are most profound on girls whose body images can be warped by the platform’s unrealistic portrayals.

For the 2024 presidential election, voters in 28 states will face restrictions that were not in place for the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy organization.

In its latest “Voting Laws Roundup” from May 2024, the Brennan Center reported that these restrictions include how mail-in ballots are handled and collected, shortened deadlines for requesting absentee ballots, and additional requirements for voter registration organizations.

Few garments evoke as much controversy as the hijab. Translated from Arabic as partition, curtain, or barrier, sometimes hijab refers to the headscarf worn by Islamic women, and sometimes it refers to the broader concept of practicing modesty by both men and women, according to the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality & Equality, a global organization dedicated to promoting women’s rights. For this reason, it is often referred to as practicing hijab or wearing hijab.

Head coverings for Muslim women come in different forms. The hijab typically fits snuggly from the forehead around the face and drapes down the neck. Nearly half a million Muslim women and girls regularly wear hijab, according to the Pew Research Center. Typically, young women start wearing hijab in public or around non-family males when puberty begins.

Participation in sports—from Little League to high school to the collegiate level—is about more than just winning. Involvement in sports promotes life skills such as discipline, responsibility, self-confidence, and teamwork.

According to Inside Higher Education, there are currently 20 states that limit or ban transgender athletes in grades K-12 from participating in sports that align with their gender identity. The constitutionality of these bans is being challenged under Title IX, the landmark gender equality law enacted in 1972, which prohibits discrimination based on sex in any educational program receiving federal funding.

Everyone can play a part in combating climate change. Corporations, however, are uniquely positioned to play an even bigger role and are facing pressure to take meaningful and timely action.

According to a 2021 report, “Taking Stock: A Global Assessment of Net Zero Targets,” published by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a London-based nonprofit, 21% of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies agreed to net zero emission targets, but many of these companies did not include the most substantial and difficult to address Scope 3 emissions.

Net zero means balancing the amount of greenhouse gases entering the Earth’s atmosphere with the amount being removed. In other words, not adding to the amount of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Net zero is a target that scientists have said the world needs to reach by 2050 in order to limit global temperature rise and mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

The sports world may appear more integrated than other career paths, but Black athletes face racial inequity as well.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Black athletes thrived in some sports, but none more so than in horse racing, which is America’s oldest sport, dating back to the early 1700s.
In fact, 13 of the 15 jockeys that competed in the first Kentucky Derby, held in 1875, were Black. The winning jockey that first year was Oliver Lewis, a Black man born into slavery in 1856, who rode a horse named Aristides to victory. In the Derby’s first 28 years, 15 of the winning jockeys were African American.