An estimated 114 million people remained forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and events seriously disturbing public order. More than 1 in 73 people worldwide remained forcibly displaced.

That persecution is based on five categories, race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. It's not someone who leaves their country for economic opportunity, that person who may be able to go back to their country. A refugee is someone who is not able to go back, they will be persecuted, maybe their ethnic group, their religious group, or they were politically active. And in that case, they get a special designation by the United Nations that they're a person of international concern and they are under special protection.

Absorbing these messages that we are given in society has caused a culture of “self-induced pressure of perfection” that is unsustainable. The fallout of this has manifested in a global mental health crisis that spans young and older generations.

One of the consequences that is often seen in many communities is a rise in eating disorders due to people trying to achieve the standards they see set by the beauty industry and social media. Global eating disorder prevalence increased from 3.4% to 7.8% between 2000 and 2018. 70 million people internationally live with eating disorders. Due to the rise in the prevalence of the problem almost half of all Americans know someone with an eating disorder.

Our climate problem is a consumption problem, that’s the bottom line. We're using too much stuff and discarding it. That TV that I could potentially repair, well Best Buy's having an awesome sale on a 50-inch Samsung TV for $189, I will buy it because I don’t want to spend a Saturday fixing this tv.

It's a numbers game rather than a superhero game. When you find other people that care about the same thing that you do, survey the resources and tools you have, and get to know the people who know people, these gifts that we have in our communities tend to get overlooked. The other important thing is that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Part of why I wrote Transforming Communities was because there are great models out there. Here's how to have a one-to-one conversation with your neighbors. Bring together people to analyze what the assets in your community are so that you can build an effective campaign together.

Once upon a long time ago, we lived in a world where the doors weren't locked. If you needed a cup of sugar, you wandered into the house next door. If they weren't home, you let them know you borrowed a cup of sugar. We've gone a long way away from that. People are still longing for the ability to trust their neighbors. We've been trained to be afraid of people. I had a seminal experience in my work early on before Covid. I would put 15 or 20 people in a room, and I did this several times, and I'd say, why don't we do something straightforward?

 Knock on your neighbor's door and say, hi, I'm your neighbor. I'm here if you need any help. One in four people would say they wouldn't do that or couldn't. The reason, they said, well, I'm not qualified.

We have a unique model. Whenever I meet somebody, they're shocked that it is an actual house. There have been many things tried just in general with children and families in the last 30 years. But if we look at where and when children were flourishing, it's when we had that whole circle; when we had neighbors that knew one another, they knew your parents, your principal knew your parents, your teacher knew your parents, and everything was pretty close to your neighborhood. Now children are expanding out, and they may be attending school or childcare at someplace that isn't their neighborhood.

How do we ensure that when you come back to that neighborhood, the things you need to be set up for success exist within that kind of five- to 10-block radius? Parents can access tutoring for children, and if you need food, you can access it safely and have conversations with other parents. So often, when programs are created and even funding allocated, what we see is families are asked to make that work. The concept here with the community-based hubs is planning for and by the community. Like, what, when, and how will we offer that? How will it be available and made accessible if all our parents are working and not available for a 10:00 AM program? We're not going to try to offer a 10:00 AM program because of a grant; we're going to ask what the families need.

There are currently about 3.9 Billon Women or Girls in the world. Surprisingly the world's global population is almost equal regarding men and women, with men only slightly ahead. Women play a critical role in maintaining the global population and the world's economies by producing the future workforce. Although women hold this vital position in society, women experience many gaps in their daily lives and globally.

Over 22 million women in the United States and millions abroad cannot afford or lack access to menstrual hygiene products making functioning during menstruation difficult. During this last year, headlines about a tampon shortage started appearing in early summer 2022, when The Wall Street Journal reported that 7% of tampons were out of stock nationwide. Across the U.S., shoppers looking for their preferred brand, or any brand at all, were greeted with empty store shelves. Along with shortages, prices of pads and tampons have risen along with the cost of everything else, making it expensive to have a period.

Perhaps there are two periods in your life when you understand love the best, when you are a young child and when you become an older adult. The reason is that as a young child, you look forward to all the people you will learn to love in the future, and as an older adult, you reflect on when you felt love in your lifetime. Whether looking ahead toward the future or examining the past, it becomes clear that love is a series of moments in your life that get frozen in time.

There have been over 6.5 million deaths due to Covid-19, and the loss of life has been higher than we could have ever projected. Those individuals no longer here have parents, spouses, children, friends, and co-workers directly affected by this experience. It has left a hole in many hearts and communities and brought the understanding of grief, bereavement, and what it means to care and love into the limelight.

You ask someone what scent transports you and what they recall. Something as simple as a question like that, I've had people responding from, oh, it's the scent of lemons on Amalfi coast when I was a 21-year-old, and I was in love with a woman. Remembering being a seven-year-old and having her mother smearing copper tone on her skin on the New Jersey shores or the scent of Gentle perfume associating it with their mother or grandmother suddenly pulls you back to being human to be in fellowship with one another.

When you're playing a card game with someone, and you've asked them a question, they're taking a moment to pause, think, and reflect; you're not swiping left. You're not pushing or tapping on something. You are in a human moment. You're making eye contact; you're looking at them. I think it's simply getting back to a place where we value what we have to say and slowing down and listening and hopefully doing some laughing too.

“If you ask most people what they want in life or what their next six to 12 months to look like, the most common answer is I don't know. That is a recipe for unhappiness because if you don't know what you want in life, how will you get it? If you don't know what the ideal version of you looks like or what makes you happy, how will you obtain that? There's a saying that when the archer pulls back his arrow with no target in front of him, what will he hit? He fires arrows down range.

“We're not even thinking about the people dealing with the cleanup of the messes on the planet each one of us is making.

We should be talking about this very critical issue because when we talk about the people who will be impacted by climate change or environmental risks, these are the most important ones we should be talking about. When we throw out our waste, we tend to forget who is going to manage this waste. We dispose of sanitary napkins, condoms, or food packaging without washing it. These kinds of things create an enormous impact on the people who are going to manage this waste around us.

“The war doesn't look like a short-term thing. Even if the war were to end tomorrow, unfortunately, it doesn't look like that will happen. We've got disruption in production, which will affect yields as we get through this fall, but we've also got significant damage to the export infrastructure in Ukraine that will take some time to rebuild.

Railways have been damaged; shipyards have been damaged, all those things. It's not something that we will be able to change with the snap of a finger. It's not just getting beyond that little bit of the crop that was influenced by frost.”

What made 2020 remarkable is that people still showed up to fight back against injustice regardless of the conditions. We experienced things like the pandemic and the environmental injustices that continue to plague our world. We also saw people say; you know what? I'm going to walk out of this door. I'm going to carry this sign. I'm going to go to the ballot box. I'm going to show up for what I believe in because that's the only way to affect change. I can't wait for the wildfires to stop. I can't wait for white supremacists to get it through their heads that we belong here. I can't wait for another moment to pass.

There is no better time to do that than now, regardless of how hard it is to look back at our history, the civil rights movement. During that time, people had to deal with segregation. People had to deal with fire hoses. People had to deal with not being able to work a particular job or sit at a particular counter because of their skin color, and while dealing with that, those people still showed up to the ballot box. They still marched. They still protested. They still worked through systematic violence and racism.

During these unique challenges of our modern-day era, it is incumbent on us to seize on the now; if we take a piece of what John Lewis said, "If not us, then who, if not now, then when?" so it must be now.

The way I describe racism to my students is that it affects you from the womb to the grave because racism can affect the prenatal care that your mother gets. Think about that; before you've even arrived on the planet, the prenatal care, or lack thereof that your mother gets, how she's treated when she's pregnant, the kind of birth experience she has, it starts there. Then we take it into infancy. What kind of experiences did you have as an infant, as a child, when you go to school, as you get older? Then your parents, if your parents are racialized, what kind of experiences of racism are they having?

A lot of us are rethinking our futures. There's been a lot of lives lost. There's been a loss of security. There's a lot of unrest in our own personal lives that is registering in our society as frustration, anger, feelings of powerlessness, things are changing so rapidly. A lot of people feel powerless to change their personal situation, whether that's due to job loss, the loss of a loved one, isolation, or uncertainty. These emotions can eventually lead to things like anxiety, depression. It can create a situation where violence is on the rise, because sometimes some people who are unstable tend to see violence as a way of lashing out or a way of unleashing this violent energy.

There is so much conflict in so many different types of relationships in marriages, conflicts in the family, between siblings, between parents and adult children, between parents and smaller children. There's conflict in the workplace. We live in a society in conflict.

If we go back in history and look at the paintings during the 1600s and 1700s, we see that all the fashionable and wealthy people loved to make their hair or wigs curl and stand tall on their heads like modern time Afros. The most memorable person in people’s minds is Marie Antoinette, widely known for her puffy hairstyles. Although she was controversial in her day, she continues to influence fashion.

The pandemic has elevated people’s fears related to virus exposure; according to studies from the Pew Research Center, 70% state that their jobs could be done from home. Approximately 25% of workers stated that they were less satisfied with their jobs than pre-pandemic. It is safe to say that this issue is part and parcel of the "Big Quit" and will play out in our organizations for quite a while in both our near and distant future.

Our mission is to elevate women's voices, particularly from marginalized communities and minority groups in communities. Our key philosophy lies in storytelling. Number one, we aim to give women a safe medium of expression that transcends all cultural, language, or geographical barriers. The second goal is to cultivate a sense of agency amongst the girls and the women that we target, often eroded by the backgrounds they're coming from. The third goal is to equip the women with skills that can provide them with sustainable means of income. The goal is to challenge negative stereotypes associated with women and their communities and present them more dignifiedly. Last but not least is to create a pool of information that offers an accurate understanding of the issues affecting underrepresented women.

Within the larger homeless population, about 38 percent are youths and young adults 18-25 years old. Many of these young people are former foster children who have aged out of the system or left home due to instability. This often-forgotten population is the most vulnerable on the streets since they are still developing and growing into adulthood.

People who make the rules and the policies either don’t have a clear understanding of what it takes to teach, or they clearly don't understand what powerful teaching and learning look like because our system is antiquated. It's not reflective of where we currently are as a society.