PERSPECTIVE: Back to School—Don’t Forget Your Child’s Mental Health

by Rachel Papke Back to school time is upon us. Parents are scurrying around shopping for back to school deals for their children—clothes, school supplies, and more. For parents with college-aged students the prep-work is more extensive: purchasing dorm room items and packing boxes to start. There are long “to-do” lists, calendar updates, alerts, reminders—a whirlwind of things to do to ensure that your child is ready for the school year. But what actions are you taking to check-in on your child’s mental health?

First, familiarize yourself with the symptoms of a mental health condition by accessing these mental health screening tools.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 5 young adults has a diagnosable mental health disorder, yet most are not receiving help. If left untreated, the risk for suicide increases. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for persons aged 15-24. With suicide rates at their highest in 30 years, prevention programs like those of the Jordan Porco Foundation need your support more than ever to help save young adult lives.

First-Year College Students

Majority of U.S. first-year college students feel underprepared emotionally for college. 65% said they tended to keep their feelings about the difficulty of college to themselves, 60% of students wish they had gotten more help with emotional preparation for college, and 87% of students said college preparation during high school focused more on academics than emotional readiness.¹ These statistics are striking and we need to fill the gap to combat these statistics.

Connecticut Statistics

During the past 12 months, 26.6% of Connecticut high school students felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities. This is suggestive of clinical depression, meaning that more than a quarter of high school students should be receiving treatment for depression or depressive symptoms.

When they feel sad, empty, hopeless, angry, or anxious, 50.4% of students said they only sometimes, rarely, or never get the kind of help they need. Talk your children, listen, and validate their feelings.

18.5% of CT high school students did something to purposely hurt themselves without wanting to die, such as cutting or burning themselves on purpose, within the past year. If your child displays the signs and symptoms of self-injury, you should consult a mental health professional with self-injury expertise. Learn more, here .

13.4% of Connecticut high school students seriously considered suicide in the past 12 months. It’s more common than you think, and it may well be your child or one of their friends. For more information about the warning signs of suicide visit our Nine out of Ten website.

Stay informed and attuned to any changes in behavior. Keep the mission of the Jordan Porco Foundation, the Hartford, CT-based non-profit, at the forefront to help you in your discussions.

The mission of the Jordan Porco Foundation is to prevent suicide, promote mental health, and create a message of hope for young adults.

To accomplish this, they:

Help challenge stigma by talking openly about mental health issues

Offer engaging and uplifting programming, emphasizing peer-to-peer messaging

Promote help seeking behavior, self-care, and coping skills

Educate about the risk factors and warning signs of suicide and other related mental health concerns

They do this in the name and spirit of Jordan Porco, who died by suicide in 2011. They’re in it for life every day. Saving lives is the heart and soul of their cause. Mental health needs a voice: you are that voice; we are that voice.

Work to create a message of hope for your children. Encourage open, honest conversations about mental health. Talk about feelings. Listen to your children and know what mental health resources are available in your area and at school. Educate your children to take care of their mental health, to carry the skills with them as they head off to school. Help them understand that they are not alone—where there is help, there is hope.

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Rachel Papke is Communications Coordinator for the Jordan Porco Foundation.  She may be contacted at (860) 904-6041 or rachel@rememberingjordan.org.  Learn more about the Jordan Porco Foundation at www.rememberingjordan.org

PERSPECTIVE commentaries by contributing writers appear each Sunday on Connecticut by the Numbers.

Also of interest: Creating a Message of Hope for Young Adults 

1 – The “First-Year College Experience Survey” was commissioned by the JED Foundation, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, and the Jordan Porco Foundation, and conducted online by the Harris Poll among 1,502 U.S. college freshmen between March 25 and April 17, 2015. Survey respondents were students 17-20 years old in the second term of their first year at college, and attending some classes in person at a 2-year or 4-year college. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, visit www.SettoGo.org.

Travelers Initiative Aims to Predict Chronic Pain from Workplace Injuries

Can chronic pain, often the lingering result of a workplace injury, be predicted? The Travelers Companies, Inc. believes the answer is yes.  The company has developed what it describes as the first predictive model designed to reverse a sharp rise in chronic pain caused by workplace injuries.

The Travelers Early Severity Predictor (patent pending) identifies the likelihood of an injured employee developing chronic pain so that they can avoid it in recovery and reduce the need to use opioids or other painkillers.

“Millions of American workers are injured on the job each year, and the number of cases in which chronic pain interferes with an employee’s recovery has risen from less than 10 percent a decade ago to more than half of all serious injuries today,” said Dr. Adam Seidner, the National Medical Director at Travelers, when the initiative was announced in April.

According to A.M. Best, Travelers is the largest workers compensation carrier in the United States. The company manages more than 250,000 workplace injury claims and 3.5 billion medical treatments per year.

“When someone develops chronic pain, they are prescribed opioids or other painkillers more than 90 percent of the time. Our goal is to work with injured employees and their doctors to eliminate or substantially reduce the need for painkillers that can slow their recovery or lead to devastating long-term addiction.”

The Travelers Early Severity Predictor has been applied in more than 20,000 cases since early 2015. Of those, more than 9,000 injured employees were identified as being at risk of developing chronic pain. These employees received a customized, sports medicine-like regimen of treatment precisely sequenced to aid and accelerate their recovery, the company explained.

Injured employees who participated in the program in the past year have, on average, recovered and returned to work more quickly, the company said. They were also far less likely to receive a prescription for opioids, and when they did, it was typically a lower dosage or only for short-term use. At the same time, medical expenses, which cost American employers an average of nearly $40,000 per injury, were reduced by as much as 50 percent.

In 2014, there were 107.1 cases of nonfatal occupational injuries or illnesses requiring an employee to miss work for every 100,000 full-time American workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the website IPWatchdog reported. Although this represented a decline from 2013’s workplace injury numbers, it still resulted in 1,157,410 days away from work among private, state government and local government employees. BLS statistics show that workplace injury incidence rates were highest in the industries of transportation and warehousing as well as health care and social assistance, according to the website.

Two patent applications published this year by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cover technologies associated with the Early Severity Predictor project, IP Watchdog reported.

The Centers for Disease Control issued a guideline earlier this year, the Insurance Journal reported, for primary care physicians for treating chronic pain. The new CDC guideline aims to lessen opioid use disorder and overdose. When opioids are used, doctors should prescribe lowest possible effective dosage, according to the guideline. The CDC guideline also suggests increasing the use of other effective treatments available for chronic pain, such as non-opioid medications or non-pharmacologic therapies.

According to research into physician dispensing of opioids, the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) noted that three out of four injured workers with pain are prescribed opiods, with the amount per claim varying by state, the Insurance Journal reported.  Nearly 1 in 12 injured workers given narcotics are still on them 3 to 6 months later as few doctors appear to be following recommended treatment guidelines to prevent abuse, according to WCRI research in 2012.

A 2012 study in the Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine found that when long-acting opioid painkillers are prescribed, workers’ compensation claims are nearly four times more likely to turn into catastrophic claims with costs tallying more than $100,000.

“Helping employees avoid chronic pain and the slippery slope to possible opioid dependency is critical to reversing this disturbing and costly health crisis,” Seidner emphasized.

The Travelers Companies, Inc. is a leading provider of property casualty insurance for auto, home and business. The company’s main offices are in New York, Hartford and St. Paul.  A component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Travelers has approximately 30,000 employees and generated revenues of approximately $27 billion in 2015.

Americans Moving Less Often, Changing Jobs Less Frequently - Divorce May Be Among Reasons Why, UConn Researcher Says

Surprisingly, Americans are moving far less than they used to, only about half as much as they moved 50 years ago.  And Americans aren’t moving or changing jobs with the frequency of decades past.  Counter-intuitive, but true, according to the mounting data. In the early 1980s, about 17 percent of Americans changed their address each year. Now it’s less than 12 percent. Bigger moves, between different states, have dropped even faster, the Boston Globe reported this month.

“When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, about one in 10 Americans changed occupations in a given year. As of 2012, it’s more like one in 24,” the Globe reported, citing data from a team of researchers at the Federal Reserve and the University of Notre Dame.

A researcher at the University of Connecticut has developed a theory regarding a key contributing factor to the diminishing moves and job changes.

“I’ve been banging my head against a wall for almost a decade, trying to figure out why migration rates are declining like this,” says Thomas Cooke, professor of geography in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Cooke spent the spring of 2015 in the Department of Demography at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands on a Fulbright fellowship, where he worked on just this problem, UConn Today reported. His research findings give the first direct evidence for one major factor contributing to this trend: divorce and child custody.

“Changes in family complexity, like divorce and child custody, make a big difference for migration,” he told UConn Today.  Cooke’s current work stemmed from the idea that in the 21st century, families are becoming increasingly complex. More women are working, people often live with elderly parents or grandparents, and step-children and cousins often live under the same roof.

Less moving is not good news for the economy, published reports have indicated.

Economists worry that the lower turnover is an indication of stagnation, not stability, the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this year. “Workers are staying put because there are fewer better jobs to move to, or they face other barriers that are keeping them locked in their current positions. And with declining job movement may come slower gains in overall employment, wages, productivity and, ultimately, economic growth,” the LA Times reported.

The Globe report suggests that “one big reason people jump between states and careers is because they’re lured away by the promise of higher pay and grander opportunities. The fact that fewer people are moving suggests fewer are getting those life-altering chances.”

The Times reports that experts also blame government policies for suppressing job creation and labor market mobility, whether through taxes or burdensome regulations.  Government restrictions on who can work in which jobs have expanded greatly over time, academic economists Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger, who have written extensively on labor market flows, told the Times. Citing other research, they note that the share of workers required to have a government-issued license to do their jobs rose from less than 5 percent in the 1950s to 29 percent in 2008.

A New York Times report in May, citing data highlighted by the Brookings Institution, indicated that “Fluidity rates varied widely throughout the country, but the Brookings paper found that they declined in every state. Most of the largest drops occurred in the West: Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Alaska were all in the bottom 10.

States with the most activity included North Carolina, South Carolina, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Illinois – but even these were not as fluid as they used to be, the paper reported.

There are broad adverse economic consequences to the lack of mobility, the Globe reports.  “A recent study authored by two Harvard professors found that poor states are barely gaining any ground. Between 1880 and 1980, income differences among the states tended to shrink about 2 percent a year. This catch-up growth was only half as fast from 1990 and 2010. And if you focus on the few years just before the recession that began in 2008, there was virtually no convergence at all.  Should this trend continue, the gap between rich and poor America may become a permanent feature of economic life,” the newspaper reported.

Cooke focused on child custody following divorce. His analysis confirmed that divorced people with children were even less likely to move than those without children. The findings support the idea that people’s lives are still linked, even if they divorce, Cooke explained.  At the University of Connecticut Cooke has directed both the Urban Studies program and the Center for Population Research. His research focuses on the family dimension of internal migration, and the shifting concentration of poverty. In 2013 he earned the Research Excellence Award from the Population Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.

Cooke noted that the findings are the first direct evidence of divorce and child custody affecting migration in the U.S. Unlike the ’60s and ’70s, when state divorce proceedings usually awarded custody of children to the mother, joint custody is the norm today, he pointed out.

Combined with other factors affecting migration, such as the ease of telecommuting and the use of technology to communicate with loved ones far away, these divorce factors could spell a new era of rootedness, Cooke predicted.

E-Cigarettes Remain Controversial as New Federal Law, Yale Academic Study Weigh In

Even as new federal rules restricting the sale of e-cigarettes take effect, advocates in Connecticut continue to urge state lawmakers to impose tougher restrictions on electronic cigarettes and vapor products when they reconvene next year.  They warn that a growing number of young people are using these electronic delivery systems to "smoke" what could be harmful and addictive substances. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced rules earlier this year that will forbid e-cigarette shops nationwide from selling the products to people younger than 18 and will require staff to ask for identification that proves customers are old enough to buy.  The rules – which take effect this month - would also extend long-standing restrictions on traditional cigarettes to a host of other products, including e-cigarettes, hookah, pipe tobacco and nicotine gels. Minors would be banned from buying the products.

Teens who initially tried e-cigarettes because of their low cost had significantly stepped up their use of e-cigarettes by the time researchers checked in six months later, according to a study that senior researcher Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, told WebMD in an article published last week.  The low cost of the devices and the promise they can help teens quit smoking tobacco are the two strong predictors of continued use, she said.

In addition, teens who tried e-cigarettes to quit smoking were more than 14 times more likely to keep using e-cigarettes than those who did not consider this a reason to try the devices, the findings showed.  However, e-cigarettes didn't seem to help the kids quit. Four out of five teens who tried e-cigarettes to quit smoking were still puffing regular cigarettes six months later, the investigators found.

"Even though they said they were using e-cigarettes to quit smoking, it doesn't appear to have necessarily helped them," Krishnan-Sarin said.

Jennifer DeWitt, executive director of the Central Naugatuck Valley Regional Action Council, told members of the General Assembly's Public Health Committee this spring that every principal in the 12-town region her organization covers "has a desk drawer of these items that were confiscated from teens this year," including some retrofitted to smoke marijuana, the Associated Press reported.

"Tobacco is a success story for us in the overall picture of prevention. However, we will take a back-slide if electronic nicotine delivery devices continue to be available in the ways that they are currently," DeWitt said.  She said 7.2 percent of Connecticut high school students are e-cigarette users, marking a higher usage rate than all tobacco products combined.

According to the CDC, nationally, 7 out of 10 middle and high school students who currently use tobacco have used a flavored product. In addition:

• 63% of students who currently use e-cigarettes have used flavored e-cigarettes (1.6 million)
• 61% of students who currently use hookah have used flavored hookah (1 million)
• 64% of students who currently use cigars have used flavored cigars (910,000)

Beginning this month, retailers are prohibited from selling the tobacco products to those under 18, placing them in vending machines or distributing free samples, under the new FDA rules. While nearly all states already ban sales of e-cigarettes to minors, federal officials said they will be able to impose stiffer penalties and deploy more resources to enforce the law. The FDA action comes five years after the agency first announced its intent to regulate e-cigarettes and more than two years after it floated its initial proposal, according to published reports.

“Millions of kids are being introduced to nicotine every year, a new generation hooked on a highly addictive chemical” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said. “We cannot let the enormous progress we’ve made toward a tobacco-free generation be undermined by products that impact our health and economy in this way.”

The CDC indicated that in 2013, more than a quarter million middle and high school students who had never smoked regular cigarettes had used e-cigarettes, a number that had grown three-fold in just two years. A high proportion of middle and high school students saw e-cigarette advertisements (in 2014) from one or more of the following four sources: retail, Internet, TV/movies, and Magazines/newspapers. Overall, 66% of Middle School Students and 71% of High School Student.

The New Haven Register reported that Dr. Roy Herbst, chief of medical oncology at the Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital, said state and federal policy-makers should do more to rein in the spread of the devices.

“It didn’t go as far as we would’ve liked but it’s a good step in the positive direction and allows for more research,” Herbst said of the new federal rule. “I think now that we finally have this regulation, it will begin to stem the rapid use of e-cigarette use that is running rampant in the United States and around the world.”

New Documentary, Travelers Championship Heighten Attention to ALS, Sports is Once Again Common Theme

Public awareness of ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – has been intertwined with sports since Lou Gehrig played with the New York Yankees, and saw his career and his life, tragically shortened by the neurodegenerative disease eight decades ago.  Gehrig’s Yankee Stadium speech in 1939 has endured as one of the century’s most memorable. Earlier this month, the Travelers Championship on the PGA Tour raised more money for charity than in any previous year, when $2.8 million was raised with ALS as the primary charity.  Travelers Executive Chairman of the Board Jay Fishman announced in August 2015 that he had been diagnosed with ALS.

And now, a new motion picture documentary telling the story of a former NFL player afflicted with ALS is reaching theaters across the country, including Connecticut.  The film, Gleason, goes inside the life of Steve Gleason, the former New Orleans Saints defensive back who, at the age of 34, was diagnosed with ALS and given a life expectancy of two to five years. Gleason played for the Saints from 2000-2008.

The primary beneficiary for the 2016 Travelers tournament was the ALS Clinic at the Hospital for Special Care (HSC) in New Britain. Each year, HSC cares for more than 250 Connecticut residents with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). HSC is the only facility in Connecticut that is part of the ALS Association’s national network of Certified Treatment Centers of Excellence and is certified by the Muscular Dystrophy Association for ALS care.

According to the ALS Association, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. When a muscle has no nourishment, it "atrophies" or wastes away. "Lateral" identifies the areas in a person's spinal cord where portions of the nerve cells that signal and control the muscles are located. As this area degenerates it leads to scarring or hardening ("sclerosis") in the region.  Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their demise.

ALS burst back into the public conversation during the 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, as millions of people started talking about ALS. Recently, there have been some indications that the money raised during that social media explosion may have helped to advance research into ALS.

As the movie tells it, just weeks after his diagnosis, Gleason found out his wife, Michel, was expecting their first child. A video journal that began as a gift for his unborn son expands to chronicle Steve’s determination to get his relationships in order, build a foundation to provide other ALS patients with purpose, and adapt to his declining physical condition—utilizing medical technologies that offer the means to live as fully as possible, according to the movie synopsis appearing on the film’s website. The documentary was highly regarded at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and is making its Connecticut debut at Cinema City at the Palace 17 in Hartford.

ALS usually strikes people between the ages of 40 and 70, and approximately 20,000 Americans can have the disease at any given time (although this number fluctuates), the ALS Association reports. For unknown reasons, military veterans are approximately twice as likely to be diagnosed with the disease than the general public.

The Greater Hartford Walk to Defeat ALS will take place on September 25 in East Hartford.  The New Haven Walk will be held on October 2 in New Haven.

https://youtu.be/WgkQU32XSFQ

Distracted Driving Attracts Police Attention in CT

Five seconds is the average time your eyes are off the road while texting. When traveling at 55mph, that's enough time to cover the length of a football field blindfolded. That statistic underscores why Connecticut State Police and more than 50 local police departments across the state are participating in the “U Drive. U Text. U Pay” initiative, for the second time this year.  It is an effort to get the attention of motorists who choose to text, talk or otherwise distract themselves from the task of driving by using a hand-held mobile phone. The campaign began August 3 and runs through August 16, (a similar effort was conducted in April) with law enforcement agencies taking aim at distracted drivers—especially those on their phones. 

The state Department of Transportation observed a significant drop in hand-held mobile phone use at selected enforcement locations after a similar effort last year. The data demonstrated a decrease in distracted driving from 9.6 percent before April 2015 to 7.8 percent in August 2015, representing a 23 percent drop in phone use at the selected enforcement nationwide.

Under Connecticut’s cell phone and texting law, violations involve heavy fines, ranging from $150 for a first offense to $300 for a second violation and $500 for each subsequent violation.  In 2014, an estimated 3,179 people were killed (10 percent of all crash fatalities) and an additional 431,000 were injured (18 percent of all crash injuries) in motor vehicle crashes involving distracted.

“Crashes due to cell phone usage are preventable. Keep your eyes on the road and your hands on steering wheel all of the time that you are driving. That incoming text and outgoing phone call can wait. Nothing is more important than arriving at your destination safely,” said Commissioner Dora B. Schriro of Connecticut’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection.

At any given daylight moment across America, approximately 660,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving. Ten percent of all drivers 15 to 19 years old involved in fatal crashes were reported as distracted at the time of the crashes. This age group has the largest proportion of drivers who were distracted at the time of the crashes.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration points out that studies show that parents have a great influence on teen behavior. “While you may not think you have great influence, that’s it’s all about peer pressure, you’re still the greatest influence on your teen. Talk to your teen and set rules to keep your teens from driving while distracted. Know the facts and share it with them. Engage your teens in a dialogue about the problem.”  A national website, www.distraction.gov, has relevant information.

Connecticut remains the only state in the nation to receive special distracted driving prevention funds to create special patrols to identify, stop and cite drivers who choose to ignore distracted driving laws. Over $6.8 million dollars has been awarded to the state over the last three years to fund distracted driving prevention campaigns.

PERSPECTIVE: Philanthropy Can Respond to Anxiety, Alienation and Adversity

by Ambassador James A. Joseph [Part Two]

Think first of the anxiety so many people feel. There have been moments of great anxiety before. The period after 9/11 was such a moment. The period after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King was such a moment. But psychologists have called the present moment a period of free-floating anxiety in which the anxiety we feel is not the result of one event, but a confluence of events.

The present mood runs the gamut from anxiety about the lingering effects of the economic free fall we faced a few years ago to anxiety about what violent conflicts are doing to our soul as a people; from anxiety about the new meanness in public life to anxiety about whether the increasing tendency to use the public square to promote private interests will lead to an eclipse of the very idea of a public good. Many people have become so anxious that they are anxious about the fact they are anxious.

Occasionally, there are those moments when our spirits are uplifted and the dream of a more perfect union seems within our reach. Those are the moments when we romanticize Nelson Mandela’s call for reconciliation; when we remember Martin Luther King’s admonition to respect the humanity of the adversary; and when we revel in what President Obama called amazing grace, the spirit we saw in South Carolina when a horrendous act of violence hoping to cause a race war had the opposite effect.

But while public acts of forgiveness and grace may be seductive, while they empower the victim of violence and can disarm the perpetrator, they are rather limited unless they lead to a larger social transformation that involves individual, political and economic change. And that is why Desmond Tutu and others in South Africa who are still revered around the world, now speak of the fundamental deficit in their democracy as the failure to achieve economic reconciliation.

So if the first element of the emotion we see and feel is anxiety, the second is alienation. Reconciliation is difficult because too many of us look at diversity and want to homogenize it to fit our comfort zone. Many good people with the best intentions fail to understand the difference between the individual as actor and our institutions as agents. A recent poll found, for example, that white Americans, by a two-to-one margin, believe that where racism is a problem, it is a problem of biased individuals. People of color who were surveyed were more likely to be concerned about biased institutions.

However, it is not just the alienation of population groups from each other that concerns me. I have spent much of the last twenty years in South Africa and one of the things I learned is that enduring reconciliation is not possible without eliminating historical illusions, dismantling deceptions and coming to grips with mis-teachings.

The poet William Wadsworth put it best when he wrote that the only thing worse than being untaught is to be mis-taught. I also learned in South Africa what we are now learning in the United States, how public symbols affect public memory and how they can be used to shape a sense of belonging or alternatively foster a feeling of alienation.

Those who write about building or re-building community are the first to remind us that Americans disagree about who we are because we cannot agree about what we have been. We are at odds over the meaning of our own history, over the sources of our national strength, over what it is philosophically and spiritually that make us Americans. We are alienated not just from each other but from our past as well.

There is much made of the meanness tearing at the fabric of both national and international life. The anger we see is often the result of not just anxiety and alienation but adversity as well. Disaster is also a part of the new normal. Many people in many parts of our country and our world live with either the consequence of a prior adversity or walk in the shadows and anticipation of a future adversity. Some live in a constant rage about went wrong in a previous disaster. They are the ones who look for scapegoats rather than solutions.

There are others who live with the fear of a future disaster but they have known adversity before so they respond with a kind of resilience that engages it rather than being consumed by it. I grew up in Louisiana and I served later as chair of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so I know something about the resilience of Louisiana’s people. I can still hear ringing in my ears a favorite quote of my father who liked to say that the soul would have no rainbows, had the eyes no tears. He was defiant rather than defeated because he looked at adversity and saw not so much the tears as the potential for rainbows.

Disaster challenges philanthropy in a very special way. My experience with Hurricane Katrina was that while private donors provided millions of dollars for relief and governments provided billions for recovery, neither sector provided very much for reform. And yet it is this third stage that can have the most enduring impact. It can help sustain the public attention to what remains to be done and it can help change policies and practices that may have contributed to the disaster in the first place.

My concluding observation then is that the present mood and the present moment in our communities and throughout the nation is a time when we need leaders in philanthropy who are willing to take risk and leaders who are not afraid to stand for something. I have been a leader and I have been a manager. As a manager, I prized order, but as a leader I had to be willing to risk chaos.

If those of us engaged in philanthropy are to help reimagine and reaffirm the centrality of community in the American story, if we are to be agents of reconciliation and purveyors of hope, we will need to take risks that may disturb our comfort zone; but I know from my experience that times of crisis are also times of opportunity and that when you provide help you also provide hope.

This is a moment when not just individuals but the entire civic sector will need to lead again. It is a moment when philanthropy will need to act wisely and boldly, without fear or timidity. It is not enough to simply lament the deficit of leadership in our public life. You have it within your power to be the authors of not only a new narrative, but the architects of a new age.

So I conclude these observations about the pursuit of connection and cohesion with a vision of community that has been my constant companion since the day I first pondered how to build community by design. Some of you may have heard it before. It comes from the writings of the mystic, theologian and poet Howard Thurman, who was fond of saying “I want to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.” There is no better way of thinking about building and sustaining community.

I wrote my recently published book because I wanted the reader to imagine what the future community would be like if each of us were able to say “I want to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.”

I wanted readers to imagine what our world would be like if more Americans were willing to say I want to be an American without making it difficult for an Asian to be an Asian, an African to be an African or a Latin American to be a Latin American. I wanted readers to imagine what our communities would be like if more Christians were able to say I want to be a Christian without making it difficult for a Jew to be a Jew, a Muslim to be a Muslim, a Buddhist to be a Buddhist or a Hindu to be a Hindu.

I hope that if you remember nothing else I said today, you will leave here saying to all in hearing distance “I want to be me without making it difficult for you to be here.”

__________________________________________

Ambassador James A. Joseph is professor emeritus of the Practice of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. The president of the Council on Foundations from 1982-1995, he has served in senior executive or advisory positions for four U. S. presidents, including Undersecretary of the Interior for President Jimmy Carter and Ambassador to South Africa for President William Clinton. His most recent book is “Saved for a Purpose,” published by the Duke University Press. This piece is excerpted from his keynote address delivered at the Connecticut Council on Philanthropy annual Luncheon and Conference on May 13, 2016. ©

Part I of Ambassador Joseph’s remarks were published last Sunday in perspeCTive.

Olympic Coverage Starts in Rio But Reaches Us Through Stamford, Connecticut

The 2012 London Olympic Games, the most watched event in U.S. television history with 217 million viewers, is so four years ago.  NBC Sports, with the epicenter of its operations in Stamford, is looking to break its own Olympic and world record with coverage from Rio. So far, it seems to be working.

Just over three years ago, NBC Sports launched a new state-of-the-art 300,000 square foot facility headquartered in Stamford, on a thirty-three acre campus (formerly the home of Clairol). The facility brought NBC Sports, NBC Sports Network, NBC Olympics, NBC Sports Digital, and NBC Regional Networks all under one roof. Connecticut’s First Five program, providing financial incentives to major business entities to relocate to the state, helped get the deal done. At the ribbon cutting for the facility in July 2013, just off exit 9 along I-95, NBC Sports Group Chairman Mark Lazarus said it was “built for every conceivable media platform, known today or yet to be built or conceived.”

This month, much of what we see of the Olympics in Rio, across a range of media platforms, has come through Stamford.

NBC reports that over the past six nights, the network’s primetime Olympics coverage has averaged three times more households watching than the other television networks combined, across the ten NBC owned and operated stations – including NBC Connecticut.  Digital viewership is outpacing the numbers achieved during the London Games, and has grown in recent days mirroring the Olympic achievements of American athletes.

All the video coverage comes to Stamford from Rio and then is relayed to a variety of NBC Universal platforms — the NBC broadcast television network; cable channels, such as the NBC Sports, MSNBC and CNBC; plus websites and apps.  Telemundo and NBC Universal are narrating events in Spanish and focusing on sports popular in Latin America, Paul Janensch, a former local newspaper editor, noted recently. A total of 6,700 hours of content are being televised and streamed, with much of it live. NBC is telecasting Rio events on five cable channels, compared with two for the 2008 summer games in Beijing.

“Naturally, due to the volume of events and sports and amount of talent and employees, it's a vast challenge,” said Kaare Numme, NBC Sports’ at-home coordinator producer for the Rio games, told the Stamford Advocate, before the Games began. “This will be our largest single event happening.” Lazarus has called the Rio Olympics the “biggest media event in history.”

Published reports indicate that the number of employees and other personnel involved in the Stamford operations for the Olympic games has grown to nearly 1,400.  That is nearly double the routine staffing levels, and considerably higher than the approximately 1,000 people involved in coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics. It is virtually a 24 hour-a-day operation (and some days may indeed be round-the-clock) with 6 AM to 2AM the regular work day for the duration of the Games.

There has been some pushback on NBC’s coverage, some from a generation more accustomed to viewing-on-demand and watching commercial-free.  And NBC announcers have had some unforced errors, which are commonplace these days largely due to the pervasiveness of social media.  In addition, ratings from the Opening Ceremonies on NBC television were down substantially from the London Games.  But that seems to have been the floor, not the ceiling, for viewership levels.

As part of the expansion for the Olympic coverage, NBC Sports built two new control rooms and brought in another portable center in Stamford, the Advocate reported. It also installed an additional 13 announcing booths to bring its total to 18, nearly double the quantity used to telecast the London games four years ago.

In a section of the facility dubbed The Highlights Factory, about 200 highlights and features packages will be produced each day during the games, Eric Hamilton, NBC Sports’ director of digital Olympic video production, told the Advocate. “You might be able to watch one of seven different streams of gymnastics on the first day of gymnastics,” Hamilton said. “You can really channel surf in a big way.” Scores of edit rooms and graphics suites fill the sprawling center.

There is more to come in Stamford.  In addition to a range of sports programming throughout the year, NBC Sports owns the rights to the Olympics through the 2020 Summer Olympics, at which point the network will have presented 12 consecutive and 17 total Olympic Games, the most for a U.S. media company in both categories.

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CCMC Study Brings Attention to Dramatic Increase in Trampoline Injuries Nationwide

As trampoline parks are becoming more common in Connecticut and across the United States, so are emergency department visits for injuries that occur at these facilities, a new national study led by physician researchers at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center (CCMC), has found. The study published this month in the journal Pediatrics, co-authored by CCMC emergency physicians Steven Rogers, MD, and Jesse Sturm, MD, and pediatric emergency medicine fellow Kathryn Kasmire, MD, came about after the physicians began noticing a sharp increase in trampoline injuries, including some that were serious.

For the study, the CCMC physicians analyzed emergency room reports from a national database to estimate the total number of trampoline-related injuries both from parks and trampolines at home. From 2010 to 2014, the average annual number of Emergency Department visits for trampoline injuries was close to 92,000.

The vast majority happened at home - but injuries at trampoline parks surged more than 10-fold during the study period. The study found that emergency room visits related to injuries at trampoline parks grew from 581 in 2010 to 6,932 in 2014, which was the latest year represented in the study. Patients injured at trampoline parks were more likely to be males, with an average age of 13.

The study concluded that “trampoline park injury patterns differed significantly from home trampoline injuries. Trampoline park injuries are an emerging concern; additional investigation and strategies are needed to prevent injury at trampoline parks.”

The number of trampoline parks in the United States also increased during that time frame from around 40 in 2011 to 280 in 2014. It is now estimated that nationwide, five to six new parks open each month. Over the last year alone, it is estimated that more than 50 million people visited trampoline parks in North America, according to the International Association of Trampoline Parks.

In Connecticut, trampoline parks are up and running in communities including Hartford, New Britain, Trumbull, Bethel, Stamford, Norwalk, Manchester, Milford, Danbury, New Milford, Ridgefield, Brookfield, Wallingford.  Another is expected soon in East Haven.

The state’s official tourism website, www.ctvisit.com, includes six trampoline parks among the places highlighted for “safe, family-friendly indoor recreation.”  The “Connecticut – Still Revolutionary” site features information about, and links to, Launch Trampoline Park in Hartford, Sky Zone in Bethel and Norwalk, Chelsea Piers in Stamford, Rockin’ Jump Trampoline Park in Trumbull and Flight Trampoline Park in New Britain.

The study found that the majority of trampoline-related accidents occur at home — rather than at a park — and these accidents did not increase significantly from 2010 to 2014, nor did overall trampoline injuries.

The International Association of Trampoline Parks (IATP) said the rise in injuries should be expected because of more parks in recent years. "We believe that the positives of youth recreational sports far outweigh the negatives, and we are actively engaged in programs aimed at promoting the safety and well-being of jumpers who visit our member parks," the organization said following publication of the study.

"I don't think trampoline park injuries are increasing because they are especially dangerous compared to home trampolines, but rather because of their growing popularity and the increasing number/availability of these facilities," said Kasmire, indicating that 1 in 11 children or young adults who went to the emergency room for park injuries was admitted to the hospital.

Most of the injuries were leg injuries, including strains and fractures. Children injured at trampoline parks were less likely to have head injuries than those injured on trampolines at home, but the severity of park-related injuries was concerning, the authors said.

In a published report, Kasmire said that parks generally have done a good job of ensuring that youngsters do not fall off trampolines, reducing the likelihood of head injuries, because the floors are covered with a bouncy surface. This floor, though, can increase the risk of other injuries if a person lands between two trampolines, she said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against trampoline use for all children but says if children do use them, they should not do flips or have more than one jumper at a time on a trampoline. The academy said adult supervision is needed and that trampolines should also have proper padding.

The IATP indicated that the organization “welcomes studies like the one published” because they “provide a deeper understanding of safety issues and provide data on our sport allowing us to better educate parents, jumpers and parks so all can fully enjoy indoor trampoline park facilities.”

The trade organization also noted that “if the study reported Trampoline Park Injuries (TPIs) as a percentage, rather than a total, a more accurate industry picture would develop. As a point of reference, high school football players experience injuries at a rate of 3.87 per 1,000 exposures. The rate of reportable injury at a typical trampoline park is less than one per 10,000 jumpers.  Therefore, the rate at which injuries occur is a much more meaningful statistic than total number of injuries.”

The study in Pediatrics notes “adult supervision has been proposed to reduce trampoline injuries in children, although trampoline injuries often occur despite adult supervision.”  The study also states that “although only a fraction of trampoline-related injuries occurred at trampoline parks (11% in 2014), the trend is alarming.”

Yale, UConn Back-to-Back in Top 10 Best Value Law Schools in US

The law schools of Yale University and the University of Connecticut both ranked in the top 10 “law schools that pay off,” according to a new national survey of the nation’s law schools.  Yale ranked seventh and UConn eighth in the survey by U.S. News and World Report. The survey determined the 10 best schools where full-time 2014 graduates who borrowed for law school and entered the private sector had the highest salary-to-debt ratio, according to data submitted to U.S. News by 172 schools around the country. Connecticut and Massachusetts each had two law schools ranked among the top ten "best value" schools.

The leading “best value” law schools were University of Texas – Austin, University of Alabama, Boston College, Brigham Young University, University of Wisconsin – Madison and University of Hawaii. Rounding out the top 10 after Yale and UConn are Boston University and UCLA.

The average student debt among UConn Law graduates was $70,129 for 2014 graduates, the lowest in the Northeast and the 15th lowest in the nation, according to the survey. Starting salaries for graduates entering the private sector reached $95,000 in 2014. That gives the law school a 1.4-1 salary-to-debt ratio, tied for eighth place nationwide.

Among Yale Law School graduates, starting salaries for graduates entering the private sector reached $16,000 in 2014. That gives the law school a 1.4-1 salary-to-debt ratio, with average student debt of $117,093.

Yale University has been ranked as the nation’s number one law school by U.S. News.  UConn School of Law ranks 65^th on the U.S. News nationwide list, and is the highest ranked public law school in the Northeast. The relatively low student debt level is a product of what the school describes as “reasonable tuition,” now $27,792 for in-state students, and “robust financial aid packages” for eligible students, according to the university.

UConn indicates that 10 months after graduation, more than 80 percent of the graduates from the Class of 2015 had full-time, long-term jobs for which a law degree was required or preferred, up substantially over the last three years.  At Yale, that percentage is 93 percent, with 41 percent employed at law firms, 39 percent in judicial clerkships, 8 percent in public interest positions (including public defender), 5 percent in government and 4 percent in business and industry.

“Our high value and great employment results are only part of what makes UConn Law School great. Our students and faculty are deeply engaged in the institutions and communities that surround us, as well as the intellectual exploration of a legal education,” Dean Timothy Fisher said. “That, coupled with a supportive atmosphere and energetic student body, make this an exciting place to learn and a transformative chapter in our students’ lives.”

In recent years UConn Law has added several programs that let students realize even more value from their legal educations, according to the school. Three new LL.M. (master of laws) degrees can be combined with a JD to prepare students for careers in energy and environmental law, human rights and social justice or intellectual property and information governance.  The law school has also added, in partnership with the UConn School of Business, a certificate in Corporate and Regulatory Compliance. And the two school are now offering a program to earn both a JD and MBA in three years.

Yale Law students, the university’s website highlights, “are among the most sought after in the nation by employers of all types,” both within and outside of the legal profession.

https://youtu.be/OReBEdVb308

https://youtu.be/VgAJwQ0qyOU