The streetlights lining Baltimore Avenue have been aglow for nearly two hours when Books Through Bars begins to bustle. Volunteers, stepping in from the stony November cold, come to support an often overlooked cause: providing reading material to people in prison. Incarcerated individuals often have little to read, and the range of books provided to
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Before she started working on the green schoolyard at Henry C. Lea School in West Philadelphia, landscape architect Sara Pevaroff Schuh, principal of SALT Design Studio, encountered a group of kids who called her over after finding what they said was a spider on playground equipment. It turned out to be a half-squished worm. She
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Don’t give up on Philadelphia just yet. Our centuries-old city has big problems, including the legacy of lead. It’s in our paint, our pipes, our bloodstreams. When it gets in our children, it hurts their young brains’ development, negatively affecting learning and behavior. With the district-wide installation of hydration stations — filtering units that remove
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Fatherhood, for me, has been a course in community building and reclaiming collective cultural memory. As the son of a social worker and a Vietnam veteran (working with jazz musicians in Brooklyn post-war), I prayed for a daughter named Coltrane so that my parents would see that I understood the lessons that they taught through
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“The only thing you absolutely have to know,” as Albert Einstein once said, “is the location of the library.” When it comes to Philadelphia’s public schools, Einstein’s dictum leaves most students hamstrung, as the district’s number of librarians has declined sharply in recent decades. “In 1991, the School District of Philadelphia had 176 paid librarians,”
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The FBI kept Hakim’s Bookstore, 210 S. 52nd Street, under surveillance for some time, sniffing around for subversion, says Yvonne Blake, 70. Daughter of Dawud Hakim, the store’s late founder, Blake recounts how her father had done the unthinkable in 1959 by opening an independent Black bookstore, five years before segregation would be outlawed in
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Watch how We Love Philly’s program at One Arts Center is teaching students how to heal themselves and their communities through mindfulness and entrepreneurship and what the school district can learn from this program. Read the full story here.
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When you approach the storefronts at 52nd and Warren streets, just off Lancaster Avenue in West Philadelphia, you might notice the handcrafted facades of One Art Community Center’s Earthship-style building, which uses glass bottles and cans placed in cement to provide structure and light. In the center’s backyard, a group of students are working on
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Years ago, my parents told Miss Farber, a white 60ish teacher at the elementary school in our Black working-class neighborhood, that when my brother and I graduated they would enroll us in a junior high program for gifted students. “There’s a Hebrew element at that school,” Miss Farber said, “and your children won’t make it.”
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