#underserved populations

[crumbleclub]

I think William's death in the Family Business AU might take place in California actually

#they start travelling bc you can only get away with so many murders in a small town #but william tends to stick to places where seasons aren't as easy to count bc. he's trying #and half failing? #to disguise the passage of time from his immortal kids #so there were a few locations i could have them at but southern california seemed like an interesting option #their accents would get so fucked upon being able to interact with people again lmao #and they would probably be able to chill for a bit without being noticed considering how underserved homeless populations can be there #i think they'd have a vehicle as well #this could be fun to actually write sometime huh #i wonder if they'll still be able to reunite with anyone they knew back in hurricane? #fnaf #fnaf family business au #family business au

[bisamwilson]

anyways johnny’s part of the devil went down to georgia is one of the best fiddling portions of recorded songs of all time and the devil’s bit is just a glorified scale exercise

#johnny’s part is not only musically more interesting and engaging but it’s also steeped in a very rich folk song and fiddle tradition #whereas the devil has the accompaniment flare but very little musically interesting happening #and his fiddling is meh at best. his demons are carrying #hes lost bc he’s not actually fiddling!!! #and discounting johnny’s bit is not only just generally wrong in terms of what’s written and performed and the difficulty/complexity/origin #originality levels #but it’s also discounting a very rich tradition of folk music made by a generally underserved poor and undereducated population that carries #a lot of significant cultural weight #sorry people were saying dumb shit on the devil went down to georgia post #and i am gonna vague about it #bc that’s just fucking disrespectful #to both charlie daniels and the folk music culture in general #mak rants #charlie daniels #the charlie daniels band #the devil went down to georgia

[twcfaces]

Random thought I keep meaning to put down but Harvs is conversationally skilled in Mandarin Chinese.

Dude isn't afraid to learn some things to communicate better with the sizable Chinese-American population in Gotham.

Plus it's fun to just kinda whip that kind of knowledge out when appropriate.

#nobody asked i know but #gotham does have a sizable immigrant population #and an underserved chinese population #so he just... #started picking it up

[tellmeayarn]

I had a hilarious "fat with a fucky gender" moment this week.

I have been wearing a King Size hoodie for a couple years, but my dad got it for me. The zipper is dying, so I ordered a new one and made an account on their site. IMMEDIATELY got an email from Woman Within saying, like, hey we saw you have a new address and updated your record!

#all the fat clothes are one company #one smart company that knows we are an underserved population

[sidrahumanitarian]

Bridging Gaps: Serving Underserved Populations in Maine

SIDRA Humanitarian works tirelessly to serve underserved populations in Maine, offering vital support and resources. Through community outreach, advocacy, and empowerment programs, SIDRA ensures marginalized individuals receive the assistance they need. Their dedication embodies compassion and solidarity, fostering a more inclusive and equitable society for all.

#serving underserved populations in Maine

[genderkoolaid]

Renowned LGBTQI+ advocate Apako Williams has been elected as a board member of the Uganda Country Coordinating Mechanism of the Global Fund, a worldwide partnership to fight HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. [...] Apako will serve as the representative of “Key Populations” on the board. Key Populations refer to marginalised communities disproportionately affected by diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, including transgender individuals, sex workers, men who have sex with men, and people who inject drugs. Apako is a transman, meaning a person who despite being identified as female at birth, identifies as a man.

Very cool to see!!! Especially since trans men&mascs have been extremely underserved in HIV prevention and care (as well as healthcare in general).

#m. #news

[cheeses-ib]

Hey why is the concept of college and higher education so stressful

#bro I’m going to medical school. my major in undergrad basically doesn’t matter I shouldn’t have to think too much of 2028 rn and YET. #like undergrad I’m just gonna Do Well but apparently? it matters more than I thought??? #which means I have to get into a Better undergrad than I was aiming for which means I have to take the SAT AGAIN ON PURPOSE. #and I’ll have to For Real study for the ACT #I have a safety school that Used to be my dream school but the academics like lowkey aren’t good enough for med school w/o a hella good MCAT #but I’d get a full ride there based on my high school academics #and I’m starting IA and EE season at? the same time?? and I’m trying to get into a Good summer program with a grad school I’m looking at Grr #c’est très difficile #people are like ‘at least it’s almost spring break’ NO that means the Deadline is Approaching!!!! #that’s scary!!!!! #cheese speaks #to be fair based on the Kind of medicine I want to do (rural) getting into The Best med school isn’t the Most important #it’s such an underserved population and I could probably get a job most places based on how I like the surrounding area #still upset though. #this is upsetting.

[arkipelagic]

The faces of Aeta peoples. Photos by Ophelia Persson, from “DNA study reveals evidence for the presence of Islander Denisovans in the Philippines” (2021) by Larena Lab, Uppsala University.

Aeta is often used as an umbrella term referring to specific ethnic groups in the Philippines distinguished by their much darker complexions and often curly- to kinky-textured hair, such as the Batak of Palawan and Mamanwa of Mindanao. Due to their distinct physical appearances they are commonly misidentified as modern-day descendants of prehistoric Africans who managed to find their way to the Philippine archipelago in Southeast Asia. In reality, they are descended from the same major populations non-Aeta Filipinos are also descended from, i.e., First Sundaland People and later Austronesian migrants.

Today, Aeta peoples are a recognized albeit underserved minority alongside other (non-Aeta) Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines.

#philippines #southeast asia #human diversity #indigenous peoples #x

[rjzimmerman]

Here's the link to the report from the Union of Concerned Scientists described in this story from EcoWatch:

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has found that Tyson Foods dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of pollutants into U.S. waterways from 2018 to 2022. The pollutants came from company facilities including slaughterhouses and processing plants.

UCS analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and found that Tyson Foods processing plants released 371.72 million pounds of pollutants into waterways from 2018 to 2022. Half of the pollutants were dumped in waterways of Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri. The group published the findings in a report titled Waste Deep: How Tyson Foods Pollutes US Waterways and Which States Bear the Brunt.

“As the nation’s largest meat and poultry producer, Tyson Foods plays a huge role in our food and agriculture system and has for decades exploited policies that allow big agribusiness corporations to pollute with impunity,” Omanjana Goswami, co-author of the report and an interdisciplinary scientist with the Food and Environment Program at UCS, said in a press release. “In 2022, the latest year for which we have data, Tyson plants processed millions of cattle and pigs and billions of chickens, and discharged over 18.5 billion gallons of wastewater, enough to fill more than 37,000 Olympic swimming pools.”

Waterways in Nebraska had the most wastewater pollutants dumped by Tyson Foods plants, about 30% of the total or 111 million pounds, UCS reported. The pollutants dumped in Nebraska included 4.06 million pounds of nitrate, which a 2021 study linked to increased risks of central nervous system cancers in children.

According to the National Provisioner, Tyson Foods is one of the top meat and poultry processing companies in the U.S. From 2018 to 2022, it generated 87 billion gallons of wastewater, based on EPA data. This wastewater can include pathogens and microorganisms (such as E. coli) and slaughterhouse byproducts, such as body parts of animals, feces and blood.

As noted in the report, the dumped pollutants contained high amounts of nitrogen (34.25 million pounds) and phosphorus (5.06 million pounds), which can contribute to algal blooms in waterways. As UCS pointed out in its analysis, many Tyson Foods facilities are located near waterways that are home to threatened and endangered species. 

The facilities are also positioned near historically underserved communities, leading to additional pollution near and burden on vulnerable populations.

“Pollution from these plants also raises environmental justice concerns,” Stacy Woods, co-author of the report and research director for the Food and Environment Program at UCS, said in a press release. “We know from previous research that almost 75% of water-polluting meat and poultry processing facilities are located within one mile of communities that already shoulder heavy economic, health or environmental burdens. In mapping these plants, we found Tyson largely fit that pattern, with many plants located near communities where people live with more pollution, less socioeconomic and political power, and worse health compared to other areas of the United States.”

The report provides insight into a larger problem. As The Guardian reported, meat processing pollution in the U.S. is much higher and goes beyond Tyson Foods.

“There are over 5,000 meat and poultry processing plants in the United States, but only a fraction are required to report pollution and abide by limits,” Goswami told The Guardian. “As one of the largest processors in the game, with a near-monopoly in some states, Tyson is in a unique position to treat even hefty fines and penalties for polluting as simply the cost of doing business. This has to change.”

#Tyson Foods #water pollution

[probablyasocialecologist]

Articles, reports, and studies about agriculture are likely to contain some version of the following sentiment: “The population is expected to grow to almost 10 billion people by 2050. We must double food production in order to meet demand without hiking up prices. How are we going to produce enough food to feed all of these people without destroying the planet?” Increasing food production to meet the demands of a growing population is presented as the ultimate conundrum. Proposed solutions are predominantly centered on increased reliance on technologies to maximize yields and feed ‘all of these hungry people’ as the population grows, accelerating at a seemingly unstoppable rate. Whatever new technologies or techniques are introduced, they are, first and foremost, measured along the metric of increasing yield. This narrative isn’t just misguided — it depoliticizes the problem, shifting blame in a dangerous way. The reality is that we have enough food on the planet to feed every human being a calorically complete and healthy diet. Contrary to popular belief, hunger is most often caused not by a lack of food but by a lack of access. With the amount of food we produce today, we could feed the highest population prediction of 10 billion people by 2050 — today. This has much more to do with economic inequality than anything to do with population. The people who cannot afford food are most often the people involved in growing it. The vast majority of the world’s impoverished people, most of whom live in rural areas, are involved in agriculture. This seems counterintuitive, but many farmers worldwide are net food buyers, meaning they do not subsist on the food they grow, they sell their crops and use that money to buy food for their families. When prices for crops are too low to offset input prices, when farmers face barriers to accessing markets or credit, or they are forced into exploitative contracts or other arrangements, farmers do not have adequate funds to purchase food for themselves and their families. This is the result of the long process of industrialization that has displaced millions of rural people and removed them from their traditional agricultural practices, replacing polycultures with monocultures. Perhaps the other most damning piece of evidence to counter the narrative that we must ramp up production to end hunger is that some cities have already ended it — without increasing yield. Belo Horizonte, one of the largest cities in Brazil, managed to virtually eliminate hunger through a network of policies addressing different facets of the issue. They expanded school meal programs; partnered with local small farmers to deliver produce to underserved parts of the city at fixed prices for staples; created subsidized restaurants where people could eat affordable, dignified meals, and a host of other policies. It never took more than 2 percent of their annual budget, and the whole transition took less than 10 years. It didn’t require corporations ‘innovating’ or developing expensive technologies. It required political will, the strengthening of governance systems, declaring food as a right of citizenship, and correcting for hunger as a market failure. We are choosing not to end hunger. Presenting it otherwise obscures the fact that it is, at its core, a matter of political will — not a matter of ability.

#food #farming #hunger #agriculture

[wachinyeya]

The Nature Conservancy is leading the Expanding Agroforestry Project to provide training, planning and funds for 12,140 hectares (30,000 acres) of new agroforestry plantings in the U.S.

Goals for the program include enrolling at least 200 farmers, with a minimum of 50 from underserved communities.

Initial applications have surpassed expectations — 213 farmers applied in the first cycle with 93% coming from underserved populations.

The first round of payments is set for distribution in fall 2024.

#good news #agroforestry #agriculture #environmentalism #farming #environment #global climate change #climate crisis #climate change #usa

[fallintosanity]

calling all US-based renters

I just spotted a VERY interesting request for public comments from the FTC: 

The Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau invite interested individuals to submit comments about background screening issues affecting individuals who seek rental housing in the United States. Tenants, prospective tenants, tenants’ rights and housing advocacy groups, industry participants (including property managers, commercial landlords, individual landlords, and consumer reporting agencies that develop credit and tenant screening reports used by landlords and property managers to screen prospective tenants), other members of the public, and government agencies are encouraged to provide comments and information about the use of credit reports, credit scores, and criminal and civil (including eviction) public records in tenant screening; the use of algorithms in making tenant screening decisions; the use of tenant screening recommendation products developed, marketed, or sold by consumer reporting agencies; and other tenant screening issues.

The full document (pdf) also includes a series of questions about “unique impacts on historically underserved populations, such as Black,  Indigenous, and people of color; the LGBTQI+ community (especially trans and gender nonconforming individuals); military service members; immigrants; public housing voucher recipients; renters with disabilities; or others”

If you have Opinions on this, drop a comment by May 30th, 2023: 

https://www.regulations.gov/document/FTC-2023-0024-0002

#sanity talks a lot #psa #social commentary #politics #sort of #also please share this with any other renters you know #reblog repost whatever idc #the current FTC is VERY effective #and VERY determined #help 'em crack down on shitty landlord business practices

[covidsafehotties]

Highlights

COVID-19 increases post-infection mortality risks 4 times in MS patients

COVID-19 increases risk of new optic neuritis risks 3 times in MS patients

COVID-19 increases use of high-dose methylprednisolone for an acute relapse

COVID-19 increases risk of post-infection all-cause hospitalization in MS patients

MS patients suffer worse select long-term outcomes following COVID-19

#mask up #covid #multiple sclerosis #covid 19 #covid isn't over #pandemic #covid conscious #long covid #covid is airborne #wear a mask #coronavirus

[perisceris]

This shop update features a set of prints whose profits will be donated to help different underserved populations, especially trans BIPOC and indigenous communities in Mexico

>>>perisceris.bigcartel.com<<<

#original #shop open #charity

[wyn-n-tonic]

Hi hi!

So I'm considering approaching my bosses to ask if I can put together a presentation (that can possibly be adopted into our training model) regarding deconstructing ableist language within our field. I don't foresee them saying no but I do think that they may tell me I'm still too new and they don't want to put extra responsibilities on me. Even though I'd be volunteering to do this and I have volunteered myself to take on next steps earlier in the past, my bosses are very big into making sure their employees are taking care of themselves first and foremost and I have felt safe in disclosing my own conditions to them so they are aware that I sometimes have limitations that I don't feel comfortable speaking up about and they will do so for me. In preparation for that possibility I was thinking of actually going ahead and putting this together anyway because I think that it's something that could benefit the writing community as well.

A big reason why I think that this is so important (and can be used in all fields but is a huge deal in my own) is because disabled people are often times un- or under-employed. So when it comes to my field, we are lacking in representation of the very community that we serve. This leads to a lot of outdated language and it leads to a lot of inaccurate understanding of the individual that they are serving. The language that is often used regarding disabled people is language that paints us as sad and evokes pity. So somebody who has never worked with this or that person automatically has an image in their head based on that language and that is what they go into interactions with and it leads to poor experiences where caregivers and families and individuals themselves feel unseen and unheard and uncared for by the very people who are supposed to help amplify their voices.

How this could benefit the writing community is helping with ensuring that we're not intentionally excluding an entire group of people from narratives. I've talked about this before but I don't expect to see myself in every story nor do I want to see myself in every story but I'm very good at picking up on when people like me are not wanted or welcome in a story.

That being said, I'd really love to hear from other disabled people regarding things that have been said to them that wasn't meant to come off as aggressive or dismissive or ableist but did anyway. Two of my biggest phrases that I plan to focus on are suffers from and struggles with.

For example, I've had somebody say, "she suffers from hearing loss," about me. Well... no. I don't suffer from my hearing loss and I'm not some half drowned kitten in a thunderstorm. What happened is that I had an infection that, as a result of poor access to medical care, I experienced partial hearing loss in my left ear. This is something that compounds on top of my auditory processing disorder that I experience as a symptom of my cognitive disability, which is autism and ADHD.

I hope that the difference between the original statement and the way that I presented my own abilities was noticeable and I welcome discussion and suggestion from abled and disabled people alike. Obviously, I'm prioritizing disabled voices but abled voices do have their space in this conversation. Why? Because it has to be a conversation and it has to be about learning and no gaps can be closed if abled people feel as though they can't ask questions or can't speak as somebody who loves a disabled person who has also experienced disrespect of language.

I also want to hear from queer and BIPOC people with disabilities on this topic because it has been my experience while working in this field that both populations are underserved and language plays a huge part in that not only by being ableist but also by being anti-LGBTQ+ or racist. My goal with undertaking this project isn't only to help my colleagues address and check their biases in real time but also to become a better advocate and hopefully help to increase services for people in my community who need it and are ignored.

#long post #disability #disabled #actually disabled #writing community #idk what to tag this as actually but this feels like a good start

[rapeculturerealities]

Trans youth health care and media: What to understand about how the debate is covered.

Here are some things we know about gender-affirming health care: We know that the number of young patients being seen by gender clinics has increased, and that the gender balance of these young patients has changed, with more female-assigned youth seeking care. (We don’t see the same gender imbalance outside of clinics, where young people identify as trans in roughly equal numbers regardless of birth-assigned sex.) We also know that autism is more common in trans youth than in the broader population.

We don’t know why these things are true. Nonetheless, these facts have helped spur a wave of coverage and concern around gender-affirming health care for young people experiencing gender dysphoria. This concern presents itself on the front page of the New York Times, in New York magazine, in the account of a woman who used to work at a gender clinic. At the heart of this concern—among good-faith debaters, those who are not merely trying to ban access for all trans people—is the idea that young people today who are identifying as trans may grow out of it, and come to deeply regret treatments like cross-sex hormones or surgeries. (It’s worth saying upfront that only a minority of young people who experience gender dysphoria are even receiving these treatments.)

We know that research on gender-affirming care for tweens and teens has shown generally positive results, and that side effects are usually mild (and that medical treatments always pose trade-offs). We know that accessing gender-affirming care can be extremely difficult. But it’s true that we don’t know how teens who are treated today with, say, puberty blockers will feel about that treatment 50 years from now.

There are—speaking extremely broadly—two things to do about the unknowns in gender-affirming care, and the expanding, and underserved, patient population. We could work to increase access and reduce barriers, to help patients have access to a promising treatment. We could do this with the understanding that medical choices always involve a highly personal calculus of benefit versus downsides and risks. Or, we could react to the increase in patients seeking treatment with broad-brush skepticism, positing that the new patients won’t necessarily benefit the way previous, but much smaller, cohorts have. We can make minimizing any chance of regret in pursuing gender-affirming medicine and procedures the centerpiece of our policies. The first side wants to reduce standardized gatekeeping around procedures, leaving the matter of the right age at which to, say, undergo top surgery up to the doctor, parents, and teen. Guidance in this case looks like providing doctors with some general things to consider, such as how long the teen has identified as another gender, how much distress they’re experiencing, and whether there are other mental health concerns. The second side worries that allowing access to top surgery for young people at all is reckless, and could lead to regret.

#Trans #Transition #Detransition #Trans youth #protect trans youth #transgender