Tag: Volunteers and Community Service

Chicago Begins Evicting Migrants From Shelters, Citing Strain on Resources

Chicago officials on Sunday began evicting some migrants from shelters, joining other cities that have made similar moves to ease pressure on overstretched resources. The process is starting gradually. Out of the nearly 11,000 migrants living in 23 homeless shelters in Chicago, according to the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, a fraction — 34 […]

Read More

The Isolationism Antidote

Why has the isolationist wing of Congress been blocking aid to Ukraine and become, in effect, a tool for President Vladimir Putin of Russia? Republican politics explain some of this folly, but I think another reason is pure cluelessness. Congress has a thread of insularity, reflecting an American population that is, by the standards of […]

Read More

Six New Yorkers Who Made the City a Better, Cooler, Fairer Place in 2023

Year-end lists are entirely subjective, often maddening and frequently inexplicable. So let’s explain the logic behind this one: It aims to highlight New Yorkers who, though you were probably not aware of them, have come at some of the city’s biggest challenges from unexpected angles. You’re likely to have your own ideas, and I would […]

Read More

What It Takes to Transform the White House for the Holidays

The 300 volunteers were divided into eight teams, each named for a different Santa’s reindeer. On the day after Thanksgiving, while the Bidens were still in Nantucket, the teams descended upon the White House, working through the weekend to festoon the halls with hand-pinned gumdrops, shape chicken wire into bough-covered arches, install crystal-studded nutcrackers on […]

Read More

What It Takes to Transform the White House for the Holidays

The 300 volunteers were divided into eight teams, each named for a different Santa’s reindeer. On the day after Thanksgiving, while the Bidens were still in Nantucket, the teams descended upon the White House, working through the weekend to festoon the halls with hand-pinned gumdrops, shape chicken wire into bough-covered arches, install crystal-studded nutcrackers on […]

Read More

Behind the Scenes With Volunteer Crews at the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Festival

That pilot was Gregory Ashton, 61, from Meridian, Idaho, who was flying Montie the Black Sheep, a grinning member of the special shape category, which also included Yoda, a tiger, and a sunglasses-wearing saguaro cactus. Mr. Ashton put the pair to work right away, pulling out the balloon and getting it inflated, and then had […]

Read More

For Car Crash Victims and Drivers, Circles for Safe Streets Program Is a Place to Heal

Bill Penny was the center of attention in a tense room. It had been about nine months since he drove the wrong way down a one-way road in Brooklyn, hitting and critically injuring a woman who was crossing. He had been arrested and charged with reckless endangerment and had gone through safe-driving classes. Now he […]

Read More

What Endures After a Climate Activist’s Suicide: Grief, Anger and Hope

They were walking up Ninth Street in Park Slope as they often did after work, each man a movie unto himself: one a crusading L.G.B.T.Q. rights attorney who quit the law to shovel dirt, the other a young man from the projects who became his most brilliant protégé. David Buckel and Domingo Morales were professional […]

Read More

Peace Corps, Criticized for Medical Care, Settles Wrongful-Death Suit for $750,000

The Peace Corps, which has repeatedly come under scrutiny for the medical care it provides to volunteers, has agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a 24-year-old volunteer who died of undiagnosed malaria in the island nation of Comoros off the coast of East Africa. The federal government did […]

Read More

They Refused to Serve. Now They’re Supporting Israel’s War Effort.

On a recent day, at its main headquarters at a Tel Aviv convention center, several hundred volunteers worked on their computers and phones, using an internal app to match requests for aid and to figure out how to ship supplies to where they are needed. This is a civilian “war room,” effectively operating like a […]

Read More

Israelis Rush to Volunteer and Donate After Hamas Attacks

The message popped up at 10:55 a.m. on Thursday: “Looking for volunteers to help unload a truck of equipment for soldiers. We are at the Museum of Tolerance. Come, there is nobody here.” Barely four minutes after the note appeared in the 1,000-member WhatsApp group for volunteers in the Jerusalem area, Hadas Duchan showed up […]

Read More

Have Gear, Will Deliver: Why I Carry Supplies to Ukrainian Troops

Supplying the army quickly, often with imported items, could not easily be done otherwise: The military’s lingering post-Soviet bureaucracy makes reacting to its own soldiers’ needs difficult. Soldiers get kitted out with gear when they sign up, but lost or damaged items, from socks to helmets, are not automatically replaced. The Defense Ministry is busy […]

Read More

Peace Corps Sued Over Mental Health Policy

Lea Iodice was thrilled to hear that the Peace Corps had accepted her application and was sending her to Senegal as a community health care worker. She shared the good news with her roommates, her family and her favorite professor and daydreamed about her last day at her job, managing a gym called SnapFitness. She […]

Read More

U.S. Army’s Landstuhl Hospital in Germany Treats Troops Wounded in Ukraine

A group of Ukrainian Army soldiers pierced by Russian grenades and mortar shells arrived at a hospital recently in need of surgery. It would have been a familiar scene from the bloody war grinding on in Ukraine, except for two crucial differences: Most of the wounded soldiers were American, and so was the hospital — […]

Read More

‘Only God Can Thank You’: Female Health Workers Fight to Be Paid

On a given work day, Misra Yusuf might vaccinate a child against polio, inject a woman with a long-acting contraceptive, screen a man for tuberculosis, hang a bed net to protect a family from malaria and help dig a pit latrine. Over the past few years, she has administered some 10,000 coronavirus vaccines in her […]

Read More

After Morocco Earthquake, Frustration Fuels Solidarity

The line of eight vehicles made its way up the dirt road shuttling loaves of bread, folded sweaters, antibiotics and a warm sense of solidarity up to the broken mountain. An hour up the road into the Atlas Mountains from the provincial capital of Taroudant, the caravan came to stop in a darkened village that […]

Read More