This party needs more CHIPs

Ok, forgive me for the lame PCU reference.  This is an important issue, and was a great interview.

On Sunday, August 24, I was joined by Geoff Wool of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.  The topic of discussion was Texas’ CHIP program and Children’s Medicaid, both programs for providing medical insurance for kids whose families cannot afford it.

Key points we touched on:

• As many at 800,000 children in Texas are eligibile for CHIP or Medicaid, but are not signed up for the programs.
• A large number of enrollees lose their coverage every year simply because they do not re-enroll.  Families that have lost coverage can regain it simply by applying again.
• It is the same application for both CHIP and Children’s Medicaid.
• The MAXIMUM cost of these programs is $50!

Income requirements and more information can be found at www.chipmedicaid.org.  It is truly every child’s right to have access to health care.  They didn’t choose where they were born!

The podcast of this interview is available at www.talk1370.com/pages/405616.php.

Last Week’s Show

I was at a beach earlier this week (don’t tell anyone) so sorry I haven’t posted.  Last week I was joined by Carol Johnson of the Care Communities and Elizabeth Hummer from CASA of Travis County.

The Care Communities will be having their iCare Gala on Thursday, August 21 at 6:30pm.  It will be a great opportunity to learn more about the wonderful organization, and to pay tribute to a handful of Austin residents who make our city a better place.

The Speak Up for Kids CASA 5K is coming up on Sunday, September 7 at the Domain (very chic, I know).  Anyone who cares about our little ones is encouraged to come out, run or walk, and “become a part of a powerful solution.”  You can read more about CASA on my previous post HERE.

The Podcast Cometh

It’s been discussed.  It’s been rumored.  And now, it is happening.

Look for the very first podcast of Inside Austin in the next week!

Because they can’t march for themselves…

March for Babies is March of Dimes’ most visible event of the year – taking place in Austin this year on Saturday, May 10 at Auditorium Shores.  More on that in a second.

One in eight babies in the U.S. are born prematurely.  In Texas, that number jumps to 1 in 7.  While no conclusive causes have been found for why some babies are born prematurely (no cause found in 70% of cases), there are certain steps that can significanly reduce that risk.  One program called Centering Pregnancy brings together 15 women in the same gestation cycle, providing training and special care.  Only 3 percent of women who complete that program have premature births.  Centering Pregnancy is just one of the programs that March for Dimes provides funding to.  Other programs involve support for parents and families with a child in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a time when any support is needed.

March for Dimes’ March for Babies event has gone through some changes this year.  Mostly, the name has changed.  Amy Holland, Communications Coordinator for March of Dimes here in Austin, explained that the event title “March for Babies” not only conveyed the purpose of the walk more effectively than the previous name (WalkAmerica), but it also reminded people that it is a fundraiser for March of Dimes.

Since its beginning in 1938, March of Dimes has been a leading light in the fight to improve the health of newborn babies.  Not only did they help find a vaccination for Polio, but they also helped establish the link between alcohol use during pregnancy and birth defects.

As mentioned before, the March for Babies event is taking place on Saturday, May 10 at Auditorium Shores.  The march kicks off at 10am, but feel free to show up ealier because there are some great tents and other displays for the whole family.  Oh, and dogs are welcome.  At the March for Babies website, you can sign up (although it is not required in order for you to participate), join or create a team, and find out about other marches going on all over the country.

Austin Mazda Dealers Association is one of this year’s main sponsors and is raffling off a Mazda 5 at the event.  Sonic is also a main sponsor is donating a portion of sales of their Java Chillers right now to the March.  All of this, plus your donations, go to raising the goal of $1.15 million dollars this year.

Austin currently has the 11th biggest March for Babies in the country.  Let’s move up a little on that list this year.

Keep Austin Beautiful

On March 23, Keep Austin Beautiful’s Executive Director, Brian Block, joined us in the studio.  Their website says it all: KAB is doing as much as anyone to clean and beautify our city, and to educate average people like you and me about what we can do for the environment.

But their website leaves out one important detail: Keep Austin Beautiful makes caring about the environment incredibly easy.

From adopting streets and creeks to providing grants for beautification projects, Keep Austin Beautiful has a wide array of programs that can fit anybody’s schedule and lifestyle.  Each of KAB’s programs falls under one of their central tenants: Clean, Beautify, and Educate.  Each are incredibly important to the needs of the environment and none of them are mutually exclusive.  I think that’s one of the things that impressing me most about Keep Austin Beautiful.  They have a deep awareness of the Austin’s environmental needs and an understanding of Austin’s residents and how they are most likely to get involved.

There’s not a lot of pulling teethe going on here; people pretty much get on board.  And so do businesses.  More and more we’re seeing local businesses and even larger, national corporations pull their workforce together to make an imprint on the environment – or should we say make our imprint a little less noticeable.  REI Outfitters is a great example of this.  Along with Austin native Whole Foods, the Seattle-based outdoor store has been pulling together employees and loyal customers alike to clean up the Shoal Creek Greenbelt right in their back yard.  And every time a company or a group of individuals get together to clean up green areas of Austin, Keep Austin Beautiful will provide you with all of the supplies needed, from trash bags to cool orange vests to make you more visible to traffic.

Did I mention that they make it easy?

By far their largest event of the year, KAB’s Clean Sweep 2008 is Austin’s annual city-wide clean up.  Last year over 3,700 people volunteered and picked up 25 tons of trash in  just 2 hours!  Before you pull out your calculator, that’s 13 and a half pounds per person.  My immediate reaction is – how could there possibly be that much litter in our city?!?  But the fact is that not all of that is people tossing Big Mac wrappers out the window.  Trash enters our green areas in a variety of ways.  It ends up and creeks and eventually in our lakes.  While rain is great for our city, it also effectively spreads waste throughout.  That is why events like Clean Sweep are so important.

Taking place from 9 to 11 am on Saturday, April 5, Keep Austin Beautiful hopes to mobilize more volunteers than ever in an attempt to keep our city looking like we all know it should.  Keepaustinbeautiful.org is chock-full of clean-up events already organized and just waiting for you and some of your friends to join.  Or you come up with your very own project in an area of town you think needs some serious cleaning and/or sweeping.  As always, Keep Austin Beautiful provides all of the supplies needed to pick up 13.5 pounds of trash.  They even arrange for all of the collected garbage to be picked up!  Again, easy.

So again, from 9 to 11 in the morning you can be out with your friends cleaning up this town.  And then at 11:30, the party kicks off at Waterloo Park with live music, free food and drinks, a climbing wall, and a lot of cool educational exhibits for the children.  Did I mention this entire event is free AND you get a cool shirt out of it?  No?  Will I meant to.

While Clean Sweep is Keep Austin Beautiful’s largest and most visible event of the year, efforts are going on constantly to make this the most beautiful city in America.  If you can’t help out for a couple of hours on April 5, there are plenty of other opportunities you can get involved with.  Check out KAB’s website, www.keepaustinbeautiful.org, for much more information.

 Also, I mentioned this on the show yesterday, but the City of Austin has a great website pertaining to practicing healthy planting practices and specifically about invasive, non-native plants in our creek areas.  That website is www.growgreen.org.  It’s really cool.

CASA of Travis County

Court Appointed Special Advocates, in case you were wondering. That’s what CASA stands for.

As discussed a couple weeks ago when talking with Gena VanOselear of the Austin Children’s Shelter, child abuse and neglect is a growing problem, not just nationally, but here in Central Texas as well. At the end of February this year, 1,092 of the approximate 221,000 minors in Travis County (US Census Bureau) were in the court system for cases of abuse or neglect. While that is just a fraction of the young population, that number certainly does not account for all of the children living in abusive homes. And for all of those children out there, identified or not, their lives can be at times a living hell. No child deserves to be abused or neglected. Not a single one.

“As a community, we will all be paying, literally and figuratively, for the impact of child abuse on adults who experience it.” That is how Laura Wolf, Executive Director of CASA here in Travis County sees it, a view that is backed up by research of adults in the prison and welfare systems. It’s possible that the best chance these children have at succeeding later on in life is to have their best interests represented during the court process. That is exactly what CASA does.

The official term is Guardian Ad Litem, and Casa of Travis County has over 400 volunteers acting in this capacity for cases of neglect and abuse. Those volunteers are able to work with 65 to 70 percent of all the cases in Travis County, giving those children an incredible advantage in reaching a verdict on their case that reflects their best interest.

Best interest – that is the key term.

On top of a guardian ad litem, a child is also assigned an attorney ad litem to represent what the child wants. It may go without saying, however, that what a child wants and what a child needs can at times be in conflict. Many children who are taken out of abusive or neglectful homes simply want to go back. This may be because they cannot imagine that there may be better places for them elsewhere. It could also be because the fear of the unknown can be more fearsome than the fear of being at home. Whatever the case may be, it is the “awesome responsibility” of the CASA to ensure that these children get what they need.

CASAs are, in many cases, the most knowledgeable people about a child’s case. They have access to medical records, they can show up unannounced to the child’s temporary home and even visit with those accused of abusing the child. They see the children at school, they talk to their teachers. Their role is not that of a mentor, but oftentimes that comes into play. Put simply, CASAs may be the only constant that the children have during this alienating and caustic process.

Cases of child abuse and neglect come before a judge 3 to 4 times a year. At this time, CASAs are there in court and are called upon as key witnesses in the case. One local judge refers to them as “the eyes and ears of the court,” because of their intimate knowledge of the issues involved. It seems that verdicts are nearly always affected by the witness of the CASA volunteer, making all of those hours devoted to these children worth every minute.

CASA is not a state or city program. It’s a non-profit organization with over 30 staff and 400 volunteers who care deeply about the young. They get some of their funding from government and city grants, some from foundations, and a whole lot from people like you. Coming up on April 21 is their annual Golf Tournament taking place at Flintrock Falls golf course. You can still get a foursome together, even get on the sponsors list. Lots of more information on the CASA website or email Anna.otsuki@casatravis.org.

Mobile Film School

Also on Sunday, March 9, we had Lisa McWilliams of the Mobile Film School in to talk about her organization. She informed me upon arriving that this was her second time being a guest on the show, having previously joined us when MFS first began about a year ago. There was plenty to talk about, even as simply with all the ways the organization has grown in the last year.Mobile Film School is a non-profit organization that takes high quality and comprehensive film and video training to underserved areas in Central Texas. Their approach is 3 pronged:

“We bring media arts education to underserved communities. We create long-term mentoring relationships, pairing students with seasoned industry professionals. We cultivate a unique appreciation of local history and culture using storytelling in film.” (from mobilefilmschool.org)

Since their beginning, Mobile Film School has worked primarily with area School Districts, most recently in Manor and Elgin. According to McWilliams, both School Districts were extremely helpful and open to the ideas behind MFS. They saw the benefits that some of their students would receive from the program and signed up to make it happen. Upon arriving at a high school, MFS picks a handful of students to participate in their program, all of whom have applied in the weeks before. From that moment on, those students are full time film makers, working hours not uncommon for the industry. For several days straight these students are at it, and at the end of the process, they have a film.

Typically a documentary, these films tell a story about the students’ community. A film coming out of Manor, TX told the story of an old farm house and it’s residents. The family living there were as interesting as could be, and the house has been used in movies before – specifically as Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio’s home in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?

Another film, coming out of Elgin, TX, had the opportunity to right a wrong committed by “Dr. Do-Good” himself, Dr. Phil McGraw. The 11 minuted film documents Dr Phil’s selection of Elgin as “Anytown, USA” and his efforts to fix this little community. Dr. Phil’s program depicted Elgin as a town on the verge of sliding into hell, a place where teen-pregnancy, drug use, and other illicit activities were out of control. The residents of Elgin were shocked when they saw how McGraw showed their town. They felt betrayed, as if the production company had lied about why they came. And the students of Mobile Film School were able to do something to right that wrong.

The film exhaustively looks at the “facts” that Dr. Phil used for his program and debunks them one by one. The end result? A film that celebrates a community, embraces its culture. It was something the students were proud of, because in the end, they were proud of their community.

Mobile Film School is not in and out of communities, leaving their students to take the next steps into film making on their own. McWilliams has gone to great lengths to make sure that the students are kept in touch with, many helping out in later projects with MFS. No big time film makers out of the program yet, but Lisa is optimistic.

I have never heard of anything like Mobile Film School before, but my sincere hope is that they get the funding they need to take their program state-wide – as is their desire in the coming years. With technology making it possible, young students shouldn’t have to travel all the way to New York or LA just to try out this art. Thanks to Mobile Film School, everything they need could be right down the street.

Find out more at www.mobilefilmschool.org.

So Much More than Cookies…

On Sunday, March 9, Cheryl Lowe of the Girl Scouts of Central Texas was in the studio letting me know just how naive I was about her organization.  Silly - that is how I felt.

Up until yesterday, all I knew of Girl Scouts was camping, crafts, and of course, cookies – The “3 C’s” of scouting, I was informed.  But what amazed me most was the vast array of programs that lie beneath the surface of the national organization.  Girl Scouts of Central Texas works with over 20,000 girls from 46 counties.  Along with their more typical programs, Girl Scouts of Central Texas employs a wide array of outreach efforts to build confidence, courage, and character (that’s right, another 3 C’s) in young girls from all backgrounds.

One of the programs, Troop 1500, is designed for girls whose mothers are incarcerated in an effort to interupt the cycle of intergenerational crime.  While Troop 1500 provides mentorship and positive encouragement to the kids in very unique situations, the Girl Scouts also attempt to reconnect the girls with their mothers and help educate them on where their mothers went wrong.  This is done in partnership with the YWCA, the Crime Prevention Institute, and the University of Texas School of Social Work.

Girl Scouts is also going in to schools in underserved areas.  26 schools now have Girl Scouting in the School Day, an after-school initiative that applies Girl Scouts’ excellent character and education training to girls who normally would not have the chance to join a troop.

Ready for some crossover?  GSCTX actually partners with local shelters, including the Austin Children’s Shelter, to provide scouting for the abuse, neglected, and abandoned.  “Every girl is entitled to the skills that we’re teaching in these classes,” said Lowe, proven by the multitude of outreach programs they offer.

So much going on with Girl Scouts of Central Texas, and I haven’t even mentioned their more “typical” programming.  Across the board, in every aspect of the local effort, the Girl Scouts are investing in young women.  To find out more about the Girl Scouts here in Austin, visit www.gsctx.org or call (512) 453-7391.

Blasted Auto-Save Function!!

As wonderful the idea is that WordPress automatically saves my work as drafts, this blessed little feature brings out the procrastinator in me, resulting in postings being published sometimes a week late…

The last posting was about an interview that aired a week ago.  Tomorrow should give me enough time to write about BOTH of today’s interviews, maybe even get some stuff up about SXSW.

But really, thank you for reading.  I hope this blog helps you understand the needs of this city and who is working to meet them.

Gimme Shelter

Last week, Gena VanOsselaer, executive director of the Austin Children’s Shelter.

The numbers are, for lack of a better work, depressing. When it comes to the abused and neglected in our state, there is not much that would merit hope in the situation. In 2006 there were 239,115 reported cases of child abuse or neglect on the state hot line; 67,737 of those reports were confirmed. 2,435 of those confirmed cases were in Travis County.

When a child is found to have been abused or neglected, the first step is to take them out of the dangerous situation. A case-worker for Child Protective Services is assigned to the child and he or she is taken from the abusive or neglectful parents or guardians. The child is then taken to a temporary shelter while the situation is assessed.

While homes filled with abuse and neglect are a traumatic and unhealthy place for children to be, the process of being removed from that place can be a virulent process as well. Children need a safe place to land; a place filled with love and compassion; a place where they can begin to forget about the storm behind them.

At last, hope.

Those that find themselves at Austin Children’s Shelter find just that. The staff at ACS have gone to great lengths to ensure that the children who find themselves in their care are taken care of completely. No need, however small or great, is overlooked.  This is includes health examinations, ensuring the children adjust to a healthy diet, and of course beginning the long road to normalcy.

There are simple things that Austin Children’s Shelter does that make all the difference.  Children eat meals together, for instance, something that many of them may not have the opportunity to do in the homes they have left.  ACS also begins instilling healthy reward cycles rather than simply punishing children when they do wrong.  It’s amazing to listen as Gena talks about the children in her organization’s care.  It’s true that their oftentimes destructive behavior is a product of a malevolent upbringing, but not everyone has the heart to continue working with these children against such great odds.  But the great people at ACS care deeply about the abused and neglected in the Austin area.  They love the children, and love is a great incentive to stay the course.

These days Austin Children’s Shelter is learning.  They are learning that in their current situation they cannot care for the kids in the way they desire to.  Because of space limitations they are forced to turn away almost half of the children that are referred to them.  Not only that, but some kids require much more intensive care than they currently can provide.  That is why ACS has recently broken ground on a new campus in East Austin.  The new HQ will be a great overhaul and a desperately needed face lift for them.  They will have a much greater capacity and be able to solve many of the problems caused by their current limited space (such as boys in girls in separate buildings!).  They will also be able to care for some of the kids they had to turn away before, something that the staff at ACS are very excited about.

The folks at Austin Children’s Shelter are well on their way to raising the money  they need for this great new facility, but they need a little more.  Giving is as easy as going to their website – www.austinchildrenshelter.org.  Like many wonderful organizations in the Austin-area, they also recently lost funding from the United Way, so this is a time when you could really help them out.