In 2015, Xerox published an eBook with findings from experts at the Yale School of Medicine ​called How Social Factors Shape Population Health,​ that​ outlines how environmental and social factors influence roughly 60% of an individual’s health​ and not medical interventions. The ​book also​ illustrates factors such as socioeconomic status, employment, and housing rates ​that ​play… Read more

At The Elmezzi Foundation, we understand the role good health plays in sustaining a productive and fulfilling life. At the same time, however, we are also aware of the difficulties associated with maintaining ‘good health’ — from access to healthy food, the necessary time it takes to exercise, and the cost of health insurance. A little… Read more

With more and more information becoming available in digital form — from newspapers, to movies, to eBooks — it can be easy to dismiss older paper iterations of information as unnecessary and cumbersome to work with. In the same vein, it would be understandable to think that public libraries may begin to be phased out…. Read more

We love reading about new ways to address/mitigate longstanding social problems, and a recent article on technology to deal with homelessness intrigued us. In a New York Times article, Claire Cain Miller, documents the way that access to technology has the ability to combat homelessness. For many homeless folks, their priorities lie in securing shelter,… Read more

Here’ an interesting article on the now infamous word gap research. While it is widely understood that there is an academic achievement gap between low-income students and their more well-served peers, one of the contributing factors to this is what is known as the “word gap.” In short, it estimates that children from low-income families… Read more

In the recent article “Why More Education Won’t Fix Income Inequality” featured in The New York Times, Neil Irwin illustrates that encouraging more working and middle class Americans to obtain a college education will not solve income inequality in this country. He states that positing higher education as a means for solving economic inequality is… Read more

In a recent NPR article, Donating A Single Rollerblade Is Not Going To Help Disaster Victims, Kathryn Kempton, the director of international operations for Partners in Health, confronts the negative consequences of well-intended individuals and corporations making in-kind donations without considering what is needed to best help people during a disaster. “When in-kind donations are not well-considered, they slow response efforts by diverting… Read more

A Scholastic report recently found that among children between the ages of 6-17, reading for fun has dropped significantly over the last few years with only 31% of kids stating they read a book for fun almost daily. In the age of smartphones, IPads and TVs, a clear incentive to pick up a book for one’s own reading pleasure can be hard to… Read more