Daily equity news

“A First Lady Who Demands Substance,” - Washington Post
Michelle Obama Wants to Be Part of Events That Have Purpose And a Message — and That Parallel the President’s Agenda.

For weeks, Michelle Obama had been telling her staff and closest confidantes that she wasn’t having the impact she wanted. She is a woman of substance, with a background in law, public policy and management, who found herself relegated to role model in chief. The West Wing of the White House — the fulcrum of power and policy — had not fully integrated her into its agenda. She wanted more.

So, earlier this month, she changed her chief of staff, and now she’s changing her role.

“When jobs go, so do a city’s people,” - MSNBC.COM (Newsvine.com)

REDMOND, Wash. - For a cautionary tale, communities hard-hit by the current recession don’t have to look much further than Youngstown, Ohio.

Like many other manufacturing-dependent cities struggling in this recession, Youngstown’s economy was once booming mainly because of the success of one dominant industry. And also like those cities, Youngstown saw its fortunes fall fast and hard when that industry suddenly bottomed out, leaving many of its residents jobless and unsure what to do next.

“Unemployed Hit the Road to Find Jobs,”  - The Wall Street Journal

LINCOLN, N.H. — After seven months without a paycheck, Tim Ryan turned into a werewolf.

Laid off from a construction job, Mr. Ryan finally found work last month playing the wolfman at Clark’s Trading Post, a tourist attraction in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For $12 an hour, about half what he made before, he dons furry rags, a coonskin cap and an eye patch and jumps out of the woods when the Trading Post’s steam train chugs by, snarling and growling at passengers.

A recap of this week’s equity news.

 ”All Boarded Up,” - The New York Times Magazine

TONY BRANCATELLI, A CLEVELAND CITY COUNCILMAN, yearns for signs that something like normal life still exists in his ward. Early one morning last fall, he called me from his cellphone. He sounded unusually excited. He had just visited two forlorn-looking vacant houses that had been foreclosed more than a year ago. They sat on the same lot, one in front of the other. Both had been frequented by squatters, and Brancatelli had passed by to see if they had been finally boarded up. They hadn’t. But while there he noticed with alarm what looked like a prone body in the yard next door. As he moved closer, he realized he was looking at an elderly woman who had just one leg, lying on the ground. She was leaning on one arm and, with the other, was whacking at weeds with a hatchet and stuffing the clippings into a cardboard box for garbage pickup. “Talk about fortitude,” he told me. In a place like Cleveland, hope comes in small morsels.

The next day, I went with Brancatelli to visit Ada Flores, the woman who was whacking at the weeds. She is 81, and mostly gets around in a wheelchair. Flores is a native Spanish speaker, and her English was difficult to understand, especially above the incessant barking of her caged dog, Tuffy. But the story she told Brancatelli was familiar to him. Teenagers had been in and out of the two vacant houses next door, she said, and her son, who visits her regularly, at one point boarded up the windows himself. “Are they going to tear them down?” she asked. Brancatelli crossed himself. “I hope so,” he mumbled.

 ”YouthBuild: one stimulus model,” - The Christian Science Monitor
The program has turned lives around and builds affordable community housing.

Daniel Brito finished high school, but he didn’t know what to do next. His family, in a low-income Boston neighborhood, just wasn’t there for him. He was scared he’d be a failure.

Then a former teacher connected him with YouthBuild Boston, a local affiliate of a nationwide program that enables low-income young people to stay with their education and learn job skills while building affordable housing for their communities.

“Coalition plans two food stores in Detroit,” - The Detroit News
Community-operated sites would offer more nutritional groceries.

DETROIT — A Detroit neighborhood coalition seeking to bring healthy food to the city is eyeing two sites — one on the east side and one on the West — for the community-run grocery store it envisions.

The M.O.S.E.S. Supermarket Task Force, a partnership among neighborhood groups, churches and a union, among others, is designed to give residents greater access to healthy food through community-owned and run grocery stores.