Employment
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to Grads: Love Is the World’s Oldest Medicine
On May 16, 2021, Vice Admiral Dr. Vivek Murthy gave a heartfelt and humble commencement address to the 331 graduate students and 208 undergraduate students who make up the UC Berkeley School of Public Health class of 2021. Murthy, who is both the 19th and 21st surgeon general of the United States, is a passionate believer in the power of public health to change lives and communities. He’s devoted his career to tackling some of the nation’s most urgent health issues, including addiction, the lack of safe and walkable communities, and the loneliness epidemic. more »
Congressional Policy Institute Weekly US Legislative Update, May 17, 2021: Education & Labor; Civil Rights, Education and Labor, Family Support, Expanding Opportunities and Protections for Women and Girls
Small Business and Entrepreneurship- On Wednesday, the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee will hold a hearing, “Realizing the Vision of Parren Mitchell—Untapping the Potential of Minority and Women Contracting; “Oversight of Prudential Regulators: Ensuring the Safety, Soundness, Diversity, and Accountability of Depository Institutions.” Bringing women policymakers together across party lines to advance issues of importance to women and their families. “Paid Leave for Working Families: Examining Access, Options, and Impacts.” A bill to require mail-in ballots to use the United States Postal Service barcode service, to provide paid parental leave to officers and employees of the Postal Service. A bill to limit the amount that the portion of a taxpayer's tax refund attributable to the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit may be reduced by reason of student loan debt. A bill commitment to combating hate, bigotry, and violence against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community. more »
Fact Sheet: The American Families Plan: Add at least four years of free education; Provide direct support to children and families; Extend tax cuts for families with children and American workers
"Add at least four years of free education. Investing in education is a down payment on the future of America. As access to high school became more widely available at the turn of the 20th Century, it made us the best-educated and best-prepared nation in the world. But everyone knows that 12 years is not enough today. The American Families Plan will make transformational investments from early childhood to postsecondary education so that all children and young people are able to grow, learn, and gain the skills they need to succeed. It will provide universal, quality-preschool to all three- and four- year-olds. It will provide Americans two years of free community college. It will invest in making college more affordable for low- and middle-income students, including students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and institutions such as Hispanic-serving institutions, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving institutions, and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs). And, it will invest in our teachers as well as our students, improving teacher training and support so that our schools become engines of growth at every level." more »
Kristin Nord Writes: My Mother As a Young Widow Restarted Her Life Again in Midlife; I Began to Follow in Her Footsteps
Kristin Nord Writes: As a young widow of means my mother would restart her life again in midlife, packing up the contents of her house this time and relocating from Grosse Pointe to Bucks County, PA. I suspect she must have decided early on — as someone who had not suffered during The Great Depression — that she would volunteer rather than engage in a career for money. Yet she did so nonetheless for a rather astonishing 40 years at the little library in New Hope, PA. Some of the choices my mother and mother-in-law made were dictated by circumstance, but they came at a time when they might still have been discouraged from truly pursuing careers of their own. more »