Gail Short - a freelance writer in Birmingham, Alabama

While many Americans are sheltering in their homes to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, long-haul truckers are traveling down the highways day and night delivering food, medicines and other essential goods to grocery stores, hospitals and pharmacies.
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But what happens if a trucker gets coronavirus or feels ill while on the road? While driving heavy or tractor-trailer trucks has always put drivers at a high risk for accidents and injuries, COVID-19 poses an added danger. But, as the pandemic rages on across the country, truckers, their employers, associations and others are working to keep them healthy. Read the article here. 

While blockchain technology is usually associated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, today some companies in the food industry are beginning to implement this tool to increase transparency, trust and consumer safety while reducing waste.
Many experts describe blockchain as a digital ledger. It is decentralized, meaning that no single individual or entity controls every computer on the blockchain network or the information entered onto the digital ledger. Every transaction along the supply chain is recorded on the ledger, time stamped, given a code or “hash,” and linked to the blockchain. All parties on the network — growers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers — can read the data in real time and add their own updates. And, almost without exception, the data, once entered, cannot be altered or erased. Read the article here. 

Warehouses are the large, often nondescript structures where goods are stored, packed, tagged and distributed to destinations around the globe. While they already play an important role in any supply chain, today these facilities are undergoing major changes in both their dimensions and complexity.
Experts say one reason for the change is the rapid rise of e-commerce retail sales. In fact, according to the U.S. Census, e-commerce today makes up 12% of retail sales and is growing 15 to 20% every year.
As e-commerce retail sales continue to grow, the need for warehouses and fulfillment centers that meet the needs of online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores is also rising, says James Breeze, senior director and global head of industrial and logistics research at CBRE Group Inc. Read the article here. 

To hold a job, live independently and become part of a community are ambitions many young adults have for themselves. But for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, such goals can seem out of reach.

But in Lafayette, Colo., a nonprofit called Imagine! is helping nearly 4,300 people with disabilities in surrounding counties integrate into the workforce and local communities and live independently by providing them with job training and placement, technical assistance and other supportive services.

“The greatest advantage of community integration over institutionalization is human dignity, respect and agency,” says Chris Baumgart, an assistive technology specialist for Imagine! Services.
​Read the article here (page 7). 

 Abbey Brooks-Derzay never attended church growing up, but three years ago, as a survivor of sex trafficking, she decided to give it a try. 

​She walked through the doors of Life Church in Germantown, Wisconsin, and instantly felt accepted and welcomed. She started attending regularly and eventually joined the congregation.
“It was easy to be ashamed of myself,” she says, “but the lessons and the Scriptures have really shown me forgiveness—how to forgive myself and not hold hate for other people and to forgive them.” Read the article here. 

In Woodlawn, an underserved neighborhood in east Birmingham, a group of local teens are growing and harvesting bushels of crops, knowledge and opportunity.
The teens are all students or recent graduates from Woodlawn High School, the site of a two-acre urban farm where they and their instructors are growing banana peppers, turnips, collards, okra, sorghum and other produce, along with sunflowers and gomphrena and more than 40 apple, pear, plumb, fig and persimmon trees.
Destiny Nelson-Miles, 16, a soft-spoken 11th grader at Woodlawn, says she has already learned how to harvest, pull weeds around tender plants and build raised garden beds.
“I love how, if I plant something, I’m able to watch it grow and turn into this beautiful thing,” says Nelson-Miles. “It’s so amazing.” Read the full article here. 

This spring, on the parking lot of the long-defunct Century Plaza Mall in Birmingham, Alabama, stand rows and rows of new Mercedes-Benz vehicles.

The cars, mostly sport utility vehicles, occupy nearly every parking space on the property as they have for weeks, starting well before the first day of spring.
“This is the first time we have a global launch for all markets simultaneously and not a phased launch by markets,” says Tuscaloosa County-based Mercedes-Benz US International (MBUSI) spokesperson Felyicia Jerald.
“As a result, we are using a number of locations in the plant and off-site locations nearby for the storage of those vehicles as a temporary storage for our vehicles.” Read the full article here. 

The skyrocketing home prices and rents in California have created a true housing crisis. The broad spectrum of vulnerable, low-income individuals and families are disproportionately affected. They are priced out of their communities, cycled through bureaucratic systems, shunted into institutions or abandoned to the streets. Read the article.