Gail Short - a freelance writer in Birmingham, Alabama

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. 

When it comes to snagging a coveted medical residency on Match Day, the competition is hot and getting hotter. That is because the number of residency applicants in the U.S. Match has long outpaced the number of available medical residency spots. In fact, the number of residency registrants reached an all-time high of 43,909 in 2018, for only 30,232 first-year post-graduate (PGY-1) positions.
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Getting the preferred residency is just the beginning. New interns often find the first few weeks on the job nerve-racking as they begin treating patients on their own.
Read the article. 

​In an age when some of the most iconic American companies are no longer around, EBSCO Industries Inc., at age 75, is proving it has staying power.

EBSCO Industries’ founder, Elton Stephens, started out selling magazine subscriptions to pay for college during the Depression. After realizing he had a knack for sales, he soon organized a sales team. Then in 1944, he incorporated the business, and over the next several years, EBSCO grew, becoming one of the largest subscription services in the world, serving schools and universities, libraries and the military. Read the article.

​Birmingham resident Ginger Mayfield knows first-hand the hassle that comes with hiring a babysitter — especially in a pinch.
She recalls one instance when she had an evening graduate school class to attend. After learning that her attorney husband, Tommy, had to work late the same night, she scrambled to find a sitter for the couple’s two children, ages 3 and 14 months at the time.
“At that point,” she says, “I probably had 20 names in my phone, a network of sitters that I had built out through our church and our community. So I had plenty of people to text, but I couldn’t fill that job through my network. I ended up having to miss my class.” Read the article. 

In California, more than 7 million private-sector workers have no workplace sponsored retirement plan. As a result, California workers are retiring into poverty. Read the articles.

In today's economy, the pathway to a well paying job requires an education beyond high school and a willingness to gain new skills. 

Giving local residents the skills to be job-ready is the goal of the Kern Adult Education Consortium, a partnership of education providers dedicated to expanding and improving educational opportunities for adult learners. 
​Read the articles.

In 2017, Tammy Bradford and her family experienced devastating storms, both physically and spiritually. That year, as her 52-year-old husband battled stage 4 lung cancer, they began searching for a church. Then one Sunday, their youngest daughter contacted them after visiting Faith Church.
“She said, ‘Mom, you need to get online and listen to this service,’” Bradford says. Bradford logged onto Facebook Live and watched as Faith Church’s lead pastor Steve Huskey preached a message about faith and Jesus being a believer’s anchor.
“It connected with everything that I was going through at the time,” Bradford says. “I knew that I just had to go and be in a service.” Read the article here.

Across Twin Rivers Unified School District, teachers and administrators are working together to boost learning and help students make the grade on standardized tests like the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP).  Read the article here.