Beyond Walmart: How The California FreshWorks Fund Aims To Feed The Food Deserts Of California

The FreshWorks Fund, a collaboration between the California Endowment and over a dozen partners, has $200 million to give to aspiring food vendors (everything from big grocery stores to small produce trucks) in California food deserts. "The reason the market doesn't work [in food deserts] is because the risk of loss in those communities is higher on a relative basis than what you would find somewhere else," says Annie Donovan, COO of NCB Capital Impact. "We pull together incentives and use grant dollars and socially motivated capital in strategic ways to get those traditional lenders to put their money there."

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From Ball and Chain to Cap and Gown: Getting a B.A. Behind Bars

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The 43 degrees granted that day were from Bard, an elite liberal arts college in the nearby scenic Hudson Valley. This rite of passage, however, took place in a maximum-security prison, the grads convicted felons who for now can only hang their diplomas in their cells.
With 2.3 million prisoners, one in 100 adults, the U.S. locks up the most people anywhere in the world, and at the world's highest rate. Repressive China comes in a distant second, with 1.6 million inmates, closer to one in 1,000. U.S. imprisonment has soared sevenfold since the late '70s, when the tough-on-crime movement began -- with good reason, many would argue.

Bard College initiated and helped staff a privately funded B.A. program with total enrollment now up to 250.  Bard College is highly selective, admitting only 30 percent of applicants. Bard behind bars is far pickier, with an admission rate rivaling Harvard's, says the program's founder, Max Kenner.

MAX KENNER, Bard Prison Initiative: We get the best 15 students at each place, each year. And, typically, you have roughly 10 applicants per spot.

PAUL SOLMAN: Forget SATs or GPAs. Some of these guys never even started high school, much less finished it. The key criterion for admission, how badly do they want it, determined by an essay and interview.

MAX KENNER: Those students that are most intellectually ambitious, that are most curious are so often the same people as children who dropped out of conventional school the youngest.

KYLE ALSTON, inmate: This is my third time being incarcerated. And each time that I was incarcerated before in the past, I was always looking for the easy way out, some program that I could try to get out of prison so that I could just go back and hang around the same neighborhood and do the same things that I did that led me here this time. This time, I'm committed to bettering myself and to educating myself.

PAUL SOLMAN: Would you choose to stay here if it meant that you would get your degree?

KYLE ALSTON: Yes, sir.

PAUL SOLMAN: Even if you could get out of prison?

KYLE ALSTON: Yes, sir.

PAUL SOLMAN: Carlos Rosado, sentenced to 16 years for robbery and assault, majored in environmental studies at Woodbourne. He has gotten out, is now gainfully employed as a recycling engineer, here showing one of his former Bard professors around.

We separate the toner, the circuitry, the plastic.

PAUL SOLMAN: Rosado is one of 158 grads now just trickling out of prison. But so far, almost everyone on the outside has a job, suggesting a prison B.A. can be the ticket.

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Opposition To Health Reform Falls, Majority Want To Keep It Or Expand It

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