Video Links

Teens and Smartphones: A Summer Camp Experiment
A sleep away camp in Pennsylvania has decided to allow campers to keep their screens, with the hope of teaching them how to use them in more mindful ways. In this WNYC video, the head of the camp and the campers reflect on the experience. 1. To what technological and social changes is the camp responding?

Promoting Social Change: The Most Important Questions-Karama Neal
Karama Neal describes the path to creating meaningful social change.

Audio Links

This American Life 336: Who Can You Save?
Act one focuses on the hypothetical scenario that there's a group of five people standing on a train track, and you're on a train coming toward them. You can save the whole group by pulling a lever and switching to another track, but the catch is that you'll kill another person who's standing on that other track. Do you pull the lever? According to a Harvard scientist, who posed this question to hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet, nine out of 10 people say yes, they would pull the lever. But then, the questions get harder--and the answers much more confusing. It turns out that different parts of our brains make different moral decisions. Act two is about the, moment when the U.S. government sent out a call for volunteers--regular, non-military people--to go to Iraq and help rebuild the country, Randy Frescoln signed up. He believed in the cause of the war and in the promise of its mission. He had experience setting up agriculture projects overseas, so was sent to the Sunni Triangle to try to reconstruct the broken economy there. But three months into his yearlong assignment, he comes to a horrible realization: the people he's trying to help hate him. In Act three, Brady Udall tells the story of the time he helped a stranger get his car out of a ditch. In exchange, the man promises to help him any time, for any reason--legal or not. Brady carries the man's card in his wallet; he's reassured that he has such a powerful guy in his corner. Many years later, Brady finally looks him up.

This American Life 372: The Inauguration Show
The election of Barack Obama was evidence of significant social change in the United States. On the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, reporters were sent out all over the country to talk to people about how they're feeling about this new president. Do they believe things will change? Do they think there'll be changes in their own lives? From dozens of hours of interviews, at a Marine Corps base and a button factory, at a New Orleans bar and a Florida town that used to be a stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan, we hear opinions about what's going to happen in America after the ceremony on January 20th, 2009.

Web Links

The Sentencing Project
“The Sentencing Project is a national organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing law and practice and alternatives to incarceration.” Statistics can be found by state. Publications, news, and advocacy information about issues including sentencing policy, racial disparity, felony disenfranchisement, drug policy and women in the justice system are all available.

Amnesty International
Amnesty International is a worldwide campaigning movement that works to promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards.

Color of Change
Color of Change is the largest online racial justice organization advocating for the rights of Black people and other people of color.