Category Archives: Blog

This is a follow up to my previous post about Strive Together’s plans for “cradle to career” collective impact. Pursuing this work is a curious experience. Most times I can’t tell what, if any, progress I’m making. Yet I continue to forge ahead and regularly stumble across guideposts that seem to affirm I’m doing the […]

I’ve heard rumblings from folks in a number of states about pending legislation to establish home visit programs for expectant families or families with newborns or pre-school age children. So many families are struggling. Poverty is at an all time high. When hearing about such bills, those who have not been faced with the challenge […]

A red flag for me in Gavin Newsom’s “child-friendly” proposed budget was the $45 million he allocated to screen children and adults in Medi-Cal for ACEs. I’m writing this post to express serious reservations I have about the process of developing ACE (Adverse Early Childhood Experiences) scores for people. ACEs are getting tremendous media exposure of […]

Videos of the historian calling out the billionaires in Davos have been circulating online a lot over the past few days. Kind of makes you wonder how he got in the room in the first place, doesn’t it? Well, my colleague from Save Maine Schools pointed out today that Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for […]

Stanley Druckenmiller, also a hedge fund manager, recruited Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs for the board of the Harlem Children’s Zone. As board chair, Druckenmiller shaped the leadership of the organization, which came from the highest echelons of New York’s finance sector. Druckenmiller and Geoffrey Canada had gone to school together at Bowdoin in Maine. […]

Over twenty plus years, Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) grew from a one-block pilot offering integrated social service delivery to a vast enterprise overseeing 20,000 children and adults within a ninety-seven block area. Under the leadership of Geoffrey Canada, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed from finance interests into HCZ’s programs, including Promise Academy Charter Schools, […]

Global finance has not underwritten “cradle to career” interventions to empower the poor or eliminate the source of their suffering. No, the intent of the 168 pages of calculations paid for by Paul Tudor Jones and the Robin Hood Foundation is to harness the human capital of oppressed communities so it can be scrutinized for […]

An influential network of economists and billionaire-backed foundations have laid out this nefarious plan for a futures market in human capital data with the help of complicit academics and think tanks (here, here, here, here, and here). They did it piece by piece, so gradually that few realize the dangers that loom on the horizon. […]

168 pages 168 pages of calculations 168 pages assessing people as commodities 168 pages estimating economic returns on “investment” in the poor 168 pages of financial depravity, inequality, callousness 168 pages of too few with too much and too many with too little 160 pages built on the trans-Atlantic slave trade 400 years from Jamestown’s […]

In the aftermath of the well-funded “Choose Children” campaign, we are left to ponder what Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2019 budget really means for California’s children. Will he use his position to do the will of the people, or instead sacrifice the state’s youth on the altar of technological surveillance and venture capital? I see […]