See Denver Youth Achieving: cityWILD Spring Dinner

cityWILD is a bold effort to bring the typically exclusive world of outdoor experiential education to a broad non-traditional audience: low-income youth of color. For the past 14 years, we have been providing tuition-free, comprehensive experiential education programs for urban youth (10-18 years old) in northeast Denver.

Our mission is to provide low income, culturally diverse youth with outdoor and environmental service learning opportunities that promote developmental themes of personal empowerment, leadership and community participation. Intensive programs (students spend 1-4 afternoons per week at cityWILD throughout the school year) are combined with dedicated staff and carefully coordinated support services, resulting in a positive influence on students’ school, work, and family experiences.

On Thursday, May 17th, from 6:00-7:30 pm, we are hosting a dinner and fundraiser at the cityWILD offices. cityWILD students will be presenting their service learning project and leading group initiatives to show off their skills!

The event is free and you won’t be required to donate (but it's always appreciated!). The worst that could happen is you come eat dinner on us, meet some cool people, and find out a bit more about a great local nonprofit. We want people who care about the mission of cityWILD to come and be a part of this event, and to donate if they can and want to.


RSVP here: cityWILD Spring Dinner

No Shit, Sherlock: "Deporting Parents Hurts Kids"

It concerns me that this distinction is an issue: families being torn apart by the Immigration Deportation regime. How can it be so taxing to differentiate between families and violent criminals. I have multiple client families where one parent of a child with a disability has been deported, or lost in detention for months, while their family struggles to get by and wonders where is their loved one. 

Deporting Parents Hurts Kids Op-Ed from the NYTimes, April 21, 2012:

By HIROKAZU YOSHIKAWA and CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO

Read the first few paragraphs here, then follow the link for more: 

"LAST May, President Obama told an audience in El Paso that deportation of immigrants would focus on “violent offenders and people convicted of crimes; not families, not folks who are just looking to scrape together an income.”

Two weeks ago, however, the Department of Homeland Security released a report that flatly belies the new policy.  From January to June 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 46,486 undocumented parents who claimed to have at least one child who is an American citizen.

In contrast, in the entire decade between 1998 and 2007, about 100,000 such parents were removed. The extraordinary acceleration in the dismantling of these families, part of the government’s efforts to meet an annual quota of about 400,000 deportations, has had devastating results.

Research by the Urban Institute and others reveals the deep and irreversible harm that parental deportation causes in the lives of their children. Having a parent ripped away permanently, without warning, is one of the most devastating and traumatic experiences in human development."

More undocumented immigrants have been deported under Obama than any previous administration, without differentiation between violent criminals and other undocumented residents. 


Maria Hinojosa's Frontline documentary, "Lost in Detention." FRONTLINE and the Investigative Reporting Workshop examine the Obama administration’s controversial get-tough immigration policy.

Psychedelics Can Help Patients Face Death

Psychedelics in Palliative Care: 

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death

From the New York Times, August 19, 2012

To help address the crippling, intoxicating fear of death, its anxieties and uncertainties, researchers are opening their minds: "a study being conducted by Charles Grob, a psychiatrist and researcher at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center who was administering psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms — to end-stage cancer patients to see if it could reduce their fear of death. Twenty-two months before she died, Sakuda became one of Grob’s 12 subjects. When the research was completed in 2008 — (and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry last year) — the results showed that administering psilocybin to terminally ill subjects could be done safely while reducing the subjects’ anxiety and depression about their impending deaths."

'Alive Inside' explores the hidden lives of people with dementia and how to unlock them

Alive Inside

Watch this! See how a man nearly incapacitated by dementia is revivified by music.