Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Tell us what you’ve been reading at [email protected] and we just might feature it here.
Call and response
In Baltimore, when someone calls 911 about a mental health crisis, mobile crisis teams have long been able to step in and reroute the caller to mental health professionals instead of the police. Now, according to a KFF Health News story shared by RTBC Editorial Director Rebecca Worby, there will be even more options: Using money it received from opioid-related legal settlements, Baltimore is creating a broader service to respond to other crises that don’t require traditional emergency services. Whether someone needs housing, legal help or other resources, the goal is to reduce violence and solve problems without sending people facing poverty, addiction or mental health issues into the criminal justice system.
Becca says:
Imagine knowing that if you called 911, the dispatcher would figure out what kind of help you needed (even if it turned out to be well beyond the usual scope of 911 calls!) and then make sure that help reached you.
Party on
Around the world, billions of celebratory balloons are purchased every year. But after the festivities, what happens to them? Most people aren’t aware that traditional balloons don’t degrade, and can pose dangers to birds and marine life. Enter the “Bioloon,” a newly invented balloon that, as Euro News reports in a story shared by Contributing Editor Michaela Haas, fully breaks down in less than a year.
Michaela says:
In the coastal town where I live balloons are banned — yet people still bring them to the beach or let them fly, unaware that they are “the highest-risk plastic debris item” for seabirds, according to science. They take years to degrade. Two young London researchers have now created a 100 percent compostable version.
What else we’re reading
🪻 The Revolution Will Be Planted With Wildflowers — shared by Rebecca Worby from the New York Times
🌲 A rare win in Indian country: how tribes drove out a mining company in one week — shared by Michaela Haas from the Guardian
🍞 Books and Bread: Free Grocery Stores in Libraries Tackle Food Insecurity — shared by Michaela Haas from the New York Times
In other news…
Writer, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry passed away this week at the age of 92. The nonprofit Berry Center, established in 2011, is “putting Wendell Berry’s writings to work by advocating for farmers, land-conserving communities, and healthy regional economies.”
Learn more about the Berry Center’s projects or give this Wendell Berry poem a read.