Each year, Common Cents engages a group of interns to study a global issue of concern to youth and share that knowledge with their peers. This year, our interns studied hunger and they produced a cool and educational video promoting hunger awareness and exploring what the hunger looks like in New York City. The video, titled Faces of Hunger, is available on YouTube!
These are some reflections from our interns.

This is the time year when students across NYC are making grants to organizations in the community. This week we caught up with students at PS 1 in Manhattan who made grants to The American Red Cross, Friends of Karen,New Yorkers for Parks, Lower East Side Ecology Center, Fresh Air Fund, Children’s Aid Society, Westside Campaign Against Hunger, God’s Love We Deliver and Habitat for Humanity.

by Arvin Temkar
Every 26 seconds a child quits high school. This is the dropout epidemic, and it plagues 1.2 million students a year. So far, tactics to improve graduation rates have been rather, it seems, …

by Teddy Gross
It is only December, but already there is snow on the pine trees and a foot accumulation – in the store windows on Broadway near our offices.  But out in the Bronx, along …

Every week around lunchtime on Wednesdays, I hop on my bicycle and pedal across Central park to PS6 for a much-need shot of the Penny Harvest in action. It began because I had fallen in love (platonically) with the Penny Harvest Coach at the school, a devoted lifelong classroom teacher named Kate Gutwillig. I had met Kate years earlier when she was teaching at a school for emotionally and cognitively troubled children, for whom she had chosen to adapt the Penny Harvest as their social studies curriculum for the year.

Common Cents Fellows get VIP passes to NYC Christmas tree lighting!
Our Fellows were special guests at this year’s Christmas tree lighting a the Rockefeller Center. Two years ago we had the Penny Harvest Field right …