“Every kid at every grade level in every subject area can do the majority of their learning outside.” Sharon Danks has been working for more than 20 years to get school kids outdoors. As a trained landscape architect and urban planner, she says too many schools across the country ignore the educational and health benefits offered by the outdoor spaces of their campuses. This is something she’s been trying to change through her nonprofit Green Schoolyards America , based in Berkeley, California, and something that’s become an international topic of concern since the coronavirus pandemic caused the mass closure of schools. Read Full Story

It limits exposure of medical staff and other patients, frees up the hospital for other work, and allows you to test a lot of people quickly (if there are enough tests, of course). Drive-through coronavirus testing is popping up across the U.S., and other countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic have already been deploying this tool for weeks. South Korea has been operating drive-through testing facilities since February; there, the speedy clinics have helped Korean health officials conduct up to 15,000 tests a day, and this way of testing is credited with helping slow the spread of COVID-19 and reducing deaths. Drive-through testing alone won’t rid us of COVID-19, but it’s an important step toward curbing the pandemic, for multiple reasons. Read Full Story

Is your city or town ready for an influx of COVID-19 hospitalizations? A new impact planning tool from Esri might give you an idea. In New York City and other areas heavily impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals and healthcare systems are already becoming overwhelmed , and that scenario is likely to play out in cities and towns across the country as COVID-19 spreads. Read Full Story

As families try to limit their exposure to coronavirus, the childcare industry is becoming collateral damage. Five daycare workers and nannies share how they’re making ends meet. Between school closures and shelter-in-place orders to curb the spread of COVID-19, parents across the country are now quarantined with their children. For those who have the ability to work from home, this has meant juggling a variety of roles in addition to their full-time jobs. Read Full Story

Conference Board has been tracking pay reduction announcements for publicly traded companies. More than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since the economy first began to unravel due to the coronavirus pandemic. That figure may not count untold millions of freelancers or self-employed individuals who are also out of work, nor does it factor in countless people who simply couldn’t get through to their state labor department to file a claim. And of those who are still working, many are making considerably less money due to reduced hours. Read Full Story

The report comes amid news of coronavirus surges across the country, which have caused a number of states to roll back plans for reopening. The Labor Department on Thursday reported that around 1.4 million Americans filed new unemployment claims last week—up from 1.3 million the prior week, marking the first increase in new unemployment claims since March. Read Full Story

During the pandemic, a “digital mindset” became critical for survival. When the coronavirus pandemic descended in March, as various stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders rolled through the country, technology became a lifeline for millions of housebound citizens and thousands of companies struggling with the economic effects of the shutdown. Read Full Story

Posted by DaisyQ Creating content can feel incredibly difficult right now. If you’re like me, you’ve spent the last few weeks oscillating between a can-do approach and hours of staring into space. Here’s how to tap into those very real emotions and channel them into more impactful content. What empathy is and isn’t We commonly confuse sympathy with empathy. Sympathy is understanding and perhaps feeling bad for the struggles that someone may be experiencing. Empathy means understanding the person’s feelings and thoughts from their point of view. Sympathy is when you feel compassion, sorrow, or pity for what the other person is going through. Empathy is about putting yourself in their shoes. In this post, I focus on cognitive empathy, which is the ability to understand how another person may be thinking or feeling. Cognitive empathy helps communication by helping us convey information in a way that resonates with the …

The hearing with one of the most respected experts in America will be about the risks of reopening the country too soon while COVID-19 death and infections continue to surge. If there’s a single person who has become a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the point man on the Trump administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. Read Full Story

30-second summary: Market conditions have shifted; they’re on a volatility roller coaster ride with an indeterminate amount of track of opportunity. US ecommerce sales in July rose 55% year-over-year (YoY) reaching a record $66.3 billion. 73% of consumers who are shopping online more since the pandemic plan to continue doing so in future. Ready or not, retailers need be planning new ways to deal with demand fluctuations across ecommerce categories now and plan for the holidays. In the face of dramatic shifts in consumer behavior, social distancing recommendations, and no end in sight to the uncertainty and changes in consumer behavior caused by the coronavirus, retailers are finding ecommerce and the mobile shopping experience more important than ever before. In fact, according to new data released from the Adobe Digital Index US ecommerce sales in July rose 55% year-over-year (YoY) reaching a record $66.3 billion. Strategies and technologies in the …