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Posts published in “Children”

Little League World Series Sensation Mo'ne Davis to Donate Her Jersey to Baseball Hall of Fame

By goodblacknews on September 24, 2014

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Philadelphia Little League sensation Mo’ne Davis is headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Mo'ne Davis
Mo’ne Davis will donate the jersey she wore in becoming the first girl to win a game at the Little League World Series. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Davis, the first girl to win a game at the Little League Baseball World Series, will donate the jersey she wore during the game to the museum Thursday. The top-notch pitcher be accompanied by teammates from her World Series team and the travel team she’s played on since she was 7.
Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, a former pitcher and one of only three women to play in the Negro Leagues, will also attend Thursday’s event at the Hall of Fame. Afterward, Davis and her teammates will face a team from upstate New York in an exhibition game at Doubleday Field.
Davis pitched Taney Little League into the Little League World Series, becoming the fourth American girl to appear in the tournament. In her first game, she shut out a team from Nashville 4-0 over six innings while featuring a fastball that reached 70 mph.
Copyright 2014 by The Associated Press via espn.go.com

New Jersey 10 Year-Old Cory Nieves Builds Delicious Cookie Empire From The Age Of 5

By goodblacknews on September 20, 2014

Facebook
Mr. Cory’s Cookies CEO Cory Nieves (Photo: Facebook)

Cory Nieves wants to become a household name because of his decadent cookies. CBS News reports that every Saturday, Nieves can be found along with his wagon cart of treats, selling homemade cookies to clients at various city locations. In an interview, Nieves told a CBS reporter the reason why his cookies are so good is because they are “made with love”… and without preservatives. Nieves founded his company, Mr. Cory’s Cookies at the age of five. Currently, he is the founder, CEO and head of distribution for his company. He created Mr. Cory’s when he and his mother moved from the Bronx to Englewood, New Jersey; his mother recalls the conversation that birthed his business:

“One day, we were on the bus and he just came out and was like, ‘Ma, you know, I wanna get a car or whatever. Cause it’s too cold.’ I said, ‘Cory, how am I gettin’ a car, off of my looks?’ I told him that and then, he said, ‘Well, we can sell hot cocoa. And then, he wanted to add something to that, like, something, a dessert base. And he wanted to try the cookies.”

Although Nieves did not know much about baking, he set forth to research the craft before making into an enterprise. He shared: “I didn’t really know. I just looked it up with some magazines, websites. Looked it up. Little search. ‘What is this? How you make that?’ And I didn’t like the recipes, so I just started changin’ it around.” From a humble beginning in his home kitchen, Nieves has now moved into a commercial space to bake his desserts. He sells a thousand cookies a weekend at about $1 a piece.
Besides becoming a culinary mogul, Nieves would like to own a fashion line. With over 30,000 followers on Instagram and press appearances, his most recent on The Ellen Degeneres Show we are sure Nieves will be a name we won’t forget.
See more at: http://madamenoire.com/470750/new-jersey-ten-year-old-builds-delicious-empire/#sthash.QK6qqzrd.dpuf

Lupita Nyong'o Stops By "Sesame Street" to Talk About the Beauty of All Types of Skin

By goodblacknews on September 16, 2014

skin-lupita-nyongo
Academy Award winner and Lancôme Beauty Ambassador Lupita Nyong’o stopped by “Sesame Street” to talk to Elmo about the importance and beauty of skin.
“Elmo’s skin just happens to be very ticklish. Lupita’s skin happens to be a beautiful brown color. Skin can come in all different shades and colors. Isn’t skin just the best? However, ticklish or smooth or black or brown or white or tan, be sure to love the skin you are in.”
See video below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIC2hHECZ6Y&w=560&h=315]
article via newsone.com

Teen Siblings Ima, Caleb, Asha and Joshua Christian Create App to Document Police Interactions

By goodblacknews on August 31, 2014
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Five-O App Inventors Caleb, Ima, Joshua, and Asha Christian (Pine Tart)

Like everyone else in America, Ima Christian has been nervously watching the news unfold in Ferguson, Missouri. The 16-year-old resident of Stone Mountain, Georgia, says that she and her siblings have been in constant conversation with their parents about the recent deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (who died last month in Staten Island) at the hands of police.
“Our parents try to put everything in context for us,” Christian says. “They try to tell us to focus on solutions.”
So they decided to build their own answer to police abuse. On Monday, Ima Christian (pictured, second from left) and her siblings—principally Caleb, 14, and Asha, 15, with the support of Joshua, 10—are launching a beta version of Five-O, an app that will enable users to rate their interactions with police and view aggregate scores for how law-enforcement agencies fare.
“As soon as we decided that we wanted to make an app, we threw the idea on the white board,” she says.

Ima Christian and her siblings decided to build their own answer to police abuse.

Here’s how Five-O works: Users log in to a dashboard, where they have several options. A Five-O user can create a detailed incident report and rate the professionalism and courtesy of the officer, using an A-F scale. Or they can view police stations by county or state to see how various departments rate. (Those A-F officer interaction scores are averaged out on a 4.0 scale—like a GPA for the fuzz.)
The app also allows people to post messages to a community board. There’s another function called “Know Your Rights,” a Q&A-formatted feature, “so you have your rights at your fingertips at any moment,” Christian says. The family drew the information from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Christian, a senior at Parkview High School, credits her brother Caleb for the idea to create an app for rating police interactions. They decided early on in the project planning stages that Five-O would focus on the good as well as the bad.
“I haven’t really heard of issues happening in Stone Mountain of the scale of what’s in the news,” she says. “I do have relatives who have had negative interactions with police.” She says that friends of the family include police officers, who offer a friendlier model for police interactions. “This is an app to offer up positive experiences. They can be an example.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-Veei0jQM&w=560&h=315]
This is the Christian family’s first app release, but it’s unlikely to be their last. Ima and her siblings are aggressive students of programming, especially for a mobile environment. She and her siblings Asha and Caleb have participated in programs such as MIT’s +K12, Scratch, and App Inventor programs. Ima and Asha Christian are both executive team members in the ProjectCSGirls computer science competition. And they were both 2014 #Include Fellows in the She++ program. Ima is a Codecademy alum as well, and has done coding programs through Stanford.Stanford, incidentally, is Ima’s reach school—she’s also got her sights set onWashington University in St. Louis, Brown, and Columbia—and the graduating senior has also done work at her top in-state choice, the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Ima’s siblings could not be reached for comment, as they were not yet home from school.)
Following Monday’s beta launch for Five-O, the Christian siblings are continuing work on two more projects: Coily, a review app for hair-care products for black girls and women, and Froshly, an app to facilitate meetings for in-bound college pre-freshmen, “so they can greet each other before they meet each other in school.” The Christian siblings started a company, Pine Tart, Inc., to advance their work.
“We don’t have any institutional support right now,” Ima Christian says. “It’s just us. We’re our own team.”
article by Kriston Capps via citylab.com

Tameka Lawson Brings Yoga to Youth in Chicago Neighborhood

By goodblacknews on August 27, 2014

Tameka Lawson
Tameka Lawson is changing her Chicago neighborhood one yoga pose as at a time.  Lawson, a yoga enthusiast for only a year, is the executive director of I Grow Chicago, a non-profit organization in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.
Lawson said she started practicing yoga because she needed to learn how to slow down and relax, and she thought the idea of bringing it to her community would bring people closer together.
Tameka Lawson
From The Huffington Post:

Not long after she took up yoga, the student became a teacher as she began to lead classes for youth in Englewood through her organization.
Initially, the classes took place inside the five area schools her group works with as a means of helping the young students cope with the stresses of their environment. While Lawson does go through basic yoga poses and breathing exercises with her young students, the lessons she hopes they will take away from her work extend far beyond the practice of yoga itself.
Built into each class, she says, are elements of art therapy, motivational speaking, mentoring and job skills. Yoga is simply the gateway to that information.
“There are lots of elements causing these youth to have stress,” Lawson said. “We want to get at the center of these youth and give them a moment to breathe in a way that will change the way they react and process things.”
The classes have been such a hit that Lawson and her group have taken their show on the road — or, more specifically, to the street. They’ve held regular, free community yoga classes on a blocked-off stretch of 64th Street, and are also offering free lessons the first Monday of every month at Kusanya Cafe.

“If we can prevent one 8-year-old from growing up to become a person who could potentially pick up a gun, we’ve succeeded,” she said. “If we can intervene for a 14-year-old who has made bad choices from making another bad choice, we’ve succeeded. If a 28-year-old who says he wants to stop selling drugs and just needs the opportunity, we’ve succeeded. We don’t have the answers, but we’re trying to come up with creative solutions.”
article via clutchmagonline.com

Estella Pyfrom's "Brilliant Bus": a State of the Art Mobile Learning Center that Helps Underserved Students Learn Technology

By goodblacknews on August 26, 2014
Estella Brilliant Bus

If Estella Pyfrom looks familiar, it’s because she was recognized last year as a CNN Hero, a honor she received for the humanitarian genius behind her Brilliant Bus initiative, which really is quite brilliant.
Pyfrom, a retired 50-year veteran of Florida’s Palm Beach County School District, didn’t have any training in technology before she realized students in her district lacked the digital know-how to meet the demands of the 21st century workforce.  “The minute I decided that [in retirement] I wanted to continue what I was doing for 50 years [as a school administrator], I knew I needed to be creative, and I needed to understand it,” Pyfrom said in a phone interview.
So Pyfrom, who is now 76, brushed up on her tech skills in 2009 and emptied her pension to build a non-profit, state-of-the-art mobile learning center called Project Aspiration, which was later renamed Estella’s Brilliant Bus. She’s been offering free tutoring to students since 2011.
Students who were among the winners of the #YESWECODE Hackathon at the 2014 ESSENCE Festival for their GlucoReader app rode from Florida to New Orleans on Estella’s Brilliant Bus, and Pyfrom takes great pride in her affiliation with the winners.
And that’s just one of many success stories tied to Pyfrom and her work. She spoke to us about what’s next for her organization.
ESSENCE: Why did you decide to launch your Brilliant Bus?
Estella Pyfrom: I started Brilliant Bus in an effort to expose kids to technology. I became passionate about technology when I realized that it would give kids so much exposure and different ways to connect with the world. I also just looked at what was going on in the community.  When I was building my curriculum, I coordinated with area schools so that I could correlate what I was doing on the bus with what students were doing at school.  I started working with kids at day care centers, churches, schools and community centers, and I ended up being able to offer a program for kids at all levels to prepare them for standardized tests, readiness tests and GED tests.

ESSENCE: What’s special about this method of teaching?
EP: Not only is it unique and innovative, it’s an idea that works. The Brilliant Bus is customized and I built it from scratch. The bus is a mobile learning lab and it can do whatever a classroom can do. Instead of kids who live in undeserved neighborhoods finding me, I am able to take the learning to the neighborhoods.

ESSENCE: What do your students tell you is their favorite part of the Brilliant Bus?
EP: Kids will do anything to get out of the classroom. They say it’s like going on a field trip. One of the good things they tell me is that the activities [on the bus] are so much in sync with what they are doing in the classroom and that it’s a good supplement. Everything that I do with kids on the bus is grade and age level appropriate.

ESSENCE: What’s next for the bus? How will you expand on it?
EP: Brilliant Bus isn’t just a bus; it’s a movement. We plan on building these clubs in various communities. We’re conducting surveys now so that we can move beyond coding and into Robotics. We are going to get really creative with science and math so we can build robots.
Don’t forget to follow the #YESWECODE conversation on Twitter and keep up with Estella’s Brilliant Bus on Facebook.
article via essence.com

Jackie Robinson West All-Stars Gave Their All in Little League World Series Championship, Celebrated by Hometown Even in Defeat

By goodblacknews on August 25, 2014
Chicago’s Jackie Robinson West All-Stars  (Photo: TWITTER)

The Jackie Robinson West All-Stars are still the pride of Chicago, even after a tough loss to South Korea in the Little League World Series championship game. The Jackie Robinson West team put up a valiant fight, including a late rally in the bottom of the sixth inning, but in the end it was not enough to hold off the mighty bats and dominant pitching performance from the Seoul team, which handed the South Side Chicago sluggers an 8-4 loss.

According to the Associated Press, normal Sunday activities in Chicago were on hold for a few hours while the all-black Jackie Robinson West ballplayers, who “made their first appearance in 31 years in the Little League World Series” and had stolen the nation’s heart on their way to the championship game, took the field.
Several hundred supporters gathered at TV watch stations to root for the team, which, until the final game, had dominated all comers.
AP notes that despite the defeat, several fans gathered at the South Side community center gym and roared and cheered just as if their boys had won.  “They showed what heart they have. The city could not be prouder of them,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told AP.
Jackie Robinson West’s run was a nice break for an area that has been ravished by poverty and violence.
“I have never seen the community come together like this,” Eldridge Dockery, 44, told AP. “We’re usually behind our walls or gates—but this team brought us out, talking and celebrating together.”
According to news station WGN-TV, a parade is planned for the team on Wednesday.
Read more at the Associated Press and WGN-TV.

All-Black Team from Chicago Heads To Little League World Series

By goodblacknews on August 20, 2014
The Jackie Robinson West Little League Team. (Facebook/Little League Central Region)
The Jackie Robinson West Little League Team. (Facebook/Little League Central Region)

According to thegrio.com, an all-black little league team from Chicago has been invited to represent the Great Lakes region in the Little League World Series.
The Jackie Robinson West League, founded in 1971, and named after the iconic ball player, has helped to keep baseball accessible to underprivileged kids. The Jackie Robinson West All-Stars bring much-needed good vibes and a great deal of hope to the people of Chicago.  Even Mayor Emanuel noticed, saying, “The Jackie Robinson West All-Stars have excited an entire city with their dedication and athleticism, and everyone should have the chance to see a Chicago team play in the Little League World Series for the first time since 1983.”
“This is stuff of legends,” said renowned Cincinnati Reds player Barry Larkin on ESPN. Major League Baseball’s David James, a senior director of the Reviving Baseball In Inner Cities (RBI) program, knows all about the team’s story, and it delights him to see them return to the biggest stage in Little League. “All of us at MLB are talking about that team,” said James, a native of Williamsport and a former head of the Little League Urban Initiative. “It’s really good for the game.”
This year’s Jackie Robinson West team has come to the attention of Curtis Granderson, a Mets right fielder, who knows all about the hardship that the boys on this team face every single day, having grown up in Chicago’s south suburbs. Granderson began playing baseball in the Lynwood Little League.
“The cool thing is the way people talk about it,” Granderson reflected. “Like, ‘Wow, there is an all-black team out there; I didn’t know there was an all-black team playing.’ The fact that people don’t realize that there is a black team means that people are under the assumption that black kids aren’t playing baseball. Hopefully, this could be something that sheds light both in the African-American community and the non-African-American community.”
While diversity is often talked about and praised in baseball, the game’s costs have not stopped increasing and as a result have been beyond the wallets of a large and growing number of future players after Little League. The expense of playing, since teams who travel have become standard even prior to reaching high school, might extend to thousands of dollars each year. That is why there are programs to help inner-city areas maintain a team.
article edited by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (follow @lakinhutcherson)

Detroit Dad Dan Davis Turns Vacant Lot Into A Play Area For Kids & Adults

By goodblacknews on August 6, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-08-06 at 3.32.37 PM
On the vacant lot next to Dan Davis’ house on Washburn in Detroit, there is a homemade movie screen, a bonfire pit, a swing set, a barbecue grill and weights for working out.
Across the street, Davis turned a stretch of lots into a go-kart track and athletic field ringed by a wall of tires.
It’s all part of his goal to transform his block on the city’s west side into a place where families can have safe fun close to home. He mows the grass up and down the street and makes sure there’s no trash on the ground.
“He’s like an icon around here. What he does for the neighborhood, people look up to him for it,” said one of his friends, Michael Knight, 51.
Detroit's Dan DavisDavis, 50, grew up in the area. As a child, he was always cleaning or fixing things. His mother made him clean up trash outside their house.
Inspired by an outdoor movie screen he saw at Campus Martius Park, Davis decided to build his own, using sheets of wood spray-painted white that he positioned on top of a metal stand. On warm nights, his neighbors gather around on lawn chairs as Davis uses a projector to play kid-friendly movies and music videos.
“Everybody comes out, about 10 to 15 people. … and then some people, they just sit on their porch and watch it, and it’s all good. It’s beautiful, lovely,” he said.
The same field holds a bench-press, dumbbells and a mirror. A few feet away sits a play set and swings. Basketballs and toys are scattered on the ground, and there is a sand pit for playing horseshoes.

Doc McStuffins Merchandise Garners $500 Million in Sales, Record for Toy Line Based on African-American Character

By goodblacknews on July 28, 2014
Natalie Elisabeth Battles, 3, of Arkansas, with her Doc McStuffins toys. She sometimes wears a doctor’s coat to preschool. (Credit: Jacob Slaton for The New York Times)

Jade Goss, age 2, looks as if she just stepped out of the wildly popular “Doc McStuffins” cartoon.  “She has the Doc McStuffins sheets. She has the Doc McStuffins doll. She has the Doc McStuffins purse. She has Doc McStuffins clothes,” said Jade’s mother, Melissa Woods, of Lynwood, Calif.

“I think what attracts her is, ‘Hey, I look like her, and she looks like me,’ ” Ms. Woods said of the character, an African-American child who acts as a doctor to her stuffed animals.

With about $500 million in sales last year, Doc McStuffins merchandise seems to be setting a record as the best-selling toy line based on an African-American character, industry experts say.  Its blockbuster success reflects, in part, the country’s changing consumer demographics, experts say, with more children from minority backgrounds providing an expanding, less segregated marketplace for shoppers and toymakers.

DocMcStuffinsBut what also differentiates Doc — and Dora the Explorer, an exceptionally popular Latina character whose toy line has sold $12 billion worth of merchandise over the years, Nickelodeon executives say — is her crossover appeal.  “The kids who are of color see her as an African-American girl, and that’s really big for them,” said Chris Nee, the creator of Doc McStuffins. “And I think a lot of other kids don’t see her color, and that’s wonderful as well.”

Nancy Kanter, general manager of Disney Junior Worldwide, which developed “Doc McStuffins” — and who suggested the character be African-American in the first place — said Doc’s wide-ranging fan base could be gleaned from a spreadsheet. “If you look at the numbers on the toy sales, it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t just African-American families buying these toys,” Ms. Kanter said. “It’s the broadest demographics possible.”