We Live Here | Season 1

For our holiday episode, we talked to faith leaders about their experiences addressing race with their congregations. We wanted to know if they felt…

It’s the holiday season, and like many of you, we’re taking stock. Taking stock of what we accomplished with this We Live Here project; the stories and topics we’ve covered; and where we hope to go in the future.

The nationwide debate about gun control, mass shootings, and violent crime was once again jump-started in the wake of recent massacres at a county center in California and at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado that left several people dead.But here in St. Louis, officials are concerned with a different type of gun violence — the kind that happens almost routinely and usually takes one life at a time.

The activist group Concerned Student 1950 has vowed to keep pushing for change in the wake of resignations by both the University of Missouri system President, Tim Wolfe, and chancellor of the Columbia campus, R. Bowen Loftin.Among their demands is increasing the number of black faculty members at Mizzou from 3 percent to 10 percent over the next two years.

There is this term that gets thrown around in education circles that we felt needs some exploring. School to prison pipeline.

Racial disparities are a huge topic in education. And Missouri schools — specifically those in the St. Louis area — have been singled out as having some of the nation’s highest rates of suspensions that are disproportionately allocated to African Americans.

The arcane world of school finance in Missouri can be harder to understand than the most obscure poem or the most difficult calculus problem. But clear away all of the acronyms and calculations and modifications, and it comes down to two simple questions.

This is Kameel Stanley's inaugural article for St. Louis Public Radio's We Live Here project. We asked her to introduce herself.

This week's We Live Here podcast is something a little different.Recently, we've been looking at health and the way that toxic stress can impact someone's ability to succeed and even to be healthy. We'll be transitioning to a new area soon, but we wanted to take a step back this week to allow Emanuele Berry to produce her own, unique show.

A year after Michael Brown’s death, is the landscape around racial and economic disparities in St. Louis and beyond starting to shift? Can some changes already be seen?