General News

Our new family Thanksgiving tradition is to run the neighborhood 5k and donate nonperishable food items as an entry fee. This run is my favorite of the year. It has social cause, allows one to eat guiltlessly and gives a good early winter jolt to the metabolism. Runners through the neighborhood see women parading into […]

All parents ask themselves “Is my child prepared?” as they think about the first day of kindergarten. Some begin pondering this question even before their child enters a pre-k program. Preparing children for school begins well before they step inside the classroom. Developmental studies increasingly show the importance of a child’s first five years of […]

Two weeks ago, the Census Bureau’s announcement of national income and poverty figures for 2010 filled the headlines, and the news was not good. In 2010, real income continued to fall, settling about where it was in the mid-1990s, and the poverty rate increased for the third consecutive year to its highest level in 17 […]

The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute collaborated with Council for Children’s Rights to map all YMCA locations in Mecklenburg County. These locations were then overlaid onto maps of individual indicators from the 2010 Charlotte Neighborhood Quality of Life Study. Finally, four of these indicators (teen births, high school dropouts, juvenile arrests, and food stamp recipients) were […]

Full reports on several topics are available now for review: Findings on economics, education and health can be viewed with these links. Working with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Urban Institute, the Urban League of Central Carolinas is assessing the conditions and experiences of all people in an eight-county Charlotte region through a […]

This white paper was composed by researchers at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute for Urban League of Central Carolinas as part of their project, The State of Ethnic Charlotte. The State of Ethnic Charlotte, 2011 is the first project of the Joe Martin Institute for Inclusive Policy at the Urban League of Central Carolinas. The […]

I’ve never thought of a loblolly plantation as a bona fide forest. The rows of neatly spaced and stalky trees seem more akin to a long-rotation corn crop. In most pine plantations, trees are thinned in 15 years, and the rest are harvested at 30. Like other agricultural land, pine plantations provide open space, but […]

Although a hard word to pronounce, “gentian” is a group of pretty flowers that are found all over the world, on all continents except Antarctica. There are more than 1,000 species of gentian worldwide, and gentians are found in a wide variety of habitats, from rainforest to desert. In this area, gentians are typically found […]

Local business leaders’ expectations for the upcoming quarter have dipped into negative territory for the first time since March, when a new opinion survey began. Not only is their outlook negative for the national economy – as it was after the second quarter – but they’re feeling grimmer about the local economy as well. The […]

Summer officially ends Friday, and the close of a week of cloudy, unseasonably cool weather marks an occasion to look back and remind ourselves of the Carolinas Piedmont in summer 2011. It was a summer of hail storms, high winds and in some parts, even the fringes of tropical storm Irene. The National Oceanic and […]