NEW YORK - As 2016 draws to a close, one organization has issued a set of New Year's resolutions calling on mothers everywhere to preserve advances in human rights.

Moms United to End the War on Drugs was founded seven years ago to fight policies the group says destroy families and promote mass incarceration. However, lead organizer Gretchen Burns Bergman, executive director of A New PATH, said she feels the sharp and sometimes violent political tensions of the past year threaten to undermine decades of progress - not only in drug-law reform but also a host of social-justice issues.

"The main message," she said, "is remain vigilant, get organized, get connected, resist and defend our values."

The complete list of seven New Year's resolutions is online at momsunited.net. They include resisting all forms of prejudice and bigotry, and promoting peace and tolerance in the face of hatred.

Bergman said her years of advocacy against the so-called "war on drugs" have convinced her that it is intrinsically connected to attacks on reproductive rights, on the poor and immigrants, and to rising racial tensions, "and that it was time to kind of expand that, and to say that we need to dig in and protect the rights of all human beings."

During the first seven days of January, she said, Moms United will be using social media to promote the resolutions, which will remain a focus of the group's activities throughout the year.

Throughout history, Bergman said, mothers have come forward to demand sensible policies for the sake of their children, and that continues today.

"Moms are saying that we will resist and protect, and protest and promote and fight," she said, "and we won't allow our principles and our values and our human rights and dignity to be decimated."

More information is online at momsunited.net.


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Minnesota continues to rank highly for quality-of-life indicators, including health, but long-standing disparities persist.

A new round of grants will help community-based social entrepreneurs and nonprofits boost health access for underserved populations. The EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator is led by the American Heart Association and is in its second year of funding Minnesota initiatives.

Kelly Robinson, owner and CEO of Messianic Care in the Twin Cities, took home this summer's top grant prize of $15,000.

With this year's emphasis on helping women, she will use the funding for activities to promote heart health which are more engaging.

"It allows me financially to provide things that I know culturally excites us," Robinson explained. "Who wants to go to the gym and just work out, you know? But for us, I pay for line dancing, I pay for step dancing."

She pointed out efforts like this bring more cardiac awareness to women of color, who are near middle age but lack resources such as insurance. As a community health advocate, Robinson also hopes to use funding to purchase equipment such as blood pressure cuffs.

Among its most concerning data, Minnesota has a high racial disparity in premature death rates, ranking 48th in the nation.

Finalists get a chance to present their ideas at the General Mills headquarters through an event sponsored by Cheerios.

Kerry DeLaney, business unit director for the company, said as they pursue more health equity around the state as a corporation, they need to elevate the people on the ground doing the work.

"Our contribution is to fund them and help accelerate their business ventures," DeLaney noted.

DeLaney, who is also a board member of the American Heart Association-Minnesota, stressed Cheerios does not greatly benefit from the program as a public relations move because it is still largely away from the public's radar.

However, the company said it is committed for the long term and is signed on as a sponsor for next year's grant cycle. DeLaney added he hopes to expand the program's reach across the region.

As states ban abortion with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, women's advocates in New York and beyond are raising awareness of the outsized impact these policies will have on Black women -- and they're outlining a framework for economic and health justice moving forward.

The Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls has created a legislative agenda for putting Black women at the center of these policy discussions, to address their long-standing economic barriers.

Azza Altiraifi, senior policy manager for the group Liberation in a Generation, co-chaired the working group that put together the report and said dismantling every structure of oppression is necessary to create collective economic prosperity, and to strengthen democracy.

"It is futile to singularly focus on just closing racial gaps, whether it's wealth or health or housing or education," Altiraifi said, "unless they are also willing to uproot and dismantle the primary causes of those inequities in the first place."

The report relied on the intersectional "Black Women Best" framework coined by Janelle Jones, the first Black woman to serve as chief economist in the Department of Labor. Altiraifi said it builds on a rich history of Black women's feminist scholarship, and includes ties to disability, reproductive and economic justice.

Along with centering Black women, Altiraifi said it's important to follow their leadership on these issues that have affected them disproportionately, adding that in the post-Roe landscape, advocates will be looking to the networks of abortion care that have been built by Black women over time.

"Black women have, in the face of such organized abandonment - both historically and presently - created their own systems, networks of care and community support to meet each other's needs," Altiraifi said, "at a time and in places where the state was failing to do so."

The report pointed to such policies as guaranteed income that have proved to help reduce economic disparities. Members of the congressional caucus, including U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., also have introduced a resolution encouraging their colleagues to follow the blueprint from the Black Women Best report.

Pride Month during June highlights the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities, which have long faced discrimination. People in these communities say they continue to face prejudice in Montana, including in finding a place to live.

Pam Bean, executive director of the nonprofit Montana Fair Housing, said LGBTQ people only recently received a major victory in housing at the federal level.

"Given the fact that it's only been a year-and-a-half that under the Fair Housing Act, it's illegal to discriminate against this population based on gender identity and sexual orientation," she said, "there's a lot of education that still needs to take place with housing providers."

A 2020 report from UCLA found LGBTQ people face significant barriers to finding housing. Young adults in this population experience homelessness at a rate more than twice that of the general public. The number is even higher for people younger than 18.

Bean has noticed that people moving from out of state may not understand some of the landlord-tenant laws in Montana or local city ordinances, and this has led to conflict at times. For instance, she spoke to one renter who hung LGBTQ Pride flags outside his residence.

"He and the housing provider ended up with a very adversarial relationship," she said, "because he didn't realize he had to get permission to be hanging things up on the exterior of the unit."

Bean said it's important to understand the laws governing housing. But she also notes that organizations such as hers can provide dispute resolution between landlords and tenants.

"We can share information with both parties and educate them in regards to the issues at hand," she said, "and hopefully reach a resolution where, particularly in this housing market, the household is able to maintain their housing."

Bean said Montana Fair Housing also can help people file administrative complaints with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, she noted this isn't a speedy process, typically taking months or years to resolve.