Brenda Glass and Kevin talk at a large folding table in a mostly unadorned cafeteria. In her late 60s, Ms. Glass looks at him with a motherly mix of pride and concern. Kevin, despite being in his late 30s, seems like a kid on his best behavior – polite and reverent toward the woman he describes as a mother figure and angel, and toward the quiet community space that’s been his refuge. (After twice being the victim of gun violence, Kevin asked that his birth name not be used.)

In March 2022, Kevin survived a shooting. He remembers lying in the hospital feeling “stressed out,” paranoid that the shooters were still targeting him. When a nurse asked if he felt safe, he said no. Soon, he was on the phone with Ms. Glass and found his “home away from home.”

“It was like someone’s got my back,” he says, visibly relieved. “It was safe. I can go somewhere safe. Especially in that dark moment I was in.”

That safe place is the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center, of which Ms. Glass is founder and CEO. Housed in a portion of a church, the center sits in a Cleveland neighborhood known for violent crime.   

Starting with one trauma recovery center in San Francisco in the early 2000s, TRCs like this one now number more than 50 and operate in states spanning the political spectrum. 

As the United States searches for solutions to violence, TRCs have generated cooperation and promising results by challenging a long-standing – though often faulty – assumption in the criminal justice system that those committing violent crime and those suffering from it are different people. 

As with other TRCs, Ms. Glass offers services to anyone looking to escape violence, even if they’ve participated in it. That’s part of the TRC strategy: detailed case management and personalized, wraparound services for people who have been involved in serious violence and want to escape it. In Kevin’s case, he received 16 weeks of counseling and safe housing for him and his family. That help is paired with what Ms. Glass calls “a mindset shift” to remove people “physically and mentally” from violence. 

Stephen Cutri/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

The neighborhood near the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center, Nov. 29, 2023, in Cleveland.

“[Society doesn’t] have what we need to support people who become the victims or the perpetrators, so we send people to the court,” Ms. Glass says. “How they gonna clean the streets up? The only way we gonna clean the streets up is in the street, and not through death – through resources, through opportunities, through hope.” 

TRCs collectively serve a few thousand people a year, and supporters often note that they’ll never be a one-stop solution to violence. But they’ve caught the eye of policymakers by getting results like reduced PTSD symptoms and quicker returns to work and life activities – all among populations typically excluded from victim services.

In their holistic approach, TRCs illustrate the immense care and cooperation needed to stem the tide of violence. In their relatively quick spread across the country, they show both the best practices for and the pains of growth. And by pairing victim services and violence prevention, rather than pitting them against each other, they pull lessons for safety from the murky space where victim and perpetrator overlap.

The centers are, Ms. Glass says, smiling, “not your typical agency.” On a given day, she and staff might hold multiple counseling sessions and give several rides. If a client needs groceries or prescriptions, staff gets them. If someone needs to move in the middle of the night, staff finds them housing. And the 16 weeks of counseling may include four to five home visits per week. 

“We’ve had people on our team work with survivors to clean their apartments up,” says Stephen Massey, director of the Citilookout TRC in Springfield, Ohio. “Maybe they were so depressed or scared or still in shock that they couldn’t do the basic things that keep them afloat like get a meal, take the trash out, feed their pets.”

This seemingly infinite list of what TRCs do began taking shape in 1999. Alicia Boccellari was working at what was then called San Francisco General Hospital, a Level I trauma center. 

“One day in passing,” Dr. Boccellari remembers, “the head of the trauma surgical unit, an amazing surgeon by the name of Bill Schecter, said to me, ‘We can sew them up, but we can’t make them well.’”

That struck a chord with Dr. Boccellari’s psychology background. All the hospital could offer was a community mental health center referral, “and then we would keep our fingers crossed,” she says. 

Dr. Boccellari started envisioning individualized victim services.

Jae C. Hong/AP

Homeless people wait in line for dinner outside The Midnight Mission in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles, Oct. 25, 2023.

“[Medical professionals] tend to assume we know what people need rather than asking them,” she says. When staff actually started inquiring, “a lot of people said, ‘We need safe housing. We need physical help getting back on our feet. We need help with child care and transportation. We need help in talking to the police.’” 

Based on these insights, the first TRC was born in 2001 at University of California San Francisco Health. Quickly, its work challenged assumptions about best practices. Rather than peppering people with questions or services upfront, the TRC team built safety and connection over time. 

If TRCs are to operate successfully in the fog of violence, trust is the lighthouse. In addition to putting in time with clients, Ms. Glass and others earn trust, in part, by being credible messengers – people who have survived the type of circumstances they now help others through. 

That Ms. Glass’ past looks like the lives of her clients surprises many of them, and it’s a story she’s only recently grown comfortable sharing. 

After surviving violent traumas in her childhood, Ms. Glass lashed out against the world. “At that point,” she says, “nobody is going to make anybody else pay but me. And everybody’s gotta pay.”

Like many facing serious violence, Ms. Glass realized that talking to the police could carry a cost to her own or her family’s safety. It might also come with racial hostility. With no hope for justice, she says she unleashed her fury in a tangle of rage, shame, and desperation.

“I hated God. I started doing everything under the sun to destroy my life and anybody’s life around me, making big money all the time,” she remembers. Then, she says, while delivering drugs one day, “I knew it was either I was gonna die that day, or I was going to the penitentiary. And I didn’t care.” 

She did go to the penitentiary, serving a little over two years. There, she connected with her faith and her history – filled with harm both caused and suffered.

Ms. Glass’ transformation is encapsulated in what’s become something of a motto for her: “Whatever you’re going through, you deserve to go through it with dignity.” 

TRCs are typically housed in a hospital or with other community groups, and clients come through various avenues, including street outreach and referrals from other agencies or even from law enforcement. 

“We have really tried to make it as easy as possible to get people connected to our services ... and also individualizing that approach,” says Kim Miiller, a clinical psychologist and the director of trauma recovery and resilience at Chicago’s Advocate TRC, a hospital-based center. 

Courtesy of Nikeya Clark

Nikeya Clark at her graduation last year, where she was salutatorian.

“We connect survivors with their why for recovery,” says Alyson Simmons, founder of the Central Iowa TRC. “Every person deserves the right and opportunity to heal, to the degree that it’s possible for them, and it will look very different for everyone.”

Nikeya Clark’s idea of healing grew as she did. 

Engaging with a TRC near her home in New Jersey after the shooting death of her oldest son, Ms. Clark welcomed the initial 16 weeks of counseling. Then, she asked for – and was granted – another 16. 

“During my counseling sessions, we didn’t only speak on the grief; we spoke about everything,” remembers Ms. Clark. 

She recalls TRC staff delivering food, coats, and Christmas gifts for her two sons. Then, during a conversation, she mentioned wanting to get her high school diploma. 

“[My counselor] referred me to this online program here in Newark, New Jersey, where I can actually go and get my high school diploma, not my GED. So last June, I graduated as the salutatorian of my class.” 

The TRC experience, she says, is not all about trauma. Instead, Ms. Clark says, it’s a way of helping connect people to their goals, even in the face of tremendous obstacles. She says that perspective can help “minimize the crime.” 

The level of cooperation required to knit together individualized communities of support is both gargantuan and necessary. Mr. Massey in Springfield, Ohio, says TRCs must be able to collaborate with “shelters, police, law enforcement, EMTs, hospitals, churches, food banks. Just anyone who can help.”

Many acts of violence never get reported, which can place TRCs in a unique position. Unlike diversionary programs or alternative sentencing, TRCs may deal with violent acts outside of any law enforcement activity. TRC staff members understand the profound fear and potentially negative consequences that dissuade some clients from reporting the violence they experienced, but staff also supports those who decide to report crimes and abuse. 

Not all TRCs maintain a close relationship with law enforcement, but Mr. Massey’s staff goes as far as helping to train local police officers. Some have even worked with special-crimes units, Mr. Massey says, describing the relationship as “really robust.”

“They call on us. We sit, we talk, we strategize about what has happened to these victims, how to keep them safe, what are their needs,” he says.

All TRC teams use some version of a therapeutic “life stability tool” to measure clients’ progress, says Ms. Simmons, from Iowa. This tool looks at external factors that can lead people to slip back into harmful behaviors as well as their internal state. 

“It was employment; it was their financial concerns, social supports or lack thereof, housing, transportation, food insecurity,” Ms. Simmons says, along with clinical measures of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. 

“You’re able to see that [when] those needs are met and fulfilled, they’re healthier mentally and emotionally. They’re able to focus. They show up for their appointments. They’re consistent,” she adds.

Stephen Cutri/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

“One, two, three, 12 situations don’t have to define you.” – Nickey, a former client at the Brenda Glass TRC who is now certified in massage therapy

Of all the needs, housing might be the most difficult to fulfill. Nonprofits searching for safe, sometimes long-term housing for people with histories that alarm landlords encounter a laborious and often prohibitively expensive process.

Antoine “Mikey” Dotson, founder of the Glass center’s safe housing initiative, says he’s seen the number of available units yo-yo from around two dozen to single digits and back, all while he’s trying to rapidly rehouse people in danger. He’s candid that they rely, largely, on generosity. 

Yet despite round-the-clock support and customized plans, success isn’t guaranteed. Housing provided by a TRC might be the first safe space a client has ever lived in. Adapting to that sometimes proves too difficult. And some, as many TRC staff members say, just aren’t ready to make the transition.

“They need the understanding that it’s gonna take a lot of willpower and determination to grow out of what you’ve been living your whole, entire life – the only thing you know,” Mr. Dotson says.

But some people are ready to change. Nickey, who feels safer withholding her last name, is one of them. She first came to the Cleveland center after police killed her son. But, as she tells it, she was also living in the wreckage of other traumas – an “undignified” life. She “could barely walk a straight line,” she says, worn down by years of grief, substance use, and unhealthy relationships.

One day when she drops in, she and Ms. Glass talk about feeling shame, being seen, and “shaking legacies” of trauma. With help from what Nickey calls the TRC’s “ladder of resources,” she is now certified in massage therapy and is training further to land a job. Her reason for choosing that career? To reacquaint trauma survivors with safe touch. 

Success stories like that have drawn bipartisan political attention. A study of the first TRC found that clients were 56% more likely to return to work than other survivors. A wider-ranging study of 261 TRC clients in more than a dozen centers in California showed an average 52% drop in PTSD symptoms, while another nationwide analysis found 96% of clients reporting that TRC services “helped them feel better emotionally.” 

Notably, a study of the MetroHealth TRC in Ohio indicated the ripple effect of clients’ progress: Engagement with mental health resources through the TRC reduced the likelihood of that person committing a crime by nearly two-thirds. 

All these outcomes are happening among groups historically least likely to access victim services but most likely to be impacted by violent crime – people of color, unhoused people, and LGBTQ+ people. 

One of the qualities that sets TRCs apart in victim services is the rare, but growing, belief with which they operate: that victim services and violence prevention are one and the same. The TRC model acknowledges the often cyclical nature of violence, which could mean that today’s survivor engaged in that violence and might become tomorrow’s perpetrator. It also recognizes that even those participating in violence often seek an escape from it.

Recent research found that 1 out of every 14 people surviving gun violence will be shot again within a year; in eight years, it’s 1 in 6. And people who have faced violence, including children, become much more likely to perpetrate it, studies show.

“The myth is: Here’s the people who commit crimes, and here’s the victims,” says Lenore Anderson, co-founder and president of the public safety nonprofit Alliance for Safety and Justice. “The reality is it’s more like a Venn diagram. ... The life circumstances that people who commit crime face are virtually indistinguishable from the life circumstances that people who are chronically hurt by crime face.” So, those in the middle may be victims and perpetrators. 

Tyler LaRiviere/Chicago Sun-Times/AP/File

A Chicago police officer hands out pamphlets about how to anonymously give information to police that could help in solving crimes, during a town hall meeting at a school in Chicago, Nov. 29, 2021.

That’s where Lily fits. (She asked that her last name be withheld.) Sitting at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), a TRC serving unhoused women and gender-diverse people in Los Angeles, she recalls her desperation to escape violence, but also the times she caused it. 

“I was both,” she says.

In “a toxic relationship” and barely surviving on Skid Row, she was eventually referred to the DWC, where she was given safe housing, a therapist, and other services.

“It’s teaching me where all this behavior came from, or my way of thinking,” she says. 

Lily has now spent months sober, living with her dog in a DWC-run apartment. But in the typical victims’ rights paradigm, Lily’s history would render her ineligible for help.

Sixty years ago, victims’ rights in the U.S. was barely an idea. As Ms. Anderson outlines in her book, “In Their Names,” the victims’ rights movement launched after Earl Warren’s Supreme Court of the 1960s enshrined several rights of accused people in criminal proceedings, such as Miranda rights and the right to counsel. Many saw these decisions as an insult to victims and began organizing to protect their rights. 

The victims’ rights movement quickly gathered near-unanimous bipartisan support from politicians and law enforcement, who saw the opportunity to increase budgets and political power, Ms. Anderson explains.

The first victims’ rights wave was a strong voice in creating essential tools, such as victim compensation funds, rape crisis centers, and stronger protections for domestic violence survivors. Legal reform took off, too. “From the 1980s to 2010s,” Ms. Anderson writes, “over 32,000 laws seeking to advance victims’ rights were enacted.”

But the movement overlooked a lot. Almost immediately, well-off white women became the face of victims and of those fearing rising crime. This approach was very successful at building support and getting laws passed, but it failed to create much that was accessible to low-income, urban communities facing the bulk of violence. 

Victim compensation funds are typically unavailable to people who, like Lily, have been involved in a crime during the violence they experienced. Many states have a strict time frame for reporting the crime to law enforcement, or require cooperation with police, and a few exclude people with past convictions. 

“You have to show proof that the crime happened. You have to show proof that [the money you’re requesting] was a result of the crime,” says Amy Turk, CEO of the DWC. And the funding available is for reimbursement, she adds, which assumes that applicants can pay upfront for medical or funeral costs, for example.

Many survivors at TRCs have no idea these funds even exist. Others don’t want the further trauma they fear the legal system would inflict. And their expectation of actually receiving help is low, which may be justified. While no nationwide numbers exist, an Associated Press investigation found people of color were disproportionately denied victims’ rights funding in 19 of 23 states studied. But TRC staff helps clients who want to tackle the complicated paperwork and laws involved in applying.

The required engagement with law enforcement in the hope of finding the perpetrator also misses what many survivors actually want – help that goes beyond punishment.

The largest exploration of survivor perspectives is gathered in Crime Survivors Speak, commissioned by the Alliance for Safety and Justice in 2016 and again in 2022. Surveying 1,537 crime victims, the report found people of color, LGBTQ+ people, low-income communities, and people with criminal convictions vastly overrepresented. But across demographics, survivors generally supported rehabilitation over punishment (57% to 33%), mental health investments over prison (77% to 12%), and shorter sentences over mandatory terms (73% to 20%).  

“What most survivors want is for the thing that happened to them to never happen again and never happen to anyone else,” notes Ms. Anderson. “It is also well known among a wide diversity of survivors that the way to stop someone from ever doing that again is unlikely to come from our prison system.”

Despite the different approach between TRCs and the traditional victims’ rights movement, TRC staff and supporters see the centers as not a refutation, but an evolution.

“Victim services, victim rights ... it’s a result of a revolution that’s ongoing,” says John Maki, former executive director of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority and a key person in bringing TRCs to Illinois. “The trauma recovery center is the unfolding of that revolution.”         

Just as bipartisan support ushered in the first wave of victims’ rights, the next step might be a quieter bipartisan openness to expanding those services, based in part on TRCs’ success.

In 2013, the first TRC published positive results that caught the attention of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. Realizing they had similar goals, the two organizations started pitching the TRC model across the country. 

One of the first states outside California to adopt the approach was Ohio, where Republican Gov. Mike DeWine was attorney general at the time. Working in that office, Michael Sheline, section chief for Crime Victim Services, learned of TRCs in 2014.

“We were really focusing on meeting the needs of those that were underserved, and maybe did not access traditional victim service programs, such as a rape crisis center or domestic violence shelter,” says Mr. Sheline. “And we were also concerned about those that were victims of other violent crimes like gun violence.” 

“When I happened upon [the first TRC’s data and results], I was like, why hadn’t I come into contact with this before? It made sense,” adds Mr. Sheline, who describes his role as “nonpolitical.”

The majority of TRCs operate in states with Democratic governors, but Ms. Simmons says that in Iowa, much of the support she has gotten has come from Republicans. And Republican support was necessary in Florida as well. 

But the relatively rapid spread of TRCs has been somewhat of a double-edged sword. While data from individual centers has been strong, national data on effectiveness is sparse. But in 2019, Dr. Boccellari founded the National Alliance of Trauma Recovery Centers, and she says work is underway to standardize and deepen their measurements. 

Stephen Cutri/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

“Whatever you’re going through, you deserve to go through it with dignity.” – Brenda Glass (right), founder and CEO of the Brenda Glass Multipurpose Trauma Center

Not surprisingly, perhaps, funding is a concern. Despite the relatively low annual cost of about $1.2 million per center, policy enthusiasm hasn’t kept money coming in. TRCs typically get funding through the Victims of Crime Act. But VOCA coffers are filled by fines and penalties from federal prosecutions of white-collar crime, and a sharp and prolonged reduction in those prosecutions across the Trump and Biden administrations has driven VOCA funding down, from more than $13 billion in 2017 to barely more than $1 billion this fiscal year.

Ms. Glass in Cleveland says her staff “works full time but gets paid part time.” And both she and Ms. Simmons in Iowa mention having put up personal money to keep their TRCs running. 

But the newest TRC, launched in November in Austin, Texas, may avoid the current financial crunch. Funded by the city and Travis County rather than by the state, the Harvest Trauma Recovery Center is Texas’ only TRC, but it has a strategic head start. It’s run by the African American Youth Harvest Foundation, a well-established community organization. As a bonus, the TRC is in a building with dozens of other service providers, so the cooperation needed is close at hand.

“Our model was 120 [people per year],” says founder and CEO Michael Lofton. “Our first seven weeks, we’re already at 96.”

Chief Clinical Officer Calvin Kelly credits the national TRC network for the center’s  ability to navigate that quick start. “All of those pieces: the assertive outreach, the case management, getting people connected to those resources. ... Being a part of that national model gave us the structure,” Dr. Kelly says. 

Of course, individual clients’ progress doesn’t always follow a predictable model. 

Back in Cleveland, Kevin experienced another shooting. He was the random victim of gang activity at his apartment complex. Now he’s back with Ms. Glass, once again trying to keep his family safe while processing another life-altering incident. Even so, he’s gotten a warehouse job and is working to find safe, permanent housing. 

Lily isn’t sure what comes next, but she wants to help others, possibly as a home health care worker. She says it’s not easy, that “trials and tribulations” continue. But she’s learned breathing and meditation exercises to help her work through difficult moments, and she’s practicing other life skills like budgeting her money. She says her story reminds her of the character on her shirt: the Grinch.

And Ms. Clark, the salutatorian at her graduation, says that, while grief still appears in unexpected places, she’s now equipped to handle her emotions and create a healthier life for her children. 

“I didn’t know how to cope with my grief and still be a mom at the same time,” she remembers. But after she went through the program and counseling, she says, “My now-14-year-old son, he said, ‘Mommy, I see a big difference.’”

On the banks of the Merrimack River, a coal-fired power plant sleeps for most of the year. Concrete smokestacks stand silent. The industrial sprawl is eerily quiet compared with the hum of producing electricity for decades. 

One December morning, Nick Lydon spots a dark plume wafting through the air. On the coldest days of winter, the generators at Merrimack Station rumble into production, burning coal to generate electricity when demand peaks. But this day was different. 

“That’s the first time that I ever looked at the smokestack and saw something other than just water vapor coming out of it,” says Mr. Lydon, who’s lived and worked here in Bow, New Hampshire, for two decades. “You could actually see, like, a clear trail of ash that was leaving the smokestack.”

The electrician already knew that the power plant had thrice failed to complete its sulfur emissions tests in 2023, and its electric output had been waning. Like so many across the United States living in coal towns, Mr. Lydon is focused on what comes next. And the state has set a deadline: Merrimack Station’s private owners must bring the plant into compliance with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services standards by March 23.

The last sputtering cough from Merrimack’s smokestacks will be the final breath of coal in New England. And residents say that it appears that economics has accomplished what more than a decade of protests alone did not. The region’s gradual transition away from coal has pushed New England’s last coal plant further out of competition. 

When this power plant closes, it’ll mark the end of an energy era in New England. It will mark another milestone as well – the first region in the U.S. in over a century will be coal-free. 

The shift is notable both for residents’ matter-of-fact acceptance of the coming closure and for a lack of consensus on what comes next.

“This is the final chapter of coal in the region” says Don Kreis, New Hampshire’s consumer advocate. “It’s pretty obvious [Merrimack Station’s] days are numbered. It is inevitably the case that we will completely stop using coal to produce electricity in New England.”

New England’s journey toward decarbonization is gaining momentum, with five out of six states firmly committed to slashing emissions by at least 80% by 2050. New Hampshire stands as the lone state without legally binding emission reduction targets. Neighboring Vermont has already been producing nearly 100% renewable energy since 2015.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Nicholas Lydon, a construction electrician and resident of Bow, New Hampshire, speaks about transitioning Granite Shore Power’s Merrimack Station, a coal plant, to clean energy, Feb. 12, 2024, in Concord. Merrimack is the last operating coal plant in New England.

The region’s power grid operator, ISO New England, says new resource proposals are dominated by wind power. Solar power is also growing rapidly. Renewable energies currently account for 40% of New England’s resource mix. Another 49% of the area’s power comes from natural gas. 

The big question is whether the Bow plant will be added to the renewable or fossil fuel side of the ledger. Residents, state lawmakers, and clean-energy activists are all debating the plant’s future after summer 2025.

“The way you get a plant like Merrimack Station to close is by bringing online new clean resources that can compete in the market and push Merrimack out of the money. Now that’s happened,” says Sam Evans-Brown from Clean Energy New Hampshire. 

A turning point

Just south of New Hampshire’s capital, Concord, the historic small town of Bow was founded in 1727. The town’s lifeline has always been its waterways, the town’s name originating from its establishment along a bend, or “bow,” in the Merrimack River.

Merrimack Station has been running fewer days every year. Last year, the two coal-fired generators ran for 500 hours, or about 21 days. The year before, it was 27 days.  

​​Far past its glory days of serving roughly 450,000 homes, the fading fossil fuel factory produces less electricity each year. Other coal and oil plants in the region have switched energy sources or set a date for their eventual closure. Yet Merrimack Station has done neither.

It’s now been out of compliance for more than a year. Last February, Merrimack failed its emissions certification test. The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services alleged the plant’s particulate matter emissions exceeded national standards by more than 70%. 

Three more tests were scheduled. All three were uncompleted due to “mechanical failures,” which halted the tests before any final results could be verified.

“Last year the plant ran for like 500 hours total. And the question is, of those 500 hours, when was the public properly protected?” asks Catherine Corkery of the Sierra Club New Hampshire.

Longtime Granite State resident Mary Beth Raven spent the past five years advocating for the plant’s shuttering with the No Coal No Gas campaign. After raising her family in New Hampshire, Ms. Raven – who lives in Merrimack County – began letter-writing campaigns and demonstrations to boost awareness of climate change in her backyard. 

“There’s still no official plan to shut it down. And tons of coal are still sitting there seeping into the groundwater and into the river. It’s still an issue that needs to be dealt with,” says Ms. Raven.

Granite Shore Power, a subsidiary of Atlas Holdings, confirmed in an interview with the Monitor that there were no official plans to shutter the power plant, but declined to be quoted. 

What comes next?

There’s been no shortage of ideas for converting the plant. At the Statehouse, the plant’s owners and others have touted wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and even green hydrogen as possible replacements down the line. Which are practical, and which are even possible, remains to be seen.

While some focus on a fading fossil fuel factory, Mr. Lydon – who sits on Bow’s local energy committee – still sees an opportunity for clean energy in his town. “We don’t want coal in our town, but we already have a working power plant. So let’s use” that tie to the electrical power grid for clean energy, says Mr. Lydon.

“We don’t seem to have an answer for what comes next. But now, any plan that you have is going to take years,” he says. “It’s something that really should have been thought about, like, a long time ago, before we got to this point.”

The plant doesn’t generate as many jobs as it used to – right now, there are a few dozen, mostly seasonal, jobs. However, the utility still counts for about 8% of the city’s tax base. And some Bow residents say other parts of the country should take heed of the need for planning for the future.

“The plant’s always been the biggest entity that exists in the town,” says Mr. Lydon.

“If you take a major tax revenue like that out of the town, that’s going to leave a big hole in the local community. I don’t think anyone wants to see the plant just disappear,” he adds. “I just don’t think anyone wants to see it run as a coal plant anymore.”

On a recent morning, a group of delivery drivers slouched against their motorbikes near a petrol station here and launched into an animated discussion. 

“Petrol prices keep increasing; it’s unbearable,” one man complained.

“I’m barely breaking even,” another lamented.

Nearby, Brian Otunga listened silently from atop his orange-and-black bike. Two years ago, he would have been front and center in this gripe session. But now he drives an electric motorbike, and gas prices feel like a worry from another lifetime. A price hike “does not bother me at all,” he says. 

Mr. Otunga and his Halloween-hued motorcycle are part of a global paradigm shift. A decade from now, electric vehicles will probably be the only choice in the world’s biggest car markets: China, the United States, and the European Union. And by 2050, EVs are likely to make up more than three-quarters of all vehicle sales around the world, part of a bid to slash vehicle emissions and slow climate change. 

The stakes of this transition are particularly high in sub-Saharan Africa, a region on the front lines of global warming, where air pollution levels are also among the worst in the world. However, going electric also poses a unique set of challenges on a continent where only about half of the population is on the electricity grid and the price difference between a combustion engine car and an EV can amount to a year’s wages. 

For the continent to quietly glide into an electric future with the rest of the world, “the infrastructure [must] be made easily accessible and more affordable,” says Céleste Vogel, co-founder of eWAKA, a company that sells electric motorbikes and cargo bicycles in Kenya and Rwanda. Otherwise, she says, Africa runs the risk of being left behind altogether. 

The world’s car graveyard

Mr. Otunga never set out to be a clean energy pioneer, or even to drive a motorcycle for a living at all. He studied as a chef, and dreamed of opening his own gourmet restaurant. But cooking jobs were hard to come by, and eventually he realized he could make more money driving a boda boda, one of the ubiquitous motorbikes that Kenyans rely on as both taxis and delivery vehicles.  

Lenny Rashid Ruvaga

Brian Otunga sits on his electric motorbike taxi in Nairobi, taking a break between customers.

The work was steady, he says, but it also came with a slew of challenges. The pungent black smoke from his exhaust pipe gave him headaches. Neighbors complained that the roar of his bike starting up was waking them up in the morning. And gas prices just kept going up and up. 

Then, a little over three years ago, a salesperson from a Swedish Kenyan company called Roam wheeled an orange-and-black bike into Mr. Otunga’s boda boda “bay,” the corner of a local parking lot where he and other drivers sit, awaiting jobs. 

Mr. Otunga was taken. At the time, “[my] headaches were quite unbearable,” he remembers. Then he heard the price.

At about $2000, the Roam electric bike was twice the price of one with a normal combustion engine. Mr. Otunga’s heart sank. 

That’s a problem mirrored across Africa, where EV costs are often prohibitive, Ms. Vogel says. 

The gap between EVs and their combustion engine cousins is the most pronounced when it comes to cars. When Mr. Otunga pulled out of the boda boda bay where his colleagues were complaining about petrol prices, he merged onto a road filled with old European and Asian sedans that coughed black smoke into his face. They are “in dire need of service,” he quipped. 

Because of high demand and loose import restrictions, sub-Saharan Africa has become a kind of graveyard for the world’s old cars, with 40% of worldwide used vehicle exports ending up on the continent.

Lenny Rashid Ruvaga

Brian Otunga swaps his empty battery for a recharge.

This compounds the problems for EV adoption in Africa, experts say, because the used vehicles crowd nearly all electric cars out of the market. But governments are pushing back. Last year, Kenya banned the import of used cars more than 8 years old, and Rwanda has eliminated import taxes on electric vehicles. Still, EV companies in the region say they struggle to compete with secondhand cars. 

That’s why most of the 20-odd EV startups in the East Africa region focus on types of electric vehicles that aren’t cars. Many are particularly geared toward motorcycles. 

A new start

For Mr. Otunga, the idea of driving a vehicle he never had to fill up with gas again was enough to convince him that the higher price of an electric bike was worth it. For a year and a half, he scrimped and saved, and then in mid-2022, he bought his orange-and-black bike.  

Soon, his headaches cleared up. He now says he makes more money, too – averaging about $16 a day now, compared with about $12 a day on his old bike. He also works less, about 13 hours a day, compared with as many as 17 before. 

Courtesy of BasiGo

An electric bus awaits passengers in Nairobi. Known for their colorful minibus culture, Kenyans are turning to low-carbon transport.

Often, Mr. Otunga finds himself on the road beside matatus, the extravagantly painted minibuses that serve as another crucial mode of public transit here. In recent years, buses have been another target of EV startups in this region, because their regular routes mean it’s easy to predict their charging needs. 

That’s important because charging is another barrier to EV access in many countries in Africa, which has the lowest rates of electricity access in the world. 

Although Kenya is better off than most, with a 75% electrification rate, EV companies here said they’ve still had to get creative. For instance, BasiGo, a Kenyan startup, set up four charging stations in Nairobi for its electric matatus to use. “One of the biggest challenges is that it takes time and resources to build infrastructure,” says Samuel Kamunya, BasiGo’s head of business development.

The day his colleagues were lamenting petrol prices, Mr. Otunga spent about six hours on the road before he saw his own digital “fuel” gauge flashing. He pulled over and swapped the battery in his bike for the spare stored behind his front wheels. Then, he took off for the 3-kilometer drive to the nearest Roam charging station. 

There, he paid about $1 to swap out the dead battery for a new one – about 20% of what he says he used to spend on gas. 

As Mr. Otunga pulled out, his phone chimed, alerting him to a request from an app to deliver a parcel. Driving to collect it, he passed several petrol stations along the road. But he barely even noticed they were there. 

Claudia Rubio/ GDA Photo Service/Newscom/File

Author Ethan Zuckerman has written "Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them." He is an associate professor of public policy, communication, and information at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

If you don’t think trust is important, take a look at Sicily. Yes, the birthplace of the Mafia. Shocking as it may seem, the Mafia was not created at the behest of Oscar-hungry Hollywood directors. It emerged because of a complete lack of trust.

Ignored by imperial rulers and gripped by a collapse of law and order, Sicilians turned to local power brokers. Want to sell a cow and you don’t trust the buyer? The Mafia arose as the answer to this problem, multiplied hundreds of times over. 

It’s a story author Ethan Zuckerman tells in his most recent book, “Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.” When trust fails, societies founder. Security, economic growth, and personal freedoms all suffer as trust becomes a commodity for sale. And it underscores why we should look at the story of modern America through the lens of trust, he says. 

In today’s deeply antagonistic politics, it often seems that one side couldn’t sell a cow to the other, much less pass complex legislation. The decline in trust explains a lot.

Mr. Zuckerman was an entrepreneur at the dawn of the 1990s dot-com boom – a true believer in the power of the internet to address humanity’s woes. Since then, he’s worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied the nexus of media, social media, society, and politics. Now he’s a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

The book explores why Americans have lost faith in their institutions, and what that means. The numbers are stark. America’s trust in government, for example, has fallen from 77% to 16% since 1964. That general downward trend applies to virtually all American institutions. Mr. Zuckerman and I talked recently in conjunction with the Monitor’s Rebuilding Trust project. What’s going on in the United States, and what might the steps forward be?

When did the “trust crisis” start?

The fact is, the “trust crisis” is hardly a new thing. The decline in trust in the American government took its biggest dive decades ago – after Watergate and Vietnam. It’s never recovered. Why? Mr. Zuckerman suggests the reasons might not be all bad. The average American of today is far more educated and better informed than the American of 50 years ago. “Some of this mistrust, I argue, is well placed,” he says.

But beneath the skepticism of a better-informed population lies a deeper, more toxic mistrust that Mr. Zuckerman says is connected to the dizzying pace of change in America, from immigration to employment to artificial intelligence to LGBTQ+ issues. That puts the country’s institutions under enormous strain.

“When we mistrust an institution it is because, rightly or wrongly, we feel that that institution has not changed to react to the circumstances that we find it in,” Mr. Zuckerman says. “So restoring trust becomes a matter of figuring out, ‘How do you balance change and not-change?’

“If you just change everything the moment someone gets unhappy, that’s its own set of difficulties,” he adds. “But how you manage change ... that’s where trust comes from.”

How government has changed

How the American government addresses change has itself changed. Mr. Zuckerman points to the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which found laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional. At the time, fewer than 20% of Americans supported interracial marriage, according to Gallup. Contrast that with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage was protected by the Constitution. At that moment, nearly 60% of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

“We go from law leading norms to norms leading law,” Mr. Zuckerman says.

In that way, the old model of political and legal change might not work either. The Civil Rights Movement, for instance, was based on the premise that moral persuasion could force law and politics to take steps beyond what many voters were ready for. Now, at a time when law and politics stay in line with what partisan voters want, change is harder. Institutions seem brittle and resistant to evolution.

It might be time for a new model, Mr. Zuckerman suggests. It might be that voting – and government – is no longer the best way to create change.

Different ways to be heard

He cites an idea put forward by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. It says there are four main ways we regulate society. First, we can pass laws. This is the classic model. But we can also use economic markets, we can use technology, and we can use social norms.

For instance, Elon Musk changed how we view electric cars by making them a sought-after luxury item and creating a new, robust market for them. He used economic markets to create change. But it’s the power of norms that intrigues Mr. Zuckerman most.

He points to a movement against femicide in Latin America called Ni Una Menos or Not One [Woman] Less. The determination and moral force of their advocacy awakened society first, and then came the laws. “That’s another example where the norms lead, and then the laws follow,” Mr. Zuckerman says. “In that case, you now have a wave of anti-femicide laws throughout Latin America. But it’s coming from a popular movement that’s emerging first on social media and then broader in society.” In the U.S., #MeToo had a similar effect.

“All those four forces become ways you can make change in society,” he continues. “So absolutely, you can make change in society through laws. But you also have at least three other channels that you can go through.”

In his book, he says rebuilding trust could start with a new model of good citizenship.

He quotes friend and fellow activist Quinn Norton. Beyond voting on election day, she wrote once in a blog, “vote with every dollar, in every relationship. Vote in how you work and how you speak. Vote in how you treat others and what you will accept from them. Vote your dignity and the dignity of others.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the movement against femicide in Latin America to Ni Una Menos, or Not One [Woman] Less. 

In 2004, Enrique Bautista was serving time at an isolated prison in rural Oregon and wanted to discuss his dreams with his neighbor in the next cell. Others on the tier would hear them if they spoke out loud, so the pair began writing – and then passing sheaves of paper through small holes in their cell doors with string pulled from elastic bands of underwear. 

With those first exchanges of notes, writing became a regular part of life for Mr. Bautista, who is a poet and visual artist and served 21 years in Oregon prisons on assault convictions. Shortly before his case was dismissed and he walked free several months ago, Mr. Bautista discovered a small subculture dedicated to writing in the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. 

“Opportunities like that are rare,” says Mr. Bautista, who behind bars penned a book of more than 100 poems with illustrations. He’s now building an organization to mentor youths in Portland.

The Salem prison – Oregon’s oldest – is known for sustaining a relatively rich environment for education and the arts within the state correctional system. Two volunteers, Tracy Schlapp and Daniel Wilson, had launched a writing workshop that resulted in an anthology of meditations on beauty, regret, and confinement.

Mr. Bautista joined the coffee-swilling group as it was planning to build a statewide community of writers inside Oregon prisons that offer fewer opportunities, like the rural institution where he was first incarcerated in 2002. 

In April 2023, Ms. Schlapp and Mr. Wilson launched a literary journal called ponyXpress featuring poetry and prose from incarcerated people throughout the state. In an echo of the famed 19th-century mail service, volunteers hand-deliver fresh stacks of work to an editorial board of seasoned writers at the state penitentiary, who curate collections for publication. They also run writing workshops at prisons for men in central and eastern Oregon and at the state’s only prison for women, just outside the Portland metro area.

Ms. Schlapp, a Portland-based visual artist, leads the workshops. She and Mr. Wilson often drive long hours across Oregon to engage and train new incarcerated writers. Ms. Schlapp is usually surprised at the turnout. “They keep showing up,” Ms. Schlapp said.

Courtesy of Stephanie Lane/Oregon Department of Corrections

A marker changes hands between Enrique Bautista (left) and workshop leader Tracy Schlapp during a writers meeting at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Logistical hurdles

Much of the writing in ponyXpress comes from writers incarcerated at the medium-security Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, where a writing workshop regularly draws 25 participants.

Ms. Schlapp typically kicks off meetings by ringing a Tibetan singing bowl, which produces an enduring hum said to heal its listeners.

She must receive approval from the state Department of Corrections to bring the ceremonial instrument into a prison – as is the case with everything volunteers bring from the outside world as educational materials. And the writers must earn permission from prison officials to participate in the gatherings.

That’s one of many logistical hurdles for incarcerated writers and journalists throughout the United States. For instance, Mr. Bautista said he was allotted only two pieces of paper a day when he was first incarcerated. 

Ms. Schlapp’s list of outside materials, called a transport memo, is the responsibility of Matt Reyes, a member of the Klamath Tribes of southern Oregon and northern California who is serving a life sentence at the state penitentiary. Mr. Reyes is president of the Lakota Oyate Ki club for incarcerated Native Americans, which organizes logistics for the literary journal. 

He helped push the idea to develop new writers in the state penitentiary and other prisons.

“All these guys around here, they need to find their voices somehow, right?” Mr. Reyes says.

For Mr. Reyes, writing has helped him make sense of his past after he was convicted of murder in 2018. In one piece, “I Am a Survivor,” he describes his family’s generational trauma and reflects on his use of violence – even lethal violence – to protect his loved ones.

“I thought I only had two options, to ‘protect’ my family or be a ‘coward.’ I can now see another option. I don’t have to take another person’s life,” Mr. Reyes writes.

Stressla Lynn Johnson, who has been incarcerated for more than 30 years, is an editor for ponyXpress who started writing poetry when he was briefly on death row in the 1990s. He comes from a large African American family with deep roots in Albina, an area in Portland where rapid gentrification has displaced Black residents. 

Mr. Johnson tackles his family’s trials in his writings. And as an editor, he enjoys helping new writers work through their own pasts. “I treat people’s writing like they’re letting me babysit for them,” Mr. Johnson says.

Courtesy of Stephanie Lane/Oregon Department of Corrections

Matt Reyes (center) and members of the Lakota Oyate Ki club gather around a drum at a recording session for writers.

A retreat from “the yard”

Mr. Johnson is Black, Mr. Reyes is Native American, and Mr. Bautista is Hispanic. Mr. Bautista says the writing workshops were special because they allowed people from different races and “cliques” to converse and be creative together.

Gangs often shape prison culture. But the writing spaces became refuges from that dynamic, Mr. Bautista notes, where almost everyone was excited to create and connect.

“It didn’t matter what race you were, what clique you were in, whatever was going on in the yard,” Mr. Bautista says. “That, to me, was the most powerful part of the whole operation.”

While incarcerated writers are hard at work crafting their next pieces, Ms. Schlapp and Mr. Wilson are seeking new ways to reach them and fund the program. In mid-December, the pair attended a check-writing ceremony with a western Oregon confederation of tribal nations. They’re also in talks to publish the literary journal on reading tablets in some U.S. prisons, which could put ponyXpress in the hands of 100,000 incarcerated readers.

For Mr. Reyes, it was unthinkable that the words he penned from the state penitentiary would reach anyone on the outside. But he recently learned that a counselor in a Portland public school had given his work to a young Native American student who needed guidance.

“I never thought that anything like that would affect anybody,” he says.

AP

Muslims gather for Iftar meal during the first day of Ramadan at Sheikh Abdul Qadir Gilani mosque in Baghdad, Iraq, March. 11. Muslims throughout the world are marking the Ramadan – a month of fasting during which observants abstain from food, drink, and other pleasures from sunrise to sunset.

Negotiators meeting in Cairo last week had hoped to secure a cease-fire in Gaza before Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that started Sunday evening. Elsewhere, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres made a similar appeal for Sudan, a predominantly Muslim country where warring generals are fighting a protracted civil war. Neither truce has come about yet.

But the groundwork for peace is often laid in smaller gestures. In years past, for example, some Muslim families in Jerusalem and the West Bank have invited their Jewish neighbors to help them break the daily fasts of Ramadan with joyous evening meals – reflecting the holy month’s emphasis on charity and reconciliation.

Celebrations like those may be muted this year. Amid the wars in Gaza and Sudan, Muslims around the world have approached Ramadan in quieter contemplation. Many planned to forego traditional festivities in favor of more devout worship and selflessness. They “want to spend more time with God,” Dr. Ahmed Soboh, director of the Islamic Center in Yorba Linda, California, told the Whittier Daily News. “Many will find it more meaningful to serve others who are in need.”

That desire has not gone unnoticed. In Israel, a tourism group that has partnered with Muslim communities in the West Bank to enable Jews to encounter how Muslims practice Ramadan is seeking a different approach this year. To avoid intruding in private homes, it will invite Israelis and Palestinians to share their aspirations for peace in evening conversations via Zoom.

“We understand that Ramadan won’t look the same this year,” Ilanit Haramati, program manager of Shared Paths, told Haaretz. “It’s not clear that it’s right to enter a mosque as a visitor now, or even wander with a group of Jews on the street in an Arab community.”

Such empathy and respect reflect a broader trend reshaping the Middle East. Across the region, religious tradition is gradually becoming less politicized. A 2022 Zogby Research Services poll conducted in seven Arab countries found that “strong majorities ... believe that when religious movements govern, they make countries weaker.” The survey found broad desire for freedom, innovation, equality for women, and more modern approaches to teaching religious tenets.

Those attitudes coincide with a shift among younger, progressive Jews worldwide who, amid the Israel-Hamas war, feel torn between “embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects liberal democracy,” wrote Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor, in The Washington Post last week.  Young Muslims in France who increasingly see Islam as an individual path to spiritual growth rather than a politically stigmatized identity.

Ramadan begins a six-week period that includes Easter and Passover – a time when Muslims, Christians, and Jews turn thought more deeply to values of humility, sacrifice, and love. “Above all, it’s a way of getting closer to God,” Youcef, a high school student in the suburbs of Paris, told Le Monde. Despite the persistence of war, a season of devoutness reveals the mental foundations of peace.