Happy New Year!
I'm happy to see you here in 2025! One of my biggest professionals lessons has been to be a continuous learner. I'm always reading, listening to podcasts, and watching videos to learn and unlearn. My goal in 2025 is to share these resources with you in a curated, action-oriented format. You can expect to see insightful and thought-provoking content that takes you from Awareness to Action. This email will provide an overview of a few resources. Bookmark the Table of Diversity Weekly website for in-depth resources, activities, and discussion prompts. The current week is free to access, but the archive is only available to subscribers!
This week, we have resources related to Mental Health (Mt in the Disability column); Unhoused (Uh in the Location column); Managers (Ml in the Organizational Role column);
Here's to a new year full of learning and action!
-Demetria
Articles We Are Reading This Week
The Year 2024 In...Health: Mental Health Levels Up- TIME
"Progress in addressing mental health is notoriously slow and mostly incremental. Breakthrough treatments tend to be rare, and trained professionals too few to meet the demand for services, which is increasing. But 2024 was a pivotal year—thanks to the culmination of decades of research and post-pandemic attention to mental-health issues.
About a fifth of teens in the U.S. report symptoms of anxiety or depression, according to the most recently analyzed federal survey data from 2021–22, but 20% say they can’t afford therapy to address their symptoms. The national lifeline for mental-health crises, 988, fielded around 5.3 million calls, texts or chats this year. And the U.S. surgeon general raised the alarm about two major mental-health issues: first calling for warning labels about the dangers of social media for young people, and then highlighting the extraordinary stress and anxiety parents experience in raising families today."
A Program for Founders with Disabilities and An Idea For A Startup- Forbes
"2Gether-International (2GI) got started about five years ago, aimed at seed-stage companies run by people with disabilities. But its founders realized there was a need for a program targeting founders at an even earlier phase, especially for entrepreneurs with disabilities who tend to have little access to funding.
“We realized there were so many people with ideas, but the accelerator program was only for existing startups,” says Mendez.
Venture Labs’ founders decided four weeks was enough to provide a program able to help entrepreneurs validate their ideas. That would include a self-paced curriculum presented via one-hour videos on such topics as how to pinpoint buyers and create a problem statement, plus group sessions to discuss homework and hear guest speakers, typically founders themselves. The homework assignments ultimately could produce documents to be included in a presentation deck. Mendez also connects participants with mentors, who often are experts with relevant technology experience."
Where Have All the Managers Gone? -Wall Street Journal
"Corporate America is on a mission to thin its management ranks in pursuit of greater efficiency. The purge is pushing workers on all levels to rethink their career paths and the traditional way to better pay and status.
United Parcel Service and Citigroup say they have cut thousands of supervisor jobs since last year. Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy is aiming to increase the ratio of workers to managers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff this month that the company had culled managerial roles by 10% in its cost-cutting drive.
In all, U.S. public companies have cut their middle-manager head counts by about 6% since the peak of their pandemic hiring sprees, according to a new analysis of more than 20 million white-collar workers by employment-data provider Live Data Technologies. Senior executives, whose ranks have shrunk nearly 5% since the end of 2021, haven’t fared much better.
With fewer higher-level jobs to move up into, aspiring managers are struggling to get promoted and former bosses have shifted to nonsupervisory positions—sometimes not by choice. Others are moving into new industries to keep a foothold on the management ladder. Companies, meanwhile, are wrestling with how to motivate workers who feel stuck."
9 unexpected things we learned about mental health and our brains in 2024 -NPR
"1. Writing by hand beats typing for learning and memory
Yes, typing is usually much faster than writing by hand. But increasingly studies are finding deep brain benefits when we write out letters and words by hand. For kids, it can improve letter recognition and learning; and when adults take notes by hand it can lead to better conceptual understanding of material."
Podcast We Are Listening To This Week
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness- The Daily
"In Austin, Texas, a local businessman has undertaken one of the nation’s biggest and boldest efforts to confront the crisis of chronic homelessness."
Video of the Week
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