Twenty-year-old Rachel Cohen is the Founder and Executive Director of Hand2Paw. Hand2Paw's mission is to connect homeless teens and shelter animals in a mutually beneficial way. Hand2Paw provides homeless teens with professional skills training and therapeutic experiences. It also ensures that thousands of homeless and abandoned animals get the socialization and training they deserve.

Rachel has loved animals since her parents got her the Eyewitness Companion Guide to Dogs for her 8th birthday. This fateful Hanukkah present, they now realize, was wholly responsible for her career trajectory. She is also a Penn student and is a current Top 15 National Finalist for the Washington Campus Compact's Students in Service Awards as well as the winner of a DoSomething Grant.

Listen and subscribe to the Big Vision Podcast on iTunes.

Learn more about Hand2Paw:

• Website: http://www.hand2paw.org
• Blog: http://hand2pawblog.blogspot.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Hand2PawFB
• Twitter: @Hand2PawOrg
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Hand2Paw
• How to Bring Hand2Paw to your town
• Blog: Alternative Spring Break at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

Connect with me

• Website: http://brittbravo.com
• Speaking & workshop calendar: http://brittbravo.com/speaking
• Blog: http://havefundogood.blogspot.com
• Twitter: @Bbravo
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/britt.bravo

Music: "Mango Delight," by Kenya Masala.  Connect with Kenya through CD Baby and Source Consulting Group.

 

Nola Brantley is the Parenting and Youth Enrichment Director, and the Coordinator of the Sexually Abused and Commercially Exploited Youth  Program at the George P. Scotlan Youth Program in West Oakland.

According to Nola, not only is the sexual exploitation of minors increasing, "the young ladies are getting more savvy because some of them, who went in at 14, are now 16 or 17.  They're recruiting 12 or 13 year olds. . . . We have girls that come from out of state to prostitute in Oakland who are under 18 and I've asked them, 'Well, how did you end up in Oakland?' They say, 'Don't you know that everywhere else, coming to Oakland to do your thing is a big thing?'"

One of the many aspects of Nola's job is to be an advocate for young girls who are arrested for prostitution and she is often called upon to use her expertise in the field of sexually exploited minors to train clinicians and case managers in Oakland and the surrounding counties.

You can read a transcript of this interview on my blog, Have Fun * Do Good.

Abby Rosenheck (actually, she is Abby Jaramillo now) is the founder and Executive Director of Urban Sprouts, a school gardening program in San Francisco.

You can read a transcript of this interview on my blog, Have Fun * Do Good.

Mei-ying Ho is the co-Director of SOUL (The School of Unity and Liberation) a youth activist training program.

You can read a transcript of this interview at my blog, Have Fun * Do Good.

Welcome Big Vision Podcast listeners new and old.  I am transferring my interviews over from Gcast, where I started posting the Big Vision podcast in February of 2006.  My first interview was with Alli Chagi-Starr.  Alli is the Art and Media Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights' Reclaim the Future Program. Alli is also the co-founder of Art and Revolution, and founder of Art in Action, Dancers without Borders, and the Radical Performance Fest. In addition to being an artist, performer and dancer, Alli is also a writer, whose most recent piece can be found in the Code Pink anthology, Stop the Next War Now.

You can read a transcript of this interview on my blog, Have Fun * Do Good.