McCormack Speaks

January 9, 2018
by McCormack Speaks
0 comments

Pension Action Center Assists Veteran Denied Pension Vesting Right

This blog originally appeared in the Gerontology Institute blog.

by Steven Syre, Gerontology Institute

An Illinois man who reached his normal retirement age in June of this year discovered he had a big pension problem. The company he expected to pay the pension said it didn’t exist.

The man came to the Pension Action Center for help through the Illinois Pension Assistance Project. PAC counselor Susan Hart and attorney Sophie Esquier soon discovered the event that caused their client’s immediate problem had taken place more than 40 years earlier. The event was the Vietnam War.

The client had worked for GTE Automatic Electric from May 1971 to October 1983, a length of time that clearly gave him vesting rights in the company’s pension plan. But during that period, he had temporarily left his job to serve in the military. His period of wartime military service covered more than two years between 1972 and 1974.

The Gerontology Institute’s Pension Action Center is part of the McCormack Graduate School at UMass Boston. It provides free legal assistance to low- and moderate-income workers, retirees and their survivors in the six New England states and Illinois whose pension benefits have been wrongfully denied. This is one in an occasional series of posts about cases the center pursues on behalf of its clients.

January 4, 2018
by McCormack Speaks
0 comments

How Housing Plus Services Addresses Senior Needs

This post originally appeared on the Gerontology Institute blog.

By Meghan Hendricksen

A shortage of affordable housing for seniors will pose a huge challenge for the United States in the years ahead. But finding homes for those elders is only part of the solution, according to Alisha Sanders.

Helping seniors deal with health issues locally and age in place in their homes should be an important element of any housing plan, she said.

Sanders, director of Housing & Services Policy Research at LeadingAge, was the final fall speaker series guest at McCormack Graduate School’s Department of Gerontology. Her talk, “Affordable Senior Housing Plus Services: Meeting the Needs of Low-Income Seniors,” stressed the value of providing housing and services together. Continue reading.

January 1, 2018
by McCormack Speaks
0 comments

I Am Not a Cardboard Cutout! The Bias of Body Mass Index (BMI)

by Thomas Nee, McCormack Graduate School public administration student

An insidious movement is discriminating against people like me. So far, only my life insurance rates are materially affected but this movement is so pervasive and accepted that it’s only a matter of time before it affects my relationship with my doctor, my health insurance provider, and my government. These groups increasingly rely on Body Mass Index (BMI) to categorize me. This simple formula combines height and weight into a single index. It is quickly applied to large populations and simplifies research across space and time. I am not writing about the common observation that BMI does not measure fat vs. muscle but about something I cannot change: my height.

BMI = m / h²

Where m is mass in kilograms and h is height in meters (multiply by a conversion factor of 703 if mass is in pounds and height is in inches). The formula has a fundamental flaw: the exponent 2. It is applicable only if we are two-dimensional beings! It allows us to grow in height and width but not depth. I am not a flat, cardboard cutout. Continue Reading →

December 26, 2017
by McCormack Speaks
0 comments

Conflict Resolution Professor Publishes Book on Youth Encounter Programs in Israel

Ross conducted more than 100 interviews with former participants and program staff and spent more than 200 hours observing their programming in order to understand the structure and pedagogical approaches of each organization. She also analyzed the impact of the youth meetings in terms of the depth of changes in their belief systems and their continued social change engagement.“Looking at impact in terms of continued engagement in significant in two ways,” writes Ross. “First, it shifts the discussion from an internal focus to one emphasizing externally oriented initiatives. Moreover, looking at impact in terms of social change engagement enables us to see how programs that aim to transform individuals can link to societal-level shifts.”Decades after the Oslo Accords, alienation and distrust has grown between Jews and Palestinians in Israel, and grassroots groups struggle to find funding to continue their important work to shape participants’ national identity, vision of social change, and motivation to continue to work toward the transformation of Israeli society.

Yet Karen Ross’ investigation and findings on how individual transformation can lead to larger-scale societal change provide not only new insights to conflict resolution methodology and practice but also bring renewed hope for the possibility of Jewish-Palestinian partnership. Continue reading.

December 22, 2017
by McCormack Speaks
0 comments

Mandela’s Chosen Successor: Ramaphosa’s Long Wait to Reignite South Africa’s Promise

by Padraig O’Malley, Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation

Roelf Meyer, Padraig O’Malley, and Cyril Ramaphosa, 1993

I met Cyril Ramaphosa on my first visit to South Africa in 1985. Ramaphosa was secretary general of the powerful National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), fresh off leading the largest strike in South African history. I met him again in 1990 after I began to document the South African transition from apartheid to democracy, and interviewed him on several occasions.

In 1993, the University of Massachusetts Boston, where I hold the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation at the university’s John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, awarded Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer, both of whom were the lead negotiators on the African National Congress (ANC) and National Party sides in the talks to end apartheid, honorary doctorates at its commencement ceremonies.

In 1997, at my behest, Ramaphosa and Meyer went to Belfast to meet with all the key negotiators in the Northern Ireland peace process. As a result, President Nelson Mandela hosted the Great Indaba (The Great “Gathering”) at Arniston, a secure military base in the Western Cape Province that same year. Negotiators from all parties in Northern Ireland and the principal negotiators from the multiparty talks in South Africa that ended apartheid participated. Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s lead negotiator, called it a “turning point.” A year later, the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was signed. Subsequently, Cyril Ramaphosa was appointed one of the two interim decommissioning commissioners and I advised him on things Northern Irish. Continue Reading →