James “Lucky” Deans is used to working in times of crisis. Over the years, the electrical lineman has traveled up and down the East Coast with fellow crew members in the wake of hurricanes and natural disasters, lending a hand to public power utilities and repairing downed power lines in communities left without electricity. 

Nancy Strickland Fields serves as director and curator of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian located on UNC Pembroke’s campus, working for the museum since 2017. As director and …

Last month, North Carolina lawmakers enacted three new maps to revise the state's district maps for both chambers of the General Assembly and Congress.

Every year, the 6,000 people who live adjacent to the Port of Wilmington, in New Hanover County, are assaulted with hundreds of tons of air pollution: from the concrete plants spewing ultrafine dust, the fumigation facilities legally emitting neurotoxins like methyl bromide and phosphine, the ships and trains and tractor-trailers exhaling plumes of diesel fumes.

Rockingham County struggles with the same health issues that plague most of the state’s rural communities. Residents suffer from  high rates of diabetes and other chronic conditions. There aren’t enough local providers to ensure equitable access to care. The population is aging.  During a recent discussion at Rockingham Community College in Wentworth, the county of about 91,000 people was presented as a microcosm of rural health in North Carolina.

Amanda Price and her husband were finally in the process of adopting their three daughters in 2022. The couple had fostered the girls for four years and had planned to adopt them in 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic caused delays.

People go to the annual North Carolina State Fair for all kinds of reasons. It might be the topsy-turvy rides. Or perhaps the Village of Yesteryear and the antique farm machinery. Often, though, the food is a major attraction.

The idea formed when Jana Tagel-Din remembered the light in her mother’s eyes after seeing the flowers and cookies. Her mother was in the hospital — her second bout with cancer, this time Stage 4 colon cancer. Tagel-Din remembers visits to the hospital as draining. But then she saw how her mother lit up at an unexpected gift. That moment in May 2022 blossomed into the nonprofit Care to Care NC.

North Carolina does not have enough private-duty nurses to provide home-based services to Medicaid participants with complex medical needs, creating a crisis for many working families who cannot single-handedly manage their loved ones’ care.

Suicide rates were 3.2 times higher for teenage boys than teen girls between 2018 and 2020 — with guns increasingly playing an outsize role. Boys and young men represent  80 percent …

Across the globe, scientists, doctors, public health practitioners and community-centered groups are continuing their work to combat the transmission of HIV.  And they’re turning the tide against the disease.

With just hours left for Congress to come up with a funding deal, government observers say a government shutdown seems likely. This will mean certain non-essential employees will be furloughed, services will cease and more.

On a Friday night in late July, Axe to Grind got a visit from the local police. Zaidoon Al-Zubaidy, co-owner of the Hamlet cafe, was presenting a local band in the back room. When he learned there were officers out front, he joked with his staff that a night out isn’t successful until the cops are called, but still, he was concerned. He had a packed house, and he didn’t want a scene. …

Arthur Durham is keenly aware of the impact that gunfire and other street violence can have on a community. As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, that was the world he lived in. His mother battled heroin addiction, and his father was absent. Now, he’s bringing the expertise he has accumulated from his childhood and work in Philadelphia and New York to Greensboro, where a new violence interrupter program is being launched.

It’s been a little more than a year since  the  launch  of the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline number , 988, and North Carolina saw a  31% increase  in calls for support during that time.  While the national hotline isn’t exactly new, the shortened number is. The previous 10-digit number was replaced by the easier-to-remember 988 in the hope that it will become as recognizable as the universal emergency number 911. 

When a South Charlotte mom was looking for a psychiatrist to prescribe medication for her teenage daughter’s depression last year, she described sitting with her phone and going down the list of doctors listed as in network with her insurance company. Some weren’t taking new patients. Others never returned her messages. And a few said their first appointment was months away. 

A few months ago, Jemonde Taylor stood, like a proud shepherd, on a bank and looked down at a section of Walnut Creek that runs through Southeast Raleigh’s Rochester Heights community, where he s the rector at St. Ambrose Episcopal Church. As the chair of Raleigh’s Stormwater Advisory Committee, Taylor values wetlands’ vital role in flood mitigation, air and water purification, and wildlife habitat, among other things. For these reasons, he’s concerned about the potential loss of intermittent wetlands.

As state-designated advocates for North Carolina’s older residents, the  Senior Tar Heel Legislature  has a 30-year history of advocacy — and relatively limited clout in recent times. Now its leaders are working to become a more aggressive, diverse force for change in legislative sessions to come.

RALEIGH — State and local law enforcement officers will be out in force as part of the Labor Day Booze It & Lose It campaign, according to the N.C. Department of Transportation.

Enduring threads of North Carolina’s past — such as bygone industries and separate public schools for whites, Blacks and Native Americans — still affect older state residents, as harmful holdovers and even, in some cases, as positive forces

Whitney Parker has had enough.  The Snow Hill resident lives close enough to the GFL Sampson County Regional Landfill to see the daily operations from his house.  Parker said that for decades, the landfill has cast an imposing  shadow over his community and destroyed its quality of life.

Two organizations that manage behavioral health services for people on Medicaid and for some uninsured people in different areas of North Carolina have agreed to merge into a single entity that will serve more than 100,000 people across 21 counties. 

The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services recently announced plans to  accelerate the launch of Medicaid expansion  to Oct. 1, which is about three months earlier than expected.

According to research by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, recent moves by the Biden administration to deliver high-speed internet to rural communities will do more than connect homes to the internet: It may improve rural health. Associate Professor Carrie Henning-Smith with the university’s School of Public Health said in an interview with The Daily Yonder that access to high-speed internet will affect rural health in a number of ways, including direct access as well as more indirect health outcome-affecting factors.

Jill Sergison, a certified nurse-midwife, stood amid a crowd of nearly a thousand people on May 13 wearing a rainbow-colored clinic escort vest and a white coat as Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed …