Kyle Norris

Making antifreeze safer for children and animals

Kyle Norris — Sun, 05 May 2013 18:48:29 +0000

Antifreeze often looks like a sports-drink or Kool-Aid and it can have a sweet smell that attracts animals and kids. A bill in the Michigan legislature would require that a bittering agent be added to antifreeze so humans and animals don’t want to drink it.

Shakespeare helps prisoners change

Kyle Norris — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:33:33 +0000

Frannie Shepherd-Bates is a Shakespeare geek. She is also executive artistic director of the Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company in Detroit.

Twice a week, Shepherd-Bates drives from metro Detroit to the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, which is about 10 miles south of Ann Arbor, to share her love of Shakespeare.

Metal heads and academics unite

Kyle Norris — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:10:03 +0000

This weekend an international heavy metal conference for academics and researchers is happening in Bowling Green, Ohio. It's called "The Heavy Metal & Popular Culture Conference," and organizers say it's the first of its kind in the U.S.

It will feature presentations by heavy metal scholars from around the world about race and gender in the genre, and about its growing popularity in places like Finland and Puerto Rico.

UM professor says “no shame” for children with disorder of sex development

Kyle Norris — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 22:55:02 +0000

It’s not uncommon for newborn babies to have an unclear gender. About one in 300 infants have a disorder of sex development (or DSD). That means babies have atypical sex chromosomes, atypical gonads, or atypical genitals.

For some parents, the experience can be overwhelming and in the past, shame and secrecy have been associated with the disorder.

Counting Michigan's homeless

Kyle Norris — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 20:48:06 +0000

Michigan organizations that help homeless people are taking part in a “snap-shot” census. The federal government requires the overnight count every other year. It’s part of the Obama administration’s plan to eradicate homelessness by 2020.

The census must happen on a single night during the last ten days of January. The count includes people who are in shelters, transitional housing, and on the street.

Stateside: Homeless shelters get a makeover

Kyle Norris — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:01:17 +0000

Imagine what you might know about physical space and tranquility if you lived in a drug house, an abandoned building, or jail.

That’s the experience for many of the women who stay at the Women and Family Treatment and Shelter at Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries. They often come from intense circumstances to the shelter, in order to make big changes in their lives.

The shelter is housed in a former convent. On the third floor everything reeks of fresh paint. A professional paint company has donated the paint and man power to paint the walls. The long hallway is now sky-blue and the twenty rooms where the women live now have fresh coats of cotton-candy pink and lemon-yellow paint.

Terry Grahl runs the non-profit Enchanted Makeovers and she’s making this large-scale renovation happen by coordinating a symphony of volunteers and businesses. She got a church in Taylor to making curtains for all the rooms. An artist from Georgia is coming in to paint murals on the walls and the shelter is also getting new ceiling fans and new floors.

Stateside: At-risk, LGBTQ kids find safety through vogue dance

Kyle Norris — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:22:18 +0000

Matthew Dawson is the kid wearing sunglasses inside, in the middle of the day. He’s in a room full of about twenty kids who flip, dip, and cat-walk in a dance style known as “vogue.” (For a quick reference, think Madonna’s “Vogue” video from 1990.)

He says this style of dancing is a powerful way for him to express himself. “One of the emotions I say I put into my vogue is anger. I feel like I put it into vogue so I won’t have to put it into other things that are not very constructive.”

Matthew Dawson says as an LGBTQ young person, if he danced like this in the outside world—or on the street—he would not be safe. And these vogue dancers find safety in their dance community.

Stateside: Med team brings "street medicine" to Detroit's homeless

Kyle Norris — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:56:28 +0000

Several Wayne State University students started Street Medicine Detroit in May.

They’d heard about a similar program in Pittsburg and they were inspired. They partnered with a Detroit non-profit called Neighborhood Service Organization and together they created a mobile medical clinic.

Philip Ramsey is a community outreach specialist with NSO. (Rumor has it that if you’re trying to locate a specific homeless person, and you give Ramsey the vaguest of details, he can go out and find that person who might be living in a tent next to highway.)

It’s Ramsey’s job to drive the med team around the streets and back-alleys of Detroit and to help them locate homeless people who are in need of medical services.

So once a week, the van rumbles down Michigan Avenue past prostitutes on the corners and a young man pushing a baby stroller. Ramsey helps the team find people who are lying down on the ground or sitting on the curb. He says additional clues that someone may be homeless are people with dirty clothes and uncombed hair, or people who are openly drinking.

Helping the homeless in Detroit

Kyle Norris and Christina Shockley — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:36:11 +0000

Michigan Radio's Kyle Norris has been been spending a lot of time in Detroit lately to report on stories of people doing things to help the homeless in the city.

And this week Michigan Radio will be airing the first of her three part series on the homeless on Stateside.

Norris reported on a mobile medical clinic that works with the homeless, how a woman gives homeless shelters makeovers, and how homeless gay youth create their own families.

Norris talked about her experience reporting on these stories on Seeking Change. She says her stories are about people doing little things to make a difference for the homeless in Detroit.

The week in Michigan politics

Jack Lessenberry, Kyle Norris and Emily Fox — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 13:30:40 +0000

It's a busy news week in Michigan politics. This week Kyle Norris and Jack Lessenberry discuss various proposals and happenings in Lansing:

1. Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway faces allegations of fraud in a federal civil lawsuit. It accuses Hathaway and her husband of hiding assets to qualify for a short sale on a $1.5 million dollar home in Florida.

2. A proposed bill that would allow people to claim a 12-week-old fetus as a dependent for tax exceptions.

3. Another proposed bill would bring massive overhaul of Michigan's school funding system. Jack discusses some of the major changes.

Homeless Awareness Week

Kyle Norris — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:24:41 +0000

Homeless Awareness Week in Michigan is November 10-18. The idea is to highlight the causes of homelessness and the issues that homeless people face. There are events planned in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Port Huron, and other towns.

In Livingston County a group of people will live in their cars for 24 hours and eat only what they can buy with about $5 in food stamps, in order to raise awareness.

The week in Michigan politics

Jack Lessenberry, Kyle Norris and Emily Fox — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:26:50 +0000

Every week Michigan Radio talks with political analyst Jack Lessenberry about what's been happening in Michigan politics.

This week Lessenberry and Kyle Norris talked about how Governor Rick Snyder is campaigning against all of the ballot proposals except for Proposal 1. Prop 1 involves emergency managers. And how Proposal 5, the proposal that deals with raising taxes, seems to be the most confusing and controversial proposal.

Norris and Lessenberry also discussed if Hurricane Sandy will influence Michigan voters, and how a recent Romney campaign ad claims the auto bailout resulted in GM using that money to hire more workers in China than in the U.S. Lessenberry says the ad isn't true.

A year of eating an indigenous diet

Kyle Norris — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 19:29:42 +0000

Imagine eating the same foods that Native Americans in the Great Lakes region ate before European settlers arrived. That’s the idea behind a one-year study at Northern Michigan University.

Politicians learn their lines

Kyle Norris — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Bob Kolt is using a wildly popular video clip to teach future politicians the importance of knowing their lines. It’s an excerpt from the 2007 Miss Teen USA competition. In the video, Miss South Carolina is asked why she thinks 1/5 of Americans can’t find the United States on a map.

http://youtu.be/lj3iNxZ8Dww

Center for homeless youth opens in Wyandotte

Kyle Norris — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:25:12 +0000

The Yard is a new center for homeless and runaway youth based in Wyandotte. It provides tutoring, food, computers, a washer and dryer, and a place for young people to hangout.

Jane Scarlett is the director of homeless programs at Wayne Metropolitan Community Action Agency. She’s says school districts call the agency on a daily basis looking for organizations that can help homeless kids in their area. But Scarlett says it’s tough to know exactly how many homeless kids are out there.