“Oaxaca is a very poor place, and there were not many things to eat because there is no money. There is no work there, and there, we planted milpa and pigweed. There wasn’t much else to eat besides that.

I was a little girl and we didn't have many clothes or shoes. When I was 14 years old, I decided to come here because children’s life was very sad there. I travelled with my brother.

The first time I came, it was raining a lot, so we were walking in mud and our clothes were very wet, so we walked and we arrived. We almost made it to where we were going to get to catch a ride to get here to California, and migration caught us and threw us back and so we went back again.

We met the one who crosses the people in the desert, and we decided to come with him. Fifty or 40, yeah, there were a lot of us.

From there, the coyote, he took us there in the desert, and we walked three nights and three days, and during the day, we rested and at night we walked. Many people get tired and die in the desert. I saw human hair and human bones.

We felt tired, we were hungry, and very thirsty too, because we didn't bring much water.

We arrived in Arizona.

From there, the van came to pick us up. We were like more than 20 people that got on that van.
We were packed on top of each other and there are people who are bigger than us and they are heavy, so when we got there, we had a lot of pain in our feet, we had blisters, like pus inside our feet.

I think it was more than 5 hours. I arrived in Oxnard, and from there, they brought me to Watsonville.

Yes, we felt— the first thing was mostly sadness. Leaving my family, like mom, it's very sad to remember. It's very sad to remember that, but for us it was very difficult to get out our village and walk in the desert, and we got there.

When I started working I was able to help my mother. I was able to send her a little bit of money.

I've been here for more than 15 years and I couldn't see my mom again because she died. It's been a long time since I could see her, and she died.

The hope I have is that someday they will give us papers so we can go back to Oaxaca to see my dad because my dad is still alive, and that is the hope I have. That is my hope.

My name is Alma and I am a farmworker.

For many of those who have survived their battles with COVID-19, the fight lasted much more than just a couple of weeks. For an Arizona high school football coach, who spent weeks of 2020 in a coma in the ICU, 2021 has been about battling back to regain what he lost.

To understand why the ability to speak with Russell Stryker today can be described as miraculous, you need to look to where he was a little more than a year ago.

“There is no medical explanation as to why I’m not dead," he said in February of 2021.

A couple of months earlier, in September of 2020, COVID-19 put Stryker in the hospital. He was in a medically induced coma for 72 days.

He survived his fight with the virus. At one point in October, his heart stopped beating, but doctors were able to revive him. When he left the hospital, he was down 50 pounds and relied on a walker as he worked through the grind of rehab.

“It was a slow grind to get strength back," Stryker recalled. "I’m probably, oh I don’t know, health-wise, I feel great. Strength-wise, I might be 50% maybe still. It’s just a long process, and I’m not getting any younger either.”

Stryker is the head coach at Kingman High School in Arizona. His fight with COVID-19 forced him to miss the entire 2020 season, but for 2021 he returned to the sideline.

“Oh man, first game--the first game was just an emotional rollercoaster. I was so happy to be out there coaching again," Stryker said.

In his first game back with the team, Kingman High School won 58-0.

“To be honest, I don’t really think about it all too much,” Stryker said of his fight. "I’m kind of a forward thinker anyway, so I don’t think too much about.”

While Stryker continues to work to erase the scars COVID-19 left on his body, there is a mark that he will have forever-- in the form of a new tattoo on his forearm that reads "hard to kill."

“I told my wife I might not be the toughest guy, but I am pretty hard to kill,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind getting that tattoo on my body at some point.”

It’s a reminder of what it took to survive and what it takes to battle back.

There's a renewed push to reform qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police officers, along with some others, from civil lawsuits.

In Congress, Sen. Justin Amash of Michigan proposed a bill to eliminate qualified immunity entirely. It has bipartisan support.

Understanding why qualified immunity was established could help inform a vision for the future.

Imagine a scenario where you're walking down the street and someone clearly violates your rights. The rule of law says they should be held accountable and you'd expect that they would. But can the same be said about police officers who violate a person’s rights?

Qualified immunity protects public employees, like police officers, from being held personally liable for knowingly violating someone else’s rights, as long as the officer didn’t break any “clearly-established” laws in the process.

Critics argue qualified immunity tilts the scales of justice and makes it hard to hold officers accountable for crimes they admit to committing.

The legal path that led to qualified immunity started with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Congress declared that every American has the right to sue any public employees who violate their rights.

Then, in the late 1960s, a Supreme Court ruling would start morphing the concept into what we know today.

It was 1967 when the court granted exceptions to police officers accused of violating rights if they acted in good faith and believed their actions were within the law. Another ruling, in 1982, shifted the burden entirely to the citizen, requiring they prove the officer’s actions broke a “clearly-established” right.

That means presenting a case where the Supreme Court found an official guilty of the same “particular conduct” under the same “specific context” as is being alleged. Without it, the officer is protected from liability.

The Supreme Court granted one exception for a particularly cruel case in 2002.

In June 2020, the Court declined to take up a petition asking it to re-examine qualified immunity. The order was unsigned, and Justice Clarence Thomas was the only one to write a dissent.

He wrote the “qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text.”

Justice Thomas and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have urged the court to take up the doctrine multiple times in the past. In 2018, Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg joined in a dissent authored by Justice Sotomayor. It said that the way the Court previously ruled on qualified immunity had established “an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.”

Saguache County, Colorado is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

It is a valley surrounded by mountain peaks that draws people who are looking for the secluded lifestyle that rural America can offer.

“Everybody knows everybody,” said Doug Peeples, who owns a grocery market in the county seat of Saguache.

The town of Saguache is small, having never boasted more than 700 full-time residents in the last 30 years. The county is even more dispersed as the population density is less than two people per square mile.

Then, in 2014, all of that changed once Colorado became the first state in the country to legalize recreational marijuana.

“I would venture to guess we saw 2,000 to 3,000 people in overnight,” said Saguache County Sheriff Dan Warwick.

“All of a sudden we had an influx of people that were out-of-towners,” added Peeples.

Located in the southern part of Colorado, the county became a destination for people from neighboring states who wanted to use the weed recreationally, but particularly those who wanted to start grow operations before returning the product back to their home state-- something that is illegal.

“With only six deputies, how do you try and catch these bad actors?” said Warwick. “You just hope to come across it.”

The influx led to squalor and crime as sheds laid abandoned after people would use them for growing marijuana before skipping town once they harvested.

“You’d see people come in and they would grow on a piece of property that they leased for a short period of time,” said Warwick. “They would leave all their trash and junk everywhere and then just pack up and leave.”

It became a divisive issue in the county as full-time residents would be left to deal with the mess.

“For a while, this place was the Wild Wild West,” said county commissioner Jason Anderson.

Anderson, along with the rest of the county commissioners, worked to find a solution by passing an excise tax in 2016 that would give them 5 percent of the profits when legal growers would sell to retailers.

In theory, the legislation would allow the county to benefit from something that had caused so much turbulence as the commissioners allocated money to go towards schools, enforcement, and other areas that needed improvement, but it started off slow.

“The first year [of the tax] we only saw $6,000, again, because the legal operations weren’t up and running yet,” said Anderson.

Gradually, however, that tax money started to increase. After only seeing $6,000 in 2017 Saguache County pulled in $67,000 in 2018 and $280,000 in 2019.

“We hired a code enforcement officer and outfitted him with everything he needs full-time, which is something we could never even think about beforehand,” said Anderson.

The county also set up a scholarship fund for local students planning to go to college and helped others get to school by updating trail systems that encouraged kids to walk in a county where the childhood poverty rate is 46 percent.

“I think we are better off [from the legalization of marijuana] in that we need all the resources we can to continue to adapt to the changes.”

Some places in town still have yet to see the money as some storefronts along the town of Saguache’s main street still lay vacant, but the county hopes as the tax money grows each year, so does prosper in the town.

BRANSON, Mo. — Branson, Missouri is a tourist destination for tens of thousands of families every summer. The winter months bring colder temperatures and empty amusement parks, meaning high unemployment across the community. This year, COVID-19 has made the widespread seasonal poverty even worse.

Kevin Huddleston runs the Christian Action Ministries Food Bank in Branson and helps feed thousands of families per year. He said this year, they've handed out twice the amount of food as they did last year because so many families have been financially struggling through the pandemic.

Huddleston said the need for services has fluctuated throughout the year, skyrocketing at times and leveling out when the stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits kicked in. With winter on the horizon, he is worried for what is to come.

"I really am concerned that we are entering our season of highest demand, and typically, normally people enter this period of time with some stored back, they have some money set aside, some food set aside, to get them through the dark days of winter when our tourism season is dormant here. We don’t have that fallback this year, people are not prepared," said Huddleston.

He is also worried that the community, without a homeless shelter or affordable housing units, will see more community members on the streets than ever before.

"I think we’re likely going to see a housing problem this winter, seeing more people being homeless situationally, so we as a community are scrambling trying to do something."

The city is opening up a warming center for people to have somewhere to go to escape the frigid temperatures, but it is not an overnight place yet. Huddleston is hoping a homeless shelter will be able to open up soon.

Despite the adversity families are facing across this tourist town, Huddleston said he does have hope.

"Our financial contributions have been very good this year, much better than we’ve expected in this kind of economic situation," he said, adding that their shelves are often overstocked.

Thankfully, food supply has not been an issue. The food bank has been able to help thousands without ever running out.

Still, he says handing out food does not fix the problem. He and other community leaders said poverty in Branson needs to be addressed at the root. He is part of a group helping to build resources in the community so families can work themselves out of a constant situation of struggle. However, he is worried these solutions will not come quick enough.

"We are planning for a very dire situation this winter," he said. "We are going to practice as if that’s going to happen, and if it doesn’t, we’ll be blessed."

In some places, it can be easy to think a crime scene is just a part of life.

“When you just look at the murders, you can problematize people. You can problematize Baltimoreans, and you can ignore this entire system that is causing this number that you see," said Erricka Bridgeford.

But in cities that have long dealt with the issue of violence, the type of loss felt a crime scene fuels those working for change.

"In 2004, my little cousin's father got murdered, so it just kept happening and I was like, OK, I need to do something," said Jakia Jones.

Jones works with Bridgeford, who is the founder of Baltimore Ceasefire 365.

The group organizes citywide ceasefires in hopes of stopping the violence Baltimore has come to know all too well.

“The idea of using collective consciousness to just raise Baltimore’s vibration," Bridgeford explained.

The cause of crime is complicated, to say the least.

“Joblessness, homelessness, food insecurity, and education," Bridgeford listed. "All the things are prevalent in Black and brown communities, which tells you there is a system in place that is violently attacking a particular group of people and making these kinds of things show up in cities all across America.”

Bridgeford believes at least part of the answer to stopping violence can be found in places like Baltimore's Community Mediation Center.

“People can really come and talk about anything, so neighbor dispute, landlord-tenant, baby momma drama," Bridgeford said.

The Mediation Center is a safe space for people to speak their minds.

“There’s this myth that oh in Baltimore, all the violence is happening because of drugs, so I was looking at this research that really showed reason that people end up getting killed, and drug disputes is definitely a part of it, but by and large, most of it is misunderstandings in conflicts that people couldn’t resolve," Bridgeford said.

“It’s not a big city problem. It’s not a red or blue problem. It really is an American problem," said crime data analyst Jeff Asher.

Across the country, crime is down overall in the pandemic with offenses like shoplifting and burglary happening less often, but when Asher and his company AH Datalytics looked at preliminary crime data from more than 70 cities nationwide, he saw a darker reality.

“Last year, we had an enormous increase in murder, that somewhere likely 25 to 30 percent or higher, likely the largest increase in order we have ever seen," Asher said.

2021 could be even worse. As of August, murders are up more than 12 percent on top of 2020's rise.

“Racism is already an epidemic. Oppression is already an epidemic. Violence has already been an epidemic, and so when you put a global pandemic on top of those things, absolutely," said Bridgeford of the rise in homicides nationwide.

Baltimore is now trying to take a different approach to prevent violence in the city.

“Too often we’ve tried to police our way out of our problems, and we see that simply does not work," said Baltimore City Council member Zeke Cohen.

Cohen is helping lead a first-of-its-kind effort to change the thinking around violence by having city employees go through training sessions to learn skills like de-escalation tactics. The first city group to start the training is the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

“Librarians are at their heart. People who want to connect people to information, access, and resources," said Heidi Daniel, CEO of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library.

City librarians are going through special training to understand the trauma of those who may come into their libraries and are struggling with issues that can lead to crime.

“I think that the more that we can build their tool kit and capacity to respond appropriately to situations that arise in our community, the better partner we are the city to reduce crime and other issues," Daniel said.

The goal is to train all city employees in Baltimore, with the hopes, other cities can take the same approach.

“We’re acknowledging what happened to people is wrong, it’s abnormal. We need to be able to discuss it and we need to give folks the tools the vocabulary and language to heal," Cohen said.

The efforts are what he and others, like Bridgeford, are working for, finding peaceful ways to solve a problem Baltimore has long grappled with.

Every punch Donahue Fields throws is part of the fight against what life has thrown at him.

“I see the world differently; the world sees me differently," he said.

For nearly two decades, Fields lived without a wheelchair, without knowing how quickly everything can change.

"When I was 19, I was coming out of a store one night. It was 2 in the morning. A group of guys was fighting on the corner,” Fields recalled. "That’s when I hear, ‘pow pow pow’ coming from my left, and I look and all I see is this muzzle flashes.”

He says he ran like everyone else, but he fell to the ground.

"I thought I tripped, but come to find out, I was hit, but I didn’t feel it. I didn’t know," he said. “I tried to get up, but my legs didn’t move. I thought it was the fear, so I tried to psyche myself, like, ‘No, just get up and run and run and move,’ but they would not move; they just would not.”

He went from standing at 6-foot-5 to living each day from a different perspective.

“Every day, I would tell myself I can’t live like this anymore. It's just too much," he said.

A stray bullet hit his spinal cord and his legs had to be amputated. Then, within months, he says his dog was shot and killed right in front of him.

“I’m out of here, you know, so I tried to pop a whole bottle of OxyContin, and next thing you know, I woke up in an ER ICU with a tube down my throat," he recalled.

But in boxing, he found an outlet and new outlook.

“Boxing, punching, is all about technique," he said. "Some people see power; some people see speed. But in the mix of all that the fine details is the proper technique the proper way to do it.”

Fields’ sport is officially known as adaptive boxing.

"Over here they’re like, ‘Oh my God, you shouldn’t do that. You’re disabled, you’re not why are you doing that you’re broken already you’re fragile already,’" Fields said of people who don't approve of him taking part in the sport.

“So, if someone comes at you in disbelief, you prove them wrong, but mostly, I'm going to say, I'm going to prove myself first and then I'm going to prove them wrong,” said Tyrell Eddy.

Since birth, cerebral palsy has limited Eddy’s ability to walk, but the limits stop there.

“I was always a physical person,” he said. “Just having that extra outlet just created a whole another opportunity for me.”

While boxing is a sport, fighting can be a necessary life skill.

“We are, sorry to say, in a vulnerable position, no matter what we do," Eddy said. "Everything is against us, so we have to be able to adapt faster than anyone else regardless.”

When the Paralympics take place in August in Tokyo after the Olympic games, adaptive boxing will not be included.

Fields hopes that will change for future games, but for him, adaptive boxing's impact is less about what a punch does to an opponent and more about the impact it can have on the life of the person who is throwing it.

“Don’t let that chair define you because the world does a great job of doing that itself,” Fields said. “When they see you, they see chair, chair, chair. We’re more than that.”

This pandemic has been like a fog, a cloud, over what we once considered to be normal. But as we move through it, people are re-discovering what life will be like when it clears.

“I mean we, here, don’t consider us America. We joke when we’re going to Costco, ‘Hey, we’re going to America today, do you need anything?’" said Farhad Ghatan, mayor of Friday Harbor, Washington.

Friday Harbor is an island town near Canada. Here, Ghatan’s responsibilities go beyond entertaining the guests at his bed and breakfast, the Friday Harbor Grand.

“It’s great to be able to make a comeback after a tough year, but it’s almost pretty tiring," he said. “We had one hospitalization. We have a population of 7,500, approximately 7,500 on this island.”

The mayor says strict measures, like an early mask mandate, kept COVID-19 cases from climbing and the town’s vaccination rate is more than 80 percent, as tourists flock by ferry here each day.

“I’ve had zero openings since the beginning of June, and I probably won’t have any until the beginning of September," Ghatan said of his B&B.

As the US-Canada border is expected to open later this summer, Ghatan has mixed fillings.

“I have mixed opinions on that. I know business will go down because people will now have options of going across the border,” he said.

Most visitors to Friday Harbor are Americans.

“The exchange rate doesn’t make it appealing to Canadians to come here," Ghatan said.

On this island, keeping up with traffic from the mainland is hard enough.

“It’s ridiculous. Right now, I’m turning five to six people a day," Ghatan said.

Washington State has allowed restaurants to go full capacity, but Debbie Rishel’s restaurant, Downriggers, still isn’t at 100 percent.

“Right now, actually, I could have more of my restaurant, but I don’t have enough people upfront to do it," she said.

Finding enough help isn’t just a problem for a remote island like this.

“Not all of them have the luxury of having a full staff right now, so they’re only open part-time or five days a week," explained San Juan Island Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Becki Day.

More than 90 percent of chambers of commerce nationwide say worker shortages are hurting their economies. Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont are among the states struggling the most, according to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Experts say a shrinking number of working-aged people could mean this shortage will continue for years, even beyond a pandemic recovery.

“My crews are already tired, and it’s not even the summer," Rishel said.

Step into Irene Herring’s coffee shop, San Juan Coffee Roasting Company, you will feel the pace of a busy season, lost in many tourist towns last year.

"We kind of jump in with both feet," she said.

But for Herring, COVID and coffee do not define her path through the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She says she’s doing fine now but will be selling her shop after 32 years, in order to enjoy this edge of America, which is her home.

As many work to charter a path beyond the limits of a pandemic, she says do not forget to go in the direction of what you value the most.

“A time like that that has lasted as long as it has, it's nice to have something that brings you some pleasure," Herring said.

Blight, a plant disease, and how to get rid of it are issues cities are grappling with across the country.

“Seeing these properties that I used to drive by as a kid, used to see burning, burned down buildings, houses where people are selling drugs, you got homeless people staying at these properties," described Dajuan Robinson.

The emptiness of an abandoned lot can be filled with the problems that plague a community.

On the South Side of Chicago, Bonita Harrison sees a future.

"I see a family that can't be here. I see kids that can't play. That's what I see," the South Side native said.

She shares that vision with four other developers, all of whom grew up on the South Side.

“We all have an affinity to the South Side of Chicago and making it a better place to live," developer Sean Jones said.

The natives have backgrounds in contracting, flipping homes, and real estate. They came together to buy 13 vacant lots in the West Woodlawn neighborhood.

"Even though this is a 100 percent Black community, we own less than 30 percent of the real estate," Harrison said.

The group's vision is to build and sell affordable, multi-family homes.

"Significance to us is not just a dollar, it’s about the value of the neighborhood and the value we are bringing to the neighborhood," Robinson said.

To buy the land, they used the Cook County Land Bank, an organization started in the wake of the housing crisis to fight blight. The organization buys vacant properties and sells them to developers that can give them life again.

"They level the playing field for us. They stepped in and basically [have] been able to give us access to the properties that we, as smaller investors, would not have had," Jones explained.

This group believes the true impact of what will fill this land comes from the power of who is behind it.

“We’re looking at recycling the Black dollar, leaving an example in the presence for our youth and neighbors in the neighborhood. That this is for us, by us," Jones said.

Housing is a complicated issue in both cities and suburbs nationwide. In places like the South Side of Chicago, it can be hard to find the exact number of lots that are vacant. But for this group, who is dedicated to bringing positive change to where they call home, they say it’s not just about the structure you build, but the people who will call it their own.

“I mean, what it means to me personally, is that I made a change in not my neighborhood, but somebody’s life," Robinson said.

AKRON, Oh. — On your first trip to Akron, the brick-covered streets may take you by surprise.

“They add character, but they’re not the smoothest ride; they slow people down,” said Jason Segedy, the Akron city planner.

They’re considered beloved relics from the turn of the 20th century when the city’s population was booming. While the days of creating new brick roads are over, Mayor Dan Horrigan would like Akron to once again be growing.

“We probably lost 100,000 people from 1960 to 2015, but we have this infrastructure. We have this space for a lot more,” said Horrigan.

The problem: many existing homes in Akron are old. Built in the WWI era for factory workers, many weren’t meant to last 80 years, but they continue to stand. Horrigan says repairs are too expensive for the public or city to fix them all.

Segedy says what Akron is going through is being seen throughout the nation.

“We are really trying to get supply and demand right in like our supply-demand equation right now,” he said.

Last month, Mayor Horrigan joined the mayors of Tempe, Arizona and Bozeman, Montana in testifying in front of U.S. senators. What the mayors have in common is an affordable housing shortage, driving people out of their cities. In the hearing, they proposed an idea: add funding for more affordable housing to Biden’s multi-trillion infrastructure plan.

“I do not expect the federal government to build new housing from the ground up, but I do expect you to do something to give tools to local governments to fill the gaps the private sector is not meeting,” said Mayor Cyndy Andrus of Bozeman during the meeting.

While they may believe affordable housing needs more avenues of funding, are they right in considering housing as infrastructure? Horrigan believes so.

“All the water meters, all the roads, all the water lines that lead to houses, they all lead to commercial buildings. So, we think it's a key part of the infrastructure in many urban areas across the country.”

Republicans at the hearing cautioned the committee, urging frugality and state control when it comes to infrastructure. Housing, as of now, has not been included in the plan, but Mayor Horrigan continues to hope for some extra help, so those brick roads will lead more folks to their new home

“When they get involved, they help out so many people. It's such a large scale. That's the difference that we're trying to make,” said Mayor Horrigan.

College a defining moment in life, but many Americans will tell you the cost of higher education has had a big impact.

"While it was a great experience, I made great network connections and I learned a lot, after I finished, I learned employers weren’t offering competitive salaries for that degree and I wondered, ‘Was it even worth getting that degree?" said Jessica Gawrych.

For Tyrone Hanley, who grew up outside Chicago, college was not a guarantee.

"I was raised in poverty,” he said. “My mom raised us in Section 8 housing.”

Hanley overcame the odds and went on to graduate from law school, but he found the journey to a better life has a price. He says he currently owes around $200,000 in student debt.

“I wouldn’t go to grad school again," Gawrych said. "I would do undergrad again, but I would prioritize the state schools that offered me a more reasonable financial package.”

Gawrych is a first-generation college student who grew up in Massachusetts and is the daughter of Polish immigrants. She says it’s now hard to think of the future when she’s still paying for what it took to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees.

"How can I think about bringing a child into this world when I have almost $100,000 in debt?" she asked.

More than 44 million Americans are in student loan debt, which’s larger than the entire population of California.

According to the website Student Loan Hero, that adds up to more than $1.7 trillion.

But during the pandemic, the government put a pause on borrowers having to make payments on federal student loans.

"I’ve been able to put money aside for my savings, so now, I’ve had more savings than I’ve ever had in my entire life," Hanley said.

October could be an unwelcome return to normal. Borrowers will have to start making payments again.

“I went to law school and my parents could afford to send me to college," said Democratic D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George.

Lewis George still carries tens of thousands of dollars of student debt herself.

“For many of us, we had no other option,” she said. “We were sold a dream with a big price tag.”

African American college graduates owe on average $25,000 dollars more than college grads who are white. Experts say Black college students often need to take out larger loans to pay for school.

“In the Black community, it feels like student loan debt is stifling our ability to be able to attain even an inch gain an inch of wealth or progress and a community," Lewis George said.

Lewis George introduced a resolution in her city, that was unanimously approved by the council, calling on President Biden to cancel student loan debt. Cities like Boston and Philadelphia have done the same.

“We’re trying to make this a national push. So, what’s next is sending our resolution to other cities across this country and say, ‘Hey, let's stand together in solidarity and let this administration know that student loan debt is a crisis,’" Lewis George said.

Critics point to the cost of forgiving student loans and say it’s unfair to let those with debt off the hook.

“You need to go to college, and in many cases, you need to go to graduate school in order to get a decent income, especially if you’re someone like me who grew up poor," Hanley said.

"In my experience, I didn’t have, my parents didn’t know how to advise me on this process. I didn’t have anyone guiding me on how to fill out my FAFSA or what was a good scholarship amount or what’s a good loan or interest rate is. This isn’t something I understood until years later," said Gawrych.

It’s easy to point to numbers to show how big of an issue student debt is. Those with it say to see its true toll, look to the people within its grip.

“I think through our stories, people really can have a better understanding on an emotional and human level to really wrap their heads around their issue to understand what my generation and younger generations are dealing with at this moment," Hanley said.

There are more than 2.5 million Chinese immigrants in America. Many make the journey to the U.S. and share a similar experience to Yi Andy Chen’s father.

“He got punched. He got locked up in different jails in different countries from South Asia to Mexico, and he didn’t even know where he was supposed to go the next minute,” said Yi.

In the early 90s, it took his father two years, walking across mountains and hitching rides on boats, to get from Fujian Province, China to New York City. Throughout the entire journey, Yi and his family had no communication with Yi’s father.

“At one point, we didn’t even know if he was alive,” Yi said.

His father made the dangerous journey out of desperation.

“At that time in China, we were not allowed to have two boys at home, and I was the second son,” Yi explained.

The second son had to be hidden for fear of being taken away by the government at the time. Yi’s father didn’t want to live with that fear forever, and he wanted the chance at giving his children more opportunities in the land of opportunity: America.

“I grew up in China until 14 years old,” said Hailing Chen.

Hailing is of no familial relation to Yi, but their families do come from the same province in China. Chen's father made a similar journey from Fujian to the U.S. as Yi’s father, except Chen’s father, who chose to never speak about that part of his immigrant story

“I know it was tough,” said Hailing. “And I learned some stories that he worked in the restaurants and lived in the basement, and those kinds of stories really break my heart.”

Like most first-generation immigrants, both Chen’s fathers worked low-wage jobs for long hours, often seven-day work weeks and 12 to 16-hour days in restaurants. They lived extremely modestly, often boarded with a dozen other people in a small New York City one-bedroom apartment in order to save up for their families to legally come to the U.S. and to give their next generation a better chance in life.

“You know, he gave me a chance to go to college,” Chen said of his father.

Chen and Yi both went to college. Yi now lives the quintessential American dream, owning a small business in Queens. Chen studied accounting but found his passion was actually fighting for immigrant rights and has since become an advocate. After turning to Uber for work during the Great Recession, Chen helped immigrant drivers fight for union rights and protection.

“We were able to successfully pass a number of bills that are on the state and city level to provide job protection, to provide minimum pay,” said Chen.

This year, Chen decided to further stand up for his community by running for office in the biggest city in the country. He is the first immigrant from the Fujian Province to ever do so. Yi became the second, and now, there is a third candidate. They are running in different districts, which means they all have a chance of winning their races and NYC could see all three potentially as the first-ever Fujian council members.

"Once we announced our candidacy for city council this year, all the community leaders, they said, 'We have been waiting for this moment for far too long. For almost 100 years,’” Yi recalled.

Their candidacies are a potential moment for representation in America that each of them and their community hopes lead to better a better understanding and acceptance of their people and all immigrants.

“We come here because not only do we think we can get something from this country, but also we think we can contribute,” said Chen. “Immigrants have always demonstrated a bonus and bravery to this country.”

As the owners of Darkhorse Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee, Shannon Wood and her husband, Peter Kurland, have worked hard over the last three decades to make sure their quaint black box theatre is inclusive to anyone who walks through the front doors.

But while they love drama, they prefer for it to be on their stage and not in the place where it has unexpectedly started unfolding, the bathroom.

"No one has ever complained about our all-gender bathroom," Wood said while sitting inside the theatre which has been closed for nearly a year because of COVID-19.

Under a new state law passed in Tennessee, it's possible that Darkhorse Theatre could have to put up signs on their bathrooms, saying they let transgender people use the multipurpose restrooms here.

"What happens if someone goes into a bathroom and it’s not the gender they were assigned at birth? Are they gonna put those people in jail? Are they going to send police officers to inspect people? It’s not only mean, it’s totally impractical and ridiculous," Wood added.

As the CEO of the LGBT Chamber of Commerce in Nashville, Joe Woolley has worked hard over the last decade to push back again legislation that discriminates against the LGBT community. He’s been successful in this deeply conservative state by playing the economic angle.

"I talk to businesses on a weekly basis and they’re concerned about what it’s like for LGBT people to live here in the South, to live here in Tennessee," Woolley said about a recent string of legislative bills targeting the LGBT community.

For years, Woolley and other LGBT groups partnered with small businesses and major corporations who lobbied lawmakers hard to not support things like the bathroom bill and it worked.

"It harms businesses' ability to attract and retain the talent they need," he noted.

This year though something changed.

"It’s been tough, and I will tell you I’m exhausted, Woolley said.

"For the first time ever, the business voice was not listened to. Businesses were told to shut up, stay out of politics. I think it was an eye-opening moment.”

So far, 2021 has been a record year when it comes to anti-transgender legislation. Thirty-three states have passed more than 100 bills all aimed at curbing the rights of transgender people.

Arizona, Montana, Texas, and Florida are among a handful of states who’ve introduced legislation that prevent minors from receiving gender-affirming healthcare. Only Arkansas has made the bill into law.

Woolley is concerned about the kind of long-term financial impact these pieces of legislation will have on state economies, as businesses and conventions go elsewhere.

"These bills are targeting transgender people and transgender youth because it’s easy; they picked one of the most marginalized groups in the country, and we need to wake up," Woolley said.

As for Shannon Wood and her husband, they have no plans on changing their all-gender bathroom signs because they know the message that it sends to anyone who walks into the theatre.

"There's an act and an intermission. People want to go the bathroom; they don’t care about where they’re going to the bathroom."

In some parts of America, sports just mean more.

St. Louis is one of those places.

“I bleed blue. I’m a true Blues fan, and they’re the best," said hockey fan Sarah Middleton.

Our lives can be shaped by what we love.

“They mean everything to me, besides of course my family and all that. They are like number one in my life," Middleton expressed.

During the pandemic shutdown, it’s been hard for fans to be distant from the field, the ice, the experience.

“You can't come in and get the same vibes at home," said Blues' fan Brandon Mixon.

Few know the power of a crowd more than Chris Kerber; he’s been the radio voice of the St. Louis Blues for more than two decades.

“Sports teams represent a city. They represent a fan base, they represent a region, they bring positivity," he said.

The city of St. Louis let the Blues start with around 1,400 fans in the arena in February.

For the NHL playoffs, the team will be allowed to fill half its arena.

Most cities’ health departments have followed the same framework, limiting the number of fans, even for outdoor games.

But in some places, like Georgia, Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves are playing outside to a packed stadium of fans, with no capacity limits.

“Safety is important. The fans want to come in the building. They want to feel safe they tell you," Kerber said.

This season, masks have been required. Seats are zip-tied to keep pods of fans socially distant.

All tickets are digital, and food and drink orders are cashless.

Fans can also use an app and have an order brought to their seats, so they don’t have to stand in line.

Kerber feels Blues fans have followed the rules to this point.

“We would not have been able to expand our capacity and bring more fans in if the fans didn’t comply with the orders and understand,” Kerber said.

Sports still feel different in 2021.

The St. Louis Cardinals have also limited fans this season and put COVID-19 measures in place.

"The number one thing is vaccinations, as those go up just continue to encourage people to get those vaccinations so we can return to normal," said Cardinals' Vice President of Stadium Operations Matt Gifford.

But being close to normal can only increase the desire for a full return.

“I can’t wait until we get back to full capacity and the boards are rocking again," Mixon said.

DENVER — Across the country, a growing number of colleges are making it mandatory for students and staff to be fully vaccinated by the fall semester. Many colleges are saying this can help higher education get back on track.

“This past year, it wasn’t an optimal decision for students or staff for the remote learning,” said Ken McConnellogue, the vice president for communication at the University of Colorado. “We are now working towards operating at normal capacity in the fall. That’s what our staff and students want.”

McConnellogue said that the University of Colorado, a public University, will require its students to be fully vaccinated to go back to in-person learning on campus.

“We are working towards full vaccinations as one of the strategies we need to put in place before fall,” McConnellogue said. “However, just as with our measles and mumps immunization policies we are allowing our students to opt out for medical and religious reasons. There are schools around the country who were out ahead of us on this, but we didn’t so much take our lead from them as much as the state health department and local health department. Plus, we are a research institution with an academic medical campus, and we have substantial expertise in that as well. We feel like we made a very well-informed decision.”

Colleges from California to New York are now moving toward mandating students and staff to be fully vaccinated by the fall semester as well.

However, for some private colleges, like the University of Denver, that offer more flexibility for their requirements.

“As a private school, as long as we are clear about our requirements, we have the flexibility to implement them,” said Sara Watamura with DU. “For example, in the fall we required the flu vaccine and that was not something the state schools felt they were able to do in the timeline they had.”

Watamura said that DU has even been providing vaccines for their students.

“We have provided the opportunity for almost 30,000 vaccinations on campus for DU students and faculty as well as the broader community,” Watamura said.

All 50 states have at least some vaccine mandates for students attending public schools, such as polio, tetanus and whooping cough.

Of course, not all colleges and universities will require a vaccine. But for those colleges that are requiring them, experts believe this could be the key to getting campus life back to normal.