What difference can one ordinary person make?

Here are six people Fixes wrote about in the last year who show what the answer can be: a lot.

Katie Fahey

RESTORES POWER TO THE PEOPLE

“There were great moments in American history when people rose up to correct it when something wasn’t right. I said, ‘Technically, I’m allowed to try. So I’m going to.’”

Last month, Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that changed the state Constitution. It created a commission of independent citizens to draw the lines of congressional districts, taking the job away from politicians.

This result is remarkable. Even more remarkable is how it happened. The founder and leader of Voters Not Politicians is Katie Fahey, a Michigan woman in her 20s with no political experience. She wrote on Facebook that she wanted to end gerrymandering. Thousands of volunteers responded. They collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to put the measure onto the ballot, and then went door to door to ask people to vote for it. When the campaign needed money, volunteers asked their family and friends to chip in.

Ms. Fahey kept waiting for someone who knew what they were doing to come along and tell her to run along now, but no one did.

In the last few months, Voters Not Politicians became more professional. By then, its citizen army had made its message of citizen power even more persuasive.

But being amateurs also had drawbacks. “The system wasn’t built for civilians,” Ms. Fahey said. Most campaigns, for example, have experts file the required reports to the state. Voters Not Politicians had to learn to do it itself.

Voters Not Politicians now gets calls from people all over who want to fight gerrymandering or want to organize around other issues. “Who’s helping the regular person who wants a dog park in their community?” Ms. Fahey asked. “We challenged the assumption you have to wait for someone else, or look to a politician to fix a problem. Some 27-year-old can get a lot of people excited about gerrymandering and amend the constitution.”

Jukay Hsu

WIDENS THE PATH TO THE MIDDLE CLASS

“Job training requires a very deep investment in people. We have to think about sources of financing.”

Amazon’s move to Queens will make New York’s shortage of software developers far worse. At the same time, lots of low-income New Yorkers would love those jobs — but don’t have the skills.

Is there a way to solve both problems at once?

Jukay Hsu has some suggestions. He’s the founder of Pursuit (which used to be called C4Q, and before that, Coalition for Queens). It trains talented young people in dead-end jobs to become software developers.

Pursuit starts with a 10-month intensive boot camp where students learn coding, professional skills and how to navigate the tech industry. Then, for the next three years, they get coaching and support while working.

That’s expensive, but, Mr. Hsu says, good job training is. “Most job training doesn’t really have results,” he said. “It’s really hard to do this well.”

There are lots of coding boot camps. Pursuit is different because it aims at students who can’t pay. Such projects often get their money from charity or grants, but that would have kept Pursuit too small.

Since the program started five years ago, about 550 students have graduated from or are studying in Pursuit’s boot camp — largely female, without college degrees, immigrant, black or Hispanic.

Mr. Hsu has come up with new ways to pay for the work. Pursuit’s students do pay tuition — but only after they graduate and get a job paying at least $60,000. Then they pay 12 percent of their salary for three years.

Pursuit raises the upfront money in two ways. One is to issue a bond, as public infrastructure projects do. Pursuit found investors to put up $750,000 for the first bond. If enough students graduate, get high-paying jobs and pay tuition, the investors will profit. Mr. Hsu is now seeking multiple millions for the organization’s next bond.

The other way is to charge companies. Companies already pay recruiters to find software developers. Now, instead, they can pay Pursuit to retrain their own blue-collar workers.

So far, only two companies, Blue Apron and Managed by Q, are doing this. But another company is about to start: Pursuit will run a training center inside Amazon.

Jennie Joseph

SAVES BABIES

“It’s a place to let off that toxic stress. We can’t fix your housing issue or your violent partner. But we can hear you.”

One of the sad mysteries of American life is our infant mortality rate, which ranks 130th in the world out of 184 countries, just ahead of East Timor.

And complications for the mother and baby are concentrated among African-American mothers. In a study of New York City hospital births, African-American mothers with a college education had more pregnancy complications than white mothers who didn’t finish high school.

Increasingly, researchers believe it’s because of the effect on the body of the stress and feeling of powerlessness caused by racism.

Jennie Joseph may have an answer. She is a midwife, trained in her hometown, London, who practices in a suburb of Orlando, Fla. Her patients are largely Haitian, African-American or Latina. She takes any patient, regardless of ability to pay or how advanced the pregnancy. And yet their rate of prematurity is half the local and national average. (Studies are here and here.)

Ms. Joseph believes that treating patients with dignity protects them from stress.

She designed her clinic to help patients feel respected, valued and in control of their pregnancies, starting with a welcoming, no-drama front desk that doesn’t ask about ability to pay. “Our receptionist is probably the most important person on the team,” said Ms. Joseph. “Greet, be nice, wipe the tears.”

Ms. Joseph teaches her method, which she calls the JJ Way. But it’s hard to spread her ideas in a system in which the economic incentives lead to worse care: For example, a premature baby (average cost: $50,000) is very profitable for most hospitals.

Ms. Joseph can barely keep her own doors open. “We bill, and when people can pay, they do, and when they can’t, we don’t charge. There’s not a business model here.”

Alison Green

PROTECTS COMMUNITIES FROM WILDFIRE

“People think there’s nothing they can do to protect their homes. Then the light bulb comes on: ‘I am not helpless. I can do something here.’”

Deschutes County, Ore., is a declared wildfire hazard area. But in the last 15 years, only three houses have burned down. Allison Green has had a lot to do with that success. She’s coordinator for Deschutes County of Project Wildfire, teaching residents how to keep their homes safe from fire.

That means showing them how to clear anything flammable within 30 to 50 feet of a house. “Fire moves through a landscape throwing embers two to three miles ahead,” said Ms. Green. “If they find flammable materials, they smolder and ignite.”

“The science behind defensible space has been around since the late 1990s,” she said. “I translate that science to residents. These are really simple changes, but not something a lot of folks think about.”

Her biggest challenge: Twenty people move to Deschutes County every day. They all need to learn how to protect their homes — and put in the work to do so.

In August, three houses burned — the first home casualties since 2003. It was a high-wind day, and there had been no rain for more than two months. “These folks hadn’t found the time to put in defensible space correctly,” Ms. Green said. “It was devastating, but the way that fire was burning, it could have been 3,000 home losses.”

Carol Tracy

GETS POLICE TO RECOGNIZE RAPE IS A CRIME

“When we first sat down, it felt pretty adversarial. But he realized we were serious and looking for solutions.”

Getting the police to prosecute rape is a problem everywhere, but few police departments were quite as bad as Philadelphia’s before 2000. The department declared hundreds of rape cases each year to be “unfounded”— without investigation.

Carol Tracy is the director of the city’s Women’s Law Project. In 1999, she pushed a new police commissioner, John Timoney, to let advocates for rape survivors read through the case files. Police and advocates often saw one another as adversaries, if not enemies. But a series of meetings with Ms. Tracy convinced Mr. Timoney. “We didn’t want to punish people and do a ‘gotcha,’” she said.

The next year, Ms. Tracy and five or so colleagues went to department headquarters and spent three days reading through the files, flagging questionable practices. That review still happens every spring.

Over time, police practices have greatly improved, Ms. Tracy said. And now the advocate reviews are starting to spread — for example, to the New York Police Department.

While reading the files, Ms. Tracy noticed that the F.B.I. defined rape as “carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” If that sounds archaic, it’s because it was written in 1929. “That came as news to all of us,” she said.

Ms. Tracy and the Women’s Law Center wrote to Robert Mueller, who was then the F.B.I.’s director, asking the bureau to amend the definition. That started a national movement to expand the definition of rape as a crime to be taken seriously — which didn’t happen until 2012. “It comes back in so many ways for me how marginal sexual assault has been to public policy,” Ms. Tracy said.

Mihir Shah

FIGHTS BREAST CANCER

“There are lots of gizmos out there. Innovation is only one aspect.”

Few women around the world can get a mammogram. They are far from a clinic, or lack the money, or just don’t know about breast cancer. But now there’s another kind of breast exam that could reach women that mammograms don’t.

The iBreastExam machine fits in your hand, runs on batteries, costs as little as a dollar per scan, is painless, uses no radiation and is simple enough that community health workers can do breast exams.

Mihir Shah, who is from Mumbai, India, studied computer engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. With colleagues, he formed a company in January 2009 to make a machine that could democratize the breast exam. The first attempt was too big and too expensive. Then they used a Drexel-developed sensor to create iBreastExam.

That was, however, far less than half the battle — and it’s the second part that trips up most entrepreneurs, especially those making products for poor countries. “There are so many great technologies out there,” said Matthew Campisi, a co-founder. “That doesn’t make them a successful product.”

In 2016 they began testing iBreastExam in India with some health organizations, and at a private hospital in Bengaluru. Those tests allowed them to collect data on the machine’s accuracy and sensitivity (see here and here) and learn useful lessons about how to proceed.

So far, iBreastExam has been cleared by regulatory bodies in 10 countries. One is the United States. Mr. Shah said that 70 percent of uninsured women don’t get routine mammograms. “We’re not saying it’s a replacement for a mammogram,” he said. “We’re saying there are areas where it can help.”

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”

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