From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, “How To Build A Greener City” by Michael Totty:
Urban populations around the world are expected to soar in the next 20 years, to five billion from more than three billion today. If the current rate of urbanization holds steady, cities will account for nearly three-quarters of the world’s energy demand by 2030 [...] So, cities aren’t going to have be made a little greener; they’re going to have to be rethought.
The people rest on land and weather, on time and the changing winds.
The people have come far and can look back and say,
‘We will go farther yet.’ [...]The people, yes.
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. [...]In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:
‘Where to? what next?’– Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes, 1936
DC Youth Orchestra (at Eastern Senior High School, 1700 East Capitol Street NE)
A full day of rehearsals, masterclasses, and sectionals for advanced students on Saturday at 8:30 AM. You can sign up right here. Musicians will perform a free concert for the public at 7:00 PM the same day.
New to music? From 9:00 to noon, visit the Open House & Petting Zoo — meet the instruments and try them out.
The Posse Foundation (at Southeast Tennis and Learning Center, 701 Mississippi Avenue SE)
The Posse Foundation identifies, recruits, and trains incredible young leaders from urban public high schools and sends them in “posses” to top colleges. Volunteer to help out with Posse’s first stage of Dynamic Assessment Process (DAP) and identify young people who have outstanding leadership qualities on Saturday at 8:30 AM. Call Andres Maldonado at (202 ) 347-7071 x221 for more info.
Catalogue welcomes … Marti Worshtil, Executive Director of Prince George’s Child Resource Center, which offers a wide variety of services that foster stable child care programs, help working families, and nurture home environments where children can thrive. The Family Support Center is the hub, where family-friendly programs reach over 18,000 people a year.
1. What was your most interesting recent project, initiative, partnership, or event?
The Resource Center celebrated our 20th anniversary with a Family Festival at FedEx field. Even with torrential rain and thunder one hour before the event and horrendous heat and humidity after the storm … we had a blast! Almost 1,300 attend and danced the Cha Cha slide with the County Executive, climbed Calleva’s rock wall, skated, painted, broadcast news on CTV and learned all about County services.
How Sept. 11 changed charity in America (CNN Money): “Americans donated a record-breaking $2.8 billion to help the victims of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy [...] Four years later, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Deep South, Americans pulled out their checkbooks once again. Donations to help the survivors of Katrina outpaced September 11 charity by 90%.” According to Dr. Una Osili, director of research for the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, an incredible 66% of households in the US donated to survivors of Katrina and September 11. Is this a truly new phenomenon? Or have the developments in technology in this decade simply enabled more Americans to act upon their desires to give?
Let’s catch a glimpse into this past summer at … The Reading Connection, which opens up the world of books to at-risk families by bringing literacy services and programs into emergency shelters, domestic violence safe houses, long-term shelters, and transitional housing.
TRC’s We Are Readers aims to conquer “summer slump,” the well documented phenomenon wherein low-income children lose as much as 2.6 months of reading skill over the summer. High school soccer players, a zookeeper from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, author Mary Quattlebaum, firefighters, a chef and police officers all visited during the summer and read aloud with the kids.
The awesome results? 46 children read a total of 13,775 minutes, or about 300 minutes per child. Check it out!
The history of the United States is in vital respects the history of labor. Free men and women, working for a better life for themselves and their children, settled a continent, built a society, and created and diffused an abundance hitherto unknown to history. Free men and women, affirming their dignity as individuals and asserting their rights as human beings, developed a philosophy of democratic liberty which holds out hope for oppressed peoples across the world.
Yet our achievements, notable as they are, must not distract us from the things we have yet to achieve. If satisfaction with the status quo had been the American way, we would still be 13 small colonies straggling along the Atlantic coast. I urge all Americans, on this Labor Day, to consider what we can do as individuals and as a nation to move speedily ahead [...]
– President John F. Kennedy, Labor Day Statement, September 2, 1963
All American workers, brain workers and manual workers alike, and all the rest of us whose well-being depends on theirs, know that our needs are one in building an orderly economic democracy in which all can profit and in which all can be secure [...] There is no cleavage between white collar workers and manual workers, between artists and artisans, musicians and mechanics, lawyers and accountants and architects and miners.
Tomorrow, Labor Day, belongs to all of us. [...] The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom — a freedom which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.
– President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, September 6, 1936
By Jade Floyd
This is the first post in a two-part series by Jade Floyd. Ms. Floyd works in international public affairs in Washington, DC and serves on the Board of Catalogue non-profit DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative, a non-profit devoted to providing free arts education experiences for DC public school students and teachers. Follow her on Twitter: @DcThisWeek.
International Volunteering
My arrival to Bangkok was filled with trepidation and butterflies. I thought to myself on the plane that I was completely nuts and had lost my senses. Had I just flown around the world to a country where I knew no one to volunteer with children for a month teaching them art? Surely they had perfectly good teachers there who could give them instruction. I had spent months planning for this international volunteer program. From the onset, I knew that I wanted to partake in a program that focused on children. And after serving for four years on the board of directors for a DC-based arts education nonprofit, two years volunteer teaching at a children’s art center for two, and countless hours fundraising for similar organizations, I decided it was time to take a plunge and expand my reach outside of the US.
Can job training help solve the jobs crisis? (Washington Post Blogs): “In the southern US, 51 percent of current job openings are middle-skill, but only 43 percent of the region’s workers are trained to that level, according to a recent study by the National Skills Coalition [...] In a major speech next week, ‘s expected to propose support for job training as part of his renewed push for job growth, focusing especially on the 6.2 million Americans who’ve been out of work for more than six months.” In other words, the current jobs crisis is two-fold: too few entry-level jobs and too few workers for middle-skill opportunities. For some innovative solutions right in DC, check out Catalogue non-profits Byte Back (where adults can access Advanced Certification training and mentorship in technological fields) and New Course Restaurant and Catering (where the kitchen staff all receive comprehensive on-the-job training in commercial food preparation and customer service). Or learn about one our newest non-profits, the DC Students Construction Trades Foundation. Continue reading
As we continue our recap of cool spring/summer events, catch a glimpse into … The Theatre Lab’s Dramathon fundraiser for the “Send a Kid to Theatre Camp” campaign this past May. The Dramathon participants that raised the most for the campaign (between April 4 and May 6, 2011) had the chance to perform alongside some of DC’s most recognized professional actors in an evening of original ten-minute plays by local playwrights.
So how does this story end? The Theatre Lab exceeded its campaign goal by 19%, bringing in $58,676 for their youth scholarship fund, which enables low-income local youth to participate in The Theatre Lab’s drama programs at little or no cost. The Dramathon was to thank for over one-quarter of those funds. Check out the stars below — and learn here how you can support programs at the Theatre Lab all year round! Continue reading