Friday, December 28, 2001
100 Community Projects that Work
Let’s celebrate some work that good people are doing that really makes a difference. Here is a website that explores 100 great grassroots projects going on in communities around the country. You can look up some of the projects in your area, Some examples:
- Project Bread-Boston
- Corpus Christi House, in Lawrence, Mass a residence for people living with HIV and AIDS. There’s a pre-school child learning center, a free dental clinic and monthly primary care medical clinic; and an advocacy program with a full-time staffer who works with participants to help them achieve their goals and realize their rights.
- Room in the Inn-Nashville was started in 1986 by a parish priest who noticed homeless people sleeping in their car in the dead of winter. Now a dozen churches a night provide a warm place to sleep for more than 100 people every night all winter long. The whole program costs less than $60,000 a year.
- From Anchorage Alaska, this story, “Promptly at noon, a rumbling semi-trailer pulls in, bearing huge white plastic bins filled with fat, glistening pink salmon carcasses in salt water on ice. They’re free for the taking for anyone who wants them — just bring your own bag — and they’re good food, food that was being thrown away by the ton until Michael O’Callaghan got into the act.
I always recommend that you run the name of the group through a charity check to be sure you know what you need to know about their fiances, spending and affiliations. You can enter the name of the group into http://www.guidestar.com. If they take in more than $25,000 a year, they should be in there.
It is amazing how many good people there are going about their good work quietly. Find them, celebrate them. Your viewers and your readers will love you for it.
Be Careful With Your Film as You Travel
Stephanie Boswell at WDSU New Orleans reminded me that the high-intensity x-ray machines now in use at many airports for checked luggage will damage all unprocessed film — amateur, professional, or medical. Under no circumstances, therefore, should unexposed or unprocessed film or single-use cameras be packed in checked baggage. While the FAA on Sept. 20 confirmed that current x-ray equipment used at airport security checkpoints for carry-on items does not harm film, some passengers may be randomly selected to submit their carry-on items to a high-intensity scan through a machine usually located apart from the normal security checkpoints. Eastman Kodak Company advises all persons traveling by air, rail, or cruise ship to pack all film and single-use cameras in a clear plastic or mesh bag for carrying with them onboard and ask for inspection by hand when passing through security checkpoints employing high-intensity x-ray scanners. As in the past, travelers should be wary of all scanners at airports outside the US. When traveling internationally, therefore, always ask for hand-inspection of your film and single-use cameras.
Testing Racial Profiling
Jesse Jones at WLWT-Cincy did an interesting investigation into police profiling. He compared police citations that came from cops who monitor traffic from airplanes (where you could not know a driver’s race) to citations that are written by cops on the road. To his surprise, he. “Troopers wrote more than 800,000 citations initiated from the road during 1999 and 2000. Whites got 88 and 89 percent of the tickets while persons of color received close to 10 percent during the same period. Now take a look at the numbers when troopers were assisted by aircraft. Racial minorities got 12 percent of the citations in 1999 and 14 percent in 2000. Simply put, Blacks, Asians or Hispanics have a better chance of getting a ticket initiated by troopers who can only watch their car from above than from a trooper, who can see a driver’s race at street level.”
The examination is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. It does not proove that there is no racial profiling, but it is the kind of things that all of you can do to see if the ground arrests are way out of line with the ariel stops.
A Boy’s Dying Wish
This one will spark a little newsroom debate. From the London Daily Telegraph, the story of a 15 year old dying boy who wanted a last wish. It is not Disneyland — he wanted a hooker.
