A new Panera opened outside of St. Louis, MO last week that's a little bit different from all the others. It's a non-profit! The shop's motto is "Take what you need, leave your fair share," and donations cover food costs. If this location is successful, Panera hopes to open similar non-profit restaurants in every region of the country that houses its for-profit restaurants.
Check out the "Suggested Funding Levels" on the menu.
I'd like to think I'd pay my fair share, and hopefully the Missourans will too. I'd love to see some of these in Texas!
My husband and I have been married for three months as of yesterday. In the span of a lifetime, three months is nothing - our professional photos from the wedding are not even finished. We haven't yet gone on our honeymoon. But I think we truly understand the importance and significance of the vows we took.
In a random act of violence, my husband was assaulted on New Years and suffered head trauma. I can't tell you how thankful I was that we got married before the incident took place. When he was in the ambulance and emergency room, I was able to make medical decisions for him. I was able to sign for him and be with him at every moment. And this gave me great comfort to know that I was there when he needed me most. And I am continually comforted to know that at some point in our marriage, the roles will be reversed, and he will be there for me when I most need him.
Today is a day in remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I've been thinking a lot about equality since the incident. It troubles me that friends of mine have been a loving, monogamous relationship for over a decade and cannot do these things for each other in Texas because they are in a same-sex relationship and cannot legally marry. It angers me that this inequality still exists. I can't begin to imagine how it must feel to be unable to do such things for your life partner.
I hope things change because everyone deserves to be legally married to the one person they love.
I finally watched Food, Inc. and highly recommend it. The documentary continues the conversation started by The Jungle in 1901 and continued by Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma in recent years. It presents good background of the issues surrounding our food: foodborne illness, corporate bullying, employee safety and protection (or lack thereof), corn subsidies and the resulting pervasiveness in our food, animal welfare, early onset diabetes and obesity, poverty's affect on diet and health, genetic engineering, oligopoly and government lobbying, death of the small farmer, the blurring of industry and regulation, cloning...
Food, Inc. did a great job of reminding me that my dollars are my power. I've made many informed choices about what I choose to eat and not eat, but there's still room to improve for sure. Choose education over ignorance, friends. In the words of the filmmakers, "change the world with every bite!"
Today is a great day for our nation's students, yet political divisions are distracting. President Obama is addressing American students at 11:00am today to tell them directly how important their education is, not only for their own futures but also for the future of our country. Only two Presidents (Reagan and Bush 1) have ever addressed students directly in this way. From what I've read, Bush's student speech proposal was also met with significant opposition from parents whose views differed from his own politically.
My last year in the classroom (before beginning graduate school) was 2007, when Obama and Clinton were beginning their runs for presidency. My class that year was made of 100% minority children, about 85 to 90% of whose families relied on government assistance for food and other necessities. Almost every child was from a broken home, and at least 3 of my 26 students that year had fathers who were currently in prison. In the past two years, one of the fathers of one of those students murdered the child's mother, and one of my female students is now pregnant. So many of the students were victims of abuse and had unbelievably low self-worth.
I realize that these facts may seem extreme for people who haven't worked in the education system or with government or nonprofit services that benefit those at need in our country. But my classroom was not an anomaly. Every other classroom at my school had similar issues and continues to. Austin is not an aberration either. These challenges are plaguing our country's children, and it is definitely impacting our overall level of education and our country's workforce. Our dropout rate remains around 30% (thirty percent!), and our children continue to lag behind children in other developed nations, especially in math and science. Teenage pregnancy is a problem now more than ever, and the percentages of young minority males in our correctional system greatly outweighs the similar percentage for white males. These are deep, complex problems in our society.
I applaud President Obama for speaking directly to students today. He has spoken to teachers, to parents, and now he is working on motivating the students. He's asking them to take responsibility for their education, their future. And I think it's unfortunate that many children will miss out on his speech today because their parent(s) disagree with the President's stance on health care, the economy, or the Middle East. I would have felt the same way if I was a teacher during Bush 1's speech. Our young people are capable of listening and having discussions within their classes following the speech, just as we adults watch televised debates and later discuss. In fact, I hosted classroom debates in 2007 with my fifth graders regarding presidential candidate agendas. These children were not only extremely motivated and excited about the presidential candidates, but also eager to discuss what they liked and disliked about their platforms. And the icing on the cake was to hear one student explain to the others in an "I Told You So" moment that yes, Black people and women were in fact allowed to be president in our country.
President Obama is a role model to millions of children. He was a role model well before he became president. And he is doing the right thing by drawing on his own experiences as a child to create a commonality with many of our kids today and give them hope for their own futures. If little Barack Hussein Obama can do it, so can they. And believe me, they are listening.
"...when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe — that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground."
I found Obama's Notre Dame commencement speech to be very well written, and he did a great job of addressing the extremely hot topic of the day: abortion. Here are his unifying words on the issue:
So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions, let's reduce unintended pregnancies. Let's make adoption more available. Let's provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women. Those are things we can do.
I had the pleasure of attending the Texas Trails Network conference last month in Waco as a City of Austin representative. I love getting paid to do things I would have liked to do anyway :) The conference had a little more focus on urban (read: paved) trails than my co-worker and I were hoping, but still, I learned a lot and had a great day.
Some of the things I scribbled down and thought others would also find interesting:
Americans work 163 hours more each month than they did twenty years ago. That's four additional weeks of work each year!
The Lady Bird Lake Trail is now the number one tourism destination in Austin (surpassing the Capitol)! 3,000 to 15,000 people use it every day.
The keynote address was given by Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia. Penalosa was a radical and controversial mayor. Here are some of the things he accomplished in his three years as mayor:
Reduced murder rate by 2/3
Created a BRT system (bus rapid transit)
Planted over 100,000 trees
Created/refurbished over 12,000 parks
Built 50 new schools
Increased children's enrollment in school by 34%
Built over 300 kms of bike paths and greenways
Created a referendum (passed by the public) that created a yearly car free day and decided that from the year 2015 onwards, there would be no cars in Bogota during rush hours (6 AM to 9 AM and 4:30 PM to 7:30 PM).
Penalosa is very focused on equity and the notion that cities should maximize happiness for ALL of their citizens. In the context of our conference, Penalosa talked about parks and greenways. Here is one of this thoughts on parks:
Higher income groups always have access to nature at beach houses, lake cabins, mountain chalets, on vacations - or in urban settings at golf courses or large gardens. Parks allow the rest of society that contact as well.
He spoke of his experience building bike lanes that connected poorer areas of the city to downtown areas where many people worked. One point that resonated with me and I'm still ruminating on is the concept of sidewalks/pedestrian crossings at intersections. Think about a major intersection with many pedestrians. Pedestrians must enter the space of the cars by stepping down as they enter the intersection. Penalosa spoke of a different model - so simple, but quite a new one to me at least. Cars must enter the space of the pedestrians. How is that done? It's simple. The sidewalk simply continues at its same height through the intersection. In effect, this makes a speed bump for the cars and forces them to enter the pedestrian space. I wish I could find a picture of this. Imagine what a change this would be for handicapped people, children, bikers.
The only example I have found in the Austin area is in the South Park Meadows shopping center, which unfortunately is EXTREMELY car-dominated. However, the pedestrian crossings are made in this way, so that is a start.
Penalosa really is inspirational and motivating. He did things in his city that no one has been able to accomplish in America in such a short time, let alone Latin America. Here's a short excerpt of an interview with Penalosa talking about possibilities in NYC:
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