More Not in the News Round Up

Still catching up on my long list of blogging topics . . . so here some more things you should know that I didn’t get to yesterday! More for the “good news” portion of the blog!

DOWNTOWN COMMUNITY GARDENS MEETING

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, August 23, 7:00, Ambrosia Coop, 225 W. Lakelawn Place (off Langdon St.). We will continue our discussion of where we go from here and ways to network and work together with other groups to get more community gardens downtown. Join us if you can. Call Sue on her cell phone (332-0565) if you have trouble finding us. Hope to see you there.

WOMEN’S INT’L LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM DINNER

Madison WILPF Annual Peace & Freedom Dinner
Friday, August 19
St. Mark’s Lutheran Church
605 Spruce St.
Madison, WI 53715 (off Park St. across from Copps)

5:30 Appetizers
6:15 Dinner
Eggplant & Zucchini Parmesan
7:00 Key Note Speaker
Fab 14 Wisconsin Dist. 4
Sen. Lena Taylor
“Building real Democracy in Wisconsin – What Will It Take?”

Call now for reservations: 244-6595 Nancy; ncg_53704@yahoo.com
Suggested donation $20 per person

NORTHSIDE PLANNING COUNCIL POTLUCK AND ICE CREAM SOCIAL

August 24, 6-8pm, Lakeview Lutheran Church (4001 Mandrake Road).
Join the NPC Board, your friends and neighbors as we say goodbye to summer and celebrate the beginning of a new school year with food, community updates and networking. Bring a dish to share; you can enter our taste contest; you can bring your best summer picture for possible inclusion in the next Northside News; and BRING THE KIDS for ALL THE FREE ICE CREAM they can eat!! Contact Scott Heinig for more information 661-0060.

NEED COOL STUFF

From now until Thursday, August 25th the Grassroots Leadership College is asking for the donation of good salable household objects, tools, and ‘cool stuff’ to sell at a fundraising yard sale the weekend of August 26-28th. Please drop off your donations on the porch at 2017 Jenifer Street (catty corner from the Jenifer Street Market near the corner of Jenifer Street and Division Street) until August 25th. Then plan to come and buy back other people’s treasures that weekend. Make space in your apartment,house or garage AND support a worthy cause. Items can just be dropped off, or call 241-3078 with questions or to schedule a drop off of larger items. If you are tidy but would like to help anyway you can make a mail donation to GLC here: Grassroots Leadership College, 1321 E. Mifflin St., Suite 201, Madison, WI 53703, or donate online here.

Help us support GLC’s continued good community work guided by the philosophy that “Everyone a Learner, Everyone a Teacher, Everyone a Leader”

WILLY ART PROJECT

Draft Public Art Concept

Poetry in Sidewalks Survey

The MNA Public Art Committee

The MNA Public Art Committee has been meeting with the City of Madison arts coordinator to develop a plan for public art in the Willy Street corridor. Interest in including public amenities and art percolated up during the neighborhood discussions about the Willy Street reconstruction. The MNA Public Art Committee was formed at the request of interested neighbors attending an MNA board meeting this spring.

Excitement about the possibilities along the corridor are building. The current focus is on the following areas:

• Gateway Project – This will be a commissioned work to be placed at the gateway to the neighborhood. The preferred location is the street median in the 600 block between Machinery Row and the Gateway Mall.
• Historic Markers – The neighborhood is rich with history, people and place of interest. Historic markers help bring together the context of the neighborhood both to residents and visitors.
• Poetry in Sidewalks – This would be a pilot of a program that could occur throughout the city (information). The current focus is on Madison’s 3 poet laureates: John Tuschen, Andrea Musher, and Fabu Carter-Brisco. One poem from each poet would be selected by the neighborhood and stamped into the sidewalk somewhere along Willy Street. This part of the project is the most time sensitive due to the current construction.
• Murals – There may be opportunity to create murals on private property along Willy Street.
• Other Amenities – Other public amenities such as benches.

What can you do?
Your ideas and opinions are important to the development and execution of this project. Neighborhood input is important and required to select poetry, historic markers, amenities, gateway piece, etc.

Attend an MNA Public Art Committee meeting.

Attend MNA Board meetings.

Participate in surveys regarding the public art plan and opportunities for Willy Street. The city is developing a Survey Monkey tool to collect feedback from the neighborhood.

ONE MORE FOR WILLY ST

Poetry in Sidewalks is a project included in the Williamson Street Public Art Concept.   The MNA Board will be selecting a poems at the August 18 board meeting.

The MNA Public Art Committee as decided to include a selection from Joel Gersmann to be included in the sidewalk in front of the Broom Street Theater based on positive responses from the neighborhood survey.   The Broom Street Theater has provided three selections for our consideration.

Please indicate your preference in the following survey:

Willy Street Art – Selections of Joel Gersmann Poetry.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFF2Z2dTNFRpV1pzTE1taFdaWk9aZ0E6MA

Additional information about the Williamson Street Public Art Concept is available on the MNA Website.

ART OPENING

Artists’ Opening Reception
Friday, September 2, 2011
5-9 pm

Absolutely Art (2322 Atwood Ave.) & Café Zoma are proud to feature the works of painter Tiffany Olson and the collective works of Operation Fresh Start students. Please join us for live music by Catfish Stephenson, delicious catering by Bunky’s Café and fantastic art the night of the reception.

Inspired by the beautiful forms and colors of nature, Tiffany Olson creates bizarre new worlds that invite the viewer to step into an alternate reality that is extraordinary, and yet familiar. As a vegetable gardener, a cook, and a painter, she has in an intimate relationship with her subjects from seed, to canvas, to plate. Like the fusion of ingredients that occurs when food is cooked, the elements in her paintings simmer together until they form their unique blend. While it is easy for people to appreciate a delicious meal, it can be difficult to make the connection to the landscape that produced it. By blurring the line between landscapes and still lives, Tiffany hopes to inspire the viewer to contemplate the relationships between the land, plants and humans.

Operation Fresh Start is a local nonprofit that provides employment training and education services to at-risk youth. Affordable housing construction and public natural areas conservation are used as work platforms to powerfully transform individuals as well as our community at large. Participants are supported by caring staff to overcome immense barriers to change. A past participant, Tu, says, “One thing I love about fresh start is that they don’t give up on you. There is so much love and support here, no matter what your background.” These paintings are the result of a teambuilding project to help our young people reflect on the work they’ve done for their community. Each image represents homes built by our participants that are now occupied by a family in our area. Some of the paintings represent the connections made with nature through the work done by our conservation crews. We are hoping to raise awareness of the important work done at Operation Fresh Start by telling our amazing story through these paintings.

The exhibit will run from September 1-30. Please visit us on Facebook for updates on this show and other events at Absolutely Art.

FOOD SOLUTIONS

Oasis in a Food Desert
Bringing a Farmers Market to WIC Clients

A new farmers’ market on Madison’s east side is making fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables more accessible to area residents including participants in Public Health Madison and Dane County’s (PHMDC) Women Infant and Nutrition (WIC) program. This program, serving 7000 pregnant women, new moms and children in Dane County provides nutrition education and monthly checks to purchase nutritious foods at local grocery stores. In addition, WIC families are encouraged to consume more fresh fruits, vegetables and herbs by being provided with additional checks each summer to purchase locally grown produce at area farmers’ markets and farm stands.

The new market, located outside the public health office, at 2705 East Washington Avenue, is in an area where there are few convenient options for WIC participants to use their farmers’ market checks.

A frequent problem of low income families is that they often live in areas where fresh, healthy food is not easily available. Getting to full service supermarkets requires the time and expense of a two way bus trip and the inconvenience of wrestling heavy grocery bags on the bus trip home. Foods that are available in the vicinity are often sold by fast food outlets or gas station convenience stores – not typical sources for healthy, fresh vegetables. These areas are often labeled “food deserts”, and such deserts do not promote the health and well being of the local community.

“This new market stand is a win-win situation,” according to WIC Nutritionist, Cheryl Levendoski. “Our clients come out of our East Washington WIC clinic with farmers market checks, and have high quality, fresh picked fruits and veggies available right outside the door that they can spend these checks on.”

This new farmers market is the result of a collaborative effort between PHMDC, Hawthorne Library and the Farley Center for Peace Justice and Sustainability (a local nonprofit created in 2010 to carry on the work of Drs. Gene and Linda Farley who spent their lives and careers in the service of social justice). The Farley Center, which owns 43 acres in the Town of Springdale, provides land and teaches farming and marketing skills to “socially disadvantaged farmers” – a USDA term that includes farmers whom have been discriminated against in the past, such as women, minorities and recent immigrants.

These activities converged with WIC recently when Alan Chancellor and his wife Tina, new farmers who were part of the Center’s Incubator Program and the Spring Rose Growers Cooperative, opened a farm stand just outside the East Washington Avenue WIC office. Every Wednesday by 10:00 am, Alan and Tina set up large tables to the entrance of PHMDC’s office and stack them with produce harvested by several co-op members early that morning. Market Wednesdays are long full days for the Chancellors who get help manning their farm stand from their own children and from, other young people involved in the Neighborhood Intervention Program. Whether it is new potatoes, red beets or squash blossoms, the Chancellor’s not only sell their produce, but also provide families with education and ideas on how to use these foods to make tasty meals for families.

“Our office shares a building with the Hawthorne Branch of the Madison Public Library in a strip mall that sees lots of traffic, and we are equally happy if others using the mall find this a convenient source of healthy food as well,” said Levendoski. “We hope that this small pilot project could become a model for other WIC locations and for other communities living in a food desert.”

The market operates outside of 2705 E. Washington Ave every Wednesday between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm.

For more information about WIC, see PHMDC’s website.

For additional information about the Farley Center, see their website.

WISCONSIN UPRISING VIDEO UPRISING MEETING

Wednesday, August 24, 7:00 p.m.
WYOU Community Television
(WYOU Studio or the Community Room)
Social Justice Center 1202 Williamson street
Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Tentative Agenda:
New Development
Legalise
System Management
Fund Raising

Background:
The WYOU Board of Directors has authorized creation of a Wisconsin Uprising Archiving project to preserve video generated in covering the 2011 February and March Wisconsin uprising against the governor’s budget bills.

The goal is to collect documentary video footage so as to make it available in one place as well as to preserve it for historical education for future generations.

You do not need to be a WYOU member or a videographer, everybody is welcome.

If you are interested but cannot attend but like to be keep informed, please contact:
archive @ wyou.org
608 249 8428