Blog

By Julia Camp, July 10, 2020, Sonoma West. The Sebastopol Center for the Arts and the Poet Laureate Selection Committee hosted a virtual reception on July 12 to honor Sonoma County's newest poet laureates. The event honored the outgoing county poet laureate, Maya Khosla, and celebrate the incoming laureate Phyllis Meshulam and youth poet laureate Zoya Ahmed. The Sebastopol Center for the Arts is home to the Poet Laureate Selection Committee and is composed of representatives from each of the...

Public Citizen Larry Barnett, July 9, 2020, Sonoma Sun. The doorbell rings and outside the door is a well-dressed young white man. How do you feel? Or, outside the door is a well-dressed young black man. Do you feel differently? Or, in either case, the young men are poorly dressed. How does that affect your feelings? Or, it’s a policeman dressed in uniform at your door; what then? The emotional experiences of fear and safety begin in infancy. How we resolve such feelings as infants resides...

By Bill Lynch, July 13, 2020, Sonoma Index Tribune. Why is my little town of Sonoma so white? That question has crossed my mind more than once, especially recently. As best as I can remember, there were no African Americans at Sonoma Valley High School during my four years there. The residential neighborhoods of my childhood days in Sonoma were just as white. There were no reported cases of redlining, but I remember one incident when I overheard adults discussing a petition to keep a black...

Brian Semsem, a pastor based in Fresno, California, who has been working with troubled youth and adults for most of his professional life, says when he first learned about ACEs in 2014 from a colleague in a county foster youth program, “I started seeing numbers over everybody’s head.

By Sonoma Sun Staff writers, July 9, 2020. Like most cities, the City of Sonoma finds itself in a financial hole due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to cope with deep cuts in revenue, city staff developed a set of three different five-year financial projection plans for City Council review, named Optimistic, Base Conservative, and Pessimistic. [ Please click here to read more. ]

By Christian Kellan, July 6, 2020, Sonoma Index Tribune. It was the final meeting for long-time Planning Commissioner Dick Fogg when the county’s Board of Zone Adjustments (BZA) met on June 25 – Fogg’s retirement was announced four days later. But all three items on the agenda pertained to the first district, the one Fogg has represented since 2002, on issues whose importance hasn’t diminished over the past 18 years: wineries, affordable housing and water use. [ Please click here to read more. ]

By Lorna Sheridan, July, 6, 2020, Sonoma Index Tribune. Five years after opening its doors in the Maxwell Village Shopping Center, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma Valley is giving up the lease on its teen-centric club location. Club CEO Cary Snowden told the Index-Tribune that while the program “continues to thrive,” because it is a free offering, “the financial sustainability of the building itself is just too much with the onset of COVID.” “We’ve always known taking over that big...

Regulation Before Education: The Roots and Fruits of a Trauma-Informed School July 29-31st | 12:00 - 3:00pm EDT These times are unsettling in many ways. But the disruptions have widened opportunities for different ways of being, thinking and doing in education. The trauma-informed schools movement has never been more relevant. Schools committed to cultivating trauma-informed change can successfully buffer the adverse effects of the pandemic, economic collapse, and persistent racial...

By Will Schmitt, July 1,2020, Press Democrat. Santa Rosa residents continued to press the City Council this week to defund or reform the Santa Rosa Police Department as city officials, reacting to the protests over George Floyd’s killing, held hearings in an effort to improve community relations and increase scrutiny of the police department. [ Please click here to read more. ]

By Lori Carter, July 1,2020, Press Democrat. Santa Rosa police will begin collecting demographic data on people its officers stop earlier than state law requires in an effort to quantify and ultimately prevent racial profiling. Chief Ray Navarro said Wednesday the department is working to begin gathering certain demographic details about pedestrian and traffic stops by 2021, one year earlier than required by the state Racial and Identity Profiling Act. The law, passed in 2015, gave smaller...

ACEs Connection will begin highlighting ACEs and Resilience initiatives by county. We're starting this effort off by listing the recent ACEs Aware grantees by county.

By Katherine Minkiewicz, June 27,2020, The Healdsburg Tribune. Inequality in schools — Nonprofit Corazón Healdsburg held a Community Conversation on June 23 surrounding the topic of racial and academic divides in Healdsburg schools. This was the second live stream event in a series of interactive community conversations hosted by the organization. [ Please click here to read more. ]