Skip to main content

Connections



I have reached the stage of Maryland summer where I am just plain angry about the heat. I try not to take it personally, but…it does feel like a personal attack. 

Due to the extreme heat over the weekend Howard County Government shared the locations of local cooling centers on social media.


This made me wonder how many are accessible by public transit. All, I hope. But I have some research in my future.

No, I most likely would not need to use public transit to get to a cooling center. I still care about making sure that others in our community have access to cool places during dangerously hot weather. Not everyone has a car. 

I continue to be appalled by locals who care about county initiatives only if they themselves will benefit, which is probably why I make it a point to examine ways that we as a community should keep working to remove obstacles and open doors for those around us.

Ahem. Sermon over.

Howard County Government has put together a Food Connection Map which does include transit information. Good for them.

Howard County Food Connection Map, Local Health Improvement Coalition 

It’s an interactive map and you can tell just by looking at it that a lot of work went into it. Your tax dollars at work, as they say. I’m thrilled. I’d love to know how the county is connecting this resource with people who need the information. (Ooh, more research ahead.)

I have a great deal of leisure time and I spend several hours every day looking for local stories online for the blog. So I know about cooling centers and the summer food resources and the Food Connection Map. I have home internet, a smart phone, an iPad. 

How do people who truly need these resources get connected with this information?

The first thing that comes to mind is the library. Which is also a cooling center. And a home base for some of the summer food programs. 

Yes, our libraries are places to borrow books, music, movies (and more) but they also provide computers and internet and opportunities to connect with very important information. 



The Howard County Department of Community Resources and Services is promoting an upcoming podcast interview with Library president and CEO, Tonya Aikens. 

The library isn't what it used to be. And that's a good thing!

"We have to engage, listen and respond," says Tonya Aikens, the president & CEO, @hocolibrary when talking about leading one the county's greatest resources.

Hear more in her conversation with host and DCRS Director Jackie Scott about how she encourages programming alongside community, in our July podcast #hococommunitychat, which drops on the first.

For back episodes, visit htts://bit.ly/ HoCoCommunityChatPodcast .

It sounds like a cool listen for one of those hot Maryland days ahead.


Village Green/Town² Comments


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more