Happily Divorced And After

YUCAIPA., CA— After more than a year and a half of being closed to the public, the doors are open again at Crafton Hills College’s (CHC) Learning Resource Center (LRC) Art Gallery, with a new exhibit celebrating the talent of the College’s faculty.

Six faculty members – including Art Department Chair Renée Azenaro and staffer Michael Bedoya – each selected works representing different mediums and interpretations to display inside the space now through Oct. 19.

The show, which opened Sept. 31, celebrates the important connection art has on CHC and the surrounding communities, Azenaro said.

“Honestly, art itself is the ‘connective tissue’ for all of humanity and society,” she said. “It’s about bringing the community together. It’s the nexus and the connection to get new ideas.”

The show also signals a bit of normalcy to the Art Department and the Roadrunner campus following the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the department took things online with a virtual faculty art show but being back in the gallery space allows for guests to take their time to absorb each piece and reflect on what they see.

“Art is so important because it fulfills parts of our life,” said Azenaro. “We are happy to be back in the space and put up physical work.”

There was not a limit imposed on how many pieces each artist could submit, nor a timeline. For example, Bedoya has three works on display, including a piece he created in the 1990s.

The painting, he explained, was originally sold to relatives, but when his uncle died, Bedoya noticed the painting was no longer on display at his uncle’s home.

“Three of my pieces are on the back wall (of the gallery), and the one furthest to the left is the one my aunt was on the verge of throwing away, which I think is funny,” Bedoya continued with a chuckle. “Exhibitions aren’t about new work necessarily, but ‘your work.’”

The Art Faculty Exhibition is open to the entire Roadrunner community and the public from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Admission is free. Chairs and seating areas will be set up inside the space to allow for visitors to “look in front of works just like at a museum and enjoy the art,” Azenaro said.

To learn more about the show or for directions to the gallery, visit www.craftonhills.edu/art-gallery.

IF YOU GO

What: Crafton Hills College Faculty Exhibition

Where: LRC Art Gallery

When: 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, now through Oct. 19

Info: www.craftonhills.edu/art-gallery

APRA HARBOR, GUAM (Oct. 02, 2021) Engineman 1st Class Anthony Munz, from San Bernardino, Calif., secures damage control equipment aboard the Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Jackson (LCS 6). Jackson, part of Destroyer Squadron Seven, is on a rotational deployment, is operating in the U.S. 7th fleet area of operations to enhance interoperability with partners and serve as a ready-response force in support of free and open Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Andrew Langholf/released)

OAKLAND, CA — Today, at a press conference highlighting California’s support for small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation that will greatly expand opportunities for outdoor dining across the Golden State. Authored by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills), Assembly Bill (AB) 61 will empower local jurisdictions and the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) to provide much-needed regulatory flexibility to neighborhood restaurants struggling with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Neighborhood restaurants are the backbone of communities across California, but too many are barely hanging on by a thread,” said Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel. “Outdoor dining has been a critical lifeline that has helped these establishments keep their doors open during these challenging times. AB 61 provides important flexibility so that restaurants can safely expand outdoor dining and continue to serve the communities they call home. I applaud Governor Newsom for his thoughtful leadership in protecting both public health and small businesses as we continue to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

AB 61 provides restaurants with regulatory flexibility on a number of key issues, including enabling more outdoor food preparation and service, allowing restaurants to better use their own spaces for increased outdoor dining capacity, and extending existing ABC orders allowing for alcohol service on outdoor premises. AB 61 also includes an urgency clause, meaning the measure goes into effect immediately.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged small businesses across the state—particularly in the restaurant industry. While the National Restaurant Association reports [1] modest employment growth in the last 2 months, with California leading the nation in job gains, employment remains below pre-pandemic levels and nearly 4 in 5 restaurants are understaffed. As of August 2021 [2], California also had 234,800 fewer eating and drinking establishments than it did in August 2019.

“The changes we made to support outdoor dining during the pandemic saved countless jobs and businesses, and Angelenos have been clear that they want to see these improvements stay in place for good,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “I am proud to support Assemblymember Gabriel’s legislation that will enable us to make outdoor dining a permanent feature in Los Angeles and across the state.”

“The restaurant industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. With indoor dining rooms still closed in most places, outdoor dining has become an important lifeline for restaurants,” stated Madelyn Alfano, Immediate Past Chair of the California Restaurant Association Board of Directors and owner of Maria’s Italian Kitchen, a neighborhood Italian restaurant with several locations in the San Fernando Valley. “AB 61 will help to address issues restaurants face as we have created outdoor spaces to continue to serve our customers. Nothing is more important to me than the safety of our customers and the ability to continue to provide delicious meals for my community.

By Lou Yeboah

The events of the last days is bringing a trap [allurements, baits, enticements] to you the people of this world. You have no idea it’s a baited snare designed to take you down, says the Lord. It will look like calm, but the real danger lies in what you can’t see. It is the unseen enemy lurking in the barren brush that blends in with the crowd, who represents the grave danger. Make no mistake, this is a war. Be not deceived, the thief comes to kill, steal, and destroy. “Escape for your life. Look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.” – [Genesis 19:17].

Unfortunately, those who miscalculate the times, believing there’s plenty of time to come to Jesus Christ, and put it off, “shall not escape.” For, when they shall say, peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Therefore, let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ [1 Thessalonians 5:3-6;9]. Get under God’s umbrella so that you will be counted as one who escaped. I tell you; judgment is so near I can almost hear its footsteps outside. Some will escape. Some will not. You can choose. But I know, like one crying “WOLF” there will be many who hear my warning to seek God while they still can, whose ears are dull of hearing from being told so many times. But it is still my responsibility to warn you from the Lord not to delay seeking Him.

For as He approached and saw the city, He wept over it, saying, “If you knew this day what it [would bring] but now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days will come on you when your enemies will build an embankment against you, surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you and your children within you to the ground, and they will not leave one stone on another in you, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” [Luke 19:41-44].

Foolish people without heart, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear. The end is at hand. Time is running out. [Romans 13:11] It will not be long before this present age as you know it will end, it is later than you think. And that’s why Satan has marked you for destruction. Your enemy has turned up the heat. He is stalking you like a lion, hiding in the grass, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. Dare not be ignorant of his methods and strategies of warfare against you. You see, the devil knows this war is his last chance, because only a short time remains before I [Christ] returns. He knoweth that he hath but a brief time.” And he will stop at nothing to destroy you. He’s going to use all of his weapons against you – all subtleties, deceits, and devices. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: [1 Peter 5:8-9].

Wake up. Watch and Pray! It will not be long before this present age as you know it will end, it is later than we think.

By Antonio? ?Ray? ?Harvey? ?|? ?California? ?Black? ?Media?

With seven meetings left before drafting their final report, the California’s Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals has enlisted the assistance of Dr. Darrick Hamilton, a scholar and leading national authority on race and public policy.

He is expected to bring an economic perspective to the work the group is doing.

The task force said it approved the appointment of the economics and urban policy professor at New York City’s The New School and charged him with helping to quantify what compensation should be for Black people living in California.

Task force member Loyola Marymount University psychology professor Cheryl Grills praised Hamilton’s selection.

“To the extent we are setting the stage for the federal reparations process, professor Hamilton brings a level of credibility that would bode well for the ability of our work, not only for California but for the nation,” she said.

Hamilton was not present at the September virtual reparations task force meeting but his perspectives on reparations and closing the racial wealth gap were clear in a discussion with Chicago-area journalist Mark Miller during a City of Evanston RoundTable podcast.

Reparations “grounds inequality and resource deprivation” in contrast to changing some “behavioral attitudes,” Hamilton told Miller, making the case for correcting past wrongs and getting people to understand why there should be change.

“Reparations is a retrospective, race-specific policy aimed at addressing both racial and economic justice,” Hamilton continued. “It has with it a component of truth and reconciliation, which not only provides dignity to the history that Black people have experienced. But it helps change the narratives about poverty and inequality more broadly.”

Hamilton has been involved in crafting progressive policy proposals, such as Baby Bonds, which are trust accounts for low income kids funded by taxpayers.  He is also a proponent of the Federal Job Guarantee, policy that would mandate government to provide a job for any person that needs one. Those initiatives have garnered national media attention and served as inspirations for legislative proposals across the country at the federal, state, and local levels.

Hamilton also served as a member of the economic committee of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force and testified before several U.S. Senate and House committees, including the Joint Economic Committee on the nation’s potential policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic-induced health and economic crises

The New School’s Henry Cohen professor of Economics and Urban Policy, Hamilton is also the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification and Political Economy at the university where he started teaching last January.

Founded in 1919, the New School is a private research university in New York City.

Hamilton, Grills said, is “considered one of the country’s foremost economists,” scholars, and “public intellectuals.” He was recently profiled in the New York Times, Mother Jones magazine, and the Wall Street Journal.

In 2017, Politico Magazine featured Hamilton in its feature “50 Ideas Shaping American Politics and the People Behind Them.” He is also a member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation in partnership with the Group Health Foundation’s inaugural class of Freedom Scholars.

Task force member Jovan Scott Lewis, chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley, said Hamilton’s work will involve examining slavery, social issues, unjust laws, educational discrimination, loss of wealth, and systematic oppression.

“From an academic and intellectual standpoint, (Hamilton’s) research, is and would be for our purposes, directly relevant because we are thinking about how to spread out in specific areas,” Lewis said.

On Sept.30, 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the state’s historic reparations bill into law, Assembly Bill (AB) 3121.

AB 3121, titled “The Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” created a nine-member commission to investigate the history of slavery in the United States, the extent of California’s involvement in slavery, segregation, and the denial of Black citizens their constitutional rights.

Members of the task force elected Kamilah V. Moore, a Los Angeles-based activist and attorney, as its chair. The group also elected Dr. Amos Brown, pastor of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and president of that city’s NAACP branch, as vice chair.

Besides Moore, Brown, Grills and Hamilton, the other task force members are state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena); Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D-Gardena); Lisa Holder, a racial and social justice attorney; and Monica Montgomery Steppe, a San Diego city councilmember.

Attorney Don Tamaki, Esq., an attorney best known for his role in the Supreme Court case of Korematsu v. the United States rounds out the nine-member panel. Tamaki overturned the conviction of Fred Korematsu who refused to be taken into custody during the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II.

SAN BERNARDINO, CA— San Bernardino County 5th District Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr. is proud to announce the approval of the contract with Social Work Action Group (SWAG) as of the Board of Supervisors meeting on October 5, 2021. SWAG will spearhead the “homeless services plan” in collaboration with the 5th district and Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr.

“It is vital that we work with providers like SWAG to engage with chronically homeless individuals, especially “Super-Utilizers” of emergency medical services to help them create a life off the streets. We must also work to link medical, predominately substance abuse, services to our identified population of people without stable shelter.” – San Bernardino County 5th District Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr.

SWAG was originally found in 2017, composed of individuals with diverse educations and experience in a variety of social services. They specialize in program design and implementation of direct services to people experiencing homelessness. Unlike many short-term solutions to homelessness, SWAG’s vision involves a systematic approach that ignores the focus on services themselves in favor of positive long-term outcomes with measurable success.

Call the San Bernardino County 5th district office at (909)-387-4565 for more information.

VICTORVILLE, CA—-The City of Victorville is seeking veterans to honor during its 25th Annual Veterans Day Celebration. The event will begin at 8:45 a.m. with a Freedom Mile Run. The parade will follow at 9 a.m., running from 7th Street and Tracy to Forrest Avenue.

The ceremony will take place at 9:30 a.m., featuring marching bands, entertainers, military units and guest speakers.  The online form to honor our local veterans is due Oct. 22 at https://www.victorvilleca.gov/government/city-departments/community-services/recreation/special-events/veterans-day-parade.

SAN BERNARDINO, CA— Last week, the First District staff had the pleasure of touring Victor Valley College’s state-of-the-art Public Safety Training Center in Apple Valley.

Led by Program Director Dave Oleson and Dean Dr. McKenzie Tarango, the 9-acre campus is described as a “village under a roof,” offering hands-on disaster training for its Criminal Justice, Fire Technology and Emergency Medical Services students.

In addition to having a cutting-edge indoor tactical shooting range with a 3-D projection scenario program, the campus boasts a four-acre prop yard with a myriad of live simulation training opportunities.

Underground tunnels, a collapsed “freeway bridge,” a five-story fire tower with burn rooms, and a derailed train car are among the props available to students. The unique setup allows students from each program to collaborate on training exercises, just like first responders do every day.

High Desert high school teachers are invited to bring their students to the center’s upcoming Multi-Discipline Day on November 18. Students will learn more about the fire, criminal justice and EMS academies and get hands-only CPR training. For more information, call Sgt. Rand Padgett at (559) 908-1498.

Are you a community member interested in learning more about a career in public safety? There is a huge demand for public safety professionals in our region, and most of VVC’s graduates are offered jobs prior to graduation!

Click the link below for more information about their program!

https://www.vvc.edu/fire-technology-program

LOS ANGELES, CA— A special event was held on the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU) campus yesterday to commemorate the recent $50 million allocation from the State of California to the University. The event was highlighted by a check presentation from Watts native Assemblymember Mike Gipson, representative of California’s 64th Assembly District which includes the CDU campus. Dr. David Carlisle, president and CEO of CDU, along with other representatives and students from the university were on hand for the presentation.

“It gives me great pleasure to demonstrate our commitment to this great institution of higher learning with this check of $50 million,” said Assemblymember Gipson. “Let’s celebrate the future of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, an institution that matters to the people.”

The funding, which was approved by the California State Legislature will be used to support the university’s latest initiative offering a new four-year medical degree program which includes the construction of a new building to accommodate it. The overall impact of the proposed new medical education program that is pending review and approval by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education will benefit the state by increasing the number of Black and Latino medical graduates joining the healthcare workforce, with the first class slated to begin in Fall 2023.

“CDU believes in the ability of education advocacy and empowerment to change lives and create opportunities,” said Dr. Carlisle. “I stand a little bit prouder as we gather to acknowledge and celebrate one of this university’s most significant funding awards to date, a one-time $50 million allocation from the state of California to support our new four-year medical degree program.”

CDU was originally founded in 1966 to better serve underprivileged residents in the area and the funding signifies a new chapter for the university, which 55 years ago graduated nurses who went on to serve the Watts community. Today, as a Historically Black Graduate Institution (HBGI), the university’s graduates go on to serve communities across the nation. The new program is expected to educate 60 students annually.

The event began with an opening prayer led by Pastor Marcus Murchinson from the Tree of Life Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. A speech from Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, dean of the College of Medicine, thanked Assemblymember Gipson, the Governor of California and all other supporting government officials for contributing to this initiative. “When the dreams of a people get matched with competent and effective elected officials, you get to celebrate because reality becomes that dream,” Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith noted. “I thank you and all of those who helped put this together for us.”

The funding signifies the next phase for CDU’s growth as an independent, four-year medical institution. Currently, CDU shares a longstanding relationship with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA through the Charles R. Drew/UCLA Medical Education Program, which has successfully trained 28 medical students annually since 1979. The incoming program at CDU pending review and approval by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education will be the next phase in evolving that partnership.

The facility that will house this program on the CDU campus is expected to be 100,000 GSF and will have classrooms, virtual and standard anatomy laboratories, staff and faculty offices, as well as common spaces for all students in the university’s three schools and colleges. Construction is scheduled to begin Summer/Fall 2022.

As a testament to how this type of program enriches lives, Felisha Eugenio gave a first-hand look at how the current curriculum impacted her career. Now a CDU Doctor of Medicine resident, she emphasized how CDU played a vital role in changing her life.

“My roots here at CDU began long before residency, I am a product of its pipelines. I first began attending and then volunteering at what was once the Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Center across the street. After college, I was a student in the post-baccalaureate program here before matriculating into the Charles R. Drew/UCLA Medical Education Program. So I would not be the physician I am today without the unwavering support of Dr. Daphne Calmes and the amazing team at our medical school,” said Eugenio. “CDU’s commitment to diversity is not only evident in its educational programs but by the makeup of its student body and educators.”

The event concluded with Pastor Robert L. Taylor of the Beulah Baptist Church who delivered the closing prayer. Attendees remained afterward for an informal lunch and photo opportunities.

CDU has contributed significantly to the diversity of the nation’s healthcare workforce over the last five decades. More than 70% of the university’s graduates since 2000 are people of color and the California Wellness Foundation report estimated that one-third of all minority physicians practicing in Los Angeles County are graduates of the CDU medical school and/or residency training programs.

To learn more about Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, please visit www.cdrewu.edu.