"The Blind Old Man" by Robert Bly, from Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey.
I don't know why so much sweetness hovers around us.
Nor why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoons,
Nor why the earth mutters so much about its children.
We'll never know why the snow falls through the night,
Nor how the heron stretches her long legs,
Nor why we feel so abandoned in the morning.
We have never understood how birds manage to fly,
Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,
Nor how heaven and earth can appear in a poem.
We don't know why the rain falls so long.
The ditchdigger turns up one shovel after another.
The herons go on stitching the heavens together.
We've never heard about the day we were conceived
Nor the doctor who helped us to be born,
Nor that blind old man who decides when we will die.
It's hard to understand why the sun rises,
And why our children are mostly fond of us,
And why the wind blows the curtains in the afternoon.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
Happy Valentine's Day
Love is gentle, love is kind....But above all, love is paranoid.
Picture from the Washington Post.
Picture from the Washington Post.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Fred is Dead, Long Live Fred
The Mystery Bookstore is closed. I finally bought a "Dead Fred" pen holder. This was at their cash register, and it was so popular that they started selling them. I'm keeping mine on my desk at work. Seems appropriate since Valentine's Day is coming up :b
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Pulling from the Archives
So since I don't get published regularly anymore, I'm pulling an article from my archives. I was very proud of this one - I wrote about all the political activity in the Valley during the 2008 season. I interviewed an assortment of interesting movers and thinkers - from a buttoned-up conservative democrat organizer in Lake Balboa, to a button-less yogi-turned Ron Paul activist in Studio City, and a whole mess of hardcore Clinton groupies (some crazier than others - myself included).
This was my last major article for the Sun Community Newspaper and represented a sort of climax in my political involvement too, since I was active in promoting Hillary Clinton. I was very involved with her on-line community, made phone calls from the Valley office, "bribed" friends with Clinton gadgets and gizmos (to no avail) and anything else to promote her candidacy. Alas, this created some friction among friends and family (you know who you are).
I was heartbroken when she lost, mildly consoled by Sarah Palin's potential in unraveling the effects of Obamania, and have yet find political love again. Sigh. Maybe I'll open my heart in 2012 - That Bobby Jindal is a looker.
Grassroots Campaigners Sprout in the Valley
BY NAZBANOO PAHLAVI
It’s the day before the Texas primary election, and a group of largely female volunteers are making last-minute phone calls at a Lake Balboa office used by Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Hitomi Heap-Baldwin, a volunteer from Tujunga, sounds like a seasoned campaigner on the phone. “Did you also know there is a caucus going on in the same day?” she asks a Texas voter. “Can I spend one minute telling you about it?”
This is Heap-Baldwin’s third day as a volunteer here. She is only 16 and a junior at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada.
Heap-Baldwin is one of many young activists involved this election season. For her, volunteering means making phone calls – even if that means skipping track practice. “I can’t just let someone else win if I’m interested in it. I have to do something about it,” she says.
Young adult professionals such as Burbank native Valerie Rothenberg, 26, are also active volunteers. Sen. Barack Obama inspired her involvement in his presidential campaign. “I think Obama especially inspires people to organize,” Rothenberg says. “He said, ‘this is your campaign, you can make a difference.’”
Her grassroots efforts started with 15 people in a friend’s Porter Ranch living room last spring, and grew from there. She was a precinct captain in her neighborhood, traveled to Nevada to campaign for Obama, and organized phone banking sessions at a North Hollywood park. Despite her dedication, Rothenberg, who is a freelance costume designer, has no intention of entering politics professionally.
Grassroots-level volunteers like Heap-Baldwin and Rothenberg are often the most effective agents for a candidate. Their active role is helpful with engaging voters who may be detached from the political process.
Bob Blumenfield, a democratic candidate for the 42nd Assembly District, believes that voters are more receptive to volunteer campaigners. “There’s a passion that’s there – not that paid staffers don’t have that passion; they do – but it’s undeniable as a volunteer,” he says.
Blumenfield has recruited high school volunteers from Birmingham High School in Van Nuys and Oakwood School in North Hollywood. He is planning another recruiting session at Van Nuys High School. He counts on the energy and enthusiasm that young people bring to his campaign.
Republican Tony Strickland also recognizes the importance of young volunteers. “It is extremely encouraging to see young people get involved in the political process at the grassroots level,” says the former Assembly member and current state senatorial candidate for Tom McClintock’s termed-out seat.
Some young activists simply have politics in their blood. Rothenberg’s father, Peter, is a coordinator for the Valley For Obama group and convened the Obama delegate caucus for Brad Sherman’s district in mid-April. Heap-Baldwin’s father, an Obama supporter, would clip news-related articles and hide them in her backpack.
Ashley Ingram, 22, was also raised in a politically active family in Burbank in the 1980s, when her parents volunteered for Ronald Reagan’s campaign. Ingram is a passionate young republican – one of a group that is not as easy to find in a largely democratic electorate like Los Angeles.
“It’s hard to come out of the republican closet, as I’d like to say, especially in the Valley,” says Ingram, who said she often felt singled-out in high school because of her conservative views.
Ingram is sharp and poised with an impressive grasp of California politics. She has already been a paid staffer on two campaigns, including her current position as Deputy Campaign Manager for Tony Strickland. She previously worked for the Rudy Giuliani campaign. She cites the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks and Giuliani’s role in the tragedy’s aftermath as factors fueling her desire to enter public service.
Many political activists refer to both September 11 and the Iraq War as the major events triggering political activism in teens and young adults. Damian Carroll, an experienced grassroots campaigner and current staffer for Assembly member Mike Feuer, says young people are more mobilized today than they were eight years ago, mainly because of those two events in addition to Hurricane Katrina.
“It brought people up to this idea that public service was important; that we had a character as a nation where we could pull together and make a difference,” Carroll says.
Cameron Silverberg, 14, is an 8th grade student at Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in Tarzana, and a volunteer for the Obama campaign. “I just think Obama has the ability to really unify a divided country,” says Silverberg. “He has the unique ability to restore what’s broken about America right about now.”
He mentions the Iraq war and its affects on the economy as one of the main issues he cares about. The other is climate change. “He (Obama) really does understand the importance of dealing with it right now as opposed to leaving it to people like myself and my generation where we’d have to deal with it.”
Chad Jones is president of Valley Grassroots for Democracy, an organization that evolved out of a coming together of Valley-based Howard Dean and John Kerry supporters in 2005. At the time, Jones says they weren’t sure whether they wanted to create another democratic club in the Valley but then they realized something.
“If you’re trying to change the democratic party,” Jones says, “which was something we wanted to do – to make it more responsive to the grassroots - the reality is that we had to become part of the system and change it from within.”
He says that teenagers and young adults don’t join as members or participate in club activities as much as he would like. Those who are active are more likely to join the Young Democrats. “We do tend to skew older – 50 plus,” says Jones, who at 37, says he is one of the youngest members of the group.
For those young people who are disinterred in the presidential campaign, the Internet has served as this season’s power tool in reaching out and mobilizing them.
The online presence of Barack Obama has been a major asset in his courting of young voters. His personal page on the social networking site Facebook, for example, has nearly 770,000 supporters listed – about five times the number of supporters listed on the Hillary Clinton page.
“It’s not a top-heavy campaign,” says Carroll, 31, who ran as an Obama delegate in Brad Sherman’s congressional district. According to Carroll, the campaign has done so well on the grassroots level because they encouraged supporters to spread Obama’s message in a personal way. In response, supporters created videos, posted them on YouTube, and emailed them to each other – a tactic more effective than receiving an email directly from the campaign.
When Carroll first got involved in politics in 2003, he used the website Meetup.com to connect with fellow progressives. He recalls his first meeting at Dupars restaurant in Studio City, a gathering that eventually resulted in his involvement with the Howard Dean campaign.
The internet has also been important in strengthening Congressman Ron Paul’s popularity. Steven Vincent, a Studio City yoga instructor, used Meetup.com to organize Ron Paul supporters in Burbank and North Hollywood. He says one of his groups now has about 300 members.
Vincent does not look like a typical republican. On a recent day, he is wearing a neon yellow T-shirt with a Ron Paul slogan emblazoned across his chest. Although Vincent is in his 40s, he has a youthful energy that befits his political activism.
“If you had told me before March [of 2007] that I was going to register republican and campaign for a republican candidate, I would have told you that you were really crazy,” Vincent says. He mentions Paul’s “unrehearsed quality” and his Gandhi-inspired writings on peaceful non-intervention in foreign policy as traits that appealed to him.
Vincent represents a group of people not necessarily young in age, but new to grassroots politics. Grassroots work, such as phone banking or precinct walking, can be a catalyst for volunteers who continue stay active beyond their first political campaign.
Vincent, who jokingly admits he had always been a “lifelong member of the no-confidence party,” says he will continue his activist work despite Paul’s defunct bid for the presidency. He plans on participating in a grassroots distribution of Paul’s forthcoming book, The Revolution Manifesto. He also wrote an article on Paul for the February issue of LA Yoga magazine and plans on doing more writing. “It’s a movement; it’s not a political campaign,” he says.
Heap-Baldwin is also active in her community. She started her own website called Teensthinkgreen.com to promote eco-friendly lifestyle alternatives for teenagers.
For the young activist interested in a career in politics, grassroots training provides an invaluable foothold. Ingram’s training gave her experience no bachelor’s degree could replace. “We all had to pay our dues and put in our free pay and interning and getting beat up for a while, but it was completely worth it to do what we do now,” says Ingram.
Seasoned grassroots campaigners often tout the importance of passing on their training to the next generation to keep their political party or organization alive.
When Carroll first got involved in politics, the then-president of the Young Democrats of the San Fernando Valley encouraged him to get involved in local groups. Carroll ultimately became president of Young Democrats and now remains on the executive board as communications director.
“I don’t feel representative so much anymore,” Carroll says. “I’m looking to find who are the young people in our club who are up and coming – who are ready to take on more of that leadership.”
Since he first joined in 2003, the club’s membership has increased from roughly 40 to 300 members. Their budget also reflects that growth.
Ingram says college republican groups often fall apart when a president or a core group graduates. She made sure that the club she founded at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita had stable leadership before she left.
For Blumenfield, there is an innate sense of duty to mentor and recruit young people.
“I got involved in politics when I was very young,” he says. “You know, it changed my life in many ways – and I want to help other people have a similar experience.”
This was my last major article for the Sun Community Newspaper and represented a sort of climax in my political involvement too, since I was active in promoting Hillary Clinton. I was very involved with her on-line community, made phone calls from the Valley office, "bribed" friends with Clinton gadgets and gizmos (to no avail) and anything else to promote her candidacy. Alas, this created some friction among friends and family (you know who you are).
I was heartbroken when she lost, mildly consoled by Sarah Palin's potential in unraveling the effects of Obamania, and have yet find political love again. Sigh. Maybe I'll open my heart in 2012 - That Bobby Jindal is a looker.
Grassroots Campaigners Sprout in the Valley
BY NAZBANOO PAHLAVI
It’s the day before the Texas primary election, and a group of largely female volunteers are making last-minute phone calls at a Lake Balboa office used by Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Hitomi Heap-Baldwin, a volunteer from Tujunga, sounds like a seasoned campaigner on the phone. “Did you also know there is a caucus going on in the same day?” she asks a Texas voter. “Can I spend one minute telling you about it?”
This is Heap-Baldwin’s third day as a volunteer here. She is only 16 and a junior at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada.
Heap-Baldwin is one of many young activists involved this election season. For her, volunteering means making phone calls – even if that means skipping track practice. “I can’t just let someone else win if I’m interested in it. I have to do something about it,” she says.
Young adult professionals such as Burbank native Valerie Rothenberg, 26, are also active volunteers. Sen. Barack Obama inspired her involvement in his presidential campaign. “I think Obama especially inspires people to organize,” Rothenberg says. “He said, ‘this is your campaign, you can make a difference.’”
Her grassroots efforts started with 15 people in a friend’s Porter Ranch living room last spring, and grew from there. She was a precinct captain in her neighborhood, traveled to Nevada to campaign for Obama, and organized phone banking sessions at a North Hollywood park. Despite her dedication, Rothenberg, who is a freelance costume designer, has no intention of entering politics professionally.
Grassroots-level volunteers like Heap-Baldwin and Rothenberg are often the most effective agents for a candidate. Their active role is helpful with engaging voters who may be detached from the political process.
Bob Blumenfield, a democratic candidate for the 42nd Assembly District, believes that voters are more receptive to volunteer campaigners. “There’s a passion that’s there – not that paid staffers don’t have that passion; they do – but it’s undeniable as a volunteer,” he says.
Blumenfield has recruited high school volunteers from Birmingham High School in Van Nuys and Oakwood School in North Hollywood. He is planning another recruiting session at Van Nuys High School. He counts on the energy and enthusiasm that young people bring to his campaign.
Republican Tony Strickland also recognizes the importance of young volunteers. “It is extremely encouraging to see young people get involved in the political process at the grassroots level,” says the former Assembly member and current state senatorial candidate for Tom McClintock’s termed-out seat.
Some young activists simply have politics in their blood. Rothenberg’s father, Peter, is a coordinator for the Valley For Obama group and convened the Obama delegate caucus for Brad Sherman’s district in mid-April. Heap-Baldwin’s father, an Obama supporter, would clip news-related articles and hide them in her backpack.
Ashley Ingram, 22, was also raised in a politically active family in Burbank in the 1980s, when her parents volunteered for Ronald Reagan’s campaign. Ingram is a passionate young republican – one of a group that is not as easy to find in a largely democratic electorate like Los Angeles.
“It’s hard to come out of the republican closet, as I’d like to say, especially in the Valley,” says Ingram, who said she often felt singled-out in high school because of her conservative views.
Ingram is sharp and poised with an impressive grasp of California politics. She has already been a paid staffer on two campaigns, including her current position as Deputy Campaign Manager for Tony Strickland. She previously worked for the Rudy Giuliani campaign. She cites the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks and Giuliani’s role in the tragedy’s aftermath as factors fueling her desire to enter public service.
Many political activists refer to both September 11 and the Iraq War as the major events triggering political activism in teens and young adults. Damian Carroll, an experienced grassroots campaigner and current staffer for Assembly member Mike Feuer, says young people are more mobilized today than they were eight years ago, mainly because of those two events in addition to Hurricane Katrina.
“It brought people up to this idea that public service was important; that we had a character as a nation where we could pull together and make a difference,” Carroll says.
Cameron Silverberg, 14, is an 8th grade student at Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in Tarzana, and a volunteer for the Obama campaign. “I just think Obama has the ability to really unify a divided country,” says Silverberg. “He has the unique ability to restore what’s broken about America right about now.”
He mentions the Iraq war and its affects on the economy as one of the main issues he cares about. The other is climate change. “He (Obama) really does understand the importance of dealing with it right now as opposed to leaving it to people like myself and my generation where we’d have to deal with it.”
Chad Jones is president of Valley Grassroots for Democracy, an organization that evolved out of a coming together of Valley-based Howard Dean and John Kerry supporters in 2005. At the time, Jones says they weren’t sure whether they wanted to create another democratic club in the Valley but then they realized something.
“If you’re trying to change the democratic party,” Jones says, “which was something we wanted to do – to make it more responsive to the grassroots - the reality is that we had to become part of the system and change it from within.”
He says that teenagers and young adults don’t join as members or participate in club activities as much as he would like. Those who are active are more likely to join the Young Democrats. “We do tend to skew older – 50 plus,” says Jones, who at 37, says he is one of the youngest members of the group.
For those young people who are disinterred in the presidential campaign, the Internet has served as this season’s power tool in reaching out and mobilizing them.
The online presence of Barack Obama has been a major asset in his courting of young voters. His personal page on the social networking site Facebook, for example, has nearly 770,000 supporters listed – about five times the number of supporters listed on the Hillary Clinton page.
“It’s not a top-heavy campaign,” says Carroll, 31, who ran as an Obama delegate in Brad Sherman’s congressional district. According to Carroll, the campaign has done so well on the grassroots level because they encouraged supporters to spread Obama’s message in a personal way. In response, supporters created videos, posted them on YouTube, and emailed them to each other – a tactic more effective than receiving an email directly from the campaign.
When Carroll first got involved in politics in 2003, he used the website Meetup.com to connect with fellow progressives. He recalls his first meeting at Dupars restaurant in Studio City, a gathering that eventually resulted in his involvement with the Howard Dean campaign.
The internet has also been important in strengthening Congressman Ron Paul’s popularity. Steven Vincent, a Studio City yoga instructor, used Meetup.com to organize Ron Paul supporters in Burbank and North Hollywood. He says one of his groups now has about 300 members.
Vincent does not look like a typical republican. On a recent day, he is wearing a neon yellow T-shirt with a Ron Paul slogan emblazoned across his chest. Although Vincent is in his 40s, he has a youthful energy that befits his political activism.
“If you had told me before March [of 2007] that I was going to register republican and campaign for a republican candidate, I would have told you that you were really crazy,” Vincent says. He mentions Paul’s “unrehearsed quality” and his Gandhi-inspired writings on peaceful non-intervention in foreign policy as traits that appealed to him.
Vincent represents a group of people not necessarily young in age, but new to grassroots politics. Grassroots work, such as phone banking or precinct walking, can be a catalyst for volunteers who continue stay active beyond their first political campaign.
Vincent, who jokingly admits he had always been a “lifelong member of the no-confidence party,” says he will continue his activist work despite Paul’s defunct bid for the presidency. He plans on participating in a grassroots distribution of Paul’s forthcoming book, The Revolution Manifesto. He also wrote an article on Paul for the February issue of LA Yoga magazine and plans on doing more writing. “It’s a movement; it’s not a political campaign,” he says.
Heap-Baldwin is also active in her community. She started her own website called Teensthinkgreen.com to promote eco-friendly lifestyle alternatives for teenagers.
For the young activist interested in a career in politics, grassroots training provides an invaluable foothold. Ingram’s training gave her experience no bachelor’s degree could replace. “We all had to pay our dues and put in our free pay and interning and getting beat up for a while, but it was completely worth it to do what we do now,” says Ingram.
Seasoned grassroots campaigners often tout the importance of passing on their training to the next generation to keep their political party or organization alive.
When Carroll first got involved in politics, the then-president of the Young Democrats of the San Fernando Valley encouraged him to get involved in local groups. Carroll ultimately became president of Young Democrats and now remains on the executive board as communications director.
“I don’t feel representative so much anymore,” Carroll says. “I’m looking to find who are the young people in our club who are up and coming – who are ready to take on more of that leadership.”
Since he first joined in 2003, the club’s membership has increased from roughly 40 to 300 members. Their budget also reflects that growth.
Ingram says college republican groups often fall apart when a president or a core group graduates. She made sure that the club she founded at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita had stable leadership before she left.
For Blumenfield, there is an innate sense of duty to mentor and recruit young people.
“I got involved in politics when I was very young,” he says. “You know, it changed my life in many ways – and I want to help other people have a similar experience.”
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
My Current Article in Carnegie Mellon Today, January 2011
As the Crow Flies
Two Carnegie Mellon students board a flight from Pittsburgh to New York, the first stop on their trip. For Jen Horwitz, who studies public policy and management, traveling isn't a big deal. The East Coast native has been abroad. But she has never been to Bangladesh. Neither has computer science student Anthony Vel†zquez. That's the final destination for their internship.
After New York, the pair touchdown in Dubai and meet up with two classmates from the Qatar campus: Brian Manalastas, studying business administration, and Aysha Siddique, a computer science and information systems student. They exchange hugs. This is their first meeting, though they've taken a videoconference course together.
The interns are in flight again as part of the TechbridgeWorld Innovative Student Technology ExPerience project. Through a 10-week internship, iSTEP provides students a chance to apply their knowledge and skills for creative problem solving outside the classroom, and, in this case, many miles from home. The multi-faceted problem awaiting this group entails developing an educational tool to enhance English literacy among pre-college students, and to determine features for a standalone Braille writing tutor for visually impaired children.
The interns land in Dhaka, capital city of Bangladesh, and have a chance to unwind at a nearby rest house during a six-hour layover. On the cab ride there, they witness the "organized chaos" of Bangladeshi traffic. Eventually, the group arrives in Chittagong, where even in the middle of the night it's more than 90 degrees.
They soon meet with their primary partner, Young Power in Social Action, to start determining what they could best accomplish during their stay. A few weeks later, Horwitz, in her role as needs assessment and evaluation coordinator, leads the visit to the Chittagong Government School for the Blind. The school has just one computer allocated for the students; it runs on DOS and is subject to sporadic power outages, a challenge for all of Bangladesh. The team uses its collective computer science knowledge to make the limited technology work for the iSTEP Braille learning game that is based on animal sounds, a game first implemented by iSTEP in Tanzania.
The interns encounter yet another problem as they work with the Bangla elementary school children sent here from across the country. In Tanzania, the game included sounds from a pig, an animal not common in the Muslim world. So, for the Bangla version, the iSTEP team adroitly substitutes a crow instead. The students gleefully recognize its squawk. Lesson accomplished.
After multiple visits to the school, the internship ends. It takes nearly 45 minutes for Horwitz and the others to leave amid the children's hugs and good-byes.
-Nazbanoo Pahlavi (HNZ'03)
Two Carnegie Mellon students board a flight from Pittsburgh to New York, the first stop on their trip. For Jen Horwitz, who studies public policy and management, traveling isn't a big deal. The East Coast native has been abroad. But she has never been to Bangladesh. Neither has computer science student Anthony Vel†zquez. That's the final destination for their internship.
After New York, the pair touchdown in Dubai and meet up with two classmates from the Qatar campus: Brian Manalastas, studying business administration, and Aysha Siddique, a computer science and information systems student. They exchange hugs. This is their first meeting, though they've taken a videoconference course together.
The interns are in flight again as part of the TechbridgeWorld Innovative Student Technology ExPerience project. Through a 10-week internship, iSTEP provides students a chance to apply their knowledge and skills for creative problem solving outside the classroom, and, in this case, many miles from home. The multi-faceted problem awaiting this group entails developing an educational tool to enhance English literacy among pre-college students, and to determine features for a standalone Braille writing tutor for visually impaired children.
The interns land in Dhaka, capital city of Bangladesh, and have a chance to unwind at a nearby rest house during a six-hour layover. On the cab ride there, they witness the "organized chaos" of Bangladeshi traffic. Eventually, the group arrives in Chittagong, where even in the middle of the night it's more than 90 degrees.
They soon meet with their primary partner, Young Power in Social Action, to start determining what they could best accomplish during their stay. A few weeks later, Horwitz, in her role as needs assessment and evaluation coordinator, leads the visit to the Chittagong Government School for the Blind. The school has just one computer allocated for the students; it runs on DOS and is subject to sporadic power outages, a challenge for all of Bangladesh. The team uses its collective computer science knowledge to make the limited technology work for the iSTEP Braille learning game that is based on animal sounds, a game first implemented by iSTEP in Tanzania.
The interns encounter yet another problem as they work with the Bangla elementary school children sent here from across the country. In Tanzania, the game included sounds from a pig, an animal not common in the Muslim world. So, for the Bangla version, the iSTEP team adroitly substitutes a crow instead. The students gleefully recognize its squawk. Lesson accomplished.
After multiple visits to the school, the internship ends. It takes nearly 45 minutes for Horwitz and the others to leave amid the children's hugs and good-byes.
-Nazbanoo Pahlavi (HNZ'03)
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
TEAM CATS - Center for Assault Treatment Services Official LA Marathon Charity
I am excited to be a team captain of Team CATS this year. the Northridge Hospital's Center for Assault Treatment Services (CATS) has been selected one of 63 official charities of the Honda Los Angeles Marathon on March 20, 2011. Tonight was our initial meeting, and we had a great turnout, with 9 people registering with Team CATS! We have partnered with Alpha Running who will providing the training support on Saturday mornings in beautiful Griffith Park. I am excited to support our team in their fundraising efforts. The minimum fundraising goal is $250 - Only $250! That's a piece of cake! If running your first marathon for such an amazing program as CATS, you will find people to support you - I promise!
Please let me know if you are interested in joining Team CATS to Race to break the silence and end the abuse. CATS provides the only 24 hour, 7 a day week program for victims of sexual abuse and assault. Unfortunately, more than 50% of those treated are children. Instead of being taken to an Emergency Room, waiting around for hours to be examined and questioned by police in a hospital setting, CATS offers a comforting location with nurses trained in forensics, who are dedicated to the cause of victims of sexual abuse. We are the only program that serves San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys.
Support Team CATS!
Please let me know if you are interested in joining Team CATS to Race to break the silence and end the abuse. CATS provides the only 24 hour, 7 a day week program for victims of sexual abuse and assault. Unfortunately, more than 50% of those treated are children. Instead of being taken to an Emergency Room, waiting around for hours to be examined and questioned by police in a hospital setting, CATS offers a comforting location with nurses trained in forensics, who are dedicated to the cause of victims of sexual abuse. We are the only program that serves San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys.
Support Team CATS!
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
My First 5K and Yours too
My first 5K was a charity run in 2007. I was covering a lecture for the Sun Community Newspapers in September- An event at the El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana hosted by an affiliate group in support of the Jewish Home of the Aging. I had recently started running seriously, and the goal of a 5K two months away was both feasible and exciting. I liked the Jewish Home too and wanted to help with this worthy cause. I set up my fundraising site through kintera.org and by that December, I had raised $500 and set an all time PR with my first 5K.
It isn't difficult to raise money when you are promoting a good organization and putting your feet where your mouth is. I had fun that first race, and it eventually led to many more 5Ks, 10Ks, a couple of half-marathons, and three marathons.
Would you like to set a goal to complete your first 5K? If so, I encourage you to do so at the Lexus Santa Monica 5000 on September 12, 2010 and choose the John Wayne Cancer Institute (JWCI) as your cause. Just like the Jewish Home for the Aging, the JWCI also has affiliate groups that support the mission of the institute. Partners in Progress is one of these groups. They help raise funds that promote institute functions not commonly supported by charitable donations such as lab and specimen maintenance and education & outreach.
I raised $500 when I ran my first 5K. How much will you raise?
First, register for the Lexus Santa Monica 5000 on September 12th. Then, set up your http://www.firstgiving.com/ fundraising page, or use the one Partners in Progress has established for the group. Then, start contacting your friends and family. You will be surprised at all the people in your life who will support YOU and the your cause.
And let me know if you sign up!
Happy running,
It isn't difficult to raise money when you are promoting a good organization and putting your feet where your mouth is. I had fun that first race, and it eventually led to many more 5Ks, 10Ks, a couple of half-marathons, and three marathons.
Would you like to set a goal to complete your first 5K? If so, I encourage you to do so at the Lexus Santa Monica 5000 on September 12, 2010 and choose the John Wayne Cancer Institute (JWCI) as your cause. Just like the Jewish Home for the Aging, the JWCI also has affiliate groups that support the mission of the institute. Partners in Progress is one of these groups. They help raise funds that promote institute functions not commonly supported by charitable donations such as lab and specimen maintenance and education & outreach.
I raised $500 when I ran my first 5K. How much will you raise?
First, register for the Lexus Santa Monica 5000 on September 12th. Then, set up your http://www.firstgiving.com/ fundraising page, or use the one Partners in Progress has established for the group. Then, start contacting your friends and family. You will be surprised at all the people in your life who will support YOU and the your cause.
And let me know if you sign up!
Happy running,
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