Last week, I did a deep dive into poems that spoke to my complicated feelings about the state of our democracy. I came up with these eight and figured I’d share them. This small collection begins with Carl Sandburg’s 1970 poem, “The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany,” which builds off of President Lincoln’s message to Congress in 1862 to …

Twenty-one years ago, the year after I started my nonprofit What Kids Can Do, I wrote a story for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation about the Boston Food Project, whose mission was to bring together a thoughtful and productive community of diverse youth and adults to build a sustainable food system. Since 1991, the Food Project has employed more than a 100 …

Here in Southern Oregon, building fire resiliency for the summer ahead begins the winter before. Wildfire worry, however, runs year round. However hot the fires are burning, the statistics are chilling. In the last 20 years, on average, the number of square miles burned annually across Oregon, California, and Washington has increased sixfold compared with the average between 1950 and …

I know that what follows isn’t a “proper” blog post, but I offer it with a sense of urgency. Below you’ll find an “open letter” from New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl to Tennessee Governor Lee after the slaughter at the Covenant School, along with her column yesterday about young Tennesseeans marching for their lives as Tennesseean legislators prepare …

Finding affordable, accessible, quality child care in America has become a Rubik’s Cube. Getting the squares to line up is harder than ever. I had no idea how lucky I was raising our two young sons in Rhode Island in the 1980’s, when my husband’s and my combined salary barely reached thirty thousand and the closest inlaw (the hat trick …

Ashland City Council “listening session,” January 30, 2023. Photo courtesy Bob Palermini (palermini.com). Two years after my husband and I moved to Ashland, inspired by the ways it was not like any place we’d lived before, the pandemic turned this small city upside down. Nostalgia for the Ashland I was just getting to know paired up with nostalgia for the …

“It’s time to secede or succumb,” a retired eastern Oregon chimney sweep wrote in a letter to his local newspaper in 2015. He proposed moving Idaho’s border west to include eastern Oregon and other rural portions of the state.  “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific.” Grant Darrow’s job cleaning chimneys once took him into homes across …