Education
Over the years, Fairyland has kept its focus on storytelling alive. Each week, the puppets go live in front of a crowd of children, telling classic tales like “Sleeping Beauty” and more obscure ones the puppet masters have borrowed from other cultures. “You don’t need a lot of technology to tell a story,” says C.J. Hirschfield, Director of Fairyland. “And it is how we pass along our culture – whatever it is – through the stories, through generations.”
What matters most for boxing trainer and gym owner Charles King is not the fame or travel he’s garnered in the more than 30 years he’s owned a gym, but to have helped a kids looking for answers find something worthwhile. “You take a troubled kid from the street and bring him here, and all of a sudden, he wakes up,” he said.
Oakland-based chef, author and activist Bryant Terry has a way with food. In his newest cookbook, “The Inspired Vegan,” he continues a longtime quest to bring flavor-intense but nutritionally rich eats to a larger audience, and to have a little fun while he’s at it.
“Here you have the unrehearsed, totally spontaneous expression of truth—a concentrated exposure to the thinking of black men,” said photographer Chris Johnson, who is also a California College of the Arts (CCA) professor, longtime Oakland resident, and one of the four brains behind Question:Bridge.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area, a local chapter of one of the nation’s biggest youth mentoring organizations, has about 750 children and teenagers in the Bay Area waiting for a mentor.
There actually is a verb for keeping warm, but it’s in a dead language, one that’s close to Latvian, said Kristine Vejar, the owner of the Golden Gate district shop that goes by that name.
“Educating Oakland,” an exhibit on the history of the city’s public schools, is now open at the main branch of the Oakland Public Library, and proves that Tom Hanks once wore a grass skirt in a school musical, and Castlemont did indeed look like a castle.
On January 19, Suneal Kolluri received an envelope in the mail from the California Attorney General’s office. Inside was the official title and summary for the College for California ballot initiative, a proposal to give every Californian a free college education, that was drafted by the high school students he teaches in East Oakland. The clock started ticking: Kolluri has 150 days to get 807,615 signatures.
About 20 concerned citizens, activists and advocacy leaders debated the mayor’s new budget proposal Monday night at a town hall meeting organized by Councilmembers Patricia Kernighan and Nancy Nadel.