Park County Cares “Food for All” program
February 5, 2009 | Filed Under Seriously/Real Stuff, Around town | Leave a Comment
Livingston based civic organizations, churches, businesses and non profits are joining together to help combat hunger in Park County. The Livingston Food Pantry will be the beneficiary of money collected during the “Food for All” drive January 19th – February 19th, 2009.
Created to serve as a community service project in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, this month long initiative will enable the Livingston Food Pantry to reach more families in need.
A group of supporters assembled Monday in front of the Food Pantry to kick off the project, which originated with a meeting at Dr. Laurel Desnick and Jim Baerg’s home to discuss a focus for community outreach and support. Since that meeting, a new floor has been installed and a dishwasher provided by the Crazy Mountain Ranch at Livingston’s Loaves and Fishes.
“We’re all in this together, those with very few resources and those with many. This a community that cares about ALL its members,” said Laurie Francis of Community Health Partners. CHP is joining together with the Chamber of Commerce, Vision Livingston, Wheat Montana, Montana Women For, Livingston Schools, and several local churches, groceries, growers and businesses to help support “Food for All.”
“What started as a service day has grown into an important project with far reaching potential,” said Margie Kidder, of Montana Women For. “The ‘Park County Cares’ idea is something we will keep going with all year. Literally every person we’ve contacted has said, ‘How can I help?’ ‘Food for All’ can use money, time and energy from everyone in the community. There are so many ways to get involved and we want to urge everyone to do just that.”
“The need is great,” reports Michael McCormick of the Livingston Food Pantry. “At this moment, I’m looking at my shelves and see an empty hole where powdered milk should be. Your donations can help us help this whole community. I want to thank all of these business owners and neighbors for coming up with this great project.”
In addition to providing food for families with economic hardship, there will also be information and classes to help all of Park County manage during tough economic times. “This affects all of us. We all need to stretch our food dollars these days,” said Joni Kresich.
All public representatives from Park County – Bob Ebinger, John Esp and Joel Boniek support this initiative and have agreed to lend their names to the project. The Livingston City Council is discussing the project at tomorrow evening’s meeting. Others at Monday’s event included Lou Ann Nelson from the Livingston Chamber of Commerce, Livingston School superintendent Hannibal Anderson, Vision Livingston’s Karyle Frazier, Michael Sanders of the Environmental Adventure Tour Company, Hebbard Blesius, Jon Ellen Snyder and Amanda Knuchel of ERA/Landmark Real Estate, Joni Kresich, Joanne Gardner and Margie Kidder of Montana Women For, Edie Linneweber who (along with Katherine Dunlap) is coordinating the churches in Livingston to participate, Laurie Francis of CHP, Jim Baerg and his daughters Nastia and Larisa and Michael McCormick of the Livingston Food Pantry.
Dorothy Bradley of Clyde Park attended Monday’s meeting to offer game to the Livingston Food Pantry and to discuss how Clyde Park can get involved with it’s own program. Leaders of this program plan to reach out to Gardiner, Clyde Park and Wilsall in the next few days.
The public can get involved by making monetary donations to the Food Pantry. Volunteers are also desperately needed to help at Loaves and Fishes and the Livingston Food Pantry.
Watch for donation jars in local businesses and in churches, and join Park County Cares for a neighborhood walk during the month. Families will be going door to door to raise money for this project. A $39.95 donation can feed a family of four for one month through the Livingston Food Pantry.
Other focus projects already underway include interacting with all elementary schools to ensure children are getting enough nutritional food daily, a “crockpot” program, outreach to seniors and special needs citizens and the Livingston Shoveling Brigade. For more information contact Michael McCormick at the Livingston Food Pantry - 222 –5335, Margie Kidder at 222-7040, Bonnie Hyatt Murphy at 222 – 2302 or the Livingston Chamber of Commerce.
Meet Pastor Rick Warren
December 27, 2008 | Filed Under Breaking News, Seriously/Real Stuff | Leave a Comment
The spirit of inclusiveness! Agreeing to disagree! Sharing a variety of viewpoints! President-elect Obama has made it fun!
Here’s some stuff that you might not already know about his Special Friend Rick Warren, the man who will be in the international spotlight at the historic Obama Inauguration:
By Bruce Wilson, from The Huffington Post, December 25, 2008
Many sharp journalists, such as Michelle Goldberg, Sarah Posner and Max Blumenthal, are cranking their talents into exposing the angry underbelly beneath Rick Warren’s carefully airbrushed and polished public persona. And, a number of political bloggers [1, 2, 3] have noted Rick Warren’s support for the virulently anti-gay Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, but the story has lacked some needed historical context; In 2006, Warren publicly lionized (literally) Akinola three months after the Archbishop had endorsed legislation more draconian than comparable anti-gay statutes passed prior to World War Two under the Third Reich.
As I described in a December 18, 2006 Talk To Action story, a schismatic faction of Virginia Episcopalian churches had just voted to align themselves with the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, who earlier that year had thrown his substantial political weight and religious authority behind draconian Nigerian anti-gay legislation to, among other strictures, “make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.”
Although I missed it at the time, the proposed legislation was apparently denounced, according to the current Wikipedia writeup on Akinola, by the US State Department: “The proposed legislation was formally challenged by the United States State Department as a breach of Nigeria’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
It was one of those rare examples from the last eight years, it would seem, in which United States foreign policy clearly aligned in support of basic human rights. Rick Warren, however, appeared to be on the other side of the issue.
In my post, I went on to chart, in very specific detail, the ugly reality that the Akinola-supported legislation was actually harsher than similar anti-gay legislation, 1935 revisions to Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, applying to homosexuality, voted into law during the early years of Hitler’s Third Reich.
As described on an activist blog that specialized in covering the controversial anti-gay legislation [and whose author has contributed to Talk To Action], in February 2006 “the Primate of All Nigeria and leader of the Anglican Communion’s largest Province, Archbishop Peter Akinola, endorsed legislation that would ban most basic civil rights for gay and lesbian Nigerians, and enforce that ban with a 5 year prison sentence.”
On April 30, 2006, pastor Rick Warren wrote an op-ed, for Time Magazine, which lavished praise on Akinola, likening the cleric to Nelson Mandela:
“Akinola personifies the epochal change in the Christian church, namely that the leadership, influence, growth and center of gravity in Christianity is shifting from the northern hemisphere to the southern. New African, Asian and Latin American church leaders like Akinola, 61, are bright, biblical, courageous and willing to point out the inconsistencies, weaknesses and theological drift in Western churches.”
“…Akinola has the strength of a lion, useful in confronting Third World fundamentalism and First World relativism.”
“…I believe he, like Mandela, is a man of peace and his leadership is a model for Christians around the world.”
Rick Warren’s support for Akinola is not an anomaly but appears to be, rather, the rule. As detailed at Talk To Action by Richard Bartholomew (author of the exceptional Bartholomew’s Notes On Religion), The Kampala Monitor reports:
Dr [Rick] Warren said that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right. “We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,” Dr Warren said.
Warren was speaking in support of Ugandan Anglicans who intend to boycott the forthcoming Lambeth Conference, and this harsh rejection of tolerance for gays and lesbians may have serious consequences in a country where homosexuals face harassment and and the threat of imprisonment.
Warren’s comment is of a piece with his support for Martin Ssempa, the Ugandan evangelist who has been a keynote speaker at a Warren conference, and who has received US global AIDS prevention funds. As I wrote in August, Ssempa wants to ensure that homosexuality remains illegal and that gays and lesbians are identified in the public mind as sexual abusers. Ssempa calls for media censorship against opposing views and the dismissal of dissenting academics, and last summer he organised a rally with the theme “A Call for Action on Behalf of the Victims of Homosexuality”, at which he railed against “molestation and sodomy.”
[Source: “Warren-Endorsed Nigerian Archbishop Backed Anti-Gay Laws Worse Than Pre-WWII Third Reich’s”]
For straight and gay citizens who feel strongly that all Americans were intended to enjoy the protections of the 14th Amendment, there is a new Web site about focusing on that issue: BrandNewGay.com.
On the Park County Growth Policy
October 31, 2008 | Filed Under Opinion and Commentary, Election 2008, Credos, Seriously/Real Stuff, Around town, Local Government | 2 Comments
by Ashea Mills October 28, 2008
You don’t know it, but I am looking down at your house right now. I am the bird in the sky, the small plane headed to Chicago and beyond. I get to see the stupendous aerial view of all that surrounds you, and my friends, it is magnificent.
I’m sorry to be leaving. It’s a perfect fall day, mostly blue skies, a few puffball clouds, mid 60’s. Family calls, so I’ll miss this perfect Montana week, but flying out over it, watching the land fall away…what a treat! The dominant features on the landscape are the curvaceous folds, the land rippling below as we bank away from Gallatin Field towards Livingston. The mountains ahead are looming closer, with the Bridgers off our port side.
On my side, looking down and south, I am running parallel to Trail Creek, seeing where it sashays into Paradise Valley. The valley itself is a sweeping sigh, an open space of clustered trees along watercourses, and glimpses of homes here and there. The broad basin of the valley almost seems at odds with the jagged saw toothed Absorokas.
I can see the Tetons piercing the haze to the south, and most of what I love is between them and I: my partner, my home, my friends, my mountains.
Now I am over the 90 degree bend the braided, winding Yellowstone River takes through Livingston. The river is steely and low this fall day. Town looks as sweet from this vantage point as it does while standing on Main Street, looking into the mountainous gloam at dusk, storefronts twinkling like a scene from a movie or a book.
And now, the crinkly folds of Absoroka peaks give way to the broad, flat top mesas of the Beartooth Plateau, already graced with this season’s base layer of snow.
What a view! What a gift to be able to see our home from up here! But my heart is weighing heavy with the impending choice we must make. I am of the opinion that when I fly eastward out of Bozeman in 20 years, when I take my starboard seat on purpose, because I love this quick and rare aerial glimpse of home, I want the mountains, the valley and the river to dominate my view.
Others do not share this opinion. There is a group of so-called “Concerned Citizens” that would very much like to be able to build whenever and however, values, views and history be dammed. They would like to have you believe that new development on the banks of the river and tops of dry canyons is good for us all, and that you and I shouldn’t mind higher taxes to pay for services to remote and scattered home sites.
One of the main reasons I fell in love with this area is that it still feels real. There is an authenticity to Park County that is lacking elsewhere. The working ranches and farms, their toil and struggle and rewards are a part of the fabric of what makes this area unique. Trophy homes in place of them are what ruins it.
Looking out on the landscape and seeing open space, feeling the wind (oh, yes, the wind,) having an unobstructed view of the big sky we all value…watching the calves grow burly in spring, while the alfalfa greens up…hunting for the winter’s food in fall, following the river’s seasonal surges and declines with the ebbs and flows in our own lives…This is what it means to live in Park County.
Maybe you’re from here, or maybe you moved here because you found yourself feeling more at home here than anywhere else in the world. Either way, we can all appreciate why we love it. I suppose then, it follows that we can see why others would too. Development will occur, and others will want to share in this most magnificent place, bordered by a world destination park, and countless opportunities for fishing, hiking, hunting and biking. Okay, so we get it. But does that mean everyone who comes in can build a monstrous house that impacts the view for miles around? Or take water away from agriculture to build a golf course that we aren’t even invited to? I vehemently say no.
Park County will see growth and that can be a very positive and necessary force. We all want opportunities and a sound economy. If current trends continue, Park County will see 2,100 new homes and 5,000 new residents in less than 20 years. We must decide now, as a community, how we want that to look. This isn’t about whether or not you can raise chickens, or if the garage door should be shut on Sundays. A local growth policy ( a non-regulatory guide, no less) can never trump Constitutional law. Your property rights are safe. This is, however, the defining moment for how Park County will look from a plane, or from a peak, or driving down East River Road in ten or twenty years.
We do have choices. A couple months ago, we were coming out of camping in the Crazy Mountains. We stopped in to enjoy a perfect brunch at The Grand Hotel in Big Timber. Lazing in the lobby afterward, I noticed a small pamphlet titled “The Sweet Grass Code of the West”. It was informative and inspiring. It talks about how the homes that have endured and weathered well are the ones tucked down in draws, protected from buffeting wind rather than posted on top of a hill for all to see. It mentions a rich and storied history and how that bonds the community to their past and future. It speaks to traditional agricultural use, the value of clean water and recreation, the value of community. Sweet Grass County comes right out and says, “These are the values we hold true. Our Growth Policy will protect these values.”
I am probably somewhere over the Dakotas now. It is beautiful in its own way, quilted as it is with its own lives and work and histories below. But it ain’t no Park County. There’s no place like home.
Folks, we can do this. Pass the Growth Policy on Nov. 4th. It is not a painful process. It only seeks to enhance what we already know and have decided. It allows for public process. It allows local residents to decide how our future will look, not a small group of opponents to any planning at all.
In the past weeks, you may have heard people say that the County Commissioners have changed the “People’s Plan” into the “Commissioners Plan.” This is an attempt to fool the public into having no plan at all. The Growth Plan has been worked on for many years and truly reflects the will of Park County residents. Opponents to having a plan are focusing on three wording changes that make no practical difference to the overall plan, but simply bring it into state compliance. They want to create a smokescreen that prevents us from moving forward. We simply need to vote yes on the Growth Plan to get it passed and get on with the business of ensuring our way of life for the future.
We will all benefit from forethought and planning. If your goals are to protect and support agriculture, clean water, and a strong economy, vote yes on the Growth Policy. If scenic preservation, history, recreation, wildlife and a sound future in Park County are important to you, please vote YES on the Growth Policy.
And then get out there and enjoy it.
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Ashea Mills has worked as a naturalist and educator for over 15 years, and has been guiding and teaching in Yellowstone National Park since 1998. Ashea is currently an instructor for the Yellowstone Association Institute and a frequent contributor to regional publications of articles relating to geology, flora, fauna, and history of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.