How nice it would be to write that Ron Burkle is the ultimate thumb on the scale, the billionaire whose name, reputation and bank account guarantee Sacramento a golden admission ticket into Major League Soccer. Unfortunately, putting the words “Burkle” and “guarantee” in the same sentence turns the story backward. Burkle doesn’t give guarantees. He takes them.
If Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to see a best-practice example of early childhood education, he doesn’t have to travel far. A trip to David Lubin Elementary School at 35th and M streets, about 23 blocks from the state Capitol, will reveal wonders.Lubin is one of seven schools in the Sacramento City Unified School District to offer a program called Parent Participation Preschool. The formula is not new—Sac City borrowed the idea from Oakland and Berkeley schools in the late 1940s. Twenty years ago, I enrolled with my two kids. The experience still pays dividends.
According to a study by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, only 3 to 5 percent of artwork in permanent museum collections around the world are works by women. Artist and advocate Kathrine Lemke Waste is out to change that statistic. “Museums are repositories of our cultural heritage,” says Lemke Waste, a leader in the “25 in 25” movement, a national push by the nonprofit American Women Artists to get more work by female artists into American museums over the next quarter century
Will Rogers wrote, “No man can be condemned for owning a dog. As long as he has a dog, he has a friend.” For Jim Hastings, that friend is a 45-pound canine named McKinley. True to his breed—a Vizsla with sleek rusty-gold fur and a slender athletic frame—McKinley has abundant energy and a drive to move. “This is not a lapdog. This is a field dog,” says Hastings, 90, who walks with his canine cohort 4 to 5 miles every day along the American River Parkway near River Park. “Otherwise he’d be a nervous wreck. Anybody who has one should know that.”
Last fall we ran an article about Marisa Bogdanoff and Steve Sphar, local volunteers who are working to foster civil political discussion by leading Sacramento’s chapter of Better Angels.
Better Angels is the national nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing liberals and conservatives together to understand each other beyond stereotypes. The idea for the group was in the works before the polarizing 2016 presidential election.
