
Out & About May 2023
Find out what is going on in Sacramento during the month of May!
Find out what is going on in Sacramento during the month of May!
Wendy Bruns has attended a lot of births. So many that she’s become a hot commodity for friends and family giving birth who want a supportive person in the room.
“Birthwork is definitely a calling,” says Bruns, a Sonoma County native who earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. “I had a friend who got pregnant at 19 and the dad wasn’t in the picture, so I went to every prenatal appointment with her and was there when she gave birth to my godson. I hadn’t seen anything about birth except on TV, so I watched birth videos and learned everything I could. Then I attended my nephew’s birth and other friends’ and family’s births and people started saying, ‘You should do this as a career.’”
Sheila Boxley sees truth in the adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” at her job as president and CEO of The Child Abuse Prevention Center.
“I strongly believe we need to give people the support they need when they need it rather than waiting for tragedy,” says Boxley, who celebrates 25 years at the helm of the center. “We’ve all had that moment where we’ve needed somebody to help us.”
The center began as the Child Abuse Prevention Council of Sacramento in 1977, a small agency serving only Sacramento County. (Every county has one child abuse prevention council.) Over the past 45 years, it has been asked to replicate and expand its programs and services locally and statewide, adopting multiple agencies along the way.
Lyndsay Burch has her hands full and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
At just 30 years old, the North Carolina native became only the second—and first female—artistic director of beloved professional theater company B Street Theatre, taking the helm from Buck Busfield, who had been involved in the company since its creation by his brother Timothy in 1986.
Directing has been Burch’s passion since childhood. She directed her first production at age 13 at the behest of a middle-school drama teacher who recognized her eye for “all the aspects of production, not just performance.”
The next time you meander along the American River Parkway and spot volunteers armed with gloves, grabbers and trash bags, give a friendly wave.
They’re probably dedicated members of the recently formed River City Waterway Alliance, a volunteer group that hosts weekly cleanups of local waterways to restore and protect these precious, imperiled resources.
“Water needed a strong focus for trash cleanup efforts,” says Kathleen Ford, who co-founded the alliance with David Ingram, Mark Baker and Lisa Sanchez. “Our rivers, creeks and streams contain a really egregious amount of trash, so we decided to focus our efforts on local waterways.”