Born To Serve
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.’”
Ounce Of Prevention
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.
Lovin’ From The Oven
This post is sponsored by Lovin’ From The Oven Family-owned pizza restaurant keeps community fed By Jessica Laskey May 2023 It’s no surprise to learn Shelly Tyler and Wendy Williams love pizza. They eat it at least twice a week. The two best friends are co-owners of...
Worse Than Imagined
The meeting was touted as a Community Participation Workshop. It was anything but.
Its purpose was to give the public an opportunity to share comments, concerns and suggestions with the Animal Care Citizens Advisory Committee, a seven-member panel that makes recommendations to the City Council regarding the Front Street Animal Shelter.
Community members who turned out to have an open discussion about the city shelter were shut down after two minutes of comments—four minutes if the committee had no follow-up.
Questions from the public went unanswered. Dialogue was zero.
Beauty Reclaimed
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.”
