Healthy Souls International, a disaster relief nonprofit that helped feed people in the Bahamas and Puerto Rico after intense hurricanes devastated the islands, plans to take on a new cause: an afterschool program for at-risk youth.
The program will be open to up to 20 high school students across Volusia County who might be homeless or on probation. The teens can be referred through school counselors, probation officers or other officials.
The new cause hits close to home for the founder of the nonprofit, who had a car accident that wiped out her finances when her youngest of three children was in his final year of high school.
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It was once a bustling main street of Daytona s Black community. Can it be reinvigorated?
Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard thrived for decades, but then it was taken down by urban renewal, desegregation and apathy.
Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, The Daytona Beach News-Journal
Published
5:36 pm UTC Jan. 3, 2021
DAYTONA BEACH A stroll down Mary McLeod Bethune Boulevard can be eerie.
The sidewalks and road are often deserted along much of the central city corridor. Whispers of a happier past waft around the century-old structures that flank the mostly vacant thoroughfare.
It feels like a worn outdoor Black history museum filled with empty and boarded-up buildings, a sad salute to a once-bustling business hub that was dealt an apocalyptic blow.
Midtown, Daytona Beach s historic Black neighborhood, struggles to find a better future
Midtown overcame the height of segregation and racism once before in the 1900s. Now the community hopes to rise again.
Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, The Daytona Beach News-Journal
Published
5:06 pm UTC Jan. 3, 2021
DAYTONA BEACH Imagine being forced to live, shop, worship, study and socialize in only one impoverished part of town that you had nothing to do with choosing.
There would be no walls or gates. But the area would be penned in by local laws and mores that dictated which hours of the day you could come out, and under what circumstances.
Death has been a grim, constant marker of the ultimate impact of the the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
The casualty count is updated daily. Nationally, the death total that approached 334,000 as New Year s week began already dwarfed the casualties of such historic events as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Pearl Harbor and the Vietnam War.
In Florida, the virus has accounted for the deaths of more than 21,300 Florida residents, a figure that doesn t include more than 300 non-resident deaths. In Volusia County, as of Monday, there have been 430 deaths. In Flagler County, there have been another 48.
Behind each of those numbers is a story.