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The University of Kentucky’s 2020-21 events calendar is filled like any typical school year’s: The 42nd Annual Kentucky Women Writers Conference welcomed attendees from around the nation. The UK Alumni Association celebrated homecoming. And to commemorate Black History Month, the Martin Luther King Center held its second annual Men of Color Symposium.
There was one difference, but it was a major one: All of these events were held online.
“The big thing is that this university has been around for 156 years, and we did not shut down because of a pandemic that ravaged the world,” says Adam Recktenwald, UK’s executive director of enterprise applications. “We found a way to keep the doors open.”
Putting More People in Jail Won’t Reduce Crime in Dallas. Will Violence Interrupters?
If the city wants to reduce violent crime, it needs to try alternatives to mass incarceration. We talked to the head of a nonprofit bringing violence interruption to Dallas.
By Alex Macon
Published in
FrontBurner
April 20, 2021
12:30 pm
Policy makers can’t always agree on the best approach to reducing violent crime. But in Dallas, city leaders increasingly seem to understand that we do know what
doesn’t work: putting more people in jail. What’s needed instead is investment in what advocates call a community-based continuum of care. “This is a big pendulum shift. This is not how things have historically been done in Dallas,” says Gary Ivory, president of the national nonprofit Youth Advocate Programs. “We’re finally turning the tide on the mass incarceration that has happened in this country the last 50 to 60 years.”
John C. Lyons’ “Unearth,” which was filmed in northwestern Pennsylvania, will debut locally on April 29 at Waterford’s Sunset Drive-in. The movie, a farm-based thriller starring Adrienne Barbeau and Marc Blucas, received positive reviews when first shown in 2020 at several national festivals, including the renowned Fantasia International Film Festival.
Lyons and his wife and partner, Dorota Swies, came up with a powerful horror story about fracking. When two longtime neighboring farms hit hard times, one sells out to an oil company that begins fracking on their land. “It ends up impacting both families in a generational and terrifying manner,” writes critic Jim Hemphill, who loved the movie.
Donald P. Ryder, Architect of Black Heritage Sites, Dies at 94
His firm, which he formed with J. Max Bond Jr., designed public works commemorating the civil rights movement as well as the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
The architects Donald P. Ryder, center, J. Max Bond Jr., left, and Nathan Smith in about 1969. Mr. Ryder and Mr. Bond’s New York firm designed prominent repositories of Black culture and social history. Credit.via Davis Brody Bond, LLP
April 14, 2021Updated 3:55 p.m. ET
Donald P. Ryder, whose firm designed important repositories of Black culture and social history in becoming one of the nation’s most prominent partnerships of Black architects, died on Feb. 17 at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 94.
Lafayette Councilman Questions Lack Of Summer Day Camps
Lafayette Consolidated Government doesn’t have any children s summer day camp programs planned yet.
Mayor-President Josh Guillory said this during last night’s meeting in response to a question from District 5 councilman Glenn Lazard. Guillory says the city is looking for more public-private partnerships to develop summer programming for the parks and recreation department. Lazard says he’s fine with public-private partnerships, but he feels it’s need that should have been addressed.
“The fact that here we are talking about not having any kind of scheduled or programmed summer recreation programs, and if we’re talking about COVID, that’s fully understandable, Lazard said. But if we’re talking about not having any because of ‘lack of funding,’ then that’s a whole other story altogether.”