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Gainesville Girls Rock Camp creates a safe space for girls and gender-expansive youth
The nonprofit organization uses music, art and creative expression to amplify the voices of marginalized gender groups May 20, 2021 | 7:30am EDT Gainesville Girls Rock Camp is a nonprofit organization that uses music, art and creative expression to amplify the voices of marginalized gender groups. (Courtesy to The Alligator)
After the COVID-19 pandemic turned down the volume on live-music events last year, Gainesville Girls Rock Camp (GGRC) will be jamming out in person for its 2021 summer session.
The week-long camp, held from July 26 to July 31, is dedicated to teaching regional youths ages 10-17 how to play instruments individually and together in bands. As a chapter of the international Girls Rock Camp Alliance, GGRC actively works to dismantle racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory behaviors and expressions.
Gainesville will negotiate with a local company instead of a South Florida firm to develop a mixed-use downtown project on city property known as “Lot 10.”
City Commissioners opted Thursday night not to go with a recommendation of a real estate consultant at least for now to hire the Boca Raton-based Predesco Property Investment to develop the site at 100 SW First Ave.
Two other local firms had submitted proposals to develop the site after the real estate firm Colliers International, on the city’s behalf, put out the development request.
Instead, the commission authorized city officials to negotiate with the locally based AMJ Group Inc., which has extensive Gainesville development experience and had also put in a development proposal for the city-owned land in front of Loosey s Downtown.
Gainesville’s long-awaited Heartwood subdivision, on Southeast Eighth Avenue just south of Hawthorne Road, has its first model home and planned construction may allow dozens of families to move in by this time next year.
The neighborhood was originally a housing project funded by a federal program dating back to the Kennedy administration, hence its former Kennedy Homes name, said Daniel Gil, a project manager with the Gainesville Community Reinvestment Area.
Over the years, the project fell into disrepair and had to be shut down in the early 2000s due to code violations and damages from a fire, he said.
Officials are considering asking the public whether they would pay higher sales taxes for projects such as high-speed Internet service in rural areas of the county and pedestrian safety road improvements around the University of Florida where students recently died.
The proposed “infrastructure surtax” is only at the initial phase of discussion, and officials don’t even know how much of a tax increase would be proposed to voters, or who would have to approve of it through a referendum. But Gainesville city and Alachua County officials are talking about increasing the sales tax, as they both struggle to fund major projects they say are sorely needed sooner rather than later.