Today's Features

This week, we take a look at Asset #8, Youth as Resources. According to the Search Institute, “Youth are more likely to grow up healthy when they are given useful roles in the community.”

This asset might be best understood by first approaching it from a family perspective. Do your children or grandchildren have tasks they do as a useful role in the family? Even if they don’t admit it, that’s where it all begins. Everyone needs to have a role in the family to feel like a valued part of it.

Michelle Holland became a poet in high school. She liked to write but staying in the rules and guidelines of writing just wasn’t her thing.

“I wasn’t a very good prose writer in high school,” she said, “(but) I wanted to write. I liked to keep a journal but I wasn’t good at putting together sentences and paragraphs.”

Poetry offered a way out of all the rules. She wrote the way she thought poetry should be written.

Do Los Alamos Big Band Leader Jan McDonald and Southwest Jazz Orchestra Founder Jack Manno together have a total of 100 years of experience in the music business? “Not quite,” said  McDonald. “But almost,” Manno added.

  The long-time collaborators will cover almost but not quite 100 years of jazz history in two sets of toe-tapping music from their two aggregations at the 2nd annual “Swing into Spring” concert at  7 p.m. April 28 at the Duane W. Smith Auditorium.

Betty Ehart Senior Center volunteer Mary Venable began a monthly support group for those facing macular degeneration and hearing challenges more than three years ago.

The group often acquired a guest speaker, then with the help of community organizer, Karen Edwards, held a low vision expo several months later.

“Macular Degeneration and hearing loss are of epidemic proportions and so much denial, even in our beloved community,” Venable said, who herself has some challenges.