Today we celebrated Anna’s birthday, and seeing as she’s from the class of 1984, we had reason to celebrate big.
Will wished her Happy Birthday.
We sent out invites and got this sweet backdrop for free off of Canva!
We had samples from the Upside Down to munch on.
We had tunnels to the underground.
Hawkins had some sample pumpkins leftover for us to try.
Elle shared some of her waffles with us.
We had some extra clubs to take on some demogorgons.
Anna’s cake! It’s got coconut shavings for the floating specks in the Upside Down.
We had a good ol’ time. Owen insisted on being a demogorgon. And we made a piñata too. With 3 Musketeers inside. In the show, Dartes (a pet demogorgon) eats 3 musketeers. So, we made sure to stuff Dart full of chocolate!
The Upside Down has these creatures called Demogorgons. One in the show is named Dart. Owen is our Dart. *He won’t be seeing the show any time soon, but he still had lots of fun listening to the soundtrack and dressing up today!
We had an awesome celebration! Thanks for those who came and celebrated another year of Anna’s life with us! And thanks to Elle, a former student who helped with having an expert fan’s set of eyes in the prep!
Tomorrow night is the Farmer’s Market Peach Jam, and we’re setting up our StoryTent in the center of the Farmer’s Market to provide children the space to come sit and read good books with volunteers, earn book bucks, and redeem those book bucks for prizes. Wondering what the StoryTent’s all about?
Let Jeremy and Jernie explain:
We’ll post pictures on our @travelingstoriesnashville Instagram page. Looking forward to a fun day!
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well”- Virginia Woolf
This is a video I produced with research from classmates in Dr. Donna Ford’s High Poverty Youth: Improving Outcomes class.
Food insecurity is defined as a lack of access to a sufficient amount of food because of insufficient funds. More than 49 million American households are considered food insecure and are vulnerable to poor health, cognitive delay, and malnourishment as a result. Currently 1 in 5 people in Nashville are affected by food scarcity (Fletcher, 2014). Here is a map of the four food deserts located in Nashville (Padgett, 2009) along with a map that details a most current food desert map that details the food deserts and the factors that affect access to the grocery stores.
While as a new resident I’m an outsider to Nashville and my neighborhood, I have become very familiar with the neighborhood, it’s history and my neighbors who are here. As I took video footage for the film I was making, I spotted 10 police cars and two additional undercover police cars. I saw one Black woman pulled over by an officer. To look a little more specifically at the crisis of Nashville’s food dilemma, here are some hard facts from the 37208 zip code I live in which is part of the Charlotte Food Desert. All data here is pulled from the April 2017 Nashville Social & Economic Disparity report.
10% of population in this area arrives to work by bus (city data)
I observed 7 predatory lending stores in my drive around Jefferson Street
There are at least 7 tobacco, liquor, alcohol stores in the zip code, and I’ve seen two within a mile from elementary and middle schools.
1/4 mile away from local elementary school
There are 16,067 residents in the area code, gentrifying 3,250 people per square mile, 86% of whom are Black as of the last census .
9 stores sell groceries, including 1 Kroger Grocery Store, 1 Save-A-Lot, and 3 Dollar Stores. The rest were corner markets.
I took this picture in the Edgehill Grocery on 12th and Edgehill. There was no lettuce. No carrots. Instead, these 10 cabbage. There were apples, oranges, mushrooms, lemons, and limes. Their fresh produce arrives on Wednesday. This was the selection available Friday.
There is a complexity surrounding the problems that are involved in the current food crisis in North Nashville. In speaking with Dr. David Padgett at Tennessee State University, he shared with me that grocery store outlets do not prefer to do business in transitioning communities.
They would rather serve a stable population and not risk losing a return on their investment. He also shared with me that oftentimes these retailers do not interview local residents about what they want, but simply make decisions of placement from data retrieved from their Geographic Information System. Nashville is a rapidly developing and gentrifying area. According to the Social and Economic Disparity report, Nashville was the number one hit location in the Zillow housing search engine.
They also reported that Nashville is the number six most rapidly gentrifying city in the United States. What might this have to do with the problem of food deserts? The density of wealthy people moving into the 37208 is alarming. While there is a culture shift occurring, there’s also a class shift occurring. One group moves in feeling like they deserve the attractive property, the other is left trying to defend and stay in the only place they’ve known as home.
A final problem I will address is how the ecology of poverty is amplified by the food drought that occurs when food deserts are present. Studies from the Social & Economic Disparity in Nashville, an annual report put out as an assessment of the state of Nashville’s engagement with poverty and other social concerns, states that “When the concentration of poverty reaches 20%, negative factors increase such as crime, increased dropouts, duration of poverty, and fewer housing options.
The 37208 poverty level where I live is composed of 40% of people living in extreme poverty, listing it within a category called ‘detrimental to everyone who lives there.’ (Social & Economic Disparity in Nashville, 2017, p. 22).
The defunding for food assistance in Nashville can be identified by the city’s one food investment project. Second Harvest’s budget has decreased from $172,500 in 2014, to $152,000 in 2015, to $127,000 in 2016, and is at it’s lowest at $88,900 in 2017 (Community Enhancement Fund). If studies show that crime increases in areas affected by food scarcity, why would we not invest in more food investment opportunities? Compared to the Metro Police Department’s $188,060,700 budget for 2017, surely there is additional funding that can be provided to address the problem of food scarcity in Nashville.
How did things get this bad and why are they this way?
The next post will dig into the history of how things are the way they are.
Sources:
Community Enhancement Fund, (2017). Retrieved from:
I never questioned the death penalty until like the Pharisees, I questioned Jesus. My thinking of who deserved death was more in line with the Pharisees in the scene from John 8:1-11:
“Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such a woman. So what do you say?”
Jesus’ response? He stares at the ground and puts his finger to the dirt with his hand. The crowd’s not happy with this response:
When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing…
This is a video celebrating our first three years of O-Bear’s life. Owen, someday when you look back on these memories, I hope you’ll know how much we’ve treasured our moments with you. We love you so much, bud.
Here’s our Elles!
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