Buy a Beer for Make A Wish

wishamileFor the last few years, my friends Tom and Trey have been taking part in the Make A Wish foundation’s annual
Wish-A-Mile (WAM) bicycle tour fundraiser. They collect pledges, peddle their bikes some 300 miles, and then hand the cash over to the folks at the Make A Wish Foundation, so that they can can continue their incredible work with children suffering from life-threatening conditions. And, tomorrow night (Saturday, May 28) there will be an event here in Ypsi to raise money for their ride. Here’s the info:

MUSIC – – – BEER – – – FOOD !!!

MAKE-A-WISH FUNDRAISER PARTY

Once again, a fun-filled evening is on tap! This year, we will have music by a local Bluegrass band, Wayward Roots. Two kinds of beer from the Corner Brewery will be available, as well as a fire, hotdogs, marshmallows, and other tasty treats.

Come on by for the Make-A-Wish fundraising party and toast Tom and Trey as they prepare for another Wish-A-Mile 300 ride. Toast Alan the bass-player of Wayward Roots who is riding the WAM as well.

This Memorial weekend can start with fun and fundraising for a great cause !!

Location: 1110 Sweet Road (near Prospect and Holmes)
Date: Saturday, 5/28/11
Time: 6 pm the beer and food is ready… 8pm the Music!

$20 entry for music, food, and beer and fun !! (You can always donate more…)

Bring your friends, the more the merrier!

If you can’t make the party, you still donate here.

When I asked Tom for details about the ride, and whether or not the money they raised would be going toward the granting of a wish for one specific kid, he responded with the following.

Each year, Make A Wish of Michigan grants about 300 wishes on the basis of the money earned from this ride. Many of the riders are family members of former wish kids who feel personally compelled to “pay back”. One entire team is founded around a young girl (Alex) who died shortly after her wish was given. They have been riding for almost 15 years. So, in general, we all ride for the mission of the whole organization, not one specific kid. Some teams are around the memory of a kid, some not. Trey and I just support the whole idea.

I like the idea that MAW helps create a memory. What do you remember growing up? That is positive? I remember taking walks with my dad. I remember some family vacations. I remember happy moments. Fortunately, I don’t have to filter out hospitals, illness, pain. I didn’t spend my youth in a hospital, in bed, or in a wheelchair.

MAW gives not just the kid a wish, but the whole family is involved in the event. A memory is created, a positive, happy occasion, a break from the routine of hospitals, tests, surgeries, chemotherapy, and the like. The family and their child receive a moment of hope, a time with joy, and hopefully the strength to continue. I think it works. At the ride and after, I see how the families there respond, and how very grateful they are to Make A Wish. I see riders who come back each year, dedicated to help, because their brother, co-worker, or friend had a kid with some life-threatening disease. They were impacted by the child, their life, and their wish event. The actual wish is less essential than the fact the Make A Wish makes it such an big event, so nice and so fun that the family has a positive, memorable time to recall. Even if they lose their child, they have something other than sickness and hospitals in their memory. They have some nice moment shared, where they can recall a time of happiness.

More information on the kids helped by Make A Wish, and the wishes that have been enabled in the past, can be found here.

[See also: Make A Wish Michigan’s Charity Navigator ranking]

Posted in Michigan, Other, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Can anyone confirm that the Elbow Room has once again closed its doors?

elbowclosed2011

According to my friend Andy, there’s a sign on their door that says, “closed until sold.” If anyone has details, I’d love to hear them.

[Our last “The Elbow Room is Closing” thread can be found here.]

Posted in Local Business, Ypsilanti | Tagged , , | 20 Comments

Sharpen your pencils…. Five Year Engagement to shoot in Ypsi

Remember how, a few weeks ago, we had a pencil paparazzi sighting of Jason Segel and a bunch of other marginally famous folks having drinks in Ann Arbor? Well, it looks like some of them may be headed to Ypsilanti next week to continue work on the film that brought them to MIchigan. (It’s called Five Year Engagement.) The following notice, sent from the production team behind the movie, was distributed to local businesses today.

drunkenpigypsi3

As Michigan’s extremely generous film incentives are being scaled back considerably under our new Governor, this might be your last chance to see someone more famous than the members of Animal Magic in our city, so sharpen up those pencils and get ready to get out there on Washington Street with your sketch pads on Tuesday…. And, if that’s not motivation enough, the best pencil paparazzi sighting will win free tickets to the next episode of the hit local talk show Dreamland Tonight!

Speaking of Dreamland Tonight, since we film on the block where they’ll be shooting, I wonder if there’s a chance that we might be able to lure someone from the cast or crew over for an interview. It doesn’t leave us a lot of time to get ready, but I bet, if we tried, we could get a new episode written and ready to go by June 3.

Posted in Art and Culture, Dreamland Tonight, Michigan, Special Projects | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

What it’s really like in Michigan’s prisons

Last night, I reprinted a letter sent by a Michigan school Superintendent to our Governor, asking that his school be converted over to a prison. Given that we fund corrections better than we do education in this state, he argued that it would be in the best interests of his students. He was clearly attempting to employ satire, but it led to a real discussion in the comments section as to what Michigan’s prisons are truly like, and whether we, as tax payers, pay for prisoners to have cable television, attend college, etc. Fortunately, our friend Natalie Holbrook, who works as a prisoner advocate, stepped in to dispel some common myths. Here’s what she had to say.

We might be spending more annually per prisoner than other nearby states, but this money is not being spent to provide extra special amenities to people in prison in MI. I know men with severe and persistent mental illness who have languished in 23 to 24 hour solitary confinement due to either being undiagnosed or lack of appropriate care. I know the families of people who have died in solitary due to inappropriate health care services and/or mental health services and custody staff who were unwilling to intervene and do what was right.

Prison is not a cake walk. Prison is harsh. I do not consider the superintendent’s letter to be satirical; it is ill-informed and factually inaccurate.

In Michigan cable is paid for by the prisoner benefit fund; it is not paid for by the state. There is no internet. There are no high tech computer labs. People go to prison illiterate and come out the same way. You can only earn a degree if you have a family that can help you pay for correspondence courses. And correspondence courses cost a lot of cash. There is no access to “free” college. There are few programs (though some very good volunteer run programming does happen) other than the psychological programs that must be completed for a person to get paroled.

The small privileges people in prison have are not what costs the state so much to keep them locked up.

However, personnel costs a crap load. Many communities in this state rely on the prison in their midst for jobs…this is a problem.

Right now the state is spending between 1.20 and 1.80 per prisoner for all three meals a day. Tell me what kind of food you get for that kind of money? I would hope that students would never be fed the soy based, filler-filled food people in prison are fed.

If you really want to go after prison spending, then we have to go after the public’s perception of people in prison and crime. Recently, some CA prisoners were transferred to the private prison in Baldwin, MI. The people of Baldwin rejoiced at the incoming prisoners cause it meant jobs for a struggling community. We have to challenge this perspective and come up with viable job options that do not rely on the mass caging of human beings.

Some of the most costly prisons in MI are in the upper peninsula, but those are not the prisons that are ever on the chopping block for closure, and guess why? Jobs.

Furthermore, if we are ever going to effectively de-populate prisons we have to talk frankly about institutional racism and the failed war on drugs. Our legislators never talk about race and class as they create policies that directly impact prison growth. This shit is huge, people, and we, the pubic, are responsible for some of the conditions that lead to the over-reliance on prisons.

If you believe in locking people up for being addicted to crack, or peddling crack, or stealing to feed their addictions (rather than treatment, education, community treatment for mental illness, etc) then prisons will continue to be over-utilized and the go-to for job creation in rural communities.

I want to see prison used as a scarce resource that stops sucking out the cash of the general fund. I want to see more spent on education. This does not mean taking away the scarce resources prisoners have access to. However, it does mean reducing the population drastically and ultimately many hundreds of jobs would be lost or transformed into community, reintegration jobs.

And, just so you know, the prison libraries are not all that. They are required by law to have legal libraries… this is useful to many, but it is not the kind of educational paradise inferred in the super’s letter.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Michigan, Other, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 45 Comments

Peter Thiel questions the value of higher education in America… Does he have a point?

Peter Thiel, one of the cofounders of PayPal, is credited in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education with saying, essentially, that higher education may be overvalued in America. Theil, who today announced the names of the 24 students who would be dropping out of college to accept $100,000 cash awards as part of his new eponymous fellowship program, stated that college could be a mistake for some. The following clip comes from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

…Students today are taking on more debt, and recently tightened bankruptcy laws make it more difficult to shake that debt, he argues, and those factors make higher education a risky investment. “If you get this wrong, it’s actually a mistake that’s hard to undo for the rest of your life,” he said…

With tuition, room, and board coming in at over $60k a year at some schools, it’s not an unfair question, especially as well-paying entry-level jobs for college graduates are becoming more and more difficult to come by. Thiel was speaking specifically about entrepreneurially-inclined students, but, in today’s America, it’s a fair question for many. Can someone studying graphic design in college, for instance, expect to make enough when they get out to recoup their investment in a reasonable amount of time? It’s a question that more and more people are asking themselves these days.

The following comes from NPR’s coverage of the Thiel Fellowship:

…Some of the recipients are leaving first-rate institutions like Harvard and Stanford to take the fellowship. In a press release, the foundation’s head, James O’Neill, said that in taking the fellowship they were “challenging the authority of the present and the familiar.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Thiel thinks ideas can develop in a start-up environment much faster than at a university. And the project is also intended to question the idea of higher education. Thiel told TechCrunch in April that the United Sates was in a higher education bubble.

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he told Techcrunch. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus”…

I’d like to go on and write a bit about all of these new Law Schools and the like that are popping up due to the fact that student loans are easy to come by, without any regard for the fact that their graduates likely won’t find work, but it’s late, and I’ve got to read about Newt Gingrich’s love of high-end jewelry.

Posted in Education, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 43 Comments

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