Every December, the volunteers for STEAC’s Holiday Program clear out a big room at the First Baptist Church in west Davis, fill the space with boxes of donated food and gifts, and then give it all away in a few hours, this year to 475 low-income families and singles in Davis. Today’s Davisville focuses on the program and the nonprofit behind it.
This is a story about people, Davis, adaptation, the pandemic, bringing donors and recipients closer together, changing demographics, poverty, relief, logistics, food, gifts — and a growing need, matched by a growing willingness to meet that need. We talk with Kelly Coleman, who runs the Holiday Program; Liane Moody, the Short Term Emergency Aid Committee's executive director; and two of the volunteers who worked on this year’s distribution day, Saturday, Dec. 11.
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Today's program re-broadcasts a March 2011 Davisville interview with Stan Forbes, a former Davis City Council member who was one of 14 members of the first California Citizens Redistricting Commission a decade ago. Every 10 years, following the U.S. Census, the commission redraws the boundaries of the state's congressional, state Senate, Assembly and Board of Equalization districts to reflect the state's changing population and "create districts of relatively equal population that will provide fair representation for all Californians."
This fall, the 2021 version of the commission is presenting its draft maps for the 2020s, and is collecting comments for about another month. This interview from 2011 presents the roots of this effort to reduce gerrymandering and put more power in the hands of California's voters.
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The New York Times recently posted a list of 115 new movies scheduled for release between now and the end of the year—way too many to track! Enter Derrick Bang, film critic for the Davis Enterprise and his blog Derrick Bang on Film, for our yearly talk about movies to see and avoid during this high season for movie-viewing.
The pandemic pummeled ticket sales in theaters this year, and movies are no longer the center of popular culture. Even so, Derrick says 2021 has been a terrific year for movies.
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We're living in a labor shortage, and signs like this one in downtown Davis aren't hard to find. The pandemic is a huge part of the reason but other factors are also at work, such as childcare, more people working for themselves, the cushion provided by benefits and a high savings rate, and baby boomers retiring. And yet California has the highest unemployment rate of any state except Nevada.
Today's guest is Suzy Taherian, a lecturer in the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis, and the chief financial officer of Xpansiv, an international company based in San Francisco. She describes conditions she and other CFOs are seeing as we talk about reasons for the labor shortage, including some you might not have heard yet; how employers are responding; how it might resolve; and how employees can take advantage of the opportunities it presents.
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For Halloween this year, we have a return visit with the imaginatively named Lord Blood-Rah, host of Lord Blood-Rah’s Nerve-Wrackin’ Theatre on TV and Nerve-Wrackin’ Auditorium on radio. They're available in Davis on DCTV (channel 15 on Comcast, menu 99 on ATT U-Verse) or KDRT. Our guest, whose real name is Frank Wallace-Ailsworth, is a science-fiction/horror-show host in the tradition of Bob Wilkins and Elvira.
We talk about ... well, pretty much what you'd expect, such as classic radio, and movies from good to bad to charmingly stupid, plus what's in the “Venusian cocktail” created for one of his in-person showings at a movie palace in Orinda, and why anyone would watch a film like My Son, the Vampire. The story concerns a would-be vampire and his misguided robot. October is high season for stuff like this. |
My guest today is Seb Oñate, the editor of the Davis Enterprise. Our subjects include the appeal of hyper-local community journalism, a "rough couple of years," popular types of stories among Enterprise readers (crime and local government), nostalgia for newsprint as paid print circulation fades but online readership grows, engaging the town's college students, and working in “a town as engaged as Davis.”
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The prediction a few weeks ago, inspired by this year’s ravaging wildfires, that “every acre [in California] can and will burn” — does that really apply to Davis? And if the drought continues through this coming winter and spring, does Davis have the water it needs? Today we talk with Stan Gryczko, director of Public Works Utilities & Operations for the city, and Joe Tenney, Davis fire chief, about the city’s water supplies, conservation, and the fire risks facing Davis in 2021.
(Credits: Illustration by Mark Deamer; excerpt from “Song of the Sea” written and played by Randy Mahrer)
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A firm number is hard to come by, but there are probably at least 200 homeless people in Davis. Paul's Place is the latest resource to help them get off the street. It will offer tiny apartments, transitional housing, and services, and it replaces an old, former house where Davis Community Meals and Housing has been offering help for more than 20 years.
On today's Davisville, DCMH Executive Director Bill Pride talks about Paul's Place, why it's named for his dad, the current state of homelessness in town, the effect of the pandemic, and a few insights he's learned over the years while seeking to help the homeless in Davis.
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Yolo agriculture, which produced crops worth $670 million in 2020, is going through a few changes. That’s not surprising, because of the drought, Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, but maybe some of the details are. For example, sales of CSA boxes (“community supported agriculture”) rose sharply last year, helping to balance lower food sales to restaurants and institutions; longer term, some growers are moving crops to Yolo from even drier parts of the state. Yolo Agricultural Commissioner Humberto Izquierdo talks about these changes, his job, the value of open space, and a few things he wishes the county's city residents would know about farming, on today’s Davisville.
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About 30 to 40 percent of food in the United States is wasted, for reasons that range from spoilage and overproduction to unsold inventory and bad planning. A new California law, SB 1383, requires major changes in how we dispose of surplus food, with waste redirected to compost and edible food to the hungry. Michael Bisch, executive director of the Yolo Food Bank, believes the changes spurred by the law -- and conditions in Yolo County -- mean Yolo will be “pretty darn close to a fully food-secure county within three years, five years tops.” On today's Davisville, he explains why this breakthrough is now possible, plus how to pay for and achieve it.
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