Hasta La Gadget!

Two years ago, The Pollination Project started a daily giving practice, making daily $1000 grants to social change visionaries around the world. Since we started, 50 individuals and families have joined us, each giving $1 or more a day to support grantees in 55 countries. Here are the extraordinary people we supported this week.

Offering Education Across the Class Divide in Nepal. Michelle Welsch is tackling the class-divide and helping communities to grow in Nepal by addressing access to education in her newest project, The Learning House. In Nepal, access to education is largely limited to families with financial means. However, Michelle hopes to offer free educational services to youth in Pokhara. Michelle and a team of local educators and social workers, is currently constructing a community space and learning center that will entice Nepalese youth to pursue their education. Not only will the Learning House offer job and internship placement services, but it will also boast a trendy coffee and tea bar and a computer lounge for students and prospective job seekers.

Hope and Healing in Texas City, Texas. Demetria Krawczyk is determined to use her experience in being HIV+ to help others in similar situations. She and her husband Victor created Hope In Volumes (“HIV”), a non-profit based in Texas City, Texas to provide social support for people affected by HIV and AIDS. Demetria, Victor, and other members of Hope in Volumes are offering compassion-based support groups where participants can experience both personal and spiritual growth.

Artistic Meditations on Post-War Uganda. Daniel Komakech works with United Youth Entertainment (UYE), a film organization based in Gulu Town, Uganda. They are using film to heal the wounds caused by the 20 year war that has impacted thousands of youth and their communities in northern Uganda. In Komakech’s latest project (a film entitled A Girl from Lamwo), he explores the latent tensions over modernization and nation-building within a healing, post-war Ugandan society. They hope A Girl from Lamwo will inspire youth and their communities to reflect on major social issues in post-war Uganda such as HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, early pregnancy, and school dropout rates.

Economic Empowerment in Jinga, Uganda. Colleen Walsh Lang began working in Jinga, Uganda as a student volunteer for St. Francis Health Care Services where she met James Ibanda. James has already been instrumental in launching the Kabale Farmer’s Association, a group of 20 HIV positive individuals working together to live positively and improve their livelihoods. Their goal is to start a local ginger farm to provide income and livelihood for Association members. Together, by encouraging economic growth and community building they hope to empower people living with HIV in Uganda so that they can live happy and healthy lives.

Art and Healing in Tanzania. Frances Morris is an art therapist with a focus in community-based therapy and hospice care. A long-time committed advocate of health and wellness for the marginalized, Frances’ latest venture is the Art Club for Tanzanian Teens with HIV in Moshi, Tanzania. Through this project, Frances is integrating therapeutic and artistic techniques in order to help young Tanzanians cope with the social, psychological, and physical aspects of living with HIV. The art club is currently painting a large mural at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC), and Frances has even procured a studio space for monthly workshops at the hospital. Her ultimate goal for the project is to fashion self-sustaining monthly meetings, run by locals, and driven by the needs and interests of patients.

Bamboo and Community Growth in Kenya. As a social entrepreneur and community mobilizer, Felisters Lidonde has been looking to create environmentally sound solutions to a wide range of issues faced in her native region of Kenya. In her current project, Felisters is mobilizing local communities to plant a previously uncultivated and valuable commodity with ecologically restorative potentials: bamboo. In addition to promoting a fast-growing and ecologically sound solution to a host of issues as diverse as soil degradation and access to clean water, Felister is combining her efforts with an extensive educational campaign on environmental conservation and awareness in rural communities.

Urban Gardening in Nicaragua. Judith Nichols has been living and working with the women and children of impoverished migrant families in Nicaragua for nearly a decade. Now, after years of research on the social and psychological effects of economic instability, Judith is starting the Urban Kitchen Gardens Project in La Paz Centro, Nicaragua. The Urban Kitchen Gardens Project is part community organizing, part self-sustainable living, with an emphasis on high-efficiency urban gardening techniques. The local team is currently building a community center in La Paz Centro where educators and agriculturalists can share their knowledge of gardening with the community in an effort to help them grow their own food.

Want to be part of the joy of giving? Join our Daily Giving Community, or simply create your own giving practice. It will change your life!

Two radio show hosts surprised a woman who had recently lost her son with a gift that overwhelmed her with emotion.

Blaine Rozs, 19, died in December after being crushed by a tractor. His mother, Michele, has been struggling to cope with the loss, according to a fundraising page set up for the family by Australian radio station KIIS 1065. While she has taken time away from work, Michele planned to return soon, as she needed to pay her bills.

But earlier this month, the hosts of the “Kyle and Jackie O Show” radio show surprised her on-air, announcing that with the help of Clarendon Homes, the station would be paying for six months of Michele’s mortgage so she could take time to grieve. The emotional reveal, which was caught in the video above at the 1:57 mark, moved Michele to tears.

“Thank you so much, thank you so much,” a teary-eyed Michele told the show hosts, shown in the video. “I can’t believe it, it’s wonderful.”

Michele’s daughter, Crystal, originally reached out to the radio station and told them about her mother’s situation, the station’s website indicated. The hosts decided to surprise the grieving mother as part of their “GiveBack” initiative and coordinated with Crystal to make the announcement as Michele was listening to the show.

After the big announcement, Jackie O also mentioned that Michele would be receiving AU$5,000 (about US$3,900) to go toward renovations that her son had started, according to the video. What’s more, the hosts set up an online fundraiser so that their listeners could donate to Michele and her family during this trying time.

To learn more or donate to Michele’s family, visit the fundraising page here.

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New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton acknowledged on Tuesday that police were to blame for “many of the worst parts of black history” in the United States. Yet advocates for police reform say the comments are merely lip service from an official who continues to reinforce the city’s racial tensions.

Bratton gave a speech Tuesday morning to a predominantly African-American crowd during a Black History Month breakfast at the Greater Allen AME Church in Queens.

“Slavery, our country’s original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers,” Bratton said.

The commissioner pointed out that the first thing Dutch colonist Peter Stuyvesant did upon arriving in what was then New Amsterdam was set up a police force to prop up a system of slavery.

“Since then, the stories of police and black citizens have intertwined again and again,” Bratton said. “The unequal nature of that relationship cannot and must not be denied.”

As an example, he cited James Powell, the black 15-year-old who was shot and killed by a white NYPD lieutenant in 1964. Bratton noted that the shooting set off riots in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, as well as “half a decade of urban unrest in cities across the country.”

It was an unexpected speech from a commissioner normally in the business of defending the police. Bratton was appointed by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to help mend relations between police and minority communities. Although Bratton has overseen a dramatic decline in controversial stop-and-frisk interrogations, his tenure has also been marked by the high-profile deaths of two unarmed black men — Eric Garner and Akai Gurley — at the hands of police.

Garner’s death in particular focused attention on Bratton’s signature strategy of “broken windows” policing, which is premised on the idea that aggressively targeting low-level disorder prevents more serious crime. An NYPD officer killed Garner, 43, during an arrest for selling untaxed “loosie” cigarettes, a typical broken windows offense.

But even though Bratton’s speech acknowledged his department’s fraught relationship with communities of color, police reform advocates argued Tuesday that history may not look back kindly on the commissioner unless he does more to improve racial disparities in policing.

“While it’s important to provide the historical context of current problems, Commissioner Bratton is in the position of authority now to address current problems of discriminatory policing in New York City,” Priscilla Gonzalez of Communities United for Police Reform told The Huffington Post.

“Unless he takes action to end the abusive ‘broken windows’ and other unequal policing that only targets certain communities with aggression and enforcement, and holds officers accountable when they brutalize and unjustly kill in communities of color,” Gonzalez said, “he, too, will be judged poorly by history.”

Bob Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, said he gave Bratton’s remarks an “A” for “audacious disingenuousness.”

“We appreciate comments on historic abuses,” Gangi continued, but said that the problems were “still going on every day under [Bratton’s] stewardship.”

“The kind of policing he’s promoting and encouraging in New York is quota-driven broken windows policing that’s engaged in blatantly racist policies,” he added.

PROP regularly observes court cases in the city, and Gangi said that on some days “100 percent” of the defendants are people of color. “The NYPD regularly stops, tickets and harasses communities of color for things that have been virtually decriminalized in white communities,” he said, pointing to low-level offenses like drinking in public, fare-beating and walking a dog without a leash.

A New York Daily News report last year revealed that between 2001 and 2013, the NYPD issued over 7 million summonses for such petty infractions. Eighty-one percent of the people issued summonses were black or Latino, the report said.

In his speech Tuesday, Bratton praised the NYPD for bringing down the crime rate in the 1990s and 2000s, before noting that most of the perpetrators — and victims — of gun violence in the city are minorities.

“In our city, there are intractable racial disparities in who commits and who is victimized by crime,” Bratton said, according to The New York Observer, attempting to explain why there is more police activity in minority communities.

Josmar Trujillo of the group New Yorkers Against Bratton, said the commissioner was only pointing to “black-on-black violence” in order to “legitimize modern policing’s racist policies.”

Trujillo also said that the speech wasn’t the first time Bratton has “tried to be Mr. Civil Rights.” The activist noted that Bratton has acknowledged police forces’ history of upholding slavery in previous speeches, as well as in his book, “Collaborate or Perish!“

“We’re not fooled by what comes out of Bratton’s mouth as much as we’re focused on what he does,” Trujillo said, citing concerns about Bratton’s decision to police protests with machine guns and about the commissioner’s support of an effort to make resisting arrest a felony.

“He’s the Bull Connor of our day,” Trujillo added, referring to Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the infamous Alabama segregationist who led the Birmingham police department throughout the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Bratton’s remarks come less than two weeks after FBI Director James Comey gave a speech on race and law enforcement. In that address, Comey acknowledged that police forces have historically enforced “a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups,” and that today, “lazy” racial biases still affect the way minorities are policed.

Powerhouse playwright Clifford Odets produced his greatest plays in prewar America. Masterpieces like Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy focus on the moral dynamics and economic despair that propel the human spirit in the face of devastating circumstances. Openly political treatises, they criticize harsh economic systems, even as they concentrate on the heartache of interpersonal relationships.

By contrast, Rocket to the Moon, now at Theatre at St. Clement’s, is a Depression-era departure, insofar as emotions, not capitalism’s dark side, is paramount. Here, the search for love trumps all, though financial woes are never far from the surface.

In what Odets called his “Romance in Three Acts,” Rocket to the Moon muses on the nature of love, lust and desire. The men are dreamers, predators or elderly suitors. The women are either desperate for security or dazzled by fantasies of passion. Love may lift the spirit, but unless one seizes the chance for happiness, it’s an illusion.

Set in a steamy summer in New York in 1938, the play posits the life of middle-aged dentist Ben Stark (Ned Eisenberg), a decent, caring man assailed on several fronts. His wife Belle (Marilyn Matarrese), portrayed as hard and demanding, rightly worries that his soft heart will cost them financial security.

Angry that he’s paying the rent for fellow dentist Dr. Cooper (Larry Bull), who drinks to combat the blues, she lashes out. The couple is bound by a decade of disappointment, conjoined by the knowledge that happiness is somehow beyond their reach. Then Ben, much to his surprise, gets his deliverance.

Young Cleo, a pretty dental assistant (Katie McClellan), joins his practice — and suddenly, for the first time in his life, he gets a rare chance at happiness. Will he take that rocket to the moon?

This being Odets, the answer is tangled. What stymies or spirits our desire for fulfillment is complicated. Pathos struggles with desire. Realities collide. Even as Ben contemplates his options, he’s forced to confront his father-in-law’s agenda. Rich Mr. Price (Jonathan Hadary) delivers hard truths in a soft-spoken way. Unlike Frenchy (Michael Keyloun), a struggling podiatrist down the hall, or oily choreographer Willy Wax (Lou Liberatore), Price knows both the romantic score and the price of success, whatever the venture.

Director Dan Wackerman shapes a vision of those on the precipice. Stark’s struggles are achingly portrayed by Eisenberg, while McClellan nicely captures Cleo’s vulnerability and longing. Indeed, the cast works hard to do justice to the rarely performed play. So do Harry Feiner’s sets and Amy C. Bradshaw’s costume design.

The truth of existence, its pain and sorrow, and its occasional glimmer of hope, are Odets’ specialties. While Rocket doesn’t have the soaring power of his best works, The Peccadillo Theater Company solid revival is worth seeing.

Photo: Carol Rosegg

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