Events

Guest Post by Mary Rabinowitz

Here's an information-packed, Earth Day festivities announcement originating from Karen McCollough, parent at the Children's Cooperative Playschool. Thanks, Karen!

Everyone, check out the "Earth Action Fest" this Sunday in Chapel Hill: http://www.earthactionfest.org

Activities will include:

Tree planting
Arts and crafts
Coloring and jewelry-making for kids
Face painting
Bicycle safety inspections by REI
Caricatures by Richard Cloudt
Clown character, Mickey Le Pew, with his environmental magic program (and his family of stuffed skunks!)
And here are some other sites with kid-friendly Earth Day activity ideas -- I just did a quick web search:

Chapel Hill's Community Art Project this year invited us to to share our dreams. The result is a very broad range of objects, from children's drawings to mature poems, on display all over town. You can view the community's dreams in this online gallery (hosted by Andrew Ross), or on Thursday April 29 when the "dream tour" will be held in all venues hosting parts of the exhibit. DREAM runs until May 27.

Chapel Hill Herald, Saturday, April 02, 2005

The Carolina Women's Center's annual Women's Week, which concluded Saturday, covered a lot of topics: violence against women, gender-bending, women and war and mentoring, to pick but a few. The topic that stands out for its exclusion is abortion. This omission represents a significant decision by the Women's Center given the importance of reproductive freedom for college-age women.

Abortion has not always been kept off the program. In 2003, for example, there was a Women's Week forum on "The Abortion Pill: The Clash of Science and Politics."

This year, however, the desire to avoid controversy has left the issue entirely off the agenda.

The problem with this policy of avoidance was well-expressed by geography professor Altha Cravey: "Questions of choice should be front and center; women's control over their own bodies should be front and center.

The center should not alienate women, but the center should stand for something, and those two things are very different." Cravey also serves on the Women's Center's advisory board.