Talking Parks at City Club
Two worlds are colliding! This Wednesday, City Club's lunch will be about the future of funding for local and state parks. I'll be moderating the panel, which will have people from the state, from Pierce County Parks, and from Earth Economics, a non-profit that specializes in innovation for parks and open space. I think it will be an interesting lunch program! (the picture of the Wright Park lion is from our 2005 park tour)
Union Station at City Club, with Rep. Norm Dicks!
Next Wednesday the 20th, City Club's lunch will feature Congressman Norm Dicks, Judge Robert Bryan, and Jim Merritt to discuss the saving of Union Station. This is just in time for the 100th anniversary of the station. I have a real fondness for Union Station after Mary and I held our wedding reception there in 2008. And Mary used to be a tour guide there too, way back when. I hope you'll consider coming. It's definitely a great success story for Tacoma. More information at the City Club site.
Be the Spark! Youth Against Violence Project at City Club next Wednesday
I want to encourage you to come to next week's City Club lunch on March 16. It will feature three youth speakers who are involved in the Youth Philanthropy Board and the Youth Against Violence initiative sponsored by the Greater Tacoma Community Foundation. I've been a volunteer with GTCF for three years now and I really love their work. And I was the facilitator for a recent retreat of the Youth Philanthropy Board and was just blown away by the work they are doing. And with the upcoming Be the Spark day with Desmond Tutu (May 13!) … well, I'm all about Read more…
Social Media: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly …
… but mostly I want to talk about The Good. Yesterday I "interviewed" Andrew Fry for City Club's lunch program about social media. I thought Andrew talked about some great topics and his story-telling was really great. An all around great program. A lot of the topic was dedicated to the above questions: what's good, bad, and ugly, about social media. And that makes a lot of sense for a 45 minute presentation. But to me, the good waaayyy outweighs the bad. Since I didn't delve into it yesterday (and I shouldn't have, it was Andrew's program, I was just Read more…
Books Panel this Wednesday!
I'm really looking forward to our books panel this Wednesday. Some familiar names from Tacoma (Tom Llewellyn of Beautiful Angle and local author, sweet pea of Kings Books, and Neel Parikh of the Pierce County Library system) will join the publisher of the Mountaineers Kate Rogers and Sheryn Hana of the Book Publishers Network to discuss the future of books. RSVP today by emailing office@cityclubtacoma.org. Mention you saw it on my blog and we'll welcome you at the member rate.
Social Media as Performance
Here are two interrelated stories worth sharing. The first, in The New York Times, suggests that broadcasting our most mundane details is preventing us from being in the moment. We think, "I should totally tweet what I'm doing right now." Here's the start of it. On a recent lazy Saturday morning, my daughter and I lolled on a blanket in our front yard, snacking on apricots, listening to a download of E. B. White reading “The Trumpet of the Swan.” Her legs sprawled across mine; the grass tickled our ankles. It was the quintessential summer moment, and a year ago, I Read more…
I just realized I’ve been at @cityclubtacoma for just over a year! Man, time flies.
It took the first Monday of August for me to realize I've been on the job with City Club more than a year now. Last year at this time, we were two days away from an outing to the LeMay Car Museum at the old military academy on Pacific. This year, I'm just a day away from our fundraiser gala at Lakewold. There's been a lot of great things in this last year. Interesting programs, sometimes controversially so. I'm also very happy with Tacoma Art Museum as our lunch venue (pitch for TAM: you should definitely consider having an event Read more…
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