Mar/Apr 2016
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Crafting Community
SAY Dream Center finds kindness literally coming out of the closet. The new residents settling into their rooms at Social Advocates for Youth (SAY) Dream Center this year won’t be storing their belongings on cheap, mass-produced shelves manufactured overseas. Instead, these young adults—former foster kids between the ages of 18 and 24—will each have an elegant, solid,…
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Want to Boost the Economy?
Enjoy Life! Eat out more often! By any account, we’ve got it good. If you live in Sonoma County, you eat out. If you come here to visit, well—you probably came here to eat out and drink, too. We’re known for producing food and beverages that are exported to all parts of the globe. Take a cursory…
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Kelp!
Ocean Rich Seaweed is a regenerative super food that can help heal the earth. All we have to do is to eat it. The Pacific Ocean heaves forward one breath at a time until the tide is high, then slowly sinks again. As the water recedes, people follow as they’ve been doing in California for over…
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Suds ‘n’ Spirits
Thinkin’ to drinkin’, we offer a rotating round of spots we love. CLOVERDALE ALE COMPANY’S RUTH MCGOWAN’S BREWPUB ruthmcgowansbrewpub.com | 707.894.9610 131 E. First St., Cloverdale Open Monday-Thursday, 3pm to 9pm; Friday-Sunday, 11:30am to closing For those weary of being sandwiched in at Russian River or waiting vainly for a stool to vacate at Bear Republic,…
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Modern Kvass
Father and son team produce a beverage no really wants to drink—yet. When Adam Johnston first drank kvass deep in the mountains of Northern China, it wasn’t exactly love at first sip. “I thought it was weird-tasting,” says the 26-year-old Sebastopol resident. And yet, Johnston, who was at the time a globe-trotting college student with a knack…
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On the Rhyze
With inspiration from the past, hop growing returns to Sonoma County. On a cold January night, 10 members of the newly formed NorCal Hops Growers Alliance met around a wooden table at Fogbelt Brewing Company. They had come from Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Cloverdale, and Sonoma to discuss how best to re-introduce a crop last intensively farmed in Sonoma County…
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Nonprofit For Profit
Noble Spoon lets the hungry feed the hungry. There’s a wonderful alliteration to the phrase, “the silver tsunami,” but its meaning is a tad less lyrical. The metaphoric tsunami at hand is that of the 10,000 Americans who turn 65 every single day, 365 days a year. A full one quarter of those who celebrate this milestone…
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Zero Waste Live!
In which our reporter takes a love for cheese and chips, adds a toddler, and lives lightly(ish) on the Earth. In 2013, I visited a house that was sparse, white, and virtually waste-free. It was the Mill Valley home of BeaJohnson, the French-born author of Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life…
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Small Gestures
You can’t save all refugees, but you can certainly braid a little girl’s hair. After a tremendous storm had buffeted the beach, a young girl wandered among the thousands of starfish now stranded on the sand. As she walked, she picked up one creature after another and threw each back into the water. An old man approached…
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Folks You Should Know – Robert Weiss
Healdsburg Artist Throws a Pot on Mt. Everest for Arts Scoloarship Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. When Robert Weiss attended a high school graduation in 2003, he was gratified to learn that the graduating class had racked up 122 scholarships among them to help offset college costs. But he was also horrified. Only one of those scholarships…