Creatures on parade in Sebastopol
Our reporter and photographer, Mark Fernquest, was out and about last night on Florence Avenue, while Dale and I held down the fort, er, tent, at the Halloween event at Ives Park, hosted by Kiwanis.
Here’s what we found:
And a few more from Ives Park…
At one tent in Ives Park, Granger Lawrence Jaffe invited young people to tell him a joke to get a large candy bar. Here were his three favorites:
Where do whales go to get braces?
— The orcadontist
Where do pirates get their hooks?
— From a secondhand store
What do you call a body without a nose?
— Nobody knows
A young man with a guitar came up to Lawrence. No joke, he wanted to sing a song. Their singing, joined by those around them, produced a bit of Peacetown on Halloween night.
At the Graton Town Square Halloween Party
Thanks to our Graton columnist Dewey Watson for rounding up photos of this year’s Halloween event at the Graton Town Square.
The Sebastopol Area Time Bank celebrates its 10th anniversary
Sebastopol Area Time Bank Coordinator David Gill reached out to us this week to tell us that the time bank is now 10 years old. He provided a little history about the founding of the Time Bank and how it works:
Befitting the Sebastopol Area Time Bank’s (SATB) reputation as an “under-the-radar” organization in our city, we “celebrated” our 10-year anniversary this month in typical quiet fashion: We didn’t stage a gala event, host a silent auction to raise money, or toast what is unquestionably a tremendous accomplishment in these difficult economic times. I’ll tell you what we did, but first some background on SATB:
Back in 2015, a small group of Sebastopol residents formed a committee to explore establishing a Time Bank for the Sebastopol area. They had heard about neighbors helping neighbors with no money changing hands, that the bank’s currency was hours and not dollars, and that each member’s hour was equal in value to the next member’s hour. Quintessential Sebastopol!
They took this concept to city leadership, and this new organization became an incubation project for Cittaslow and in October 2016 SATB was ready for launch as a free service in our community. Area residents joined to access our private, secure member website, where they could post requests for help and offers of service and manage individual accounts that tracked hours earned and hours spent. The City of Sebastopol provided our initial funding, and the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center serves as our “fiscal sponsor” to manage SATB’s funds at our direction.
For the past 10 years, our members have given rides, sewn clothes, diagnosed home problems, supported technology, volunteered locally, provided pet care, gardened and weeded, edited documents, taught bookkeeping, provided companionship, assisted with residential and commercial design, offered yoga and meditation, and so much more. These services cost recipients only the hours they had earned from serving other members.
And that brings me to how we celebrated our anniversary. We deposited 10 hours in our 330 members’ Time Bank accounts, one hour for each of our 10 years serving the community! We want them to take these hours and get the help they need, and then their helper can take the hours and get the help they need, and on and on and on.
Sebastopol Area Time Bank welcomes you to be part of this valuable community resource. Learn more about who we are, our mission statement, our core values, and our membership requirements at https://sebastopoltimebank.org
If you want to get and give help in this way, click on “Apply For Membership” to access our Time and Talents (TNT) member website login page and then click “Join” to begin the process. You, too, can get 10 hours deposited in your account by completing a few simple tasks.
At Sebastopol Area Time Bank, we build community one hour at a time. And for reading this article, we thank you for YOUR time!
David Gill
david@sebastopoltimebank.org
SATB also has a nonprofit organization collaboration program where the organization’s volunteers join the Time Bank and can claim hours equal to the number of hours they volunteer for their favorite nonprofit. Email David at david@sebastopoltimebank.org to begin that discussion. Find out more about the Sebastopol Area Time Bank here.
Update on the ICE arrest in West County
For those of you who didn’t see this update in our story about the SW100 awards, we have news about the arrest of a Forestville resident by ICE earlier this month. According to VIDAS Executive Director Monica Julian, the man was released the next day because he was picked up without a judicial warrant. “We activated the Bay Area Habeas Network, and he was released by the next morning,” Julian said.
