Tag / love
WLLB Club at Wilson: We want to thank all of the Wilson Faculty for loving and serving our city! And we want to thank Nicole and Dolly from Sunnin Lebananse Cafe on 2nd Street for all of their wonderful help! We Love Long Beach!
LB Wilson students serving teachers and administators this Friday.
This Friday: The WLLB Club at Wilson will be serving all 300 teachers and administrators delicious Lebanese food from Sunnin Lebanese Cafe on Second Street.
Our desire is to show our appreciation to the Wilson faculty for all their hard work this year.
This is our third event at Wilson High School. We had a Thanksgiving and Valentines luncheon for over 100 Special Ed. students earlier in the year at the Wilson Media Center . It was an opportunity for students to serve one another.
Each student at Wilson needs 40 hours of service in order to graduate. Our goal as WLLB is to partner with our students so that they can learn why it is important to serve one another, their teachers, and their city. WLLB believes in raising up the future LB citizens with the hope that our city will known for how we love and serve one another.
WLLB & Gary DeLong Present the Long Beach Neighborhood BBQ at Marine Stadium Park:Free Food:: Live Music::Live Art::And Activities for Kids. Come get to know your Neighbors!!!
Sunday's Bands:So Many Wizards, Chris Paul Overall & Jay Buchanan. $2 Door, $2 Drinks & Free 2 hour parking w/ validation.
Photo by Jason Wilson
Avis Atkins is a senior at CSULB. By summer, she will have graduated in four years, majoring in Human Development with two minors in sociology and psychology. As an honor student, she is the founder/president of Black Scholars, the vice-president of the Rotaract Leadership Club, and a senator of the College of Liberal Arts Associated Students Incorporated. She is hoping to become a college counselor and eventually a college president.
This would be a lot of weight for anyone to carry, but when you understand where she came from, these accomplishments and goals become astounding.
Avis and her four siblings grew up with her father, a Vietnam war veteran who battled an addiction to crack. During her elementary years she regularly begged for money on the street, lived in five cities, attended eleven different schools, lived in a West Hollywood apartment, two motels, two homeless shelters, and a van.
With a smile, she recalls one cold winter night when Reginald VelJohnson (Carl Winslow on Family Matters) gave her $20 and a bucket of chicken.
At the age of seven, she met her mother for the first time (who was by then, a clean crack addict). Her stepfather was physically abusive, an active crack addict, and a thief who would steal money from her and her siblings and get in fistfights with her father. After a lengthy custody court battle, she and her siblings lived with her father in an Atlantic Avenue G.I. house.
Blaming his father for not spending enough time with him, her older brother committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. In his latter days, her father suffered from a deep depression, dabbled in crack, and developed an aggressive cancer that rapidly spread throughout his body. Avis tenderly remembers seeing the bumps under his arms and on his torso.
And then he died alone on his bed at home.
Throughout her entire senior year of high school, Avis lived at home completely alone.
During the last days of her father’s life, she asked him why he treated her so differently than the rest of the kids. She had a deep love and respect for him, but wondered why she always had to do most of the begging and assume so much more responsibility than the others.
With quivering lips and tears streaming down her cheeks, she told me the answer that would change her life forever:
“Because I always knew you could handle it. I see something in you. You got something real special.”
“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” (a Chinese Proverb provided by Avis)
// JASON WILSON
You are invited to get to know your Neighbor and Enjoy a great meal
We are lucky to travel back downtown to Pine Ave this month to enjoy a scrumptious buffet at George’s Greek Cafe.
We Love Downtown Long Beach!
Here is the Menu: ***This month’s dinner is just $16.00 which includes tax & tip and the following buffet choices:
- Traditional Greek Salad
- Pita
- Roasted Potatoes
- Veggies
- Kleftico (slow roasted lamb)
- Chicken Skewers
- Baklava
**Drinks are NOT included with this price***
Please only RSVP if you can make it
Questions on this please email us at info@welovelb.org
**There is free 2 hour parking behind George’s and Smooth’s w/ validation!!
Sue Beeny Photo by Jason Wilson
As a nurse, the first thing Sue Beeney would do at the beginning of her shift was to check the list of patients under her care. Tears would fill her eyes as she saw a line written through a name, because, of course, this meant that that person was dead.
After working in a veteran’s hospital for 1_ years, and continuously feeling the shock and weight that death left behind, she became restless. A vague and unformed question began to surface from the depths of her person until one day, in all its profoundness and simplicity, it faced her directly and unavoidably: What is grief?
In 1986 she enrolled into a self-paced study program about just that. Nine months later, she conducted her first grief support group of eight people in a local church lobby. But it didn’t stop there. People were still dieing and people were still falling into bottomless pits of despair and paralysis. Shell-shocked victims from all over the city began flocking to her intimate therapeutic meetings held in YMCA kitchens, psych hospitals, conference rooms of medical hospitals, and churches. She wrote books on the subject and lived through the doubt and tragedy of others, night after night – for fourteen years as she continued her full-time position as a nurse. In 1999, New Hope Grief Support Community was born. Sue finally quit her daytime job to become the president of her non-profit refuge for the hurt and wounded.
Today, New Hope has 241 volunteers logging in 6000 hours a year, and is running 35 eight-week groups of 8-10 mourners a year. Sue still personally leads as many of these groups as possible; highly trained, caring, and invested volunteers lead the rest. She and her team run weekend camps for children and teens and they even have a pet therapy dog named Cinder who lights up the world for both children and adults. Like Sue and her volunteers, he is a friend that will sit with you through your pain. No gimmicks, no sales pitches, no easy answers. Rather, a friend and comrade with whom you can slowly walk down the long dusty road of grief to a place of healing and a “new normal”.
On average, thirteen people are affected by each death. And each year over 3000 people die in Long Beach. Sue is one of these affected people and she is not holding back her tears, or her smile. Here is a link: http://www.newhopegrief.org //JASON WILSON
Check out the District Weekly:
Bob Hurt waving on 7th and PCH Photo by Randy Baransky
For some of you, Bob Hurt is part of a daily routine. Standing on the corner of PCH and Seventh Street from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Hurt smiles and waves at passing drivers as they inch toward the freeway. But he never leaves.
The story of how Hurt arrived at the intersection is as brief as the exchanges he makes with commuters: He’s learned his lesson with alcohol, he says, but doesn’t offer much beyond this. His son, born at Long Beach Memorial, lives in Arizona; they don’t speak. He also doesn’t speak to his older brother. Now, living under a bridge, Hurt supports two other men—his younger brother and a friend—with what he pulls in standing on Seventh.
Long Beach became home to Hurt at the age of 5, when his father landed a job as an electrical engineer and moved his family from Indiana to California. Memories from his childhood reveal our city’s forgotten history: He remembers getting into dirt-clot fights along the edges of the town dump, which would later be paved over and become Loynes Drive. Daydreaming of one day owning his very own bait-and-tackle shop, Hurt also fished in the city’s channels. And he recalls chasing rabbits in a dusty plot of land not too far from where he stands today. It’s now the Ralphs shopping center.
A genuinely happy, warm, engaging man, Hurt is filled with stories that he is all too happy to share. And while he could certainly use whatever you have to spare, he says, “I know times are hard for everybody. The goal is really just to make people happy!” Don’t worry if you pass by empty handed; wave back, then give when you can. Bob Hurt just wants to make your day. // CAITLIN CUTT
Please Check out the District Weekly every Wednesday!
We want to LOVE this city! Photo by Jeff Gould
So deliberate is the manner of Scott Jones and so demonstrative are his actions that at one point during our conversation—most of which concerns We Love Long Beach (welovelb.com), a secular/nonprofit community advocacy group the 26-year-old Long Beach native formed with his sister, Robin, 30—I jot down “love lobbying” in the corner of my notebook. Which is to say Scott Jones takes love—and all its meanings, forms and implications—very seriously. And he’d like you to, too.
In the time since 50 people showed up to the first neighborhood breakfast on March 31, 2008, We Love Long Beach has become something of a grassroots get-to-know-one-another phenomenon: 500 people attended a bands-and-BBQ bash last summer, featuring such local greats as Deep Sea Diver and the Fling; monthly dinners (at restaurants like Caffe La Strada, On the Mark, Number Nine Noodles and, on Jan. 29, Smooth’s Sports Grille) are regularly attended by upwards of 40 residents; another community breakfast will be held the morning of Feb. 28 at Livingston Park; and there is a BBQ scheduled for May 23 at Marine Stadium Park.
And that’s to say nothing of the offshoot club Scott formed for students at the Jones’s alma mater, Wilson High, where members earn service hours by hosting luncheons for special needs students and, in April, their teachers.
“I’d like to know more people in the city than anyone else,” he says. “It’s one thing to say we’re a diverse city, but it’s another to say we are a city that gets along.”
To that end, the essence of We Love Long Beach lies in its vision statement: “To know and serve the people, neighborhoods and the city of Long Beach.” And the first step toward achieving it, Scott explains, is saying hello to our neighbors—“knowing what they do, where they work.” Which leads to trust: “Every relationship is based on trust—husbands and wives, friends,” he continues. From there, Scott jumps to community, or “working off different gifts and passions,” with the ultimate goal being addressing needs, the kind that are far greater than borrowing a box of sugar. “You go off deeper needs and you become friends,” he concludes.
One could look at Scott and Robin’s efforts and see only idiosyncratic wishes rooted in youthful idealism—or, conversely, note in their accomplishments (delivering four dozen new diners to a restaurant, for example) the potential dangers that come with such influence—namely, power.
But to this Scott offers a sentence, written by Arts of the Wise Leader author Mark Strom: “True humanity is to take people places they haven’t been, so that they might go places I can’t go.”
“The goal for this year is to fine tune and get good at what we can do,” Scott says. “We’d like to be able to do what we do well in every neighborhood.”
LB native taps into need for neighborliness
By John Canalis, The Canalis Report
Posted: 01/04/2009 09:19:26 PM PST
“I want to give people an excuse … to get to know each other,” said Scott Jones of his Long Beach get-togethers. With sister Robin, left, and firefighters helping, 500 came to a summer barbecue. (Diandra Jay / Staff Photographer)
Lifelong Long Beach resident Scott Jones had plenty of friends.
But he didn’t know many of his neighbors.
So in March he asked those who live near him in Belmont Shore to breakfast. About 50 people came for coffee and pancakes cooked on camping gear in Livingston Park.
“I ended up having all of these amazing conversations,” he said. “I met more neighbors at one breakfast than I have my entire life. I thought, `Maybe I am onto something.’ It was the first time I actually hugged a neighbor.”
The breakfasts became monthly. Then came barbecues, restaurant dinner parties, fundraisers and a book club.
Careful to use a plural pronoun to reflect a collectivist sensibility, Jones, 26, called the group of strangers-turned-friends “We Love Long Beach.”
WLLB's Sibling Duo Robin and Scott Jones in front of their home in Belmont Shore, CA!
Check out the complete article here:
http://tinyurl.com/dgvg8m
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