A future stickball player embraces his father’s game. Photo by Catherine Rogers

By Catherine Rogers

NEW YORK CITY—The smell of traditional Latin food, the sound of good music and the sight of friends dancing and cheering are the pleasures you can experience every Sunday from April to August on Stickball Blvd. in the Bronx.

All this centers around a street game called Stickball that culminated this past weekend as the New York Emperors Stickball League (NYESL) hosted its 26th annual Memorial Weekend Stickball Classic.

The sport began in the 1930s as a cheap alternative to baseball and many players grew up with their teammates. For many young boys of that time, it tied players to a team rather than a gang and created a more positive brand of brotherhood.

“Its part of our culture; we grew up playing stickball. We’ve been playing stickball since we were 10 years old and it was a way for us to stay out of trouble. Instead of being in gangs, we were in teams and it meant a lot for us,” said John Franco, a stickball old-timer.

The street game continues today as a family tradition being passed from generation to generation—what players and spectators alike say the sport is all about.

“It’s just great family tradition. Your whole weekend is spent here getting sun and cheering on your team and the rivalry is really great but at the end of the day we’re all family,” said Liz Torez, the wife of a Gold team player.

With 14 teams from California, Florida, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and New York, participating in several tournaments throughout the year, the game serves to connect friends and family from across the Country.

“I like the family aspect. I like that we come back every year and we go wherever they’re at and whenever we meet up it’s always like family,” said Isaiah Blas, a stickball player from San Diego.

Franco said that he keeps coming back to catch up with a lot of old friends who have moved away.

“I know I can find them here,” he said.

The game is now more purposely use for a positive effect as the community teaches their children good values and behavior by example.

“We bring kids out here to show them how to respect each other. Winning is great but also losing and taking it graciously and respecting your fellow man and after all is said and done we’re one big happy family,” said Richard Marrero, commissioner of the NYESL.

For more information about stickball in NYC, check out the New York Emperor’s Stickball League website at http://www.stickball.com/

NEW YORK CITY – Nato Thompson, the chief curator of Creative Time Inc., would not have a fulltime job if it weren’t for federal stimulus money.

Creative Time Inc. is an organization based in Manhattan that commissions and produces public art projects both in New York City and across the nation.

The jobs in the arts that they make possible help drive things like tourism, stimulate local businesses and liven neglected neighborhoods.

As they begin to dip their toes into the global art realm, Creative Time has the potential to reach thousands, if not millions, of people, according to Rachel Ford, the director of development. Ford said that Thompson is critical to the strategic plan of harnessing this potential.

“Without the Recovery Act money, he wouldn’t be able to keep his job fulltime and our artistic director and president would have to take on more responsibility in terms of curating the programs,” said Ford. “It wouldn’t mean that we wouldn’t continue our projects; we just wouldn’t be able to do them to the extent that we can now.”

In February 2009, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was signed into law as the response of President Obama to the economic crisis in the U.S. This ordinance distributed federal funding in order to sustain and create jobs and, therefore, stimulate economic growth throughout the country.

Among this federal funding give-a-way was a $50,000 grant awarded to Creative Time Inc. used to sustain the salary of Thompson.

In the following interview, Ford talks about why they applied to sustain Thompson’s salary and what he does at Creative Time.

The Recovery Act emerged in February as a two-part process, doling out money to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as well as state agencies that would then distribute the funding to organizations that they chose to sponsor. Ford chose to go through the NEA.

“I was worried, given the way that state funding processes can go, so I opted to apply for the money directly through the NEA and it was really great because a typical NEA application is a major undertaking—it takes a good week or so to put together all the various parts—this was a very streamlined application process,” she said.

Thompson has an interest in art that is attached to a social issue, which tends to involve artists who are engaging a community in some way.

An example of this social art is “The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice” that took place last October and will continue over the next couple years. Last year it allowed over 35 international artists, curators, critics, scholars, anarchists, and activists to give presentations about their work and issues of social justice.

“Artists are doing amazing things all over the country from working in prisons to working in housing projects and their work goes largely unnoticed by the art establishment because their not doing it in museums or galleries,” said Thompson.

Creative Time’s hope in having this program, “The Summit,” is to explore the questions about what it means to do work in the social sphere and how to engage the public and how to talk about it in a critical way. The plan is for it to culminate in 2011 with the social practice triennial where 30 artist groups will gather in the Essex street market and engage the people of NYC.

“I think the key to getting the money for this particular grant was emphasizing what communities would be impacted by not having [Thompson] fulltime. Not being able to have the Summit program continue would mean not being able to have these artists come to the forefront who are doing community outreach work,” said Ford.

Thanks to the Recovery Act grant that they received this year, Creative Time Inc. is able to continue harnessing their potential to impact people across the country.

“In terms of our funding goals, I don’t know that we would have met them without this money,” said Ford.

For more information about Creative Time Inc., check out their website: http://www.creativetime.org/index.php

By Catherine Rogers

NEW YORK CITY – On April 30, the third oldest hospital in New York City closed its doors after 160 years of service.

As the result of years of financial struggle, St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection leaving not a single Catholic medical center in the area.

The closing fits a pattern of a decline of catholic hospitals in the northeast U.S.

Only two years ago, in March 2008, Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan, also closed and then filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in July 2009.

The list of Catholic hospital closings expands into other boroughs of NYC.

St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan advertises it’s closed status at the front desk area. Photo by Lana Douglas

Both Catholic hospitals in Queens, Mary Immaculate and St. John’s, shut their doors on March 1, 2009 due to monetary instability.

In 2007, Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center in the Bronx filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital (previously St. Clare’s Hospital) was shut down.

St. Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn closed June 2005 after years of heavy financial loses, according to an article by The New York Times.

These hospitals had three things in common—they were Catholic, located in New York City and closed.

These hospitals were also all part of the St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers network (SVCMC) formed in 2000 when St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan merged with the Catholic Medical Centers of Brooklyn and Queens and Sisters of Charity Healthcare on Staten Island.

This network, which included all the Catholic hospitals in the NYC area, filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and then emerged in 2007.  However, the struggle to survive failed and the closing of St. Vincent’s in Manhattan marked the end of the SVCMC network.

Map of the locations of past Catholic Hospitals in NYC. Photo courtesy of Google Maps

In a comment on an online article about the closings in The New York Sun, David M. Burke MD, the former President of the medical staff at St. Vincent’s Midtown hospital said that the closing of St. Vincent’s Midtown was a tragedy and obviously politically motivated decision.

He claimed that it was a financially sound hospital, closed in order to satisfy the precarious finances of Roosevelt Hospital who could not compete fairly with St. Vincent’s Midtown.

The current answering service for the closed St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital blames for its closing the Berger Commission Statewide Reorganization of Hospital Facilities that was enacted in 2007 in New York.

This reorganization of hospital and nursing home systems in New York, also known as the Commission on Healthcare Facilities in the 21^st Century, was established by Governor Pataki in 2005.

In a press release from 2006, the commission was projected to close nine hospitals within the state and recommended that at least six of those hospitals be in New York City.

Since 2005, seven hospitals have closed in New York City—the seven Catholic hospitals listed in the beginning of this article.

In a farewell letter by Sister Jan Lannucelli, the president and CEO of St. Vincent’s Midtown Hospital at the time of closing said, “Unfortunately, our efforts to present the needs of the community to the Commission and to the Department of Health were not supported.”

Then, she said, the hospital received final word from the Department of Health and the Berger Commission to close.

Another example of Catholic hospitals closing is Caritas Christi – a debt-ridden catholic hospital network in Boston to be sold to a private equity firm based in New York, Cerberus Capital, for $830 million.

Caritas Christi backed out of a joint insurance venture that would have secured them financially because it mandated access to abortion procedures.

St. Anthony Health System president Mother Regina Pacis was quoted by the National Catholic Register to have said that their hospitals, located in Illinois, are groaning under a mountain of bad debt.

These closings might suggest a trend in the financial decline of Catholic health care systems. However, according to Fred Caesar, special assistant to the president of the Catholic Health Association, the number of Catholic hospitals across the nation is fairly consistent if not slightly increasing.

“The fact is that in 1988 there were 616 Catholic hospitals. That changed to 621 in 2008 and 620 in 2010,” he said. “Catholic hospitals are sold or merged, or new ones are built or bought each year with a net effect that certainly shows a fairly consistent range of 12 percent of all community hospitals in the U.S.”

So far, the trend of Catholic hospitals seeing financial demise still seems to be concentrated in the northeast—a heavily Catholicized section of the country. But how long can Catholic hospitals in areas of the country with a less catholic population continue to buck the trend?

The sound of Catholic hospitals in the future….

By Catherine Rogers

NEW YORK CITY – Thursday evening around 50 men and women dressed in their Sunday best and gathered at the Dillon Gallery of art in Chelsea.

Husband and Wife, Matt and Tatianna Mahoney, pose for a picture at Operation Exodus Inner City. Photo by Catherine Rogers

At the private event, they sipped expensive wine and sampled finely made hors d’ouerves. They casually viewed the exhibit, but not just to be cultured. They congregated to support an organization called Operation Exodus Inner City, an after school program in Washington Heights.

“I empower the parents to be more active in their children’s learning process,” said Tatiana Mahoney, parent coordinator at OEIC, who aids parents in raising their children in a safe and engaging environment.

According to Mahoney, Operation Exodus Inner City (OEIC) was founded in 1988 in response to the desperate needs of children in Upper Manhattan. Today OEIC provides a refuge for around sixty children from ages five through 18 within their community of largely Dominican Republic background.

The highly successful tutoring and mentoring program reports on its Internet site that it sees 100 percent of its high school aged students gain their diploma and 75 percent continue on to higher education.

For a little more information about Operation Exodus view the following slideshow.

Many indispensable volunteers and staff run the operation, including Mahoney. To learn more about the background of Operation Exodus and her involvement there, listen to this interview with Tatiana Mahoney.

Mahoney came to New York during her college years to study acting for a summer but ended up enrolling at NYU to study video production.

Soon thereafter, she gained an internship with Walter Cronkite, who is best known as an anchorman for the CBS Evening News, which led to her becoming a video producer at CBS for 10 years. After that, she moved to Parents magazine to be an associate editor for two years.

In 2007, Mahoney lost her mother and left her career in media production to return to OEIC where she had briefly volunteered during her first years in New York.

“I wouldn’t say that I sacrificed my career because I see that God doesn’t waste anything,” she said.

According to Mahoney, her mother was a woman who deeply valued education. After her death, Mahoney realized she wanted to work with parents to enable them to give their children the same education that her mother had made possible for her.

“I just thought it would be a way to honor my mother,” she said. “I felt like this was something that I really wanted to do and God really opened the door wide.”

The open door that Mahoney spoke of was the position of parent coordinator offered to her by Matt Mahoney, the executive director of OEIC and her husband.

“When Tatiana quit her job and then was ready to jump back into work and wanted something part-time, that’s when I thought of the idea: I should drag her in here and have her out with the parents because that’s a big issue,” he said. “She just jumped right in and took over and it was great.”

Take a look inside what Mahoney does at OEIC in the following video.

For more information about Operation Exodus Inner City, check out their website at http://www.operationexodus.org.

College freshmen in the dorms at George Mason University (Photo courtesy of Catherine Rogers)

By Catherine Rogers

DAYTON (TN) – Each year millions of high school graduates pack up their most essential belongings and head off to higher education. They leave behind their homes, families and familiarity and venture into the unknown to live in dormitories full of complete strangers.

For many incoming college freshmen, this will be a major life adjustment and can be quite intimidating. However, taking a look into what dorm life is really like can help you know what to expect and how to prepare.

For a peek at dorm life, view this slideshow of students at Bryan College (Dayton, Tenn.).

Moving in with a new roommate will require a variety of adjustments. Students will have the opportunity to develop social skills such as good communication, teamwork, sharing, respect for others, and being considerate.

“Some of the biggest adjustments for me were sharing space, respecting my roommate’s living habits, and working around our different sleeping schedules,” said Hannah Rogers, graduate student at the University of Virginia.

Dorm life can also help students learn to be more independent.

“Getting to sleep at a normal hour and giving myself a decent amount of rest was definitely something I’ve had to learn,” said Josh Rivers, a freshman at George Washington University.

The following video captures what students at Bryan College have learned about adjusting to dorm life.

Another important thing for new college students to realize is that living with a roommate and experiencing dorm life is an important life experience. It will help the student prepare for life after graduation.

“I think it’s an experience that is absolutely necessary; it helps you develop essential social skills,” said Rivers.

Myra Goza, Resident Director at Bryan College, shares her perspective on dorm life in the following interview.

Going to college for the first time can be very exciting. For more information about adjusting to college and dorm life, click on the following links.

“Your First Year of College: 25 Tips to Help You Survive and Thrive Your Freshman Year and Beyond”

http://www.quintcareers.com/first-year_success.html

UCTV Series: “College Bound”

http://www.uctv.tv/series/?seriesnumber=138

Just for your consideration, this is a warning that the posts of the next few months will be off theme. They will be journalistic assignments for a class and a summer program. Hope you enjoy :)

- Cat

The picture below is of a couple renowned for being disabled competitive dancers in China. This is their story…

The girl, Ma Li, was a promising professional ballerina at age 19 when she lost her right arm in a car accident. After being dumped by a long-time boyfriend, Li attempted suicide. However, her parents rendered the attempt unsuccessful and saved her life. Through that experience, Li gained the strength to carry on and learned how to live life independently.

Five years later, in 2001, Li was invited to compete at the 5th National Special Performing Art Competition in China for handicaps and won the gold medal. That success gave her the confidence she needed to return to the stage professionally.

In 2002, Li started dating a man named Li Tao who, two years later, became Li’s agent and began helping her develop a unique performance showcasing the mastery of her handicap with her talents in dance.

A year later, Li met 21-year-old Zhai Xiaowei while he was training to be a cyclist for the National Special Olympics. Xiaowei climbed on a tractor at age four and fell off to lose his left leg but despite the handicap, took a very optimistic look on life and became passionate about athletics. He participated in high-jump, long-jump, diving, swimming, and cycling. However, he had never attempted dance.

After meeting Li & Tao and pushing through a year of intensive training and practice, the trio’s efforts and determination produced the following performance in the 4th CCTV National Dance Competition in China.

At this competition – the first time a handicap couple had ever competed – Li and Xiaowei won the Silver medal with the 99.17 high score among 7000 competitors. They became an instant national hit.

I don’t know about you, but that brought a tear to my eye. You can’t watch their performance without realizing that there’s much more going on here than just dancing. What I saw, in this award-winning routine, was an expression of pure perseverance.

These are people who know pain and despair well. These are athletes who got back up after life threw them down. These are dedicated performers who pitted against professional dancers as the only disabled pair in a notable competition witnessed by their entire country. These are competitors who came in second.

It reminds me of Kerri Strug from the 1996 Olympics. If you don’t remember, she’s the girl who fractured her ankle but ignored the pain and did her vault, where she landed on one foot, and clinched the gold medal for the U.S. in the team competition. I’ll give you that Strug had adrenaline and the pressure of the entire world on her side when she had to make her decision to persevere or to give up, but the point is – she didn’t throw in the towel.

For most of us, we know not of this brand of perseverance. Sure, we’ve had our ups and downs; we’ve pushed ourselves to keep going when the odds have turned against us. We’ve adapted. But would we really have the determination to persevere after something so catastrophic as losing a limb? You never know, right? I guess you might say that you’d need to experience it to know for sure? It’s sort of an incomprehensible idea to those of us who’ve never had to deal with something like that first hand.

In this experience of the soul, I dearly hope you have a little less experience and little more naivety. But if you do find yourself in such a situation, I hope you get back up and go farther than you had ever dreamed possible. I hope that the way you choose to live is an expression of perseverance that makes the world stand in awe.

- Cat

It’s currently 66-degrees with blue sunny skies here in Dayton – weather I’d definitely say is suitable for spring and my first post! So here it goes…

Have you come across any bold quotes lately? Any that have stuck out, grabbed a hold of your brain and really got you thinking? Well, truth be told, that occurred on this beautiful Saturday to none other than myself. I was taking part in the most essential step of any homework assignment,”Googling,” and after a search on the topic of knowledge, this one popped up:

“Without emotion, knowledge can only be gained to a certain point. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” – Arnold Bennett

I have to admit discovering this quote was the highlight of my day as I’d been planning on launching “From Where I sit…” this evening and was in desperate need of direction. So here it is – a theme, if you will. Take a good whiff of what we’ll be referring back to in future posts.

The above quote rings true on a level that I think most people can relate to at almost any age. For example, the whole “don’t touch the stove” lesson that you’re mother instructs of you at a young age shows that even though we knew touching the stove was bad, we didn’t realize just how bad it was until we went against our mother’s wisdom and experienced the effects first hand. This pattern can translate into a more mature setting with breakups. We know that heartbreaks are awful but until we’ve actually experienced one ourselves we don’t realize just how utterly and completely earth shattering they can be.  You may think you understand something completely but if you haven’t experienced it first hand, if you haven’t felt its full force, your knowledge remains somewhat naive.

In everything I discuss on this blog, should be a connection to something much deeper than the words themselves or the surface meaning. The things we’ll take a look at will always be the expression of someone who’s “added the experience of the soul” to “the cognition of the brain;” someone who’s communicating about something they have an emotional investment in. It will speak past logic, past those words we can all read and understand to what they represent – the yearnings and desires that are the experience of the soul.

- Cat