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Tag: community college

June 18, 2012

ECC sustains green efforts with passion for native plants (Sun-Times Media)

ELGIN — Gardening is one of Harriet Happel’s passions.

Happel — office coordinator for Elgin Community College’s division of Sustainability, Safety & Career Technologies — plants native vegetation that will attract the birds and bees to her home, she said. She plants river birch and pussy willow in the flood area in her backyard, plants that absorb water without altering the environment.

“I think part of it is getting that connection with things after everything we do all day that’s artificial,” she said.

Happel was one of about two dozen Elgin Community College students, staff and faculty who connected Thursday with the Kane County Forest Preserve District to plant native vegetation near the wetlands on campus at Spartan and Renner drives.

That’s part of the forest preserve district’s Prairie at Home program and part of the community college’s goal to create a more sustainable campus.

Volunteers chipped spades and struggled with an auger Thursday in the hard-packed dirt — a result of the recent hot, dry weather in the Elgin area — to put in more than 500 plants native to northern Illinois. Some familiar plants include coneflower, bee balm, coreopsis and wild quinine, according to Robb Cleave, volunteer coordinator for the forest district.

“A lot of them are really showy, so it’ll be a nice aesthetic addition to the campus,” Cleave said.

For the rest of the story, read ECC sustains green efforts with passion for native plants (Sun-Times Media).

Photo credit: Michael Smart for Sun-Times Media.

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June 15, 2012

Weekly Wrap-Up: Catching up after a full week in the Northwoods…

I spent most of the weekend catching up on sleep, and most of the workday Monday catching up on email after I spent the first week of June with my nonprofit, Hope for the First Nations, on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. I plan to write more about that trip Monday on the blog.

Meantime, here are all the articles I wrote that week and this week for my day job at Sun-Times Media:

Photo credit: File photo for Sun-Times Media.

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May 21, 2012

One man’s summer vacation of a lifetime (Sun-Times Media)

Like John Piper said when introducing the story of Ian and Larissa Murphy on the Desiring God blog,  “I tremble with the glad responsibility of introducing you” to Joseph Onesimus. It’s not often I share a story in the newspaper in which Christ is so central, but He is so central to Onesimus’ story, there was no other way to tell it. I hope his story finds you in whatever suffering, whatever sacrifices you are making, and I hope it moves and encourages you as it did me.

ELGIN — Joseph Onesimus has paid a steep price to bring a clean water source to his home village in Mbooni, Kenya.

It has cost Onesimus money, for sure, to fly back and forth between the African country and his current home in Plato Center.

It also has cost him time, taking months off from his job as an adjunct instructor of business at Elgin Community College to oversee the work in Kenya. And it has cost him his marriage: He now is going through a divorce, he said, because his wife didn’t have the same vision and because he was out of the country three months at a time.

But by the end of the summer, he said, 5,000 villagers in Mbooni will have access to clean water.

And that means no one will have to pay the same price his sister Esther Mueni Mativo did in 2004: her life.

“It’s a sacrifice for me, but you know what the funny thing is? I’ve never lacked,” Onesimus said.

“We’re here a short time, and we have to leave a legacy. If that doesn’t bring people closer to God and solve their human problems, I think that’s missing the point. How much money do you really need?”

The community college instructor, who also imports and sells art and tea from Africa, will fly to Kenya Tuesday, May 29, and arrive in the country late Thursday night, an expensive, 18-hour trip he usually makes every other year, he said.

Onesimus was born in Kenya, the oldest of five children of parents who were missionaries in Somalia. It was tough growing us as a “missionary kid,” always moving from one place to another, leaving behind friends and changing schools, but it was “eye-opening,” he said.

And, he said, it meant growing up “in a family that always gives.”

The water-producing borehole was the vision of his father, the Rev. Onesimus Mativo, the instructor said.

For the rest of the story, read One man’s summer vacation of a lifetime (Sun-Times Media).

For more information about how you can help, read How you can help Living Waters Borehole in Kenya (Between the Bylines).

Photo credit: Submitted photo.

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May 18, 2012

Weekly Wrap-Up: Hallelujah! The end of the U46 trial is in sight!

I’m trying something new this month, wrapping up all my short stories for The Courier-News in one post at the end of the week so as not to overwhelm anybody’s feed reader. This past week was a good illustration why that could be a good idea. What do you think of this format?

In addition to cover stories on prom and transportation funding, I wrote…

Photo credit: Jeff Cagle for Sun-Times Media.

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Link | March 19, 2012

ECC names lobby for Elgin business/donor Lamp (Sun-Times Media)

ECC names lobby for Elgin business/donor Lamp (Sun-Times Media)

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