NorCalUrban

What a great weekend! Last Friday and Saturday we were honored to co-host the Christian Community Development Association's (CCDA) Institute at our church (St. Samuel's). On Friday Noel Castellanos taught the class, "The Church's Role in Community Development" and on Saturday Bob Lupton taught on "Empowerment". Both classes seemed appropiate for what God is doing in East Palo Alto and the Bay Area.  We had an intimate group for both days which made the class interactive and fun. On Thursday night Melissa and I got to spend some time with Noel, and had a great dinner at Palace Barbaque in Sunnyvale. Noel is on a no-carb diet - and there is no better place to eat meat than Palace! I had a major grant application due Friday, so I was in and out for Noel's class - but the couple of hours I spent there were rich. I was able to attend all of Bob's teaching on Saturday. This is my second time through this class - and it seems to get better each time. B...

Join us for the the Christian Community Development Association ( CCDA ) Institute this Friday and Saturday. You can read more  here.   On Friday Noel Castellanos will be speaking on 'The Church's Role in Changing Communities" and on Saturday Bob Lupton will be speaking on "Empowerment".  Classes are from 9 to 4 each day and are located at St. Samuel at 1199 E. Bayshore Rd. in East Palo Alto. Call our office at 650-328-1890 for more information. 

This year is Samuel's last year in little league. It seems like yesterday he began playing in the Junior Giants program in Jack Farrell Park in EPA. This year, after some coaxing from his head coach Bruce,  I decided to be an assistant coach. The last time I coached was when Sam was in pitching machine league about three years ago. I've been pleasantly surprised how much fun this has been. The Ravenswood Kubs have a real shot at the league championship this year, after struggling over the last few years. They are a great group of kids.  Samuel has been on a tear in his hitting lately. He's batting lead off and for the last three games has been smoking the ball. Yesterday he batted three times, with a single, double and his first home run in little league. (In pitching machine league he once hit for the 'cycle'.) But this home run was no cheap shot - it cleared the center field fence in the deepest part of the yard. Thanks to Coach Bruce and others for searching for ...

It was an unusually warm weekend around the Bay this weekend. When it would usually be 65 degrees, it was around 90 in EPA. As many Bay folks do - when it gets above 75 we all start whining and head to the beach. What a beautiful beach day! Being true city lovers, Sam Melissa and I went to Ocean Beach in San Francisco.  Parts of it is beautiful black sand beach. The beach was packed, lots of folks, lots of sights. It's an odd day in San Fran when it's 80 degrees at the beach. After the beach we drove down the coast to Half Moon Bay arriving at one of our favorite restaurants the Flying Fish Grill. If you're ever in the area, check them out. It's a bit of a 'hole in the wall' place - but it has great, cheap seafood. I had the chioppino (a San Francisco creation - it's a Italian Seafood soup in a tomato base) and Sam and Melissa had their amazing fish and chips. (I loved the chioppino, but it was a little heavy on the calamari this time). If you're goin...

Charisse Domingo's  (from YUCA) photos, thoughts and work about the violence in 2007. 

The Redsox are foiled again! CNNSI Reports: NEW YORK (AP) -A construction worker's bid to curse the Yankees by planting a Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot in the ballpark. After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the remaining concrete Sunday and pulled it out. The team learned that a Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the stadium from a report in the New York Post on Friday, team officials said. Yankees President Randy Levine said the team at first considered leaving the shirt. "The first thought was, you know, it's never a good thing to be buried in cement when you're in New York,'' Levine said. "But then we decided, 'Why reward somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing?''' The worker had buried a ...

CNN.com recently had a article on the fees in banking, credit card and cell phones. It showed how these fees are boosting profits and becoming a key part of profit margins for these companies. I would like to highlight the overdraft fee issue.  The article states: - In '07, consumers paid $63 billion in credit card fees, over - $38 billion in bank fees (overdraft and other fees)  - Credit unions often have lower fees than banks - Being late with credit card bill can trigger fee of up to $35 - Credit card cash advance can carry 23 percent interest, plus fee It began with a story about a pizza: Terri Lovin and her husband, Harold, may have had the world's most expensive pizza ... at $117 a pie. No, it's not gourmet dining. A cashier charged the couple twice for the $22.50 pizza. That caused the Lovins, who live in Hawaii on a fixed income, to be overdrawn on their bank account by less than a dollar. And that resulted in multiple banking overdraft fees of $24 each. And that...

TRACY (CBS 5) ― As families from Oakland, San Francisco and East Palo Alto migrate to places such as Tracy and Stockton, police in the Central Valley say they are bringing in more young people with problems to the area. The gang graffiti that litters an otherwise well-kept city park in Tracy is a symbol of the growing pains now tormenting Central Valley communities. And police say the very children whose parents might have crossed the Altamont Pass to escape the streets of Oakland, San Francisco or East Palo Alto are driving the trouble. For law enforcement agencies such as the Tracy Police Department, the crime fight becomes even more complex because gangs are commuting to and from the Bay Area to commit crimes. See the video here.

Rudy at Urban Onramps recently posted this link. What an amazing article on the Pope's call to a faith filled response to the conflict with Islam. It calls us back to a faith filled response to our current challenge. This article resonated with my feelings about the church. I believe that in our country the Church has been all to connected to a political worldview. Our strength lies with our ability to be the subversive underground Kingdom that is governed by a different set of values. When the Church is the Church, separate from the State, we have authority and the world is forced to notice. The article states: A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter's. Allam's renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on ter...

CUs NATIONWIDE COME TOGETHER TO OPEN CU BRANCH IN UNDERSERVED AREA OF EAST PALO ALTO Branch Is First Credit Union in Area Currently Served By One Community Bank, Several Check-Cashing and Payday Lending Establishments March 21, 2008 From coast to coast, several credit unions have banded together to help Community Trust Credit Union in Modesto, CA open up a branch in East Palo Alto. The community of more than 40,000 residents, mostly low-income and Latino, is currently served by one small community bank as well as a number of check-cashing and payday lending establishments. Many banks left the 2.5-square-mile city in the 1980s. On March 15, Community Trust Credit Union of East Palo Alto held its grand opening celebration with more than 150 members, community and credit unions leaders, residents, and legislative officials in attendance. Palo Alto, CA-based Stanford Federal Credit Union and Addison Avenue Federal Credit Union, and San Francisco-based Patelco Federal Credit Union joined u...

Here's a great quote from Gordon McDonald at the Leadership Journal website where he discusses some recent retooling the Starbuck's organization and how it relates to the way we 'do church'. Gordon States: I believe that the evangelical movement—in which I've invested my life—has been pretty much hijacked away from its original identity as Jesus-proclaimers and changed into a political movement. Ask any five people on the street what an evangelical is, and I bet four of them will offer a political (not a faith-based) answer. Remember: we are named by those who are not of us; we do not name ourselves. He goes on to state: Perhaps a door-closed session might provide an opportunity for us to ask ourselves if we are really caring about (and speaking into) the most important things that challenge our world and, close-in, our own society. I for one don't think so. Is it possible (to borrow a word-picture once ascribed to D.L. Moody) that we are too often haggling amo...

Dear NCUD Friends, Recap of Grand Opening Last Saturday we had a wonderful grand opening celebration. Many leaders, well wishers and friends from the East Palo Alto (EPA) and surrounding community attended. This included State Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, East Palo Alto Mayor Pat Foster, City Council members David Woods, Ruben Abrica and Pete Evans, members of the national, regional and local credit union community and church leaders from EPA and surrounding communities. We also had a special presentation of a flag that was flown over the Capitol in Washington D.C. from Congresswoman Anna Eshoo given to us by State Congressman Ira Ruskin. This was a wonderful, joyous celebration where we culminated over 3/1/2 years of work, planning, praying and organizing. I know many of our friends were able to stop by, thank you for celebrating with us. I will shortly post pictures of the event on our website at www.norcaludc.org. I have also attached an article that was in the Palo Alto Daily News las...

Here's a recent article about the credit union project. Our grand opening was yesterday - more updates to come... First credit union shows signs of success Plan aims at low-interest loans for East Palo Alto By Banks Albach / Daily News Staff Writer John Liotti has a vision for East Palo Alto, and it involves low-interest loans. With the support and help of several community members, Liotti last December launched Community Trust Credit Union, the city's first credit union. He's hoping that a combination of cheaper car loans and mortgages, eventual small business financing and an alternative to the expensive check cashing outlets in the city will help locals save and succeed financially. Liotti said the credit union can offer members car loans 5 to 10 percent lower than banks. The credit union will celebrate its grand opening today. "This community has been amazingly under-banked," Liotti said inside his credit union office on Bay Road. "Our goal is to move pe...

The Latin phrase, simil iustus et peccator , encapsulates how I've been feeling lately in my struggle to have good character. This is highlighted by the fall of NY governor Elliot Spitzer.  It means simultaneous saint and sinner . The  excellent article on the Sojourners website called "Latin Tattoos and 24 Hours of Televangelism" (by Nadia Bolz-Weber)  The article deals with the duality of life and the redemption of the Cross of Christ. We are all 100% sinners - but Christ's sacrifice (as Christian's believe) makes us righteous in His eyes, making us 100% saints. It's not a licence to sin -we all are called to live holy and righteous, but it speaks of the state of grace we live in when we are committed to Christ in spite of our failings. It also reminds us of our hopelessness without Christ's sacrifice. Appropriate thoughts during this Lenten and Easter season.  The article states: "The really liberating thing about this is that when we all come to t...

Go visit Sam's blog. He's been following in my footsteps and blogging again. We've been on a quest to find soup dumplings like the ones we ate in New York. Living in the Bay Area, with the large Chinese population we have here, you'd think we could find something similar. Our quest continues - but we recently came close at at place called Hu Chiang Dumpling House in Cupertino. Great soup dumplings, but still not as good as Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown, Manhattan.

I recently saw a great episode of Frontline called "Growing Up Online". To me, this is the natural extension of Jeremy Del Rio's "Mook's, Midriffs, Myspace and More" teaching. In the episode the narrator states that this is the most significant generation gap since rock and roll in the 60's. I agree that many parents don't get how addictive and important their kids online profiles are and will become. As I've heard some of the experts say lately, the next wave, even greater than the social networking sites, will be  virtual reality sites like Second Life where people can create an existence of their own design. Even Silicon Valley giants like Sun Microsystems have begun using Second Life for video conferencing. This shows the importance and usefulness of this type of program.  Sites like this blog are already passe to young people. They've left this form of expression to us old folks!  If you have kids, they certainly know about and most ...

We keep getting asked about providing bank accounts for undocumented. Here's an answer: "At least 200 (including Community Trust Credit Union) U.S. financial firms and other businesses accept an identification card called matricula consular, which is issued to Mexican nationals by Mexican consulates. More than 4 million immigrants carry the cards, according to the Mexican government and the Congressional Research Service. (Source: USA Today) The U.S. Treasury Dept. granted a victory to immigrants who use consular identity cards, as well as to the banks who serve them. Source: National Immigration Law Center .)

Found the website:  The Wittenburg Door. Back 'in the day' I used to read 'the Door' religiously. It's great Christian satire and commentary on modern eveangelicism. I laughed out loud reading the article on Obama called "Blessed are the Swishy" Here's what I've been listening to lately. I recommend all these records:  Echos, Silence Patience and Grace - Foo Fighters In Another Land - Larry Norman (RIP) Brighter Than Creation's Dark - Drive By Truckers Sirens of the Ditch - Jason Isbell In Rainbows - Radiohead The Fight of My Life - Kirk Franklin Magic - Bruce Springsteen Into the Wild - Eddie Vetter Went and saw "No Country for Old Men" last weekend. While it's bloody, it has a profound message. It's not for the faint of heart. I intererpret the movie as a statement about chance and choices. It's about the choices we make and how they impact the world around us. I've been thinking about it all week.  

Great article in the Palo Alto Daily News on the current leadership crisis in the non-profit sector.  Nonprofit organizations face an unprecedented challenge in recruiting and retaining the next generation of leaders, according to a sobering report released this week by CompassPoint Nonprofit Services in San Francisco. And unless it meets the challenge, virtually every sector of society will feel the effects, noted Linda Wood, senior program officer with the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, a San Francisco organization that three years ago began offering leadership development grants for nonprofits. "As a society, we are more and more dependent on the nonprofit sector to deliver services to have strong cultural organizations, to fight on behalf of people with respect to civil rights, to create strong and healthy communities, and even to educate our children," Wood said. Government is outsourcing more work to nonprofit organizations, said Jeanne Bell, executive director of Co...

Anne Lamott was interviews in the  Washington Times about her new book on grace. I may not always agree with her politics, but I love her writing and fresh perspective. The following are excerpts from an interview: Question : This is your third book on faith. How did you choose these particular stories for inclusion? Answer: They were really just the next batch that came along organically. I love being a little bit older. I really do think you grow up as you go. In "Grace," I am kind of dealing with the reality of who I am now and that I am probably not going to be too much different than this. And how I can be more graceful about handling the things I don't get. Q: How has your faith evolved during these past 20-25 years? How does your work reflect that? A: I didn't mean to become a Christian — my father hated Christians and especially Presbyterians. He was the son of Christian missionaries in Tokyo, and he just found them lacking a certain deep human quality. He...