Intern openings sought for youths
The city of Little Rock is reaching out to businesses for help hiring youth interns this summer.
Through a city-funded program, businesses could benefit by agreeing to allow one to five youth interns to train and work at their company for a six-week period -- June 19 through July 27.
The Department of Community Programs is taking applications from potential work sites.
The city pays for the wages of more than 650 youths through the program. The youths would work Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and are ages 16 through 21. All types of jobs can qualify to participate in the program.
The department gets more applications from youths than it can employ. For that reason, the department is also asking businesses if they can commit to hiring at least one student on their own.
The deadline for businesses to send in applications is May 26. Applications and more information is available from Michael Sanders at (501) 399-3442 or [email protected].
Event offers ideas for neighborhoods
The Coalition of Greater Little Rock Neighborhoods is hosting a "saving neighborhoods" workshop Saturday.
The event will be from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Willie L. Hinton Neighborhood Resource Center auditorium, 3805 W. 12th St.
The day will start with refreshments and registration, followed by a discussion on how to cut gun crime by placing community gardens on vacant city lots and having more residents anonymously and safely report crime or suspicious activity to police. There is a Philadelphia model that will be mentioned.
After a break, Amy Pritchard of Legal Aid Arkansas will lead a session on assuring decent places for renters, with mention of current lawsuits and proposed legislation regarding landlord-tenant laws.
Another session will be about transportation. Jarod Varner, executive director of the Rock Region Metro transit agency and the Improving 30 Crossing Committee, will talk about expanding bus service and relieving Interstate 30 congestion. He will also discuss opinions that expansion of Interstate 30 and Interstate 630 could harm neighborhoods.
The last session will be about improving relations between police officers and the community. Speakers will be the Rev. Paul Atkins, associate pastor at Canvas Community United Methodist Church, and Dana Dossett, the director of the city's Community Programs Department.
Session to cover tornado recovery
Recovery plans for Vilonia and Mayflower, which were damaged in a 2014 tornado, are the subject of a talk Tuesday at the Arkansas Arts Center.
Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, will discuss plans to respond to "residents' request for walkable town centers with mixed land uses, despite no tradition of urbanism in their communities," according to a news release.
The plan to rebuild the towns focus on urban design features. The town center plan for Mayflower, called Slow Street, won the World Architecture New Award for Future Projects in Urban Design sponsored by World Architecture News in 2015. It beat out projects from Istanbul, London, Paris and Washington D.C., the news release said.
The lecture is scheduled to start at 6 p.m. at the Arts Center, 501 E. Ninth St. A reception will precede the event at 5:30 p.m.
Lecture set on political shifts
An Atlanta professor will talk about "negative partisanship" and the nationalization of congressional elections at an evening event Thursday.
The speaker -- Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University -- has written or co-written six books and more than 50 articles in political science journals dealing with the party systems, elections and voting behavior in the U.S.
"He is also one of the nation's leading election forecasters -- his Time for Change Model correctly predicted the popular vote winner in every presidential election between 1988 and 2012," according to a news release.
His speech will begin at 6 p.m. at the Clinton School of Public Service's Sturgis Hall, 1200 President Clinton Ave. It is titled "All Politics is National: The Rise of Negative Partisanship and Nationalization of U.S. House and Senate Elections in the 21st Century."
Abramowitz has a new book scheduled to be published by Yale University Press in 2017.
Seats for Thursday's event can be reserved by emailing [email protected] or calling (501) 683-5239.
Metro on 02/06/2017