It’s not just a budget-friendly place to shop for a great deal on clothes or an interesting trinket, hardcover bestseller, vintage toy or your next Halloween costume. Behind the scenes, Goodwill Industries of Mid-Michigan is a close team of professionals working together to train people who have significant personal barriers to employment.
Did you know that it takes 556 worker bees to produce one pound of honey? This is just one of the interesting things kids will learn at the Flint Children’s Museum new exhibit, A Bee’s Life. The bright and colorful display, painted by resident artist Caron Severn, opened on March 31 in the museum’s Discovery Zone exhibit area. It was designed to teach children the life cycle of bees and the important role they play in our ecosystem, according to Kimberly Roddy, Acting Executive Director. “Kids learn as they dress-up as drone bees, worker bees or queen bees, dance the ‘waggle dance’ and then carry the pollen from over-sized, three-dimensional flowers to the honeycomb climbing ramp,” she says.
Balancing his work between California and New York City these days, Eric Ogden never lost his Midwestern roots. Born and raised in Flint and a 1990 graduate of Flint Central High School, Eric’s career after graduating from the University of Michigan quickly evolved into a combination of photographer, film director and artist. His professional portfolio includes stunning portraits of top celebrities and movie stars, emotion-provoking landscapes and figures, and photographs in ads for several major news and sports networks and magazines. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Glamour, The Hollywood Reporter and many others. He’s currently putting the final touches on a visual memoir of Flint, which he hopes to have published. My City Magazine spent some time talking with Eric about his success and the impact that Flint had on him as he pursued his passion for the visual arts and found his voice as a photographer.
The Food Bank of Eastern Michigan held its 4th Annual BackPack Night Fundraiser on Thursday, March 5 at the Holiday Inn-Gateway Center. The BackPack Program provides kids at risk of hunger with a backpack full of nutritious food each weekend throughout the school year.
The menu is simple – hearty breakfasts, including mouth-watering omelets and skillet scrambles; big, juicy burgers, sandwiches, soup, and chili made from a secret family recipe. That’s right, there’s no room for dessert at Krystal Jo’s. The popular corned-beef hash is made from scratch and the French fries and hash browns are fresh cut. All meals are made to order with only fresh ingredients. Tony says the few salads on the menu are seldom ordered. “We are definitely a burger joint, and that’s what my customers want,” he said truthfully. “If you come in here to eat, you’ll not only get some good food, you’ll have a good experience.”
What began last winter as two long-time friends – bassist Johnny Mason and vocalist/guitar player Ashley Peacock – hanging out in Mason’s living room bouncing songwriting ideas off each other quickly took on a life of its own.
The idea to create a unique pet care facility came to Heidi when she was going to law school in Atlanta. While she attended classes, she would leave her basset hound, Charlotte, at a doggy day care center. She met her future husband Craig McAra at school, and when they relocated to Genesee County where Craig was from, Heidi saw that pet care facilities in the area were limited. The couple had a law practice, but Heidi was eventually bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and decided that she could meet an underserved need for doggy day care in the Flint area.
I want to tell the people of Flint: You can be great. You do not need anyone’s permission to be great. You don’t need anyone’s endorsement to be excellent.
Cliff attended Mott Middle College and received a degree in Sociology at the University of Michigan-Flint. Due to the economy at that time, he was struggling to find a job. So, he returned to his roots and decided to start an upholstering business in 2007. His mother, Cheryl Menard, upholstered furniture as a hobby while Cliff was growing up. “She taught me to sew,” he laughed. He learned the art of upholstering by watching and helping his mother, and discovered he was good at it. He would find old furniture at garage sales and items discarded on the roadside, then refurbish and sell them. “I love working on antiques,” he smiled.
“One day, I was taking my mother to the emergency room,” she recalls, “and suddenly in the midst of all that, someone started yelling my name – ‘Mrs. Ellie! Mrs. Ellie! I just earned my culinary arts degree and I’m doing pretty well now!’ It’s times like those when it really hits me that many of the people I have helped are very grateful.”
