People
The Free Press is honoring Alicia Jean (AJ) Vanderelli with our Activist Artist Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. AJ is the owner and manager of the Vanderelli Room, an art gallery that has served as a showplace and safe space for activist artists – and it is the location of the Free Press Awards dinner.
AJ was born in Los Angeles, California and was raised in Panama City, Florida. After graduating high school in 1993, she left the small beach community in search of one that provided both the comforts of a small town with the diversity of a city. In 2003, she settled in Columbus Ohio. She earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in oil painting in 2008 from the Columbus College of Art and Design, graduating Magna Cum Laude.
The Free Press is honoring Alicia Jean (AJ) Vanderelli with our Activist Artist Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. AJ is the owner and manager of the Vanderelli Room, an art gallery that has served as a showplace and safe space for activist artists – and it is the location of the Free Press Awards dinner.
AJ was born in Los Angeles, California and was raised in Panama City, Florida. After graduating high school in 1993, she left the small beach community in search of one that provided both the comforts of a small town with the diversity of a city. In 2003, she settled in Columbus Ohio. She earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in oil painting in 2008 from the Columbus College of Art and Design, graduating Magna Cum Laude.
The Free Press is honoring Cynthia Brown of the Ohio Coalition To End Qualified Immunity with our annual “Libby” Award at a ceremony Thursday, November 9. Cynthia Brown is a regular speaker at the Free Press salons and championed as a Free Press Hero online. The Free Press honors community activists annually with a "Libby" Award for Community Activism, named for a former Free Press editor, Libby Gregory, who lost her life in 1991 in an airplane accident.
A Youngstown native, she studied criminal justice and political science at Columbus State Community College, media and communications and African American studies at Youngstown State University, and public policy and African American studies at Mesa Community College.
Peace activist David Swanson will speak in Columbus on November 9 at the Free Press 2023 Awards Dinner on “War Abolition and the Ukraine Problem.” David is a regular guest at the Free Press Zoom salons and his weekly articles can be found on freepress.org. His podcast also plays on the local community radio station WGRN 91.9FM. David was one of the first to point out the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the war and the hypocrisy of the United States lies about them.
This bio is taken from David's website. David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is the director of World BEYOND War, a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. He is campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org.
Peace activist David Swanson will speak in Columbus on November 9 at the Free Press 2023 Awards Dinner on “War Abolition and the Ukraine Problem.” David is a regular guest at the Free Press Zoom salons and his weekly articles can be found on freepress.org. His podcast also plays on the local community radio station WGRN 91.9FM. David was one of the first to point out the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the war and the hypocrisy of the United States lies about them.
This bio is taken from David's website. David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is the director of World BEYOND War, a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace. He is campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org.
The October Free Press Second Saturday Salon was held on October 13 over Zoom.
Listen to the recording here.
Mark Stansbery of the Free Press Board, introduced the first speaker, Mary Jane Borden. She spoke about the current adult use marijuana legalization issue on the November ballot. If you are in agreement, she encourages voting YES on Issue 2. The link to her powerpoint is here.
Mary Jane also memorialized longtime cannabis activist Angelica Warren who passed away recently.
The next speaker was Lidia Garcia of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. She spoke about the second book that is an anthology of migration stories of immigrants in Ohio.
Justin Steiner called attention to this Facebook page.
For the first time, after more than a century, Columbus will vote for district candidates in November. But as activists have repeatedly argued, there’s nothing district about it. Candidates must live in one of the nine geographically designed districts as each has roughly 100,000 residents. However, the November 7 vote is citywide, and representation will remain “at-large.”
“If it were just my district to win I’d have a huge chance of winning,” said City Council candidate Adrienne Hood who’s running in District 4, which includes large swaths of the Northside, parts of Clintonville, North and South Linden, and also the street where undercover Columbus police shot and killed her son.
Last decade, three citizen-led initiatives sought true districts, also known as wards, through the ballot, but all lost. In 2016, Issue 1 was championed by the group Everyday People For Positive Change. They were soundly defeated by Columbus voters after a $1.1 million corporate-funded ad campaign by City officials.
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Witness the extraordinary life of Dr. Lonnie Thompson, an explorer who went where no scientist had gone before and transformed our idea of what's possible. Daring to seek Earth’s history contained in glaciers atop the tallest mountains in the world, we see the front lines of climate change, to recover these priceless historical records before they disappear forever.
The Quelccaya Ice Cap is located 5300-5670 meters above sea level in the southeastern Andes of Peru and is the Earth’s largest tropical glacier. The observed change in surface elevations on QIC is similar to those seen at other glaciers. However, the second-largest mountain range in Peru, the Cordillera Vil-canota (CV), south-east of the Cordillera Blanca, has received much less attention to date. Consequently, little is known about the timescales and equilibrium conditions of the vast majority of tropical Andean glaciers, and how climate variability affects their mass balances. In Peru, most studies have focused on glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca, which represents the largest mountain range in the tropics.
We just buried my ex-husband Darryl Mendelson. He had been battling leukemia for several months and finally succumbed on Thursday, August 24, 2023.
He had been a major player in some Columbus institutions, including Comfest, which he helped to create. Darryl, born Stephen Victor, was raised in Brooklyn with his brother Ro-z (Jeffery). I met them at the Atlanta Pop Festival in 1969. Darryl, Ro-z, Stan Bobrof, Charlie Einhorn and Steve Terkel had embarked from Columbus and were living on the bus called Progress. They had been traveling to pop festivals around the country and had established an encamptment at the bottom of “Acid Alley” at Atlanta. There were two other buses: Candy Watkins’ little bus Pathfinder and Wonderbread, which looked just like a loaf of bread, with all the spots. Four adults and four kids lived on that bus!