CAPA today announced the schedule for ¡Viva Festival Latino!, a week-long, online experience that will stand in for the popular, annual Festival Latino canceled for 2020. ¡Viva Festival Latino! will offer a series of online cultural events and activities that highlight some of the favorite features of Festival Latino, including offerings in Latin music, food, dance, visual artists, children’s activities, fashion, and community and health and wellness resources.

Produced by CAPA, ¡Viva Festival Latino! is presented by HONDA. Additional support has been provided by Nationwide, AEP Foundation, L Brands Foundation, City of Columbus Department of Recreation and Parks, and Abbott.

Wednesday, July 29, 6pm
Governor's mansion
Location TBA. We will be meeting at The Ohio Statehouse and traveling to the location. We will need bikers and medics for this event!

The Columbus Way is what our city leaders call the public/private partnerships that have been used to dress up and showcase the 14th largest city in the U.S.

Former Mayor Mike Coleman’s approach, and continuing under Mayor Ginther, has been successful in developing dozens of projects – the Arena District and Huntington Park, Columbus Commons and Bicentennial Park, the Scioto Mile, the Veterans Memorial, and the Crew Stadium, to name a few.

Here’s an apt description from Smart Columbus, another project that exemplifies the partnership approach:

“The concept of ‘The Columbus Way’ describes the unique community collaborations between the city, the businesses headquartered and located in the region, and nonprofit and academic institutions that make up the Columbus community. A 2015 Harvard Business School case study coined the phrase, capturing a decades-long spirit of collaboration that has been repeatedly tapped to tackle big challenges in central Ohio and transform the region into a world-class destination.”

The United States of America has spent much of its modern history ignoring the most important problems it must solve to be able to move forward as a contemporary democracy. A country that attempted to correct the horror of slavery after the Civil War and experienced a strong Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, stopped short of  eradicating racism. While some Western European countries kept trying to consolidate an environment with more equity in politics and economic rights with an understanding of the role of regional alliances, the US insisted on a political and economical model that increased the breach between the rich and poor. US society in general didn’t address the structural failures of a system that embraces several levels and kinds of segregation among the components of society.

It seems that a storm arrived in the context of an inoperant fascist government and it just became bigger with the pandemic and the explosion of civil rebellion towards a problem that has been ignored and even denied for too long -- racism and inequity.

Sunday, July 26, 2020, 7:00 - 8:00 PM.
During the pandemic, the lack of investment in public health infrastructure, including health care for all, has had deadly consequences for tens of thousands of people. The $22.42 billion the U.S. will be spending this year to upgrade its first-strike nuclear arsenal could pay for 624 million corona virus tests, 747, 633 covid-19 hospital stays, or 6.6 BILLION N95 masks. This has to change. Our lives and security depend on it.  More information and registration here.