You won’t want to miss this first ever Family Pride event in Mt. Airy celebrating the diverse, beautiful, and extraordinary LGBTQ families and artists here in Philadelphia.

In celebration of Philadelphia’s 30th Anniversary of Pride, the Mayor’s Office of LGBT Affairs, Philadelphia Family Pride, and the Mt. Airy Art Garage are partnering on the Philly Family Pride Picnic & Arts Festival. The event will be held at Lovett Library Park in Mt. Airy (6945 Germantown Avenue) on Sat. June 23 with a rain date of Sat. June 30, 2018. The event will run from 11 am – 4 pm. Admission will be free and open to all ages, families, and community members.

Expect family-specific entertainment, fine art and handcraft, music, food, and resource tables from a variety of organizations and nonprofits that provide services and support to LGBTQ parents and youth. Bring your questions, talk to your peers, support local artists, and just come on out for an incredible day.  Expect Mayor Kenney and a host of well-known personalities to join us in the festivities.

This will be a day for celebration, for arts and creativity, for information gathering, and just plain fun. Join us!

“Love Your Park” week will be held from May 12 – May 20, and residents are encouraged to join over 2,500 fellow Philadelphians to care for our parks and green spaces at 70 different locations across the city. You can sign up to volunteer at a spring service day in your neighborhood park or to participate in a special event, such as a bird walk, outdoor yoga, guided hike, children’s story time, and many others. Here’s a list of volunteer and special events in West and Southwest Philadelphia (to register for an event and learn more about Love Your Park Week, go here).

Philly Pumptrack Spring Service Day

Saturday, May 12, 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Philly Pumptrack, 52nd St. and Parkside Avenue

This Love Your Park event includes trash cleanup on the Crossbow Trail, pumptrack dirt and clay work; and rain garden cleaning, mulching, and planting. And stick around for the Pumpjam special event that begins at Noon.  Continue Reading

A group of community organizations are standing with residents of Dorsett Court (4710 Locust St.) and Admiral Court (237 S. 48th St.) apartment buildings who were recently given bogus eviction notices to scare tenants out and make way for the sale of the buildings. A court decision has staved off eviction for at least a few more weeks.

Residents and supporters gathered in front of the buildings, which are adjacent on the corner of 48th and Locust, at a rally yesterday organized by the Philadelphia Tenants Union (PTU), a grassroots organization focused on protecting renters from unfair evictions. Community Legal Services and the Public Interest Law Center are also assisting the roughly 70 residents who received the eviction notices. Some video of the event is available on the PTU Facebook page.  Continue Reading

Art in the Open (AiO), presented through the PNC Arts Alive initiative, is a biennial citywide event that celebrates artists, their inspirations, and their relationships with the urban environment. The program, now entering its tenth year, was designed to shape community through art experiences that bridge the Philadelphia’s outdoor spaces, natural areas, and historic waterways for the enjoyment of the general public.

Join us from May 18 to 20, 2018 as a new group of up to 40 jury-selected artists and collaborative teams working in all media take to the Schuylkill River Trail, from the historic Fairmount Water Works to South Street, to develop artwork that will inspire new ways of seeing the river and the city it runs through. From dawn until dusk over the course of three days, visitors of all ages are invited to witness new works of art evolve while engaging with a vibrant community of artists–in some cases becoming part of the creative process. Artists’ working times will vary; most activity takes place between 9 am and 5 pm.

For more information, go to: http://www.artintheopenphila.org/

Photo via fairmountwaterworks.org.

A species in decline, the once-abundant North American freshwater mussel is one of the bedrock animals of our local aquatic ecosystem. Last year, a combination art exhibit, educational facility and working mussel hatchery opened at the Fairmount Water Works. Building on the success of the hatchery, several prominent local organizations including the City of Philadelphia, Bartram’s Garden, The Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, Drexel University and the Independence Seaport Museum are joining forces to establish an Aquatic Research and Restoration Center (ARRC). 

The Center will be dedicated to the restoration of local aquatic ecosystems in general, and specifically the reintroduction of freshwater mussels and river shad (a kind of herring) to the Delaware Estuary, including our own Schuylkill River. Why shad? Mussels require shad and other host fish in order to breed. Though the shad don’t get anything out of it, we do: Mussels are filter-feeders, and a single mussel can filter waste out of enough drinking water for anywhere from a dozen to two dozen people a day. Considering that the source of Philadelphia’s drinking water is the Schuylkill, which is also where local sewage treatment plants dump their treated effluent, more mussels and therefore more filtration seems like a pretty good idea.

The ARRC program kicks off May 3rd at the Fairmount Water Works (640 Water Works Drive) when a memorandum for the development of the ARRC will be signed.

– Mike VanHelder

Lawyer and West Philadelphia resident Jeff Curry announced this week that he is running for state representative in Pennsylvania’s 188th district as a Democrat in the May 15 primary. The announcement was made on Jan. 1 at the University City Arts League, where he addressed the crowd of over one hundred and fifty supporters, according to a press release.

The seat has been held by State Rep. James Roebuck since 1985.

Curry has been a resident of this district for the last decade. He and his wife Angela first moved to the district in 2007 to start and raise a family in the community. A father of three young children, Curry is running for office because he feels “Harrisburg does not reflect his family’s values of hard work, respect others, and equality and fairness for all.”  Continue Reading