“Barona Tribe Presents Old Town's Ballard Parent Center With $5,000 Education Grant for ... - msnbc.com” plus 1 more |
| Posted: SAN DIEGO, CA — Today, the Barona Band of Mission Indians awarded a $5,000 education grant to the Harold J. Ballard Parent Center, which provides family-friendly resources to boost the academic success of students living in urban San Diego. Assemblymember Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) joined Principal Beatrice Fernandez in accepting the grant, which was presented by Edwin "Thorpe" Romero, Chairman of the Barona Band of Mission Indians. The funds will be used to purchase a laptop computer, flash drives and calculators for the Ballard Center's Soaring Eagles Workshop. The workshop is an after-school cultural arts program, offered as part of the Center's American Indian Education program, which provides Native American/Alaskan Native K-12 students with an opportunity to learn traditional ceremonies and tribal customs. "The students who attend the Soaring Eagles Workshop are often removed from their traditional tribal ceremonies and customs," said Barona Tribal Chairman Edwin "Thorpe" Romero. "We are pleased to support this important program that encourages students to participate in these culturally enriching activities, improving their self concept and cultural pride, which impacts their success in school and life." Located in Old Town since 1995, the Ballard Parent Center serves as the home of San Diego Parent University, where parents learn how to strengthen their parenting skills, become more involved in their children's education as academic coaches and improve their ability to communicate with their children. The Barona Band of Mission Indians has been sharing resources through its Barona Education Grant Program since 2006, awarding over $1 million to more than 200 schools statewide. The Barona Education Grant Program, created and administered by Tribal Government, is the first of its kind in California. The goal of the program is to create strong educational opportunities for the children of California by building upon the success of the Barona Indian Charter School, which operates under a continuous improvement model. Schools throughout California can apply for educational grants from Barona to purchase much-needed supplies and materials that promote academic improvement. Each grant awarded by the Barona Education Grant Program is $5,000. Applications can be downloaded at http://barona-nsn.gov. About the Barona Band of Mission Indians Add to DiggBookmark with del.icio.usAdd to Newsvine © MarketWire 2011 This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Why Egyptians Preserve Their Cultural Heritage - Huffingtonpost.com Posted: Two homes of magnificent ancient civilizations. Two modern countries run by despots. Two massive regime changes. Yet in Egypt citizens rally to protect their cultural patrimony while in Iraq looting and destruction accelerate. Why do Egyptians link arms in Tahrir Square to protect their National Museum, while thousands of objects are still missing from the Iraqi Museum and many of their sites look like the lunar landscape? The differences have nothing to do with love and respect for history, or knowledge of its importance to the world. Most Iraqis know of and revere their iconic sites such as Babylon, Ur and Nimrud; in the same way Egyptians revere the Pyramids, Luxor and Tutankhamen's tomb. All love their history and its importance in the development of civilization. The difference is that Egyptians also value and utilize their cultural history as an economic asset and not merely an intangible cultural one. Tourism is Egypt's largest industry (more than 11% of its GDP) and biggest employer (one out of every eight jobs), and even Egyptians who don't work directly in the tourism industry benefit from the income it generates. Almost every Egyptian knows someone who works in Egypt's vast tourist trade. Tourism is Egypt's greatest source of foreign exchange, and perhaps the best way for the average Egyptian to escape abject poverty. Egyptians thus know the vast economic benefits of the nondestructive use of their archaeological past. They "eat" their history by preserving it and sharing it with others. And they know that cultural heritage is a renewable resource -- properly managed and utilized, it can be exploited for generations to come. For Egyptians, not destroying their cultural heritage preserves both their past and their future. I have witnessed this quality since my first visit to Egypt in 1991 after the first Gulf War, another period when the tourism trade vanished there. I was among seven tourists on a Nile cruise boat designed for 150 passengers. In spite of the economic hardship, the Egyptians remained proud of their heritage and enthusiastic to show it to us. In spite of their loss of income, looting and destruction did not increase -- they recognized the long-term value of their heritage both economically and culturally. That attitude has paid off a thousand fold in the intervening years. Iraq, by contrast, during the last thirty years has been wracked by near continuous warfare and a government hostile to Western interests. Little if anything was done to encourage tourism or manage archaeological sites. Site protection was accomplished by harsh criminal penalties rather than nondestructive development. Meanwhile, the government itself showed little respect for its cultural heritage -- Saddam Hussein built one of his palaces directly atop the ancient site of Babylon. And looting has long been prevalent in Iraq when the criminal penalties could be avoided. For most Iraqis, then, cultural heritage remains an abstract notion of the past -- respected and revered, but having no relevance to their modern lives. In Iraq, there is no history of economically benefiting from tourism and other nondestructive uses. Nor do Iraqis have the day-to-day experience with their heritage that Egyptians do. They neither encounter their heritage nor benefit from it. The only way Iraqis can "eat" their history is to loot it, and when the opportunity presented itself, they seized it. Their museum was looted, and many of their sites look like the moon, pockmarked with thousands of unauthorized pits. Tourism is not always a panacea for cultural heritage. Too many tourists and too many facilities can destroy monuments as easily as looting and wanton economic development. And it won't always prevent looting. But without an economic reason to preserve their cultural heritage, can we really expect poor and desperate people not to destroy it? The locked arms of the Egyptian people in Tahrir Square provide the answer. Follow Larry Coben on Twitter: www.twitter.com/larrycoben This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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