The non-profit that I interned with last Spring, St. Matthew’s Children’s Fund Ethiopia is working on a new fundraising campaign, TwentyFive Ethiopia to mark 25 years since the famine. There’s a video that’s going to be launched this summer in coordination with the campaign. Check it out here.
Filed under: London
Via Andrew:
The British class fixation did not end in the 1990s. Like Iraqi sectarianism, it is baked deep in the pie. So we get this from the Sun:
The son of a rich banker, [Clegg] had a posh upbringing and an expensive private education. He went to elite Westminster school and Cambridge University. Friends say he is attracted to a Euro superstate because he is only a quarter English, with a Dutch mother, a half-Russian father and a Spanish wife.
A toff and a Euro-weeny! And then there’s the acronym: MPSIA. It means “minor public school, I’m afraid”. And public means private. The Guardian’s Sholto Byrnes puts the boot in to Cameron:
The metropolitan Westminster School, where Clegg went, is just not as grand as Cameron’s alma mater, Eton – which, as Dominic Lawson pointed out on Sunday, has truly become a four letter word. At Oxford, Cameron was a member of the aristocratic, moneyed Bullingdon Club, and his college, Brasenose, was founded in 1509. One imagines that tail coats were, in general, less in evidence at Clegg’s Cambridge college, Robinson (founded 1977); nor that many of his fellow undergraduates were as familiar as Cameron no doubt was with “the sound of English county families baying for broken glass”, as Evelyn Waugh put it.
So basically, David Cameron (leader of the Conservative Party) is more high class than Nick Clegg (leader of the Liberal Democrats). And this should negatively impact the Conservative Party’s ability to connect with everyday Britons. British politicians, like American politicians are as a rule more educated and more wealthy than the average citizen. But in Britain, these class distinctions are a lot more visible than in the U.S. Horatio Algerism did not exist in England until the class structure began to fall in the 1990s, whereas it has existed in colonial days here in America.
And on a personal note. I know Westminster School. I know some lovely English chaps that attended that school. Pretty amazing that they went to the same school as Nick Clegg.
Filed under: Legislature
For political junkies. Come see how the conservative and liberal wings of the U.S. Congress have evolved since the beginning of the nation with Poole and Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE scores for Congress put into movie form.
Cross-posted at the BU Roosevelt Blog:
April’s version of BU Roosevelt’s community service program, BU Roosevelt Gives Back, featured Roosevelters partaking in a yearly spring tradition – BU’s Day of Service. This year, the Day of Service, run by BU’s Community Service Center, was expanded to include alumni across the country and around the world, marking the first Global Day of Service.
BU Roosevelters originally planned to head over to the Emerald Necklace Conservency to tackle invasive species of plants in the warm spring sun. A long rainstorm cancelled that site, and BU Roosevelt ended up heading out to Dudley Square’s Haley House Cafe and Bakery to help clean and restock.
Haley House is a soup kitchen, with their cafe and bakery added on in Dudley Square in order to train under-employed women and men from the local neighborhood.
Haley House Bakery Café offers food that embraces cultural diversity and healthy living. We choose foods and recipes that are low in fat and high in nutrients while paying homage to the rich culinary traditions around us. And we support sustainable agriculture, buying organic whenever possible and accepting local organic produce from Haley House’s Noonday Farm and The Food Project in Roxbury and Dorchester. We also serve fairly traded coffee and cocoa from Equal Exchange. And of course we recycle!
And what about economic sustainability for those working toward independence? Through our bakery-training program, at least 10 under-employed, low-income women and men each year engage in a six-month training program. While being paid, these trainees (along with our trainers) prepare topnotch food for both our café and wholesale bakery. Once the trainees have successfully completed the program, we help them get jobs.
BU Roosevelters cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom as well as organized the front of the store, restocked the shelves, and inventoried the tea. In discussing their “homeless” cookies, the organizers of the Cafe and Bakery mentioned that they would love to get an in at BU to sell their cookies on campus. Hopefully, some strings will be able to be pulled with our beloved Dean of Students to make that hope become a reality.
BU Roosevelt looks forward to revisiting Haley House Cafe and Bakery as customers for our end of the year EBoard get together. It’s only a short ride away on the 47 bus, go check it out!
