In Texas, a group of veterans at the San Antonio Military Medical Center is making beautiful music, thanks to volunteers with the Warrior Cry Music Project.
The nonprofit gives instruments — guitars, drums, trumpets and more — to injured service members, then provides them with music lessons.
Robert Henne started the organization five years ago because he believes playing instruments helped him recover from injuries he sustained in a car accident. At the time, his wife was working as an Air Force doctor at the Walter Reed Medical Center, and he wondered if the same process could help wounded veterans recover.
As the veterans work through the inevitable squawks and stumbles that come along with playing an instrument, they also learn to overcome other challenges. “It’s not just learning to play music,” Henne tells the San Antonio News-Express. “It helps reprogram what’s going on in the head.”
The former soldiers agree. Army veteran Ricardo Cesar suffers nerve damage in his fingers, but plucking the guitar is helping with his recovery. “Just parking here and knowing I’m coming in here lowers my blood pressure,” Cesar says. “This is my time. This is my therapy. Now when I’m starting to transition (to civilian life), at home, I can shut the world out and start playing my guitar, rather than, you know, drinking or doing all types of other nonsense that I don’t need to be doing.”
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Tag: san antonio
This Texas Solar Farm Relies on a Flock of Sheep to Perform Maintenance
A solar farm in San Antonio, Texas is not being sheepish about its newest landscapers: a group of four-legged friends that are keeping the 45 sprawling acres perfectly manicured under the sweltering Texas sun.
The farm’s operator, OCI Solar Power, put around 90 Barbados-cross sheep out to pasture in April to graze and serve as an environmentally-friendly, cheap alternative to maintenance, the Texas Tribune reports. Though the practice is used elsewhere in the U.S., including California and South Carolina, sheep grazing is not common among Texas solar farms.
“It was good to see it was actually quite common” elsewhere, said Charlie Hemmeline, executive director of the recently formed Texas Solar Power Association. “The fact that you’ve got a solar plant there isn’t necessarily restrictive to other uses such as grazing.”
The 4.4-megawatt solar farm is part of a larger series of 400-megawatt plants that San Antonio’s municipal utility, CPS Energy, intends on adding to its system by 2016. Just one megawatt of solar energy can heat and cool up to 100 homes on a hot, Texas summer day, according to the Tribune, and in more mild conditions, can power even more houses.
OCI Solar’s experiment with sheep grazing has worked out well despite recent heavy rains. None of the sheep have chewed through cables or hopped up onto the solar panels, unlike goats, which are more prone to that type of behavior.
Not only are the solar panels good for soaking up the rays. In the blazing sun, they provide a shady respite for the sheep.
Officials contend sheep grazing not only boosts the local agricultural economy, but is also cheaper than hiring human landscapers, who have to steer large lawn equipment in sometimes difficult-to-reach areas.
The sheep aren’t the only animals living at the solar farm. The company has also employed two herding dogs to help stave off lingering coyotes and help protect the sheep.
OCI Solar intends to keep the current herd around for about 10 months before a Texas breeder will swap the sheep with a new crew. If all goes well, they might add the animals to keep its expansive 500-acre, 41-megawatt-plant in sheep shape.
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Southwest Airlines Sets Its Sight on Cities, Not Skies
Southwest Airlines is taking its services on the ground, giving cities a boost with urban design.
The national airline has partnered with New York-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces to launch a three-year initiative — the Heart of the Community grant program — working with cities to revitalize urban areas through construction of new or redesigned public spaces or funding new or ongoing programs.
Southwest has already completed three pilot projects in Detroit, San Antonio and Providence, Rhode Island. Up next? The company will turn its attention to Baltimore, where they’ll work with the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore to rehab the city’s Pratt and Light Plaza.
“We’re in the business of taking people from place to place,” said Marilee McInnis, Southwest’s senior manager of communications, “so we want to support and create and revitalize these places.”
The Pratt and Light area, which the Downtown Partnership’s vice president of communications Michael Evitts described as a “glorified, huge sidewalk,” was built in the 1960s to connect two interstate highways, according to Fast Company. The vast empty, concrete space is currently used to house a farmer’s market. But the city has long sought to revamp the area and the funding from Southwest will give the initiative new interest and fresh ideas from community members.
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The Downtown Partnership will host community workshops to welcome local ideas and hopes to finalize a plan by the fall.
“A lot of what downtown Baltimore is trying to do is undo the best thinking of the previous generation,” Evitts said. “Urban planning in the ’60s was very dictatorial. There was a lot of concrete; people were an afterthought.” Now, it’s more about “encouraging those human moments within urban design.”
The Heart of the Community program is currently accepting applications for 2015 and plans to announce grants for two or three additional communities by the year’s end. Each city will receive funding depending on the project, but the company has not disclosed how much it plans to donate over the next three years.
Have an idea to give your city a facelift? Submit your application by September 15. The only parameter? Your community must fall within one of the 95 urban regions served by Southwest.
Texas Lawyers Provide Free Help to Young Undocumented Immigrants
Many young undocumented immigrants brought to America as kids live in a kind of suspended animation — with everything from college to jobs to medical care to driver’s licenses put on hold by their legal status.
Under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, such young adults can apply for temporary permission to work, go to school, all the while not worrying about being deported. DACA doesn’t provide a pathway to eventual citizenship as the DREAM Act would if it were ever to pass, but the policy still allows these youth to progress in their lives, go to college, and start careers.
Registering for DACA it isn’t easy, however. Applicants must be younger than 31 years of age (as of June 15). Plus, they must provide proof of continuous residency in the United States. Which could be a problem for some immigrants if they started working after high school and took a job that paid in cash because of their lack of a Social Security number — leaving a gap in their records.
That’s why a group of immigration attorneys in Texas will be offering free legal help to DACA-eligible people on June 5 and 6 at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) in San Antonio.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, Texas has 210,000 immigrant residents eligible for DACA, the second highest of any state. (California has the most.) Immigration attorney Alex Garza of RAICES told Dana Choi of the Standard-Times in San Angelo that the nonprofit is trying to find and help as many of those people as it can. “We are actually coming out to the towns and counties so (people who might be eligible for DACA) don’t have to travel all the way out to San Antonio for legal assistance.”
Johana Deleón is one young Texan that RAICES helped apply for DACA; she was approved back in March. Now Deleón is studying for her driving test and was recently accepted into Texas A&M, where she will attend if she can find enough financial aid.
The challenges she faces as she continues her education are considerable, but she’s ready. “You can start at the bottom and work your way up,” she told Choi. “We work hard to get where we are, so I don’t think it’ll be much of a problem for us.”
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Paperwork Stood Between Immigrants and Their Dream, So This Group Stepped In
In 2012, President Obama issued a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals memo that instructed the departments responsible for enforcing immigration laws to refrain from deporting immigrants who were brought to this country as children. The benefits from this policy don’t happen automatically, however. Immigrants must get legal help to prove their continuous residency in the United States, pay a $465 filing fee, and fulfill other requirements to qualify, and many people in this situation can’t afford to pay a lawyer. That’s where the Center for Legal and Social Justice at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio steps in.
About a year ago the center began offering free legal help to people who qualify for deferred action, and so far they’ve helped 200 low-income teens and young adults wade through the necessary paperwork. The center has succeeded with every single case it’s taken on during this mission. Once achieved, the deferral must be renewed every two years, and allows the immigrant to receive work authorization.
For 19-year-old Luis Garcia who arrived in the U.S. at age 2, help from St. Mary’s University “gave me the boost I needed to continue on forward,” he told Jennifer R. Lloyd of My San Antonio. Garcia is now a freshman at San Antonio College.
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