#communityoutreach — Public Fediverse posts

‘How Can I Leave the People?’ California Pastor Faces Food Pantry Shutdown https://www.diningandcooking.com/us/47031/ #California #CaliforniaFood #ChristianMinistry #CommunityOutreach #FoodInsecurity #GovernmentOverreach #LighthouseFoodRescueAndDistribution #RalphOlmos #SanJose #ThreatenedFines #ZoningViolations

Local group uses flowers, notes to spread mental health awareness

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WNKY) — A local group is handing o…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Mentalhealth #actsofkindness #BowlingGreenKentucky #Communityoutreach #downtownbowlinggreen #DylanCarder #FlowersForMentalHealthAwareness #fountainsquare #freeflowers #Health #Mentalhealthawareness #Mentalhealthconversations #Mentalhealthsupport #MentalHealth #motivationalnotes
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/872635/

https://www.europesays.com/ie/721883/ Local group uses flowers, notes to spread mental health awareness #ActsOfKindness #BowlingGreenKentucky #CommunityOutreach #DowntownBowlingGreen #DylanCarder #Éire #FlowersForMentalHealthAwareness #FountainSquare #FreeFlowers #Health #IE #Ireland #MentalHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #MentalHealthConversations #MentalHealthSupport #MentalHealth #MotivationalNotes

https://www.europesays.com/uk/1239052/ Local group uses flowers, notes to spread mental health awareness #ActsOfKindness #BowlingGreenKentucky #CommunityOutreach #DowntownBowlingGreen #DylanCarder #FlowersForMentalHealthAwareness #FountainSquare #FreeFlowers #Health #MentalHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #MentalHealthConversations #MentalHealthSupport #MotivationalNotes #UK #UnitedKingdom

Local group uses flowers, notes to spread mental health awareness

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. (WNKY) — A local group is handing out free flowers and handwritten mo…
#NewsBeep #News #Mentalhealth #ActsofKindness #BowlingGreenKentucky #CA #Canada #communityoutreach #downtownbowlinggreen #DylanCarder #FlowersForMentalHealthAwareness #fountainsquare #freeflowers #Health #mentalhealthawareness #Mentalhealthconversations #Mentalhealthsupport #MentalHealth #motivationalnotes
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/922304/

Association of Science and Technology Centers: New Initiative to Examine How Museums Engage the Communities They Serve. “The Association of Science and Technology Centers, Garibay Group, and the Association of Children’s Museums, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Award MG-255854-OMS-24), today announced the launch of Museums Serving All People, a new initiative […]

Futurism: Microsoft Shrivels When Asked If Its “Good Neighbor” Data Center Policy Will Involve Actually Supporting Community Groups. “As Ars Technica reported, the group We Make Indiana — a coalition of 25 various interfaith groups, law enforcement associations, mental health organizations, and other non-profits — quickly ran up against the limits of Microsoft’s altruism after […]

‘Deserve sumikat’: Pitik Queen earns praise for giving back to the community

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://interaksyon.philstar.com/trends-spotlights/2026/10/02/319970/pitik-queen-earns-praise-giving-back-community/

American Alliance of Museums: Demographics of US Museum-Goers: A 2026 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers Data Story. “This visual Data Story is based on findings from the 2026 Annual Survey of Museum-Goers, a national survey of American museum visitors from AAM and Wilkening Consulting. Every year, the survey partners with museums to research their audiences’ behaviors and preferences and how they […]

Viral Alexandria Dining Post Sparks Frenzy Over Richmond Highway Food Truck https://www.diningandcooking.com/us/26013/ #AlexandriaDining #AlexandriaVA #CommunityOutreach #FisherOfMen #FoodTruck #FriedFish #GreaterMorningStarApostolicChurch #LocalRestaurants #RichmondHighway #seafood #Virginia #VirginiaDining #VirginiaFood #VirginiaGroceryStores #VirginiaRestaurants

Decatur Police, Food Bank of North Alabama distribute food to families https://www.diningandcooking.com/us/21375/ #Alabama #AlabamaDining #AlabamaFood #AlabamaGroceryStores #AlabamaRestaurants #CommunityOutreach #DecaturPoliceDepartment #FoodBank #FoodBankOfNorthAlabama #FoodGiveaway #inflation

Search Engine Land: The big winners and losers in U.S. website traffic over the past year. “Google Analytics 4 (GA4) became mandatory on July 1, 2023, when standard Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new data. Less than a year later, on May 14, 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews to U.S. users. The timing matters: The industry lost a clean, comparable measurement baseline […]

New York Times: 60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality. “The rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous posts each weekend has become a fixture of the president’s second term, seen more and more as a barometer of his mental state. Mr. Trump’s critics, who never considered him a model of stability in the first place, now point to these frenetic […]

Gothamist: TikTok is the new 311: New Yorkers tag Mayor Mamdani on social media for help. “Mamdani is being inundated with online requests for IRL fixes. The videos, which have become a meme on TikTok, show people begging Mamdani to take action on everything from mundane nuisances — like potholes and leaky subway stations — to more existential challenges like finding love. The requests have […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Abelvicent/117212360896060423

#EnvironmentalConservation #ClimateAction #Sustainability #Permaculture #Agroecology #FoodForest #Agroforestry #SoilHealth #TreePlanting #SchoolGardens #CommunityOutreach #Nature #FoodSecurity #ZeroWaste #LandRestoration #SustainableFarming #Naturfrënn

How does the mixture of cow dung and goat dung work??..
#EnvironmentalConservation #ClimateAction #Sustainability #Permaculture #Agroecology #FoodForest #Agroforestry #SoilHealth #TreePlanting #SchoolGardens #CommunityOutreach #Nature #FoodSecurity #ZeroWaste #LandRestoration #SustainableFarming #Naturfrënn

Press Gazette: The news publishers on Tiktok with biggest growth since 2024. “Four major news publishers in the UK and US have increased their core Tiktok followings by more than 11 million people in the last two years. Press Gazette has updated its ranking of the biggest and fastest-growing news publisher Tiktok accounts for the first time since August 2024.”

New York Times: The Funny Way That Stand-Up Comics Are Posting on Social Media. This link goes to a gift article. “That’s a contrast with recent years when comedians would post their crowd work on Instagram and other platforms. Some would even engineer crowd interactions with specially placed cameras. It allowed performers to show their comedic chops without spoiling their material, while […]

Why We Stay: The Raw Reality of Urban Ministry

“I’m afraid I’d be too comfortable here,” a church visitor once told me when they were trying to decide if they were going to plug into our community.

“I can’t say I’ve heard that one before,” I laughed. They took their statement back about ten minutes later.

Many people loved our Dinner Church model, which served many impoverished people in our city, but not everyone wanted to be involved. Admittedly, it could be a bit awkward sometimes.

For example, one Sunday, it was reported to me that two visitors had restraining orders against each other. Another time, we had two frenemies present in our service. When I didn’t immediately take the side of one of them, they began to yell at me in the middle of a crowded sanctuary. They didn’t stop until they had exited the building, leaving me now to walk on stage and lead worship. Still another time, the whole church gathered around to pray for someone as they genuinely wept over a story that they had made up. When I caught them in the middle of the lie the next morning, they refused to admit it to no end.

Urban ministry is full of unexpected moments. The first time I couldn’t go to church because I wasn’t sure if I had caught COVID or not, I sat at home and watched our service online. As a member of the church preached outside, gunshots went off nearby. From my understanding, there was a family across the street that didn’t seem to care when their kids played with their handguns in the backyard.

You see and hear it all in this job, especially when you try to reach those stuck at the bottom. Some visitors walked out the door with the church’s money. Some kids stole our Nintendo Wii. Someone stole one of my favorite hoodies. Some other kids used our church phone to call 911 for no reason. Someone made a drug drop out of the church window behind me while I led worship.

While there are many beautiful stories to highlight in this kind of ministry, there are also difficult ones like these. I share them to highlight the messiness that sometimes comes when we step into the mission of Jesus, and also to remind us that it’s all worth it. These are the kind of reasons some churches move out of their community, but for us, they’re the reason we stay. This is heavy, necessary work that’s real and raw. When we serve those in need, we serve Jesus.

Montana Free Press: Facebook, the new jury notice?. “Since the beginning of May, the sheriff’s office has been posting on its Facebook page about once a week the names of county residents who have not responded to their jury-duty summonses. The posts urge people to either respond via a provided link or call the clerk of court, but some comments under the posts (and questions sent to us here […]

Variety: ABC Unveils New Twist for Live-Streamed News: Shows That Respond to Viewer Queries, Needs. “During a recent live-stream of ‘Searched’, a relatively new entry to the schedule of ABC News Live, Benitez, clad in bright white sneakers and a short sleeve shirt, offered followers different angles on top news stories — the ones they were asking about on their own. ‘Searched’ uses data from […]

Loving Our Neighbors When We Cannot Fix Everything

I sat down in my pastor’s office in high school as he listened to the church voicemail. It felt like every single message was from a poor stranger in tears, needing large amounts of money by the end of the day.

I can tell you now that every pastor is familiar with these calls. We feel horrible about them. After all, we’re supposed to be answering the phone on behalf of Jesus Christ, who cared deeply for the poor. We want to help! However, there’s just not enough money or wisdom in our ministries to heal every moment of poverty that comes our way. And unfortunately, our inability to do so can sometimes create some rather tense situations with the very people we want to help.

For example, when I didn’t arrange a bus ticket for a stranger on the phone, he yelled, “Well, then I’m just going to die in this hospital, and when you get to Heaven, you’re going to have to answer for it!” Then he hung up.

Another time, I agreed to pay part of a stranger’s rent, but I needed to know they could find the rest of the money, so their landlord wouldn’t take our limited funds and kick them out anyway. They yelled at me for doubting them and hung up.

And still another time, I could only give someone part of the money they needed out of my family’s own pocket, and they launched into a very long monologue that targeted me and my pastoring.

These are the unusually extreme reactions, not the typical ones. I share them to illustrate a strange kind of dynamic that can come with serving those in poverty. These reactions are not born out of entitlement as much as they are out of fear, anxiety, and stress. You have to remember that many impoverished people are constantly trying to make ends meet. They are stressed out of their minds. When things start getting desperate, they have to weigh all the intense variables before them. 

What if they lose electricity? How will they cook without electricity? Can they even afford food? They know they need to get a job, but does their car work? Can they even afford gas to get to a job if they get the car fixed? And if they go to work, who will watch their kids? Does daycare cost more than their job pays them? Do they have another credit card they can max out for now? Or do they have any friends left who they don’t already owe money to?

The life of an impoverished person is incredibly heavy, and it feels like everything is working against them. When a pastor can’t do anything to help, it’s always possible there will be a natural feeling that God or Christianity has now failed them, too. It’s just one more variable that raises the intensity of the conversation.

Some churches handle phone calls well and have the staff they need to get the job done. That is very difficult for many small churches. Even if the request is doable, there’s a lot of organization required to figure out how to handle it. For example, I once spent hours of my workday driving around town, just trying to figure out how to pay a stranger’s electric bill.

May we do our best to navigate the difficult situations around us as we partner with churches, organizations, and local government to create better outcomes for those in poverty. We do not know stress as they do, and it’s no wonder they sometimes come to us already on edge. May we lovingly represent Christ well in our interactions as we step into our neighbors’ difficulties.

New mosque opens in Young, NSW as Muslim community grows ‘exponentially’

After years of planning, the small cherry-growing town of Young in the NSW Riverina is now home to…
#Australia #AU #Austrlia #Community #communityoutreach #islam #mosque #muslim #young
https://www.europesays.com/australia/72090/

Online Journalism Blog: How data journalism is done on TikTok: six key takeaways from watching 50 videos. “In a guest post for OJB, James Hickman pulls together a set of basic best-practice guidelines for creating data journalism videos on TikTok, from length and location to animation and style.”

Arab News: Mini op-ed: Middle East museums are compelling platforms for dialogue. “The region’s most ambitious museums did not inherit the Louvre model. They were built in the age of the smartphone, algorithmic content, and generative technologies. As a result, they have quietly resisted assuming the role of their older counterparts. Rather than asserting their authority over visitors, they […]

The Scholarly Kitchen: From Hub to Hustle: The Scattered Social Landscape in Scholarly Comms. “In the most recent SSP Pulse Check, the community weighed in on the way social media is being used and trusted (or neither) in scholarly communications. The insights revealed a complex picture of a time that remains uncertain and very much still evolving. To build on this data, we looked at past […]

NiemanLab: Despite concerns about AI Overviews, some nonprofit news outlets see a surge in search traffic. “In Nieman Lab’s quarterly ranking of nonprofit news outlets, four news outlets saw a bump in traffic thanks in part to their coverage of primary elections in May and June. We bring you four of these each quarter, looking at four different market segments: for-profit local news sites, […]

Poynter: As search and social traffic dries up, local newsrooms turn to Reddit. “Last October, the Big 12 conference issued a rule change that only really makes sense if you watch Big 12 football: Fans at Texas Tech’s Jones AT&T Stadium were no longer allowed to throw tortillas onto the field during the opening kickoff. In another era, it’s a story that The Dallas Morning News — located […]

Jackson Advocate: MHC launches new Mississippi Stories Grant program. “The Mississippi Humanities Council (MHC) has launched the Mississippi Stories Grant, a new funding opportunity to help communities across the state preserve, share, and celebrate the voices and lived experiences of Mississippians. The program is supported by the Mississippi Legislature through the Mississippi Department of […]

Ars Technica: With help from data, art museums are reframing the visitor experience. “Museums take this educational role seriously, and many institutions understand the need to sustain and broaden their appeal…. To aid this transition, museums and other cultural institutions are increasingly using data to inform decisions about how to present the works they house.”

UT Arlington: Share your World Cup story with UTA Libraries. “Following Arlington’s hosting of nine World Cup matches, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries is inviting soccer fans, residents and visitors from around the globe to help preserve this historic moment by contributing their personal experiences to a new World Cup digital collection.”

Bloomberg: India’s Modi adopts Meta Platforms’ Reels amid Instagram-fueled student unrest. “As student protests spread across India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has turned to Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram Reels, swapping his trademark cinematic videos for raw, self-recorded messages aimed at the country’s youth. The 75-year-old posted two selfie videos on Instagram in as many days.”

Poynter: A hyperlocal news page falls victim to Facebook’s AI. “Like many large technology platforms, Facebook now relies heavily on automated AI systems to detect accounts and pages it believes violate its policies. On July 11, it shut down The Bloomingtonian page, telling the publisher/editor/reporter Jeremy Hogan ‘the Page, or activity on it, may misuse our platform to pretend to be a […]

National Conference of State Legislatures: NCSL Launches New Elections Information Hub Ahead of 2026 State Elections. “The National Conference of State Legislatures launched its new State Elections 2026 page, a comprehensive, one-stop hub to follow this year’s state elections. This new resource provides information on the 2026 primary and general elections, legislative races by state and […]

Louisville Public Radio: Political text messages could get more effective and annoying. Blame AI. “AI-powered platforms are training bots to sound like political candidates in text messages, holding personalized conversations with thousands of potential voters simultaneously. The bots are also gathering data, learning what each voter wants from their representatives and using that information […]

Chicago Sun-Times: Chicago Public Media launching community website — chicago.com — in the fall. “The site will include Chicago-area information, civic and cultural resources, community-sourced knowledge and opportunities for audience participation, the nonprofit said Wednesday. It will also curate headlines from the Sun-Times, WBEZ and other news sources.”