WHEN: Thursday, March 17, 2011 from 1:00pm – 3:00pm

WHERE Richmond City Council Chambers
Richmond City Hall, 2nd Floor
900 E. Broad Street, 3^rd Floor
Richmond, Virginia 23219

This meeting is free and open to the public and all members of the Greater-Richmond community are invited and encouraged to attend.

WHAT: The Richmond City Council Career and Technical Education Commission will host William E. (Bill) Strickland, Jr., Founder, President and CEO of the Manchester Bidwell Corporation, for a discussion on career and technical education. Considered to be an expert in the field of career and technical education, Mr. Strickland was recently selected by U. S. President Barack H. Obama to serve on the White House Council for Community Solutions and the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Strickland is a MacArthur Fellowship Genus Award winner and the three-time subject of Harvard Business School case studies.

WHO The Honorable Doug Conner, Councilman, Richmond City Council, South Central 9th District; and Chairman, Richmond City Council Career and Technical Education Commission. For more information, please contact The Honorable Doug Conner, Councilman, Richmond City Council, South Central 9th District, at 804.233.8288, or doug.conner@richmondgov.com.

Background on William E. Strickland, Jr.

William E. (Bill) Strickland, Jr. is the Founder, President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation and its subsidiaries, Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (MCG) and Bidwell Training Center (BTC), founded in 1968 in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Mr. Strickland was recently selected by U. S. President Barack H. Obama to serve on the White House Council for Community Solutions and the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Strickland is a MacArthur Fellowship Genus Award winner and the three-time subject of Harvard Business School case studies.  Mr. Strickland has completed the development of a new 40,000 sq. ft. production greenhouse, created for the development of Phalaenopsis orchids and hydroponics vegetables; a 70,000 sq. ft. medical technology complex, which has exceeded eight million dollars in value; and a 62,000 sq. ft. facility as a mortgage free asset for both MCG and BTC.  The facilities include a 350-seat music/lecture hall, library, arts studios and labs, dining and meeting rooms, state-of-the-art award winning audio and video recording studios, serve as a demonstration site for Hewlett Packard and Steelcase equipment and are home to 25,000 Phalaenopsis orchids that are cultivated for wholesale distribution.

Please find the following video of Mr. Strickland at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_lSduJYbLo&feature=player_embedded

Background on the Richmond City Council Career and Technical Education Commission

Established by Richmond City Council on December 14, 2009 by Council Resolution number 2009-R166-194, the Richmond City Council Career and Technical Education Commission was born out of a Career and Technical Education Task Force organized in 2007 by Councilman Doug Conner. On November 28, 2007, Richmond City Council held a Richmond Regional Forum on Career and Technical Education that included presentations and discussions on model schools from around the country. Since that time the members of the Task Force and Commission have been holding regular organizational and planning meetings.

The goal of the Commission is to explore the development of career and technical education options for K-12^th grade students, young adults, displaced workers and those reentering the workforce and to identify and review various existing career and technical education providers to determine which are employing “best practices” educational and training techniques and which might be the best model for Richmond. The Commission is to provide Richmond Public Schools with its final recommendations concerning the provision of career and technical education within 12 months of the final member being appointed to the Commission. Members of the Commission are still being appointed.

The Richmond City Council Career and Technical Education Commission includes the following 21 members:

• A Member of the Richmond City Council Health, Human Services and Education Standing Committee, who shall serve as Chairman;
• A member of the Richmond Public Schools Board of Trustees;
• A representative from the Richmond Public Schools Administration;
• A representative from the Richmond Public Schools Richmond Technical Center Advisory Board
• A representative from the Richmond Department of Economic Development
• A representative from the Greater Richmond Partnership;
• A representative from the Richmond Capital Regional Workforce Investment Board;
• A representative from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a federation of international labor unions.
• A representative from the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce;
• Ten at-large members who shall either be Richmond residents or operated businesses in the city; and
• Two members appointed by the Mayor by letter to the Richmond City Council Office of the City Clerk.

Richmond City Council has previously appropriated $75,000 to assist a study on the ways to enhance vocational and technical education options within the city of Richmond.

*This information has been provided by Councilman Doug Conner.

Crime , public health, schools, infrastructure, and blight continue to be primary issues Richmond and the Southside endure. What will new mayor-elect Dwight Jones bring to the table? Will his experience as a delegate and preacher be enough to pull the fractured city back together?

Since the terms have been stretched to four years, it seems likely that each of our representatives will have plenty of time to accomplish projects without the distraction of campaigning.

Now is a time of great transition in the city of Richmond. Let us hope that our representatives will seize the momentum Barack Obama has developed nationally and utilize the spirit of change locally.

Here is the article from the Times-Dispatch:

Richmond City Council Slave Trail Commission to hold open public forums on memorializing Richmond Negro Burial Grounds in Shockoe Bottom

The entire Richmond community is invited and encouraged to attend and participate

WHAT The Richmond City Council Slave Trail Commission will hold open forum public community forum meetings to hear and discuss ideas from Richmond citizens on how to properly memorialize the site of an historic Richmond Negro Burial Grounds located in the Shockoe Bottom area of Richmond. Land on this site was recently identified and set aside by Virginia Commonwealth University. The entire Richmond community is invited and encouraged to attend and participate in this important community discussion. The first meeting will take place as follows:

WHEN Richmond City Council Slave Trail Committee: MEETING 1

WHERE Date:              Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Time: 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Location: Richmond Public Library – Main Library

101 East Franklin Street – Richmond (Downtown)

Additional meeting date/time to be announced.

CONTACT For more information, please contact Sam Patterson, at 804.646.3012.

BACKGROUND

The result of years of ongoing discussions at the state, local and federal level, a consensus was reached on August 28, 2008 between leaders of Richmond City Council, Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR), and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) to preserve, rededicate and memorialize land identified as an historic Richmond Negro Burial Ground. This area was a burial ground (estimated in use from 1750′s to 1812) for free and enslaved Africans.

Let this post be an open invitation to post your questions to the candidates. Many news agencies and political groups send extensive question lists and subsequently interview candidates in order to decide who they will support. Here we will simply collect questions from anonymous individuals and should they be responded to here, that’s wonderful, should they not be responded to here, the questions will be passed on to the candidates at a later date and their responses will be posted here.

So go ahead and ask whatever you have been dieing to have answered!