Enlarge Panelists take questions from the audience. (L-R) Schrag, Tran, Baumgarte, Printz.

Posted: March 24th, 2011 Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman

What makes a person a friend instead of just an acquaintance? What do people in other countries think about friendship?

Those were just a couple of the questions covered in Crossroads' Bonds Across Ponds conversation about cross-cultural friendships on March 22. More than 30 people participated in the event, held at the McColl Center for Visual Arts.

The panelists were four well-traveled, knowledgeable multicultural experts: Dr. Roger Baumgarte, Lara Printz, Anthony Schrag and Loan Tran. (Read their bios here.)

During the conversation, it became clear that Americans and non-Americans have differing views of friendship. While Americans charm newcomers with our friendliness when they first arrive, after a while, said Baumgarte, a psychologist, people from other cultures find Americans "a little shallow" and "don't see us as being very friendly at all."

Keep Reading

Posted: March 23rd, 2011 Greg Lacour

Some stories worth sharing this week:

• WBTV’s Steve Crump has an interesting story here about a long-buried – literally – piece of Charlotte’s past.


• Democratic N.C. Sen. Malcolm Graham, along with a pair of his fellow Charlotte legislators, spoke out Monday against a pending legislative bill that would require voters to present photo IDs. Democratic lawmakers say such a law would disenfranchise mainly minorities, students and the elderly, who tend to vote Democratic. Creative Loafing’s John Grooms’ take is here. What do you think?


• Fascinating news from the U.S. Census Bureau: For the first time, Charlotte is a majority-minority city. What do you think this means for our city’s future and how we should prepare for it?


• The Future of the Library Task Force has laid out the options: Mecklenburg County finds an extra $2 million for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library system, or six neighborhood libraries close for lack of staff. Cut and dried.


• Baseball fans who have anxiously kept up with the Charlotte Knights’ plans to play in an uptown stadium have reason to be discouraged. Five years after the idea was floated, the team still hasn’t secured the financing, and county commissioners say they want more solid assurances that the team eventually will build a stadium and play uptown before they extend the lease for the Third Ward ballpark site.

Posted: March 20th, 2011 Lee Howard

A healthy dose of multiculturalism descended on the heart of Myers Park very early Friday, when singer-songwriter Ana Lucia Divins performed at Fabo Café on Selwyn Avenue as part of Crossroads Charlotte’s Art in the A.M. series.

Divins, a native of Colombia, was accompanied as dawn broke by guitarist and music producer Alonzo Ordonez of Costa Rica. Both were joined by Carlos Robson, a native of Tampa whose heritage is Cuban and Puerto Rican. It might have sounded like an entirely Latin American experience for the stream of mildly surprised customers walking in for their first cup of coffee of the day, but Divins said the message she wanted to get across was for all people.

“I believe in the power that one person can make a change,” Divins said. “One person can drive social change.”

A featured song was “Land of Hope,” inspired by an ongoing art project by local artist Edwin Gil. Gil has been collecting handprints of people across North Carolina in an effort to demonstrate how so many different people can have so much in common.

The lyrics of the song describe “a land I can call my home; a place my children can their own.” The Latin beat had members of the audience clapping along and brought smiles to their faces.

Keep Reading

Posted: March 18th, 2011 Carolyn Steeves

North Carolina's 65 and older population will double over the next 20 years, from 1.2 million to 2.1 million, making it the state's fastest growing population, according to a 2009 study from the N.C. State Data Center. With that in mind, on Wednesday, March 16, Matthews town employees attended a “Connecting Community to Seniors—Aging Sensitivity and Communications” training session. It was presented by the Centralina Area Agency on Aging as a Crossroads Charlotte initiative.

Keep Reading