Champions of community

Mar 7, 2008 | Silicon Valley Events

Guest blog: does everyone know your name?
On Thursday morning March 6 I hauled myself out of bed at dawn to attend Project Cornerstone’s Asset Champions Breakfast. So why should Silicon Valley parents care?
Well, if you aren’t familiar with Project Cornerstone, check out www.projectcornerstone.org. It’s good stuff and every parent in the valley should pay attention.
I won’t give you the marketing spiel but basically Project Cornerstone has identified things we should be doing that will help develop healthy, caring and responsible children. How can any parent argue with that?!
OK, you want the pitch? Here is it, direct from their Web site:
Project Cornerstone’s vision is simple —to build a web of support around every young person in our community. This web of support includes families, schools, community centers, faith communities and local businesses. Unfortunately, these resources are disconnected from each other and often from children and youth themselves. Project Cornerstone facilitates the connection of the separate parts of the web so that young people can count on individuals and organizations working together to provide them with consistent support and guidance.
The great thing about Project Cornerstone is that they have formalized programs but also just simple things we can be doing every day to make our youth feel valued.
Do you know the name of the children in your neighborhood? If not, learn them and greet them regularly.
Do you smile at children and say hello when you pass them on the street or in a store? It’s simple but it makes a difference.
At the breakfast yesterday, Misha Balangit, a senior at Gunderson High School, who was the Masters of Ceremony with Chief of Police Rob Davis summed it up: “You may not realize how a little thing can make such a big difference.”
Cheers,  Vikki Bowes-Mok, SiliconMom reader and contributor

Heavy breathing at the Flint Center

Mar 6, 2008 | Silicon Valley Events

Andrew Weil MD www.drweil.com got the Flint Center crowd doing some heavy breathing last night at Dick Henning’s celebrity forum. What a guy! Looks more jolly Santa than health and fitness guru, but boy did he have some good advice and most of the audience was straining forward and hanging on his every word.

The future of healthcare in the US is so desperate, he said, the disaster may sink our economy. As our population ages, it will place a larger and larger burden on our workers. Scary stuff! A strong advocate of integrated medecine, he riles against the “anti-aging” approach reminding us that aging is a natural process. Instead, our goal should be staying healthy for longer and to do that, he encourages us to make good lifestyle choices . The usual suspects: good diet, exercise, adequate rest and sleep. But some cool green ideas.

He recommends: plenty wild salmon (omega 3 is brilliant for our blood and has been linked to lower levels of depression); fruits and veggies with strong pigments (esp. berries – strong antioxidants); turmeric and jasmine tea.

Weil also  reminded us that we should  revere and include our older friends and relatives in our lives more, just like they do in Okinawa, Japan (a place with legendary longivity www.okinawa.com). He suggested laughter as a stress buster www.laughteryoga.org and then led us in some heavy breathing. Wow: it felt good to switch off for a few minutes; breathe in for 4, hold for 4, then breathe out for 6 …with about two thousand other people. Conspire means to breathe together, so we had one big CONSPIRACY SESSION. I love these simple GREEN solutions to world problems.

Many thanks to Dr. Weil, you’ve inspired me to go back to basics. Now it’s time to get moving… must check out the wild salmon counter at Safeway, grab some “rainbow” fruit and veg… and call my mother!