This captures 30% of the last four years of my life and 100% of what I’m about: connecting people through stories to strengthen communities.
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A small boy makes shoes in the factory. Photograph: Ahmed Deeb
Syrian refugees have been flooding into Turkey, but what do they do when they make it there? Some work in apparel factories.
“He can make 400 shoes a day. He’s a real man.”
That quote is from the manager at a shoe factory about his 13-year-old Syrian worker. According to the story in the Guardian, more than ⅓ of the workers at the factory were Syrian children.
From the article:
According to Unicef, more than half of Turkey’s 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees are children – and nearly 80% of them are not in school….
Rick Friday is a farmer and a cartoonist. Farming is his muse or at least it was his muse until he he poked Big Ag in the eye with a recent cartoon.
The cartoon as described in the NY Times story on his firing:
The cartoon shows two farmers, in overalls and skewed baseball caps, chatting at a fence.
“I wish there was more profit in farming,” one farmer says.
“There is,” the other replies. “In year 2015 the C.E.O.s of Monsanto, DuPont, Pioneer and John Deere combined made more money than 2,129 Iowa farmers.”
After 21 years drawing more than 1,000…
I haven’t eaten Domino’s for years, so I’m not sure why I was dreaming about Domino’s, but I was. And I wasn’t just normal me, but SuperMe, as in I was a superhero with the ability to fly.
So Super Kelsey was looking for a way to earn a few more bucks. Domino’s apparently in this dream world was delivering pizzas via an uber-like delivery service accessible from the Domino’s app. If you had time to deliver pizzas, you logged into the app and saw what opportunities were available. Different deliveries earned you a different amount. I suppose this had to do with distance and the size of the order, maybe, but I really have no idea. None of this exactly makes sense.
I…
What questions would you ask if you could visit if a garment workers home, commute, and factory?
via LaborLink…
A few years ago Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, PA, invited me to campus to speak about my work. Since then, Dr. Pamela Bradley has been using my books in her English class. I Skype in with her class once per semester. (If you use any of my work, I’d be happy to Skype with your class for free, although Pam sent me a box of locally produced goodies!)
This semester Pam had the students read EATING while also working at the campus community garden.
She was kind enough to share more about the experience:
I teach Academic Literacy, a developmental reading and English course at Northampton Community College. This semester my students have had the experience of gardening while reading Where Am…
Three years ago the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1,134 people and injuring more than 2,500 more.
Sometimes when I deliver the information above in a lecture I say,”killed 1,134 workers.” As if a worker is a cog without a family, friends, and a complex life just like ours. I cringe at the word workers passing my lips. It’s vital that we all remember that people make our things.
Sons. Daughters. Fathers. Mothers. Aunts. Uncles. Best friends. These are the lives that were snuffed out by the unregulated manic growth of the Bangladeshi garment industry trying to feed consumers ever-hungry for cheaper prices and throwaway fashions.
Today marks three years since the disaster, and I hope you’ll join me in doing…
“Man, who comes here in a limo?” I said, to my fellow dad, Zach, as we left the daddy-daughter dance with our daughters.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but there seemed to be some pressure at the daddy-daughter dance to “out-dad” one another. This dad wore a suit. That dad wore a bow tie. This dad has some dance moves. That dad is on the phone.
But a limo?
As I turned to watch it drive by, I saw it slow in front of a dad and daughter well within earshot of my comment. As soon as I saw them, I knew that there was probably some super special reason that this dad came with his daughter in a super special limo. I…
(Stand with Santos Celestina Carranza, General Secretary of SITETSA, a union supporting blueberry farmers in Peru)
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I’m thankful for the global food economy. One of the reasons is because I like to eat blueberries year round. But the luxury of being able to eat out-of-season produce comes with a cost. A cost that blueberry farmers in Peru are currently paying.
The U.S. Department of Labor recently released a report on how farm workers are being mistreated–hired on short term contracts, unions being busted by employers–all which are in violation of the trade agreement between the United…
I’m spending the day at Ohio Northern University visiting classes, talking with faculty and students, eating, some more eating, and giving a presentation tonight.
This is the flyer they made for my event tonight.
Annie took this picture of me in our backyard in 2008, and it gets used quite often to this day on posters such as this, which makes me a little paranoid: Do I even look like that anymore? Do I look more authorial when I’m not wearing my glasses, which I absolutely have to wear today?
I’ve had professional head shots twice since, and folks can choose from, I don’t know, like 10 different ones, yet they continually choose 2008-Kelsey making 2016 Kelsey a little jealous.
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I checked in at my…
