And now we find ourselves on December 7, 2024 or at least that’s where I find myself when I’m putting together the latest sonic edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. I’m Sean Tubbs, the only person currently working for Town Crier Productions unless you count two feline partners who occasionally make an appearance in the narrations but so far have not appeared in a recording. Is today the day? Listen for yourself!

On this edition:

* Quantitative Foundation gives another $20M to UVa for second building for School of Data Science (learn more)

* Charlottesville Planning Commission gives more direction on capital improvement program (learn more)

* The Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority has a conversation on preventing evictions (learn more)

* Commonwealth Transportation Board supports cancellation of two Charlottesville projects, formally cancels Emmet Street Phase Two (learn more)

* Louisa’s Board of Supervisors support that county’s continued funding of Household Hazardous Waste Day (learn more)

* More details on UVA’s new urban area from the Buildings and Grounds Committee (learn more)

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First shout-out: Celebrating the community’s other information organizations!

In today’s second shout-out in the form of a house ad, I want to make sure everyone knows that every edition of the regular newsletter (not the podcast ones) ends with a section called Reading Material. Charlottesville Community Engagement is just one offering in a landscape that includes the Charlottesville Daily Progress, C-Ville Weekly, Charlottesville Tomorrow, and Cville Right Now, I curate links from these sources because I believe a truly informed community needs multiple perspectives.

There’s also the Cavalier Daily, Vinegar Hill Magazine, the Fluvanna Review, the Crozet Gazette, NBC29, CBS19, and other sources. But if you look every day, you’ll find links to articles in national publications, all linked to give you more perspectives on some of the issues of our times.

Second shout-out: Cvillepedia!

Cvillepedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and this second shout-out today is to provide a little bit about what I know. I helped create the website back in the late 2000’s as a way of keeping track of all of the stories being written for the nonprofit news organization I worked for at the time.

Now Cvillepedia is hosted by the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library under the stewardship of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. There are over 6,500 articles and we need volunteers to help keep it up to date and to capture more of this community’s history, present, and future.

If you want to learn how to do research, learn how to explore historical documents, and want some experience writing, consider becoming a volunteer. To give you a sense of one potential project, Frances Brand painted dozens and dozens of portraits of people in the Charlottesville area. Who were they? What can we learn about where we are now by documenting the stories of everyone from Ruth Klüger Angress to Jay Worrall?

As a little teaser, here’s some of what’s listed for December 7 throughout the years.

Events

* 2020 – Charlottesville City Council approves the idea of exploring a Sister City Connection with Huehuetenango, Guatemala. [1]

Births

* 1754 – Jack Jouett is born.

Deaths

* 1932 – George R Ferguson Sr. dies in Charlottesville and is buried in the Sammons Family Cemetery. A physician and the father of George R Ferguson, his portrait photograph was prominently featured in the “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style and Racial Uplift” exhibit of Rufus W. Holsinger's photographs that was on display at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library from 2022 to 2023.

* 1941 – Harry H. Gaver becomes the first alumnus of the University of Virginia to die in World War II, meeting his end during the surprise Japanese military strike on Pearl Harbor.

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