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Quality Issues
Archived Posts from this Category
Archived Posts from this Category
Posted by TheShot on 05 May 2014 | Filed under: CoffeeRatings.com, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Local Brew, Quality Issues
Today's Stanford Daily published an article on the Stanford Coffee Symposium that we held this past weekend: Stanford Continuing Studies hosts coffee symposium | Stanford Daily. In addition to the featured speakers mentioned in our earlier post, the event showcased espresso drinks and coffees meticulously prepared by Mr. Espresso, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, Centro Agroecológico del Café A.C. (CAFECOL, from Mexico), Coupa Café, and Café Venetia — plus an overall event coffee service provided by Peet's Coffee & Tea.
Exclusively for the event, Richard Sandlin of Fair Trade USA (and the Bay Area Coffee Community) and Stephen Vick, green coffee buyer for Blue Bottle Coffee, jointly developed a custom coffee evaluation session where some 200 students tasted three very different coffees from different regions — each personally sourced by Stephen and prepared by Blue Bottle baristas. Richard and Stephen encouraged the students to identify & associate flavor descriptors for each coffee and compare their tasting experiences with those of their own.
I was pleasantly surprised that the Stanford University team transformed the classic, 1938-built Stanford Graduate School of Education building, with its modest power & water supply, into something that could support an event of this size: with modern espresso machines and a demanding cupping-like event with three different hand-crafted coffees served simultaneously to some 70 people in three shifts.
Although I was mostly busy helping to keep things running smoothly behind the scenes, I still managed to learn quite a bit about coffee history, the coffee genome, the impacts of coffee on labor and certification practices in Latin America, and how to measure biodiversity and its effects on coffee production. That said, my favorite event logistics non-sequitur of the day had to be: "I found out that the golf cart wasn't stolen."
A big thanks to everyone who helped pull off a educational, fun, and highly caffeinated celebration of coffee that also increased our mindful appreciation of it.
Posted by TheShot on 27 Apr 2014 | Filed under: Café Society, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
Long before there was Coffee Bar, Mr. Espresso continually wrestled with the "last mile" of retail coffee delivery. All their quality efforts sourcing, roasting, and blending coffee could be undone by poor storage, an inexperienced barista, or a poorly maintained espresso machine. By opening Coffee Bar, Mr. Espresso could take more direct control of that last mile and better showcase their coffee.
Equator Estate Coffees is another local roaster that hasn't quite yet had the retail coffee outlet to truly show them off. This was a particularly nagging issue for us on CoffeeRatings.com, where over the years we noted their industry accolades but were continually challenged to find just one among dozens of example outlets where their roasts didn't underwhelm us.
Equator co-founder and master roaster, Brooke McDonnell, sometimes took to the comments on our blog posts to debate the variances in personal tastes. She was right that personal tastes vary, and none are necessarily more "right" or "wrong" than others.
Sure, we've been known to pause over the likes of Stumptown Coffee Roasters — who while clearly in the upper echelon of coffee quality always seemed to rank in the lower end of that class. Someone certainly has to, so why not them?
But if Stumptown marked a natural statistical outcome when forced to jockey for rankings within subjective personal tastes, Equator represented nothing short of an anomaly for us. Ultimately, we had more or less come to the conclusion that our perception-of-quality disparity had less to do with our own coffee palate and more with their relatively loose controls over the supply and delivery chain at the retail end.
Opening in June 2013, Equator Coffees at Proof Lab Surf Shop represents a joint venture where the roaster finally got their own "reference quality" coffee bar. Located at one of the main divides in Mill Valley between traffic into "downtown" and traffic towards Muir Woods and the California Highway 1 beaches, this red-painted wooden shack at the head of a part-gravel parking lot beckons surfers and coffee lovers alike. It seems like an odd place for a surf shop (Proof Lab, in back): sandwiched between the Bothin Marsh and Coyote Creek with no sign of sand for miles. But the surfers (and boarders) come.
There's a cement patio in front, enclosed from the highway by standing surfboards and a surf-board-inspired outdoor table. The rear entrance to the building has seating among white-painted metal café tables and chairs — and a surfboard table. Inside there are several small wooden café tables set against a wall of Hurley surf advertising. (With surfboards in the rear.) One wall is dedicated to retail sale of various coffees and home brewing equipment.
Using a red, two-group La Marzocco Strada machine, they pull shots with a mottled, textured crema of a medium and darker brown. It looks robust and organic, has a decent body, a full aroma, and a well-blended flavor of herbal pungency mixed with some spices, heavy cherry-like fruit (perhaps just a touch too much fruit for my tastes), and some honey-like edges. Served in white logo Espresso Parts cups with very necessary sparkling water on the side.
It's a solid cup. It has great visual appeal and seems like it has all the ingredients for excellence. However, you might say the enigma continues a little: as good as it is, it still falls on the weaker side of excellence with still some room for improvement.
Read the review of Equator Coffees at Proof Lab Surf Shop in Mill Valley, CA.
Posted by TheShot on 07 Apr 2014 | Filed under: Barista, Beans, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Home Brew, Machine, Quality Issues, Robusta, Starbucks
As we noted last month, tonight on Rai 3 — a regional TV news network in Italy — they aired an investigative exposé on the state of espresso in Italy titled "Espresso nel caffè": Report Espresso nel caffè. Rai 3 produced this as an episode of their Report program, which has been something of a platform for barebones investigative journalism since its inception in 1997. (Think a scrappier 60 Minutes on a shoestring budget.)
The 51-minute segment isn't groundbreaking for either journalism nor for any awareness of coffee standards. That said, it is aspirationally legitimate coffee video and television. Far too often on the Internet, the idea of a good "coffee video" — with few exceptions — is equated with a sensory montage on YouTube or Vimeo packaged like a roaster's wannabe TV commercial.
There's never any storytelling ("Plot? We no need no stinkin' plot!") — just coffee porn close-ups of the stuff either roasting or brewing, complete with a coffee professional's platitudes voiced over B-roll. Coffee fanatics have largely only encouraged these low standards by joining in on the self-congratulatory social media circle jerk that follows video after identical video.
The Report episode begins by covering the necessary espresso machine hot water purge before pulling an espresso shot — and by noting how few baristi know to follow this practice. A Lavazza trainer notes how 70% of the aromatic properties of coffee are lost within 15 minutes of grinding it. Comparisons are shown of a correct and incorrect coda di topo (or "rat's tail") pour from an espresso machine, showing how equipment can get gummed up without proper and immaculate cleaning. The program also reviews how few baristi know how much arabica versus robusta is in their blends, noting the resulting impacts on flavor and costs.
They visit cafes such as Gran Caffè Grambrinus and Caffè Mexico at Pizza Dante, 86 in Napoli. They interview some heavy hitters — from Lavazza to Caffè Moreno to Kimbo, from Biagio Passalacqua himself to Davide Cobelli of the SCAE (featured last month in Barista Magazine) to Luigi Odello of Espresso Italiano Tasting fame. And probably too many guys in lab coats.
Overall, the program is a bit condemning of espresso standards across all of Italy. But remember, this is a national news program that targets the general public: the goal is to educate and, in some ways, outrage the public about what they may be putting up with currently. If only one percent of the coffee porn videos in English would attempt something so high-minded as that.
Defensive posturing aside (he's not alone), the commissioner also welcomes those interviewed for the program to visit local Napoli coffee shops and producers to witness the mobilization Napoli has mounted in response. As such, Andrej Godina has done God's work: raising public awareness of lagging coffee standards, starting a dialog, and inciting action to improve these standards.
Posted by TheShot on 08 Mar 2014 | Filed under: Barista, Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Quality Issues
I've had a long, strange history with academics. Before succumbing to the dark side of money-plundering dot-com entrepreneurs, I worked in scientific research labs at The Johns Hopkins University and at Stanford University. It was also a joint graduate PhD program in bioengineering at UC Berkeley/UCSF, with a focus on neuroscience, that first brought me out to the SF Bay Area some 25 years ago.
Thus the idea of academia is something I know well, albeit with ambivalent feelings. For me, there's always been an inherent conflict between the practicality of "real world" grounding and the legitimate need to follow intellectual pursuits to advance any field of interest — whether that be neuroscience or coffee — even at the risk of building ivory towers.
That people in the coffee industry today swear by using measuring scales, monitor things like total dissolved solids (TDS), and continually experiment with this pressure control or that pre-infusion time are all baby-step examples of the need for an academic approach — the building of a more comprehensive coffee science, as it were.
And yet while you can earn a PhD in Coffee Science from the University of Trieste (Italy) studying the scientific papers of Ernesto Illy, in America you can't even earn so much as a bachelor's degree in the field. So it's with encouragement that we read yesterday's announcement: UC Davis establishes center for coffee science study center; possible major to follow – Our Region – The Sacramento Bee.
If you don't know UC Davis, they are an amazing ag (and veterinary) school. As just a personal example, a fellow Chicago native and husband of a lifelong close friend of the family, Chris Carpenter, moved from Chicago to Napa years ago to earn a masters in Horticulture from the viticulture and enology (i.e., wine) department at UC Davis. He's now earning 100-point scores as a winemaker and recently served four years as chairman of the board for Slow Food USA. If you can judge an academic program based on the success of its graduates, and you should, UC Davis is no slouch when it comes to food and drink.
UC Davis just formally announced their Coffee Center and their first Coffee Center Research Conference, which will take place this coming Tuesday, March 11. All initial steps, but definitely promising steps in the right direction. Unlike their world-famous viticulture program, for example, the question still remains whether such an ambitious scientific initiative can truly thrive so far from origin for an ag school — rather than in a place like Kona, Hawaii. Greenhouse coffee can only go so far in vitro.
Much of their conference agenda, like their Coffee Center, seems focused on the microbiology of coffee. However, there are also talks on coffee genetics and sensory evaluation — the latter naturally tapping into the university's expertise on the subject in the wine world.
Coincidentally, a little over a week from now the 2014 TED Conference will take place in Vancouver, and there promises to be continued servicing of TED attendees by various luminaries of the professional coffee world. Recall that an invitation from TED is what inspired the now-defunct Coffee Common.
TED fashions itself as a sort of intellectual gathering of big minds and big ideas for the betterment of the world. Sounds great for the academic and scientific advancement of good coffee, right? But if you thought I'd be a fan of TED, you could not be more wrong.
Fortunately I was able to attend a past TED conference on the tab of an ambitious dot-com entrepreneur rather than having to fork over the $7,500 hazing price myself. (I.e., "Your hedge fund must be this large to ride this attraction.") TED has done an amazing job of marketing and self-promotion, and I felt I should have every reason to support TED and its aims on the surface. But I found the TED event and organization to be intellectually shallow and ethically dishonest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, famed author of The Black Swan, once famously called TED a "monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers." Part of that is the event's general preference for infotainment over substance, as exemplified in its famous 18-minute videos that run like infographics set to moving pictures — optimized for people who prefer to be entertained rather than informed.
More objectionable to me were many of the event attendees themselves. They seemed fixated more on asserting or reaffirming their own special status in the world by the company they keep — or, perhaps as Mr. Taleb would put it, by those circus performers they invite to entertain them. Imagine The Great Gatsby, but with ostentatious material wealth replaced by grand displays of intellectual vanity.
The professionals of the coffee world are some amazing, impassioned, bright people capable of making their own brave decisions of free will. Yet I cannot help but feel that TED has cynically invited many of them merely to exploit for a premium event coffee service, helping the world of TED to maintain their personal façade of elitism in the process. I wish the best for the attending coffee pros and only hope they come out unscathed, unlike myself.
Much closer to home, about a year ago Stanford University Professor of Biology, Virginia Walbott, approached me to help co-organize a Stanford Coffee Symposium to be held in the spring of 2014. Prof. Walbott organized a similar, highly successful event for chocolate in May of 2011, tapping into both the university (Depts. of Biology, Latin American Studies, Economics, etc.) and industry (Scharffen Berger, Monique's Chocolates, etc.).
Our goal for the event is to balance some higher-minded academics with a practical, consumer-friendly grounding in what makes coffee enjoyable and fun. (Read: check your self-congratulatory intellectual elitism at the door!) To be held Saturday, May 3 at the Cubberley Building of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, Stanford Continuing Studies just published its course catalog entry last week:
WSP 172 – Coffee: From Tree to Beans to Brew and Everything in Between
Registration is now open at $195 per student with a deadline of April 26. The featured speakers and topics thus far are as follows:
In addition to the planned talks there will be various Bay Area coffee vendors and an interactive tasting session. My current challenge? Following a location visit last Tuesday, I'm now working with the university to get sufficient power into the 1938 building to run sufficient numbers of espresso machines and grinders.
That said, I'm genuinely excited about the event and hope many of you will be too.
Posted by TheShot on 03 Mar 2014 | Filed under: Barista, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
Maybe it's just me, but Napoli has come up a lot since I posted our survey of the espresso there two weeks ago.
Over the weekend I attended the comedic play Napoli! at SF's American Conservatory Theater. I can't remember a play where coffee played such a central role in every scene. Then last night, Neapolitan film director Paolo Sorrentino won the Best Foreign Film Oscar for La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty). Like any good Neapolitan, he even thanked soccer player and Napoli patron saint, Diego Maradona:
Both works of art come recommended, btw.
However, last week we also came across a great contrarian article (in Italian) about the espresso in Napoli by Andrej Godina: ANDREJ GODINA A NAPOLI – Un viaggio, una giornata alla scoperta del presunto mito del caffè di Napoli. In it, Mr. Godina tours Napoli to sample the local espresso and is mostly left with a bad taste in his mouth.
Chances are you don't know Mr. Godina, but it's fair to say he has credentials. He earned a PhD in Science, Technology and Economics in the Coffee Industry at the University of Trieste studying the scientific papers of Ernesto Illy; he is an SCAE (Specialty Coffee Association of Europe) Authorized Trainer, Master Barista, and Barista Examiner; and he works at Dalla Corte — an espresso machine manufacturer in Italy whose lineage brought about the E61 group head and the company La Spaziale.
Rather than follow a quality guide, like a Bar d'Italia, he and his barista trainer, Andrea, arrived in Napoli by train and began choosing a number of coffee shops at random. In short, they found them all quite terrible despite the legend of Napoli's great coffee — which goes back the the 18th century and is even supported by some of Illy's own research conducted there.
He discovers minute-and-a-half (i.e., over-) extractions, stale coffee, burnt coffee, dirty cups, grinders with oily build-up, and bitter and astringent espresso. He also dispenses a lot of the folklore behind why Napoli espresso is so "good": it's the water, it's the special roasting process, etc. He even takes a pot shot or two at caffè sospeso (suspended coffee), the Neapolitan caffettiera coffee maker (la tazzulella), and the zucchero-crema. After tasting some dozen espresso shots, the best he could rate them was a 4 out of 10 — with a 6 being acceptable.
It's one hell of a condemning indictment. Is it fair? In our reviews, it's true that we targeted many quality caffès with advance research. But we also mixed in a number of places at random and didn't find them to be too far off the mark. (Save for one horrid exception in the guest breakfast room of a Napoli hotel.) Mr. Godina also dismissed Gran Caffè Gambrinus with a 4/10 rating — which we found to be quite good, even if nothing in Napoli would crack our Top 15 list for San Francisco.
It just shows that a lot still comes down to individual tastes and preferences. While Mr. Godina and I may agree on how good Illy can be in Italy, his company is located in Milano — which we've long lamented as one of the most underachieving coffee cities in Italy with many places serving the Dunkin' Donuts of Italian espresso. Mr. Godina also rates an espresso in Piazza San Marco, Venezia as one of the best he's ever had. Historical, absolutely, but we would never consider the espresso quality at the likes of Caffè Florian worth writing home about.
We stand by our assessment that the random espresso in Napoli beats the typical baseline quality standards at any other city in the world to which we've been (and we've been to a lot). But as Mr. Godina's article proves, opinions will vary.
Posted by TheShot on 01 Mar 2014 | Filed under: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Local Brew, Quality Issues
Surprisingly, Epicurious had yet to make a notable entry in the obligatory culinary-magazine-rates-national-coffee-shops department. But that all changed this week with the rather ambitious title of "America's 25 Best Coffee Shops — The ultimate guide to the best coffee shops across the United States": America's Best Coffee Shops | Epicurious.com.
We do have to give them an iota of credit. Unlike most of their ilk, they cover coffee without a brand name that suggests an exclusive concern for food, eating, meals, or anything else at the expense of beverages as some kind of frivolous, second-class diversion. But then they did have to ruin it a little by filing the article under their "Where to Eat Around the Globe" category. Facepalm indeed.
Writer Colleen Clark also falls for many of the usual suspects among coffee house article tropes. Like a rapper with mad rhyming skillz just this side of 2 Chainz, she employed several examples of the journalistically lazy caffeine riff and liberally used the trite words "java" or "joe" as substitutes for "coffee". Imagine if writers playfully used the term "alcoholics" when talking about wine lovers they way they effusively use "caffeine junkies" whenever talking about coffee lovers. Double standard, anyone?
Then there's the tiresome barista-as-sommelier analogy. She also made several references to the rather dated topic of regional coffee "scenes": the concept where which urban metropolis you're in determines whether you can access quality coffee or not is becoming rapidly irrelevant if not already extinct. Now that even the world's last holdout for terrible coffee — Paris, France — has worthy and redeemable coffee shops, there are no more "coffee cities" anymore than there are wine or tea cities.
All these negatives aside, the article is actually a rather decent assessment of great coffee shops — given Epicurious' magazine peers. (Even Forbes tried to get in on the act of reviewing the nation's best coffee shops.) It might suggest that "it's hard to separate the real-deal java joints from the flash-in-the-pan trendsters" — a problem that we honestly never knew needed solving. But they at least drew a line in the sand, laying down some of their criteria by which some coffee shops should or should not be included in their list:
So we've combed the country for the coffee shops that combine craft with hospitality, for inviting spaces that spark creativity, and for roasters who know how to make your morning brew tell a story. These are our picks for the USA's top 25 coffee shops.
This beats most of the random nonsense we've seen in past magazine lists of this type. Even if some of these criteria are precisely the sort of fluff that frustrated us as distractions from a focus on the actual coffee as far back as 2003: telling stories, named architects, hospitality, etc.
So that you don't have to turn 25 pages of ads on the Epicurious Web site, we've summarized their list here in one place as something useful (and as listed in no particular order):
Risks of the No Coffee Left Behind Act aside, this is a solid list. We will be the first to admit that it is over-represented by San Francisco. But most curiously, although it does well to call out a few smaller independents such as Daylight Mind and Barista Parlor, this list is heavily represented by chains. For a Top 25 list, it's actually cheating a bit as it actually represents a total of 85 coffee shops.
Has quality coffee in the U.S. reached a tipping point where the independents have come to be outnumbered by the chains? That's hard to say just yet, but you can't argue with the quality represented here.
Posted by TheShot on 17 Feb 2014 | Filed under: Add Milk, Barista, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Machine, Quality Issues, Roasting
Napoli is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Globally, it is the city most associated with coffee — and certainly espresso. (Sorry, Seattle.) Yet despite this reputation and Napoli's many cultural treasures, most tourists avoid it like the 1656 outbreak of the bubonic plague.
Many will pass through Napoli to see the stunning sights of the nearby Amalfi Coast, the islands of Capri or Ischia, or the volcanic graveyards of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But few stay for more than a namesake pizza. Because Napoli has the reputation for a bit too much bustle and way too much hustle. Most of all, Napoli can't shake its reputation for crime — with legends about the Camorra and Napoli's scugnizzi street kids abound.
The first time I visited Napoli a dozen years ago, I too was just passing through. And Napoli immediately intimidated me with what seemed like hustlers on the make at every corner: taxi drivers, store owners, people who come up to you on the street. I felt like I had to watch my back at every moment.
I should note that hustlers and crime do not spook me easily. I went to college for four years in the inner city of Chicago at what's considered the birthplace of Chicago Blues, where John Lee Hooker performed in the streets in the movie The Blues Brothers just a few years earlier, before the Maxwell Street market area was swept up by redevelopment in the 1990s. And in the early '90s I lived at the intersection of Alcatraz & Sacramento in West Berkeley, where gunfire rang out almost nightly in front of the nearby liquor stores and the black & white Berkeley Police mobile drug enforcement bus — nicknamed "Orca" by the locals — had to set up a near-permanent camp.
But friends more recently travelled to Napoli and told me how much they enjoyed the city — and not just its surrounding environs. What did I miss? This time, I had to "conquer" Napoli: I wasn't just passing through, and I psyched myself up to face an expected onslaught. But to my bewildered surprise and delight, this time it was nothing like the Napoli I last experienced.
What was different? I've come to believe everything had to do with where I was. Before when I was just passing through Napoli, I entered the chaos of Piazza Garibaldi and the main train station or swam against the tide of humanity at the Molo Beverello port: two massive transportation hubs where tourists passing through are easy and plentiful targets for Napoli's infamous scavenger class.
This time, immersing myself in the various neighborhoods alongside the locals, the Neapolitans seemed much more friendly — in addition to being generally casual, expressive, and proud. They may hold their stares a bit longer than is considered polite in the rest of Italy, but they were no more "threatening" than most Londoners. I managed to completely relax among them, even if my Italian accent betrayed the toscanaccia (or Tuscan snobbery) of my most recent Italian teacher.
The significance of Italian regionalism is particularly acute in Napoli — something called il campanilismo that connotes a strong identity and affiliation with the town campanile from where one is from. Because the Neapolitans are a proud people with a proud history distinctly separate from the rest of Italy, and many wear a chip on their shoulder about it to this day. Since animosities are rarely one-sided, the rest of Italy — particularly the northern, more affluent regions — responds in kind.
A good bit of this internal animosity traces back to the 19th century unification of Italy, the Risorgimento, that gave Napoli and the rest of Southern Italy the short end of the economic, political, and cultural stick. The grudge continues to this day.
As with many other soccer-crazed nations, Italian football (or calcio) serves as a proxy war for the clash of cultures. This past September, Milan-based AC Milan had their stadium shut down because of anti-Napoli abuse by their fans at a match against Neapolitan club heroes SSC Napoli. In today's papers, now the Rome stadium risks closure for anti-Neapolitan chants outside of their stadium last night.
A common stadium banner in the north at matches against SSC Napoli pleads for nearby Mt. Vesuvius to "lavali col fuoco," or "wash it with fire," as Vesuvius did to Pompeii in 79 A.D. Italian soccer fans are Michelangelos of sick, black humor. SF stadium chants of "L.A. sucks!" are childish by comparison.
As an example riposte, while we were in Napoli on October 15, the city hosted a 2014 World Cup qualifier between Armenia and Italy. A vocal number of local fans loudly booed whenever an Italian player touched the ball — with the lone exception of forward Lorenzo Insigne, SSC Napoli player and native of Napoli. That's how ugly this thing gets, with Neapolitans practically cheering for the other country.
Support for SSC Napoli represents a way for locals to "stick it to the man" up North. While Napoli may have over 50 patron saints, there are perhaps none more celebrated than all-time soccer great, Diego Maradona. Playing for Napoli in the late '80s, Maradona all but singlehandedly upset the northern dominance of Italian football — leading Napoli to shock championships in 1987 and 1990.
A tough kid from the slums of Buenos Aires, Neapolitans identified with Maradona and accepted him as one of their own scugnizzi. To this day, there are still many painted murals and saintly votive shrines dedicated to Maradona in the streets of Napoli, and his occasional returns to town are as venerated as visits from the Pope.
Despite il campanilismo, Napoli is a city of immigrants — dating back from its Greek settlement roots some 3,000 years ago through to today's South Asian, Eastern European, and North African communities. But it's not all gritty slums like the Quartieri Spagnoli either. There are also the Chiaia and Vomero districts — each dotted with luxury boutiques, fine restaurants, grand caffès, and the smell of old money and some new. But what we really like about Napoli, as with Torino, is that unlike Firenze (Florence) it feels left to the locals and nothing like a Disneyland for American tourists.
Napoli is the world's most important city for espresso. There, I said it. How un-Third Wave of me. Without previously exploring Napoli enough, we had rated Torino and Piemonte as having the best baseline quality standards in Italy (if not the world). But upon further review, Napoli seems to have the edge: virtually everywhere you go rates solid 7s and 8s.
That's not to say they are the best-of-the-best. Our highest-rated Napoli caffè wouldn't make SF's top 15 list. But unlike SF, that caffè is a 94-year-old family business in the same location for 73 years.
In Napoli, old is not the enemy of good. Now what is new, and the act of exploring and discovery, has value. But take a newer, world-renowned restaurant like Chicago's Alinea and its molecular gastronomy counterparts for example. As outstanding and experimental as its food is, part of its appeal is a kind of gimmick, a fleeting conceptual art project bound to fall out of vogue within the next decade — unlike the soulfully satisfying cuisine that has stayed with us for generations. Novelty has a relatively short shelf-life.
In recent years, I have suffered a kind of fatigue over new café openings around the world. Not that I don't love the continual investments in an improved end-product. And news has the word "new" right in it, hence why all the attention is there. But lately café openings seem much more about their physical place or their gadgetry than they seem about their actual coffee.
There's a growing emphasis on named space designers and architects or on nameless machines with custom modifications (e.g., "That Modbar looks cool, but have you tried your coffee from it?"). All these superficial trappings have new cafés trying to distinguish themselves on everything but the resulting shot in the cup. It feels more like an arms race to feature in Architectural Digest or Popular Mechanics, as if they've overlooked the actual coffee in their mission.
But it's not just coffee. Much of the West seems obsessed with a disposable culture of everything new, everything trendy, and nothing that's built to last. If you really want to talk about "slow coffee", immerse yourself in a place where respect comes measured not in the number of tweets and blog citations this week but rather in generations of customers who have come to expect high standards.
Because we'd honestly like to believe that some of today's standard bearers of quality — such as Blue Bottle and Four Barrel — somehow manage to survive and stay relevant for at least another generation of customers. At least without succumbing to a fad-of-the-month that replaces them within a decade. Perhaps that seems unnecessarily nostalgic. The reality is that in 10-20 years the likes of Blue Bottle or Four Barrel will be swept up in mergers and acquisitions and become unrecognizable. Which makes us appreciate Napoli's coffee culture even more.
In Napoli, nobody hits you over the head proclaiming that they are "craft" or "artisinal" — even if they often are by most Western definitions. Nobody tries to distract you with the exotic pedigree of their coffee equipment. There's something soulfully satisfying about their focus on a solid espresso backed by tradition and, well, craft.
That aforementioned il campanilismo extends to how Neapolitans think about their coffee, and in particular their roasters. They can be fiercely local and independent in their coffee loyalties, often proudly professing their roaster affiliation on street-level signage. Furthermore, wood-fired coffee roasting is often highly revered here for its tradition and flavor profile.
When it comes to roasting, the tendency is towards second-crack darkness. Back in the '90s, Torrefazione Italia did a clever thing by offering different roast-level blends named after towns that geographically represented lighter to darker roasts from north to south: Venezia, Milano, Perugia, Roma, Napoli, Sardegna, Palermo. Napoli was one of the darker roasts as is more of the norm for Southern Italy.
This darker roasting can be a dubious quality practice. However, the beans here tend not to have a heavy sheen of oil, and the darker roasts redemptively manage to be neither bitter nor ashy. They rarely even verge into smoky territory.
Of the classic four Ms of espresso quality — miscela (bean blend), macinatura (grind), macchina (machine), and mano (the hand of the barista) — I've often said that half of the espresso quality comes down to the barista. But because the Neapolitan barista standards are so consistently good, I found the biggest quality difference between Napoli caffès comes down to their choice of roaster.
When it comes to espresso machines, La Cimbali is very popular along with La San Marco. Manual lever La San Marco machines are held in almost universal high regard among Napoli's best caffès — as if to skeptically say, "I've got your pre-infusion and variable pressure control right here!" while making an obscene arm gesture. The only Rancilio I came across was in an airport Mozzarella bar. The only Gaggia I encountered was in a hotel bar, and it made the worst cappuccino I had on the entire trip.
Although the sample sizes were small, some my favorite roasters at caffès in the area (of which I experienced multiple shots) included:
Note that this list disqualifies many of the independent, more obscure roasters that are the pride of the caffès that serve their coffee.
Neapolitan caffès will often offer espresso as "zuccherato" or "amaro" — that is, presweetened or without sugar. And that's where the coffee drink menu begins. Napoli caffès frequently offer dozens of variants to a degree unmatched in the rest of Italy. Many are rooted in a given caffè's own secret formula of zucchero-crema or cremina di caffè — a sugar/cream/espresso concoction used to sweeten up and add volume to their espresso drinks.
Despite these concoctions, Neapolitan cuisine is about simplicity and celebrating the core ingredients. After all, Napoli belongs to the region of Campania, which means "country". So it is extremely rare if you find any latte art here.
Culturally, latte art is perceived as an almost childish playing with your food — like serving pancakes covered with a smiley face made of whipped cream. Neapolitans don't have the patience for that nonsense. A dusting of cocoa on a morning cappuccino is about as fanciful as they get. Your espresso will always come with a glass of water served on the side. And you won't find a single laptop zombie.
If you go, one bit of travel advice: lose your American habits and don't trust Google Maps at all. It's not just because the Neapolitans are masters of location-based bait-and-switch marketing either. Many cities and towns in Italy follow non-serial, seemingly Byzantine address numbering systems. The piazze that frequently appear also often throw off Google Maps' overly simplistic addressing assumptions.
Just being one city block off of your destination means four square city blocks of searching back-and-forth, sometimes leading you down streets and neighborhoods where you don't want to be. For example, a Google Maps search for Ravello's Caffè Calce at Via Roma, 2 will take you 400 feet away from the square you should be on. A search for Napoli's Cafè Amadeus will lead you 4 miles away from its nearby Amedeo Metro station. Virtually all the caffè reviews linked below required me to manually enter their GPS coordinates in their maps at the bottom for accuracy, rather than relying on Google's addressing look-up.
A frequently better option is to use TuttoCittà, which additionally shows street address numbers on many of its maps.
|2014 Bar d'Italia [info]
|Espresso [info]
|Cafe [info]
|Overall [info]
|Gran Caffè La Caffettiera
|Piazza dei Martiri, 26
|Napoli / Chiaia
|2 / 2
|Via San Pasquale a Chiaia, 24
|Napoli / Chiaia
|1 / 2
|Caffè d'Epoca
|Piazza Trieste e Trento, 2
|Napoli / Toledo
|Gran Caffè Grambrinus
|Via Chiaia, 1
|Napoli / Chiaia
|2 / 2
|Cafè Amadeus
|Piazza Amedeo, 5
|Napoli / Chiaia
|1 / 2
|Gran Caffè Cimmino
|Via Gaetano Filamgieri, 12/13
|Napoli / Chiaia
|2 / 3
|Calise al Porto
|Via Iasolino, 19
|Ischia / Ischia Porto
|Gran Caffè Vittoria
|Corso Vittoria Colonna, 110
|Ischia / Ischia Porto
|1 / 2
|Via Luigi Mazzella, 75
|Ischia / Ischia Ponte
|Dal Pescatore
|Piazza Ottorino Troia, 12
|Ischia / Sant'Angelo d'Ischia
|Divino Cafè
|Via Erasmo di Lustro, 6
|Ischia / Forio
|1 / 2
|Bar Calise a Ischia
|Via Antonio Sogliuzzo, 69
|Ischia / Ischia Porto
|2 / 1
|Bar Cocò
|Piazzale Aragonese, 1
|Ischia / Ischia Ponte
|1 / 2
|Pasticceria Napoli
|Corso Regina, 64
|2 / 2
|Sal de Riso
|Piazza Ettore Gaetano Cantilena, 28
|2 / 2
|Bar Il Panino
|Piazza Duomo, 7
|Ristorante Don Alfonso 1890
|Corso Sant'Agata, 11
|Sant'Agata sui due Golfi
|La Zagara
|Via dei Mulini, 8/10
|2 / 1
|La Brezza Net Art Café
|Via del Brigantino, 1
|2 / 2
|Bar Al San Domingo
|Piazza Duomo, 2
|Figli di Papà
|Via della Marra, 7
|Andrea Pansa
|Piazza Duomo, 40
|3 / 2
|La Vecchia Cantina
|Via della Marra, 15/19
|Caffè Duomo
|Piazza Duomo, 15
|Caffè Calce
|Via Roma, 2
|1 / 1
|Gran Caffè Neapolis
|Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, 14/15
|Napoli / Spaccanapoli
|1 / 2
|Giovanni Scaturchio
|Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, 19
|Napoli / Spaccanapoli
|1 / 1
|Caffè Mexico
|Piazza Dante, 86
|Napoli / Decumano Maggiore
Posted by TheShot on 07 Feb 2014 | Filed under: Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
Giuseppina Moccia started this family bakery in Napoli in 1920. It has stood at this location since 1941. What began as a business baking bread — a panificio — has grown to include an exquisite pasticceria baking classic Neapolitan pastries and desserts, famous small pizzas (pizzette), a rosticceria serving meats, a gelateria, and a full-service bar.
Today three of Giuseppina's grandchildren — Antonio, Enzo, and Pasquale — now take care of the business operations, which is closer to being more of a restaurant given all that they do. Some picky locals might complain that the quality isn't the same as it used to be and that the prices here have rapidly outpaced the neighborhood over the years. But they do a lot of things really well, and you can't argue with the quality of the espresso here.
Located across the street from the bustling Liceo Umberto high school and with many Italian scooters parked out front, it's a relatively sizeable space (at least for a bakery) with a long bar at one end of the establishment and window counter seating at the other. They offer a few metal café tables of modern design inside plus some stool seating at the windows, but don't expect to access them: this place is notorious for its lack of seating. It's a great spot for a delicious, albeit uncomfortable, breakfast break.
Despite the location's age, it has a modern, lounge-like feel inside — especially at night. The staff here are young, outgoing, friendly, and quite funny. For example, to emphasize how they roast their own coffee, they even placed a handful of their beans on my saucer for effect as I photographed inside. They serve their espresso in an IPA demitasse with a glass of sparkling water on the side for €1.
Using an old La San Marco 85-LEVA-4 four-group lever machine, they pull shots with a textured, thick crema. It has a beautifully pungent taste with no smoke and a limited range on the bright end of the flavor scale. But the balance and tone of the coffee is outstanding.
Unassumingly, it's one of the best shots we had in Napoli and rates one tazzina and two chicchi in the 2014 Bar d'Italia.
In fact, looking back at all our ratings for this last trip to Napoli and its environs, it had the best rating we gave out anywhere. More on that in a future summary post, but consider the implications of when a 94-year-old family business serves some of the best espresso in a city that's globally renowned for its coffee.
Then contrast this with American coffee culture where we generally believe the newer the place, the better the coffee. It's as if the only means of making better coffee in the U.S. is to first start a new construction project. This is just another example of America's warped fascination with disposable culture.
One of the things to love about Italy is that, unlike the U.S., history isn't positioned as a natural enemy of good food and drink. I'll take that over a pop-up restaurant any day and how it caters to our need to be enthralled with the new, to consume, to throw it away, and then to forget.
Read the review of Moccia in Napoli, Italy.
Posted by TheShot on 20 Jan 2014 | Filed under: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Quality Issues
Words can mean a lot. When it comes to coffee, that can mean words like "food" or "transparency". We've noticed both of these words coming up a lot in recent public discussions about coffee quality, and yet neither word really belongs in the conversation.
Today's Daily Coffee News from Roast Magazine registered examples of each in an article on the recent Good Food Awards held annually here in San Francisco. In case you're not familiar with "the GFAs," they were born out of the Slow Food Nation event held here in 2008 with many of the same key players at the helm (at least on the coffee side of things). The goal of the awards is to recognize "outstanding American food producers and the farmers who provide their ingredients."
All worthy goals. But here's one of our long-time pet peeves, albeit a small one: coffee is labeled as "food". Perhaps it seems innocent enough. But while the coffee industry has spent years belaboring the point of trying to be taken as seriously as wine, there's is simply no way wine would ever be classified as "food" at an awards event.
It has none of the nutritional values of food; you do not eat it. What are we, civets? Sure, you could say that both food and coffee are consumed, but you could say the same for unleaded gasoline.
Restaurant coffee will surely suck as long as coffee is treated as food's red-headed stepchild — and not something worth recognition outside of food's long shadow the way wine enjoys. And because the "food media" provide only superficial and patronizing cover of beverages is why Karen Foley, formerly of Fresh Cup, started Imbibe magazine. There are reasons they are called "barista" — the Italian word for bartender — and not "waiter" or "waitress".
However, let's turn to a topic that's a bit more controversial: transparency.
You can roughly define coffee transparency as visibility into its entire supply chain: from seed to cup. It's about assigning the proper credit (or blame) wherever deserved and exposing just's in the bag and behind its pricing.
It's critical stuff. So much so that international coffee guru, roaster, and former barista champion, Tim Wendelboe, had this to say about transparency some three years ago:
A lot of high quality driven roasters, including ourselves, preach that transparency is the most important part of our trade.
There are a number of good reasons for this. One is sustainability of coffee growing and business practices — i.e., ensuring that not only can you find your favorite coffee sources, but that you can reward and encourage all of those behind its proper growing, harvesting, processing, storage, and shipping practices. Another virtue is the reproducibility of results, so that growing season after growing season you can ensure that you get a similar if not better product each time.
But what transparency is not is a measure of quality, and this is where we see a lot of coffee consumers — and even some purveyors — confusing the two. Just as Fair Trade is an economic program but not a quality certification, transparency has everything to do with the means of achieving your results but it is not a measure of quality in those results. The means are being confused with their ends.
Which is why we appreciated that Jen Apodaca, 2014 GFA Coffee Committee chair, didn't take the bait when Daily Coffee News asked in their article, "Are there specific benchmarks for criteria like traceability, transparency…" [etc.]. Because the fact is that transparency doesn't have a flavor — I can't taste it directly in my cup. The GFAs are trying to recognize sensory qualities more than intellectualized ones.
Even more to the point, the fact that one coffee is more traceable than another does not mean it is of any better quality: your coffee could be highly traceable but still taste like ass.
One of the most common ways coffee consumers experience transparency and traceability is through labels such as single origin (Serious Eats?: yet another coffee-is-food reference!) or micro-lot coffees. There's a misplaced sense that having greater precision in where your coffee comes from somehow naturally means it's of higher quality. It does not.
The merits of this precision are more psychological than sensory. We've seen a lot of coffee professionals donning their best Mr. Yuk faces when someone dares to dilute the pedigree of a single row of coffee shrubs by blending coffees to achieve a specific flavor profile.
We can overlook that this kind of "master race" obsession with purified gene pools has gotten our species into deep trouble in the past. But when that geographic precision becomes the primary goal of a coffee in itself, you're no longer seeking the best taste outcome in the cup but rather some intellectual notion of a purist expression of its terroir. You're not thinking about optimizing for flavors as much as you're thinking about pinning your pristine collection of butterfly species inside a museum case.
And coffee has a lot of bad terroir. Kermit Lynch, the infamous Berkeley-based wine importer and maker, recently said this about terroir:
Look, there's great terroir and there's lousy terroir. A wine showing terroir doesn't mean it's good."
I guess we all can put that in our ever-popular wine analogy and smoke it.
Posted by TheShot on 10 Sep 2013 | Filed under: Beans, Home Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
The Internet sags from a surfeit of posts from Do-It-Yourself (DIY) types. But at the risk of seeming like we're piling on, we're posting some of our bean-to-cup experiences with coffee grown quite literally in a family backyard.
But this coffee isn't the result of an obsession where home roasting just didn't take things far enough. Instead, it's an isolated glimpse into a casual family production of green coffee — much in the same way your extended family might grow its own garden tomatoes or cucumbers. It arrived hand-delivered by a family friend in a Ziploc bag, some 5,000 miles from its origin.
While there have been multiple efforts to commercially grow coffee in California's Santa Barbara County since the 1850s, the coffee for our story was grown on the island of São Jorge in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. The subtropical, volcanic islands of the Azores are the only real coffee growing region in Europe. Although bucolic São Jorge produces agricultural exports such as its famed cheese, its coffee production is dominated by personal rather than commercial use (with very rare and minuscule exceptions, such as Café Nunes in São Jorge's tiny Fajã dos Vimes).
Our mini coffee lot originates from a few acres of property that stretches from the center of town in Urzelina to the Atlantic Ocean. More than once over the years, my wife and I climbed a ladder and sat on a wall of this property — located across the street of the Igreja de São Mateus church where my in-laws were married in the Sixties — safely observing one of the many crazy street bullfights in the central Azores, called touradas à corda, that took place below our dangling feet. Thus we'll jokingly name the coffee's origin as Fazienda dos Touros Loucos da São Mateus.
It neighbors similar lots where other families grow, pick, dry, and sort their own coffee for home use. Isabel graciously offered a few pounds of the stuff from her property, and we played no role in its processing nor pedigree. Thus the goal was to experience what home-grown coffee in the Azores might truly be like. I'm no botanist, so I can't tell you if it's Typica or Bourbon or Caturra (highly unlikely). It most resembles a Yemen-like Typica variant or a shortberry harrar, which also explains a little of why it is dry-processed rather than washed.
As for any screening and hand-sorting, well, this is, after all, a family farm operation. Fortunately the sorting was clean enough that I did not have to worry about my burr grinder gagging on any obvious stones or twigs.
The first thing you notice about the processed beans is how darkly colored and irregular they are compared to commercial coffees. This is hardly unique to dry-processed coffees, but this takes the commercial grade stuff a step further.
And the beans themselves are quite small, and the screening used on the family farm isn't very stringent. But to their credit, there are few major irregularities in size. Everything is larger than a sunflower kernel and there's only the occasional large and/or off-colored bean. Even so, we resisted the temptation to further sort the coffee to keep it true to its personal use in the Azores. Long before commercial buyers, processors, roasters, and coffeehouses existed, this is how most people experienced coffee.
Pan roasting is typical among families who grow their own green coffee beans. Even James Freeman started Blue Bottle Coffee with a baking sheet in his oven. Although I could have reverted to some of these very original and primitive roasting methods, I'm no good at any of them and have no real practice. All of which spells trouble if you've only got a couple of pounds of coffee to work through to get it right.
Instead, I made a slight nod to modern convenience and opted for my old, trusty Fresh Roast+ roaster. It is essentially a glorified hot air popcorn popper with a chaff collector that I purchased over a decade ago, and I've had years of practice making pretty decent roasts with it. And unlike the newer Fresh Roast models with larger roasting chambers (normally a big plus), its tiny two-ounce batch size lent well to dialing in a target roast profile quickly with a limited supply of green coffee beans.
The first thing I noticed is that the coffee lacked a real discernible first or even second crack. Without the sound or a temperature gauge on my roaster, I thus had to determine my target roast levels by sight (color) and smell (and smoke) entirely. The second thing I noticed is that the bean size inconsistencies and bean shape irregularities required a lot of post-roast culling to even out the result. The third thing I noticed was that the chaff looked a lot like bird food.
After a trial with several roasting levels and tasting the results (after a couple days rest for the CO2 to escape), I rediscovered what all commercial coffee roasters have known for eons: by roasting cheaper grade coffee more darkly, you can hide a lot of problems.
Which isn't to say that we believe dark roasting is universally bad; there are some good body-heavy coffees from Indonesia that shine best under darker roasting conditions. But dark roasting is the lazy roaster's shortcut to consistency. We could only imagine how uneven pan roasting would contribute to this effect.
Any bean and roasting irregularities of course came out in the resulting brew, as a few under-roasted beans would lend a grassy or sometimes downright wonky taste that could spoil the entire cup. (This is a big reason why Ernesto Illy was religious about Illy's screening process.) Fortunately the combination of a darker roast profile and post-roast bean culling mitigated these problems quite a lot.
So how best to brew this beast? Espresso would be too sensitive to the bean quality and irregularities. We tried a small French press pot, but the inconsistent beans somehow imparted a little too much grit in the cup to our liking. Not surprisingly, the Moka stovetop produced some of the best results — mirroring what many families have used for years to brew coffee in the Azores. But we also did have a little success with an Aeropress, which seems to lend well for this type of coffee profile: a body-centric cup with little to offer at the bright ends and a flavor of smoke, spice, and the unfortunate edge of ashiness.
The resulting cup was definitely drinkable, but far from anything we'd write home about (save for this post here I suppose). The experience served as both of an appreciation of what coffee was informally like for consumers before the advent of the commercial coffee industry. It was also an exercise in appreciating the many quality and process improvements we enjoy from that same coffee industry today.


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Honda generator(s) in lieu of running auxiliary
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Paul2000, do mean you are not familiar with a diesel water cooled gen made by Honda? Water cooled diesel gens are the standard and commonly available. Gas powered portables are the exception.
I am a complete newbie. I know very little about boats or sailing, but I believe I would like to give it a try. I am a very considerate person in a camp site, and would be so on the water. It is a resource we all share and I would definitely put out a little extra cash and effort to get a quiet generator. If the diesel water cooled generator is the norm on the water, then that is what I would get. I do have knowledge of the Honda 2000 gens on land, and compared to many others it is quiet, but it may not be quiet compared to the diesel gens on the water. Looks like I have a lot more to learn about sailing than working the canvas.
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What does the name "Marya" mean? A name is much more than just a name!
M is for mighty, your inner strength.
A is for agreeable, the best side of you!
R is for radiant, it's your personality!
Y is for youthful, your eternal look.
A is for acquaintance, the many friends you know.
According to the 1971 U.S. Social Security Administration data, the name "Marya" is not a popular baby girl's name in California. Imagine that, only 5 babies in California have the same name as you in 1971. Across the entire United States a total of only 49 babies also bear the same first name during the same year.
Since 1880 up to 2014, your name was recorded 2,038 times in the American baby names history. Do you want to know 'how popular is the name Marya?'
Hey! How's your love life lately? Get a free love reading with the most frank answers. Start to seize every opportunity for success in your life! Did I mention it's FREE? (Sponsored Link; 18+ only)
Your name in reverse order is "Ayram". A random rearrangement of the letters in your name (anagram) will give 'Ymara'. (How do you pronounce that?)
Are you not curious to find out what happened today in history? There are historical events about today that are worth knowing! Check it out.
Now try the names of everyone you know including friends, cousins, neighbors, classmates, co-workers or your pets. Even your favorite anime, TV or movie characters! See what their names mean. Remember, this is purely just for fun.
A name poster especially made for you. Click the image to view the high-resolution version and save it on your computer or device. Collect all 10 character designs. Bookmark this page and come back again after 24 hours to get a new name poster. (Did you get the smart girl?) You can also make a poster for all your friends!
Here's something for you to ponder on...
Do the Name Game - Acrostic Challenge - This game is very simple to play. All you have to do is think of another name to spell out each letter of your name.
Copy or Link to This Page:
Kindly keep the link back to this website. Thank you!
TIP: You can refresh this page to generate a new acrostic for your name.


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Originally written on Bloguin Best | Last updated 11/14/14
On Monday the state of New Jersey it could begin offering licenses for sports betting on January 9 with the assumption a federal lawsuit filed by various professional sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) and the NCAA does not stand in the way. Perhaps trying to pressure the state to cave on the concept of sports betting, the NCAA announced they will remove championships located within The Garden State. Five championships will be removed from New Jersey in 2013, including the Division I Men's and Women's Swimming and Diving Championships, Diving Regionals (Piscataway, March 14-17), Division I Women's Basketball Championship, Trenton Regional (Trenton, March 30-April 2), Division III Men's Volleyball Championship (Hoboken, April 26-28) and the Division II and III Women's Lacrosse Championships (Montclair, May 18-19). New host sites, dates and times will be determined later. Of course, this move actually hurts some of the smaller schools serving as hosts for some of these events, so g...
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People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI) owns responsibility.
Maoist guerrillas killed three people at two places in Simdega district of Jharkhand, police said on Sunday.
According to police, two people were shot dead in Kolibera area of Simdega district, around 110 km from Ranchi, on Saturday night.
Officials added that People's Liberation Front of India (PLFI) owned responsibility for the killings in a pamphlet they left behind.
In the other incident, PLFI killed a person by slitting his throat after accusing him of collecting money in the organisation's name at Tethaitangar village of the same district.
PLFI is one of the six Maoist organisations operating in Jharkhand.
Keywords: Maoist attack, Jharkand maoists, Maoist guerrillas, People's Liberation Front of India, PLFI
Jharkhand Special Police Officers in a spiral of violence of retribution
Jharkhand family grapples with encounter death of son
Journalist shot dead
Former Maoist leader shot dead
Grenade launcher recovered, two held
Five members of rival Maoist faction killed
More In: Other States | National | News


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BA in English
Changes to this program will take effect in the 2015–2016 academic year.
The major in English (EN) offers students access to a thousand years of literature, from Beowulf to contemporary books in English from all over the world. Under the guidance of internationally known scholars and writers, students are exposed to a wide range of approaches. Many courses have an interdisciplinary dimension, making connections between literature and such fields as philosophy, religion, the arts, politics, science, material culture, and history. In small classes, students learn techniques of analysis, interpretation, and research that are applicable to many fields and professions (e.g., teaching, law, education, business, politics, journalism, and publishing). Courses in creative writing are also available to undergraduates.
The total major requirement is 11 four-credit courses. A grade not lower than C is required in all courses toward the major.
All students must complete:
- CAS EN 220 Seminar in Literature
- CAS EN 221 Major Authors I
- CAS EN 322 British Literature I
- CAS EN 323 British Literature II
These courses are usually taken consecutively.
With the aid of their advisors, students should design a coherent major of at least seven additional English courses at the advanced level (numbered 300 or above), including one from each of the following groups:
Group 1.
American Literature before 1900: CAS EN 327, 471, 479, 533, 534, 545, 571, 587, 591, or courses specified as equivalent in any year.
Group 2.
Concepts and Methods of Literary Study: Any literature course listed from CAS EN 404, EN 406 through EN 490, or from EN 493 through EN 498.
Group 3.
British or American Literature before 1800: EN 363, 364, 521, 527, 529, 530, 566, 568, or courses specified as equivalent in any year.*
Group 4.
Diverse Literatures in English: EN 326, 370, 371, 572, 584, 586, 587, 588, or any courses specified as equivalent in any year.**
*Students who declared a major in English after September 1, 2010 must fulfill the requirement for Group 3; students who declared a major in English prior to September 1, 2010 are not required to fulfill the Group 3 or 4 requirements.
**Students who declared a major in English after September 1, 2011 must fulfill the requirement for Group 4; students who declared a major in English prior to September 1, 2011 are not required to fulfill the Group 4 requirement.
Note: Students may not satisfy the requirement for multiple groups with a single, overlapping course.
Upon approval of their advisor and the director of undergraduate studies, students may elect to substitute one upper-level literature course from Classical Studies, Modern Languages & Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, or the Editorial Institute, for one of their seven upper-division course requirements outside of the four categories specified above.
Majors planning on graduate study in English should continue work in foreign languages beyond the level required by the College. French, German, and Latin are the languages most commonly required for the PhD in English.


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Winter Wonderland
1 Jun to 31 Aug 2014
Explore the Winter Wonderland of the Garden on a self-guided adventure trail. Follow the map to find the winter wonderland stops and find out about some amazing plants and animals! For children aged 5 - 12years.
The quest takes approximately 45 minutes and explores different areas of the garden.
Time: 9.30 am to 5.00 pm daily
Cost: $5 per kit - includes craft materials
Where: Kit available from the Visitor Information desk, The Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah
Enquiries: Phone 4567 3000 or


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Virtuoso Life - Your Journey Begins With Us
We love hotels, and with nearly 1,100 hotels in the Virtuoso portfolio, there's a lot to love. In this issue, we've compiled a slate of services, staffers, and special touches that we remember long after checkout. And because cruise ships are essentially floating hotels, we also highlight our favorite reasons to set sail. These hotels and cruises are even more impressive in real life, so add them to your travel to-do list.
By Land and By Sea50 things we love about hotels – plus 23 of our favorite reasons to cruise.
A World AwayExpedition cruising takes a turn for the luxe on a journey through Melanesia.
Among the ElvesReykjavik's design scene thrives on Icelandic energy – and a little magic.
True NorthAn Australian photographer turns his lens on his country's vast and varied Northern Territory.
Great Outdoors: Cowgirl UpGet out of your comfort zone – in pure comfort – with a few days on the range.Click here to view the entire issue of the May/June 2015 Edition of Virtuoso Life: Hotels & Cruising...


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Let us pause to consider the (wide) stance the GOP finds itself in 14 months before Election Day:
Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, wins his own stall in the rogue's gallery that is the Republican caucus in the 110th Congress. He can share notes with Sen. David Vitter, R-La., and swap wacky law-enforcement tales with senior colleagues such as Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.
In the House, weary veterans are simply retiring. Over in the executive branch, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been hounded out the door, following Karl Rove on a long road back to Texas that won't free either of them from legal scrutiny.
And the 2008 field is a bunch of men in search of fresh starts, from Sen. John McCain (who does Leno tonight and wants his 72nd year -- which starts tomorrow -- to be happier than his 71st) to former senator Fred Thompson (next time, have enough staff consistency so the same person can deny all the rumors of internal turmoil) to former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former governor Mitt Romney (who would love to selectively edit their governing records to get a dispirited base to trust them).
Late in the summer after Republicans lost control of Congress, the scandals have metastasized, the "culture of corruption" has spread, the Iraq war continues, and the GOP turns its lonely eyes to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the party's best chance at unity. It's just enough of an opportunity for Democrats to squander -- and they have the congressional approval ratings to make that a real possibility still.
The Craig revelation, broken yesterday afternoon by Roll Call, pushed Gonzales (mostly) out of mind after barely eight hours of a single news cycle. The actions that earned Craig the disorderly conduct charge -- stemming from an incident in a men's room at the Minneapolis airport -- have enough details to ensure that a once-obscure senator will be memorable (at least until he faces the voters again next fall).
No reason to tap our legs and go through the particulars of the "he said/he said." Craig pleaded guilty, though he now says that was a mistake (watch that "stance," senator). And this, per Roll Call's John McArdle: "At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, 'What do you think about that?' the report states." Oh, the possibilities . . .
Craig in May "told the Idaho Statesman he had never engaged in homosexual acts," the Statesman's Dan Popkey reports. In a lengthy report that reveals far more than you ever wanted to know about Craig's sex life, the newspaper reports that a reporter interviewed a "professional man with close ties to Republican officials" who said he had oral sex with Craig in Union Station. Craig said in May, "I don't do that kind of thing. I am not gay, and I never have been."
Craig last night resigned his post as "co-Senate liaison" to the campaign of Romney, R-Mass. Politico's Jonathan Martin noticed that a video where Craig declared his support for Romney was suddenly removed from YouTube's public realm. (It's not the only YouTube video that the Romney campaign would like labeled "private.")


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Book Search
1-1 of 1 results for Author: nick ganaway (sorted by Publication Date, showing all)
Construction Business Management
Only 43 per cent of U.S. construction firms remain in business after four years. Why? Inadequate management, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. This is surprising because most construction firms are formed by ambitious construction project managers, executives and tradesmen who...
Published July 26th 2006 by Routledge


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'Bama players dismiss talk of 3-peat, expectations
It helps that senior leaders McCarron and linebacker C.J. Mosley also happen to be two of the better players.
The word "complacency" has likely been heard far more around the football building than "three-peat." How often?
"You don't want to say too many times because that's a pretty complacent answer," tight end Brian Vogler said. "It's definitely an emphasis that we're focusing on. We really want to focus everything we have on getting our best potential out there."
To Saban, that means concentrating on winning, not past successes.
"There's no external factors that matter at all to any player on our team," he said. "It's all about how they perform in this game. It's not what they did last year, it's not about the girlfriend, it's not about anything but playing this game. None of it means anything unless you make it mean something."
Follow John Zenor on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jzenor
The Associated Press


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Volunteer Opportunities
Sorry, no opportunities found for that specific search but here are some other opportunities you may be interested in.
Guatemala: Mobile Dental Clinic in the Mayan Highlands
Student volunteers will have the opportunity to serve as Dental Assistants, instruct kids in best practices for dental hygiene, and/or optimize clinic flow, all while working closely with children in need. Volunteers work in teams of 15-20, including dentists, hygienists and non-medically trained volunteers. In a typical week-long dental clinic, around 600 underprivileged children will receive quality dental care.
Agency: Global Dental Relief | date posted: Oct 15, 2014 | date to expire: Jan 1, 2021 |
India: Mobile Dental Clinic in the Himalayas
Student volunteers will have the opportunity to serve as Dental Assistants, instruct kids in best practices for dental hygiene, and/or optimize clinic flow, all while working closely with children in need. Volunteers work in teams of 15-20, including dentists, hygienists and non-medically trained volunteers. In a typical week-long dental clinic, around 600 underprivileged children will receive quality dental care.
Agency: Global Dental Relief | date posted: Oct 15, 2014 | date to expire: Jan 1, 2021 |
ReStore Volunteer
Join our ReStore staff for a morning or afternoon of helping customers, assisting our drivers as they pick up donations or organizing the ReStore warehouse dock, yard, and floor. No experience is necessary, just a willingness to work hard and be apart of Habitat's mission.
Agency: Habitat for Humanity of Metro Denver | date posted: Nov 6, 2013 | date to expire: Jul 1, 2020 |
Volunteer Work and Cultural Exchange Opportunities in Africa
- Volunteer to teach in rural schools - Volunteer to build community projects - Volunteer with orphaned kids
Agency: Ethical Encounters - Volunteers Holidays! | date posted: Apr 23, 2013 | date to expire: Mar 30, 2018 |
Academic Success Facilitator
I am assisting students in their recovery of class credit, through an online program called APEX. Due to the several classes that are going on simultaneously, it is difficult for me to give the needed one on one attention. The responsibilities of the tutors would be to pull the student(s) aside for 30-40 minutes in order to help them study the concepts before their subsequent quizzes. The goal is that each scholar completes at least one quiz each school day.
Agency: Manual High School | date posted: Nov 12, 2013 | date to expire: May 15, 2017 |
Rural Community Development
All the volunteers will be located according to the their application form
Agency: YOUTH AND WOMEN EMPOWERMENT ORGANIZATION | date posted: Jul 29, 2011 | date to expire: Dec 31, 2016 |
CASA Volunteer (Court Appointed Special Advocate)
CASA Volunteers give abused and neglected children hope by visiting with them twice each month, communicating with other professionals including Social Services Case Workers, Attorneys, teachers, family members and more, and speaking up for them in court making sure their needs and wishes are heard. Today, over 600 children in Denver alone are in need of a CASA volunteer. Stand up for a child. Be their voice. Become a CASA!
Agency: Child Advocates - Denver CASA | date posted: Sep 9, 2014 | date to expire: Dec 31, 2016 |
Volunteer Coach
As a volunteer coach you will work alongside other CAC coaches (volunteers and senior staff) at one or more of our partner programs. We typically stay at each partner program for 1-2 weeks. Depending on the length of your volunteering, you may volunteer in several communities and possibly several different countries during your trip. Prior to your departure we will provide you with coach training (see below), but you will also learn a lot in your first few days On-Field with the expectation that you are a full CAC coach by the end of your first week, capable of training local leaders at that time.
Agency: Coaches Across Continents | date posted: Oct 15, 2014 | date to expire: Dec 31, 2016 |
Volunteer Work and Cultural Exchange Opportunities in Africa
EXPERIENCE: éé has it. You want an African experience, from wherever you are in the world to Africa with projects from helping Kids in Uganda to teaching Massai in Tanzania.
CULTURES: You want to emersed into a completely different life, with Africa's most unique tribe the Massai, a culture that reminds you of who you are and where in the world you belong .
LEARN: You want a project that speaks your personality; an experience to add something into your CV or college credit.
EXPLORE: You want to get into a real African safari, an opportunity that takes you to explore the BIG 5 and ultimate primates.If you are looking to go with the organisation that really connects and cares about the local communities, the people, cultures and environment. Then you've come to the right choice!
Agency: Ethical Encounters - Volunteers Holidays! | date posted: Apr 1, 2013 | date to expire: Jul 23, 2016 |
School Program Facilitator
School Program Volunteers assist school groups through their entire visit to the History Colorado Center. Volunteers escort classes into the building and break them into smaller groups. Volunteers will lead small groups through gallery-based programming which involves facilitating a high quality learning experience at each History Station. Duties also include setting up for and cleaning up after school programs.
Agency: History Colorado | date posted: Oct 16, 2014 | date to expire: Jul 15, 2016 |
Tutor a Child in Reading
Must be able to administer the Peak Reader® curriculum with students who are behind the expected reading skill level. (Training is provided)
Must be willing to partner with the site coordinator to maximize tutoring benefits for the student.
Assist with emphasizing parent commitment including reading at home and ongoing communication sessions with the parents.
Agency: Children's Literacy Center | date posted: Nov 24, 2010 | date to expire: Mar 31, 2016 |Map Directions
Colorado Grants Guide Research Volunteer
The Research Volunteer will play an important role in ensuring that the Colorado Grants Guide, Colorado's leading online tool for nonprofit funding research, is accurate and up to date. This volunteer opportunity will consist of researching funders who provide support to Colorado nonprofits by reviewing organizational websites, annual reports, financial information, and IRS tax documents. This is an excellent opportunity to gain in-depth knowledge about the giving priorities and application processes of hundreds of funders. Volunteers are required to participate in a 4-hour orientation and training will be held in the downtown area at a date and time to be determined.
Agency: Community Resource Center | date posted: Jan 7, 2014 | date to expire: Dec 31, 2015 |
Parenting Time Supervisors
Parenting Time Supervisors observe visits between children and parents, making observation notes, redirecting inappropriate conversations, and making the children feel safe and comfortable during the visit. Volunteers will also interact with the children before and after the visit with their parents.
Agency: Central Visitation Program | date posted: Sep 16, 2014 | date to expire: Dec 31, 2015 |
Grant Writing, Organization Development, Fundraising, Outreach
Search, apply for, and manage grants, assist with various general duties required in starting up and sustain a (currently small)nonprofit, assist with fundraising and outreach efforts in order to support more people in the community
Agency: IDEAS, Inc.- A Nonprofit Supporting the Success of Students with Disabilities | date posted: Dec 10, 2014 | date to expire: Dec 31, 2015 |
Food Bank Volunteer
Sign in clients as they enter food bank, assist clients as they "shop" in the Food Bank.
Agency: Denver Inner City Parish | date posted: Sep 9, 2014 | date to expire: Dec 30, 2015 |
Volunteering Projects and Opportunities in Thailand
Volunteer can participate in childcare, teaching, wildlife and conservation, community development, work an elephant camp and much more.
Agency: Volunteering Solutions | date posted: Mar 18, 2014 | date to expire: Oct 31, 2015 |
Make and Take Craft Facilitator
Help make history fun and engaging for families. We are looking for volunteers to staff our hands-on crafts. Volunteers will be responsible for learning the daily craft and associated content and teaching that content and craft to family visitors. The craft room volunteers will work with staff facilitators.
Agency: History Colorado | date posted: Oct 16, 2014 | date to expire: Oct 30, 2015 |
COmingle Volunteer
COmingle are History Colorado's after-hours history "happenings" for adults that include an offbeat mix of games, trivia, demonstrations, exhibit adventures, performances and hands-on activities. Volunteers are asked to wear something "Colorado –themed" and will help with set-up, activity facilitation, way-finding, and clean-up.
Agency: History Colorado | date posted: Oct 16, 2014 | date to expire: Sep 25, 2015 |
Youth support program Ldrshp, special event volunteers, committe volunteers
Lead activities for monthly support group meetings of you living with Tourette syndrome. Assist with activities to promote tourette awareness in the community through special events.
Agency: Tourette Association of Rocky Mountain Region | date posted: Oct 23, 2014 | date to expire: Aug 31, 2015 |
Technology Volunteer
Technology Volunteers will work directly with the public sharing their knowledge, patience, and customer service skills in a fast-paced environment, while handling multiple technology requests.
Agency: Denver Public Library | date posted: Jul 22, 2014 | date to expire: Jul 31, 2015 |
Public Outreach and Education
Marketing through Subject-Specific Sources
Includes sending listings and announcements of workshops to organizations and groups like the Early Childhood Council of Boulder County, the Boulder County Arts Alliance, various Permaculture Online Sources, and more on a monthly basis.
Media Blasting
Includes blasts of workshops (or photos, resources, articles) to Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, and Daily Camera Events, as well as Meetup.com-Greater Denver Urban Homesteaders group.
Seasonal Marketing
Includes marketing pushes for summer camp and homeschool program--getting ads into publications on time, contacting schools to get flyers i nto the hands of parents, etc. This only happens at certain times during the year.
Includes peppering Boulder, Denver and all surrounding areas with flyers and postcards with some regularity. May include visits to specific sites (ex: Parenting Place, schools for summer camp promotion).
Workshop Description Writing and Image Sourcing
Includes writing workshop descriptions for instructors who aren't inclined towards writing, editing existing descriptions, adding content, finding photos where they don't exist and requesting permission for use. This may involve actual event creation within Event Espresso on our website.
Information Packet Creation
Includes dialoguing/emailing with instructors in advance of their workshops to secure information packets to hand out to participants. May involve some amount of writing, editing or research for additional content, creation of cover page and communicating with our printer.
Agency: The Living Arts School | date posted: Jul 8, 2014 | date to expire: Jul 7, 2015 |
Operations Support
Registration Management and Assistance
Includes assisting participants who are having difficulty registering online, or having difficulty with Paypal—following up with folks who have registered but not paid, handling cancellations and refunds, workshop swaps and other registration related details. Involves sending out email reminders to participants 3-5 days prior to workshops with specific directions to the site and any reminders specific to the workshop.
Paperwork Organization and Collection
Includes collecting paperwork for workshops and children's programs, filing, requesting missing paperwork and fulfilling licensing requirements.
Agency: The Living Arts School | date posted: Jul 8, 2014 | date to expire: Jul 7, 2015 |
Grant Research Intern
The intern's role is to perform grant research and collect data for applications to be submitted, Networking with other NGO's via attending local events, researching other organizations that would be a good fit for Humanitarian House International Inc to partner with.
Agency: Humanitarian House International, Inc | date posted: Jan 21, 2015 | date to expire: Jun 30, 2015 |
Special Event / Fundraising Planning
Raising awareness and funds through special events is an easy way to support women and children escaping domestic violence. You and your friends are able to create, plan, and implement your own special event. Responsibilities will vary with the type of event and you can commit to as much or as little as you would like.
Agency: SafeHouse Denver | date posted: Jul 28, 2014 | date to expire: Jun 30, 2015 |
Safari Thrift
Sort donations, stock shelves with donated items, update social media, create retail displays, special events.
Agency: African Community Center/ Safari Thrift Store | date posted: Sep 29, 2014 | date to expire: Jun 30, 2015 |
Home Fire Safety Campaign
Home fires, annually kill nearly 2,500 people and injure another 13,000. YOU can do something about this. Own the goal of the Home Fire Preparedness Campaign. WHAT is the goal? Over the next five years reduce the number of fire deaths and injuries in the U.S. by 25 percent. How? Community canvassing with some specific, very empowering, goals: • Motivate ordinary people to take action by checking smoke alarms and practicing home evacuation when an alarm goes off. • Meet with families in their homes to complete a home safety checklist, and help them to develop a fire escape plan. • Install smoke alarms and replace batteries in existing alarms. Take a bite out of that 25 percent national goal by targeting low income, elderly, disabled and youth populations here in our neck of the woods.
We are currently focusing on the Lakewood neighborhoods, since they have the highest number of home fires. After you sign up we will provide the exact locations for each Saturday event just prior to the event. We will be working in teams of three individuals. Orientation for any new volunteers would be from 9am to 10am and project will follow from 10am to 12pm.
Agency: American Red Cross | date posted: Nov 13, 2014 | date to expire: Jun 30, 2015 |
Walker/Runner Guides and/or Drivers Needed
Walking/running guides are always welcome to accompany visually impaired athletes and athletes with prosthetics for a lap or two around Wash Park. We also need volunteer drivers willing to drive visually impaired athletes home after the run, and particularly to Littleton.
Agency: Achilles International | date posted: Jun 18, 2014 | date to expire: May 31, 2015 |
Office Volunteer
Assist OWL office in a variety of ways, depending on skills and interest. Opportunities include research, clerical work, organizational projects, language translation, and event planning.
Agency: OpenWorld Learning (OWL) | date posted: Jul 8, 2014 | date to expire: May 31, 2015 |
If you would like to spend time volunteering in Uganda we have opportunities for building, community outreaches on HIV/AIDS Awareness, organizing games and sports, working with women in crafts projects and teaching primary and high schools in English and Geography and other social subjects.
The beneficiaries of our projects will welcome you into their community with open arms. You will be made to feel at home and you will taste all the different cultural foods, see their dancing and have the opportunity to join in.The children always enjoy having visitors and will be very friendly towards you. They can take you for walks to see the monkeys and you can learn about the various local medicinal plants.
Uganda has plenty for you to be doing and seeing during your time off, from white water rafting to on foot safaris.If you are interested in volunteering with us please write to us email@example.com
We shall be very happy to talk to you as soon as possible!
Volunteer Life
Beacon of Hope Uganda volunteers enjoy an extremely unique experience not only in the work they do but also in the atmosphere they live in. The hard work volunteers put in during the week undoubtedly warrants some fun and relaxation during evening free time and on the weekends. During the week we organize a variety of activities for volunteers in the evenings. We often play football (soccer), cards and board games or chill out around the bar or go out for a dance getting to know fellow volunteers from around the world. Musical ballads are known to break out from time to time as well as the always entertaining pub-quiz nights.
Volunteers work Monday through Friday. Every weekday morning, breakfast is served from 7:30 AM to 8:30 AM, and at 9:00 AM on Saturday. The workday generally finishes around 4pm and dinner is served at our headquarters from 7pm-9pm.
Children and Youth Development
Through our Youth Development projects, we aim to enhance the physical, social and emotional development of children in Uganda. Volunteers can get involved at a local daycare center, participate in the skills and youth leadership training or participate in our Sports Program and Music, dance and drama.
Kasaala Child Care Center (The Hope Centre)
The Center provides at-risk children a safe environment in which they participate in any number of extra-curricular activities. These activities are designed to provide kids from 3 to 10 years old with creative outlets and opportunities to make constructive use of their time. The center is managed by a local teacher with the support and involvement of volunteers from Beacon of Hope Uganda. Volunteers help children to practice reading, writing, arithmetic, and English while making time for various games and recreational activities. Beacon of Hope Uganda also helps coordinate important educational workshops in areas lacking emphasis in general school curricula such as recycling, nutrition, hygiene, and self-esteem. This is a fun project for anyone who loves working with children. The kids are very enthusiastic and always keen to learn, play, and interact with volunteers.
MDD, Sports & Recreation
Beacon of Hope Uganda MDD, Sports & Recreation Program collaborates with local communities to promote healthy lifestyles amongst local children/youth through teaching basic skills and tactics of football (soccer) and volleyball, teaching music, dance moves and drama. Given the lack of adequate recreational opportunities available to kids in the villages, our programs seek to provide at-risk children and youth with a safe environment where they can practice these activities in order to make productive use of free time. In addition, we emphasize important core values like mutual respect, trust, fair-play and self-esteem as well as sportsmanship, teamwork, and leadership. Volunteers contributing to this program will plan and lead practices of understanding the activity.
Education is the key to a child's success in Uganda. The Beacon of Hope Uganda Education Program focuses on English language classes, international cultural exchanges and educational murals. These initiatives are aimed at a wide range of audiences, from school children to local villagers.
Education is a priority, it is one of the most important tools Beacon of Hope Uganda can give the children in order to break the cycle of poverty affecting their lives and to help them become independent adults. Some children excel at academics and strive to earn scholarships to attend university. Others receive vocational training in one of many hands on professions like ceramics, carpentry, hairdressing, tourism, computer sciences, electronics, child care, and husbandry.
The murals we paint are directed towards local schools to help raise awareness on key issues such as personal hygiene, recycling and environmental preservation. Improved knowledge of English provides locals with a crucial skill in seeking further education and can unlock new job opportunities.
Volunteers at the home Volunteers at the home English Classes
The community has shown great interest in learning English from our international volunteers, most of whom speak English as a first or second language.
We teach English to a wide variety of ages, ability levels, and professional orientations. Yet one of the most unique aspects of our Saturday/Weekly Evening classes is the incorporation of a cultural exchange element, which allows locals to learn about the diverse cultural backgrounds and customs of our volunteers while enriching volunteers' own understanding of the local culture.
We are always looking for people with TEFL certification qualifications or previous teaching experience to manage our English programs by coordinating with local counterparts regarding new and existing courses, preparing appropriate lesson plans, teaching classes, and training other volunteers who are interested in supporting this initiative.
School Murals
We are helping to make schools brighter, more interesting and more colorful places for kids to study by painting murals that engage students in important themes concerning general youth development and healthy lifestyles. Depending on the needs and desires of the schools, themes range from recycling and proper hand-washing techniques to promoting school spirit. These projects are a fun way for volunteers to engage the community and leave behind an image that has a lasting impact.
Community Development Initiatives
Volunteers wishing to get involved in one of our Community Development Initiatives (CDI) will work as part of a team dedicated to a particular project pertaining to one of our three main program areas: Education, Youth Development, and Environmental Conservation. These volunteers have the chance to interact directly with the community by preparing and coordinating workshops and activities with local counterpart organizations, community groups, government agencies, and NGOs whose goals are closely related to those of BoHU. They are also actively involved in the execution of educational training workshops and project monitoring and evaluation. BoHU's Community Development Initiatives provide volunteers the unique opportunity to continuously improve program parameters and best practices. Our programs are constantly enriched by the participation and insight of volunteers with a wide range of experience and educational backgrounds.
Community Construction
Volunteers who indicate their desire to work in construction enjoy a wide variety of projects to choose from every week. This is the most flexible branch of BoHU operations, as volunteers may choose to work on different projects every week or, alternatively, work on various stages of one project through to completion (assuming they are able to stay throughout the duration of the project).
Although certain projects often present unique needs and challenges, there are several core areas (and corresponding activities) you will likely find yourself contributing to at some point during your service as a BoHU Construction Volunteer: Site Preparation (demolition, digging foundations, clearing rubble, etc.), Building (Mixing and pouring concrete, bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing, etc.), or Community Beautification (planting trees, landscaping, community cleanups, painting murals, etc.). Whatever your interest, rest assured you'll get your hands dirty from the start!
Environmental Conservation
BoHU's Environmental Conservation Program aims to develop initiatives that support locals in the improvement of their neighborhoods as well as providing them with basic sanitation. We are currently engaged in fruit tree planting initiatives at schools and homes that give volunteers the opportunity to contribute to environmentally friendly projects that are made sustainable through education and inclusion.
If you are interested to volunteer with us- write to us: firstname.lastname@example.com
Or Visit our website: http://www.beaconofhopeug.org
Agency: Beacon of Hope Uganda | date posted: Sep 9, 2014 | date to expire: May 31, 2015 |
Cafe Volunteer
Involved in every aspect of Cafe, from cleaning, food prep, running out orders, and customer service.
Agency: Cafe180 | date posted: Oct 1, 2014 | date to expire: May 31, 2015 |
Grassroots Marketing Volunteers
We are looking for individuals to fill various volunteer roles and make a tangible difference in the lives of the thousands of families we serve affected by muscle disease. From recruiting participants at community events to marketing our platform, there is a place for everyone on our committee. Whether your time commitment is big or small, we need you! Through our Committee you have the opportunity gain valuable leadership experience. Members will be ambassadors of Team Momentum to the local community and commitment will be spread out throughout the year and will lead up to the weekend of the Colfax Half Marathon in May. MDA Team Momentum is the Muscular Dystrophy's (MDA) brand new, signature endurance platform. Team Momentum gives individuals the opportunity to participate in extraordinary life-changing events to support the mission of the MDA and the families we serve. The program will enable first timers, novice, and experienced walkers and runners to train for a Marathon or a Half-Marathon while raising awareness and funds to end muscle disease.
Agency: Muscular Dystrophy Association | date posted: Dec 17, 2014 | date to expire: May 31, 2015 |
Reach & Rise 1-1 Mentoring Program
Developing supportive, consistent mentoring relationship with a child through recreational play and paraprofessional therapeutic techniques. Help children explore and cope with social and/or family struggles through a 1-1 mentoring relationship.The Reach & Rise mentoring program trains adult volunteers to provide mentoring services to young people ages 6-17 for one year. We aim to help youth develop tools to cope with issues such as low self-esteem, family and peer conflicts, problems at school, and to improve their decision-making skills.
Agency: YMCA of Metropolitan Denver | date posted: Oct 22, 2013 | date to expire: May 29, 2015 |


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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dealt a blow to President Barack Obama's health-care law, ruling that closely held companies can claim a religious exemption from the requirement that they offer birth-control coverage in their worker health plans. more
By Greg Stohr
Earning a little more than $9 an hour as a front-desk clerk at the Hilton Providence, Evan McLaughlin last year lost an apartment in Providence because he couldn't afford the rent. more
By Patricia Daddona
PROVIDENCE – Members of one of the labor unions that represent state employees voted down a proposed new contract last month, WPRI-TV CBS 12 reported on its website. more
Women & Infants Hospital laid off 41 employees, and also reduced hours for six additional employees, as part of an effort to "address inefficiencies" and "bring its cost structure in line with other organizations," it said in a press release Monday. more
By PBN Staff
Rhode Island boasts 39 cities and towns and 72 separate public-safety dispatches within its 1,200 square miles. more
By Patrick Anderson
More U.S. cities are hiring than at any time since the Great Recession as the reviving economy and rising property taxes allow higher spending for a second straight year, according to a report released last week. more
Bloomberg News | 10/20/14
Over the last few weeks parties not involved in the negotiations or the voting on the proposed public-employee pension-change settlement have wanted the judicially imposed gag order on anyone involved in the deal-making lifted. While we … more
Hotel workers and their supporters said Monday afternoon that three or more of them will begin a hunger strike if the R.I. Senate passes a state budget that bans municipalities from individually voting to raise the minimum wage. more
By Patricia Daddona
On April 7, nine days shy of the Bannister House's 125th anniversary, residents and employers learned that the board of trustees had moved to shutter the long-term nursing home facility in Providence, citing more than $2 million in debt. … more
By Patricia Daddona | email@example.com | 5/15/15
The percentage of Rhode Islanders represented by unions declined in 2014 compared with the year prior, according to union membership data released Friday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. more
By Patricia Daddona