The Bluegrass and Beyond

Lewis Mayberry, 8, a third grader at Picadome Elementary School, works at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning with his tutor, Mark Molla, a financial analyst at Lexmark. They have been working together each week since August.  Photos by Tom Eblen

Every Wednesday afternoon, I stop writing long enough to spend an hour at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, helping a kindergartner learn to read.

Saniya Harris, 6, is sweet, smart and eager. When we began our weekly meetings last fall, she already knew her letters. Now we work on phonics and sight words by reading books about her favorite things: animals, princesses and Barbie.

The Carnegie Center is housed in the building that was the Lexington Public Library from 1905 to 1989. The cheerful tutoring center upstairs, with its tall ceiling and big windows, was the children’s room where I read some of my first books when I was Saniya’s age.

Now, I am one of 150 adults who tutor and mentor 180 school kids each week in a program that has helped more than 3,000 children since the Carnegie Center opened in 1992.

The center is planning a 20th-anniversary reunion on March 27 for current and past tutors, students and parents. The event honors Phyllis MacAdam, who started the program and directed it until her retirement as the center’s assistant director in 2003.

“We always knew there was going to be some kind of a tutoring program,” MacAdam said of her fellow Carnegie Center founders, whose vision was to transform the outgrown library into a place that fostered community learning and the literary arts.

MacAdam had been a teacher in Massachusetts before earning a doctorate in literacy education at the University of Kentucky. She started the Carnegie Center’s tutoring program with a few UK and Transylvania University students as tutors and a dozen students from schools in nearby low-income neighborhoods.

“I brought in all of my children’s books, all of their dead Monopoly games,” she said. “The first two kids we tutored were the sons of our custodian. Then, by word of mouth, the program grew and grew.”

The program’s goal is to give students, especially disadvantaged students, a little extra help. Kids also benefit from having an adult mentor who isn’t their parent. Children with learning disabilities are paired with tutors who have special training.

“It’s not like you’re making massive educational changes,” MacAdam said. “You’re just helping them with their needs and giving them some special attention.”

The program’s priority is students from low-income families, but it’s open to anyone. Slots fill up quickly on registration day. Parents who manage to get their kids into the program tend to be motivated to get them there each week and reinforce the lessons, said Carol Bradford, the center’s current tutoring coordinator.

Tutoring is free, but there is an annual registration fee of $50, or $5 for students on free-or-reduced lunch at school. The volunteer tutors, who must be at least 16 years old, include college students, working professionals and retirees. Over the years, a few Carnegie Center students have grown up to be tutors.

“It’s also a great opportunity for the tutors, and they just love it,” Bradford said. “It helps build relationships in the community among people who might not otherwise get to know each other.”

Last year, Neil Chethik, the Carnegie Center’s director, tutored a young Korean girl who needed help with English while her family was living temporarily in Lexington.

“It was such a relief from the workday,” said Chethik, who has continued to correspond by email with the child since her family moved back to South Korea. “It’s an hour when all you have to think about is this one little kid.”

Tiffanie Holland said her three sons — ages 8, 10 and 12 — have benefitted enormously from the tutoring program.

“The Carnegie Center has been very important to my family,” she said. “Everyone’s friendly here, and they’re rooting and cheering you on. They want every child to succeed.”

Mark Molla, a financial analyst for Lexmark International, has been tutoring Lewis Mayberry, 8, in math and reading since August. At their meeting last Thursday afternoon, they talked baseball as the enthusiastic third-grader read aloud from a book about pitching great Satchel Paige.

“It’s something I always wanted to do,” Molla said of tutoring. “And I’m probably learning as much as he is.”

If you go

Tutor Appreciation and Reunion

Who: Current and former Carnegie Center tutors, students and parents.

What: Dinner and celebration. Card-making contest for kids.

When: 6-8 p.m. March 27

Where: Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, 251 W. Second St., Lexington.

Reservations: The event is free, but register by email at tutoring@carnegiecenterlex.org, or call (859) 254-4175.

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West Sixth Brewery partners, left to right, Ben Self, Joe Kuosman, Robin Sither and Brady Barlow made community improvement part of their business plan. Photos by Tom Eblen

As so many businesses become consolidated and conglomerated, the only things that seem to matter are profit, shareholder value and excessive executive compensation. Communities, like employees, become expendable.

But the trend with small, locally owned businesses seems different, at least in Lexington. You don’t have to look far to see it.

Since its creation in 2008, Local First Lexington, a non-profit alliance of locally owned and independently operated businesses, has made community enrichment a priority. And many business people do things on their own, such as insurance agent Debra Hensley, who spends a lot of time on public service and community-building.

These business people are doing great things for Lexington. But they are quick to tell you that their efforts also are good for their businesses. There’s a term for it: “Doing well by doing good.”

Stella’s Kentucky Deli does regular “dining for a cause” nights, donating 15 percent of sales to a local charity. Thai Orchid, Nick Ryan’s Saloon and many other restaurants do similar fund-raising nights and events.

Lexington retailers often donate merchandise or gift certificates for charity auctions, or they sponsor events and non-profit organizations. Some examples: Joseph-Beth Booksellers has book fairs for organizations, giving them as much as 20 percent of sales. The Morris Book Shop sponsors several local non-profits, makes donations and opens its store for events.

“I think you’re seeing a lot more of it,” said Ben Self, one of four partners who opened West Sixth Brewery in April. “I think people are starting to understand that it’s not a one-way street. It’s beneficial all the way around.

“That’s the future of building communities: businesses and non-profits working together for common goals.”

West Sixth Brewery has some of Lexington’s most ambitious community outreach efforts, beginning with the 90,000-square-foot former bread factory the partners bought for their brewery and tasting room.

They rent space in the rambling building to artists, writers and a variety of community-minded businesses and non-profit organizations. Those include Broke Spoke Community Bike Shop, Magic Beans Coffee Roasters, Roller Girls of Central Kentucky, and FoodChain, a sustainable urban agriculture non-profit started by Self’s wife, Rebecca.

“It’s nice to see the synergies and cooperation among the different groups,” said partner Joe Kuosman, noting the Roller Girls have after-hours events at the brewery, where its resident artists’ work is displayed.

“We committed from the very beginning to giving 6 percent of our profits to local charitable organizations,” Self said of the brewery, “and we far exceeded that the first year.”

In addition, the brewery sponsors an event for a different local non-profit each month, donating 6 percent of sales that night. The next one, on Wednesday, benefits the Community Farm Alliance.

The events often bring in people who have never been to West Sixth, but then come back again and again, partner Brady Barlow said.

West Sixth’s partners also set sustainability goals for their business, from rehabilitating an old building with reclaimed wood fixtures to recycling waste, and canning rather than bottling their beer since it’s easier to recycle.

Bourbon n’ Toulouse restaurant owners Will Pieratt, left, and Kevin Heathcoat.

Bourbon n’ Toulouse, a Chevy Chase restaurant that serves good, cheap Cajun food, has made community outreach the core of its marketing strategy since it opened in 2004. Partners Will Pieratt and Kevin Heathcoat give away a lot of gift certificates for charity and frequently sponsor events where as much as 25 percent of that day’s sales go to a non-profit.

The restaurant’s two biggest annual events are Empty Bowls, a partnership with Kentucky Mudworks pottery studio that benefits Moveable Feast, which provides meals to local people living with HIV/AIDS; and one for the Race for the Cure, which benefits research into breast cancer, which killed Heathcoat’s mother.

Other events have focused on disaster relief, such as Bow to the Brow day last March that honored University of Kentucky basketball player Anthony Davis and raised money for Eastern Kentucky tornado recovery.

“Some of our very best customers came here for the first time for a charity event,” Heathcoat said. “We just can’t believe more businesses don’t do this.”

Beyond growing their business, though, Pieratt and Heathcoat think community support is simply the right thing to do.

“We opened on seven credit cards and $10,000 I borrowed from my brother,” Heathcoat said. “If it wasn’t for this neighborhood, we wouldn’t have made it. Our philosophy from day one has been that the community supported us so we have a responsibility to give back.”

Wyn Morris, owner of The Morris Book Shop, feels that sense even more acutely. His father, lawyer Leslie Morris, was among the 49 people killed when Comair Flight 5191 crashed on takeoff from Blue Grass Airport on Aug. 27, 2006.

“Lexington truly came through for all of us,” said Morris, who opened his bookstore two years later and decided to put community engagement at the core of his business plan. “I just realized I hadn’t done much of anything for the community. It was a kind of a wake-up call.”

Greg Dike, right, executive director of the Morehead Area Habitat for Humanity group, helps build an interior wall for a house near Morehead with a group of volunteers from Lexington on Jan. 19.  Photos by Tom Eblen

MOREHEAD — When Greg Dike became the director — and only employee — of Habitat for Humanity’s Rowan County unit more than two years ago, he thought he knew the mission. Then that mission got a whole lot bigger.

A cluster of tornados tore through Eastern Kentucky last March 2, killing 22 people. Eight died in neighboring Morgan and Menifee counties and dozens more were left homeless.

“When the tornadoes came, we decided to expand our service area,” said Dike, 61, whose previous careers included electrical engineer, United Methodist minister and emergency room nurse.

Dike figured that Habitat could provide valuable help in storm recovery for a couple of reasons. Habitat, an ecumenical Christian ministry, builds houses that low-income working people can afford to buy, in part through their own labors. Plus, the three-county Morehead Area unit of Habitat specializes in super energy-efficient housing.

Morehead Area Habitat’s most common house has 1,100 square feet of living space on one floor and costs about $45,000 to build. Through smart design and lots of insulation — including a foundation insulated below the frost line — each house has an average heating and cooling cost of only about $12 a month. A poorly insulated house or mobile home often has a monthly utility bill of $200 or more.

So far, in addition to its regular work in Rowan County, Habitat has built one house each in Morgan and Menifee counties for storm victims, Dike said. Six more are under construction in Morgan and two more in Menifee, with seven additional houses planned in those counties.

Judge Executives Tim Conley in Morgan County and James Trimble in Menifee County have been very supportive, and have helped Habitat identify building sites.

“They see Habitat as a way to get people into quality housing,” Dike said.

Because some people who lost their homes in the storms were elderly, disabled or otherwise unable to take on even a small mortgage, as typical Habitat clients do, the Kentucky Housing Corp. and other organizations and foundations have provided several hundred thousand dollars in grants to build homes. The state Habitat organization also has been very helpful, Dike said.

Materials for each house cost about $35,000, so the total price is kept low largely through volunteer labor. While Habitat is always happy to receive cash donations, Dike said, his biggest need is regular construction volunteers.

Dike is working with Diane James of Lexington, a longtime Habitat volunteer and former construction manager, to recruit and organize groups of regular volunteers from Central Kentucky, which is only an hour or two away by car.

The ideal volunteers are men or women who can gather several friends together and commit to one or two work days a month, ideally on the same house so they can become familiar with it.

“I think there are a lot of people out there with skills,” Dike said. “We’re not looking for award-winning carpenters; just people with some skills and common sense.”

Dike and James hopes to hear from churches, businesses or just groups of friends who think they could commit to a series of work days over the next few months. Those interested in volunteering can email James at buildwestliberty@gmail.com or call Dike at (606) 776-0022.

“It’s an easy trip, and we get a lot of work done in a day,” James said. “Most people have really enjoyed it.”

That’s certainly what I found earlier this month, when I accompanied James, Dike and a group of volunteers from several Lexington Disciples of Christ churches who were framing interior walls on a Habitat house near Morehead.

“I just love doing it,” said Bettye Burns, a retiree who volunteered through her church for a women-only Habitat build in the early 1990s and has been doing it ever since.

“It’s fun, and I’ve learned so much,” Burns said. “I credit Diane for me not getting empty-nest syndrome when my kids grew up. I was so busy helping her build houses, I didn’t have time for that.”

Steve Seithers, who began volunteering through his church in 1992, said he enjoys the fellowship and sense of accomplishment he gets from Habitat work. “Plus, it helps make a difference in people’s lives,” Seithers said. “This is something I can do, so I’m doing it.”

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When I was a child, many white Americans, and most of them in the South, considered Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists to be radicals and trouble-makers. Some even called them “communists.”

Almost everyone now considers them heroes. Ideas about racial equality and justice that were then controversial are now common sense.

Segregationist leaders such as George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Orval Faubus are now remembered with contempt, when they are remembered at all. We pity the average people who enabled the bigots, either with their actions or their silence.

On Monday, we mark the 27th annual holiday honoring King, as well as the second inauguration of the nation’s first president of African descent. Looking back, it is amazing how much changed in so short a time. Racism still exists, to be sure, but it is no longer acceptable in mainstream society.

It makes me wonder: What controversial ideas today will seem like common sense in just a few years?

The first that comes to mind is gay rights. It is today’s most controversial civil rights issue, yet the nation has clearly turned the corner. You can tell it the same way you could tell by the early 1960s that we had turned the corner of black civil rights. The groundswell of support wasn’t just coming from the victims of discrimination, but from others who realized it was wrong and found the courage to say so.

If there has been a consistent theme of social progress during my lifetime, it is this: discrimination against any group of people because of who they are is un-American.

We saw an example of that last week when the small Perry County town of Vicco became the fourth municipality in Kentucky to ban discrimination against gays, joining Lexington, Louisville and Covington. Vicco officials said they weren’t endorsing homosexuality; they just thought discrimination was wrong.

Most opposition to gay rights comes from religious conservatives. During King’s lifetime, many white Christians found Biblical justification for segregation and discrimination, just as their great-grandfathers had for slavery. Everyone is entitled to their religious beliefs. What is problematic is when they try to impose them on others.

Wendell Berry, the renowned Kentucky writer and lifelong Baptist, made that point and many others to Baptist ministers meeting at Georgetown College on Jan. 11. Coverage of his talk has attracted a lot of attention. (Read more about what he had to say on my blog.)

When I think of other controversial issues that will seem like no-brainers in a few years, the reasons for our clouded judgment have more to do with economics than religion.

Kentuckians’ disregard for the environment reminds me of our willful ignorance about the health and social costs of tobacco just two or three decades ago. Only after the price-support system that made tobacco an economic mainstay of family farms was abolished did we stop trying to deny the obvious and defend the indefensible.

More than 30 local governments in Kentucky now have public smoking bans, and some legislators are pushing for a statewide version to curb soaring health-care costs. Restricting smoking in most public places is now common sense, yet it would have been unthinkable in Kentucky a generation ago.

Sit back for a moment and try to imagine conventional wisdom a few years from now. For one thing, I think, discrimination based on sexual orientation will be as unacceptable then as discrimination based on race, gender or national origin is now.

I also can imagine hearing comments like these:

Why did people back then allow the beauty and future economic viability of Eastern Kentucky’s mountains to be destroyed just so coal companies could extract the last measure of profit in return for a declining number of short-term jobs?

How could people back then have denied the scientific consensus about climate change and refused to act when the signs — melting glaciers, the increasing frequency of killer storms and droughts, year after year of record-high temperatures — were so obvious?

What were they thinking?

As we honor civil rights heroes Monday, and pity the bigots and their enablers, let us also give some thought to the future. Who will people honor then, and who will they pity?

And ask yourself: which side of history will I be on?

In a coincidence of history, the national holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. falls on the same day this year as the second inauguration of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent.

That makes it a good day to talk about leadership, said Jeff Johnson, a journalist, commentator and social activist who is the featured speaker at Lexington’s holiday commemoration program, 11 a.m. Monday at Heritage Hall.

“I’m going to be talking a great deal about current-day leadership and what kind of leadership we need in the face of the daunting challenges in our community,” Johnson said during a telephone interview last week.

“In the face of trying to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., do we do more of a disservice by being unwilling to do the things that he did to be able to bring about change?”

Johnson, 39, is a political commentator on the MSNBC cable network, the Tom Joyner Morning Show and TheGrio.com, an NBC News website that focuses on news and opinion tailored to black audiences. He also runs an Ohio-based organization trying to recruit and develop 80,000 black male teachers.

Previously, Johnson spent seven years as a commentator for Black Entertainment Television and was national director of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division.

Today’s social justice movements could learn a lot about leadership by studying the methods of King and his colleagues during the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson said. A key ingredient in the effectiveness of the civil rights movement was training in practical leadership skills and discipline.

“You weren’t allowed to be in the marches and the demonstrations if you were not trained, because the various agendas they had were so focused,” Johnson said. “Not just from a PR standpoint, but from a legislative one. They operated from the standpoint of being able to bring about systemic and pragmatic, legislative and policy changes.

“So often the movements of today are about ‘Can I get on the front page of the paper?’ or ‘Can our organization be on CNN?,’” he said.

Training and focus are just as necessary for achieving goals in today’s more complex social, political and economic environment, Johnson said.

“It’s not about antiquated civil disobedience tactics,” he said. “It’s about whatever tactics you choose to use in the process of creating change.”

That can include learning technical skills to organize an online get-out-the-vote campaign or developing human relations and business skills to form public-private partnerships to achieve neighborhood development projects.

Working with business and government is a key to modern progress, he said. So is tackling problems in a comprehensive way, involving players with a variety of perspectives and viewpoints.

“We each have a role to play,” he said. “If we did this in a nonantagonistic way, I think some of these nontraditional partnerships would create spaces where you’re really not asking people to go too far out of the way of what they already do, because everyone is stepping up.”

Today’s social justice issues are more subtle than during King’s era, and the nation’s demographic picture is more complex.

“For example, there are African-Americans who may be in the same family who may want drastically different things,” Johnson said. “I think we have to be sophisticated enough to do that.”

He mentioned the recent controversy in which ESPN commentator Rob Parker lost his job because of remarks he made about Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, including calling him a “cornball brother.”

“You do the entire race a disservice by saying he’s less black because his black experience is different than mine,” Johnson said. “The real issue is ‘Who believes what I believe, and can I work with them to push it?’ That’s what we’ve got to help people understand.”

Effective change agents focus on simple agendas, even single issues, that others can rally around, Johnson said.

“You should ask, who are the people I can work with? Who are the people who believe what I believe? How can we pragmatically work around a concise agenda to be able to bring about those realities?” he said. “What it also does is it removes so much personal foolishness from what should be about communal advancement.”

Brent Hutchinson is the new director of the 110-year-old Hindman Settlement School. Symbolizing the school’s past and present are the circa 1913 log cabin, right, that houses the school’s offices, and the Knott County Opportunity Center, left, on the school’s campus at the forks of Troublesome Creek. Photo by Tom Eblen

HINDMAN — Brent Hutchinson knew he had big shoes to fill. And if he had any doubt, more than 100 people have told him so since he arrived in October to become director of Hindman Settlement School.

Hutchinson succeeded Mike Mullins, 63, who died unexpectedly last February. During 34 years as director, Mullins transformed the 110-year-old school to keep its mission relevant to changing needs.

The institution now provides arts programming and dyslexia services to schools in Knott and some surrounding counties. It also runs two acclaimed summer programs: the Appalachian Writers Workshop and Appalachian Family Folk Week.

Mullins left things in good shape, financially and otherwise. How does Hutchinson plan to build on that success? He isn’t sure yet, but he plans to do a lot of listening to the scores of people throughout the region who will help him figure it out.

“We have a lot of flexibility,” Hutchinson said of the school. “I want to figure out what people here really need more than asserting areas of interest to me.”

Hutchinson, 38, has the benefit of coming in as both an outsider and an insider.

His mother was born in Germany, but she moved here when her mother married an American soldier from Knott County. Displaced by the Carr Creek Lake project in the 1970s, the family moved to Whitesburg. He was raised in Louisa, graduating as valedictorian of Lawrence County High School in 1992.

“I grew up driving past the settlement school and never dreamed I would end up here at this point in my life,” said Hutchinson, whose twin brother, Brian, is athletic director at Morehead State University.

Hutchinson and his wife, Gwen, who is from Floyd County, graduated from Morehead State. They moved to Lexington in 1997. She earned a master’s in social work at the University of Kentucky and led an Alzheimer’s day care program. He earned a master’s in family studies at UK and worked in ministry and counseling.

They left in 2001 for Nashville, where she did social work and he was in ministry, most recently at Rolling Hills Community Church in Franklin. They have two sons: Adam, 9, and Miles, 5.

“I think it’s difficult for a lot of people who leave Eastern Kentucky to get it out of their blood,” said Hutchinson, who is finishing a doctorate in leadership studies from Dallas Baptist University in Texas. “We always thought we would come back. We didn’t expect it to be this soon.”

Hindman Settlement School was founded in 1902 along the banks of Troublesome Creek by two progressive women from Central Kentucky. Its original mission was to provide basic education and health services to people in this then-remote corner of the mountains, but its role has changed as the area has developed.

“Being a part of social change is something that’s always been important to me,” Hutchinson said. “I knew Hindman Settlement School was a place that did that.”

Glenn Leveridge, a Lexington banker and chairman of the school’s board, said Hutchinson stood out among 34 candidates as being well-suited to both carry out the school’s missions and figure out new ones in the future.

“Every spoke of the wheel was tight,” he said of Hutchinson’s background and qualifications. “But the thing that really sent me over the moon was when he called toward the end of the process and asked, ‘Am I going to be able to dream?’”

Hutchinson eventually wants the school to broaden its scope throughout Eastern Kentucky by partnering with other organizations to enhance education, arts and heritage programs. Rather than just try to help solve problems, he wants the school to be a positive force in shaping Appalachian culture.

More immediately, Hutchinson is looking forward this summer to Appalachian Family Folk Week and the Appalachian Writers Workshop. The workshop has become famous because of the participation of such literary icons as Harriette Arnow and James Still, who worked at the school for many years.

Kentucky-born author Barbara Kingsolver will be the featured lecturer at this year’s workshop. And, despite her recently announced move from UK to South Carolina to be closer to aging parents, award-winning poet Nikky Finney will be back at Hindman, Hutchinson said. This will be the third year she has led a special workshop for young Kentucky writers.

“I was told by people that there’s some magic that happens on the banks of Troublesome Creek,” Hutchinson said. “The more I’m here, the more I realize that people really do believe that.”

Neema Dominic puts in volunteer hours painting a foreclosed home on Savoy Road that is being renovated by Habitat for Humanity.  Habitat has renovated four foreclosed homes in Lexington this year and will do a fifth next year as part of a city program to keep foreclosed homes from becoming vacant liabilities in their neighborhoods. Photos by Tom Eblen

Lexington has a couple of big housing problems: there is too little affordable housing, and there are too many vacant houses in neighborhoods all over the city, especially since the wave of foreclosures that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

A partnership between city government and Habitat for Humanity has offered small help for both problems, but it has left officials optimistic that it could lead to bigger solutions.

On Wednesday, Mayor Jim Gray will help dedicate a renovated house at 224 Savoy Road in a well-kept, middle-class subdivision off Versailles Road. After a foreclosure in 2010, that house and another down the street sat empty for more than two years. That worried neighbors, including Urban County Council member Peggy Henson, who lives around the corner.

“These were sturdy, good, well-built homes,” Henson said. “But they weren’t going to stay that way the longer they sat empty.”

Those two houses were among 10 foreclosed, vacant properties the city was able to acquire with federal stimulus money through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008.

The city turned the 10 properties over to Habitat for Humanity for $1 each. Five had homes that could be renovated; the others will become building sites for new Habitat homes. Four of the renovations have been completed; the fifth will be done next year, as will the new construction.

Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based non-profit organization made famous by former President Jimmy Carter’s volunteer efforts on its behalf, builds affordable homes for low-income people willing to put in hundreds of hours of “sweat equity” to become homeowners.

In Lexington, Habitat has typically built new homes, usually in neighborhoods north of Main Street in the East End, West End and Winburn, where inexpensive lots were available. This venture was Habitat’s first at renovating existing homes in other neighborhoods, and Rachel Smith Childress, the organization’s Lexington executive director, said it turned out to be a winner for everyone.

“Our families like them because they’re in other nice neighborhoods and have amenities that aren’t typically part of our homes,” she said. “Plus, it removes vacant houses from neighborhoods, increases property values for everyone and increases property tax revenues for the city.”

For example, the house at 224 Savoy Road, which was built about 1960, is brick with hardwood floors and vintage knotty pine paneling. The kitchen includes a dishwasher. None of that is in a new Habitat house.

But the house needed work, including bathroom and kitchen remodeling, which was done by Habitat staff, volunteers and future Habitat homeowners. Whirlpool donated other needed kitchen appliances.

Money for the renovation was donated by business sponsors Paul Miller Ford, Ford Motor Co., PNC Bank and the PNC Foundation. Support for the other renovations has come from Ashland Inc., Calvary Baptist Church and Back Construction.

More than 500 hours of work was performed by the new owners of 224 Savoy Road, Emmanuel Katchofa, and his wife, Marceline Ilunga. He was a physician in the Congo before they and their five children fled the war-torn country and were resettled in Lexington by the U.S. State Department and Kentucky Refugee Ministries. Katchofa and Ilunga both now have jobs, although he is unable to practice medicine because his license is not valid in this country.

Legal refugees from the Congo and other troubled African nations now make up about half of the 15 or 20 Lexington families Habitat is able to help become home owners each year. That is because refugees come here without bad credit histories and with strong motivation to succeed, Childress said.

Henson said she and her neighbors are happy to have the vacant house on Savoy Road restored and occupied.

“It was a real blessing to the neighborhood,” she said. “Those properties are looking great now, and it will be really good to have folks living there.”

Although federal stimulus money is no longer available, Henson and Childress hope Habitat’s partnership with the city on rehabilitating vacant houses or building on abandoned lots can find new ways to continue.

“We’re talking with the city about property and buildings and partnerships,” Childress said. “But the need for affordable housing goes beyond home ownership.

“Everyone is not going to be a homeowner. We really have a huge gap in decent rental housing that is affordable in Lexington. It’s a huge need.”

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When a poor person gets a government handout, it’s called welfare. When a rich corporation gets one, it’s called an economic development incentive.

With local, state and federal government budgets tighter than ever, social programs are getting a hard look. But what about corporate welfare?

The New York Times started a good conversation last week with a three-part investigative series called the United States of Subsidies. Reporter Louise Story spent 10 months analyzing corporate tax breaks, gifts and other incentives in all 50 states, which she figured add up to at least $80 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies to business.

Business subsidies have mushroomed since the 1980s, when automakers started pitting states against one another to host new assembly plants. The strategy worked so well that other industries demanded freebies, too.

A big reason corporate welfare has flourished is that politicians love being able to announce lots of new jobs coming to their area. (They often are out of office when those jobs never materialize or leave for another state offering better incentives.)

From a national perspective, it is a zero-sum game. State and local incentives do little or nothing to grow the national economy; they just determine where in the nation the growth will occur.

But it’s more insidious than that. Incentives redirect billions of tax dollars to corporate bottom lines instead of to improving education, health, safety, infrastructure and making other public investments that will create genuine, long-term economic development.

The Times website (Nytimes.com) has state-by-state breakdowns of incentives and a searchable database of recipients. It shows that the nation’s biggest business incentive Santa is high-growth, low-wage, high-poverty Texas, at $19 billion a year. West Virginia and Oklahoma give up incentives equal to one-third of their budgets.

The Times calculates Kentucky’s annual incentives at $1.41 billion — about 15 percent of the state budget, or $324 per Kentuckian. Those include $264 million in personal income tax credits; $108 million in sales tax refunds, exemptions and discounts; and $69.2 million in corporate income tax reductions, credits or rebates.

The Times reports that most Kentucky incentives, $569 million worth, go to mining, oil and gas industries — no surprise there, given their political clout. That is followed by $341 million for agriculture and $180 million to manufacturers.

As is true nationally, some of the biggest Kentucky incentive recipients in recent years were automakers: $307 million for Ford; $83.8 million for Toyota and $10 million for General Motors. Given their high wages and large supplier networks, those might be good investments.

But the big head-scratcher in the Times’ database was $94.1 million in incentives to Tyson Foods from 1995-2009 for a low-wage chicken-processing plant in Henderson County. Is that the kind of economic development Kentucky taxpayers should be subsidizing?

While the Times’ report is impressive in its national scope, there has long been debate about the value of incentives. The Herald-Leader published an investigative series in 2005 that questioned the value of many Kentucky tax breaks and other giveaways. The report resulted in some improved accountability, but did little to stem the flow of tax money into corporate pockets.

A state-commissioned study issued this summer came up with incentive figures smaller than the Times reported, but still pretty staggering: $1.29 billion between 2001 and 2010. The report said 577 companies took incentives to locate 55,173 jobs in Kentucky at a cost to taxpayers of $23,385 per job.

The incentive system favors large corporations over small businesses — often the employers who are already in a community and aren’t looking to leave. Officials have responded by coming up with some incentives for them, too, which just further drains government coffers.

How do we stop this racket, where cities and states compete to steal jobs from one another? It would be great if Congress could pass a law, but it probably can’t. Still, with about 20 percent of state and local government budgets coming from federal dollars, somebody needs to be looking out for the national interest.

Taxpayers should demand reform of these corporate welfare systems, just as they did social welfare systems in the 1990s. But it won’t be easy. Corporations employ more lobbyists and make more campaign donations than poor people do.

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t play one on TV. But I did spend two days last week shadowing doctors and talking with them about what they do and the environment in which they do it.

I was one of seven people who participated in the Lexington Medical Society‘s Mini-Internship Program. Since 1994, nearly 30 groups of community “interns” have been given a two-day, close-up look at the working lives of physicians.

One of the things I have always enjoyed about being a journalist is exploring other people’s worlds. Journalism is a license to be nosy, ask questions, observe others, and discuss issues with people who have unique expertise.

That’s how I found myself in a locker room at Central Baptist Hospital, changing into scrubs so I could spend the morning in an operating room. I watched as Dr. Kaveh Sajadi, a second- generation orthopedic surgeon, performed shoulder replacements on two patients suffering from severe arthritis pain.

With help from a skilled team, Sajadi replaced two worn ball-and-socket joints with precisely fitted new ones made of high-tech metal and plastic. If you assume this is a difficult and messy process, you would be correct. But for Sajadi and his team, it was a well-choreographed ballet.

Sajadi explained each step of the operation as I stood and watched from a distance. I had to sit down a couple of times when my knees got wobbly. But soon I was able to focus on the miracle of medicine taking place before my eyes rather than, well, you know.

I spent the afternoon with Dr. John Kitchens, an ophthalmologist who specializes in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue that lines the inside of eyes. Digital imaging technology allows him to find and treat microscopic leaks in blood vessels that can reduce a person’s vision.

His most common treatment that day was injecting medicine into eyeballs. It was a process slightly painful for the observer, though not the numbed patient. But after watching shoulder- replacement surgery, I was ready for anything.

Kitchens was a busy man, dashing from one examining room to another. But he never seemed rushed when he was with patients. He carefully explained diagnoses and treatment options. He even took time to ask about patients’ families, impressively recalling many personal details about people he had seen before.

I spent the next morning in St. Joseph Hospital’s emergency room with Dr. William Wooster, an emergency-room veteran who has seen it all, sometimes in the same day. But this was a slow morning. A middle-aged man with a history of heart trouble came in with chest pains. An elderly man came in suffering from dizziness. A young man came in with an infection from a mouth full of rotten teeth.

Like more than one-quarter of all Kentuckians, the young man and several other people Wooster saw that day had no health insurance. What people forget when they debate the cost of universal coverage is that society already pays for treating uninsured people, often at high-cost emergency rooms.

I spent that afternoon making rounds at Central Baptist Hospital with Dr. Andrea Lyons, an internal medicine “hospitalist.” The young mother of two examined patients — many of them elderly and sick with a variety of issues — and worked to coordinate care with their primary physicians and specialists.

Those two days confirmed several things I already knew: Doctors have demanding jobs and exhausting schedules. They spend a lot of time updating and consulting patients’ medical records. They depend heavily on nurses, other skilled professionals and staff. And they care deeply about their work.

Like everyone else, the doctors I met had a variety of opinions about health care reform. But they all said the nation will never curb rising costs without legal tort reform. Fear of lawsuits forces physicians to pay huge sums for malpractice insurance and practice costly “defensive” medicine.

As I shadowed these physicians, I kept thinking how much of their patients’ pain and suffering could have been avoided if they had taken better care of themselves — if they had eaten better, gotten more exercise, and avoided cigarettes and substance abuse.

I wondered how we will continue to manage not only our health care system, but our rising expectations. As people live longer and get sicker, we may need to focus more on quality of life rather than simply extending it at all costs.

Medicare turned 47 years old last Monday. Bill Mahan celebrated by setting up a booth on Main Street to try to convince passersby that America’s health insurance crisis could be eased considerably if everyone had Medicare.

The Lexington retiree collected about 125 signatures for his petition. It asks members of Congress to support proposed legislation that would strengthen Medicare, which now covers more than 47 million seniors and disabled people, and make it the vehicle for providing basic universal health insurance coverage.

But Mahan spent much of his seven hours on Main Street listening to people tell him their horror stories: lack of insurance, inadequate coverage, baffling paperwork, treatment they can’t afford to get and medical bills they can’t afford to pay.

“I’ve heard so many stories, it’s just unbelievable,” said Mahan, 68, who went on Medicare three years ago. “I don’t know what to tell these people.”

What Mahan mostly tells them is that these problems are likely to continue until the United States has a single-payer health insurance system.

Under proposed single-payer systems, private doctors and hospitals would provide health care services, but the government would pay the cost from tax revenue. It is the system used in Canada and most European countries, which the World Heath Organization says offers better care for less cost than the United States does.

President Harry S. Truman proposed a single- payer system after World War II, but business interests fought it. President Lyndon Johnson was able to muster enough political support to create Medicare for seniors, which he signed into law July 30, 1965.

When President Barack Obama and a Democratic-controlled Congress pushed through health care reform legislation in 2010, a single-payer system wasn’t even considered. That was because of opposition from insurance companies, which wouldn’t even allow a “public option” choice.

Instead, we ended up with reform legislation that will cover more people and outlaw the worst insurance industry abuses but still will leave an estimated 23 million people uninsured and do too little to curb rising costs.

Republicans have vowed to repeal “Obamacare” but have proposed no adequate alternatives. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky complains that Obama’s health care law is “Europeanizing” America, but he fails to mention that those European systems provide high-quality, universal care with much less administrative cost and hassle.

The most radical GOP plan, proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and endorsed by many Republican leaders, essentially would privatize Medicare. But an independent analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found that Ryan’s plan, rather than reducing costs, would increase them dramatically, including almost doubling seniors’ out-of-pocket expenses.

Ironically, Obama’s reform law was based on market concepts developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney created a similar — and rather successful — health insurance system for Massachusetts when he was governor.

Single-payer advocates say “Obamacare” is better than what we had, but it just further subsidizes private insurance companies. It reinforces our current system’s fatal flaw: the inherent conflict between businesses trying to make as much money as possible and society’s need to provide basic health care to everyone at an affordable cost.

“Insurance companies don’t improve health care,” Mahan said. “They only add cost and complexity.”

Improving and expanding Medicare would require tax increases, but single-payer advocates think that, on balance, they would amount to far less than we now pay for private insurance that costs more and covers less with each passing year. That has been the experience in countries with single-payer systems.

House Resolution 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to create a single-payer system, has been endorsed by dozens of consumer groups, church denominations and organizations representing thousands of physicians and other health professionals. Advocacy groups include Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare (Kyhealthcare.org), Improved Medicare for All (Medicareforall.org) and Physicians for a National Health Program (Pnhp.org).

But without public pressure, the legislation is unlikely to get a fair hearing in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives or the Democratic-controlled Senate. The health insurance industry is just too powerful.

During Romney’s recent overseas campaign trip, the Republican presidential candidate praised Israel for having a healthy population while spending only 8 percent of gross domestic product on health care, compared to 18 percent in the United States.

How does Israel do it? Since 1995, the Jewish state has had a non-profit insurance system heavily controlled by the government that provides basic health care for everyone. Imagine that.

Students in the Plant to Plate program at the Family Care Center’s alternative high school began this spring by planting vegetables in donated bourbon barrels in the center’s courtyard.  Photo by Ken Gish

Sharon Aguilar said her 15-year-old brother likes to eat fast food, but she wants something better for herself and her 1-year-old daughter, Isabel.

So she is learning to buy and cook fresh food. She is even trying to grow lettuce in a little plot outside her family’s apartment, although a rabbit seems to be getting most of it.

Aguilar, 18, read recently that she and her peers might not live as long as their parents because of poor nutrition. “I don’t want that for my daughter,” she said. “Maybe I can make things different for her generation.”

Aguilar’s interest in nutrition was sparked by Plant to Plate, a service project organized by members of this year’s class of Leadership Lexington. The 33-year-old leadership development program, sponsored by Commerce Lexington, helps local professionals become more familiar with different aspects of the community.

“We started out with the idea of trying to do something with gardening, nutrition and students,” said class member Kenneth Gish, an attorney with the firm Stites & Harbison.

In the process of exploring options, the class discovered Lexington’s Family Care Center, which provides education and social services to try to help families become self-sufficient. Its programs include an alternative high school for young mothers and pregnant teens.

Leadership Lexington class members spent the fall and winter organizing Plant to Plate and enlisting the help of people and companies to make it happen. They launched the effort in February with a series of presentations for the girls about nutrition, shopping for food and gardening. They were given by dietician Judy Lawson, Alexa Arnold of the Lexington Farmers Market and organic farmer Sandy Canon.

Several of the school’s two dozen students got to attend the Bluegrass Local Food Summit, organized each March by community garden activist Jim Embry. “He’s my role model now,” Aguilar said.

Leadership Lexington class members helped the girls plant container gardens in the Family Care Center’s courtyard using half bourbon barrels donated by Buffalo Trace Distillery, soil given by Southern States, plants and tools from Fayette Seed, compost from Gunston Farms and garden hoses from Chevy Chase Hardware.

“It has been great to see the willingness of people in the community to get involved in this,” Gish said. “It was a fun process.”

The day I visited, the girls were getting lessons in healthy cooking from Jeremy Ashby, executive chef at Azur restaurant in Beaumont Centre, and Sylvia Lovely, the restaurant’s owner. They do a radio show about food, Sunny Side Up, each Saturday at 11 a.m. on WLAP-630 AM.

“One of the things we want to talk about is that local is better,” Ashby said as he told of good sources for locally grown food. He taught the students to properly cut vegetables and prepare a simple but delicious meal of almond-crusted chicken, carrots sautéed with thyme, corn bread, and macaroni and cheese.

Aguilar said she had never been a fan of broccoli, but she still might try the mac-and-cheese recipe at home. Her daughter already likes fresh vegetables better than she does, she admitted.

“It’s not as hard as I thought it was to eat healthy,” she said when asked what she has learned. “And it tastes better. I don’t like canned spinach, but I like fresh spinach.”

Plant to Plate has made a difference, said Joanna Rodes, director of the Family Care Center, which is run by the city’s Division of Family Services.

“I’m pleasantly surprised at how much they have enjoyed it,” she said of the students. “I hear them talking more about cooking at home and making healthy choices for their children.”

Rodes hopes to build on many aspects of the Plant to Plate experience, from cooking classes to growing vegetables. But it will take more volunteer efforts from individuals, companies or groups like Leadership Lexington.

“We’ve lost a lot of resources,” she said. “So we just can’t do it without people who want to do good things.”

For one thing, Rodes said, the students’ excitement about container gardening makes her think a much larger garden on the center’s grounds could be successful — if volunteers were willing to help.

“I feel that we could take any of these avenues and go 100 miles,” she said.

Jeremy Ashby, executive chef at Azur restaurant, shows Sharon Agular how to use a chef’s knife to julienne carrots. Photo by Tom Eblen

Jovanna Martinez, left, and Sharon Agular learn to cook almond-crusted chicken during a cooking class led by Jeremy Ashby, executive chef at Azur restaurant. Photo by Tom Eblen

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act turned 2 years old last week. This week, it faces a key test in the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments on challenges to its constitutionality.

President Barack Obama’s health care reform law has a curious political history. Originally developed as a conservative proposal and embraced by Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, it is now derided as “Obamacare” by GOP leaders determined to repeal it.

Many aspects of the law have yet to take effect, in part because of uncertainty caused by legal challenges. But, so far, it seems to have been good for people in Kentucky — a relatively poor state with some of the nation’s highest rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes and lowest rates of private health insurance coverage.

The law forbids insurance companies from discriminating against children with pre-existing conditions, Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, wrote in an op-ed piece. Adults also will get that protection in 2014.

Insurance companies also can no longer put lifetime caps on coverage benefits, Brooks noted, “so if a child beats leukemia at age 8, she will still be able to get the care she needs if she relapses at age 20.”

Children have received preventive care and immunizations without their parents having to pay out-of pocket costs. Young adults have been able to stay on their parents’ insurance until age 26 while they search for a job that includes health benefits — something that has been hard to find since the 2008 financial collapse.

Kentucky Voices for Health, a broad coalition of more than 250 groups in the state, notes that insurance companies must now cover more preventive care, such as mammograms and other cancer screenings, which results in better health and lower long-term health care costs.

Dr. Gilbert Friedell sees a lot of good potential in the law. The founding director of the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center started the Friedell Committee for Health System Transformation in 2008 to help facilitate improvements in a fragmented and often dysfunctional health care system.

“My question for those who want repeal is, did you like what we had before?” Friedell said. “What do you want to do instead?”

Friedell said the biggest problem with the health care system is that it isn’t a system at all, but a collection of silos and special interests whose business models are built around fee-for-service. That promotes cost escalation and pays too little attention to prevention, management of chronic conditions and coordination of a patient’s care.

While the Affordable Care Act is far from perfect, Friedell said, it is an important step in the right direction for two important reasons: it provides money and government support for new ideas and methods for improving health care and lowering costs, and it encourages discussion for continuous improvement.

“The key to success will be the active participation of the public and accountability to the public,” Friedell said. “At some point, somebody has to say, ‘How is the system working? How does it benefit the public?’ ”

Too much of the health care debate has focused on costs rather than care and prevention, Friedell said. More investment in prevention would go a long way toward bringing down overall costs.

As an example, he cited figures showing that an increase in colonoscopy exams from 2001 to 2008 among Medicare patients reduced colon cancers and deaths among those seniors by 16 percent. “It shows what we can do,” he said.

Friedell said he thinks the law is flexible enough to help states and communities tailor solutions to local needs as well as to address changes ahead. One such change is the need for more integrated care by a wider variety of professionals beyond physicians, such as nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and even social workers.

That means more teamwork — something that wasn’t happening nearly enough before the Affordable Care Act’s passage two years ago.

“You might as well call it the Affordable Opportunity Act,” Friedell said. “This gives us the opportunity to experiment, to look at new things that might work. Yes, money is a problem. If you focus on quality of care, there’s no question in my mind that it will bring down costs. But it has to be given time.”

Alan Stein, a briefly retired minor league baseball executive, hadn’t had time to hang his new shingle as a business consultant before a close friend called with Stein’s first pro bono client.

Former Vice Mayor Mike Scanlon, chief executive of the Thomas & King restaurant group, called to say that Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bluegrass needed help. Stein didn’t know how much help until he went to the next board meeting.

Alan Stein

“When I walked in, some of the staff were in tears and packing up their desks,” Stein said. The board had voted two days earlier to cease operations, the staff had been laid off and the organization was without an executive director.

But Stein thought a turnaround was possible. That afternoon, board members dug into their own pockets and went public with an emergency fund-raising appeal. Scanlon became the new board chairman.

More than $200,000 has been raised for the organization, which provides mentoring for at-risk young people in 13 Central Kentucky counties. But a big test will come this weekend, when Big Brothers Big Sisters has its largest annual fund-raiser, the Lexington Bowl for Kids’ Sake, on Saturday and Sunday at Collins Bowling Centers-Southland.

Bowling teams may register before Friday afternoon for a one-hour slot. Similar events were held in Richmond and Danville last month, and another is planned April 15 in Mount Sterling.

Several companies and organizations have given donations and fund-raising help in recent weeks, Stein said, including Thomas & King, Central Bank, iHigh.com, Central Kentucky Blood Center, Ball Homes, Quantrell Auto Group and Ashland Inc.

“I’ve been speaking all over Central Kentucky the past three weeks, and every time, some individual has stepped up with a big contribution,” Stein said. “What touched me more than anything were the small contributions we’ve received from the public — thousands of dollars, $5, $10, $20 at a time.”

Georgetown College contributed the initial month’s salary of Big Brothers Big Sisters’ new executive director, Eric Ward, the college’s former athletic director.

Eric Ward

“Things are much better today than when I walked in the door five weeks ago,” Ward said. “The program itself had no black marks against it. That’s where our reputation counts the most — how we take care of the kids. We just needed to focus more on the business side of the organization.”

Big Brothers Big Sisters got into trouble in late 2009 as the result of theft by an office manager. Bendrea Wilson pleaded guilty in May to cashing more than $435,000 in checks on the organization’s account and was sentenced to four years in prison. The resulting financial crunch led to staff cutbacks and unpaid bills.

Despite the cash-flow problems, the organization had an excellent staff and a relatively strong balance sheet, Stein said.

Big Brothers Big Sisters can be an expensive organization to run because of the background checks and supervision needed to keep the kids safe. The board decided that 90 percent of new money raised would go toward maintaining the staff of 11 and the number of Big Brother Big Sister “matches” at no fewer than the current 420. Stein and others are working with creditors to schedule repayment of old bills.

A 75-acre camp in Jessamine County, appraised at $700,000, has been put up for sale. “A lot of hard work and sweat went into that (camp), but it was a luxury,” Stein said, and selling it “could put us on some long-term sound financial footing.”

Big Brothers Big Sisters’ mission is what prompted Stein and many others to work so hard to save the organization, he said. Those mentoring relationships can be life-changers, helping at-risk kids become responsible adults and preventing costly crime, incarceration and substance abuse.

“Anyone who has been a ‘big’ knows you’re having an impact on these kids’ lives,” said Stein, who was a big brother in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “It makes a difference in a kid’s life and a family’s life and, you hope, a whole community’s life.”

If you go

Bowl for Kids’ Sake

When: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. March 17, 1-5:45 p.m. March 18

Where: Collins Bowling Centers-Southland, 205 Southland Dr.

More information: Call (859) 231-8181 or 1-800-201-8797 before Friday afternoon to register and schedule a four-person bowling team’s one-hour playing time or to volunteer at the event.

In the early 1960s, this place was the Cabana Club, and 5-year-old Holly Wiedemann came here to learn how to skate on Lexington’s only ice rink.

In the early 1970s, it was The Aquatic Club, and Wiedemann came here to swim with the Greater Lexington Swim Association and play on the adjacent putt-putt miniature golf course.

Now, this 6.2-acre site in southwest Lexington’s Gardenside neighborhood is called Parkside, a stylish new development whose first phase opened last week with 36 beautiful apartments for low-income people and offices for two social service agencies.

Parkside required creating a complicated network of public-private partnerships and financing, and it was organized and built by Holly Wiedemann.

Wiedemann, 56, is president of AU Associates, a Lexington development company that specializes in restoring old buildings and converting distressed properties into affordable housing. Over the past 21 years, the company has done $63 million worth of projects throughout Kentucky and in West Virginia with 350 housing units and more than 100,000 square feet of commercial space.

Many previous AU Associates projects have involved creating affordable housing by restoring old school buildings in small towns. She also developed the upscale Artek Lofts on Old Georgetown Street and is now working on The Bread Box, which involves converting an old Rainbo Bread bakery on Jefferson Street into a craft brewery, artist studios and the Broke Spoke Community Bicycle Shop.

Parkside was different than most AU Associates projects. Rather than “adaptive use” — that’s what AU stands for — of an existing building, the old swim and skating facility had to be demolished. Parkside’s three new, connected structures were built on the former putt-putt course.

Gardenside has changed a lot in the decades since it was a new, upscale development, then on the edge of Lexington. Back then, Wiedemann could ride her pony to the club from her family’s farm at the end of Beacon Hill Road.

The YWCA acquired the private swim club in 1977 and operated the pool and a fitness center until early 2006, when it abruptly closed because of the organization’s financial problems. After dropping affiliation with the national organization, the YWCA became the Brenda D. Cowan Coalition for Kentucky, named for a firefighter killed while responding to a domestic-violence situation.

The coalition’s plans to turn the center into affordable housing stalled, and vandalism and neglect made the facility irreparable and a threat to neighbors in the 1960s-era apartment buildings around it. AU Associates acquired the property and put together the deal to build Parkside.

Parkside’s one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments will rent from $500 to $700 per month to individuals and families earning 60 percent or less of the area median income. The apartments feature energy-saving construction and appliances, plus fancy design touches rarely seen in low-income housing.

Wiedemann said the project created 108 direct jobs, and she tried to use local suppliers when possible. For example, all of the kitchen cabinets were made by a small company near Hodgenville.

The buildings’ first floors will house rent-free offices for two non-profit organizations: Bluegrass Domestic Violence and Sunflower Kids, which works to help children maintain safe relationships with non-custodial parents.

Parkside was financed by Citizens Union Bank of Shelbyville, affordable housing tax credits and trust funds from the Kentucky Housing Corp., the Community Affordable Housing Equity Corp. and the city’s Division of Community Development. City Studios Architecture of Cincinnati designed the contemporary-style project. If Parkside is successful, an additional phase is planned on the adjacent swim-club site.

“What I think you have here is market-rate housing at an affordable price,” said Mark Offerman of the Kentucky Housing Corp. “It’s some of the nicest in the neighborhood.”

At Parkside’s dedication last Wednesday, Mayor Jim Gray also hailed it as a great example of urban infill redevelopment that revitalizes neighborhoods and preserves Lexington’s unique farmland by avoiding suburban sprawl.

“Whatever Holly Wiedemann touches is going to have a transformative effect on our city,” Gray said. “Holly has this extraordinary sense of great design. When we build a city around great design, it lasts a long time.”

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Central Bank President Luther Deaton, right, was roasted by attorney Bill Lear, center, attorney Terry McBrayer, left, as well as Alan Stein and Wayne Martin at the Salvation Army's kettle campaign kickoff. Photo by Tom Eblen

If people in Lexington don’t have much respect for you, they make fun of you behind your back. If they have a lot of respect for you, they fill a hotel ballroom for a charity fund-raiser and make fun of you to your face.

Since 2005, breakfast roasts have become an annual kickoff for the Salvation Army’s Christmas Kettle Campaign. The event Wednesday packed the Hyatt Regency’s Patterson Ballroom with more than 430 people.

This year’s honoree and victim was Luther Deaton, chairman, president and CEO of Central Bank. Deaton is an influential businessman and colorful character — a smart and savvy good ol’ boy with a big heart.

Deaton’s roasters were fellow good ol’ boys: Alan Stein, recently retired head of the Lexington Legends baseball team; Wayne Martin, head of WKYT (Channel 27); and Bill Lear, head of the law firm Stoll Keenon Ogden. Emcee Terry McBrayer, a lawyer, lobbyist and former politician, took shots at them all and received plenty in return.

“What can you say about a man who is admired, who is revered, who is loved by everyone?” Stein asked the audience. “Well, that’s for the Jim Host roast next year. It don’t think it applies to Luther.”

Deaton was born and raised near Haddix in Breathitt County, and he has lost none of his Eastern Kentucky accent after more than two decades in Lexington. So there were plenty of jokes about his mountain upbringing and the way he talks.

“He was raised so far back in the country, he had to go toward town to go hunting,” McBrayer said.

There were jokes about Deaton’s short stature, his giant houseboat on Lake Cumberland, his golf game, his politics, and his fondness for pretty women and strong drinks.

“Luther likes to cover his bases in politics,” said Stein, husband of state Sen. Kathy Stein, a Lexington Democrat. “He will tell you at the drop of a hat who he’s supporting in a political race, and he will come to you the next week and ask for a contribution — more often than not for the other guy.”

But all of the roasters’ jabs at Deaton quickly turned to praise. “He’s honest, he’s honorable. If he’s your friend, he’s always your friend. And if he’s your enemy, you’d better get the heck out of the way,” Lear said.

“The world needs more Luther Deatons,” Martin added. “Honorable, passionate people who understand that the best decisions are made not only with the head but with the heart.”

When it was finally Deaton’s turn to speak, he offered a few jabs back at his roasters. But he mostly wanted to thank sisters Joan and the late Jane Kincaid, who in 1996 put him in charge of their bank and allowed him the success that has enabled him to give back to his community and state.

Deaton and his roasters also praised the work of the Salvation Army, and they encouraged attendees to do everything they could to help the organization reach its Kettle Campaign goal of $450,000, a small increase from last year’s collection.

They urged people to give to the Army’s bell-ringers outside stores, volunteer their time as bell-ringers and set up “online kettles” to collect donations by going to OnlineRedKettle.org or SalvationArmyLex.org.

The Salvation Army said that last year in the Bluegrass it provided 142,918 meals for homeless people, 48,576 nights of lodging for women and families, emergency assistance for 42,227 people and gave Christmas gifts to 7,024 children.

The Salvation Army is often the safety net of last resort for people in crisis. As unemployment remains high and the economy slow, more people are in crisis than ever.

Deaton told the crowd that while visiting the Salvation Army’s Lexington shelter a couple of weeks ago, a woman approached him and said, “Luther, how are you doing?”

“I had known this lady for a long time, and I had no idea she was at the Salvation Army,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.

Deaton said he was glad the Salvation Army was there to help her and so many others. “What these people do is unbelievable,” he said.

In many ways, Valentine Awa is lucky. She and five of her eight children now live in Kentucky, where they can work, go to school and live in peace after years of terror in their native Congo and poverty in refugee camps in the Central African Republic.

But Awa says she can’t be happy until her youngest child — an 7-year-old girl who is frequently ill — joins the family in Lexington.

Occasionally, Awa said, she is able to speak briefly by phone with the child she hasn’t seen in years, and her two grown daughters, who are caring for her as best they can amid the poverty that grips that part of Africa.

“They say she cries, Mommy! Mommy!” said Awa, a native French speaker who struggles with English. Awa said she sends them money each month from her modest earnings to help with living expenses.

Awa, 50, is getting help from Kentucky Refugee Ministries and the office of U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, D-Ky., and from a French professor and her students at Transylvania University, where Awa works as a housekeeper.

Awa’s case is more complicated than most. But, sadly, it is not an unusual circumstance among the more than 400 Congolese refugees who have been resettled in Central Kentucky.

“There are multiple examples of people who are trying to get their children here,” said Barbara Kleine, who heads the Kentucky Refugee Ministries office in Lexington. “It’s a painful process.”

Many cases involve families separated by fighting or in refugee camps, Kleine said. Others stem from complicated family relationships, inconsistent answers given in immigration interviews, lack of documentation and government bureaucracy on two continents.

Awa’s saga began in early 2000, when the Democratic Republic of the Congo was torn by civil war, she said through an interpreter, recent Transylvania graduate Julianne Norman, who has taken up her cause.

Awa’s husband was a retired soldier, and the military wanted to press him back into service. After he repeatedly refused, he was beaten. Ten days later, he died from his injuries. Awa and her children fled across the border into the Central African Republic, wandering four days through the forests to avoid capture. They finally reached a refugee camp, where there was little food or work.

After a year, they returned to the Congo. The military men returned, telling Awa that her sons would be conscripted because of her husband’s refusal to rejoin the army. Again, the family fled the Congo. And again, there was little food or work in the refugee camp.

This time, though, Awa said an elderly man promised to feed and protect her family in exchange for sex. That resulted in her youngest daughter, Amélie, who remained behind with him when Awa and her other daughters were granted refugee status and allowed to emigrate to United States.

Amélie couldn’t get refugee status because she was born in the Central African Republic, Awa said. Since the old man died in February, Awa has been trying to regain her daughter. But that could take years, said Lydia Curtz, who is working on her case for Kentucky Refugee Ministries.

It is a difficult case because Awa didn’t initially declare her daughter, perhaps because of the circumstances of her birth. Several years have now passed, there is little documentation, and Awa made errors in her applications, Curtz said.

If the child is finally given permission to emigrate, Kentucky Refugee Ministries will pay to bring her here. But Awa must repay the loan, as she is doing for passage for herself and her children.

Awa’s case has inspired Simonetta Cochis, a French professor at Transylvania, to see how her students might work with Kentucky Refugee Ministries to help Lexington’s French-speaking Congolese refugees with longer-term settlement issues. That could include translation services, tutoring for children and even fund-raising for special circumstances, she said.

“They are coming from a different world into our world, which can be very complicated,” Cochis said. “People feel so tremendously overwhelmed by what is going on in Africa. When you hear stories like Valentine’s, how can you not want to help?”

If your home caught fire, would you put out the flames, or ignore them and focus on fixing a leaky pipe that could eventually flood your basement?

You would call firefighters, of course, and deal with the pipe after the emergency had passed. Unless, that is, you were a member of Congress.

Think of government debt as a pipe that has been springing leaks for a decade. If not fixed, it will eventually ruin the house. The fire in this analogy is America’s stagnant economy and high unemployment rate.

With that in mind, here is the best way to describe what Congress and President Barack Obama did last week: They wrapped tape around a small piece of the leaky pipe and poured gasoline on the fire.

The debt-ceiling fiasco did little to solve America’s real debt problems, although they were a start. But the bipartisan compromise will make our economic slump worse instead of better. Fears of a relapse into recession sent stocks plunging last week in the steepest market slide since October 2008.

The only realistic way to reduce government debt is to cut some spending, increase tax revenues, bring down soaring health care costs and make long-term adjustments to entitlement programs that will put them on sound financial footing. It is not rocket science; more like basic plumbing.

“We don’t have a revenue problem!” Republicans like to say. “We have a spending problem!” They are only partly right.

We do have a spending problem. We have committed what could become $3 trillion fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now we’re messing around in Libya and who knows where else on the sly. The military industrial complex spends untold billions on high-tech weapon systems we don’t need. Waste and fraud abound.

The same skyrocketing health care costs that are breaking families and businesses are making the Medicaid and Medicare programs unsustainable. Social Security must cut benefits, raise the dedicated tax or both.

But we also have a revenue problem. Sorry, Tea Partiers: you may think you are “Taxed Enough Already,” but you are taxed less than you have been in decades.

Thanks to huge 2001 tax cuts, plus tax breaks and loopholes for special interests, tax revenue as a share of gross domestic product is at its lowest point since 1950. After reaching a peak of 20.6 percent in 2000, it is now 14.8 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.

The United States has lower taxes than most developed countries, especially for wealthy people and corporations. Top marginal tax rates, tax rates on investments and corporate tax revenues as a share of GDP are the lowest they have been since World War II.

Trickle-down economic theory — what President George H.W. Bush famously called “voodoo economics” — won’t revive the economy. It will just continue a 30-year trend of stagnant middle-class wages and huge income growth for the rich.

A big reason America’s economy is stalled is that too many average people don’t have jobs. Many who do have jobs still don’t have much disposable income. Until a lot more people have more money to spend, the economy won’t recover.

Republicans’ obsession with paying down debt — and Democrats’ willingness to cave in to them — will only make the economy worse, at least for the next year or two. Republicans hope to use that for political advantage. Democrats seem scared of their own shadows.

Since banks and corporations have recovered, neither political party seems to care much about the rest of us. I guess we know who they really represent.

This obsession with reducing debt in a weak economy risks a replay of the malaise Japan suffered in the 1990s when it followed that strategy. The same thing happened here in 1937, when debt-obsessed politicians stopped much of the New Deal spending that was getting America back to work from the Great Depression. The result: a double-dip depression that didn’t end until World War II.

Political leaders need to stop admiring their taped-up pipe and notice that America’s house is burning down.

Many readers were touched when I wrote about the “extreme makeovers” that a Lexington modeling agency owner and her friends gave to 47-year-old twin sisters Hilda Bevins and Wilda Bryant.

The new hairstyles, clothes and makeup were great. But the most valuable help Bevins received was for her health, not beauty. Untreated tooth decay had left her in constant pain; a dentist and an oral surgeon donated their services to make it go away.

Oral health is a national problem, but it is worse in Kentucky than in most states. Untreated dental disease causes other health problems, hurts performance at school and on the job, and can make life miserable. Perhaps the biggest barrier to adequate dental care is cost.

“What do you do if you don’t have insurance and you’re barely making ends meet?” asked Dr. Robert Henry, who practices dentistry at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington.

That question led Henry and others from Faith Lutheran and Calvary Baptist churches in 2006 to renovate a building at 216 South Limestone and open Mission Lexington Dental Clinic.

Since then, three more churches — Good Shepherd Episcopal, Maxwell Street Presbyterian and First Presbyterian — and local organizations have joined in support of the volunteer work by 28 dentists, other dental professionals and students from the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry.

“Dental pain can be devastating, and our true mission is to get people out of pain,” said Henry, whose wife, Donita, a dental assistant, is the clinic coordinator. “This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done — and the most rewarding.”

Mission Lexington is one of several local organizations, including Southland Christian Church’s Refuge Clinic, that provide dental services to low-income people without insurance. But the need is far greater than the services available, and it is only getting worse as treatment costs rise and fewer jobs offer affordable dental insurance.

Mission Lexington’s waiting list exceeds 600 people. Patients must be at least 18 years old, live in Lexington, lack dental insurance and have income below the federal poverty level.

“If we had six times the resources, we could see six times the patients,” said Christopher Benham Skidmore, executive director of Mission Lexington, which also operates a medical clinic at 1393 Trent Boulevard for uninsured working adults whose earnings are no more than 185 percent of the poverty level.

Mission Lexington will have a fund-raiser at 7p.m. July 23 at the Barrel House, 903 Manchester Street, with food, music and a silent auction. Tickets to the Taste of Grace event are $35 in advance, $40 at the door. For more information, call (859) 273-5077.

The Mission Lexington Dental Clinic is in a building owned by Calvary Baptist that was restored with volunteer labor. Thanks to donations, a clinic worth about $300,000 was furnished for about $50,000. The clinic’s annual operating budget is about $140,000, Skidmore said.

Care is free except for dentures, which are made for dental surgery patients at a fraction of the normal cost, thanks to volunteer work by dental technician Laurie Eads.

The high cost of dentistry kept Wyvitta and Grover Brooks from seeking treatment for years, until their painful mouths led them to Mission Lexington in 2009.

“These people are a godsend,” said Grover Brooks, 55, whose restaurant cooking jobs never included dental insurance. “They’re good, man; really thorough.”

Wyvitta Brooks, 51, said she has always struggled with dental care because of her small mouth, a partial cleft palate and other birth defects. She hasn’t had dental insurance since she took a buyout from a telecommunications company several years ago. Dental care wasn’t affordable until she found Mission Lexington.

“I was so used to being turned away and going through so much pain,” she said. “You don’t realize until you get it fixed how much it affects your life. The people here are just wonderful.”

Henry, the dentist, said that is typical of Mission Lexington patients. “Most of the people who come here have been in pain for months, if not a year, and this literally changes their lives,” he said. “We’re a very small answer to a major problem.”

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The men and women we honor on Memorial Day weekend are not all lost on the battlefield.

Veterans who survive combat too often have been denied care for their damaged bodies and minds. In every war, including the American Revolution, caring for wounded veterans has been a cost this nation’s leaders have been reluctant to pay.

That is the story told in a new book by Lexington authors Robert J. Topmiller and T. Kerby Neill, Binding Their Wounds, America’s Assault on Its Veterans (Paradigm Publishers, $22.95).

Topmiller served as a Navy hospital corpsman with the Marines at Khe Sanh, one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. He wrote about his horrific experience in a previous book, Red Clay on My Boots. Topmiller earned a doctorate in history from the University of Kentucky and taught at Eastern Kentucky University.

Binding Their Wounds grew out of Topmiller’s combat experience, his study of the Vietnam War and veterans’ issues, his many trips to Vietnam to help orphans with birth defects likely caused by Agent Orange, the defoliant used by the U.S. military, and his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq.

But friends think this was a book too painful for Topmiller to finish. In August 2008, he left home with the manuscript, checked into a motel and killed himself. Neill asked Topmiller’s widow and publisher for permission to finish the book.

“I had lunch with Bob about 10 days before he died, and he was talking about the book,” Neill said. “I’m a clinical psychologist and I had no inkling at our lunch that he was in the kind of distress he was in.”

Neill and Topmiller, who was 59 when he died, became friends through their work as peace activists and a shared passion for veterans’ issues. Neill, a Navy veteran and retired psychologist, had worked several years in the Veterans Administration.

Neill finished this book with help from many people, including Peter Berres, a Vietnam veteran and scholar who wrote a chapter about Agent Orange. George Herring, a University of Kentucky historian and leading expert on the Vietnam War, wrote the forward.

After telling Topmiller’s compelling story, this well-written book chronicles the history of broken promises to and mistreatment of America’s veterans. In every war, veterans have had to lobby, protest and even fight to get promised compensation and care from politicians who wanted to save money or “move on.” Minority and women veterans fared even worse than white men.

The book explores the government’s attempts to deny care to veterans exposed to radiation, Agent Orange and other chemical hazards. And it details how the Bush administration was unprepared to care for so many injured soldiers in the early years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today’s combat veterans return home with physical wounds that would have killed previous generations on the battlefield. But perhaps the biggest challenges now, as always, are the unseen wounds.

This psychological damage has gone by different names throughout history: “soldier’s heart” in the Civil War, “shell shock” in World War I, “battle fatigue” in World War II and Korea. Now referred to as “post-traumatic stress,” these injuries have been a huge issue for Vietnam veterans and those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee last week grilled VA officials about rampant suicide, which has surpassed combat as the leading cause of death among active military personnel. Veterans now account for about 20 percent of the nation’s 30,000 suicides each year.

Neill said significant progress has been made in care for veterans in recent years, from electronic medical records and post-traumatic stress treatment to training and pay for family caregivers. But he said more must be done, despite projections that veterans’ care will push the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan past $3 trillion.

Toward the end of his life, Topmiller seemed more distressed by what was then happening in Iraq than what had happened in Vietnam. “He had hoped we had learned the lesson of wars of choice,” Neill said.

As with any medical issue, the cheapest and most effective treatment is prevention.

That is why Neill focused the book’s last chapter on how to prevent future wars.

War has become too easy, Neill said. Powerful economic interests encourage military adventurism, and an all-volunteer military distances most affluent Americans from the tragic consequences.

“The size of our military and what we invest in it is perhaps one of the reasons we use it so carelessly,” he said.

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After 33 years in the modeling and talent business, Janie Olmstead thought she had seen everything. Then she met her new friends, Hilda and Wilda.

Hilda Bevins, 47, lives in Clay City with her twin sister, Wilda Bryant, and her ex-husband, Gary Bevins. Bryant can’t work because of a heart condition. Hilda Bevins has a job at the Arby’s in Stanton, but she has no health insurance.

Bevins used to have a mouthful of bad teeth, with gaps in between where some had fallen out. She hated to work the drive-through window and would cover her mouth with a hand so customers wouldn’t see. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

“She would wake up every night crying, trying to hold the pain in,” Bryant said of her sister. “I was trying and trying to think of a way to get her some help.”

Bevins couldn’t afford a dentist and couldn’t get into a free clinic. So Bryant wrote to Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres and other TV stars, asking them for help. None replied.

Then Bryant found a business card for Olmstead, a former Miss Kentucky who owns Images Model and Talent Agency in Lexington. One of Bevins’ grown sons had picked up the card somewhere years before and had left it in a kitchen drawer. Bryant wrote to Olmstead in February 2009, asking for a makeover for her sister.

“We would like to just look as good as some of your models,” she wrote. “But we are having a hard time.”

Olmstead couldn’t get the hand-written letter out of her mind. She wrote back and eventually drove to Stanton to meet the twins. Making arrangements wasn’t easy; they don’t have a phone, so Olmstead had to reach them through letters or the fast-food restaurant’s pay phone during Hilda’s afternoon break.

Olmstead thought she could enlist friends to help her give both twins makeovers. “Wilda set all this up, but I wanted to do it for her, too,” she said.

Then she saw Bevins’ teeth. After several dentists turned down her requests for help, Olmstead explained the predicament to Georgetown insurance agent Becky Jordan at a businesswomen’s luncheon.

Jordan suggested she contact a childhood friend, Dr. Joseph Lasheen. The dentist and Dr. Gregory Erena, an oral surgeon, donated their services, removing Bevins’ remaining teeth and fitting her with false ones.

Olmstead also noticed that Bevins didn’t see well. Dr. Tammy Hoskins, a friend and optometrist in Harrodsburg, examined Bevins’ eyes and gave her glasses.

With Bevins’ health issues addressed, the makeovers began. Margaret Wagner of Insignia Hair Salon and Pam Nystrom of Seasons Salon went to work on the twins’ long hair and neglected eyebrows. Anthony Adams of the Kroger at Beaumont Centre provided grooming supplies and jewelry. Heather Hay of Mary Kay cosmetics gave them makeup and taught them how to use it. Images model Melissa Stocker taught the twins poise and etiquette.

Sandy Hicks of Dillard’s helped them choose new clothes, shoes and handbags. The twins said it was their first visit to Fayette Mall — and their first ride on an escalator.

“Each person gave them something, and I was happy to help make it happen,” Olmstead said. “I like to pay it forward when I can. That’s what we do in my business, is give you self-esteem and self-confidence.”

The twins said the generosity of strangers has changed their lives. “People didn’t recognize me at work,” Bevins said. “My hair was shorter and colored, and I had new teeth and glasses.”

The twins said they now dress more carefully and take better care of themselves. Bevins thinks she gets more respect. “You’ve got more people coming up and talking to you when you look better,” she said. “When you aren’t in pain and ashamed of yourself and your clothes.”

After high school, Bevins said, she had wanted to study nursing, but she ended up in food service. Now, she dreams of returning to vocational school. Bevins would like to be an aide in a nursing home.

“I hope to make a better future for myself,” she said. “I’m not afraid to smile now.”

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