 Hello and welcome to City View, where we give you an inside view of the City of Columbia. I'm your host, Alicia Utsi. In our top story, we take you to National Night Out and the Kickoff. The Kickoff event was held on Friday, August 3rd at Spirit Communications Park. The National Night Out Kickoff is an annual event that is held prior to National Night Out in the neighborhoods. This year's Kickoff event was held at Spirit Communications Park, which was a first. The event featured presentations, speeches, and exhibits from the Columbia Police Department, the Columbia Fire Department, and several other city departments. Following the Kickoff event, it's time for National Night Out in the neighborhoods. And this year, several neighborhoods participated. Know our neighbors or who know our neighbors. We don't see them and talk to them on a regular basis. And this is just at least one night a year, you know, that people intentionally say I'm going to, no matter how busy I am, I'm going to come out, I'm going to be with my neighbors, I'm going to have some great ice cream and food and, you know, and see people and just be neighborly and be a community. Everybody gets a chance to meet new neighbors that they probably didn't know before and communicate with each other. The police and the community together, a positive environment, I think goes a long, long way, especially in today's environment, today's society, where maybe the police and the community's relationships aren't ideal and the eyes of many people just gives all of us an opportunity to kind of help connect the dots, help bridge the gap. The people get to know each other, they get to know their neighbors real well. And for something like this, National Night Out, it's always a great chance for people to come out and meet people they didn't know and just kind of just hang out and visit, especially with the police here, the Columbia police. Not only giving out a lot of school supplies to our youth in the community, but also it's really, really good and neat to see different law enforcement agencies come together along with the community. I think that sends a strong, strong message to our communities when it comes to offering a safer environment. Columbia, we're so strong in our neighborhoods, the great part about it is that you've got neighborhoods all over the city having National Night Out, some neighborhoods coming together so you're not just with the people in your neighborhood, but you're with people with adjacent neighborhoods. And so to me, it's just a great night of community and what better way to spend a famously hot August evening. Strong neighborhoods are the foundation of our community and neighborhood growth is very important. Recently, a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held for new homes in the Edgewood community. We are extremely proud of this project and commend the Columbia Housing Development Corporation's Board of Directors and staff for the work they have done to provide quality housing in this community. Our goal in community development is to fund projects that offer opportunities for home ownership and rental housing. This project is one that includes mixed incomes. Well not only a ribbon-cutting ceremony is held for new homes, but also new business ventures. We venture into North Columbia and Northman Plaza for the new ATM ribbon-cutting ceremony at Wood Forest National Bank. Thank you to the Columbia Empowerment Zone for the great work you've done in North Columbia and across Columbia for years. The partnerships you've been able to develop with fantastic institutions like Wood Forest Bank, Community Bank, that has a truly national and global reach can't be understated. The ability to leverage a half million dollar investment in North Columbia and continue to serve as a great partner for small businesses in this incredibly transformational neighborhood is so important. Now we go from banks to barbecue. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was also recently held at Bone and Barbecue, which is the first restaurant in the Bull Street District. The litany of successes one by one that collectively working together we've been able to achieve right here in this beautiful historic Bull Street District. This is an important day for a number of different reasons. Not just another notch on successes but a homecoming, an accomplishment for one of our own. Where Steve Benjamin continues his books to boys and girls initiative and this time a kickoff was held at Greenview Park. He was joined by police chief Skip Holbrook. God has given you incredible gifts and your job, our job is to help you find those gifts. You may find them in books, you may find them in music, you may find them in sports, whatever that gift is. But once we help you find that gift, it's your job to do something with that gift, all right, to help change your lives, to help impact your families, to help impact this community that you live in, all right. The Columbia Arts Center is always an outlet for creativity and this year they partnered with the Refugee Task Force of Columbia, which yielded a program that offered an opportunity for children to participate in a kids camp, especially for refugees. We have partnered with the Refugee Task Force Lutheran Family Services Refugee Resettlement Program and the Carolina Survivor Plan and we're working with the refugee population. We have about 10 refugee children in here this week that the Refugee Task Force raised money for eight of them and then we had a private donor donate money for two others. And we've got children from the Congo, from the Karen population, they're from Myanmar and most of them had to flee to Thailand and then we've got some Vietnamese. We've gotten familiar with the Congolese children since April when they came to one of our World's Creativity Presentation and we fell in love with them. The children are so joyful and full of life and energy. They've had a rough story. The Congolese children at about the age these are now, the girls would have been taken and enforced to be brides for the army and the boys would have already been confiscated to be soldiers. So we've got them enjoying life in campus. And we've also got some of our American children in here so we're trying to encourage them to be friends. It's a positive experience for everything and we're very glad to be able to provide this opportunity for the children to interact with other American children. All these children are in school. Sometimes some of us need to step forward and let folks know they're wrong. We're doing our little small part in our little corner of the world to do that. Well that wraps up this edition of City View where we give you an inside view of the City of Columbia. Be sure to stay tuned to City TV for information regarding the City of Columbia and news and upcoming events. You can also follow us on our social media platforms and check out our website on a 24-hour basis at columbiasc.net. And remember we are Columbia.