 You are tuned in to the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm your host, Autumn Lab A-Reno, and today is Friday, April 24th. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. The show airs live at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays and repeats at 5 p.m. both days and at noon on Sundays, and you can also listen online at kdrt.org. My guests today are Brett Moraska of Davis Downtown and Sandy Hulman of the Culture Co-op, and we'll have that first interview in just a few minutes. Next Tuesday, I'll chat with Sheila Allen of Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance and Chris Granger of Cool Davis, and on Friday, May 1st, Congressman John Garamendi will be back with us. I just want to say, folks, I hope you're taking care and sheltering in place to the greatest extent possible. According to the Centers for Disease Control, we're rapidly moving towards 850,000 cases of COVID-19 and nearly 50,000 deaths from the virus in this country alone. Please stay home and hang in there, would you? Okay, on the local news front this morning, Yolo County issued a new health order and an amendment to its shelter-in-place order. Both of these are part of an emerging draft roadmap to recovery response that gradually facilitates a path forward through the current pandemic. The new health order requires wearing face coverings in public settings, including while waiting in any kind of line, while shopping, picking up food at a restaurant, seeking health care, or working an essential job that interacts with the public. Here's the key for businesses because this really rests on them to a large degree. They must require their employees, their contractors, owners, volunteers, etc., to wear a face covering at the workplace and when performing work off-site. They must inform customers about the need to wear a face covering, and this includes signage and also verbally advising those in line or in the store. They must take reasonable steps to keep people who are not wearing a face covering from entering their business and refuse service to anyone not wearing a face covering. I'm trying to imagine our friends next door at Redwood Barn Nursery barring the gate or handing out bandanas. I don't know how that's going to go down, but I understand the need for it. To clear up some lingering confusion, face coverings are not required to be worn by people who are at home, who are in the car alone or with members of their own household, or by children under the age of two years old due to risk of suffocation, or by those who can provide documentation that their doctor has said not to wear a face mask. Here's been a real point of contention. They're also not required outdoors when you're walking, hiking, bicycling, or running. I was yelled at by a neighbor the other day for walking the dog while not wearing a mask. I was nowhere around anyone else. So the key is we must comply with physical distancing during these activities, and we should also have a face covering readily accessible. Stick one in your pocket. This order will be effective immediately and enforceable as of April 27th at 8 a.m. The purpose of the order, of course, is to provide additional public health protection against transmission of the COVID-19 virus. And no surprise, we're still required to stay at home as much as possible to practice physical distancing of at least six feet and use other public health measures. It comes down to stay home and wash your hands, cover your coughs, etc. Additionally, Yolo County is adding an amendment to the current shelter in place order that allows select community activities to resume immediately. These have been assessed to be low risk for the spread of COVID-19, and they include reopening of things such as golf courses, gun and hunting clubs and archery ranges, boat ramps, and fishing. Each of these activities are not strictly prohibited by the state order, and county staff and law enforcement says they will closely monitor outdoor activities over the first two weeks. So as always, I direct you to yolocounty.org. They have a new roadmap to recovery link there. And real quickly, listener Lois Richter writes to ask, did you know that to keep your car healthy, you need to drive it for about 15 minutes once a week. During this time of shelter in place, many of us are driving very little, but just turning your car on and off doesn't help because it only drains the battery more. And letting it idle in the driveway isn't enough to get the alternator working. So the recommendation is to drive it at least once a week. And this tip is courtesy of Hoffman Automotive, who is an essential business and remains open. And thanks to them and Lois both. We're going to take a moment for music before our first call. All right, Brett Moraska is a native of Napa, California and an alumnus of UC Davis. And after spending several years running his own high level sports marketing enterprise in Sacramento, he returned to Davis, where he assisted his partner in acquiring Bohem used clothing and gifts. That was in 2015, and he continues to assist with the store's business development and marketing strategies. But these days, he is the executive director also of Davis Downtown Business Association. And he's here today to tell us about their new gifting stimulus program, which launched this week. Welcome, Brett. Thanks for having me on. You bet. So I heard through the grapevine that although the gift cards to the gifting stimulus program downtown launched this week, that it's really off to a big success already and that several businesses have have maxed out their stimulus. So before we get into the program itself, let's talk a little bit about the work of the ddba in general and your role there. And then we'll talk about this new program. Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually really excited to come on board the ddba. Although when I first came on, which was early last month, very new to the organization, the landscape was quite different. Yeah. Great timing, Brett. I know. Well, like I say, it's like not just jumping into the fire, it's like kind of in the middle of the ocean, right? Yeah. But yeah, so when you go to a new organization, I had a lot of goals. I had a lot of things that I'm looking forward to accomplishing. And the ddba as a whole is really to advocate for downtown Davis businesses focused on marketing and events and other things as well. But that really do try to bring people downtown and support these downtown businesses. So with the COVID-19 crisis, things changed instantaneously and had to kind of change focus with that. Of course, events canceled, not knowing exactly when they're going to start up again. Yeah. And of course, not only that, students leaving town, which of course is a big part of the population in Davis when they're here. And a lot of businesses having to close their doors, at least partly if not all, because of the mandates. Yeah. So had to be kind of innovative in how we're going to move forward. And it had to happen fast as livelihoods are at stake with a lot of these small businesses, their owners, their employees, et cetera. Sure. So the gifting stimulus program is a partnership with the city of Davis. So how did that come about? Yeah. So actually the ddba is when we launched this program, we are the ddba program and it's co-sponsored by ddba and the city of Davis. Great. We greatly appreciate their contribution of $25,000 into the program, which matched our $25,000 contribution as well. So for stimulus money, to date it's $50,000. Looking to infuse a total of at least $100,000 into downtown businesses because the consumers will be purchasing gift cards or gift certificates directly through our web portal and the favorite business are businesses. And for each dollar they spend, we match that amount to the business that goes into the business pocket. So if you buy a $50 gift card to your favorite business, we match $50, give it that to the business directly so the business gets $100. Each business having a $1,000 cap of stimulus funds as a whole, so up to $2,000. So to participate, a business has to be a member of the ddba and they have to register for this program, right? So it can't be just any business. Correct. And we've had a great response. We did everything we could in a short period of time to reach out to all our member businesses that we could that could benefit from this program. And we had a great response with that. It's always a challenge trying to get a hold of people, making sure there's up to date contact information, et cetera. But what we did, we got a lot of businesses in right away. And ever since we launched, there's been a lot more as well. So it's also reconnecting us to a lot of businesses that we almost, you know, some kind of lose contact with. Not everybody is a retail store where you can walk in and talk to somebody. So that was a challenge, but it's been a great response to that. Well, and even prior to COVID-19, the whole business landscape downtown changed pretty radically, you know, over the last year or two as as the Brinley properties were sold and a lot of things shifted around. So I think you came on at a very interesting time, regardless of COVID-19. Yeah, there were a lot of empty spaces downtown and some were getting filled slowly, but some have been empty for quite a while. So it's, you know, again, when you go into an organization with certain goals, that is something definitely that I was looking at and trying to solve. I'll figure out how to solve. But obviously at this moment is that's definitely not the focus, but hopefully this really changes how people shop. Yeah. And ultimately the goal for the DDBA and even through this program and now realizing how COVID-19 is changing people's spending habits. We want to make sure that people are really focusing local because what downtown of any city is the central core, right? And that city center of events and vibrancy. And so if it's not there, then it's, you know, we lose a lot of what Davis has been and it should be again. Right. I'm guessing largely because of the student population. We have a very high proportion of, you know, restaurants and cafes and in the downtown area, many of whom are obviously they're they're hampered right now. But they have been incredibly creative in creating options such as, you know, curbside pickup or different forms of takeout, you know, if they weren't doing takeout before. I read something and this is not a hard news fact. I just want to run it by you and see if you know. I read a friend's post today who said that a restaurant tour thanked her for doing her dinner pickup herself instead of going through something like DoorDash or Grubhub. Because the restaurant, they actually take a 25% cut from the restaurant for that. Do you do you know if that's true? Yeah, those typical services do, typically, and they can't speak for all of course, but they charge the business and the customer both. That's how they make their money. I do believe that there were some, some forgiveness, at least on the, on one side, the customer side. During this, but realistically, most of these are really, you know, big businesses and it does take, you know, off, you know, a good percentage of that sale to the businesses. So it is tough. It is, it is great if somebody can go safely and legally, right? Go pick food up themselves and, you know, support the business in that fashion. My family's done more takeout in the last month than we normally do in a year. And, you know, because it is, it's just what we need to do right now. We want these businesses to be here when this is all done and we want to be able to, you know, to walk in. Well, let's talk a little bit about the other work of the DDBA. The way I'm mostly, most directly connected to you is through the Second Friday Artabout that you all sponsored, which is fabulous. I chair the Arts Alliance of Davis and so I've worked a lot with your marketing folks to, you know, to get word out about the Artabout and to collaborate on that. We miss it. We just want you to know we all miss it. It's a great thing. Yeah, certainly, certainly. And we hope to get it up and running as soon as possible again. But it's not looking like it's going to happen at least through mid-summer and when we don't know beyond that. It is going to take at least a month, of course, to get things back in order again with that. So there will be a little ramp up period. You've got to, you know, got to schedule people and end the venues, entertainment, etc. So we hope to get up and running again. But we do have something also exciting in the works and making internally is we are, and it's not certain it's a, it's in process right now. Conceptual process, I should say, is a communal art project that can bring people together in the community together in a way of what, it's almost to try to share your emotions and what you've gone through during COVID-19. And to be able to express that in art through different mediums. And the goal would be to showcase this art at our first art about once again and have it available for the community to see. And so different age groups would be able to participate and be assigned or you can get something for, you know, winning that age group. As well as the businesses being able to benefit from it for bringing people in. And also the possibility of taking some of those pieces and making products, perfect stickers, magnets, maybe t-shirts, things like that. Like I said, this is something, these are things that the BBBA kind of works on behind the scenes. It's trying to be innovative in that way and try to bring something new and exciting to the community. And really tying in the emotion. And the BBBA slogan is powered by the people. Yeah. Well, this, with this art project, yeah, with this art project you're speaking my language. So you'll have to let me know how Davis Media Access and the Arts Alliance can help support you in that. We need to wrap this segment so I want to make sure that people know how to find out more about the Gifting Stimulus Program and where to reach you if they want more information. Okay. Well, it has been amazing response by the community and we thank the community greatly for the support and showing their love. It really is what it's kind of all about here. This isn't about, you know, the business is greatly profiting. This is about helping them come back. So they can go to davisdowntown.com and right on the homepage there is information on how to access the portal. People to support for these businesses to actually get the stimulus money, the funds, the match funds. They have to go through this portal on our website, not fly directly from the businesses. So they can do that if a business hasn't registered, they can do so as well. But just to let you know, this has been an amazing response and right now we are really close to the cap on this. It's been unbelievable in a day and a half. But we are currently very actively trying to find more donors to keep this program going. All right. Well, let me know how that evolves so we can provide updates here on the show. Yes. Absolutely. I want to thank you so much for calling in today. It's been a pleasure to speak with you and best of luck with the DDBA. We have to keep dreaming of our future events. You know, we have to keep that hope alive. Yep. We'll be back. All right. Thanks so much, Brett. Thank you. Have a good day. All right. I was reading a New York Times article today about childhood vaccine rates dropping dangerously as parents are avoiding doctors' offices. In my interview with Sutter Davis Hospital CEO Rachel McKinney earlier this week, we actually talked about that continuity of care, even as COVID-19 is ravaging every, you know, ravaging the land. She reminded us that every care and precaution is being taken to keep patients safe and that routine wellness care should not be abandoned at this time. The Times article notes that as parents around the country cancel well child checkups to avoid coronavirus exposure, public health experts fear they're inadvertently sowing the seeds of another health crisis. So questions about individual care should always be directed to one's personal health care provider. All right. When the news started breaking about how COVID-19 was disproportionately affecting communities of color, it wasn't all that surprising when protests by far right white people started up with the underlying message being, sure, let's open up the country. It doesn't affect us. My next guest is well-known for her work for equality and equity in our social, economic, educational, and political systems. Here to tell us more is Sandy Holman, Executive Director of the Culture Co-op. Welcome, Sandy. Great morning to you, Autumn. How are you doing? I'm doing fine, thanks. It's good to hear your voice. Good to hear yours too. So this is a big topic and we only have a few minutes to chat here today. I know. But although economic inequality affects people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds, African Americans in particular face structural inequality on nearly every level and it's taking folks out in droves, this virus. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit more about that. Well, you know, we have been dealing with historical constructs, policies, practices, white supremacy ideology, anti-oppression, since the inception of the country. And these things don't go away and it's created structures, as you said, that create a compounded institutional impact disproportionately on people of color, poor people, other marginalized cultural groups. And, you know, the pandemic is just exemplifying the magnitude of when we don't deal with the zoo in the room, not just the elephant, what happened, and yet the right people are dropping in droves. And that's why I have been wanting to do this cost of darkness documentary for so long. Right. So you've run the Culture Co-op. I don't even know how long it's been. I've known you for a long time and you've been doing that nonprofit work for a long time. The cost of darkness is a documentary looking at all of this. And it's something you've been working on with your interns over a period of years. You're getting close to finishing, right? Yes. We basically have started to do previews because it actually will officially release in 2021, but we are using it now. And it had done two previews and we're getting ready to actually partner with some organizations in Northern California and the East Coast when this pandemic hit. But this documentary is a labor of love. It was done in partnership with my brilliant, incredible interns, most of whom are from UC Davis and we met with so many obstacles and everything, but oh my God, it is so incredibly powerful. And I want people to understand the importance of this and the reason why we did it. We've done this because we want to give people a foundational introduction on these things, structures, policies and all those things which are affecting cultural groups and systems so they can hit the ground running with their strategies. We want people to facilitate a deeper discussion of historical and equity oppression and supremacy ideologies so that deeper solutions can be explored. And we want people to have a foundational knowledge base of this concept of compounded institutional impact and the complicated structures they create which require way more creative and thoughtful strategies. Marching is great for example, but we've got to go much deeper. And I really want to align with my brothers and sisters to kind of plant seeds and an impetus for a systems approach that's built on evidence-based practices, goals, lessons from our ancestors and elders and which really address the root causes we are seeing. So that we can create interventions that are more likely to be successful long-term. Right, because it is that systems approach. Sandy, I watched the trailer this morning on YouTube, the trailer for The Cost of Darkness. It was very powerful and it really makes the point that after decades of doing all this work for equality, we are still so far behind. And of course the current administration has set us further behind. So what does that look like to tackle it on so many fronts? I mean it seems like an almost impossible task and yet we must. Yes, we must. And that's why I wanted to do this, because we can't have new generations starting from the letter A. We need to get them to Z as fast as possible. And that's why I'm doing this documentary and working on a book called Lessons Learned from Our Ancestors and Elders. So they can understand that we can't just do perversial kinds of things. Again, Marxists are huge, but they need to be done in conjunction with understanding what the root causes are. So for example in our political system, to register people to vote is great. But if we're not dealing with the structural things that we still have an electoral college that was based on slavery by the way, that we need to have public funding so other candidates besides rich folks can run, that we need to address gerrymandering and voter suppression and those kinds of things, that corporations should not be treated as an individual, then we're not really addressing the political things that are going to hinder us being successful. And that's just to give you an example in one system. So it's really, really important that no matter what, no matter how daunting it is, how crazy it is, how hard it is, that we understand we still have to try, but we have to operate from the sense of a mosaic working together, where I come together with Otto, I come together with people like Andrew and other groups out there. I'm just thinking of all my colleagues and stuff and we each have our talents and we attack different aspects of the institution as a collective, as a mosaic, so that we're not distracted by every single crisis that comes along and we forget who the real beast is. Which is really the various and toxic system. Yeah, what you were just talking about with the political system is about representation, but then we have other huge system issues like the industrial prison complex for one that's run for profit and really run largely on the shoulders of people of color. Yes, and so that's why the documentary is dealing with seven key institutions. We are dealing with the political system, criminal justice, education, media, healthcare, the environment. I mean it's very powerful what these young people have done under my direction and working with them and they have stayed the course and I am so proud. You guys are going to be blown away and a few people have gotten a chance to see a few segments of it already, but it's powerful and again it's going to inform more strategic strategies and from a systemic, a human systems approach, which is what we have to do. And tomorrow on Facebook at 2 p.m. I'll be doing my first Facebook live interview with someone for about an hour that goes into these things more and I hope people join us. You know you're talking to this non-techie here, but I am determined to learn as we are experiencing this pandemic so that I can continue this critical work. It is more vital than ever and I'm seeing colleagues, activists, other folks on the front lines and who have been on the front lines, like you said, dropping dead. I have a fire under me and I plan to do whatever I can to make a difference. Okay, Sandy, is that Facebook live on Sandy Holman's page or the Culture Co-op page? How do people find it? You know, I'm going to have to figure that out automatically. I'm scared of Sandy Holman's page, but I think it's also on the Culture Co-op page. Someone is helping me out of text. That's okay, you know, we're all learning here. We're all having to develop new skills. You know, I have a lot of, my superpowers love and trying to do what's right, but when it comes to technology I have a lot of work on to do. But I will figure that out. But people are friends with me and I tend to link out to some people that I can send it to you also. Okay, send it to me and I'll share it. I want to thank you for your time here. As I said, it was just a few minutes to talk about something really big, but I want to direct people's focus and attention to the fact that the documentary will be coming out next year. So thank you so much for joining us, Sandy. No, thank you for having me. You have a wonderful day. All right, you take care. Okay, bye-bye. That was Sandy Holman with the Culture Co-op, culturecoop.org, or find it on Facebook. I want to thank you all for tuning in. I'm going to be back next week with local nonprofit rock stars Sheila Allen and Chris Granger. Two people I really love working with and they're both doing fabulous work adapting to the COVID-19 virus and everything else. From the KDRT studio, I am Autumn Laberino and this has been the COVID-19 community report.