Green Columbus
Earth Day Community Service Volunteer Events and Earth Day at the Commons
Volunteer dates: April 8-15, various locations
Earth Day Celebration: April 22, 1-7pm, Columbus Commons, Town and High Streets, downtown Columbus, Free
The largest Earth Day volunteer service project in the nation! Service sites vary in size from 5 to 300 volunteers and range from neighborhood litter sweeps, community gardens, and river-cleanups to tree planting and invasive species removal.
We will cap off Earth Day Volunteer Week with a community celebration on Saturday, April 22, 2017. Join us rain or shine at Columbus Commons downtown for a day-long celebration featuring local music, family-friendly activities, eco-friendly artisans, and Columbus' best food trucks.
Main Stage schedule/line-up:
1:30pm-2:15pm - Joey Hendrickson and The Sleepless Nights
2:45pm-3:30pm – Mr. Eric Music (4 Kids rocks!)
4:00pm-4:45pm - Clemens & CO
5:30pm-6:45pm – Hebdo

When a group of Ohio State University students interrupted an OSU Board of Trustees meeting on April 7, the timing was perfect for causing maximum embarrassment to the university’s administration.

While 22 members of the of the Student/Farmworker Alliance and Real Food OSU waited in the back of the conference room at the Longaberger Alumni House,  board members and students gave glowing reports of OSU’s philanthropic programs. The College of Dentistry gives free care to underserved communities with the Ohio Project. The Buckeye Civic Engagement Connection provides tutoring for student athletes at East High School.

Then university president Michael Drake gave his annual report to the board, waxing eloquent about OSU’s service to the community and connecting it to swelling enrollment in recent years. But before he finished, PhD student Henry Anton Peller interrupted him.

“Our environmental and human needs are desperate and urgent. We need to transform our economy, our politics, our policies and our priorities to reflect that reality. That means reversing the flow of our tax dollars, away from war and militarism, and towards funding human and environmental needs, and demanding support for that reversal from all our political leaders at the local, state and national levels.

We and the movements we are part of face multiple crises.  Military and climate wars are destroying lives and environments, threatening the planet and creating enormous flows of desperate refugees. Violent racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia and other hatreds are rising, encouraged by the most powerful voices in Washington DC.

Jacques Offenbach’s four-hour The Tales of Hoffmann is simply one of the greatest operatic extravaganzas I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing, from opera houses at Manhattan’s Metropolitan to Zurich to Croatia to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, etc. The sprawling story (libretto by Jules Barbier, based on his and Michel Carre’s play, derived from three stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, a Prussian Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror), accompanied by a soaring score, explores the love life of the poet Hoffmann (Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo), as he embarks on an odyssey seeking the golden fleece of the ideal woman. He’s a sort of 19th century Henry Miller off on a sensuous sojourn that takes the gallivanting wordsmith across Europe with destinations vividly brought to life by costumer/scenic designer Giovanni Agostinucci’s sets, exquisitely wrought without peer.