community

The Asian Community Development Corporation is rebuilding the sense of community in Boston's Chinatown through five free evenings of arts and entertainment - the Third Annual Films at the Gate.

What is your neighborhood doing to rebuild or enrich its sense of community?

Starting today, Wednesday, Sept. 3rd, through Sunday, Sept. 7th, for the third year in a row, a vacant lot near Boston’s Chinatown Gate will become a FREE outdoor theater, showing Kung-Fu and classic Chinese-language films under the stars.

Films at the Gate is a collaborative project of several Chinatown residents and the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC).

The series seeks to:

• Improve awareness of Boston’s Chinatown as a site of cultural activity
• Restore a tradition of shared, public experience of Chinese-language films in Chinatown
• Provide temporary community use of Chinatown’s underutilized spaces, draw foot-traffic to neighborhood restaurants, and make downtown Boston a destination beyond the working hours.

Seen as non-essential services, libraries across our state are suffering budget cuts in the form of slashed hours, or even closed doors.

Magnifying local budget cuts is the loss of state certification and its associated rights, such as inter-library loans, that can occur when towns cut funding to libraries disproportionately to the rest of town priorities.

So what?

Ruth Hathaway, manager of the Holbrook Library calls the library, "the ultimate community center for all ages.” Ruth, and countless Massachusetts citizens like her, are fighting to save these public structures that provide opportunities for education and community interaction.

Unless Holbrook voters support a Proposition 21/2 tax override on June 10, the doors of that community center will be locked.