Click On This is a collection of weekly found treasures. It’s our version of inverting our pockets and showing you our seashells. Have a shell to share? Send it here.
Still in L.A. for our ~regularly scheduled~ Sunday edition of Click On This, but on Friday because there are some things here are time sensitive. Included are new items that have come across my line of vision, updates from my last missive, and some thoughts, ideas, just generally positing.
A few newer things/opportunities I’ve noticed from the past week:
For the knitters: If you lost your stash in one of the fires, Purl Soho will help you replenish. This was shared via newsletter with instructions to simply reply to the email. This is the address: customerservice@purlsoho.com
For the parents: Block Shop (Atwater Village) has used their personal collective superpower of creating a supportive and bright and fun space to put together a landing spot for parents (and other people) to relax or get some work done while children are supervised with various ongoing games and activities. What a damn gift. (This is what it’s like.)
For the kids: Space and time to talk, play, process and get together to think about what just happened to heir hometown! Led by child therapists and trauma specialists. (Info here.)
For people nearby with any bandwidth left: Master List of volunteer opportunities. (Linked here.)
For people with a mouth: Cinnamon roll fundraiser!!!!!!!!! (Yum.)
For people with their wallets out: A new GoFundMe for domestic workers of Pacific Palisades. (Linked here.) As the Palisades is an affluent area, there’s an entire support economy that relies on it functioning normally. This fundraiser is seeking support for the nannies, housekeepers, et al. who will be unable to collect income during this time. (As an aside, if someone is in need of a housekeeper in Los Angeles, I happen to know the best one, who is an utterly fantastic human, and who will need ongoing non-Palisades clients!)
Updates to some of the links I shared previously:
The master list of resources is now a Reddit page. Here’s the link.
That Kalon studios free shop now has it’s own IG account, so that you can get more direct information on when they’re restocked, etc. Link to that here.
Finally, the Free Shop happening in Highland Park tomorrow keeps expanding its participants and offerings. It should be really fantastic. Link here. Big, big love to Lizz for this amazing effort.
Not to be all “Block Shop, Block Shop, Block Shop,” but a few weeks ago, the sisters shared a creative visioning meditation, with journal prompts. (Here’s the link to it.) I keep thinking about the rebuild efforts that are about to take place; I keep feeling intensely worried about developer influence and, in the case of Altadena, the potential imminent loss of culture, history and the vibrancy that comes with that. In this meditation, there’s a pretty moving part (well, to me) about community and who are the people that aid in, support a vision. True, it’s more woo-woo than I usually get, but: What if there is a collective shared visioning and, instead of popping up structures ASAP, those on the ground are able to put together something special, again. I’m watching this collective and sort of lying-in-wait to see if there are ways to support from afar.
At the very least, and on a practical level, I am wondering if there’s a way to put grassroots pressure on the Capitol to extend Prop 131 to new builds in Altadena. After seeing this post, I wonder if the Movement for Black Rights is a good candidate to lead that pressure campaign for us to all rally around?
Some thoughts! I don’t know, respond in the comments if you have thoughts or think these ideas are (a) great or (b) hideously dumb.
Prop 13 is an important real estate law that applies to all of California. The short hand is this: Your tax rate is locked in when you purchase a home, based on your purchase price. It allows people to stay in their home when they may otherwise be unable to afford increasing rates due to surging home values. It is especially impactful to seniors and to multigenerational homes (like so many of the homes in Altadena). However, a new build resets Prop 13 to the valuation of the new build—this would force a lot of multigenerational families that have passed down a certain property to be unable to continue to afford it.