It’s a nice addition to a City Council meeting when the Council can recognize and applaud special guests. We had two opportunities to do just that at last night’s Council meeting.
These are the ABC girls from the ABC House. The A Better Chance Foundation (ABC) is a charitable foundation that seeks to bring high school students from struggling urban school districts into strong urban and suburban school districts, like Eden Prairie, in other parts of the United States. These girls are all students at Eden Prairie High School. The girls all live together in group quarters and are supervised by two resident assistants. The chief of the operations is my friend Gardner Gay. If you ever met Gardner, he’d be your friend too. He’s a likeable guy with the right heart for this organization. He’s a great ambassador for ABC.
In no particular order, the ABC girls are: Rachel Wright (So) from Gary, Indiana; Avery Glover-Wright (Fy) from Oakland, California; Sheyla Soriano (Fy) from Bronx, New York; Hyunhi Chong (Sr) from Los Angeles, California; Carolina Ogaz (Jr) from Santa Ana, California; Magda Pastrana (So) from Santa Ana, California; and Kim Tran (So) from Santa Ana, California.
This is Carla Kress. Carla is a Recreation Coordintor for the City of Eden Prairie. Carla manages our Senior Center and our therapeutic recreation services. TR, as therapeutic recreation people like to call it, is something that Eden Prairie is a leader in around the Twin Cities, and probably the Midwestern United States.
Carla is receiving an award in this photo from Mayor Nancy Tyra-Lukens in a formal ceremony at our Council meeting last night. Carla received this award originally at the Annual Conference of the National Institute on Recreation Inclusion (NIRI) on September 9, 2005. The award is the 2005 Excellence in Inclusion award. One person in the nation gets this award each year from NIRI. Our Carla got it this year.
Congratulations, Carla! We’re very proud of your work for our citizens.
