#Visionary Arkansans 2018

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018

Inspired men and women who are making great things happen.

Benito Lubazibwa Working for economic mobility.

Benito Lubazibwa wants to do more than encourage African-American entrepreneurship, though that is the primary focus of his own startup, Remix Ideas. "Integrating capital with humanity" is what the native of Tanzania and University of Central Arkansas alumnus says is the ultimate goal: to make Little Rock a more connected, integrated place to live, to break down barriers not just to capital — an entrepreneur's biggest challenge — but between people.

That's what Remix's Night Market in the Bernice Garden has been able to achieve on a small scale. The Night Market's slogan is "One City, One Love," and serves as both a platform for startups — 40 vendors were at the September event — and a place to mingle, listen to music, dine and dance. Nearly all the vendors were women, a fact that pleased Lubazibwa mightily, and established businesses on Main Street indirectly benefited. The event, which Lubazibwa and chief creative officer Angel Burt organized, featured not just African-American women starting out in business, but food trucks featuring the cuisine of many nationalities: Venezuelan, Mexican, Colombian and African. It also had a broader mission than to help create business: It also created jobs. The men setting up and taking down the market were hired intentionally from the ranks of SoMa's homeless population, and Lubazibwa said they were eager, excellent employees who not only showed up on time, but early. They were paid $15 an hour and given T-shirts identifying them with the Night Market. "I told people, the people you have been serving, dancing with, those are the people you call homeless. I call them freedom fighters — they have to fight against whatever is holding them back," Lubazibwa said.

Remix has been in business for a year, working with financing partner Communities Unlimited Inc., which provides microloans, and Innovate Arkansas, an initiative of Winrock International. It hosts the "Remix Pitch Challenge," awarding $1,000 to the winning startup pitch, and will hold a "Celebration of Startups" networking and pitch challenge party from 5-10 p.m. Dec. 14 at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, 201 E. Broadway in North Little Rock. (Tickets are $10.)

Remix seeks to inspire would-be entrepreneurs with its radio show "Remix Ideas." Creative officer Burt interviews business people on the half-hour show on KABF-FM, 88.3, which airs at 11:30 a.m. Wednesdays.

Remix has also worked out discounts for use of co-working spaces at the Little Rock Technology Park and the Innovation Hub. Remix clients will be able to use space at the tech park, at 417 Main St., for $50 a month, and at the Hub for $40 a month.

Remix has several workshops and events lined up for 2019, including a 12-week Startups Business Academy, beginning in February, for people who have the ideas, but not the know-how, on running a business. "Eighty percent of startups fail," Lubazibwa said. The business academy will be practical, showing people how to test their ideas. "You don't buy a car without driving it," he said. "You test drive."

Remix will also hold three pitch challenges and the Ideas Weekend festival July 25-27.

Lubazibwa is also working to introduce the Impactor card, which for $10 will give card holders discounts at participating businesses. It's similar to the Partners Card that the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences issues to support cancer research, but instead of two weeks, the Impactor Card will be good for a year. Several businesses have signed on to the idea already, including Remix Ideas' most high-profile success story, Kontiki African Restaurant; and Pyramid Art Books and Custom Framing. Garbo Hearne, who owns Pyramid, said she was impressed with Lubazibwa's energy and his ideas for Little Rock. Lubazibwa said the card would be a "win-win" for customers, giving them a break, and businesses, who would see more customers.

Lubazibwa said he worked in Africa after graduating from UCA in 2001, but realized that Arkansas was as much in need of the same "ecosystem" — a favorite word of startup promoters — to address similar barriers to economic success as were the places in Africa he worked.

It was his parents who instilled in him the notion that the important thing in life was to help others. "They believe that you are judged not by your harvest, but by the seed you are planting. ... That's been in my life since the beginning."

The next movement among people of color will be an economic movement, Lubazibwa believes. "Martin Luther King did an excellent job on civil rights. Now it's time for this generation to fight for economic mobility," not just for African Americans, but "women, Latinos, everybody." He believes Remix is part of that movement.

For information on Remix workshops and events, go to remixideas.com.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Brandon Markin A curious and roving eye.

Brandon Markin's approach to photography and life are the same: "You get one go-round and so you might as well try it all and put yourself into situations that make you uncomfortable and just deal with that. ... I look at photography as an extension of who I am as a person and a way to document my learning experience as I go through life."

That deep curiosity shines through in a scan of his online portfolios on Instagram (@bnikram) and brandonmarkin.com. There you'll find a tender black-and-white portrait of a young black man holding a diaper-clad baby who regards the camera with a blank wonder, while her father, eyes downcast and with the hint of a grin, plays with her impossibly small baby fingers. It's captioned "From a front porch in Helena. Talking boxing with TJ." Another black-and-white image from January is all light and shadow, a big band of men in cowboy hats on a stage, with beams of light emanating from spotlights out into a sparse crowd on the dance floor, dark shapes huddled tight. It's titled "Quinceañera de Juliana."

Like everyone else's Instagram page, Markin also includes pictures of his family. His wife and frequent muse, Mariella, is a student at the Clinton School of Public Service. The family traveled to Bocas del Toro, an island chain province of Panama, over the summer while Mariella did her required service project, so you'll also find pictures such as one Markin captioned "Girl in Bahia Honda, Panama with her dolls. Life is sweet and fleeting." It's of a small girl in a white dress standing in front of a giant window, looking warily outside the frame and clutching her dolls tightly to her chest.

Markin, 43, of North Little Rock, prefers analog film photography. "I've always been drawn to that process," he said, though he didn't start young. "It wasn't until I was well into adulthood [that] I had the resources to pursue that." Why film? "Part of it is nostalgia. We're nostalgic creatures. Photography is the nostalgic medium. What you're doing, in a way, is stopping time. You're capturing light from a moment that will never be repeated again." You also learn to appreciate motion, he said. "When most people do digital photography, that obsession with perfection means, if they're shooting something with low light, they'll try to stop the motion. But if you're doing it with film, that motion turns into a beautiful thing, with waves and streaks and such."

He's part of noted photographer Rita Henry's Blue-Eyed Knockers collective in Little Rock. The group gets together regularly at Henry's Stifft Station studio to hang out and process film. Through that group and under his own initiative, he's done a number of projects: pics of political protest, of the dilapidated Hotel Pines in Pine Bluff, of the Kanis Bash, where skateboarders and punk and hardcore bands gather at the Kanis Park skate bowl.

Markin makes a living as a photographer, which means he shoots products, events and magazine portraits with a digital camera. But he's committed to continuing his art photography. He has a solo retrospective coming in November 2019 at the William F. Laman Library in North Little Rock. He dreams of traveling through Central and South America on a photo project (Mariella is from Ecuador, so he's traveled to South America before). He met Adger Cowans, the famed fine art photographer, at a talk at Hearne Fine Art earlier this year and asked him for advice. "He said, 'Do what you do and don't worry about where the money is going to come from. If you're true to your spirit and vision, it may take a while, but the money will come.' " For now, Markin is content to keep on keeping on. "Any day that I can be walking around with the camera taking photographs and doing what I love, that's a win for me."

—Lindsey Millar

Jared Henderson Lost the battle, but sees hope for Democrats in the longer political struggle.

First, a bit of news for the politicos for whom it's already time to begin worrying over elections in 2020: Count Jared Henderson of Little Rock out as a candidate for the U.S. Senate or Congress. But don't take that as a sign that his political fire is dwindling. Yes, as the Democratic nominee for governor, he got walloped by Governor Hutchinson in November. (Henderson got 31.7 percent of the vote, while Hutchinson secured 65.4 percent.) That's a big gap, but Hutchinson was a popular incumbent; no one gave Henderson much of a shot to defeat him, particularly considering Henderson had little to no name recognition.

After 10 months of hard campaigning, meeting and greeting and stump-speaking across the state, Henderson may be beat up a bit, but at 40, with a decorated resume and a Clintonesque gift for making policy relatable, he has the look of a star prospect for Arkansas Democrats.

So what's next? He hasn't charted a path yet, but says he plans to "stay engaged in politics." He won't run against U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton or U.S. Rep. French Hill, not because he doesn't think they're beatable in two years, but because he's got a young family and isn't ready to spend 60 percent of his time in Washington, D.C.

After getting two advanced degrees from Harvard, in business administration and public administration, Henderson worked for NASA and for McKinsey & Co., the worldwide consulting firm. He returned to Arkansas to lead the state branch of Teach for America, with a plan to eventually get into politics. "But I was perpetually six or 10 years away until Donald Trump got elected," he said. "When that happened, especially as a new father, I said, 'We've got to get a good, competent, compassionate, inclusive party back in the state,' and the fastest way is just to get in and do it. And, yeah, we may continue to get thumped for a while, but there's not a faster way to make progress."

Why make the political leap into a race for the highest statewide office? Why not start in city hall or in the state legislature? "Whether it's right or wrong, in politics, as long as you're a credible and competent candidate, voters fit you into the box in which you're introduced. ... In politics, I think you have to take risks," Henderson said.

He concedes that he made some first-time-candidate mistakes. "I didn't really start to understand and build an operation that could raise significant amounts of money until June or July, but once we did, I actually started raising significant amounts of money, especially since I was going against someone that no one thought was beatable. If I had been able to start that a year earlier, we would've had enough money to introduce myself to the rest of the state. Would that have won it for us? Probably not. But would that have gotten me another 10 points? Very plausible."

For Democrats to succeed down the road, the party must invest in infrastructure and continue to improve on candidate recruitment, he said.

"My campaign built a field organization that really reached pretty far, but could've gone so much farther. We're rebuilding data systems as a party, so we know which doors to knock on and which voters to engage. As we rebuild that over the next 10 years, you could imagine that compressing some of the margins even more. It's going to take more money than we had. It's going to take a party infrastructure that brings more people in. It's going to take contesting every race."

If Democrats can make improvements, Republicans might help their cause, Henderson said, noting as markers Oklahoma, which recently elected a Democratic congressman, and Kansas, which elected a Democratic governor.

"I don't want the economy to teeter for anyone's political fortune," Henderson said. "But sooner or later it'll turn. I was running this year because I wanted to win and I believed there was a hell of a good argument to win. And I lost. Let the Republicans go do what they say they're going to do in the next few years. Let them cut another $180 million in taxes. Let them ignore that we have the sixth-highest prison population in the world. Let them kick the can on highway funding. We'll see if they follow through with this raise on teachers, but even if they do, it's not going to be enough. This profession is bleeding."

Henderson would like to continue to advocate for issues on which he campaigned. "Education, teenage pregnancy and rural economic development — those are things I'm passionate about and things I believe are really fundamental for building a better future for the whole state, and they're areas that are way under-resourced. You can also speak to them in conservative values. I can talk to my conservative family members on why these things matter and I can get them to nod their heads."

— Lindsey Millar

Lorenzo Lewis Mental health care advocate.

Lorenzo Lewis says his narrow escape from the school-to-prison pipeline was a testament to the importance of equipping marginalized men of color with coping skills and resources to manage their mental health. That's why in 2016 Lewis founded the Confess Project; its mission is to bring mental health and emotional awareness education to men and boys of color.

Lewis was born while his mother was incarcerated. He said behavior and anxiety issues in his early childhood led to his two-month stay at a juvenile facility in Pulaski County at age 10. He wasn't encouraged to talk about his feelings or trauma and almost re-entered the juvenile system at age 17.

"Emotionally, I wasn't validated as a young man," Lewis said. He was told that God heals everything, "but [that's] not practically looking at what helps and digging into the issue." The Confess Project advocates for psychological therapy and medication management. "Some of these different tools that you need to understand, through the process of healing and growing, [are] really important to getting on the right track. And I think those were not the things that were pushed in front of me."

The Confess Project offers monthly empowering sessions, community forums on social and emotional issues; 90-minute workshops for marginalized men and boys ages 10-40 on character education, academic improvement and life skills; and the Confess College Tour, which travels to different campuses with a curriculum focused on mental health education, prevention techniques and open dialogue.

The Confess Project also travels to barbershops in the South and Midwest as part of its "Beyond the Shop" series to meet men and boys where they are. Lewis said the "Beyond the Shop" model is intended to initiate conversations that spread further into the communities the nonprofit serves.

"The model of 'Beyond the Shop' is really meant to let this conversation start here, but blossom into our communities, into our homes, into our families, to help our children, to better our relationships," Lewis said. "So that's why it's called 'Beyond the Shop,' to say that it starts here but it revolutionizes throughout the places we live, work and play in."

Confess Project facilitators provide pamphlets on counseling services at the "Beyond the Shop" meetings. Lewis said that these efforts come full circle when he learns of someone who attended a session and went on to begin counseling, or quit smoking, or otherwise take better care of themselves.

"That is why we do what we do. ... I think it's the ultimate feeling as a founder of this organization," he said. "You intend for that to happen, but you don't always see it happen as rapidly, so when you see that happen, it really gives you a lot of satisfaction. At that point, you know that they have a larger chance of transforming their life, more than what they had before."

The Confess Project also trains barbers to become mental health advocates. Lewis said it intends to train 700 barbers next year through webinars, online video training and follow-ups.

Healing is at the root of what the Confess Project does. The curriculum guides men and boys through three archetypes of masculinity: provider, protector and priest. Lewis said once men and boys are able to identify the harmful constraints and pressures of these archetypes, they're able to gain perspective on the unhealthy behaviors they engender.

"Once you get men to understand that, I think they will begin to live a better quality of life," Lewis said. "We also ask, what is the speed of healing? But we let them know that time to heal and grow is different. ...

"A lot of the conversation is about manhood. It's mental health, but it's also about manhood. We have to dig deep into identity, and social skills, and building relationships. A lot of stuff comes up about divorce, and girls, and domestic violence, and child support. You're really dealing with men from the things that affect men."

According to Lewis, the Confess Project is built on the testimony and storytelling of facilitators with stories like his — stories like those of the men and boys in the barbershops and college campuses and community spaces they visit. Lewis said the resonance is crucial to the fulfillment of the organization's mission.

"I think it's important, because it allows them to really see the bigger picture," he said. "It allows them to see accelerated growth, and it's also just transparent, because it's someone who looks like them and comes from the same neighborhood, or went to the same high school as them, may have had failing grades just like them. ... Our facilitators and staff with the Confess Project all harness stories of power. ... It's a mixture of guys from different walks of life and professions who can relate to our key mission that helps us develop a bigger narrative."

— Rebekah Hall

Project REACH How a team of Arkansans hopes to change the criminal justice system.

Dr. Nickolas Zaller, Dr. Femina Varghese and Ben Udochi were recently awarded a three-year, $350,000 fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program. The fellowship will allow the team to conduct a telehealth pilot study that provides behavioral health counseling in the West Memphis area for people on probation or parole.

Zaller, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, said the project came to fruition after discussions with Varghese and Udochi, the assistant director of substance use treatment with Arkansas Community Correction, about the capacity of telehealth medicine to reach people in isolated areas.

"We hear all the time that we live in a rural state, [that] we have all these access issues in terms of health care in general," Zaller said. "I feel that we underutilize the potential with things we have, like telehealth and telemedicine, to reach more people in rural areas."

According to Zaller, the pilot study will take place at the local office of Arkansas Community Correction, which oversees parolees and probationers, who are required to report there. If they fail to show up for a meeting with their probation or parole officer, a warrant is issued for their arrest.

"The idea was that is an opportunity," Zaller said. "They're already in the office. We've identified individuals who are struggling. Can we then provide some additional services while they're there?"

According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of data from a 2016 federal Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, one in 44 Arkansans is under some form of correctional supervision, one of the highest rates in the nation. Zaller said this high rate could in part be attributed to the fact that Arkansas lacks adequate treatment capacity for folks with mental health or substance use issues.

"We haven't invested, it's just plain and simple," Zaller said. "We have not invested in that capacity. We haven't prioritized it, we haven't invested, and this is the consequence."

Zaller and Udochi said the team decided on West Memphis for the pilot study because of its proximity to more rural areas of the state, as the RWJF fellowship focuses specifically on health care in rural America. Udochi said individuals on parole or probation living in rural areas face unique challenges to accessing necessary services.

"Some of the rural areas, they don't have the necessary services rightly available in their location," Udochi said. "Second to that is the transportation issue. So they have to travel a long distance to get the services they need. The hope is that with telehealth services, we can see how beneficial those services can be in alleviating some of those problems in those areas."

Varghese, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, will supervise her Ph.D. students who will provide the telehealth counseling. Zaller said he, Varghese and Udochi intentionally designed the pilot study to involve students in hopes of generating future interest in the criminal justice field.

"We wanted to do something where we could help these parolees in critical areas and provide our students with some wonderful training, as they're interested in this area, and when they graduate they could continue the work in this area, whether it's part of their practice or pro bono," Varghese said. "It would be sustainable to two different roles."

According to the research team, the pilot study will compare two different groups. Each group will receive a six-session intervention. One group will receive only the treatment that the Community Correction department assigns to it based on its assessment and no telehealth counseling. The other group will also get the Community Correction treatment assigned to it, but that will be augmented by the telehealth counseling conducted by Varghese and her students.

Zaller, Varghese and Udochi will follow the progress of participants over a period of about six months to observe "overall substance use behaviors," Zaller said. The team will then compare the outcomes of the two groups using standardized assessment tools, such as the Addiction Severity Index, and by conducting pre- and post-study interviews with both the Community Correction officers and the individuals who received treatment.

Zaller, Varghese and Udochi said the pilot study would be considered successful if participants respond well to the telehealth counseling and the ACC decides to expand the study to collect more information from different Community Correction locations in the state. But expanding the study would require funding from the state, and Zaller said such funding could be difficult to come by because of attitudes about criminal justice and punishment. According to Zaller, a main emphasis of the fellowship is also to change the cultural narrative surrounding criminal justice and incarceration by becoming public health leaders in the community.

"A lot of it is a cultural shift," Zaller said. "What do we see as the big picture? What sort of society do we want to live in? Right now, we've chosen a society totally dominated by fear. ... And unless we change that narrative, and unless people understand that there are a lot of structural factors that relate to crime, including violent crime, we have to understand that it's not all the same. We have to really start thinking carefully about what it is that we're punishing people for."

—Rebekah Hall

Steve Arrison The Hot Springs promoter wants to see hordes in hot water.

Here's what Steve Arrison envisions: lots of people pouring into Hot Springs, biking in, hauling kayaks in, driving in for the World's Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade. Bunking in the new hotels, soaking up the craft suds, enjoying the thermal waters. And he wants an improved quality of life for the residents of the Spa City. Thanks to the internet, Arrison said, "people can live anywhere." Why not Hot Springs?

Arrison, 62, has worked as the CEO of Visit Hot Springs, the city's convention and visitor's bureau, for 20 years. In that time, he's seen gaming join the racetrack at Oaklawn Park, the reopening of once-struggling Magic Springs Theme and Water Park in 2000 thanks to a local bond issue, the expansion of the convention center and the opening of the Embassy Suites Hotel. He was part of the group that worked on the Hot Springs Historic Baseball Trail. The latest big thing that has Hot Springs promoters licking their chops: Oaklawn's $100 million expansion that will bring a high-rise hotel with 200 rooms, an event center and a bigger gaming area.

Arrison is quick to say he wasn't alone, or even the prime mover, in bringing such new investments to Hot Springs. He's part of a team, and he was reluctant to have the Arkansas Times single him out.

But he would take credit for the Northwoods project, the multimillion-dollar bike-trail development taking place on 2,000 hilly Ouachita Mountain acres just west of downtown. The property was made off-limits to the public after 9/11 because its four lakes supplied drinking water to the city. The city opened the land after it discontinued use of three of the lakes, and in 2016 Arrison — who said he didn't even know the property existed — visited. He was struck by its beauty and had the notion that it would be a good place to build bike trails. Hot Springs already attracts the cycling public with several bike trails, both rugged and easy.

After a visit to Bentonville, where the Walton Family Foundation has invested $74 million on mountain bike trails and the bike trail system that connects Bentonville to Bella Vista and Fayetteville, Arrison made a pitch for Walton money for the Northwoods trail. He was successful: The Walton Family Foundation matched Visit Hot Springs' contribution of $680,000 and phase one was launched. The city dedicated the trail's first 14 miles in November; eventually, Northwoods will have 44 miles of mountain bike trail, complete with angled berms, dirt ramps and tricky turns. Arrison wants to see the lakes become kayaker destinations.

Arrison is also looking forward to the day when the Southwest Bike Trail from Pulaski County to Garland County becomes a reality, but that will be many years from now. He's not going anywhere, however: "I hope to be in this job six or seven years from now. I love what I do."

Next on Arrison's plate is the development of the city's five acres at Park and Central avenues, where the Majestic Hotel once stood. The University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and Kansas State University are in charge of the "visioning process" for the site. Arrison's vision involves Hot Springs' reason for being: the thermal waters. He'd like to see outdoor thermal pools, where people could relax in the toasty 143-degree F. (on average) water.

The Majestic property is a "real pivotal piece" to Hot Springs' development, so it's important to "get it right." He thinks a public-private partnership is likely.

—Leslie Newell Peacock

Stacey McAdoo Transformative teacher.

Long before Stacey McAdoo was a communications teacher at Little Rock's Central High School — let alone the 2019 Arkansas Teacher of the Year — she was a poet. In the mid-'90s, having just graduated from Hall High School, she and her future husband, Leron, began self-publishing a magazine intended to serve as a platform for fellow creatives, especially people of color. They put out a call for submissions, cut-and-pasted together their book by hand and were soon running off copies at a 24-hour Kinkos. They dubbed it "The Writeous."

"When you talk about underrepresented people, one of the things we are underrepresented in is media, and the ability to tell our story," McAdoo said. "A lot of poets wanted to have a place to share their voice, and we filled that niche."

"Fast forward: When I became an educator, I took that same concept and brought it to the classroom," she said. "So I am now the founder and sponsor of the Writeous Poetry Club ... and the Writeous has transformed from a magazine to a youth-oriented poetry collective."

Since McAdoo started the club in 2002 — her first year at Central and her first year teaching — at least 50 students have participated each year, writing and performing original material at open mics, concerts and on "The Writeous Hour," a radio show she co-produces on local station KWCP-FM, 98.9. Kids learn new skills, build creative projects of their own and travel to other cities. "We also do workshops around Arkansas and the country, teaching other people, other youth, how to use and find their voice," she said. (Leron, who's better known around town as the multitalented performer, writer and artist Ron Mc, remains an integral part of "The Writeous.")

The state's teacher of the year is a product of the Little Rock School District. McAdoo grew up in Southwest Little Rock, where she attended Baseline Elementary and Cloverdale Elementary, then went on to Henderson Middle School and Hall. McAdoo received a B.A. in professional and technical writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Though she always knew she wanted to be a teacher, she brushed those thoughts aside after graduating. The teaching profession was losing the esteem it had once enjoyed in society, McAdoo said; the message she received from her peers and community was that the classroom wasn't the place for her. Instead, she found a comfortable job at Alltel as an administrative assistant and started a family.

Then, her brother died in a car accident, "and I realized then that life was too short for me to not do what I felt I was supposed to do," McAdoo said. "I quit my job, cut my hair off, and enrolled in ... a master's program [at UA Monticello]." As a first-year teacher, she said, she saw a drop in both pay and health benefits compared to her secretarial job at Alltel.

McAdoo arrived at Central the same year as its principal, Nancy Rousseau. She's been teaching communications at the school ever since. She's also taught AVID, or Advancement Via Individual Determination, a college-readiness program for students who are typically the first in their families to go to college since 2007. "I'm their teacher 9th-12th grade," she said. The purpose of AVID is to equip students with the "soft skills" they need to navigate adult life and "discover the hidden curriculum" in college and beyond. "We, as in society, basically operate from a middle-class white person's perspective, and we assume everyone's experience matches that," she said.

As Teacher of the Year, McAdoo will receive a $14,000 award sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation. Beginning in July 2019, she'll spend a sabbatical year of service traveling the state and the nation, speaking with teachers and doing professional development. McAdoo will also have a nonvoting seat on the state Board of Education — the body that took over the Little Rock School District in 2015 and has controlled it for the last four years.

McAdoo said she "has a lot of thoughts" about education policy and the LRSD, but she's not yet sure how she'll leverage her newfound status. "I'm just looking and trying to see where my place is," she said. Was she surprised to be selected for the honor? McAdoo laughed. "In light of who I am, and in light of today's climate — yeah, it's real interesting!" she said.

In general, McAdoo isn't shy about expressing her views. Sixteen years ago, as a newly minted teacher, she was skeptical of the emphasis placed on standardized testing by No Child Left Behind, the federal education law. She recalls saying as much to Rousseau during her first interview. Today, she said, "I still think standardized testing is — the word I want to use is 'wack.' ... Because there's no standard child. The whole premise of testing students to whatever this norm is, it's ridiculous." In her classroom, she said, "I close my door and I've done what I thought was best for the children. I teach pretty much the way I wish I had been taught — and/or the way that I think my biological children need." (She and Ron have a daughter who's now a senior at Central and a son who attends Tennessee State University; her daughter is an accomplished poet in her own right.)

Though she's proud of her work in the classroom, McAdoo considers the Writeous Poetry Club her "most valuable contribution ... to society" because it takes a group of kids and "helps validate them as thinkers."

"My platform as Teacher of the Year is using passion and poetry to close the opportunity gap," she said. "You have a core group of students, for the most part from inner-city Little Rock ... spending their time sitting around writing and re-writing and practicing. That's how you transform not just education, but a city."

— Benjamin Hardy

Chrissy Chatham Defender of potential.

When Chrissy Chatham took the helm as CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arkansas in 2015, she didn't exactly know what she was getting into. The secondhand store Savers, which provided a significant amount of funding for the nonprofit, closed both its locations in Little Rock and North Little Rock in 2017, a major setback to the operations of BBBSCA. But Chatham said her vision of growth for the organization has remained the same since she became CEO.

"I've been hopeful the entire three years," she said. "My tendency is to be more resilient and optimistic. We've had several blows over the three years that could have caused some serious changes, but at the end of the day, it's an opportunity to grow, it's an opportunity to build and make this organization true to what it is and get down to the basics. So many nonprofits end up doing more than they're supposed to do, and when you don't have that ability to do more, you get really good at what you're supposed to do."

Big Brothers Big Sisters' mission is to provide at-risk children one-on-one relationships with adults. According to Chatham, the Central Arkansas chapter has 89 children matched with mentors. But there is a disparity in the number of boys waiting for adult mentors — 127 boys are in the process of becoming Little Brothers; 50 are waiting for mentors. At the moment, there are only 19 men going through the necessary background checks and interviews required to be a Big Brother. The reverse is true for girls: There are 42 girls in the process of becoming Little Sisters, and 60 women in the process of becoming Big Sisters. The organization needs more male volunteers and more young girls.

Chatham said the continued investment in the matches is an investment in the future. "I think mentors are valuable and incredibly undervalued in our community," she said. "Every single person has had somebody, whether they realize it or not, to help them through a situation, or a period, or their entire life. ... This is one solution to help our community get better. We've got a lot of crime and we've got a lot of problems with the school system, and we can point to all kinds of things that are wrong. But we have to invest in our youngest populations and set them up for success for that long-term goal of having a successful community."

Big Brothers Big Sisters of America handed down new brand positioning in October, complete with a new logo. Chatham said the new branding is an effort to expand the organization's impact and to "defend the potential" of every child. The new logo of BBBS America features a lowercase "b" in white, which the organization's website said represents Littles and their families. The logo is completed by a green curve that creates an uppercase "B," which represents the Bigs who strengthen the relationships among themselves, their Littles and their families.

A new video for the organization says, "We are not saviors. We are allies." It's a sentiment that Chatham said she's inspired by.

"I love the idea that we're not saviors, we're defenders," she said. "And it's true, we're not saviors. ... [These are] kids who just have an opportunity and have a chance, we just need to open the door for them."

Opening that door isn't nearly as much of a time commitment as people think, according to Chatham. The community-based mentorship program requires Bigs to spend time with their Littles for a minimum of two hours, at least twice a month — just 48 hours per year. Chatham said another common misunderstanding about the organization is what the definition of a good mentor is.

"You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be present," she said. "And, in fact, people who have less than perfect backgrounds are generally going to be fantastic mentors."

When Bigs draw on their own life experiences to help shape the futures of the Littles they mentor, this helps the Littles realize they can do and be more, Chatham said.

"It's not the mentor's role or job to create potential," Chatham said. "It's there. It's our job to defend it, and to make sure it's able to grow, and to light that fire within the kids."

— Rebekah Hall

Kim Lane Empowering entrepreneurs.

Those who think that studying poetry in high school is a waste of time for those whose future is in business should meet Kim Lane.

Lane, 27, who speaks (and thinks) nearly as fast as the speed of sound, rattled off the Edgar Lee Masters poem that inspired her in her teenage years to make her own happiness and success in the working world, part of which is "Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. ... Life without meaning is torture."

Did this reporter know, Lane asked during an interview at a coffee shop in Conway, where she is the CEO of startup promoter The Conductor, that "85 percent of people hate their jobs?" She was determined that would not be her fate.

Lane's path to The Conductor was a complicated one, a route that took the Hendrix College writing major to work as an advertising writer, then a freelance writer of listicals for a national online publication, then an editor for a local online publication about business (she was also an intern at the Arkansas Times). After a visit to the first Arkansas Challenge startup contest in Northwest Arkansas, she "fell in love with the whole entrepreneurial thing." On she went to the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, where she oversaw its One Million Cups entrepreneur meetups created by the Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation. She was so successful that Kauffman asked her to be a regional organizer. She became an organizer for the Global Entrepreneurship Network after she brought Global Entrepreneurship Week to Arkansas. For the network, she's traveled to places as far-flung as Africa and Istanbul to help create community among entrepreneurs.

People have been starting businesses for eons, so why the need for The Conductor's mentorships, guidance and access to funding? Because the economy has changed. She cited Kauffman vice president Victor Hwang's comparison of the industrial age economy to today's: It was once the case that the entrepreneur created a widget and the factory that turned it out. Lane likened it to row crop farming, with one plant dominating and weeds — new ideas — being removed. In today's technological world, she said, there is more opportunity for entrepreneurs to act on their own, "and by the way, weeds are good now." Today's job creation is "more about embracing the beauty of everybody's ideas," Lane said.

Some of those ideas are coming from students. The Conductor, which Lane and "Chief Catalyst" Jeff Standridge got up and running with help from partner Startup Junkie Consulting of Fayetteville, partners with the University of Central Arkansas. UCA offers the free Makerspace, complete with 3D printers and other fabrication tools, on its campus, and Lane said it's always full. The space will grow — and continue to be free — when the Conway Corp. utility creates the Arnold Innovation Center in what is now City Hall at 1201 W. Oak St. "It's going to be groundbreaking," Lane said, and credited the collaboration of the Conway Chamber of Commerce, City Hall, Acxiom, Conway Corp. and other sponsors for "moving the needle" of entrepreneurship in Conway and Faulkner County and reducing barriers to business ideas from minorities and women.

Lane said she works "at the intersection of life coaching and entrepreneurship," helping people see that they can act on their dreams, and "see their life a different way." She advises not just people who have ideas but people who only know they want a job that will make them happy.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Drs. Yu-Po Chan, Edmund Wilson and Po-Hao Adam Huang Spaceflight cubed.

Hold your hands in front of you and form a pair of square brackets with your fingers and thumbs, your palms a few inches apart. That's about the size and shape of the device that will be Arkansas's first satellite. If all goes well, a tiny cube packed with scientific instruments soon will be gathering atmospheric data as competently as satellites thousands of times larger and more costly, according to Dr. Yu-Po Chan of UA Little Rock.

"We are planning in the long run to have a constellation of these satellites ... flying in formation," Chan said. "This would be Arkansas's very first with our name on it. Many other states bigger than us have already launched, so we are catching up, basically."

Chan, the chair of UA Little Rock's systems engineering department, is among a trio of Arkansas researchers working to design CubeSats, a class of miniaturized, low-cost "nanosatellites." His collaborators are Dr. Po-Hao Adam Huang, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UA Fayetteville, and Dr. Edmund Wilson, a chemistry professor at Harding University in Searcy. Their first CubeSat model, ArkSat-1, is being designed by Huang. It should be delivered to NASA by the end of 2019 and launched in early 2020.

CubeSats aren't novel in themselves — NASA's most recent mission to Mars experimentally deployed a pair of the devices near the red planet — but the Arkansas team has a number of original research goals and design innovations. Many nanosatellites don't have a propulsion system. The ones that do typically use a pressurized aerosol propellant, such as freon. But Huang came up with a different fuel: water.

"Our technique is basically using small, micro-channels to contain the water," Huang said. "We open those valves, and it will evaporate. ... It becomes a gas, and we use it as a propellant."

In October, Chan received a $24,900 grant from NASA to develop a different CubeSat project. Called SAMSAT ("solar and atmospheric measuring satellite"), it will eventually map the presence of water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere above Arkansas. Chan will then compare that information to data collected by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES-16, which is one of two weather orbiters operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

GOES weighs in at over 3 tons, according to NASA's website — about the weight of a Hummer H2. SAMSAT will probably weigh around 3 pounds.

"We are using the big satellite's data to validate that what we see is accurate," Chan said. "We're talking about billions of dollars in the big satellite, thousands of dollars in these small satellites." The team hopes to prove a CubeSat "can do the same job at monitoring the atmosphere as the big, big bird," he said.

The team also hopes SAMSAT can do a better job at collecting data than some of its cousins because it will be more nimble. That's where Huang's propulsion system comes in. "CubeSats generally don't have a way to maneuver," Huang said. Because they can reorient themselves only a few degrees per second, it's difficult for their instruments to gather data on a small patch of atmosphere as the craft zips through low earth orbit at thousands of miles per hour. "With our design, we can rotate 90 degrees on the order of five to 10 seconds. ... That may be kind of slow on Earth, compared to a car, but it's really fast for a spacecraft."

The job of measuring the atmosphere's composition falls to the team's third member, Wilson. Scientists determine the composition of a gas by examining the behavior of light that has passed through it, a technique called spectroscopy. But most spectrometers are too large to fit comfortably inside a CubeSat, Wilson said.

"I've been able to find a spectrometer that is about the size of a joint in your finger. It's about 1 inch by a half inch by a half inch ... so it may be exactly what we need for our mission," he said. In addition to demonstrating the utility of their technological innovations, the team hopes to gather unique data on the atmosphere above Arkansas, establishing a baseline that could be of use for climate science in the future.

The long-term goal, Chan said, is to deliver a proof of concept that could yield funding for further research. "We're trying to catch a big fish — a multiyear, much larger grant," he said. "It could be beneficial for industry, including manufacturing."

And beyond. Wilson and Huang said they have hopes that their innovations could have application to NASA as it contemplates exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in the coming decades. "Our overall goal is to be able to have a mission to some other solar system body, like Titan," Wilson said.

— Benjamin Hardy

Brian Mitchell History detective.

As the 100th anniversary of the massacre of African Americans at Elaine approaches, first-year graduate students in Dr. Brian Mitchell's public history class at UA Little Rock are filling in gaps in the story of what was one of the most deadly race riots in America.

In September 1919, after one of several meetings black farmers held with representatives of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, a white deputy spying on the meeting was fatally shot. Acting at the urging of the Phillips County sheriff, a mob of whites roamed the county, killing hundreds — some estimates are as high as 800 — of black residents. Five whites were killed, but only African Americans were arrested and jailed.

Twelve black men were quickly found guilty of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. They were imprisoned while their appeals in two famous cases traveled to the state and U.S. supreme courts. Their convictions were overturned, and they were sentenced to time served and released. But fearing they'd be lynched, all 12 fled the state, along with hundreds of other African Americans from Elaine who feared for their lives.

Mitchell has guided his public history students in the search to find out what happened to those 12 men. He did the legwork over the summer to provide them with public records — census records, city directories, vital records and newspaper accounts. They've been able to track down six of the 12 so far, and locate most of the graves of those six.

As part of the class, the students will write biographies of the men for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies' Encyclopedia of Arkansas. They are also raising funds to place markers on their graves, a project UA Little Rock is doing in collaboration with the National Park Service and other agencies and with the help of private individuals.

Mitchell said that one of the "more interesting aspects" of the class' work on Elaine is to "reassess the role of black World War I veterans." One of the hundreds of men killed by the posse was a veteran who'd been home in Arkansas for just a few months. Returning veteran farmers were "looking for fair compensation, and rather than deal with them fairly, it was easier to kill them," Mitchell said.

UA Little Rock's drama department will use Mitchell's class' research to write and produce a play. "There are such rich characters" in the Elaine story, Mitchell said. "There was one guy who became a gangster in Illinois," Mitchell said.

A previous class worked to transcribe the death certificates of African Americans killed in the race massacre and created a database. The database has been provided to the Arkansas State Archives for public use.

Future projects for Mitchell's first-year grad students include research into West Rock, the African-American community once situated at the base of Cantrell Hill, as a way to learn about redlining, the real estate practice of segregating blacks in certain neighborhoods. He's interested, too, in more study of the tragedy at the Wrightsville boys' so-called "industrial school," which was in fact a prison, where 21 boys locked in a dorm perished in a fire in 1959. He has turned over to the Butler Center records he has on what so-called offenses the boys committed to be sent to Wrightsville.

Mitchell, 50, a Louisiana native who came to Arkansas after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, has been a professor at UA Little Rock for four years (he was an adjunct earlier in his move to Little Rock, and later an investigator with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Metroplan researcher). Mitchell wants to give his students the opportunity to collaborate more with the community, doing joint projects with state and federal agencies and other history-minded groups "to open up an avenue of employment" for those who choose not to pursue doctoral degrees. He said the public history program's success in finding jobs for its graduates, including archival work and museum exhibition, is nearly 100 percent. In fact, the program doesn't accept more students than it thinks will be able to find jobs. The program has "given a level of visibility to the school," Mitchell said. "When I say it's an excellent program, I mean it's an excellent program."

—Leslie Newell Peacock

Jen Gerber Multifaceted creative.

Jen Gerber's first time on a film set was for a small acting role in a country music video in Nashville, Tenn. Gerber, who goes by Jen, said being on the set that day changed her life. "I realized in that moment it was everything I wanted out of theater, which was storytelling [and] a collaborative creation process, but I really didn't want to be an actor," she said.

She's been busy since. She earned an master's of fine arts degree in writing and directing at Columbia University in New York and served as the creative director at The School of Creative and Performing Arts in Los Angeles and New York for six years. She previously worked as an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and now teaches a film production class at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts.

In her spare time, she's directed a film — "The Revival" — that has been screened in Los Angeles and abroad.

Now the accomplished writer, director and professor is the executive director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, a job that keeps her busy yearround. This year's festival, in October, screened 127 films — up from the 2017 festival's 84 films — and its audiences are growing as well. Gerber said she plans to continue the festival's growth by adding more education and outreach opportunities, such this year's inaugural Emerging Voices Filmmaking Retreat for new voices in nonfiction filmmaking and the Emerging Filmmakers workshops for middle and high school students.

These outreach programs, as well as events such as a guided walking tour of Hot Springs given by Matt Green, the subject of the documentary "The World Before Your Feet" and a "walker" who's walking every street and path in New York City, help audiences connect with the documentaries in a larger way, Gerber said.

"I want to do much, much more of that next year to create more of an interactive experience," she said. "Because what's the difference between watching the film at home and watching it at the festival? It's that you get that extra connection to enhance the experience."

With the rising popularity of documentaries such as box-office hits "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and "RBG," Gerber said she's excited about the future of the genre and her involvement in it.

"I think I've become the director of this festival at the right time for the genre because documentary is becoming so mainstream," she said. "It's always been around, it's not in any way new, but I feel right now people are hungry for the truth. ... It's been a new time for documentaries in terms of the audience desire for them and also just creatively. They've become very well told stories. And they always have been, but I think right now we're really seeing different ways that documentary filmmakers are elevating the storytelling within their films."

Though she hasn't made a documentary film, Gerber said she's inspired by the intensive research conducted by documentarians on the subjects of their films. She's now writing a script for a new project: "Crash Reel," about a female demolition derby driver.

"You get to walk in someone else's shoes," Gerber said. "I don't anticipate that I'll ever drive in a derby, but through film, your curiosity can lead you anywhere. I was at a derby and had this idea, and it's started a path now for me of asking questions, getting to know a world, and daydreaming my own ideas into that world."

Gerber is also working on a more autobiographical project titled "Pretty Near Perfect" that's loosely based on her time as a teenage beauty queen living in Hot Springs. For other female filmmakers and storytellers who are looking to break into the industry, Gerber encourages them to find a great mentor and support system, a role she happily served for her former UCA students, some of whom go on to be hired on Gerber's own projects.

"I want to support them, I want to help them grow their resume, and they're really good at what they do," she said. "I've watched them grow beyond what I taught them, so when it comes to any project that I do, I start by hiring this group of young women that I worked with here in Arkansas."

—Rebekah Hall

Jerrmy Gawthrop and Bryan and Bernice Hembree They form the engine that makes the Fayetteville Roots Festival go.

This is a story about three friends with complementary talents who started a music and food festival that's grown into an event that has no rival in Arkansas — but still, its founders insist, remains humble.

More than a decade ago, Fayetteville's Bryan and Bernice Hembree, the husband-and-wife musical duo who perform as Smokey & The Mirror, befriended Fayetteville restaurateur Jerrmy Gawthrop. Gawthrop, in turn, regularly asked them to play at his restaurant Greenhouse Grille. (At the time, the Hembrees were performing as part of a trio called 3 Penny Acre. Gawthrop and his business partner, Clayton Suttle, sold Greenhouse Grille to the Arsaga family earlier this year; they still own two Wood Stone Pizza restaurants).

In 2010, the Hembrees were asked by three musical groups they'd met on the road for help booking a show in Fayetteville on the same weekend. That was the impetus for getting with Gawthrop to put on a one-day Fayetteville Roots Festival at Greenhouse Grille on a Sunday — brunch paired with 10 bands. About 160 people showed up. There was a morning slate of music and an hour break, which was to be followed by an afternoon lineup. During that hour, a water main near Greenhouse Grille ruptured. "During that geyser that was happening, we had musicians putting sandbags in front of Greenhouse Grille," Bryan Hembree remembered. Luckily, George's Majestic Lounge was free that day and welcomed the waterlogged fest.

Near-catastrophe aside, the trio realized they had a winning concept on their hands. Thanks to some underwriting support from a fan from the first event, the Roots Festival was able to book Texas singer/songwriter legend Guy Clark and, in turn, secure the Walton Arts Center as a venue. From there, the festival, held annually in August, has grown exponentially.

This year's event featured the likes of Mavis Staples, Booker T. Jones (of Booker T & the M.G.'s), Gillian Welch, the Del McCoury Band and John Moreland. In addition to the main stage at the Fayetteville Town Center, the festival extended to the Fayetteville Public Library and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Brightwater Culinary School in Bentonville. Food had always been a major component of the festival, but the Hembrees said this year it reached equal footing with the addition of a special Saturday Roots, Food & Spirit event with dozens of guest chefs from around the region and country. Among both free and ticketed events, organizers estimated 7,500 people attended the five-day festival this year. Tickets now regularly sell out before the music lineup is announced (early-bird tickets for the fest, scheduled for Aug. 22-25, 2019, went on sale Dec. 5).

Community buy-in came early on in the festival's run, Gawthrop said. "We started doing things and people jumped on board, like, 'How can we help? I wanna volunteer.' " This year, upward of 100 sponsors supported the fest and some 200 volunteers helped out.

The festival now has a year-round headquarters and an administrative assistant, but Gawthrop and the Hembrees continue to run it amid all their other commitments: In addition to two restaurants, Gawthrop and his wife have three kids with another one on the way. Bryan does ACT-prep work for the University of Arkansas and Bernice works in music education; they also stay busy recording and touring as Smokey & The Mirror and are part of a collaborative album project with Danish folk-rockers The Sentimentals. So, how do they swing it all? "The three of us have a really good working relationship," Bryan Hembree said. "Like now, it's hot and heavy on my shoulders for the booking. Other times Jerrmy is busy with procurement of food and chefs. Or Bernice is working on the educational outreach. It's a true kind of partnership tag team."

Gawthrop added, "It can be a lot. Being able to ask for help and organizing your people are key. Thankfully, we've got a great community where people really want to help — sponsors, local bars, chefs. They want this thing to be here. They're proud of it. People refer to this as 'our festival.' It's a beautiful thing."

— Lindsey Millar

Visionary Arkansans 2018

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Brian Mitchell

History detective. As the 100th anniversary of the massacre of African Americans at Elaine approaches, first-year graduate students in Dr. Brian Mitchell's public history class at UA Little Rock are filling in gaps in the story of what was one of the most deadly race riots in America.

In September 1919, after one of several meetings black farmers held with representatives of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union, a white deputy spying on the meeting was fatally shot. Acting at the urging of the Phillips County sheriff, a mob of whites roamed the county, killing hundreds — some estimates are as high as 800 — of black residents. Five whites were killed, but only African Americans were arrested and jailed.

Twelve black men were quickly found guilty of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. They were imprisoned while their appeals in two famous cases traveled to the state and U.S. supreme courts. Their convictions were overturned, and they were sentenced to time served and released. But fearing they'd be lynched, all 12 fled the state, along with hundreds of other African Americans from Elaine who feared for their lives.

Mitchell has guided his public history students in the search to find out what happened to those 12 men. He did the legwork over the summer to provide them with public records — census records, city directories, vital records and newspaper accounts. They've been able to track down six of the 12 so far, and locate most of the graves of those six.

As part of the class, the students will write biographies of the men for the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies' Encyclopedia of Arkansas. They are also raising funds to place markers on their graves, a project UA Little Rock is doing in collaboration with the National Park Service and other agencies and with the help of private individuals.

Mitchell said that one of the "more interesting aspects" of the class' work on Elaine is to "reassess the role of black World War I veterans." One of the hundreds of men killed by the posse was a veteran who'd been home in Arkansas for just a few months. Returning veteran farmers were "looking for fair compensation, and rather than deal with them fairly, it was easier to kill them," Mitchell said.

UA Little Rock's drama department will use Mitchell's class' research to write and produce a play. "There are such rich characters" in the Elaine story, Mitchell said. "There was one guy who became a gangster in Illinois," Mitchell said.

A previous class worked to transcribe the death certificates of African Americans killed in the race massacre and created a database. The database has been provided to the Arkansas State Archives for public use.

Future projects for Mitchell's first-year grad students include research into West Rock, the African-American community once situated at the base of Cantrell Hill, as a way to learn about redlining, the real estate practice of segregating blacks in certain neighborhoods. He's interested, too, in more study of the tragedy at the Wrightsville boys' so-called "industrial school," which was in fact a prison, where 21 boys locked in a dorm perished in a fire in 1959. He has turned over to the Butler Center records he has on what so-called offenses the boys committed to be sent to Wrightsville.

Mitchell, 50, a Louisiana native who came to Arkansas after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, has been a professor at UA Little Rock for four years (he was an adjunct earlier in his move to Little Rock, and later an investigator with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Metroplan researcher). Mitchell wants to give his students the opportunity to collaborate more with the community, doing joint projects with state and federal agencies and other history-minded groups "to open up an avenue of employment" for those who choose not to pursue doctoral degrees. He said the public history program's success in finding jobs for its graduates, including archival work and museum exhibition, is nearly 100 percent. In fact, the program doesn't accept more students than it thinks will be able to find jobs. The program has "given a level of visibility to the school," Mitchell said. "When I say it's an excellent program, I mean it's an excellent program."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Brian Mitchell

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Jen Gerber

Multifaceted creative. Jen Gerber's first time on a film set was for a small acting role in a country music video in Nashville, Tenn. Gerber, who goes by Jen, said being on the set that day changed her life. "I realized in that moment it was everything I wanted out of theater, which was storytelling [and] a collaborative creation process, but I really didn't want to be an actor," she said.

She's been busy since. She earned an master's of fine arts degree in writing and directing at Columbia University in New York and served as the creative director at The School of Creative and Performing Arts in Los Angeles and New York for six years. She previously worked as an assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and now teaches a film production class at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts.

In her spare time, she's directed a film — "The Revival" — that has been screened in Los Angeles and abroad.

Now the accomplished writer, director and professor is the executive director of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, a job that keeps her busy yearround. This year's festival, in October, screened 127 films — up from the 2017 festival's 84 films — and its audiences are growing as well. Gerber said she plans to continue the festival's growth by adding more education and outreach opportunities, such this year's inaugural Emerging Voices Filmmaking Retreat for new voices in nonfiction filmmaking and the Emerging Filmmakers workshops for middle and high school students.

These outreach programs, as well as events such as a guided walking tour of Hot Springs given by Matt Green, the subject of the documentary "The World Before Your Feet" and a "walker" who's walking every street and path in New York City, help audiences connect with the documentaries in a larger way, Gerber said.

"I want to do much, much more of that next year to create more of an interactive experience," she said. "Because what's the difference between watching the film at home and watching it at the festival? It's that you get that extra connection to enhance the experience."

With the rising popularity of documentaries such as box-office hits "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and "RBG," Gerber said she's excited about the future of the genre and her involvement in it.

"I think I've become the director of this festival at the right time for the genre because documentary is becoming so mainstream," she said. "It's always been around, it's not in any way new, but I feel right now people are hungry for the truth. ... It's been a new time for documentaries in terms of the audience desire for them and also just creatively. They've become very well told stories. And they always have been, but I think right now we're really seeing different ways that documentary filmmakers are elevating the storytelling within their films."

Though she hasn't made a documentary film, Gerber said she's inspired by the intensive research conducted by documentarians on the subjects of their films. She's now writing a script for a new project: "Crash Reel," about a female demolition derby driver.

"You get to walk in someone else's shoes," Gerber said. "I don't anticipate that I'll ever drive in a derby, but through film, your curiosity can lead you anywhere. I was at a derby and had this idea, and it's started a path now for me of asking questions, getting to know a world, and daydreaming my own ideas into that world."

Gerber is also working on a more autobiographical project titled "Pretty Near Perfect" that's loosely based on her time as a teenage beauty queen living in Hot Springs. For other female filmmakers and storytellers who are looking to break into the industry, Gerber encourages them to find a great mentor and support system, a role she happily served for her former UCA students, some of whom go on to be hired on Gerber's own projects.

"I want to support them, I want to help them grow their resume, and they're really good at what they do," she said. "I've watched them grow beyond what I taught them, so when it comes to any project that I do, I start by hiring this group of young women that I worked with here in Arkansas."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Jen Gerber

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Kim Lane

Empowering entrepreneurs. Those who think that studying poetry in high school is a waste of time for those whose future is in business should meet Kim Lane.

Lane, 27, who speaks (and thinks) nearly as fast as the speed of sound, rattled off the Edgar Lee Masters poem that inspired her in her teenage years to make her own happiness and success in the working world, part of which is "Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. ... Life without meaning is torture."

Did this reporter know, Lane asked during an interview at a coffee shop in Conway, where she is the CEO of startup promoter The Conductor, that "85 percent of people hate their jobs?" She was determined that would not be her fate.

Lane's path to The Conductor was a complicated one, a route that took the Hendrix College writing major to work as an advertising writer, then a freelance writer of listicals for a national online publication, then an editor for a local online publication about business (she was also an intern at the Arkansas Times). After a visit to the first Arkansas Challenge startup contest in Northwest Arkansas, she "fell in love with the whole entrepreneurial thing." On she went to the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, where she oversaw its One Million Cups entrepreneur meetups created by the Ewing Marian Kauffman Foundation. She was so successful that Kauffman asked her to be a regional organizer. She became an organizer for the Global Entrepreneurship Network after she brought Global Entrepreneurship Week to Arkansas. For the network, she's traveled to places as far-flung as Africa and Istanbul to help create community among entrepreneurs.

People have been starting businesses for eons, so why the need for The Conductor's mentorships, guidance and access to funding? Because the economy has changed. She cited Kauffman vice president Victor Hwang's comparison of the industrial age economy to today's: It was once the case that the entrepreneur created a widget and the factory that turned it out. Lane likened it to row crop farming, with one plant dominating and weeds — new ideas — being removed. In today's technological world, she said, there is more opportunity for entrepreneurs to act on their own, "and by the way, weeds are good now." Today's job creation is "more about embracing the beauty of everybody's ideas," Lane said.

Some of those ideas are coming from students. The Conductor, which Lane and "Chief Catalyst" Jeff Standridge got up and running with help from partner Startup Junkie Consulting of Fayetteville, partners with the University of Central Arkansas. UCA offers the free Makerspace, complete with 3D printers and other fabrication tools, on its campus, and Lane said it's always full. The space will grow — and continue to be free — when the Conway Corp. utility creates the Arnold Innovation Center in what is now City Hall at 1201 W. Oak St. "It's going to be groundbreaking," Lane said, and credited the collaboration of the Conway Chamber of Commerce, City Hall, Acxiom, Conway Corp. and other sponsors for "moving the needle" of entrepreneurship in Conway and Faulkner County and reducing barriers to business ideas from minorities and women.

Lane said she works "at the intersection of life coaching and entrepreneurship," helping people see that they can act on their dreams, and "see their life a different way." She advises not just people who have ideas but people who only know they want a job that will make them happy.

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Kim Lane

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Yu-Po Chan, Edmund Wilson and Po-Hao Adam Huang

Spaceflight cubed. Hold your hands in front of you and form a pair of square brackets with your fingers and thumbs, your palms a few inches apart. That's about the size and shape of the device that will be Arkansas's first satellite. If all goes well, a tiny cube packed with scientific instruments soon will be gathering atmospheric data as competently as satellites thousands of times larger and more costly, according to Dr. Yu-Po Chan of UA Little Rock.

"We are planning in the long run to have a constellation of these satellites ... flying in formation," Chan said. "This would be Arkansas's very first with our name on it. Many other states bigger than us have already launched, so we are catching up, basically."

Chan, the chair of UA Little Rock's systems engineering department, is among a trio of Arkansas researchers working to design CubeSats, a class of miniaturized, low-cost "nanosatellites." His collaborators are Dr. Po-Hao Adam Huang, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UA Fayetteville, and Dr. Edmund Wilson, a chemistry professor at Harding University in Searcy. Their first CubeSat model, ArkSat-1, is being designed by Huang. It should be delivered to NASA by the end of 2019 and launched in early 2020.

CubeSats aren't novel in themselves — NASA's most recent mission to Mars experimentally deployed a pair of the devices near the red planet — but the Arkansas team has a number of original research goals and design innovations. Many nanosatellites don't have a propulsion system. The ones that do typically use a pressurized aerosol propellant, such as freon. But Huang came up with a different fuel: water.

"Our technique is basically using small, micro-channels to contain the water," Huang said. "We open those valves, and it will evaporate. ... It becomes a gas, and we use it as a propellant."

In October, Chan received a $24,900 grant from NASA to develop a different CubeSat project. Called SAMSAT ("solar and atmospheric measuring satellite"), it will eventually map the presence of water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere above Arkansas. Chan will then compare that information to data collected by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES-16, which is one of two weather orbiters operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

GOES weighs in at over 3 tons, according to NASA's website — about the weight of a Hummer H2. SAMSAT will probably weigh around 3 pounds.

"We are using the big satellite's data to validate that what we see is accurate," Chan said. "We're talking about billions of dollars in the big satellite, thousands of dollars in these small satellites." The team hopes to prove a CubeSat "can do the same job at monitoring the atmosphere as the big, big bird," he said.

The team also hopes SAMSAT can do a better job at collecting data than some of its cousins because it will be more nimble. That's where Huang's propulsion system comes in. "CubeSats generally don't have a way to maneuver," Huang said. Because they can reorient themselves only a few degrees per second, it's difficult for their instruments to gather data on a small patch of atmosphere as the craft zips through low earth orbit at thousands of miles per hour. "With our design, we can rotate 90 degrees on the order of five to 10 seconds. ... That may be kind of slow on Earth, compared to a car, but it's really fast for a spacecraft."

The job of measuring the atmosphere's composition falls to the team's third member, Wilson. Scientists determine the composition of a gas by examining the behavior of light that has passed through it, a technique called spectroscopy. But most spectrometers are too large to fit comfortably inside a CubeSat, Wilson said.

"I've been able to find a spectrometer that is about the size of a joint in your finger. It's about 1 inch by a half inch by a half inch ... so it may be exactly what we need for our mission," he said. In addition to demonstrating the utility of their technological innovations, the team hopes to gather unique data on the atmosphere above Arkansas, establishing a baseline that could be of use for climate science in the future.

The long-term goal, Chan said, is to deliver a proof of concept that could yield funding for further research. "We're trying to catch a big fish — a multiyear, much larger grant," he said. "It could be beneficial for industry, including manufacturing."

And beyond. Wilson and Huang said they have hopes that their innovations could have application to NASA as it contemplates exploring the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in the coming decades. "Our overall goal is to be able to have a mission to some other solar system body, like Titan," Wilson said.

  Visionary Arkansans 2018: Yu-Po Chan, Edmund Wilson and Po-Hao Adam Huang

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Project REACH

How a team of Arkansans hopes to change the criminal justice system. Dr. Nickolas Zaller, Dr. Femina Varghese and Ben Udochi were recently awarded a three-year, $350,000 fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program. The fellowship will allow the team to conduct a telehealth pilot study that provides behavioral health counseling in the West Memphis area for people on probation or parole.

Zaller, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health, said the project came to fruition after discussions with Varghese and Udochi, the assistant director of substance use treatment with Arkansas Community Correction, about the capacity of telehealth medicine to reach people in isolated areas.

"We hear all the time that we live in a rural state, [that] we have all these access issues in terms of health care in general," Zaller said. "I feel that we underutilize the potential with things we have, like telehealth and telemedicine, to reach more people in rural areas."

According to Zaller, the pilot study will take place at the local office of Arkansas Community Correction, which oversees parolees and probationers, who are required to report there. If they fail to show up for a meeting with their probation or parole officer, a warrant is issued for their arrest.

"The idea was that is an opportunity," Zaller said. "They're already in the office. We've identified individuals who are struggling. Can we then provide some additional services while they're there?"

According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of data from a 2016 federal Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, one in 44 Arkansans is under some form of correctional supervision, one of the highest rates in the nation. Zaller said this high rate could in part be attributed to the fact that Arkansas lacks adequate treatment capacity for folks with mental health or substance use issues.

"We haven't invested, it's just plain and simple," Zaller said. "We have not invested in that capacity. We haven't prioritized it, we haven't invested, and this is the consequence."

Zaller and Udochi said the team decided on West Memphis for the pilot study because of its proximity to more rural areas of the state, as the RWJF fellowship focuses specifically on health care in rural America. Udochi said individuals on parole or probation living in rural areas face unique challenges to accessing necessary services.

"Some of the rural areas, they don't have the necessary services rightly available in their location," Udochi said. "Second to that is the transportation issue. So they have to travel a long distance to get the services they need. The hope is that with telehealth services, we can see how beneficial those services can be in alleviating some of those problems in those areas."

Varghese, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, will supervise her Ph.D. students who will provide the telehealth counseling. Zaller said he, Varghese and Udochi intentionally designed the pilot study to involve students in hopes of generating future interest in the criminal justice field.

"We wanted to do something where we could help these parolees in critical areas and provide our students with some wonderful training, as they're interested in this area, and when they graduate they could continue the work in this area, whether it's part of their practice or pro bono," Varghese said. "It would be sustainable to two different roles."

According to the research team, the pilot study will compare two different groups. Each group will receive a six-session intervention. One group will receive only the treatment that the Community Correction department assigns to it based on its assessment and no telehealth counseling. The other group will also get the Community Correction treatment assigned to it, but that will be augmented by the telehealth counseling conducted by Varghese and her students.

Zaller, Varghese and Udochi will follow the progress of participants over a period of about six months to observe "overall substance use behaviors," Zaller said. The team will then compare the outcomes of the two groups using standardized assessment tools, such as the Addiction Severity Index, and by conducting pre- and post-study interviews with both the Community Correction officers and the individuals who received treatment.

Zaller, Varghese and Udochi said the pilot study would be considered successful if participants respond well to the telehealth counseling and the ACC decides to expand the study to collect more information from different Community Correction locations in the state. But expanding the study would require funding from the state, and Zaller said such funding could be difficult to come by because of attitudes about criminal justice and punishment. According to Zaller, a main emphasis of the fellowship is also to change the cultural narrative surrounding criminal justice and incarceration by becoming public health leaders in the community.

"A lot of it is a cultural shift," Zaller said. "What do we see as the big picture? What sort of society do we want to live in? Right now, we've chosen a society totally dominated by fear. ... And unless we change that narrative, and unless people understand that there are a lot of structural factors that relate to crime, including violent crime, we have to understand that it's not all the same. We have to really start thinking carefully about what it is that we're punishing people for."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Project REACH

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Stacey McAdoo

Transformative teacher.

Long before Stacey McAdoo was a communications teacher at Little Rock's Central High School — let alone the 2019 Arkansas Teacher of the Year — she was a poet. In the mid-'90s, having just graduated from Hall High School, she and her future husband, Leron, began self-publishing a magazine intended to serve as a platform for fellow creatives, especially people of color. They put out a call for submissions, cut-and-pasted together their book by hand and were soon running off copies at a 24-hour Kinkos. They dubbed it "The Writeous."

"When you talk about underrepresented people, one of the things we are underrepresented in is media, and the ability to tell our story," McAdoo said. "A lot of poets wanted to have a place to share their voice, and we filled that niche."

"Fast forward: When I became an educator, I took that same concept and brought it to the classroom," she said. "So I am now the founder and sponsor of the Writeous Poetry Club ... and the Writeous has transformed from a magazine to a youth-oriented poetry collective."

Since McAdoo started the club in 2002 — her first year at Central and her first year teaching — at least 50 students have participated each year, writing and performing original material at open mics, concerts and on "The Writeous Hour," a radio show she co-produces on local station KWCP-FM, 98.9. Kids learn new skills, build creative projects of their own and travel to other cities. "We also do workshops around Arkansas and the country, teaching other people, other youth, how to use and find their voice," she said. (Leron, who's better known around town as the multitalented performer, writer and artist Ron Mc, remains an integral part of "The Writeous.")

The state's teacher of the year is a product of the Little Rock School District. McAdoo grew up in Southwest Little Rock, where she attended Baseline Elementary and Cloverdale Elementary, then went on to Henderson Middle School and Hall. McAdoo received a B.A. in professional and technical writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Though she always knew she wanted to be a teacher, she brushed those thoughts aside after graduating. The teaching profession was losing the esteem it had once enjoyed in society, McAdoo said; the message she received from her peers and community was that the classroom wasn't the place for her. Instead, she found a comfortable job at Alltel as an administrative assistant and started a family.

Then, her brother died in a car accident, "and I realized then that life was too short for me to not do what I felt I was supposed to do," McAdoo said. "I quit my job, cut my hair off, and enrolled in ... a master's program [at UA Monticello]." As a first-year teacher, she said, she saw a drop in both pay and health benefits compared to her secretarial job at Alltel.

McAdoo arrived at Central the same year as its principal, Nancy Rousseau. She's been teaching communications at the school ever since. She's also taught AVID, or Advancement Via Individual Determination, a college-readiness program for students who are typically the first in their families to go to college since 2007. "I'm their teacher 9th-12th grade," she said. The purpose of AVID is to equip students with the "soft skills" they need to navigate adult life and "discover the hidden curriculum" in college and beyond. "We, as in society, basically operate from a middle-class white person's perspective, and we assume everyone's experience matches that," she said.

As Teacher of the Year, McAdoo will receive a $14,000 award sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation. Beginning in July 2019, she'll spend a sabbatical year of service traveling the state and the nation, speaking with teachers and doing professional development. McAdoo will also have a nonvoting seat on the state Board of Education — the body that took over the Little Rock School District in 2015 and has controlled it for the last four years.

McAdoo said she "has a lot of thoughts" about education policy and the LRSD, but she's not yet sure how she'll leverage her newfound status. "I'm just looking and trying to see where my place is," she said. Was she surprised to be selected for the honor? McAdoo laughed. "In light of who I am, and in light of today's climate — yeah, it's real interesting!" she said.

In general, McAdoo isn't shy about expressing her views. Sixteen years ago, as a newly minted teacher, she was skeptical of the emphasis placed on standardized testing by No Child Left Behind, the federal education law. She recalls saying as much to Rousseau during her first interview. Today, she said, "I still think standardized testing is — the word I want to use is 'wack.' ... Because there's no standard child. The whole premise of testing students to whatever this norm is, it's ridiculous." In her classroom, she said, "I close my door and I've done what I thought was best for the children. I teach pretty much the way I wish I had been taught — and/or the way that I think my biological children need." (She and Ron have a daughter who's now a senior at Central and a son who attends Tennessee State University; her daughter is an accomplished poet in her own right.)

Though she's proud of her work in the classroom, McAdoo considers the Writeous Poetry Club her "most valuable contribution ... to society" because it takes a group of kids and "helps validate them as thinkers."

"My platform as Teacher of the Year is using passion and poetry to close the opportunity gap," she said. "You have a core group of students, for the most part from inner-city Little Rock ... spending their time sitting around writing and re-writing and practicing. That's how you transform not just education, but a city."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Stacey McAdoo

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Steve Arrison

The Hot Springs promoter wants to see hordes in hot water. Here's what Steve Arrison envisions: lots of people pouring into Hot Springs, biking in, hauling kayaks in, driving in for the World's Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade. Bunking in the new hotels, soaking up the craft suds, enjoying the thermal waters. And he wants an improved quality of life for the residents of the Spa City. Thanks to the internet, Arrison said, "people can live anywhere." Why not Hot Springs?

Arrison, 62, has worked as the CEO of Visit Hot Springs, the city's convention and visitor's bureau, for 20 years. In that time, he's seen gaming join the racetrack at Oaklawn Park, the reopening of once-struggling Magic Springs Theme and Water Park in 2000 thanks to a local bond issue, the expansion of the convention center and the opening of the Embassy Suites Hotel. He was part of the group that worked on the Hot Springs Historic Baseball Trail. The latest big thing that has Hot Springs promoters licking their chops: Oaklawn's $100 million expansion that will bring a high-rise hotel with 200 rooms, an event center and a bigger gaming area.

Arrison is quick to say he wasn't alone, or even the prime mover, in bringing such new investments to Hot Springs. He's part of a team, and he was reluctant to have the Arkansas Times single him out.

But he would take credit for the Northwoods project, the multimillion-dollar bike-trail development taking place on 2,000 hilly Ouachita Mountain acres just west of downtown. The property was made off-limits to the public after 9/11 because its four lakes supplied drinking water to the city. The city opened the land after it discontinued use of three of the lakes, and in 2016 Arrison — who said he didn't even know the property existed — visited. He was struck by its beauty and had the notion that it would be a good place to build bike trails. Hot Springs already attracts the cycling public with several bike trails, both rugged and easy.

After a visit to Bentonville, where the Walton Family Foundation has invested $74 million on mountain bike trails and the bike trail system that connects Bentonville to Bella Vista and Fayetteville, Arrison made a pitch for Walton money for the Northwoods trail. He was successful: The Walton Family Foundation matched Visit Hot Springs' contribution of $680,000 and phase one was launched. The city dedicated the trail's first 14 miles in November; eventually, Northwoods will have 44 miles of mountain bike trail, complete with angled berms, dirt ramps and tricky turns. Arrison wants to see the lakes become kayaker destinations.

Arrison is also looking forward to the day when the Southwest Bike Trail from Pulaski County to Garland County becomes a reality, but that will be many years from now. He's not going anywhere, however: "I hope to be in this job six or seven years from now. I love what I do."

Next on Arrison's plate is the development of the city's five acres at Park and Central avenues, where the Majestic Hotel once stood. The University of Arkansas's Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and Kansas State University are in charge of the "visioning process" for the site. Arrison's vision involves Hot Springs' reason for being: the thermal waters. He'd like to see outdoor thermal pools, where people could relax in the toasty 143-degree F. (on average) water.

The Majestic property is a "real pivotal piece" to Hot Springs' development, so it's important to "get it right." He thinks a public-private partnership is likely.

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Steve Arrison

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Lorenzo Lewis

Mental health care advocate. Lorenzo Lewis says his narrow escape from the school-to-prison pipeline was a testament to the importance of equipping marginalized men of color with coping skills and resources to manage their mental health. That's why in 2016 Lewis founded the Confess Project; its mission is to bring mental health and emotional awareness education to men and boys of color.

Lewis was born while his mother was incarcerated. He said behavior and anxiety issues in his early childhood led to his two-month stay at a juvenile facility in Pulaski County at age 10. He wasn't encouraged to talk about his feelings or trauma and almost re-entered the juvenile system at age 17.

"Emotionally, I wasn't validated as a young man," Lewis said. He was told that God heals everything, "but [that's] not practically looking at what helps and digging into the issue." The Confess Project advocates for psychological therapy and medication management. "Some of these different tools that you need to understand, through the process of healing and growing, [are] really important to getting on the right track. And I think those were not the things that were pushed in front of me."

The Confess Project offers monthly empowering sessions, community forums on social and emotional issues; 90-minute workshops for marginalized men and boys ages 10-40 on character education, academic improvement and life skills; and the Confess College Tour, which travels to different campuses with a curriculum focused on mental health education, prevention techniques and open dialogue.

The Confess Project also travels to barbershops in the South and Midwest as part of its "Beyond the Shop" series to meet men and boys where they are. Lewis said the "Beyond the Shop" model is intended to initiate conversations that spread further into the communities the nonprofit serves.

"The model of 'Beyond the Shop' is really meant to let this conversation start here, but blossom into our communities, into our homes, into our families, to help our children, to better our relationships," Lewis said. "So that's why it's called 'Beyond the Shop,' to say that it starts here but it revolutionizes throughout the places we live, work and play in."

Confess Project facilitators provide pamphlets on counseling services at the "Beyond the Shop" meetings. Lewis said that these efforts come full circle when he learns of someone who attended a session and went on to begin counseling, or quit smoking, or otherwise take better care of themselves.

"That is why we do what we do. ... I think it's the ultimate feeling as a founder of this organization," he said. "You intend for that to happen, but you don't always see it happen as rapidly, so when you see that happen, it really gives you a lot of satisfaction. At that point, you know that they have a larger chance of transforming their life, more than what they had before."

The Confess Project also trains barbers to become mental health advocates. Lewis said it intends to train 700 barbers next year through webinars, online video training and follow-ups.

Healing is at the root of what the Confess Project does. The curriculum guides men and boys through three archetypes of masculinity: provider, protector and priest. Lewis said once men and boys are able to identify the harmful constraints and pressures of these archetypes, they're able to gain perspective on the unhealthy behaviors they engender.

"Once you get men to understand that, I think they will begin to live a better quality of life," Lewis said. "We also ask, what is the speed of healing? But we let them know that time to heal and grow is different. ...

"A lot of the conversation is about manhood. It's mental health, but it's also about manhood. We have to dig deep into identity, and social skills, and building relationships. A lot of stuff comes up about divorce, and girls, and domestic violence, and child support. You're really dealing with men from the things that affect men."

According to Lewis, the Confess Project is built on the testimony and storytelling of facilitators with stories like his — stories like those of the men and boys in the barbershops and college campuses and community spaces they visit. Lewis said the resonance is crucial to the fulfillment of the organization's mission.

"I think it's important, because it allows them to really see the bigger picture," he said. "It allows them to see accelerated growth, and it's also just transparent, because it's someone who looks like them and comes from the same neighborhood, or went to the same high school as them, may have had failing grades just like them. ... Our facilitators and staff with the Confess Project all harness stories of power. ... It's a mixture of guys from different walks of life and professions who can relate to our key mission that helps us develop a bigger narrative."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Lorenzo Lewis

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Jared Henderson

Lost the battle, but sees hope for Democrats in the longer political struggle. First, a bit of news for the politicos for whom it's already time to begin worrying over elections in 2020: Count Jared Henderson of Little Rock out as a candidate for the U.S. Senate or Congress. But don't take that as a sign that his political fire is dwindling. Yes, as the Democratic nominee for governor, he got walloped by Governor Hutchinson in November. (Henderson got 31.7 percent of the vote, while Hutchinson secured 65.4 percent.) That's a big gap, but Hutchinson was a popular incumbent; no one gave Henderson much of a shot to defeat him, particularly considering Henderson had little to no name recognition.

After 10 months of hard campaigning, meeting and greeting and stump-speaking across the state, Henderson may be beat up a bit, but at 40, with a decorated resume and a Clintonesque gift for making policy relatable, he has the look of a star prospect for Arkansas Democrats.

So what's next? He hasn't charted a path yet, but says he plans to "stay engaged in politics." He won't run against U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton or U.S. Rep. French Hill, not because he doesn't think they're beatable in two years, but because he's got a young family and isn't ready to spend 60 percent of his time in Washington, D.C.

After getting two advanced degrees from Harvard, in business administration and public administration, Henderson worked for NASA and for McKinsey & Co., the worldwide consulting firm. He returned to Arkansas to lead the state branch of Teach for America, with a plan to eventually get into politics. "But I was perpetually six or 10 years away until Donald Trump got elected," he said. "When that happened, especially as a new father, I said, 'We've got to get a good, competent, compassionate, inclusive party back in the state,' and the fastest way is just to get in and do it. And, yeah, we may continue to get thumped for a while, but there's not a faster way to make progress."

Why make the political leap into a race for the highest statewide office? Why not start in city hall or in the state legislature? "Whether it's right or wrong, in politics, as long as you're a credible and competent candidate, voters fit you into the box in which you're introduced. ... In politics, I think you have to take risks," Henderson said.

He concedes that he made some first-time-candidate mistakes. "I didn't really start to understand and build an operation that could raise significant amounts of money until June or July, but once we did, I actually started raising significant amounts of money, especially since I was going against someone that no one thought was beatable. If I had been able to start that a year earlier, we would've had enough money to introduce myself to the rest of the state. Would that have won it for us? Probably not. But would that have gotten me another 10 points? Very plausible."

For Democrats to succeed down the road, the party must invest in infrastructure and continue to improve on candidate recruitment, he said.

"My campaign built a field organization that really reached pretty far, but could've gone so much farther. We're rebuilding data systems as a party, so we know which doors to knock on and which voters to engage. As we rebuild that over the next 10 years, you could imagine that compressing some of the margins even more. It's going to take more money than we had. It's going to take a party infrastructure that brings more people in. It's going to take contesting every race."

If Democrats can make improvements, Republicans might help their cause, Henderson said, noting as markers Oklahoma, which recently elected a Democratic congressman, and Kansas, which elected a Democratic governor.

"I don't want the economy to teeter for anyone's political fortune," Henderson said. "But sooner or later it'll turn. I was running this year because I wanted to win and I believed there was a hell of a good argument to win. And I lost. Let the Republicans go do what they say they're going to do in the next few years. Let them cut another $180 million in taxes. Let them ignore that we have the sixth-highest prison population in the world. Let them kick the can on highway funding. We'll see if they follow through with this raise on teachers, but even if they do, it's not going to be enough. This profession is bleeding."

Henderson would like to continue to advocate for issues on which he campaigned. "Education, teenage pregnancy and rural economic development — those are things I'm passionate about and things I believe are really fundamental for building a better future for the whole state, and they're areas that are way under-resourced. You can also speak to them in conservative values. I can talk to my conservative family members on why these things matter and I can get them to nod their heads."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Jared Henderson

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Brandon Markin

A curious and roving eye. Brandon Markin's approach to photography and life are the same: "You get one go-round and so you might as well try it all and put yourself into situations that make you uncomfortable and just deal with that. ... I look at photography as an extension of who I am as a person and a way to document my learning experience as I go through life."

That deep curiosity shines through in a scan of his online portfolios on Instagram (@bnikram) and brandonmarkin.com. There you'll find a tender black-and-white portrait of a young black man holding a diaper-clad baby who regards the camera with a blank wonder, while her father, eyes downcast and with the hint of a grin, plays with her impossibly small baby fingers. It's captioned "From a front porch in Helena. Talking boxing with TJ." Another black-and-white image from January is all light and shadow, a big band of men in cowboy hats on a stage, with beams of light emanating from spotlights out into a sparse crowd on the dance floor, dark shapes huddled tight. It's titled "Quinceañera de Juliana."

Like everyone else's Instagram page, Markin also includes pictures of his family. His wife and frequent muse, Mariella, is a student at the Clinton School of Public Service. The family traveled to Bocas del Toro, an island chain province of Panama, over the summer while Mariella did her required service project, so you'll also find pictures such as one Markin captioned "Girl in Bahia Honda, Panama with her dolls. Life is sweet and fleeting." It's of a small girl in a white dress standing in front of a giant window, looking warily outside the frame and clutching her dolls tightly to her chest.

Markin, 43, of North Little Rock, prefers analog film photography. "I've always been drawn to that process," he said, though he didn't start young. "It wasn't until I was well into adulthood [that] I had the resources to pursue that." Why film? "Part of it is nostalgia. We're nostalgic creatures. Photography is the nostalgic medium. What you're doing, in a way, is stopping time. You're capturing light from a moment that will never be repeated again." You also learn to appreciate motion, he said. "When most people do digital photography, that obsession with perfection means, if they're shooting something with low light, they'll try to stop the motion. But if you're doing it with film, that motion turns into a beautiful thing, with waves and streaks and such."

He's part of noted photographer Rita Henry's Blue-Eyed Knockers collective in Little Rock. The group gets together regularly at Henry's Stifft Station studio to hang out and process film. Through that group and under his own initiative, he's done a number of projects: pics of political protest, of the dilapidated Hotel Pines in Pine Bluff, of the Kanis Bash, where skateboarders and punk and hardcore bands gather at the Kanis Park skate bowl.

Markin makes a living as a photographer, which means he shoots products, events and magazine portraits with a digital camera. But he's committed to continuing his art photography. He has a solo retrospective coming in November 2019 at the William F. Laman Library in North Little Rock. He dreams of traveling through Central and South America on a photo project (Mariella is from Ecuador, so he's traveled to South America before). He met Adger Cowans, the famed fine art photographer, at a talk at Hearne Fine Art earlier this year and asked him for advice. "He said, 'Do what you do and don't worry about where the money is going to come from. If you're true to your spirit and vision, it may take a while, but the money will come.' " For now, Markin is content to keep on keeping on. "Any day that I can be walking around with the camera taking photographs and doing what I love, that's a win for me."

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Brandon Markin

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2018: Benito Lubazibwa

Working for economic mobility.

Benito Lubazibwa wants to do more than encourage African-American entrepreneurship, though that is the primary focus of his own startup, Remix Ideas. "Integrating capital with humanity" is what the native of Tanzania and University of Central Arkansas alumnus says is the ultimate goal: to make Little Rock a more connected, integrated place to live, to break down barriers not just to capital — an entrepreneur's biggest challenge — but between people.

That's what Remix's Night Market in the Bernice Garden has been able to achieve on a small scale. The Night Market's slogan is "One City, One Love," and serves as both a platform for startups — 40 vendors were at the September event — and a place to mingle, listen to music, dine and dance. Nearly all the vendors were women, a fact that pleased Lubazibwa mightily, and established businesses on Main Street indirectly benefited. The event, which Lubazibwa and chief creative officer Angel Burt organized, featured not just African-American women starting out in business, but food trucks featuring the cuisine of many nationalities: Venezuelan, Mexican, Colombian and African. It also had a broader mission than to help create business: It also created jobs. The men setting up and taking down the market were hired intentionally from the ranks of SoMa's homeless population, and Lubazibwa said they were eager, excellent employees who not only showed up on time, but early. They were paid $15 an hour and given T-shirts identifying them with the Night Market. "I told people, the people you have been serving, dancing with, those are the people you call homeless. I call them freedom fighters — they have to fight against whatever is holding them back," Lubazibwa said.

Remix has been in business for a year, working with financing partner Communities Unlimited Inc., which provides microloans, and Innovate Arkansas, an initiative of Winrock International. It hosts the "Remix Pitch Challenge," awarding $1,000 to the winning startup pitch, and will hold a "Celebration of Startups" networking and pitch challenge party from 5-10 p.m. Dec. 14 at the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, 201 E. Broadway in North Little Rock. (Tickets are $10.)

Remix seeks to inspire would-be entrepreneurs with its radio show "Remix Ideas." Creative officer Burt interviews business people on the half-hour show on KABF-FM, 88.3, which airs at 11:30 a.m. Wednesdays.

Remix has also worked out discounts for use of co-working spaces at the Little Rock Technology Park and the Innovation Hub. Remix clients will be able to use space at the tech park, at 417 Main St., for $50 a month, and at the Hub for $40 a month.

Remix has several workshops and events lined up for 2019, including a 12-week Startups Business Academy, beginning in February, for people who have the ideas, but not the know-how, on running a business. "Eighty percent of startups fail," Lubazibwa said. The business academy will be practical, showing people how to test their ideas. "You don't buy a car without driving it," he said. "You test drive."

Remix will also hold three pitch challenges and the Ideas Weekend festival July 25-27.

Lubazibwa is also working to introduce the Impactor card, which for $10 will give card holders discounts at participating businesses. It's similar to the Partners Card that the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences issues to support cancer research, but instead of two weeks, the Impactor Card will be good for a year. Several businesses have signed on to the idea already, including Remix Ideas' most high-profile success story, Kontiki African Restaurant; and Pyramid Art Books and Custom Framing. Garbo Hearne, who owns Pyramid, said she was impressed with Lubazibwa's energy and his ideas for Little Rock. Lubazibwa said the card would be a "win-win" for customers, giving them a break, and businesses, who would see more customers.

Lubazibwa said he worked in Africa after graduating from UCA in 2001, but realized that Arkansas was as much in need of the same "ecosystem" — a favorite word of startup promoters — to address similar barriers to economic success as were the places in Africa he worked.

It was his parents who instilled in him the notion that the important thing in life was to help others. "They believe that you are judged not by your harvest, but by the seed you are planting. ... That's been in my life since the beginning."

The next movement among people of color will be an economic movement, Lubazibwa believes. "Martin Luther King did an excellent job on civil rights. Now it's time for this generation to fight for economic mobility," not just for African Americans, but "women, Latinos, everybody." He believes Remix is part of that movement.

For information on Remix workshops and events, go to remixideas.com.  

  Visionary Arkansans 2018: Benito Lubazibwa

[oselatra]

The class of 2016

First-time candidates outraged by Trump's election off the bench and into state and local races.

Nothing wakes a sleeping person quicker than a splash of cold water to the face. The election of President Trump in November 2016 appears to have been that cold dousing for progressive Americans.

Across the country, people who had never considered running for public office have turned their outrage into candidacy, and recent elections —including a near-sweep for Democrats on Nov. 7 in Virginia, with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam crushing Republican Ed Gillespie, and Republicans seeing their supermajority in that state's legislative body evaporate literally overnight — seem to suggest that the wind might be blowing against the party of Trump. Arkansas is also seeing a surge of new candidates from the left, most of them political novices who freely admit they're off the bench because of Trump's election. With a wave election potentially brewing for next November that could cost Republicans control of Congress, Arkansas candidates for offices from school board to the U.S. House are hoping they can surf that hoped-for tsunami, even in a deep red state. State Rep. Michael John Gray (D-Augusta), the chairman of the Democratic Party of Arkansas, said that while the election of Donald Trump and the policies he has put in place has Democrats inspired to run, Democratic candidates he's talked to are mostly engaged by their repulsion at what goes on in Washington. "It's not necessarily just Trump," he said. "It's the bad policies or the Washington politics of doing nothing and blaming it on the other guy." Though the politics of running against "Barack Obama everywhere" has paid dividends for Republicans over the past decade, including in Arkansas, Gray said he believes it would be a mistake for candidates to run on an anti-Trump agenda. "People want to believe in something," Gray said. "I think really, if you're trying to change things, you've got to have a vision. You've got to have hope and an idea." Gray said that while he is "at best, cautiously optimistic" about Democratic chances in November 2018, he said the lesson from Virginia and other challenging special elections recently won by Democrats is you can't win if you don't run, and if you run, fight for what's going to make peoples' lives better. "What we learned from Virginia is that you go out there and run your campaign on your issues and on your solutions," he said. "Don't just run a campaign about how bad the other guy is, but a campaign on your vision of the future and how you want to make life better for where you're from or for your kids or for your neighbors. Then things do seem to cut through the noise a bit." Nicole Clowney, a Fayetteville Democrat running for Arkansas House District 86, said that while the election of Donald Trump wasn't that surprising, the immediate, organized response to the election and how the resistance to Trump's agenda has been sustained over the past year has been. "I think this year has brought a lot of anger and a lot of frustration," she said, "but it's also been really inspiring to watch grass-roots movements make that real change. There's no doubt that the election motivated me, but it was in that way."

Clowney has an edge: She's running for the seat held by a Democrat — Rep. Greg Leding, who is seeking a seat in the state Senate. But Clowney said she had never seen a place for herself in politics until she saw the work the Trump resistance — particularly women — have been doing since the election. "Just that hard planning, and making the phone calls, and dealing with elected representatives in that way that women have done so consistently for the last year," she said. "There need to be more women doing that as elected officials. I've always known that, but I'm not sure that the power of that was brought fully home to me until I witnessed what women have been able to do." Clowney joins Fayetteville City Council member Mark Kinion as an announced candidate for the District 86 seat. Another motivated to run, in part, because of the Trump election is Jonathan Crossley of Jacksonville, who is aiming to unseat Republican Rep. Karilyn Brown (R-Sherwood) in House District 41. Crossley, the principal of Baseline Academy in the Little Rock School District, said that as a person trying to help teach children civic duty, responsibility and respect for others, he believes America can do better than Trump and his divisive politics. "I think Arkansas can do better, and I want to be a part of the new wave of Arkansas Democrats that brings that better to the forefront. We're a generation that expects more, a generation that does more for our local communities, that believes in something really tangible and visionary." Even though he personally opposes Trump, Crossley said his campaign is about what he believes is possible for the state, not about the president. "I think that's a bad way to run a campaign, [and] that's a bad way to present policy," he said. "If it's always about the negative and what you're against, what's the affirmative? What are you for? What do you believe in? What's the vision for a better tomorrow? What's the bold action you're trying to bring about for a better tomorrow? If it's just about the negative, that's not a very inspiring message." Crossley said his message is that all Arkansans, regardless of party, politics or where they live, want a better future for our children. He'll reach across party lines to accomplish that, he said. "Today's rhetoric is all or nothing. What I want to do is help change that paradigm to where we can come together for a positive message and not just shun the other side because we disagree about something we saw in the national headlines. It's about Arkansas, not just about the national narrative." Gwendolynn Millen Combs, an Air Force veteran and Little Rock school teacher running to unseat Republican 2nd District U.S. Rep. French Hill, said that while she refuses to call Trump an inspiration, his election was "absolutely" her motivation for running. The organizer of the Little Rock Women's March on Jan. 21, an event that drew thousands of protestors to march on the state Capitol, Combs said that within days of announcing she was organizing the march, she met with local politicians who convinced her to have an impact by running for public office. A first-time candidate, Combs knows she's aiming high by running for a seat in Congress, but said that she did so because she doesn't believe she can address the issues she wants to tackle at the local level. She said she believes Hill is vulnerable. "He's making bad decisions. He voted against health care, he voted in favor of the tax plan. He's voted against a living wage for people in the past. His voting record is pro-business, pro-banker, anti-people. I think if that message is able to get out to people in an effective way, I think that it can make a difference." Combs noted the leadership women have shown in the protest movement against Trump policies, and said that has translated into a surge of female candidates nationwide. She said Emily's List, a website that supports female candidates, reports there are over 20,000 women nationwide who have announced they are running for public office since the 2016 election. Combs said she believes that reflects the outrage women feel over the misogyny Trump displayed during the campaign. Still, like Gray and others, she said a solely anti-Trump election strategy is a ticket to defeat. "We need to be pro something," she said. "That's an idea that seems to be known pretty widely. People are thinking about that, realizing that, and understanding that. That's encouraging, and we've seen positive things as a result of it." While Combs said she's optimistic about the chances for Democratic candidates in Arkansas next year, Trump's relatively high approval rating in the state means it will be tough for any progressive candidate to win. She said her approach has been to talk to people about their concerns first, and their politics second. "I open every conversation with everybody I meet by saying, 'What are the issues you'd like to see Congress tackle right now?' " she said. "I don't say, 'Do you vote?' I don't say, 'Who did you vote for?' I open by listening to that. Then I say, 'The reason I asked is because I'm running for Congress. I think that's the right way to approach anybody. We're all people, and we all have serious concerns.' "

Correction

The Walton gift to the University of Arkansas to create the School of Art, reported in last week's issue on philanthropy, incorrectly said the gift came from the Walton Family Foundation. The $120 million is coming from the Walton Charitable Support Foundation.

The class of 2016

[oselatra]

Visionary Arkansans 2017

A celebration of Arkansans with ideas and achievements of transformative power.

It's time again for our annual Visionaries issue, a celebration of Arkansans with ideas of transformative power. This year's class is filled with people who are devoted to making Arkansas better. They’re working to understand the social media forces that may have helped tilt the presidential election for Donald Trump (Nitin Agarwal), advocating on behalf of the most vulnerable homeless population (Penelope Poppers) and investing in projects that make Northwest Arkansas a healthier and cooler place to live (Tom and Steuart Walton). They’ve ensured the preservation of the heritage of the Arkansas Delta (Ruth Hawkins), been at the vanguard of an electronic music subgenre (Yuni Wa) and made solar work for Arkansas municipalities and companies (Bill Halter). Craighead County Judges David Boling and Tommy Fowler took on a predatory private probation company that was putting citizens of their community in a cycle of debt. Joshua Asante is simultaneously the leader of two of Little Rock’s best bands, a sensitive portrait photographer and a budding filmmaker. All 20 are people with bold visions.

Jason Macom Paralympic hopeful

The story of Jason Macom's career as an internationally ranked cyclist began at the moment a lot of other athletes' careers would have ended: with the amputation of his leg below the knee. A BMX bicycle racer since he was young, Macom took a tumble while playing bike polo in the summer of 2009 and shattered a bone in his right ankle. Over the next six years, he would endure several surgeries to try and correct the issue, leaving him in near constant pain. In the summer of 2015, however, a bone infection led to a long-delayed decision to amputate. Macom took what could have been seen as a devastating blow as an opportunity.

"I remember just trying to create a file in my head of all the things I could be able to do once we swapped over and I was able to get a prosthetic and start using that," Macom said. "What could I do? Bike racing was back on the table as something I could do. I started looking into that more and more." During the three-month recovery time following the amputation, Macom dove headlong into researching all he could about para-cycling: prosthetics, record times and the top-ranked disabled cyclists in the world.

"I sort of made it a mission to figure it out: looking at all the world record times, learning who the competition guys are, really getting into it from all those different angles. As soon as I got a prosthetic, I went straight home and put on cycling shoes and jumped on my bike."

Macom soon realized that the walking prosthetic with which he had been fitted wasn't right for cycling. After reviewing video of his "good" leg as he worked the pedals of a bike on a stand, Macom got to work developing a series of ever-more-sophisticated racing prosthetics, eventually working with friends in the local cycling community and a Little Rock machine shop to get the parts and pieces right on both the leg and his specially modified bike. These days, his racing leg looks a lot like a carbon fiber fan blade. "It's very aero," he said.

When he spoke to the Arkansas Times in October, Macom had just received his 2018 contract to join the Team USA Paralympic cycling team, and was practicing for December's Para-Cycling National Championship in Colorado Springs, Colo. Though he has a contract with Team USA, he doesn't have a spot on the Team USA roster yet.

"I have to race for that spot," he said. "Everything is earned on Team USA. It's all based on previous results. It's all, 'If you're fit at the time and the weeks leading up to the big race, you have to prove it and earn your spot on the roster.' That's the goal at the moment: to earn a spot on the roster to go to the world championships." The selection race will be in held in February, with the World Championships in Rio next March. If he makes the Team USA roster, he can compete in what are known as World Cup events in countries around the world, including Japan, New Zealand and the U.K. The results of those races will determine which Team USA members will represent the United States in the 2018 Paralympic Games, which will be held in Tokyo in 2020.

"A lot of racing has to be done between now and then," he said.

—David Koon

Tina and Trina Fletcher One plus one, working for better schools in the Delta.

Twins Tina and Trina Fletcher were raised in Morrilton by their single mother. "We did not have the easiest childhood," Trina said. "We were poor, working-class, living check to check. Most days when we came home from school, there was no one there; mom was working until 7 p.m."

That history helps Tina and Trina relate to many of the students they meet in their work in the Delta with Forward Arkansas, an education initiative created by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the state Department of Education. They tell the students they meet, you can be like us. You can be first-generation college students. You can go on and get graduate degrees.

The Fletcher twins, 31, did: Tina holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Arkansas and a master's degree in secondary teacher education from Harvard University. Trina holds a bachelor's degree in applied engineering from UA Pine Bluff, a master's degree in operations management from the UA, a second master's from George Washington University and a doctorate in engineering education from Purdue University. Tina interned with programs in the office of first lady Michelle Obama. Trina interned with Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar and Kellogg's. One could go on; their accolades are many.

Here's what happened to bring them to work together: About 10 years ago, Tina said, Morrilton High School invited them to speak to students about their success. "After that experience, we said, 'We have really interesting stories. We think we could be valuable, to kids like us, first-generation college students, [from homes] with single parents,' " Tina said.

The twins joined up to become inspirational speakers, going to high schools, nonprofits, churches, telling kids to "take advantage of opportunities" offered by education. They are "blunt and honest," Trina said, about their own struggles. They also talk about beloved teacher mentors who made the difference in their lives.

Then, last January, Forward called, asking Tina and Trina, now incorporated as Fletcher Solutions, to work with Crossett and Lee County as they talk about what they want their school systems to look like. Their job is to help bring people together to talk about what they want from their schools.

"A lot of it is just connecting the dots," getting the community together. "There are resources right in the towns, like access to grant money," Trina said.

For example, Trina said, on her visit to Crossett last week, a meeting brought together folks who may not have been in the same room before: parents, the mayor, the president of the bank, a representative from the community college, all asking, "How do we improve our partnership?"

"It's fascinating, the work that these communities are doing," Tina said.

Trina and Tina hope to improve students' motivation to get an education, to help "plant a seed." To that end, they connected students from Lee County with the UA's Skilled Trades Camp. The students learned about careers in welding and HVAC, for example; they got to drive 18-wheelers. They also went to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Trina's hope was that they would then share their experiences with friends back home: There is a big world out there.

Forward "is not the magic dust," Trina said. But she and Tina are helping people in the communities write down what they want to achieve, how they can achieve it and how they can sustain the achievement.

Talk about buy-in: The Fletchers provided to school administrators in Crossett and Marianna surveys including 35 questions about what goals for education should be. The surveys, posted on the Crossett school website and distributed on paper in Marianna — with students inputting the results into a computer — elicited 400 responses from Lee County and 375 from Crossett. It's not known how many downloaded the surveys or were provided the surveys, but the number appeared substantial to the Fletchers.

"Even though Forward is education-focused, it's really an initiative in building community," Tina said. Noting that Lee County schools have lost 1,000 students in the past 10 years, Tina said she's discovered a passion for rural education, and is considering pursuing a doctorate in education, studying the impact of consolidation on small communities — an impact that can kill small towns.

Trina's passion is to get students — girls and students of color especially — interested in STEM studies. And so a future chapter in the twins' lives: "The 12th Street Collab," a co-working space for people of all ages to grow their businesses. "That's a wild animal of its own," Trina said. The dream has foundations: The twins have bought property on 12th Street in Little Rock zoned commercial.

Stay tuned.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Bill Halter From political to solar power.

When Clarksville Light and Water Co. decided to think about powering the city-owned utility with solar energy, it first looked to Missouri municipal systems. It next investigated the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp.'s solar power purchasing agreements.

Then, in early 2016, CLW General Manager John Lester said, the utility started talking to Scenic Hill Solar's CEO Bill Halter. Halter, the former lieutenant governor of Arkansas (2007-11) whose political career included challenges to former U.S. Rep. Blanche Lincoln and his position as COO of the Social Security Administration, incorporated Scenic Hill Solar in 2015.

"Bill was more flexible, which accommodated our needs better," Lester said. Scenic Hill's solar panel technology was another attraction: Like the compass plant, a prairie sunflower, Scenic Hill's solar panels follow the sun as it moves across the sky, rather than staying in one position. How the panels move is determined by weather stations that compute the positions in which the panels can best absorb the sunlight.

Halter's firm was based in Arkansas, as well. "We do business locally, if not with the state, whenever we can," Lester said. And because Halter is well known in several circles, technological as well as political, some 300 nationwide periodicals wrote about Clarksville's contract with Scenic Hill, Lester said, giving the town a great "bang for our buck" in public relations.

The solar plant, being built on 42 acres owned by the city, will when complete in the middle of next year provide 5 megawatts of alternating current, enough to power 25 percent of Clarksville's households, Lester said.

The biggest splash Halter's company, which does commercial work only, has made was in September 2016, when international cosmetics company L'Oreal announced it was partnering with Scenic Hill to build solar power plants at the Maybelline plant in North Little Rock and another L'Oreal plant in Kentucky. The Kentucky plant is the largest commercial solar array in that state. Maybelline's is the third largest commercial project in Arkansas. The North Little Rock project, which took only 49 days to construct, covers 8 acres and provides 10 percent of the overall energy needs.

The projects are like "bookends," Halter said. Scenic Hill designed and built the solar plant for L'Oreal, which the company then bought. Scenic Hill owns the plant in Clarksville, which is buying power from Scenic Hill at a fixed rate of 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for 30 years. It can lower that price by purchasing the plant from Scenic Hill in seven years, when Scenic Hill's tax credits expire.

The reasons companies are turning to solar power are many, Halter said. They can save money by owning their own plants or entering long-term contracts at fixed prices and not being vulnerable to the vagaries of electric grid price volatility. There are environmental reasons, because sunlight is a sustainable source of power. There are multiple tax incentives. There are public benefits, too, in the form of property tax revenues.

But more than the power of the sun or the declining cost of solar plants, a factor that determines how much a state turns to this cleaner, sustainable energy source is policy. North Carolina for example, which produces 2,000 megawatts of solar energy (compared to Arkansas's 20 mw), requires utilities to produce a fraction of their electricity from renewable sources and awards state solar tax credits.

Solar power growth in Arkansas could be affected by two policies being debated at the state and national level.

The Arkansas Public Service Commission will hold a hearing Nov. 30 on its net metering rules that regulate the price utilities pay when they buy excess energy produced by independently owned solar power plants. Entergy wants to pay at a lower rate that Halter says would reduce the benefit — but not zero it out — of generating solar power.

In September, the International Trade Commission ruled that Chinese solar panel imports are a threat to American manufacturers, which would allow the U.S. to impose tariffs on the panels, making the panels more costly to purchase. That might benefit U.S. solar panel manufacturers but harm the industry as a whole.

Still, thanks to New Market Tax Credits available from the federal government, Halter and Clarksville Water and Light are making plans for the future, Lester said. "It's highly likely we're building a second solar facility on a different property," Lester said, thanks to the credits, created to stimulate the economy.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Penelope Poppers Helping the most vulnerable.

From a new office and drop-in center on the seventh floor of a building at 300 Spring St. downtown, Lucie's Place director Penelope Poppers can see the streets where many of the clients who come to her organization for help are forced to live.

Lucie's Place — named in memory of Little Rock transgender resident Lucille Marie Hamilton, who died in 2009 — was established as a nonprofit in 2012 to provide services for some of the state's most vulnerable homeless people: LGBT youths, the majority of whom were kicked out of their homes by religious parents.

"There are still a lot of religions that have very anti views on LGBT folks," Poppers said. "Parents here in Arkansas might hear from their pastors that their LGBT kids are going to hell, or shouldn't deserve to exist or whatever they say from the pulpit. The parents hear that and they repeat the same things to their kids. A lot of times, they either end up kicking their kid out of the home for being LGBT, or the parent ends up making it so bad that the kid just has to leave."

Since starting the nonprofit, Poppers has learned the harsh reality of life on the streets for LGBT youths. Though some shelters in town will accept LGBT people, Poppers said others that are connected to churches with anti-LGBT views won't. In the past, she's been forced to tell kids looking for shelter to hide the fact they are gay — no rainbow T-shirts, no mentioning a boyfriend or girlfriend — just so they can find a dry place to sleep.

The organization got a big publicity and fundraising boost in 2014, after a #DoubleTheDuggars campaign against the Duggar family's $10,000 donation toward repealing Fayetteville's LGBT civil rights ordinance went viral, including a mention by national syndicated columnist and LGBT activist Dan Savage. The group has raised $24,000 because of the Duggars' anti-gay efforts.

Lucie's Place recently moved into the larger, 1,000-square-foot office and day center. It's also earned tentative approval to open a group home on Main Street. It expects to close on the property in a month. In the new Main Street home, Lucie's Place will have 12 beds where young people can stay for up to six months before transitioning to a longer-term independent living home or their own apartment. The process of getting those beds hasn't been easy, however. An earlier attempt to establish a home in the Leawood neighborhood was met by protest from a neighbor, leading Lucie's Place to withdraw the plan. Poppers said the backlash was "disappointing, but maybe not surprising."

"People still have these sort of backward ideas about LGBT people," she said. "It was just a couple loud people. But that leaves me feeling very positive about the state of things. There weren't a hundred people saying, 'No, we don't want this.' It was just one or two. That's not my favorite thing, but it's better than it could be. We could have a hundred people saying they don't want this."

While Poppers said that attitudes are changing, she hopes a generation doesn't have to pass away for life to get truly better for LGBT youths. Whatever the case, she believes she's part of that change, and necessary for now.

"My concern is that it's just not getting better quick enough for the people that we see that need things right now," she said. "That's why we exist: to catch them when we need to, when the world has been terrible to them." — David Koon

Ruth Hawkins Heritage champion.

The Arkansas Delta would be a much less interesting place without the almost two decades of work put in there by Arkansas State University's Ruth Hawkins. Director of ASU's Arkansas Heritage Sites program since it started in 1999, Hawkins has been instrumental in spearheading ASU's efforts to save, renovate and preserve historically important sites all over East Arkansas, including the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum and Educational Center in Piggott, where the writer Ernest Hemingway wrote sections of "A Farewell to Arms"; the Southern Tenant Farmer's Museum in Tyronza; the Rohwer Relocation Camp, where over 8,000 Japanese-American citizens were incarcerated during World War II; Lakeport Plantation in Lake Village; and the recently restored Johnny Cash Boyhood Home in the town of Dyess.

An employee of ASU for 39 years, Hawkins was originally a vice president for institutional advancement in the late 1990s, when the university turned its attention to preserving the heritage of the area. "We were looking at ways to match up the needs of the Delta region with education programs at the university," Hawkins said. "One of the things we became aware of was the National Scenic Byway program. We felt like creating a route along Crowley's Ridge, starting up in Clay County and going down to Phillips County, would be a way to link a number of the assets in the region together." Working with mayors, county judges and volunteers in the eight counties Crowley's Ridge passes through, Hawkins and her team eventually succeeded in getting the National Scenic Byway designation. Once that was accomplished, however, they were faced with another problem: What could they direct people to see along the route?

"We knew we had the Delta Cultural Center anchoring the southern end [of the scenic byway, in Helena/West Helena]. We had Arkansas State University in the middle, and we had five state parks and a national forest along the route," she said. "But the problem was, when you got up to the north end, up near Piggott, there wasn't really a developed attraction up there." At that point, Hawkins began looking at the ties writer Ernest Hemingway, who married into the Pfeiffer family near Piggott, had to the region. Eventually, ASU was able to acquire and restore the barn Hemingway sometimes used as a writing studio, as well as the home that belonged to his in-laws, and turn them into a museum.

From there, the Heritage Sites program has seen a whirlwind of activity, including the full restoration of Lakeport Plantation. Students use the projects as a kind of laboratory to learn about the restoration and research that goes into historic preservation. It is the restoration of the Cash boyhood home, however, that Hawkins is maybe most proud of. Hawkins said the leaning and neglected house, which the Cash family moved into in 1935, sent a mistaken message to visitors.

"People were driving by that and thinking that was what Johnny Cash lived in. They thought he'd lived like that," she said. "The truth of the matter is that when he lived there, it was a brand-new house. ... I really wanted it restored back to the way it looked when the family actually lived there. His mother was very proud of that house. It was the first new house she'd ever lived in."

Purchased by ASU in 2011 and opened to the public in 2014, the Cash house now sends a more correct message about the efforts of FDR's New Deal in the area, providing visitors with what Hawkins called an "authentic" experience. That authenticity is what restoring old places can provide all over the Delta.

"To the extent that a structure can help tell a story, to me, that's what's important about preservation," she said. "That's true particularly here in the Arkansas Delta. For some reason, the stories are not recorded. We're beginning to lose so many stories from the Great Depression and the New Deal, the era the Johnny Cash house represents and the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum represents. Many of those people are no longer with us, and the ones who are with us were children when a lot of this happened. So, to me, preservation is important in being able to utilize a structure to help tell the stories that would be lost otherwise."

— David Koon

Maria Meneses DREAMER, fighting.

Maria Meneses is counting on the idea that America will keep her promises.

Brought to the United States from Guatemala at age 2, Meneses, 19, who formerly served as chairwoman of the Progressive Arkansas Youth PAC and works as the United Arkansas Community Coalition's Central Arkansas Organizer, is a beneficiary of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented people brought to the United States as minors to stay and legally work. Meneses said the election of Donald Trump has brought a wave of fear in the state's community of approximately 5,000 DACA recipients, both that the program might be abolished and that the information they gave the government might be used against them and their families.

"It's very worrisome," she said. "You don't know what ICE is going to do with all the information, what the Department of Homeland Security is going to do. They know where we live, where we work, they know where we go to school. We are Americans, and we have dreams of wanting to better ourselves and wanting to better the United States."

In her work with the UACC, she has talked to Arkansas lawmakers tasked with coming up with a replacement. Sitting in a coffee shop near downtown, she cried as she described her frustration.

"I'm a 4.0 [GPA] bio-chem pre-med student," she said. "I want to be a doctor. There's many people like me who want to be nurses, police officers, teachers. They want to contribute. I know this. I've spoken with them. I told [Arkansas 1st District U.S. Rep.] Rick Crawford that I wanted to be in the Navy. He said, 'We'll help you in your case.' I said, 'What about the other [DACA recipients]? Why don't you help them as well?' He is supposed to represent the masses, not just one person."

Meneses resigned as chair of Progressive Arkansas Youth PAC to serve on the campaign of Democrat Gwendolynn Combs, who is running against Rep. French Hill in the 2nd District. She's also going to college full time and working a waitressing job while continuing her outreach efforts with the UACC. If DACA recipients are forced to leave the country, Meneses said, we will all be poorer.

"I know one DACA recipient who is the mother of a U.S. citizen — a toddler," she said. "Let's say she was to be taken away? What happens to that child if she's not prepared? He goes into the foster system. Things like that. Not only does the removal of DACA affect the recipients and their families, but it also indirectly affects American citizens as well. We pay taxes, none of which we can receive back in return, or any of the benefits they provide."

As for herself, Meneses is at a dark crossroads, having to imagine two futures simultaneously: one in which she serves as a doctor in Arkansas, and another in which she could be deported to a country she can't remember. Either way, she said, she will face the future with the adaptability immigrants show every day.

"Wherever I end up going, whether it's here in the United States or back to Guatemala, I know that as an immigrant I can adjust quickly and get it together," she said. "If I can do it here in the United States, I can do it anywhere in the world, as long as I'm willing and dedicated to do it for myself and for those I care about."

— David Koon

Joshua Asante Multihyphenate talent.

It seemed like Joshua Asante became the closest thing Little Rock has to a rock star almost overnight. Or maybe you saw it coming. Maybe you saw him nine years ago when he was relatively new to town, tall and taciturn and hanging out at open mic nights. That's when he says he started singing out loud again for the first time in decades. (He'd stopped when he was 5 or 6; his father and he had fought about him singing. "I was/am stubborn," he says by way of a partial explanation.) The poems he'd been delivering in front of the mic morphed into songs that his friends cheered. Before long, he'd cut an EP and started Velvet Kente, a band full of accomplished players who synthesized a broad swath of black music — '70s-era funk/soul, West African chants, electric blues. The 2009 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase was the first time many in Little Rock had seen Velvet Kente, and that battle-of-the-bands served as a sort of coronation for Asante and his soul-stirring vocals, powerful enough to quiet a noisy bar. Velvet Kente won handily and went from a band that few people knew to the most in-demand one in town, the rare local act capable of consistently filling Little Rock venues. Then in 2010, Asante joined up with another group of veteran Little Rock musicians and formed Amasa Hines, a similarly genre-bending unit that pulls as freely from sprawling psychedelic rock as it does Afro-beat. As Velvet Kente began to play out more sporadically, Amasa Hines took its place as the band Little Rock celebrated above all others.

Now, almost seven years later, Amasa Hines has done all the things a promising band does en route to broader success: It's toured the country widely, playing the likes of SXSW and the Newport Folk Festival. It cut an excellent debut LP, "All the World There Is," in 2014. It secured a national booking agent and management company based in New York and Nashville. That none of that has translated into broader fame or significant remuneration doesn't strike Asante as a reason to hang it up.

"I feel like a lot of bands don't make it. That five-year mark is like, 'Whoa, man, we've been at this for a long time.' " But if you have been making good moves and good music, you should be patient with it." Success in music is like making a half-court shot, Asante added. "But I've made a few of those," he said with a smile. The band just completed a new EP that Erik Blood, a Seattle producer/engineer most known for collaborating with Shabazz Palaces, is mastering. Asante expects the band to shop it to national labels for release next year. (Meanwhile, Velvet Kente continues to play Little Rock shows sporadically, often with a massive ensemble, including multiple horn players and percussionists on stage. Velvet Kente is slated to play South on Main on New Year's Eve, debuting many new songs.)

But music is only part of Asante's creative life. He's long been an accomplished photographer and his reputation has grown in recent years. His tender treatment of his subjects, especially of black women, often accented by shadows or resplendent in colorful dresses or jewelry, has earned him empathetic praise: Consistently, the people he shoots tell him, before he took their picture, no one had ever photographed them the way they saw themselves.

Hearne Fine Art has hosted an exhibition of his photographs, the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center has acquired several shots, Coulson Oil commissioned a series of cityscapes from him, and next year, Little Rock's Et Alia Press will publish a book of his photographs. See his work @joshua_asante on Instagram or at churchofchaos.com. Moreover, he's been able to carve out a meaningful revenue stream from his work. Despite never advertising himself as a commercial photographer, he shoots portraits for pay about three times a week.

"I've been obsessing over photography way before I ever picked up a guitar or started writing songs," he said. "I've always been more confident as a photographer. For one thing, I'm framing photographs and portraits in my mind's eye all the time. It never turns off."

His creative work extends further. He's laying out a book for celebrated artist Delita Martin, formerly of Little Rock and now of Hufffman, Texas. And he's the sound engineer on a documentary about the Elaine massacre. Asante, who had a peripatetic childhood throughout the Delta and South, had not visited Elaine in 20 years before going along on the shoot earlier this year. "The black people were terrified that we were there, and the white people were incensed that we were there," he said. The filmmaker, Michael Wilson of the San Francisco Film Institute, told Asante about a new initiative at the school to recruit nontraditional students into the film program. "I had film school in my 2025 plan," Asante said. But he said he might jump on the opportunity if it emerges earlier. It's all part of a broader goal of doing meaningful and financially sustainable work, Asante says.

"I want to be in those conversations along with the people I admire, eventually, and I want a level of comfort that comes from my own creative output, rather slaving for somebody else."

— Lindsey Millar

Laura Shatkus Spearheading experimental theater in Benton County.

The last time this reporter spoke with Laura Shatkus, she was holed up in preparation for an adaptation of "1984" by Lookingglass Theater Artistic Director Andrew White. She included the following dispatch: "Just survived my first hurricane by sleeping inside a movie theatre inside a theatre-theatre in Florida. For my job. Life is an adventure!" It is, particularly if you're an actor and the founder of the Northwest Arkansas-based theater group ArkansasStaged. The floating theater collective kicked off the year with an Inauguration Day reading of Lauren Gunderson's "all-female political farce" ("The Taming") and ended its 2017 lineup with a fully staged Halloween performance of "Empanada Loca," a macabre take on the legend of Sweeney Todd starring Guadalupe Campos, with the occasion marked by specialty empanadas courtesy of famed chef Matt McClure of The Hive restaurant.

Shatkus described the women at that "theatre-theatre in Florida," The Hippodrome, as "scrappy, strong" and "badass," and the Arkansas Times couldn't help but think, upon hearing those words, that she must have fit right in. An aspiring English teacher who jumped ship on her career plans when she discovered she hated student teaching, Shatkus dove headlong into the Chicago acting world without any formal theater training — and actually managed to get work. For a whole decade, even. "I used to joke," she said, "if somebody said something technical to me in a rehearsal, I would say, 'Oh, I don't know what that means. I didn't go to theater school.' Brought down the house." Though her M.F.A. in acting from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville means she's had to put that quip on the shelf, Shatkus still embraces the idea of demystifying theater-speak in favor of connecting with an audience — and, despite the title of "artistic and managing director" that precedes her name these days, erring on the side of uncertainty. "I love saying, 'I don't know. What do you think?' " she said. "And giving people permission to say that, because this art form is totally collaborative."

Collaboration is exactly how ArkansasStaged got going — and how Shatkus ended up at its helm. The company was founded in 2013 by Sabrina Veroczi and Kris Stoker, and after founding a longform improv troupe, made up mostly by women and called 5 Months Pregnant, taking over ArkansasStaged was a natural fit for Shattkus. "In some ways, I was functioning as an artistic director of that little improv group, and I really liked it. And I was pretty good at it! So, when I graduated and started looking at my opportunities it wasn't a strange fit to go, 'Hey, here's a company that has a little bit of some traction already, and a name. And I took over and I started doing the work."

That work includes stagings of "everything from Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary American plays to the poems of Baudelaire and the absurd musings of Gertrude Stein," it says on the company's 2018 season fundraising website. The ArkansasStaged performance of Lauren Gunderson's aforementioned political farce (which generated $1,000 in proceeds for Planned Parenthood) opened at 21c Museum Hotel with a note from the playwright, who waived her royalties for any companies that would perform "The Taming" on President Trump's Inauguration Day. It ended as follows: "Theatre isn't supposed to be a safe place, it's supposed to be a brave place, so let's be brave together." As if in accordance with that mantra, ArkansasStaged has made the most of being without a brick-and-mortar performance space, transforming rooms at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and 21c into sites for George Brant's "Grounded," UA professor John Walch's "Craving Gravy," Steve Martin's "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," Donald Margulies' "Collected Stories" and David Ives' "Venus in Fur," an erotic two-person comedy.

"I'm very interested in telling stories that are not being told here," Shatkus said. "Stories about women, very contemporary theater. Not to say that The Rep [the Arkansas Repertory Theatre] and TheaterSquared aren't doing that, too, but maybe being independent means I can take more risks," a couple of those, she said, being "Empanada Loca" and the S&M-heavy "Venus in Fur." "It's definitely an R-rated play," Shatkus told me, "but some of my oldest patrons, who I was afraid were going to be horrified by it, were like: 'That was the best play ever. I love that woman. Where is she? How can I tell her I love her?"

For Shatkus and ArkansasStaged, who are devoted not only to producing plays that amplify and explore the stories and voices of women, but to doing so with a donation-based admission, it turns out that not being beholden to the trappings of a facility (or a board, or a historic legacy) comes with its own set of challenges, but also its own freedom. "I'm just adding to the conversation," Shatkus said, "with my unique background of appreciation of theater in Chicago, appreciation of experimental theater, appreciation of site-specific theater — using the site to inform the play. And really just giving opportunities to wonderful people that I know are capable of doing the work." A lot of what's been done at ArkansasStaged, she said, was a matter of good timing. "Part of being a producer is seeing who should be put together, who makes sense together. How can you bring these forces together to make something good?"

— Stephanie Smittle

Tom and Steuart Walton Heirs with a vision.

As a kid growing up in Northwest Arkansas in the era of bike-centric movies like "Rad" and "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," there weren't many places to follow up on that cinematic inspiration in real life. In fact, there weren't any bike shops at all. There was the flagship Wal-Mart in Bentonville, where you could stare at rows of Huffy cruisers hanging from hooks in neat rows overhead, adorned with the essentials: Disney-themed decals, handlebar streamers, neon plastic spoke beads. Now, though, over a dozen high-end cyclist outfitters dot a curve along Interstate 49 between Bella Vista and Fayetteville. Thanks to networks of bicycle trails like Slaughter Pen, piloted by Walmart heirs Steuart and Tom Walton, the area has become a darling of a destination for cyclists around the world. The brothers, grandsons of Walmart founders Helen and Sam Walton, are expanding on the company's mid-aughts recruitment efforts with a network of stellar singletrack bike trails and projects like the Momentary, a 63,000-square-foot arts space in a defunct Kraft cheese factory.

"Cultural experiences are not isolated," Tom Walton said in an Aug. 31 announcement on the Walton Foundation's website. "With its proximity to the Razorback Regional Greenway and the recently opened culinary school, Brightwater, the Momentary will be a space where cyclists, foodies, artists and the entire community converge." Under the direction of Lieven Bertels, formerly the director of the Sydney Festival in Australia and the year-long Leeuwarden-Fryslân 2018 European Capital of Culture in The Netherlands, the industrial space — slated to open in 2020 — will be repurposed to house art that might not fit so neatly into the fine-art focus of the nearby Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, its exposed pipework and warehouse walls in keeping with the contemporary, experimental nature of the art within its walls.

"Art is transforming lives in Northwest Arkansas," Tom Walton said. Before projects like the Momentary can make a life-changing impact, though, people have to be able to get to it. And, by way of another one of Tom's experiments, residents won't necessarily have to do that by car. The Momentary sits at 507 SE E St., about a mile south of Crystal Bridges and right on top of the Razorback Regional Greenway, a 36-mile off-road, shared-use trail that stretches from Bella Vista to south Fayetteville. According to data the Walton Family Foundation collected in 2015 by placing pneumatic tubes and pyro counters along its pathways to calculate cyclist and pedestrian traffic, Northwest Arkansas residents have taken to it in droves. Pretty quickly after the development of Slaughter Pen, Steuart Walton told Bike Magazine, "Tom was thinking about how we go from 5 to 15 miles and then from 15 to 50 miles, so it was a progressive effort."

As it stood in 2015, pedestrian and cyclist activity peaked in the late afternoon and early evening on weekdays, suggesting that use was primarily recreational. Still, the per capita usage of the paved trails clocked in at rates comparable to cities with much longer histories of trail development, like San Francisco and Portland, and it's not far-fetched at all to imagine once-sequestered corners of Bentonville connected to one another. In fact, a Google Maps search will tell you that it only takes about five minutes longer to bike between Crystal Bridges and the Momentary than it does to drive, and future trail networks are bound to narrow that gap even further.

As for Steuart Walton, when his focus isn't on the trajectory in front of the handlebars, his thoughts lean skyward. Game Composites, an aircraft company founded in England in 2013 by Walton and Phillip Steinbach, finished construction on its Bentonville production facility in August 2016. There you can take entry-level classes in aerobatics — or, if you've got an extra $400,000 kicking around, customize your own brand-new GB1 Gamebird, a sleek two-seat monoplane that cruises at around 230 mph.

For those of us with shallower pocketbooks, we'll settle for enjoying the fruits of the efforts that earned Tom Walton the title of 2016's Arkansas Tourism Person of the Year: world-class museums and green spaces to be enjoyed by everyone — even those of us who aren't heirs to a dime-store fortune.

— Stephanie Smittle

Cheryl Roorda and Zachary Smith Sunny entrepreneurs.

You might call Cheryl Roorda and Zachary Smith Hot Springs' low-power couple. That would describe the solar-powered radio station, KUHS-FM, 97.9, that Smith directs and Roorda is involved with in her role as president of the board of Low Key Arts, the licensee of the nonprofit station.

But you wouldn't call Roorda and Smith low power. The couple, also known as the polka duo The Itinerant Locals, has invested lots of wattage into their adopted home of Hot Springs. Since moving to the Spa City 14 years ago, they have fulfilled Smith's longtime dream of creating a community radio station, rehabbed a building at 240 Ouachita Ave. that Roorda says was on its last legs, and are finally on the verge of opening their own restaurant, SQZBX (Roorda plays the accordion), where they'll serve beer they've brewed in their spare time while running a radio station, rehabbing a building, playing every Friday night at the Steinhaus Keller restaurant and beer garden and raising two children.

Smith said he was "underemployed and hanging out in a coffee shop talking philosophy with other underemployed people" in Seattle many years ago when he began to think about creating a radio station that would give musicians and artists access to media. But he didn't have the resources. In 2013, when the Federal Communications Commission finally promulgated its rules for such low power stations, all the elements were in place: Smith, Roorda, a nonprofit to hold the license — Low Key Arts — and the experience of broadcast engineer Bob Nagy. The community rallied around, especially after it was decided the station would be solar-powered, Smith said, participating in Kickstarter and other fundraisers. The station, which has a license for low power FM, with an equivalency of 100 watts, went online in August 2015.

KUHS has 70 volunteers a week — including Smith — who run the station and DJ. The volunteers are from all walks of life — from Karl Haire, a sales rep at Car-Mart, who DJs the "Dad's House" program (playing "music I would hear when I spend time with my dad just talking or sharing our life experiences"), to Jane Browning, executive director of the United Way, who DJs "the Heart Beat" ("exploring our community's needs, challenges and solutions, pulling resources together in volunteer service"), to pastor Mark Maybrey, who DJs the "Blues and Roots Review" ("featuring blues music of all types, roots of rock 'n' roll, Americana and a special interest in the grooving, soul, bluesy sounds from Muscle Shoals both past & present.") The station's reach is 5.6 miles (though there are gaps), but its programing is streamed online. The station will move up the dial next year, to 102.5, which has less interference.

The couple hopes to open the SQZBX restaurant and brewery, in the same building as KUHS-FM, in a month to six weeks. The restaurant will feature six of the Roorda-Smith family brews and cider on tap, along with pizza, sandwiches and salads. "We're keeping it real simple," Smith said. The beers will be German-style, "easy to drink" beers "that let you get up and go to work the next morning," he said.

That puts the opening at just about the time that Smith and Roorda will be honored at Preserve Arkansas's 2017 Arkansas Preservation Awards dinner with the Excellence in Personal Projects — Commercial award for their work on the Ouachita Avenue building. The event is scheduled for Jan. 19 at the Albert Pike Memorial.

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Onie Norman Delta activist.

Onie Norman doesn't tell her age, but her career of public service in the Delta does. A resident of Dumas, Norman traces her community work back to the 1980s, when she won a Volunteer of the Year Award from Gov. Bill Clinton. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she worked with the Kellogg Foundation on community-building and get-out-the vote programs. She served as a justice of the peace in Desha County for eight years, and ran for mayor twice and once for county judge, winning neither seat but showing, she believes, that an African-American woman has every much right to seek office as a white person of any sex. She ran a childcare center for 27 years to earn her living, but volunteered, then and now, with the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' College for Public Health and the Delta Citizens Alliance. In 2009, she won an Arkansas Democratic Black Caucus President's Award for her activism.

"She's unabashed. She'll ask questions of anybody. She may make people in power uncomfortable, but she's not intimidated," said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Public Policy Panel.

"I'm just trying to make a difference in my community," Norman said.

Recently, Norman worked with the mayor of Winchester to bring attention to the town's sewage problems. Residents of the tiny town of 167 or so who either couldn't afford to install or keep septic systems in good repair were piping their sewage straight into neighborhood ditches, Norman said. The soil of Winchester, a nonporous clay, also made septic systems problematic. The problem has been long-running; help from the state has been expected for years. Mayor General Alexander told Norman he'd "run up against a brick wall" after a grant in 2016 did not get funded, and took Norman on a tour of the town, where she learned the smell was so bad that people were being made nauseous; they could not even sit outside. Norman started making phone calls and writing emails. The state Department of Health, legislators from Drew County, Governor Hutchinson, U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. No luck.

Then, she said she thought, "We've got to bring this to the public." TV stations KLRT, Fox 16, and KARK, Channel 4, took up the cause in August, shooting footage of the raw sewage and interviewing residents. In September, the deputy director of the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission announced the commission would provide Dumas with $3.9 million to bring Pickens and Winchester into the system and another $2.3 million to connect to Dumas' drinking water system. The towns are still working out the agreement.

Norman also serves on the Housing Authority for Dumas, which recently opened The Woodlands, a renovated apartment complex in an area Norman described as previously blighted. She is pushing for the creation of a Boys and Girls Club in Dumas that would serve the children of Gould as well. "She has good ideas," Dumas Mayor Johnny Brigham said. "Sometimes she gets in a little bit of a hurry" to see them funded, he added.

Tangible results of Norman's activism, like an apartment building or a sewer project, may be limited, but she believes simply bringing the problems of the Delta to light — its lingering "Jim Crow" mentality that has kept the African-American residents, which represent more than half the population, impoverished; fear of a change in the status quo by decision-makers; laws in the legislature on food stamps and the like — is accomplishment in itself. She is proud of her work with the Public Policy Panel, helping people understand how the political system works, that the public has a voice and should use it. "When I served on the Quorum Court, I tried to empower people. People would say, 'You can marry people now.' She told them that there was far more to being a justice of the peace than that.

Her unsuccessful runs for mayor — the first black woman to run — and for county judge "opened doors and minds for people. I did it to show that any African American can do this."

Norman said people from the community have helped outsiders — "we've trained the researchers" — to understand to whom they should be talking to address needs, and it's not just the entrenched power structure. For example, the efforts to promote tourism, like creating the bike trail down the Mississippi levee, are fine, she said — but most people who actually live in Delta towns won't be enjoying those trails.

"I think our elected officials let us down," Norman said. "I would like to see people hold them accountable. ... We've had people on the Quorum Court for 30 or 40 years. Now look, let's be real. That's a long time. ... You don't have that energy anymore. They're good people, but once they get in, they don't have an opponent."

— Leslie Newell Peacock

Nitin Agarwal Researcher studies how social media legitimizes disinformation.

The same day the Arkansas Times spoke to Nitin Agarwal in his office at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, three major Internet media companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google — testified before Congress. Each company was grilled on its failure to regulate a massive disinformation and misinformation campaign committed by Russia during last year's presidential election on their platforms.

While some questions veered into the political milieu of the point of the cyber deception (to elect Donald Trump, according to U.S. intelligence), it was also a much broader moment. An "initial public reckoning," according to The New York Times, as a question, and fear, lingered over the preceding: How does democracy work in a world dominated by social media?

Since 2009, Agarwal, professor of information sciences, has been paid by, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and now the Department of Defense — with a massive $7.5 million, five-year grant — to study the dissemination of information on social media. He's looking at the effect of social media on human behavior, human behavior on social media and then how that new social media affects ... well, it just keeps going. "It's kind of a co-evolution, how the behavior is changing and how the social media platforms are changing," he said, creating a cycle of influence. His research tries to suss out this push and pull to create a "sort of a digital ethnography" of information online.

In creating these ethnographies, Agarwal said his team looks "at that from the entire range of good, bad and ugly."

But, lately, it's been the ugly: how bots help cloud and haze messaging to dismantle truth; the way radicalization works in online communities, especially with ISIS; how fringe narratives go from blogs to mainstream sources.

For someone tasked with picking at the things that keep some of us up at night, Agarwal was surprisingly chipper, and positive, when a reporter walked into the office; offering him almond chocolates from a recent trip to Turkey because, he said, he's been "going through them faster than I should."

Agarwal came to studying social media before the doomsday proclamations of the death of truth were infused into the zeitgeist. In 2003, when he graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Information Technologies and began applying for graduate programs in the United States, Mark Zuckerberg had not yet created Facebook. By the time he graduated six years later with a doctorate from Arizona State University, "social [media] was just gaining momentum," he said.

His background and work had largely been in investigating large sets of data from a mechanical background. He looked at the burgeoning internet as a "viable data collection platform" to harvest huge amounts of information about "how human behavior in society evolves," he said. With this in mind, in August 2009, Agarwal came to UALR as a professor and "found a home here," he said.

After a few years studying blogs, Agarwal started seeing the effect of tweets and bots on human behavior.

In, 2013 Russia annexed Georgia and waged "regular warfare as well as cyber warfare ... disseminating false narratives ... trying to inject this narrative so that they can influence the local population and the local people are thinking," he said. The Russian government, just as governments have done for years, hoped to use propaganda to legitimize the effort. "This is not a new problem. Look at what happened during WWII. Instead of pamphlets being dropped from the airplanes, now it is tweets," Agarwal said. "[Social media] has made the dissemination much faster, the content travels much faster."

In part, this speed was because of the new "menace of the bots," another weapon in cyber warfare's arsenal.

Agarwal has a large graphic of a group that uses bots on social media: ISIS. The swirling graphic depicts 80,000 to 100,000 Twitter account estimated to be linked together to spread a certain message.

Whereas ISIS may use a chatroom to recruit users, bots help distort truth. Users will program bots to, for example, pick a certain hashtag and flood it with tweets, often coded with misinformation from both sides of the issue. "The goal is not to have a certain outcome — the higher goal is to create divisions in the society, to polarize discussion in society; to unravel the fabric of democracy in the free world," Agarwal said. This deluge of mass information muddles the truth. "Social media has done tremendous damage in that aspect," he said.

But, Agarwal and his group COSMOS — Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavior Studies, composed of graduate students from around the world — see a system that has been created and can be changed.

"The entire goal is to find out what kind of models can be used to counter this information," he said.

"We can take one of the two paths. We can just completely ignore, deny what is out there. Which," he says immediately, "is not an option." Or, "we get involved in these discussions," he continues, "and the community can rally around this issue."

— Jacob Rosenberg

Sens. Joyce Elliott and Jim Hendren Making a rare bipartisan case for considering race in policy.

In September, state Sens. Joyce Elliott (D-Little Rock) and Jim Hendren (R-Sulphur Springs) proposed an eight-member bipartisan panel — composed equally of Republicans and Democrats — to discuss how race affects policy and life in Arkansas and look for ways the legislature could work to address race relations in the state. The Arkansas Legislative Council soundly rejected their proposal.

But Hendren and Elliott say they want to continue to discuss race, because of the unrecognized role it plays in politics and Arkansans' lives, including their own. They talked about their proposal and their desires to keep talking about race relations at a recent Political Animals Club meeting in Little Rock.

Growing up in South Arkansas, "I was uncannily aware of the savage inequalities," Elliott said. "I loved hanging around the old people and listening to what they were saying. That's when I learned so much about people being afraid and knowing things just were not equal. And, eventually knowing it was all embedded in race." She recalled going to a school that was not integrated and saying the Pledge of Allegiance or reading the founding documents "knowing it was not true" based on her experiences with racism. "That just became part of a bedrock for me, of knowing someday I'm going to do something about race. Because it shouldn't be this way. And I was a child, but I never lost that desire," she said.

As a legislator, Elliott has been a dogged champion for policies that push back against structural racism. Especially in recent years, with Republicans in control of the legislature, that has been an uphill battle.

Hendren said he grew up going to a school that was "100 percent white" in Northwest Arkansas.

"I guess I would say I was naive and uninformed about the world that many people live in," he said, "and also, even our own history." After college at the University of Arkansas, Hendren joined the Air Force and "that's where I really started to have my eyes opened."

"I can tell you, I may have been taught the Little Rock Nine and what happened at Central High, but it certainly didn't sink in and I didn't understand it," he said. "As a National Guardsman for 15 years, to think that the governor would activate the Guard to come and keep kids out of the school. ... And then to have the president nationalize them and say, 'No you're not, you're going to protect those kids.' That's such an amazing thing.

"I think so many kids — all across our state — don't fully understand the period from 1865 to the present and what happens in our country with regard to race relations," he said.

For Elliott, racism is structural. She pointed to a structural column in the room where the Political Animals were meeting. "It's like it's embedded in that column, you don't know what's holding that column up and something is. You take for granted it's going to stand. You don't go around wondering what's holding it up," she said. "It's structured into the systems we have."

Hendren said he agreed that bias was built into some systems and they "need to be fixed." But, Hendren said he did not want to discuss the "abstract" nature of racism. He wanted "facts and figures." And, he added, "What I will not agree is that there is a unanimous effort to be racist."

"I don't just have the time and desire to do that, if we're just going to talk about stuff, if things are not going to change," he told the Arkansas Times. "Let's look at the facts, let's define that problem. Then, how do we fix it?" he said.

The idea of considering these issues is not an unusual idea — or a new one — to deal with a country's "original sin," Elliott said. She talked about South Africa's reconciliation councils after apartheid and the commissions established after genocide in Rwanda. "That is a beacon of an example of how you confront tough issues and do something about [them]. When something becomes unacceptable, you do something," she said.

Hendren and Elliott promised to continue the discussion and will push the committee forward in the future.

— Jacob Rosenberg

Judges Tommy Fowler and David Boling Taking on a private probation company.

When Tommy Fowler and David Boling ran for separate district judge positions in 2016, both talked about a problem in Craighead County District Court: The Justice Network. The for-profit, Memphis-based organization had run probation services for more than 20 years in the county and had been known to keep people convicted of misdemeanor offenses locked in a cycle of debt fueled by high fines and fees.

"In our courts, we have three options we can do," Boling told The Jonesboro Sun in 2016 during his campaign. "You can do probation, you can do community service and you can do fines. And I think one of the mistakes that is occurring is that oftentimes people are being caught up in the cycle because they are being hammered with all three ... . Oftentimes these people ... they're the working poor, that are on the margins."

Fowler also talked to the Sun about the company. "It's not a money-making arm of the government ... . If it's privatized, that's what's left. It's to make sure enough people are coming through to meet the bottom line."

An Arkansas State University student researching the subject told the Sun about a man who was selling his plasma each day to afford the fines. Another probationer, after not paying a $25 seatbelt ticket, saw the charges blossom to $2,400 in fines, 40 hours of community service and 10 days in jail, the Sun reported.

In January 2017, both men took office and promised to kick The Justice Network out by July 2017. In the meantime, they have worked on stopgap amnesty programs to help people pay fines or have them waived. It was a move meant to fundamentally change the court system in Craighead County for the better. To give an idea of scale of the problem, according to the nonpartisan news organization The Marshall Project: In August 2016, Boling had 34 people come before him; only six were accused of crimes while the rest were there to address issues stemming from The Justice Network.

The Justice Network sued the judges in June. It said it was contractually obligated to receive the money from the imposed fines and fees. No court date has been set for the lawsuit. (Fowler and Boling declined to be interviewed by the Arkansas Times, citing the pending lawsuit.)

— Jacob Rosenberg

Yuni Wa Producer trying to make sense of a digital world.

In YouTube comments for Yuni Wa's "So 1989" (which had 998,858 views in early November), no one talks about Little Rock, or the legacy of the Stifft Station neighborhood where he lives with his grandmother in a house across from the old Woodruff Elementary School, making beats on a Dell Inspiron desktop computer. The commenters do not try to guess his real name (which is Princeton Coleman; he chose Yuni Wa because it means "universal" in Japanese in a shortened form, and "it's a cool language, literally an artform," he said). They don't call him, at 20 years old, a wunderkind. And they don't talk about how he has already put out 25 "projects" — LPs and EPs mostly, some beat tapes. Instead, they write things like, "I need a 10-hour version of this," and "I'd rather live in this video than my own life" and "I'M IN LOVE."

Yuni Wa is a sound and force from their computer. "It's very personal and impersonal at the same time," the soft-spoken Wa said of his music.

As Wa, he has jam-packed his consciousness into his music. "It's a lot of emotion," he said. "Because, I grew up in poverty and ... ." He trailed off for a moment. Then Wa began to discuss a few things vaguely, including, but not limited to, absent parents and lost siblings. "I really speak with my music," he said. "Because technology can allow for people like me ... I just think about sound. I just know sound. You know when you know what you're doing? You can't always conceptualize it in words."

Wa's songs don't have specific references to personal tragedies. Instead, he conveys his emotions through elegant electronic pulsations. His music has been called Vaporwave, though thinks he's more expansive.

Vaporwave is an attempt at nostalgic reconstruction of consumer-first music from the '80s and '90s. It's a sub-sub-sub-genre of electronic music. Imagine remixed Muzak into a slow, smooth heartfelt jam.

Unlike the classic model of local sensation, who climbs the ladder of the scene, he went global before going local.

"My relationship with Little Rock isn't too, too good," he told me. Mostly he's achieved success online. His album covers are made by a guy who lives in the Netherlands, he said. His 20,000-plus monthly Spotify listeners, 9,336 followers on SoundCloud and the 233,587 who have viewed his YouTube channel are not concentrated in Little Rock. Sometimes he even struggles to book shows. "We're still facing the local gatekeepers now," he said.

The "we" is a growing creative collective that regularly meets at Paramount Skate Shop in North Little Rock, trying to create an "in-house society of creatives," he says, so they can photograph and film and produce away from the current structures of art in Little Rock. The group includes rappers Goon Des Garcons, Solo Jaxon and Fresco Grey. Wa creates beats for them. Sort of like BROCKHAMPTON, they've revolted against joining other scenes or systems, creating their own instead. Some of them have moved to Los Angeles, and Wa said he's considering moving, too.

— Jacob Rosenberg

Visionary Arkansans 2017