Joshua Hugg, manager of the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County, donated the iPad mini that he won at the Connect13 conference to a CSM student who was a victim of the Terrace Apartment fire in Redwood City on Oct. 17. He contacted the College of San Mateo to find out if there were student victims from the recent fire that might need it. That's how he made the connection. So great!

Congratulations to the 26 Youth Ambassadors who took the time to learn about the North Fair Oaks Community Plan, created learning centers to teach others, and participated in the first community education project! They set up booths in the parking lot of the Fair Oaks Community Center and invited the public to come and learn. They did a terrific job! I was so impressed with what they'd learned, how organized the event was, and that these young people will continue to be ambassadors about the plan. They are the leaders of tomorrow!

Bay Area News Group Forum Explores District Elections, San Mateo

Meet Vanessa Tostado, Ashley Davis and Margarita Tenisi, & Rose Valencia of East Palo Alto. Self-dubbed the “EPA Chica Squad,” three Eastside Prep sophomores and one Sequoia High School freshman competed in the Technovation Challenge, a global competition that uses online curriculum to guide teams of middle school and high school girls through the process of developing mobile-phone application.

County Gets Poet Laureate: Caroline Goodwin To Be Named To New Post, San Mateo Daily Journal

San Mateo County Officials Prepared To Weigh Supervisorial Boundaries

Supervisor Maps Ready For Hearing, San Francisco Examiner

Group Recommends Three Redrawn District Maps To San Mateo County Supervisors, The Mercury News

Menlo Park Mayor Peter Ohtaki will welcome and join San Mateo County Supervisor Warren Slocum at the Supervisor’s ‘Office Hours’ in Menlo Park on September 4, 2013 from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. at Cafe Zoё, 1929 Menalto Avenue.

When a six-alarm fire broke out in Redwood City early Sunday morning, the emergency response was fast and thorough. With nearly 100 people left homeless, that response soon transformed into an ongoing support system that gathered resources from multiple sources...

Imagine how you would feel if you and your family lost everything in a fire and you couldn’t find a new place to live? Now imagine your home was one of the very few affordable places to live in one of the most expensive areas of the country...We are now asking San Mateo County apartment building owners for help. We ask that you consider offering one vacant unit in your building to a fire victim. We realize this is a unique request; these people have lost their housing because of a fire and not through any fault of their own. For those people with vacant in-law units, motels with living units and home-share opportunities: • We’re not asking that the unit be free — we’re asking that it be affordable; • We’re not asking that it be forever — we’re asking that it be for as long as the tenant wants to call it home; • We’re not asking for multiple units — we’re asking for a single unit. If enough housing rental units aren’t found in the next couple of weeks for these people, the 80 fire victims will be forced to look for housing in places like Modesto, Fresno or Galt — communities that are not known, not “home.” Can’t we do better as a community? Can’t we find a way to accommodate the victims of this tragedy?