The twisting corridors and ad-hoc floor plan suggest a history of repeated additions and expansions to the Gemeinschaft Home, which once again is bursting at the seams. In late 2013, a closet-building campaign was launched to ensure the growing number of residents of the home – which helps former inmates find work and provides various therapeutic […]
Let’s begin in 1992 , when the Free Food For All Soup Kitchen opened to the world, every Monday at noon, at The Little Grill restaurant in downtown Harrisonburg. Ron Copeland, the restaurant’s owner, drew inspiration for the soup kitchen from a number of different sources, including his Christian upbringing and political views shaped by his […]
In the late 1960s, not long after John R. Mumaw had completed nearly two decades as EMU’s fourth president (1948-1965), he began to devote more attention to his concern for people with intellectual disabilities. This had been close to his heart since his great-nephew, Chester, was born with Down syndrome. Then moderator of the Virginia Mennonite Conference, […]
The way things used to work here went something like this: A child might mention something suggesting sexual abuse to a parent or a teacher. The child might be asked to talk about it with their guidance counselor, and then a social worker. A police officer would come ask questions about what happened. An investigator – […]
When Devon C. Anders ’88 was finishing his bachelor’s degree at EMU and heading into a career as a certified public accountant with a well-established firm, he probably would have looked bemused, or at least quizzical, if anyone had suggested that one day he would be named Business Person of the Year by the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Chamber […]
About 250 alumni in the City of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County work as entrepreneurs or are otherwise engaged in business and independent professional activities. In early 2014, Crossroads attempted to identify local businesses that are owned by alumni or have top managers who are alumni. Here is the resulting list of 88 businesses (feel free […]
Consider a few statistics: In 1990, just 2.4% of Harrisonburg’s population was foreign born. That figure rose substantially over the following decade to 9.2%, and now sits, per the latest Census Bureau estimate, at 14.1%. Or, to put that in more real-to-life terms, there are now more than 7,000 immigrants living in Harrisonburg – plus […]
Ann Yoder, class of 1961, has tapped her real-estate career experience to locate housing for the single mothers and their children assisted by Bridge of Hope Harrisonburg-Rockingham. For those families, “housing comes first,” said Yoder, one of several alumni who have served on the program’s board. “Then, the heart of the program is surrounding a […]
More than 50 years after his first visit to campus, social activist and scholar Vincent Harding returned to EMU on Feb. 26 and 27, 2014, where he urged packed audiences to engage fully in the struggle to build a real participatory democracy based on justice, equality, sustainability and spiritual fulfillment, rather than on militarism, materialism and […]
