For a visiting group of educators from Ukraine, seeing American school classrooms in action was a learning experience.

  To read about the mission and design for the Open World Leadership Center, click here .

The Open World exchange program was established to increase partnership and sharing of economic and democratic practices between the two nations.  Sonoma County is one participant in the education program of having Ukraine educators visit for two weeks.

 To find out more about the US-Ukraine non profit organization, click here .

A unique affordable housing project in Sebastopol is combining a new co-housing community with the self-help or "sweat equity" approach to building it.

Tom Kuhn, the Sequoia Village project manager for Burbank Housing, explains the co-housing aspect of the development.

As future Sequoia Village homeowner Lee Logan sees it, this co-housing process has been different than most.

Sequoia Village in Sebastopol, a new family co-housing development offered through Burbank Housing Development Corp, was facilitatied by the late Michael Black (left)   who was the architect for the Two Acre Wood co-housing project in Sebastopol (pictured below). 

To learn more about co-housing, visit  Planning for Sustainable Communities here.

The Geneva Conventions are not a conference, but an international treaty signed by every established nation in the world. And there are four of them.

Miller talks about the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that applied the Geneva Conventions to the U.S. detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Tim Miller

The local Red Cross offers a free class to educate the public about the Geneva Conventions four times a year. Upcoming classes will be held September 20, and November 15, 9 to1 each day . For further information call (707) 577-7600, or to register online, click here .

For the direct link to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, about the Geneva Convention, click here.

What does the future hold for the swath of vacant land that was once meant to hold an extension of Highway 12 through Santa Rosa's east side?

 Julie Combs of the Neighborhood Association of Bennett Valley describes the present state of the Highway 12 right-of-way lands:

After CalTrans was unable to build a planned extension of Highway 12 through Bennett Valley and over Spring Lake (above)  because of community resistance, the future of the land that was acquired for that project (see overhead view and map below) has remained in limbo.

On September 16^th, the Neighborhood Association of Bennett Valley will  to discuss transportation issues as they pertain to the land that was meant to be a continuation of Hwy 12, at their regular monthly meeting.

To visit their website and read more about their upcoming meeting, click here.