By BHARATHA MALLAWARACHI, Associated Press

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Marxist politician Anura Dissanayake won Sri Lanka’s presidential election over the weekend, dealing a blow to a political old guard that has been widely blamed for the unprecedented economic crisis that hit the South Asian island nation two years ago.

Dissanayake, whose pro-working class populist campaign won him youth support, secured victory over opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, the runner up; and incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over the country two years ago after its economy hit bottom.

Dissanayake is the leader of National People’s Power alliance, and of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist political party that waged two unsuccessful armed insurrections in 1970s and 1980s to capture power through socialist revolution.

Early interest in politics

Born on Nov. 24, 1968 into an ordinary family in a paddy-growing central part of Sri Lanka, Dissanayake was politically active from his school days, taking part in student demonstrations against an agreement with India to grant a degree of self rule to Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority in an effort to resolve the demands for autonomy that later erupted into a decades-long civil war.

Dissanayake political involvement was further sharpened when he entered university to read for his science degree and joined the Socialist Students’ Union, the student wing of the JVP, which had already staged one armed insurrection in 1971 before giving up arms and entering politics.

In 1987, the JVP started its second armed insurrection after the government banned the movement, aiming at overturning the deal with India and overthrowing the government. Dissanayake went underground as the government stepped in to violently crush the insurrection, killing the group’s leader Rohana Wijeweera and nearly all of its top members.

Several thousands were killed by the JVP and government forces and their agents in the course of the insurgency and its suppression.

Parliamentary politics

Dissanayake entered public politics in 1993, working to rebuild the party under a new leader-in-exile, Somawansa Amarasinghe. The party won its first seat in Parliament in 1994, signalling its re-entry into democratic politics.

Dissanayake became national organiser of the Socialist Students’ Union in 1997 and the same year, he was added to to the Central Committee of the JVP. One year later, he joined the party’s politburo.

Dissanayake was elected to Parliament in 2000, and when the JVP entered an alliance with President Chandrika Kumaratunga, he briefly served as agriculture and irrigation minister.

That alliance was formed to oppose a cease-fire agreement signed between then-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the now-defeated Tamil Tiger rebels to resolve the separatist conflict that had blown into a full scale civil war.

Later, Dissanayake and the JVP backed former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to militarily defeat the rebels in 2009.

He was elected JVP leader in 2014, after a party schism in which a radical left wing broke off to form a new party.

A new coalition

Having realised that it was not possible to come to power through his party alone, Dissanayake formed the NPP in 2019, bringing together 21 groups including political parties, youth groups, women’s groups, trade unions and other civil society groups.

Since the formation of the coalition, Dissanayake has moved away from his far leftist stance. Although he remains head of a Marxist party, he now says that he supports a free market economy.

He ran for president as the head of the NPP for the first time in 2019, losing to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was forced to flee two years later because of protests driven by the country’s economic crisis.

Vows to end austerity and corruption

Dissanayake enters office with a raft of promises to improve standards of living and clean up government.

His main campaign theme was accountability, promising that politicians and officials will be held responsible for their actions. He’s also promised to end corruption and privileges for politicians and retired presidents.

But supporters are also counting on him to ease up on the punishing austerity imposed by the country’s deal with the IMF. He’s promised to keep the deal alive with changes, given its importance to the ongoing economic recovery. He’s also pledged to encourage local businesses instead of relying solely on foreign investments.

For the country’s Tamil minority, Dissanayake’s election offers little hope. During the campaign, he rejected devolving more power to the north and east, where most Tamils live, and investigating incidents during the civil war that U.N. investigators said could amount to war crimes. Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed during the final months before the Tamil Tiger rebels’ defeat.

Emilie Buchwald comes from the literary world. Mark Connor from the boxing ring. These two Minnesota poets from very different backgrounds debut their new collections this week. And we start celebrating the 100th anniversary in 2025 of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby” with a look at a new book about one of St. Paul’s favorite sons.

(Courtesy of Nodin Press)

“Incandescent”: by Emilie Buchwald (Nodin Press, $17)

I dissolve aspirin in clean water/cut back last week’s flowers,/vibrant tenants of the purple vase,/offering them another day, or two or three.

And what might I cut back,/and what might I take in/to linger in sun and air?  — “Everything Wants to Live” from “Incadescent”

Emilie Buchwald (Courtesy of Milkweed Editions)

Emilie Buchwald has returned to poetry, one of her first loves, with “Incandescent,” taking readers from childhood to intimacy between mature couples. It is Buchwald’s first published collection since “The Moment’s Only Moment” in 2016.

Buchwald has been an editor, a teacher and an award-winning children’s author and nonfiction author as well as a poet. She had an outstanding career as co-founder/publisher of Milkweed Editions literary publishing house. During her years at Minneapolis-based Milkweed she received some of the highest literary awards, including the Minnesota McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, the Minnesota Book Awards Kay Sexton Award and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. After retirement in 2003, Buchwald and her daughter Dana launched the Gryphon Press, dedicated to publishing picture books that help children understand the human-animal bond.

Minnesota poet Connie Wanek (“Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems”) calls Buchwald’s collection “luminous” and writes that many of the poems are spare and beautifully crafted and “rich with soul-nourishing images and eternal themes.” She picks out the poem Motivation as one that will stick with readers always, in which a bird is perched on a fake branch of a fake tree on a balcony but is still singing. Buchwald writes: “the perch may not matter/only the desire to sing.” In “Making Bread” Buchwald condenses years of experience into seven short lines.

During her 24 years at Milkweed Editions, Buchwald published influential Minnesota nature poets such as Bill Holm, John Caddy and Paul Gruchow, so it’s not surprising nature runs through her new collection, from rosebud trees to ravens.

Buchwald’s collection “The Moment’s Only Moment” won a Benjamin Franklin award from the Independent Book Publishers Association and her poems have been published in national journals. She taught poetry at the Loft Literary Center and edited three poetry anthologies. Her award-winning children’s books are “Gildaen,” “Floramel and Esteban” and, through Gryphon Press, “Buddy Unchained.”

Nodin Press and the University of Minnesota Libraries Literary Archives are hosting Buchwald’s launch of “Incandescent” with a free reading at 2 p.m. Saturday at Elmer L. Andersen Library, 222 21st Ave. S., Mpls.

“It’s About Time (Millions of Copies Sold for Dad)”: by Mark Connor (Connemara Patch Press, $14.99)

Mark Connor (Courtesy of the author)

“He’s the last badass Irish boxer in St. Paul.”

That’s the way poet Danny Klecko describes Mark Connor and Connor’s debut book “It’s About Time.” Although this collection has poetry in it, Connor’s insightful and personal essays about growing up Catholic in St. Paul offer a mini-history of the days when local Irish-Americans described themselves by the parish in which they worshipped. Connor writes that he is the product of a “mixed marriage” since his dad belonged to the Irish parish of St. Columba in St. Paul and his mom was from Holy Rosary “over the border, in South Minneapolis.”

Connor is a poet pugilist who began boxing at 10. He is a former Upper Midwest Golden Gloves lightweight champion who has trained amateur, professional, competitive and recreational boxers since 2003 and works at the Element Gym in St. Paul. He’s also written articles about boxing and Minnesota boxers since the 1990s.

In this collection of poetry/essays Connor writes everything from tender tributes to lost loves and affectionate memories of his father. He had lots of jobs, including being a counselor at Ain Dah Yung, a facility for Native American youth that took him into friendships with people in the Native community, where he found a spirituality that matched his own.

Earlier this year Connor received the $1,000 Irish Network Minnesota Bloomsday Literary Award for this collection, from which he’ll read at 8 p.m. Tuesday at The Dubliner Pub, 2162 W. University Ave., hosted by Klecko and the Bards of St. Paul with poet Erica Christ. Its free and open to the public.

(Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press)

“F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography”: edited by Niklas Salmose and David Rennie (University of Minnesota Press, $29.95)

If you are a devotee of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing you will find new and interesting perspectives about him and his work in this collection of 23 essays by writers and scholars who look at this complicated man’s career, his fraught marriage to Zelda, and his milieu in two-year chapters, giving a clear, linear picture of his life from birth in 1896 to his death in 1940. University of Minnesota Press calls this a new way of “grouping together” biographical materials and perspectives.

Minnesota Fitzgerald scholar Dave Page writes the chapter on 1908-1909, when Fitzgerald’s parents moved back to St. Paul from Buffalo, N.Y., and Scott made lifelong friends who lived in and around Summit Avenue. Brian Mangum, English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, writes about 1922-1923, the year after the Fitzgeralds left St. Paul with their baby, Scottie. Magnum reminds us that the Jazz Age of flappers and gin, which Fitzgerald invented, peaked in ’22. He writes that this was the year of Fitzgerald’s early success, but it didn’t last, pointing out that in Fitzgerald’s 1931 retrospective essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” he noted that “though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.”

In the chapter 1924-1925, French professor of American literature Marie-Agnes Gay explores what should have been a happy period in Fitzgerald’s life because “The Great Gatsby’ was published. But he was despondent living in the south of France where Zelda may or may not have had an affair with an aviator. Gay quotes a letter Fitzgerald sent to his editor, Max Perkins: “I write to you from the depths of one of my unholy depressions.”

Scott Fitzgerald had fame and lost it, had money and spent it, had no money and cracked up. Loved St. Paul but left as an adult.  And he wrote “The Great Gatsby,” which will be celebrated in 2025. (See today’s Literary Events calendar for one of the first local discussions of “Gatsby” by Anne Margaret Daniel.)

If you are following the “Gatsby” centennial celebrations, you will want this enlightening book about a man who never forgot his Minnesota roots.

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Australia’s government wants to ban children up to age 16 from social media, and is spending millions of dollars to figure out how. I’m willing to wager it won’t take long for tech-savvy teens who grew up on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to figure out how to log back on.

The promised regulation, currently sparse on details, comes at a time when policymakers and parents around the globe are grappling with the negative consequences these platforms can have on developing minds. This global debate has raged for years, reaching a fever pitch in 2021 after former Facebook (now Meta Platforms Inc.) employee Frances Haugen leaked documents showing the company was aware its products were harmful to girls’ mental health. Years later, U.S. lawmakers are still sputtering on federal regulation to keep the powerful Big Tech companies accountable for harms to young users.

Australia is taking matters into its own hands. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to introduce new laws that set age limits this year, saying that the government was considering a range between 14 and 16 for the cutoff. In a video posted on X for “the mums and dads,” Albanese said he wants children “off their devices and onto the footy field.” Surveys indicate most Australians support a social-media age limit, and the idea has broad political support.

But Albanese acknowledges that they are still trying to figure out how this would actually work. The government doesn’t identify what social media platforms the youth ban would apply to (Can children message their parents on WhatsApp? Or watch Khan Academy’s Algebra tutorials on YouTube?). It also doesn’t offer specifics on enforcement (Big Brother-esque digital IDs? Further criminalizing children, this time for opening TikTok?). And in the absence of substantive policies, it’s hard not to see this as a soundbite-y proposal to signal concern to voting parents on a popular issue ahead of an election year — without actually accomplishing anything to keep children safe.

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Thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley, Australia has been leading the charge in efforts to rein in the dominance of Big Tech. Separate proposed legislation aimed at cracking down on digital misinformation has even drawn ire from Elon Musk, who last week labeled the government “fascists.” (The government sued Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, over a violent video of a terrorist attack but lost in court.) The nation has also been engaged in a years-long battle to force tech titans to pay for news content. At a time when other jurisdictions have struggled with taking on such powerful companies, Australia’s multi-faceted attacks are admirable.

But research has shown that age limits for social media aren’t the most effective way to protect teens from its potential harms. Young people have shown remarkable prowess for finding workarounds — even those under the age of 13 whom most platforms already prohibit. The American Psychological Association has argued that using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to teens, but strict age limits ignore individual differences in adolescents’ maturity levels. In other words, turning 16 doesn’t instantly make you more competent at navigating the digital world than a mature 14-year-old.

The process of enforcing broad age verification online raises a slew of privacy concerns, ranging from how identifying information about young users could be stored to cutting off their ability to freely browse the internet while maintaining digital anonymity.

Completely shutting off access to digital communities can also sever lifelines for some young people, especially those from marginalized groups. TikTok, in particular, has emerged as a popular platform for Indigenous Australians, allowing them a space where they share everything from budget-friendly recipes to relatable responses to racism. Indigenous youth in remote areas who may not see their stories reflected in traditional media can feel less isolated. LGBTQ+ advocates in Australia have raised similar concerns about a potential loss of connections for vulnerable queer teens if the ban takes effect. More broadly, tech researchers warn that excluding young people from social media platforms will just drive them to darker, even less regulated corners of the web.

Still, a growing body of evidence points to a minefield of harms young people can encounter, as much as company executives like to deflect any links. It’s critical that lawmakers take action to protect children from these risks, but selling quick fixes for complex, global problems distracts from the harder policy work required to come up with effective real-world solutions.

Simply banning young people from participating in digital life comes a generation too late. Teens today are very much growing up online, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. So much so that the United Nations has said that children have the right to get information from the internet, but adults have a responsibility to make sure it isn’t harmful.

Policymakers need to focus on holding social media companies accountable for the harms, especially for young users, embedded within their services. They can start by demanding that platforms offer more transparency about how their algorithms work and allowing more outside researchers to look under the hood to identify risks. Without sharing data on how their services are designed, it’s hard for mental health experts and officials to recommend solutions that address the dangers. Lawmakers must also focus on requiring social media companies, which go to great lengths to understand their users, to create and enforce more guardrails for young people.

Without putting the onus on tech companies to reduce risks on their platforms, raising the age limit by a couple of years doesn’t keep the next generation safe. Instead of bucketing out floodwater, policymakers in Australia and beyond should turn off the spewing faucets.

Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News.

On any given day, 130 children come to the Catholic Charities Northside Child Development Center in North Minneapolis. Kim Osborn knows every single one of them.

She really knows them.

She knows that 2-year-old Jamarion has a hard time with goodbyes. She puts a graham cracker in his locker for him to eat when he goes home. It makes him feel better, she says.

She knows that 4-year-old May will not remove her jacket until it is time to go in for breakfast. When that time comes, May and Osborn together put her jacket in her locker.

Kimberly Osborn helps May Clarke-Williams, 4, with her zipper. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

She knows that 5-year-old Robert does not answer to “Robert” in the morning. “He will tell you who he is in the morning,” she said. “He’s usually some form of Spider-Man. He’ll say, ‘Ms. Kim, I am Miles Morales today’ or ‘Today, I’m Peter Parker, Ms. Kim.’ Or sometimes he wants to be called ‘Danger.’”

For the past 17 years, Osborn, the center’s program director, has made it her mission to know each child under the care of the center’s 20 employees.

On Wednesday, Osborn received the Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan Award from Catholic Charities USA at the organization’s annual convention in Oklahoma City. The award goes to a person in the Catholic Charities network with a distinguished record of dedicated service and leadership for children, youth and families.

Earlier this year, Osborn won the 2024 Director of the Year Award from the Minnesota Association for the Education of Young Children “in recognition of the amazing work she has done for the children, families and early childhood educators in her program.”

For those who know Osborn, the awards were no surprise.

Osborn, who started as a classroom teacher at Northside in 1994, “has tangibly and profoundly changed the lives of thousands of children and their families over the course of her career,” said Kerry Alys Robinson, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA. “Her work is a tremendous blessing to her community and to the entire Catholic Charities network. She has forged a legacy that all of us should admire and seek to emulate.”

Amanda Luedtke, senior division director of children and family services for Catholic Charities Twin Cities, said Osborn “is deeply engaged with her students and their families” and “has developed a talented team that is committed to supporting children early in their lives, ensuring they are ready for success in school and in life.”

Low-income neighborhood, high-performing  kids

Northside, which educates children from 6 weeks to 12 years old, is seen as a “refuge” in a neighborhood that has been historically challenged by marginalization and structural racism, said Keith Kozerski, Catholic Charities’ chief program officer.

“Our kids are statistically subject to one of the worst opportunity gaps in the country. So, to know that these children have someone of Kim’s quality leading their child care center, someone who has been committed to them for almost 30 years, is so meaningful,” Kozerski said.

Northside consistently achieves the “Parent Aware” top 4-star rating from the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families. In 2023, more than 80 percent of children at Northside “met or exceeded expectations” in all development areas as outlined by Teaching Strategies GOLD, the Minnesota Department of Education-approved kindergarten-readiness assessment, according to Osborn.

Northside also has been accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children – a process that takes months of planning and preparation to ensure every standard is met. Fewer than 10 percent of all child care centers, preschools and kindergarten programs across the country achieve this recognition. The Northside team secured an average rating of 97 percent, she said.

Kimberly Osborn, program director of Catholic Charities Northside Child Development Center, talks about the challenges and rewards of her job. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“The kids here deserve everything we can do for them,” Osborn said. “I’m lucky to be part of a team that works hard every day to provide the best possible care.”

The center serves low-income families who are eligible for state-subsidized child care. Northside also receives support from private scholarships and state funding.

Osborn said she was drawn to work in early childhood education as a way to advocate for women and children. “Once I started working in a community where there’s a lot of generational poverty and families that are marginalized, I could just see the importance of getting the children ready for kindergarten, the early access,” she said. “I ended up here, and I just fell in love with it.”

The children who attend Northside “need a lot of one-on-one time,” Osborn said. “There are kids who have quite a few family members living in their households, and so it’s nice to break those kids off and give them some quiet space and some one-on-one attention.”

That means Marley, 5, who has to come in extra early some days because of her mother’s work schedule, gets to have private time to play with her favorite toy: the pink kinetic sand. Osborn and Marley have made a special container for her morning sand that no one else is allowed to touch.

When Joe, 4, arrives, he has no interest in “morning court time” in the center’s inside play area, but requests that Osborn bring magnetic letters out to him to practice words.

Danielle, 4, always wants to spread her own jelly. “Ms. Kim, remember I like to do it,” she told Osborn the other day.

Control Data legacy

Northside was once owned and operated by Control Data for the company’s employees and employees of other businesses in the community.

“When they were leaving North Minneapolis, they really still wanted it to be a quality, reliable child care center,” Osborn said. “When they were leaving, they still wanted it for the community – for the families, the parents that were working in the community. So Catholic Charities took it over.”

That was in 1986. Osborn joined the center in 1994. She’s been there so long that she is now caring for the children of children she cared for when she started.

It’s not always glamorous, she admits.

Kimberly Osborn helps serve breakfast for preschoolers at the Northside Child Development Center in Minneapolis. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“So far today, I’ve made bleach water, sanitized the highchairs and wiped down the counters, and changed two poopy diapers,” she said around 9:30 a.m. one recent morning. “I helped a little person who was very much missing her mom. I just reassured her that her mom was coming back. ‘After snack, she comes back,’ I said. ‘Your job is school right now, and mom’s job is work.’

Osborn, 55, who lives in Balsam Lake, Wis., generally is up by 3:50 a.m. “I like to be here by 6 a.m.,” she said, adding that her one-way drive time is “one hour and six minutes.”

“I like to come in to open,” she said. “I make the coffee. We have a couple different classrooms, and so I’ll just be here if there’s kids that come early. I open the preschool room because right now there’s a real shortage of preschool teachers. Kids start coming at 6 or 6:30.”

A bulletin board near the preschool room features this month’s “Attendance All Stars.”

“We really promote the value of school and education, and attendance is really important,” Osborn said. “We try to start that as young as possible, so we just celebrate everyone who’s made it here every day during the month. Then we do a drawing for a $5 gift card to Walmart. We surveyed the parents, and they said they wanted gift cards to either Walmart or McDonald’s.”

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On the other side of the bulletin board is a large indoor playground area with skylights. It’s called the “open court,” Osborn said. “It’s really important because there’s not as much green space in the area for the kids to play in, so it’s nice to have something pretty close and easy for us to use. Some of the playgrounds that are within walking distance, sometimes they’re just overused or just too busy or too grown up, and so they’re not as helpful.”

The open court is the site of Osborn’s favorite Northside tradition: the preschool graduation, where each “graduate” signs a “Letter of Commitment” to their elementary school.

“I was trying to figure out how we could jazz it up, so two years ago, I thought of doing a signing day,” Osborn said. “I love sports as well, so we got each child a shirt with where they’re going to school, like Ascension or Bethune. We call them up, and we put their shirt on them, and then they sit at a big table, and we have them sign a ‘commitment letter.’ They commit to being a good friend, to going to bed on time, to listening to their teachers. I mean, it’s some pretty important stuff that they need to practice every day. The parents really, really, really value their kids, and they want them to be successful, so they are dressed up. It’s a big deal.”

Goes the extra mile

Osborn has always gone “the extra mile” when it comes to serving the Northside kids, said Briana Thompson, 35, who, along with her twin sister, had “Ms. Kim” as her teacher at Northside from the ages of 6 through 12. Now, two of Thompson’s three children are at Northside: Kacyn, 7, and Kera, 6; her oldest daughter, Aavaeh, 16, also attended.

“It’s much more than a job to her,” Thompson said. “That’s why I put my kids there. It feels like a family. She makes you feel welcome. She has a good heart. She’s very fun, very dedicated. She takes the time to not only know the kids but their families, too.”

Northside works with a number of different specialists, including on-site occupational, speech and physical therapists employed by Capernaum Pediatric Therapy. “We give them the space so the kids can get the therapy they need while the parents are working because, really, the ultimate goal is to have the child ready for kindergarten or a plan set in place, right?” Osborn said. “Sometimes there’s not much flexibility in the parents’ work schedule, and so we want the kids to get the appointments, the services that they need.”

Parents tend to be more receptive to their child’s needing therapy if the subject is first broached by a Northside teacher, Osborn said.

“It helps just because there’s a relationship that we have with the parents,” she said. “If you’re hearing for the first time that your child might need a therapeutic service, it’s kind of overwhelming. It feels different coming from myself or Ms. Anne (Parrett), you know, or a teacher who says, ‘Hey, there’s a worry. Let’s try to figure it out together.”

The care and consistency of the staff at Northside helped the community get through the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Osborn said.

“People were rioting and having fires … just two, three blocks away,” she said. “We had a parent meeting just to say, ‘How should we be responding? How should we be talking to the kids? What do you want us to be doing?’”

Parents told Northside staff that they wanted the center to remain open so their children could come to the center “and just have a normal day,” she said. “Basically, they were just really wanting quality, reliable, consistent care.”

Remaining open during the COVID-19 pandemic “was probably one of the hardest experiences, especially for families where there’s not a lot of resources,” she said. “There’s a lot of generational worries for their families, and most of all, the families really are essential workers. They’re medical assistants; they’re bank tellers; they work in grocery stores, gas stations – and so they had to work every day. Their kids, you know, came here, but it was a lot of isolation, and I think that was pretty hard sometimes for families with not a lot of resources.”

‘Power of home’

Osborn holds Ja’Zyah Johnson-Smith, 3, who just arrived for the day. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Osborn grew up in St. Croix Falls, Wis., and graduated in 1992 from St. Cloud State University with a bachelor’s degree in applied psychology. She and her husband, Richard, have five children and three grandchildren.

She believes play is essential to a child’s development because it contributes to their cognitive, physical, social and emotional well-being. “Using your imagination, or being able to just get your hands dirty, is so valuable,” she said. “Parallel play, where they’re sitting there playing with their friends and being able to coordinate and figure out together the problem. Maybe it’s the castle. Everyone wants to be the king, right? Somebody’s got to be the prince or something. You know, it’s just really trying to navigate some of those important life lessons of sharing and taking turns and not always getting your way. It’s hard.”

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Some children, who live in families with busy households, “don’t want to play with anybody,” Osborn said. “They just really would like to sit in the quiet space and, you know, build or look at books or just do some sensory items,” she said. “We just have to meet them where they are at.”

There’s a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall of Osborn’s office at Northside. It reads: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

“I’ve been thinking about the ‘power of home,’ and I really was trying to figure out where Northside fits into ‘the power of home,’ and what does that look like from Northside Child Development Center’s lens?” she said. “I’ve had the opportunity to witness what that looks like for the past 30 years. It’s a sense of community, a sense of belonging. … This feels like home. One former student told me, ‘I have had over 10 addresses, and the only address I remember is 1000 Plymouth Avenue North.’ That is the power of home.”