Nominations are being accepted for awards to be given at the Women of Excellence Luncheon in June.

YWCA St. Joseph Executive Director Jean Brown said the annual Women of Excellence Awards Luncheon is a successful event due to quality nominations that come from the community.

“In all of (the) awards, we are looking for women or an employer who have made a difference where they are working or volunteering… but not only that, that they have helped to bring other women along with them in that path of excellence,” Brown said.

The categories are Woman in the Workplace, Woman in Volunteerism, Woman in Support Services, Emerging Leader (under age 40) and Employer of Excellence. Nominations are also made by high school counselors for the Future Leader award for a high school senior.

Brown said the luncheon is put on each year to recognize and celebrate the many women who make a difference in the community.

“Over the past 16 years, we’ve had the opportunity to recognize and celebrate over 700 women and I think that is just significant in our community that we lift those women up and bring to public attention all the things they are doing in their workplace or in their place of volunteer service.”

Nominations will be accepted until March 16.

The 17th Annual Women of Excellence Awards Luncheon will be held 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on June 21st at the Civic Arena in St. Joseph.

For more information and nomination forms, click here.

(UPDATE 12:53 a.m. Monday) St. Joseph police have identified the woman who died after a stabbing incident early Saturday morning.

According to Capt. Jeff Wilson with the police department, 38-year-old Terra M. Reents and 48-year-old James B. Cleveland were injured during the incident and transported to Mosaic Life Care for treatment. Reents later died from her injuries.

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(UPDATE 10 a.m. Monday) According to police, the woman injured in a stabbing incident early Saturday morning has died.

We will update this post as we learn more details.

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One man is in custody after two people were injured in a stabbing early Saturday morning.

According to the St. Joseph Police Department, at 1:16 a.m. Saturday at Legends Sports Bar at 210 North Belt, two employees were cut or stabbed by a patron at the bar. Both were taken to Mosaic Life Care for treatment, one of the victims, a 38-year-old woman, was last known to be in critical condition.

Police say the suspect was a 26-year-old man who was located around 6 a.m. Saturday morning, taken into custody and charged with first degree aggravated assault.

Creating Valentines for veterans will be the purpose of a crafting event next week at the Downtown Library in St. Joseph.

Katey Girard is the Young Adult Librarian at the Downtown Library and said the annual crafting event gives students ages 12-18 the opportunity to make Valentines that will be delivered to the Cameron Veterans Home.

“I think it’s a good way for students to give back to people who sacrificed a lot for us… and I think it’ll mean a lot to people who might not get Valentines otherwise,” Girard said.

The Valentines for Veterans crafting party will begin at 4 p.m. on Monday at the Downtown Library and Girard said art supplies will be provided for as many Valentines as volunteers want to make.

According to Girard they are planning to make around 200 Valentines.

For more information, contact the library at (816) 232-7729.

The St. Joseph Police Department recently made the switch to a new crime reporting system that has the potential to benefit the department and community.

The St. Joseph Police Department announced they are one of 38 law enforcement agencies in the state to have demonstrated the ability to report Missouri Incident Base Reporting System data.

Previously, the department has used summary reporting or Uniform Crime Reporting, a system developed in the 1920s to collect national crime data. Supervisor Dawn Hill with the department is the Assistant to the Public Safety Network Administrator. Hill said the Missouri Incident Base Reporting System (MIBRS) is a significant change in how data is collected, the detail of the data and the research capability.

“Missouri Incident Base Reporting looks at 49 different offenses. So, when we’re looking at an incident, it looks at all offenses that are involved. It also focuses on details of that incident which can be really important when you’re looking at crime trends or different crime data,” Hill said. “Things that it includes… the date, time and location of an incident. The race, the sex, the age of your victim and your offender, the relationship between your victim and offender, weapons, drug usage, details of property loss or injuries in a victim. You can see where all of these things would be really beneficial when you are looking at this type of data and trying to determine how crime is affecting our communities.”

Hill said the system will help the department work with similar jurisdictions and neighboring communities to find solutions and solve common problems.

Although it was not mandated until 2021, Hill said the police department recently obtained the MIBRS certification, which comes from criteria set by the state of Missouri and the FBI. Hill adds the St. Joseph Police Department was the first in the state to make the switch and successfully implement the software changes for the reporting system.

A vintage book sale hosted by the Friends of the St. Joseph Public Library began Tuesday.

According to Library Community Services and Promotions Coordinator Crystal Stuck, the sale at the Downtown Library location is different from their fall sale and includes a variety of items.

“Not everything we have is vintage, we just don’t quite know what to call it,” Stuck said. “At our fall sale, everything is a dollar or two dollars, but every once in awhile, we have items that we want to price higher than that, so we decided to have a special sale every January at the downtown library. So these are things that are old, maybe they’re a little more fragile… collectibles.”

The sale includes approximately 600 items such as novels and local interest and nonfiction books.

Proceeds from the sale go toward library services and programs, including the summer reading program.

The sale runs through January 31st at the Downtown Library at 927 Felix Street. It is open during regular library hours, which are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

 

Free lifeguard training will be offered to anyone wanting to be a lifeguard for the City of St. Joseph’s Aquatics Division this summer.

According to St. Joseph Parks Department Special Events and Communications Coordinator Julie Noel, there’s been a national decline in lifeguards the past few years and that the cost of training might be a factor.

“We thought that might be one possibility why we weren’t getting as many people trained to be lifeguards,” Noel said. “So we decided to take that barrier away and see if we couldn’t garner a little bit more interest and hopefully those who might not have gone ahead to be a lifeguard in the past because of the cost of the training, they would go ahead and try this year.”

The training course, which usually costs around $150 will be provided for free to all lifeguard candidates who join the city’s lifeguard team as an employee for the Parks and Recreation Department.

Anyone interested in being a lifeguard can contact the Aquatics Office at (816) 271-5519. Those interested must pass a pretest before registering for training. Courses will be offered beginning in February.  

The Red Cross is in need of blood donors to help address a winter blood donation shortage.

American Red Cross of Northwest Missouri Executive Director Angie Springs said there is typically a shortage during the winter months due to several factors including severe winter weather and donors being sick.

Springs said there will be several blood drives coming up in the area.

“There is a constant need for blood, blood isn’t something that can be created any other way than rolling up your sleeves and giving arm to arm,” Springs said. “So if you can, if you’re healthy, I encourage everyone to get out, donate blood, save a life, because you never know when you may be on the receiving end of that blood.”

Springs said Type O negative and B negative blood are the types most needed right now.

 

Upcoming blood drives will be held at the following locations:

Leavenworth, Kansas, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday at The Guidance Center, 500 Limit St.

Cameron, 12 p.m to 5 p.m. on Friday at Walmart, 2000 Walnut St.

Atchison, Kansas, 2:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on January 15, at Trinity Lutheran Church, 603 N. 8th St.

St. Joseph, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on January 23, at the Northwest Missouri Chapter of the American Red Cross, 401 N. 12th St.

 

For more information and other locations, go to redcross.org.

The City of St. Joseph Health Department is conducting a community health assessment to help with planning programs and working toward a healthier community.

Health Educator Nancy King said the assessment will help get feedback on what community members feel are the overall health issues in the community, with an emphasis on priority health issues for infants, children, adolescents and women of childbearing age as part of the maternal child health contract.

“This will help us to develop programming and to develop what priority health issues we want to address over the next three years with regard to maternal child health,” King said.

The questions are broad and ask for opinions about community health issues and quality of life in the St. Joseph area. King said some of the questions ask for opinions on the most significant health problems in the community, safety issues for people in the community and whether the area is a good place to raise children and grow old. 

“We really encourage people to take the survey… it’s the new year and as we are looking at New Year’s resolutions and how we can make positive changes in our own lives, we really look for feedback on what people feel like what positive changes we can make in our community to make it a healthier and safer place to live,” King said. “We would like to have this community health assessment sort of be that starting point to help us identify what positive changes we need to make in our community to make it a better place.”

The survey is available online. The Health Department will also be posting notices on its Facebook page of times and locations Health Department staff will be out in the community with tablets and paper copies of the survey within the next week.

For more information, contact the Health Department at (816) 271-4636. Print copies of the survey are available at the St. Joseph Health Department at 904 South 10th Street.

A project is underway to tell the story of how Amelia Earhart lived.

Chris Williamson is the creator of the Chasing Earhart Project. Williamson said his interest in Earhart goes back to third grade.

“My teacher, I remember, put up all these 8x10s all around the room of all these famous Americans and you had Martin Luther King, you had Harriet Tubman… Theodore Roosevelt, all those great Americans and then you had this woman who, at the time I had no idea who she was, it was the famous bomber jacket photo with her hands on her hips,” Williamson said. “I did a history day project on (Earhart), I just kind of fell in love with her life and the way she was and the obstacles that she overcame and just her story. Then, of course, you get this incredible 39 years of living and all the stuff that she went through and all the stuff that she did and that’s before you get to the disappearance, which is probably the juiciest disappearance of all time.”

Williamson said he did multiple school projects throughout the years and continued to have an interest in Earhart’s life. Williamson’s background is in Information Technology (IT) but about nine years ago, he started researching with the intention of doing some sort of project about Amelia Earhart. What eventually started out as a podcast project turned into also working on a documentary. Williamson said he originally didn’t want to do a documentary because there are already so many, until his wife changed his mind with one sentence.

“If you look at the documentaries, they either sway two ways, they’re either completely biased toward one hypothesis or they’re about how she died, but what if you flipped it and talk about how she lived instead.”

Williamson said the plan, because of the amount of content and interviews so far, will be to make a documentary series of 14 installments or episodes about an hour-long each. The estimated completion date for the documentary is in Fall 2019. The podcast is still a part of the project, offering in-depth discussions with the guests of the documentary.

Williamson said he and his wife are originally from southern California. They do a lot of traveling because of the project and traveled to Atchison, Kansas, for the Amelia Earhart Festival.

“While we were out here, my wife really fell in love with the ambiance. She has been wanting to get out of southern California for quite some time and she wanted to go to a place that you could experience all the seasons and kind of have a change in her life and we have an eight-year-old son we wanted to raise somewhere different than southern California,” Williamson said. “We were out here shooting and we fell in love with the place and decided to move out here. I think for us it’s really twofold, not only is it a personal decision but it really helps the project to be based out of Atchison, Kansas, because Atchison really is the “Mecca” of Amelia Earhart.”

Williamson said as part of the project, he and his team are putting together a Chasing Earhart discussion panel which will be July 21st at this year’s Amelia Earhart festival. The first two guests were announced Tuesday and they are Abigail ‘Astronaut Abby’ Harrison, Founder of The Mars Generation and International STEAM and Space Ambassador and Shaesta Waiz, the youngest civilian pilot to fly around the world solo in a single engine aircraft. Waiz also launched the Dreams Soar foundation which encourages young girls and young women who have an interest in the fields of aviation and STEM to pursue their dreams.

For more information, go to chasingearhart.com.

Listen to the full interview with Chris Williamson below: