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Rosie Newmark

I am a reporter and editor working toward my undergraduate degree in journalism and history at Northwestern University. I like to cover social issues, local politics and activism.

I am originally from Chicago but I am currently based in Evanston, Illinois.

District 65, 202 Boards of Education discuss collaboration with NU, literacy efforts in joint meeting

Evanston Township High School. The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 and District 202 Boards of Education discussed literacy efforts and NU collaborations Tuesday.

The Evanston Township High School District 202 and Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Boards of Education spoke about Northwestern’s district partnerships and literacy updates for both districts at a joint meeting Tuesday.

Several members from the Office of Community Education Partnerships at NU presented their efforts to engage wi

Woodlawn neighbors launch project to welcome and integrate migrants at Wadsworth shelter into community

The city’s use of the former Wadsworth Elementary School as a temporary shelter for hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers has been a point of contention and frustration for many in the community for months.

But a coalition of neighbors and religious leaders in Woodlawn are trying to change the narrative, creating an initiative to ease the new residents’ integration into the community.

Dubbed Chicago 4 All, the initiative aims to integrate the asylum seekers into the Woodlawn community throug

Evanston Public Library digitizes Evanston’s historical newspapers

EPL takes on a project to digitize Evanston’s historical newspapers, which part-time reference librarian Jeff Garrett said should be completed by the end of this year.

The Evanston Public Library is working to make sifting through newspapers less tedious and more inclusive.

Jeff Garrett, a current part-time reference librarian at EPL, is spearheading a newspaper digitization project to upgrade EPL’s online search system and make historical newspapers more accessible for the Evanston community.

Evanston restaurants use Too Good To Go to reduce food waste

Cinnaholic, located on Davis Street. The store uses Too Good To Go to reduce food waste.

Madison Houk, manager at Great Harvest Bread Co. on Central Street, said she disliked throwing out all of the bakery’s leftovers at the end of the day.

But last year, the bakery joined Too Good To Go, an app that allows restaurants to sell leftover food at a discounted price with the goal of reducing food waste. Now, they offer grab bags through the app, each typically containing three scones and a loaf of

Recycled Modern, vintage home decor store and art gallery, opens in Harper Court

When Shari Currie began furniture shopping for her new home in Kenwood in 2017, she struggled to find pieces that spoke to her style and identity.

“I felt like there was a lack of diversity when it comes to two different spaces; the styling of the space, mixing vintage to modern pieces, as well as seeing primarily African American art and artists in spaces,” Currie said. “So that is where my niche came from.”

Currie’s niche soon grew into Recycled Modern, a vintage and modern home decor store

‘The Funnel,’ a new film about ancestral connections and 1940s South Side housing, to screen at Black Alphabet Film Festival this weekend

In a cramped kitchenette-style apartment somewhere on the mid-South Side in the 1940s, neighbors squabble over the use of a communal bathroom, its dwindling toilet paper and a disintegrated bar of hand soap. The tensions (and joys) that invariably arise in those close living quarters, from the mid-20th century to today, are the subject of a new film by writer and organizer Charlene Carruthers.

The founding national director of youth organization Black Youth Project 100 and author of “Unapologet

Rebuild Foundation to open up its archives this weekend

The Rebuild Foundation’s Stony Island Arts Bank — a combination gallery, media archive, library and art center at 68th Street and Stony Island Avenue — is sharing a small portion of its archives with the public this weekend.

Among the foundation’s vast collection of tens of thousands of books, vinyl and other artifacts are more than 60,000 glass slides of art and architectural history from the Paleolithic to modern eras - two of which will be the focus of Sunday’s program exploring western art

Belarusian revolution on display in new photography exhibition

Oliver Okun, a University of Chicago PhD candidate in comparative literature, speculates that many Americans cannot point out Belarus on a map. But in the summer of 2020, Belarus made international headlines when its citizens erupted into the largest anti-government protests in the country’s history. These demonstrations against President Aleksandr Lukashenko —and what protestors allege is a corrupt and authoritarian government— are the subject of Okun’s photography exhibition “Belarus: Faces of

SROs in the era of guns

Members of the Evanston Township High School (ETHS) community have disputed over the presence of police officers in schools (school resource officers), since the summer of racial unrest that the United States experienced two years ago, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. While some Evanston residents claim that school resource officers (SROs) disproportionately discipline students of color which perpetuates the school-to-prison pipeline, the police department and ETHS leadership remain steadfast in their support of SROs for safety purposes.

Officer Loyce Spells, one of the two ETHS resource officers, strongly favors keeping the police presence. He believes that he has formed positive relationships with students. To him, SROs are not a problem in the Evanston community, even if other towns have experienced troublesome incidents.

Cracking the code

Last fall, Weinberg third-year Julia Greenberg walked to her game design computer science class with two male classmates. On the walk, she often felt anxious, like she knew less about the subject than them, even though that wasn’t the case.

“It just felt like I was falling behind, which wasn’t necessarily true,” Greenberg says. “It also can be a little intimidating to ask questions when you’re a woman because you don’t want to be perceived as dumb, and you don’t want to mess up.”

Greenberg had

Mind the gap

Weinberg first-year Daphne Zuckerman expected to be marching through the Weber Arch in September 2020. Instead, she found herself rafting down the Colorado River through Utah, 1,500 miles away from Evanston. This was just one portion of the 70-day camping trip through Utah, Colorado, Arizona and California that Zuckerman took in the fall.

“I loved it,” Zuckerman says. “I thought it was the perfect balance between just exploring nature and living in a tent for three months but also getting to do

Vaxxed vacation

McCormick first-year Marcos Rios returned home for his brother’s graduation the first weekend of May and was overjoyed to safely hug his grandparents for the first time in over a year. Rios’ immediate family had been socially distancing from his grandparents since last March when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged Americans to avoid interacting with anyone outside of their household for fear of contracting COVID-19. At the end of a seemingly endless year, Rios and his fam