When money grows tight in a town like Sacramento, nonprofits must get creative to stay afloat. This is particularly true for the performing arts. But the region’s creative nonprofits have risen to the challenge in recent years, finding innovative means to engage the community and fill both seats and coffers.

The Family Business Association of California is a lobbying firm founded to protect the interests of California family businesses in the state legislature, and to “fight against proposals which will add new regulations and costs to family businesses.”

There are good reasons to focus on the special challenges posed by family businesses, like how to keep family resentments from turning to business rivalries and avoid nepotism that results in the wrong people working in key positions. But for some Sacramento immigrant family businesses, blood ties have been the key to survival.

Taking parental leave whether you’re the mom- or dad-to-be is no easy undertaking, and it’s not always guaranteed. If you’re traditionally employed, paid maternity leave is at the discretion of private companies.

Girls on the Run of Greater Sacramento is an afterschool positive youth development program that inspires girls to be joyful, healthy and confident, using a fun, experience-based curriculum that creatively integrates running

When Latino kids grow up not seeing doctors, cops or college professors that look like them, they begin to think that those are not viable career choices: Those are jobs for other people. It is hard to encourage anyone to go into those professions when they don’t know people already in them.

“If I have to use the word ‘funnel’ one more time today, I might die. #buzzwords” — @abhinemani

Posted on Twitter by Sacramento’s Chief Innovation Officer, Abhi Nemani, on Aug. 22, this was the tweet heard ‘round the Comstock’s office. It kicked off a lengthy debate among our staff about what “funnel” actually meant.

California’s landmark greenhouse-gas reduction law, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, turned 10 last month. Like most precocious 10-year-olds, AB 32 (as it’s better known) is very much a work in progress.

The U.S. medical profession is changing for its practitioners. There are fewer and fewer self-employed physicians, as more turn to employment by a medical group or hospital. In general, the U.S. will face a projected shortage of up to 90,400 physicians by 2025. 

The friendly family doctor with a black bag who would come for house calls, remove swollen tonsils, check a child’s temperature during the flu season, deliver a young woman’s baby and carefully tend to the sick and dying in their own beds is gone.