January 18, 2025

Saturday, January 18, 2025. Annette’s News Roundup.

Joe is always busy.

Biden admits mistakes.

Biden declares the ERA the law of the land — but it may not matter - POLITICO

President Biden declared on Friday that he believes that the Equal Rights Amendment has met the requirements of ratification and therefore is now part of the Constitution, but he declined to order the government to finalize the process by officially publishing it.

“In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: The 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.

Under the Constitution, however, the president has no direct role in approving amendments and his statement has no legal force by itself. The archivist of the United States, a Biden appointee, has refused to formally publish the amendment on the grounds that it has not met the requirements to become part of the Constitution.

Aides said that Mr. Biden was not ordering the archivist, Colleen Shogan, to reverse her position and publish the amendment, as advocates have urged him to do. Asked for comment on Friday, the archivist’s office referred back to previous statements refusing to publish the amendment, indicating that she would not change her stance.

Even so, advocates maintained that Mr. Biden’s imprimatur gives the amendment additional credibility for any future court battle over whether it actually has the force of law. In effect, Mr. Biden and his allies are daring opponents to go to court to argue that women do not have equal rights.

Mr. Biden’s decision to weigh in just three days before he leaves office on an issue that has divided the country for generations amounted to a late effort to bring about profound change and shape his own legacy, but without taking actual action.

The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed more than a century ago and has taken a circuitous route to ratification. It easily passed both houses of Congress with the required two-thirds votes in 1972 and over the next few years was ratified by most states. But it fell short of the three-quarters of states required under the Constitution until January 2020 when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it.

Opponents have argued that a seven-year deadline imposed by Congress (and later extended by another three years) meant that the ratification was not completed in time, while proponents maintain the deadline was invalid. Moreover, several states that originally ratified have tried to rescind their approval, adding another point of legal uncertainty to the situation.

The amendment itself, originally written by the women’s rights activist Alice Paul in 1923 and later modified, essentially is a single sentence: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The rest of the amendment simply says that Congress can pass legislation to enforce it and that it would go into effect two years after ratification.

While the text of the amendment seems relatively straightforward on its face at a time when federal law already prohibits sex discrimination, in fact it has long been an explosive issue. Advocates argue that such a bedrock principle should be explicitly built into the Constitution, not just statutory law, while critics contend it would have far-reaching consequences on everything from abortion rights to a military draft for women.

Democrats have been pressing Mr. Biden to order the archivist to publish the amendment. Last month, Dr. Shogan and her deputy, William J. Bosanko, issued a statement saying that the Equal Rights Amendment “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial and procedural decisions.”

Dr. Shogan and Mr. Bosanko cited various court decisions and memos from the Justice Department in concluding that they “cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment.”

But former Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and president of the American Constitution Society, a progressive advocacy group, who has been among those pushing for the archivist to publish the amendment, said Mr. Biden’s statement was meaningful even if she does not.

“It’s completely historic to have the president of the United States say it’s already in the Constitution,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview. “I believe and many believe that whether or not the archivist certifies it or not doesn’t matter.”

That represents a turnabout more than two years after saying that it did matter and advancing the strategy of pressing the archivist to publish it as a way to finally declare the amendment part of the Constitution. Now, Mr. Feingold said, the archivist’s role is “merely ministerial” and the president’s opinion is more meaningful.

“For the president to recognize it as a matter of law is something we’ve been working on for years,” he said. “It is a significant moment after 100 years.” (New York Times).

Lawrence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan say the Equal Rights Amendment is now the Law of the Land.

The Equal Rights Amendment at Long Last.

Thanks to President Biden, the Constitution will finally guarantee equality for all.

With three days left in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden ensured that the United States Constitution, the oldest on earth, would finally include an explicit guarantee of sex equality. In truth, the Equal Rights Amendment should have been recognized as part of our Constitution nearly half a dozen years ago, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it on January 27, 2020.

By proclaiming, in effect, “Yes, Virginia, you have made history by repairing a glaring omission in our most fundamental law,” President Biden made official a reality that many Americans failed to recognize at the time: that Article V of the Constitution expressly makes any proposed Amendment to that document “Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.” Nothing in Article V makes the Constitution’s binding contents depend on any further official action by any branch of the federal government, whether Congress or the Judiciary or indeed the Executive.

What makes this action controversial is, of course, the decades that have elapsed since Congress saw fit to propose the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972. But there is no legal basis for treating the ERA as having expired when the arbitrary time limits of 7 and then 10 years set by the House and Senate for the ratification process had run out. The Constitution’s arduous process for amending the document makes it the hardest in the world to revise, with the result that an 18th and 19th century sensibility casts too long a shadow There is no justification for making a uniquely difficult amendment process more difficult by grafting onto it a requirement that amendments must be ratified speedily, a requirement nowhere to be found in the Constitution’s text . Nor can any such requirement be extrapolated from the history of the amendment process as we have employed it over the years. The most recently ratified amendment, the 27th, was finally approved by the Legislature of Michigan in May 1992, more than two centuries after it was proposed by the First Congress in September 1789. But because its text – unlike that of the 18th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd Amendments – contained no language making it “inoperative unless ratified” by enough states “within seven years of its submission” or indeed within any specified time, that long percolation period made no difference.

So too with the ERA. Congress knew by the date of its submission to the States, March 22, 1972, precisely how to include a shelf date in the text of the amendment , but instead included a time limit only in the advisory resolution . That makes all the difference, because such a resolution is not a binding law, and is not a part of the amendment the States vote whether or not to ratify. Congress recognized as much when it extended that limit by three years in 1982 through a resolution of the two houses.

The Supreme Court, in a case that one of us (Tribe) presented to that court over four decades ago, National Organization For Women v. Idaho, similarly treated the time limit in the resolution as non-binding. And, although five states – Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee – attempted to rescind their state legislatures’ earlier ratifications of the ERA between 1972 and 1982, nothing in the Constitution provides for any such turnabout nor tolerates the chaotic and unpredictable legal situation that would be created by permitting states to reverse course as the process proceeds. Ratification is rightly understood as a one-way ratchet.

After careful consideration and consultation with constitutional experts, President Biden – like the American Bar Association last year – concluded that the ERA had met all the requirements for inclusion in the Constitution. He decided that the Oath of Office he took upon assuming the presidency – the Oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” – meant that he should formally announce that conclusion to the world.

We welcome debate on the political and moral pros and cons of keeping the ERA alive rather than letting it fade from memory until Congress is again willing to propose similar language for the states to consider – a wait that could be many decades long. And others can debate the implications for the Biden legacy and even the eventual outcome of the multifaceted litigation likely to ensue. Faithful to his Oath and to his duty to execute the laws, this president did not flinch from acting in accord with simple, straightforward, legally impeccable principle. For that, he deserves our undying gratitude.

It is not necessary for the National Archivist to publish the ERA in order for it to be adopted according to the provisions of the Constitution. The President avoided triggering a clash with the Archivist, who recently announced her intention to defy her statutory, and purely ministerial, duty to publish the ERA. The only reason Congress gave the Archivist such a duty nearly a century ago was to ensure that the Nation got word that an amendment was in force, enabling officials at all levels of government to conform their actions to it. In our modern age of broadcast, cable and internet communication, the President’s announcement itself performed that function.

Accordingly, our Constitution now demands that “equality of rights under the law cannot be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”

It’s long past time!

Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University.

Kathleen M. Sullivan is former Dean of Stanford Law School and professor of law at Harvard and Stanford. (The Contrarian)

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Virginia is coming back to true Blue

And will do more when its citizens elect Abigail Spanberger governor in November 2025.

In case you are up at night, worrying about the damage Trump and colleagues may do to major universities…

Here is how Harvard is fighting back.

Harvard Hires MAGA-Linked Lobbying Firm Amid Congressional Probes, Threats To Tax Its $53 Billion Endowment

Harvard president Alan Garber has said Trump's threat to go after endowments 'keeps me up at night'

R: Susie Wiles and Pam Bondi Andrew Harnik; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) L: Harvard President Alan Garber (harvard.edu

Harvard University has hired the former lobbying firm of Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles and Trump attorney general nominee Pam Bondi as the Ivy League school hopes to dampen investigations into campus anti-Semitism and curtail threats to tax its massive $53 billion endowment.

Harvard tapped Ballard Partners to lobby on the broad issue of "advocacy supporting education and educational research," according to lobbying disclosures filed with Congress.

The hiring comes as Harvard president Alan Garber has signaled the university will take a more diplomatic approach to the second Trump term compared to the first. Garber reportedly told Harvard faculty last month that the school must rethink its messaging strategy in the wake of the decisive GOP wins in November, and that he saw the election results as a repudiation of elitism, according to the Harvard Crimson.

Ballard Partners founder Brian Ballard, who will lobby on behalf of Harvard, forged close ties to Trump during his first presidential term. And many of the firm’s alumni have joined the Trump ranks. Wiles, Trump’s 2024 campaign manager, served as a partner at Ballard until 2019. Bondi, whose confirmation hearings begin this week, joined Ballard as a partner in 2019.

Harvard’s approach is a far cry from the one it embraced after Trump’s first election. Then-president Drew Faust ramped up lobbying efforts to challenge Trump’s immigration policies and his threats to cut funding for research and humanities, which she called an "assault" on the relationship between the federal government and universities.

Faust penned an op-ed criticizing Trump's plans to cut funding for the National Endowment for Humanities, and Harvard joined lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s executive actions on immigration.
It’s not entirely clear which issues Ballard will help Harvard navigate. But Harvard officials have said they are concerned about ongoing congressional probes into campus anti-Semitism, proposals to increase taxes on university endowments, and threats to cut research funding.

Trump has called for higher taxes on the Harvard endowment, and incoming vice president J.D. Vance proposed a bill in 2023 to increase the highest tax rate on school endowments from 1.4 percent to 35 percent.

Garber has said the Trump threat "keeps me up at night."
Harvard remains in the crosshairs of several congressional investigations over the rampant anti-Semitic activity at its Massachusetts campus.

Harvard came under heightened scrutiny after Garber’s predecessor, Claudine Gay, testified to Congress in December 2023 that statements that call for the genocide of Jews did not necessarily constitute harassment under the university’s policies. "It depends on the context," Gay told Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.). She was later found to have plagiarized parts of at least eight of her published academic works, the Washington Free Beacon reported. [A Report in the Washington Free Beacon does surely not make something true].

Harvard and Ballard Partners did not respond to requests for comment.(Free Beacon).

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Joan Plowright has died. The world is less.

One of the many pleasures of my life as a theatre producer was producing Dame Joan Plowright in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Absolutely Perhaps, Martin Sherman’s version of the comedy by Luigi Pirandello (along with my colleagues Sonia Friedman Productions, and Act Productions.)

Joan Plowright (left) and Oliver Ford Davies in Absolutely! (Perhaps) in London in 2003.

Joan Plowright (right) and Liza Tarbuck in Absolutely! (Perhaps) in London in 2003.

Needless to say, Dame Plowright and her cast, guided by the amazing Franco Zeffirelli, made the production brilliant and memorable.

But there were extraordinary sidebars too.

On Opening Night, my role as producer led to a delightful pre-curtain conversation (how could it be otherwise) with Dame Plowright’s fellow Dame, Maggie Smith, as well as a second conversation, this one post performance, with the two dames.

Ask me about it sometime.

Having my name linked for all eternity in any way with either of these magnificent dames will remain forever thrilling.

The things that can happen to a girl from the Bronx.

Joan Plowright, Acting Legend of Stage and Screen and Laurence Olivier’s Widow, Dies at 95.

Joan Plowright, perhaps the greatest Anglophone actor of the 20th century and the widow of Laurence Oliver, died on Thursday. She was 95.

Plowright was a prominent actress of stage and screen in her own right, especially in her native England, and was a Tony winner for “A Taste of Honey.” The actress had retired in 2014 after going blind due to macular degeneration.

Her family confirmed the news of her death to The Guardian on Friday, writing: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95. She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire. She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories. The family are deeply grateful to Jean Wilson and all those involved in her personal care over many years.”

Theaters across London’s West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. on Jan. 21 in remembrance of Plowright, the Society of London Theatre announced shortly after the news broke of her death.

She was nominated for an Oscar for 1991’s “Enchanted April,” winning a Golden Globe for her role in the Mike Newell-directed film about four mismatched Englishwomen sharing an Italian villa. The New York Times said she was “uproariously funny as Mrs. Fisher, a commanding older woman who becomes Rose and Lottie’s unlikely roommate” and “booms through the film dropping the names of literary eminences she once knew through the connections of her distinguished father.”

Plowright was no stranger to comedy: She was a standout in Lawrence Kasdan’s black comedy “I Love You to Death,” in which she played the mother of Tracy Ullman’s character, the wife of a pizzeria owner (Kevin Kline) who has cheated on her; Plowright’s mother urges her to have him killed, and hilarity ensues. Roger Ebert said, “Joan Plowright might seem like an unlikely choice as the mother, but gets the movie’s biggest laugh in a bedside scene.”

The actress also did television and was nominated for an Emmy in 1993 for her role in the HBO telepic “Stalin,” starring Robert Duvall.

Though she was first and foremost a creature of the theater, Plowright made a number of prominent appearances in feature films including not only “Enchanted April” and “I Love You to Death” but “Tea With Mussolini,” Barry Levinson’s “Avalon,” the Irish-set comedy “Widows’ Peak” and 2005’s “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.”

Plowright first came to prominence among those unfamiliar with the English stage thanks to her work in Tony Richardson’s brilliant 1960 film “The Entertainer,” based on the play by John Osborne and featuring a tour de force performance from Olivier as a dance hall performer facing existential defeat. She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for most promising newcomer for her role in the film in which she played his daughter, but the pair started an affair prior to the film, when they were in the stage production, that scandalously ended his two-decade marriage to actress Vivien Leigh. Plowright, who was also married when the affair started, became Olivier’s third wife — Lady Olivier — in March 1961.

To escape the scandal of the divorce from Leigh, Olivier and Plowright headed for New York, where each appeared on the stage, he in “Becket,” she in Shelagh Delaney’s “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony as best actress in a play.

Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright.

Joan Ann Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England on Oct. 28, 1929.

She appeared in amateur theater productions as a child, and won an amateur theater prize at age 15 and after high school did a stint at the Laban Art of Movement Studio. She made her professional stage debut in a 1948 production of “If Four Walls Could Talk,” then received a two-year scholarship to study at the prestigious Old Vic Theatre School in London. In 1954 she made her London stage debut, and two years she later became a member of the Royal Court Theatre, where she appeared in such productions as “The Crucible,” Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and Shaw’s “Major Barbara and Saint Joan.” During a performance of “The Country Wife,” Olivier first noticed Plowright and was instantly smitten.

Plowright would eventually join Olivier at the National Theatre, which he founded in the early 1960s. At the National she appeared in “St. Joan,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Three Sisters,” “Tartuffe,” “Back to Methuselah,” “The Advertisement,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “The Merchant of Venice” and “A Woman Killed With Kindness,” among others; later she starred in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in 1981-82, “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Way of the World,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” “The House of Bernarda Alba” and “Time and the Conways.”

She had appeared on British television as early as 1951, in the series “Sara Crewe,” as well as in a 1954 adaptation of “The Comedy of Errors” for “BBC Sunday-Night Theatre” and starred in Richard B. Sheridan’s play “School for Scandal” for a 1959 edition of the BBC program “World Theatre.”

The actress made her feature debut in the Joseph Losey-directed 1957 thriller “Time Without Pity,” starring Michael Redgrave and Ann Todd, and after 1960’s “The Entertainer,” she appeared as Sonya in a 1963 feature adaptation of “Uncle Vanya” that starred Michael Redgrave and also featured Olivier as Dr. Astrov.

For a substantial period, the actress divided her time between occasional acting gigs and raising her three children by Olivier, then returned to her profession with gusto at the age of 60.

She played Masha in the Olivier-directed feature adaptation of Chekhov “Three Sisters” (1970) and starred with Olivier in a 1973 TV adaptation of “The Merchant of Venice.”

Plowright played the mother of the disturbed boy in the 1977 feature adaptation of “Equus,” starring Richard Burton, drawing her first BAFTA Award nomination. The same year, she appeared in a Granada Television adaptation of Eduardo de Filippo’s play “Saturday, Sunday, Monday,” about the goings on in a large Italian family as the weekend unfolds, with Olivier as the paterfamilias and Plowright as his daughter-in-law, who prepares the Sunday feast that is central to the weekend.

The actress played Mrs. Frank opposite Maximilian Schell in a 1980 NBC adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” played Lady Bracknell in a 1986 BBC adaptation of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and starred with Robert Guillaume in a 1992 TV movie adaptation of “Driving Miss Daisy.”

In Richard Loncraine’s 1982 feature “Brimstone and Treacle,” Plowright played the gullible mother, whose husband is played by Denholm Elliott, menaced by the evil character played by Sting. She was the best thing in the disaster that was Hugh Hudson’s “Revolution,” starring Al Pacino, in which Plowright played the mother of Nastassja Kinski’s character.

In 1988, she starred with Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson in auteur Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers.” While the film was rather puzzling, the Washington Post said Plowright was “wonderfully wry.” The following year, she starred with Billie Whitelaw in “The Dressmaker” as Nellie, a woman outraged by change in an American-beset Liverpool during WWII. The New York Times said, “Miss Plowright moves through the film with the imperiousness of the ferociously genteel, which doesn’t mean that Nellie can’t improvise when the situation demands it.”

In Levinson’s “Avalon” (1990), she played the matriarch of the large Russian-Jewish family in Baltimore, always squabbling “entertainingly,” as the Times put it, with her husband, played by Armin Mueller-Stahl. In “Widows’ Peak,” set in a small Irish town in the wake of WWI, she played a dowager who rules over a large number of women made widows by the recent war.

As a treat for her grandchildren, she played Mrs. Wilson in the 1993 adaptation of “Dennis the Menace” opposite Walter Matthau, and Nanny in the 1996 live-action retelling of “101 Dalmations” that focused on Glenn Close’s Cruella De Vil; she also played Aunt Lucinda in 2008’s “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” (About the last of these, Roger Ebert enthused, “The movie is distinguished by its acting, not least by the great Joan Plowright.”)

Generally, as Plowright entered her mid to late 60s in the 1990s, the screen roles grew smaller and less interesting. She was fine as Mrs. Fairfax in Zeffirelli’s 1996 adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” but the character has little to do. In “Surviving Picasso,” starring Anthony Hopkins, she played the grandmother of the artist’s mistress.

In the late ’90s, the actress signed on a series regular for NBC’s “Encore! Encore!,” starring Nathan Lane as a former opera star who returns home to the family winery and Plowright as his mother; the series’ run was brief.

Working again with Zeffirelli, the actress starred with Cher, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Lily Tomlin in 1999’s “Tea With Mussolini.” The film is a semi-autobiographical tale co-penned by the director about his boyhood in 1930s Florence, when his closest companion was an old British lady (Plowright), who was hired to raise him to be a perfect English gentleman and brought him into the company of the other Anglophone expats living in the area. Again for Zeffirelli, she appeared in a supporting role in the director’s strange 2002 paean to his friend Maria Callas, “Callas Forever,” starring Fanny Ardant.

Plowright threw herself into a supporting role in the 2003 Steve Martin-Queen Latifah vehicle “Bringing Down the House,” with its awkward racial and sexual politics. And then in 2006, when the actress was 77, she starred in a charming if sentimental movie aimed at an older crowd, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” about a woman, seeking independence, who stumbles upon a London hotel full of older eccentrics.

She made her Broadway debut in Ionesco’s “The Chairs and the Lesson,” directed by Tony Richardson, in 1958, a year in which she also appeared on the Rialto with Olivier in a transfer of “The Entertainer.” Decades later, in 1980, she starred on Broadway with Frank Finlay in “Filumena,” an original production by Franco Zeffirelli directed by Olivier.

In Herbert Kretzmer’s book “Snapshots: Encounters With Twentieth Century Legends,” the author quotes Plowright: “Everybody, outside the theater, thinks that actors and actresses are soppy people, and that acting is like having a lovely hobby. The truth is that actors are more tremendously disciplined than most. I was taught very early to leave my troubles at the stage door — all my aches and pains and domestic upsets.”

She was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1970, and was promoted to Dame in 2004. In 2018, she appeared in Roger Michell’s documentary “Nothing Like a Dame” alongside Plowright’s fellow dames Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Olivier died in 1989. Plowright’s brother, David, was an executive at Granada Television who died in 2006.

Plowright was married to actor Roger Gage from 1953 to 1960. She divorced him to marry Olivier.

She is survived by a son, actor-director Richard Olivier and two daughters, actresses Tamsin Olivier and Julie Kate Olivier, as well as a number of grandchildren. (Variety International).

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The Theatre Development Fund give free membership to graduating high school students in NYC.

That means serious discounts and deals for 1 year, for many Broadway and off-Broadway productions.

Start spreading the news. 🎶

The cast of “Hell’s Kitchen” on Broadway, 2024.

“TDF will offer free membership to graduating New York City students” by Broadway News’ Michael Abourizk - “TDF’s “Graduation Gift” program will return for a second year. The program offers a free one-year TDF membership to all graduating seniors from New York City public and charter high schools.”

Additionally, TDF will partner with the Broadway productions of “Hell’s Kitchen” and “SIX.” Every student who signs up for the TDF membership can enter a drawing for a chance to win a pair of complimentary tickets to the May 7, 7 p.m. performance of either “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Shubert Theatre or “SIX” at the Lena Horne Theatre. All tickets for both performances will be reserved for the winners.

Also on May 7, TDF will host an outdoor graduation celebration on the red steps of the TKTS Booth in Times Square. The event will include music, graduation photo and other activities to be announced.

“We are thrilled to be launching the second year of TDF’s Graduation Gift after a successful inaugural 2024,” said TDF vice president of programs Ginger Bartkoski Meagher, in a statement. “TDF believes that the theater belongs to all of us and that it’s every New Yorker’s birthright to have access to the amazing wealth of arts and culture in the City. Together with our continuing partners the New York City Public Schools Arts Office and ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ on Broadway, as well as our new partner ‘SIX’ on Broadway, we welcome the next generation of theatregoers with open arms!”

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One organization to donate to help victims of the California fire.

Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen.

World Central Kitchen’s Relief Team is in Southern California to support first responders and families impacted by wildfires in the Los Angeles area. Our teams and partners have mobilized across the region to provide nourishing meals to people in need.

WCK is first to the frontlines, providing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. When disaster strikes, WCK’s Relief Team mobilizes to the frontlines with the urgency of now to start cooking and provide meals to people in need. By partnering with organizations on the ground and activating a network of food trucks or emergency kitchens, WCK provides freshly made, nutritious meals to communities impacted by disasters quickly and effectively. We know that good food provides not only nourishment, but also comfort and hope, especially in times of crisis.

WCK has provided more than 450 million fresh, nourishing meals for communities around the world. Your donation today will be used to support our emergency food relief efforts in Los Angeles or in response to other climate disasters.

Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen

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Happy MLK Day. Is anything else happening on Monday? I will be back on Tuesday.