Latest news with #Breaktime
CNA
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNA
CNA938 Rewind - Wrap of the week's hustings and what to expect on final day of campaigning, Cooling-Off day and Polling Day
CNA938 Rewind - Wrap of the week's hustings and what to expect on final day of campaigning, Cooling-Off day and Polling Day We're on to the final day of hustings this election season before Singapore heads to the polls on Saturday! CNA's Afifah Ariffin gives The Morning Report a wrap of what she's seen and heard so far from the main political parties with Hairianto Diman and Susan Ng. 7 mins CNA938 Rewind - Why do Singaporeans love plushies… and reselling them? The charms and plushie craze has led to a spike in scalping. Milo's new Breakfast and Breaktime sets had fans flock to supermarkets, with some taking to Carousell to cash in on the hype. And the viral $19.90 Scotch Brite EZ-Link charm is now going for double. Lance Alexander and Daniel Martin ask Associate Professor Ang Swee Hoon from NUS Business School why Singaporeans enjoy reselling. 15 mins CNA938 Rewind - Penknife incident: do we need regular bag checks in schools? A Bartley Secondary School student was arrested on Monday after cutting a teacher with a penknife. Lance Alexander and Daniel Martin speak to Associate Professor Jason Tan from the National Institute of Education – Policy, Curriculum, and Leadership to discuss how else we can further improve safety for teachers and students. 17 mins CNA938 Rewind - Inside the World's Highest Microbrewery at LeVel33 In 'Destination Anywhere' Melanie Oliveiro finds out where, in Singapore, listeners can go to visit the world's highest microbrewery in a building, as recognised by the Guinness World Records. It's at LeVeL33, the rooftop bar-restaurant located on the 33rd floor of Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 1. Dr. Martin Bém, LeVeL33's founder and managing director will talk about how the microbrewery came about and how public tours around it are held. LeVeL33's brewmaster Gabriel Garcia will share some facts about making the freshly brewed craft beers like blond lager and India Pale Ale. 19 mins
CNA
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNA
CNA938 Rewind - Penknife incident: do we need regular bag checks in schools?
CNA938 Rewind - Why do Singaporeans love plushies… and reselling them? The charms and plushie craze has led to a spike in scalping. Milo's new Breakfast and Breaktime sets had fans flock to supermarkets, with some taking to Carousell to cash in on the hype. And the viral $19.90 Scotch Brite EZ-Link charm is now going for double. Lance Alexander and Daniel Martin ask Associate Professor Ang Swee Hoon from NUS Business School why Singaporeans enjoy reselling. 15 mins CNA938 Rewind - Penknife incident: do we need regular bag checks in schools? A Bartley Secondary School student was arrested on Monday after cutting a teacher with a penknife. Lance Alexander and Daniel Martin speak to Associate Professor Jason Tan from the National Institute of Education – Policy, Curriculum, and Leadership to discuss how else we can further improve safety for teachers and students. 17 mins CNA938 Rewind - Inside the World's Highest Microbrewery at LeVel33 In 'Destination Anywhere' Melanie Oliveiro finds out where, in Singapore, listeners can go to visit the world's highest microbrewery in a building, as recognised by the Guinness World Records. It's at LeVeL33, the rooftop bar-restaurant located on the 33rd floor of Marina Bay Financial Centre Tower 1. Dr. Martin Bém, LeVeL33's founder and managing director will talk about how the microbrewery came about and how public tours around it are held. LeVeL33's brewmaster Gabriel Garcia will share some facts about making the freshly brewed craft beers like blond lager and India Pale Ale. 19 mins CNA938 Rewind - Attention all poets & writers – answer to the GPA 2025 Open Call In 'Culture Club' Melanie Oliveiro finds out more about the GPA or The Golden Point Award, Singapore's premier creative writing competition in the nation's four official languages: English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. Established by the National Arts Council in 1993, GPA is now a significant platform for discovering new writers whose works exhibit literary merit and encourage literary expression in Singapore. GPA 2025 is now receiving submissions via its Open Call exercise which ends on 12 May. Arts House Limited's Geraldine Cheang and creative writer Mohanapriya Chandrasekaran will talk about how they are/were involved in GPA. 30 mins
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Boston Bets Big on Public Art With a New Triennial
Boston holds an important place in the public imagination for many things: claims to fame include its entrenched Colonial-era stories, like Paul Revere's midnight ride and the Boston Tea Party, and its array of world-class academic and research institutions. But the city has not been known for contemporary art in the way thriving art-world hubs like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami are. A new event, the Boston Public Art Triennial, looks to put the city on the contemporary art map and 'signal who we are as Bostonians in a different way,' said its executive director, Kate Gilbert. On May 22, the opening day of its first iteration, 20 commissioned works will be shown at outdoor and publicly accessible sites across East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Downtown Boston and Charlestown, and at five partnering museums. The Triennial is a reboot of Now + There, a nonprofit founded by Gilbert a decade ago that produced dozens of public art projects in more than 20 Boston neighborhoods over the years. But those one-off commissions never had the critical mass to attract a substantial audience, leading Gilbert to create a citywide exhibition that would happen every three years. 'We wanted to concentrate it in a not-to-be-missed, festival-type experience,' Gilbert said. 'We really want to see a more open and equitable city through people having extraordinary art experiences.' The Triennial cost $8 million to produce and will be on view through Oct. 31. 'Boston's a city of experts,' said Pedro Alonzo, the artistic director of this year's exhibition, titled 'The Exchange.' 'The idea of the Triennial is to give artists access to this amazing pool of talent we have to develop projects that hopefully the public can get behind.' Alonzo and the curator Tess Lukey selected artists including Cannupa Hanska Luger, Swoon, Ekene Ijeoma and Stephen Hamilton who collaborated with local experts on works about Indigenous identity, health and recovery, climate and our shared humanity. Patrick Martinez, an artist known for his neon signs who lives and works in Los Angeles, partnered with Breaktime, an organization helping young people experiencing homelessness. He worked with youths to come up with phrases such as 'People Over Property' and 'One Paycheck Away From Being Homeless' to turn into vibrant neon pieces. They will be installed on abandoned storefronts in the Downtown Crossing district, where Breaktime has its headquarters. In collaboration with the conservation nonprofit Mass Audubon, the Brazilian artist Laura Lima is making sculptures to surround and hang from trees, which urban wildlife can interact with at the Boston Nature Center & Wildlife Sanctuary in Mattapan. She's 'thinking about how we behave on the planet and our relationships with other species,' Alonzo said. The artist Julian Charrière, who lives and works in Berlin, is also engaging with the environment. Working with climate scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he will present a live video feed from the Amazon jungle on a large screen on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston. A speaker in the forest will be linked to a phone booth adjacent to the screen so that people can speak directly to nature. (Boston has a significant Brazilian population.) The curators are making clusters in their treasure hunt across the city. On a trip to East Boston, viewers can visit a storefront where the artist Gabriel Sosa will be producing zines and posters with his community press and then head to the ICA Watershed, a seasonal space run by the city's Institute of Contemporary Art, with an immersive installation by Chiharu Shiota. In the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, Yu-Wen Wu's monumental image of transient flowers will grace the facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum near Alan Michelson's sculptures of two contemporary Indigenous figures, who appear to be addressing the public from plinths outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At Evans Way Park, a triangle between the museums, Nicholas Galanin, a Lingit and Unangax artist who lives and works in Alaska, will present the sculpture 'I Think a Monument Goes Like This.' Based on a knockoff of an Indigenous totem pole produced for tourists that the artist chopped like firewood and cast in bronze, the stooped figurative piece appears in the process of reassembling itself from pieces on the ground as an act of self-determination. 'This work references the idea of picking yourself up in a world that has discarded you and having to navigate that,' Galanin said. The piece received $100,000 in funding from the 'Un-monument' initiative led by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture to create temporary projects that expand the range of who and what is commemorated in public space. The multiyear program, funded by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, awarded money for research and development to more than 30 projects last year, according to Karin Goodfellow, who oversees the initiative in the Mayor's Office and considers the Triennial a curatorial partner. 'We've been doing this work somewhat quietly, as a city,' but are now getting to a place where those efforts can be shared, Goodfellow said. An augmented reality project by Roberto Mighty that seeks to revive lost African American stories tied to Copp's Hill Burying Grounds in Boston's North End will be started by 'Un-monument' in tandem with the Triennial in May. 'It's been a multiyear journey to make sure we can tell the fuller story of who we have been and who we are today,' said Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office has supported the Triennial with an additional $500,000. The goal of 'The Exchange,' she said, 'is to create an experience that cuts across barriers in the city — geographic, generational, cultural — to really draw everyone in.' Leading the charge for contemporary art in the city for the last 27 years has been Jill Medvedow, who stepped down last month as director of the ICA Boston. 'I recognize, having both done public art here and built two buildings now, that building visibility, building critical mass, building audiences takes time,' she said. 'Whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,' she added, 'both in terms of what the artists and the Triennial produce separately and together, it's a great wait-and-see moment.'
Boston Globe
11-02-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
‘A force of nature': How nonprofit founder Connor Schoen, 26, bought a downtown office building
Advertisement A view of 63 Franklin St. in downtown Boston. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff To understand how Schoen pulled off something that many established nonprofits have been unable to do, it helps to know his background. Schoen is the youngest of three brothers, his mom a corporate recruiter and his dad an IT project manager. At age 14, he was selected for Project 351, a Boston nonprofit that taps eighth-graders across the state to take on social missions within their communities. For Schoen, that meant being the lead wrangler for clothing donations in his hometown of Westborough for As a Harvard freshman, he volunteered for a homeless shelter for young adults in Cambridge, a time that proved to be an important inflection point: Schoen said he came out as pansexual, as he was 'figuring out my sexuality, my identity,' and was inspired by the challenges that the young adults at the shelter faced, many of them LGBTQ+. Related : 'They were so brave and authentic about who they were,' Schoen said. 'Working at the shelter was life-changing.' It was there that Schoen and Tony Shu, a like-minded Harvard student, came up with the idea for Breaktime. Assisting young adults with getting and keeping a job, their thinking went, would go a long way toward helping people achieve housing security. They were still teenagers — Schoen was 19 and Shu, 18 — when they launched Breaktime in 2018, initially to open a cafe in Boston's West End where homeless young adults could work. Advertisement Schoen 'dove in headfirst and never looked back,' Shu recalled. Tony Shu (left) and Connor Schoen at a kickoff launch party at the planned location of Breaktime Cafe in Boston in 2019. Once the pandemic hit, the pair scrapped the cafe idea in favor of a job-training platform involving a variety of employers. Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff To focus his energies on Breaktime, Schoen structured his class schedule to graduate from Harvard in three years, in 2020. Shu and Schoen lined up permits to open their cafe on Portland Street. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. They quickly pivoted to plan B: scrapping the cafe idea in favor of a job-training platform involving a variety of employers. The trainees, referred to as 'associates,' go through three weeks of job readiness and life skills training, and then they're placed in three-month work or internship opportunities, with matches set up by Breaktime. Schoen's parents became an important support system in the early months of the pandemic, as he returned home to Westborough for that time. They talked during daily walks with the family dog, Sammy, and helped him brainstorm and troubleshoot during Breaktime's pivot. 'I wasn't fitting into the vision of what other people expect, graduating from Harvard,' Schoen said. 'It's not the normal path. But my parents turned that into something I should be proud of.' At first, Schoen recalls, it was hard to be taken seriously, as a new college graduate asking well-heeled donors for money. 'A lot of people thought, 'It's great he has the energy and the creativity, but he's not going to stick with it,'' Schoen said. 'I had to prove it.' The forced pivot helped. Grant money began to flow from foundations. As the program developed a track record — in 2022, 126 associates went through the program, and 79 percent of graduates had found stable housing — donations came in from wealthy benefactors such as Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel and his wife Brenda Bancel. Advertisement In addition to job training, Breaktime offers associates follow-up coaching, mentorship, and a modest amount of financial help for three years. Lowell resident Arnetia Jean was among the success stories. She was staying in a shelter in Dorchester with her young daughter when she enrolled in Breaktime courses — one of the first students to attend the online training program. Through that work, she landed a paid internship with Samaritans Inc., the suicide hotline operator, and then a full-time job there. She still sounds incredulous that Breaktime's leader is only a few years older than her. 'To find out he's 26 years old, and he's doing all these amazing things, I think it's awesome,' Jean said. 'It was honestly inspiring to hear.' A portrait of Connor Schoen was part of the 'Portraits of Pride' installation on Boston Common in 2022. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Around the time in 2023 that Jean started taking Breaktime's virtual classes, the nonprofit's board decided it needed more physical space — in part to provide more services such as showers, washers and dryers, donated food and clothing, and closed-door rooms for confidential conversations. With Related : Advertisement Michael Nichols, who runs the Downtown Boston Alliance, wasn't that familiar with Breaktime when Schoen began looking around about a year ago. 'But I think Connor has proven to be a force of nature in the work that he's doing ... and clearly was able to identify supporters of his vision,' Nichols said. Among those who backed the building purchase: the Bancels, Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine (chairman of Boston private equity firm Bain Capital), and Linda Hammett Ory and Andy Ory (interim chief executive of quantum computing startup 'The way everyone has stepped up is truly remarkable,' Schoen said. Connor Schoen is now tasked with retrofitting 63 Franklin St. for the needs of Breaktime, the homelessness nonprofit he leads. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Brenda Bancel said she and her husband were driven to support Breaktime in part because youth homelessness is on the rise, and it was important for Breaktime to have a better physical space where the people it serves could be supported and educated. 'Connor's leadership is inspiring,' she said in an email. 'He has the knowledge and heart to lead [through] this complicated crisis.' Schoen's charisma and Breaktime's results also impressed Andy and Linda Hammett Ory, according to Jeremy Cramer, a philanthropic adviser to their family foundation. 'He has a unique ability, especially for someone [his age], to find himself at the epicenter of the power and influence centers of our city,' Cramer said. Rishi Shukla, cofounder of the Downtown Boston Neighborhood Association, said Breaktime fills a pressing need to reach young people at formative times in their lives, to get them on a career track and teach them how to stick with it. Advertisement Buying the empty 34,000-square-foot building on Franklin Street was just a first step. Now, Schoen has to retrofit it for Breaktime's needs. His nonprofit's 40-plus employees will eventually settle into the third, fourth, and fifth floors while Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program opens a clinic on the second floor. He's still seeking a retail tenant for the ground floor, to do what Schoen and Shu originally wanted to do: employ homeless young adults. A view of the first floor of 63 Franklin St. in Boston. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Life is moving at a breakneck pace. The stress had started to get to Schoen after working nonstop, and so he took a one-month break in July 2023 — inspired in part by sabbaticals taken by a few of his mentors. Buying the building, he said, might not have happened without that break from the day-to-day grind. 'I don't think I would have been able to dream that big if I hadn't taken that step back,' Schoen recalled. Now, he is focused on putting his problem-solving and community-building skills to work for a noble cause — and for his dream job. 'Being a social entrepreneur has been a natural fit for me,' Schoen said. 'It's certainly not the easiest job. It can be taxing emotionally, physically. It's a lot of stress. It's a lot of pressure. But I wouldn't want to be doing anything else.' Connor Schoen, 26, engineered one of the most surprising real estate deals in the city: a $6.3 million purchase of a five-story building on Franklin Street for the nonprofit he leads, Breaktime. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff Jon Chesto can be reached at
