The Charlotte City Council held a business meeting on May 28, 2024, at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center. The meeting included a proclamation for ALS Awareness Month, approval of consent items, a public forum with 15 speakers, a public hearing for the Oak Lake Townhomes 2 annexation, and adoption of the FY2025 Annual Action Plan for Housing and Community Development. The major discussion centered on the CATS Transit Governance Interlocal Agreement amendment, which was approved despite opposition from one council member.
I think hair is the culture. Because hair is art. And I think the thing about it is is that culture, art, history, they all go together. You can't have one without the other. And I think that hair, just in the African American community, has placed such a major part in history, just throughout the history from Madam CJ Walker to, you know, in the 60s when they had the perms and the presses and things like that. It's always just been a part of our culture. So I don't think that you can have black history without hair. My name is Sean Corbin. I'm owner of Lucky Spa Barbershop. I'm executive director of Cops and Barbers, and I'm also the director and president of Lucky Spot Leadership and Barbicane. I was in a space in life where I didn't know what my next was. And if it wasn't getting an opportunity to get a partial scholarship to go to barber school, who knows what my life would have turned out to be? And we've seen all of the amazing things that barbering has allowed me to do. And so even with the Cops and Barbara Scholarship, that was just an extension of I know what the scholarship meant to me. So I just always wanted to be able to give that opportunity to other young men and other young women. And after a certain time, you're you're you're sending them to other schools, but we're seeing that so many are interested in the industry. So it was just like, okay, it makes sense to open the school to where we can we can house more, we can we can touch more, we can give more opportunities. Lucky Spot Barbershop is the community. But the community is important to the hair industry. Um, when the barbers were your pastors, um your city council members, you know, and it always in it and this evolved over time. And so the community aspect has always been there. It's never been separate, it's never been, it's never been two different entities because most of your barbershops are in the community. So these are the people that we serve, these are the people that we that we talk to every day, these are the people that we interact with, these are the stories in the lives that we're a part of. So um, our artists are featured for an entire year from January 1st to December 31st. And they are provided, they are all collectively receiving over six and a half million dollars worth of advertising, and through that, they are seen, they are known, and they're no longer a secret. I retired from our company and I'm doing this full time in this building. Butterfly weed, everybody, okay. And so I So the second graders learn about pollinators and um pollinator conservation and habitat and the importance to our ecosystem. What does that mean? They pollinated, right? They learned that in second grade as part of the curriculum. We have a little activity where they can actually plant a couple of seeds of butterfly weed, which is a really important um host plant species for the monarch butterfly, which a lot of people are familiar with. I drew a flower and uh a panda. All right, give me a round of applause for BMBs. We had a um game in this station earlier where they learned how to actually be a bee and carry pollen from one uh bee to the next. All right, come on back. Have you guys seen a microscope before? And then they'll get to look at some flowers and and the um insects under a microscope. So that actually is like a square species. It's just a fun safe space for them to get outside and to um actually see these things up close. And you're gonna get to bring them home and plant them in your own garden. I'm gonna try and color you dread. They are pollinating. And they they don't do it because they mean to, they do it because they're hungry. Just a great um space here that's um safe for them to come out and just kind of be in nature for a little bit and have fun and play around. You know, um that it might get um they're the wheels turning about what they could do when they grow up to help the environment and to do conservation work. A lot more than more than what we started with, right? So it takes a special person to be a firefighter technician. We love our job, we do our job well. The best thing about my job is that we get to work outside and know it is the same.