The Siouxland Community Health Center has received a surprise $5 million donation. The gift will help the vulnerable in the community.
MacKenzie Scott’s “Yield Giving” charity awarded the money to the center. Scott, who was married to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, vowed a few years ago to give most of her wealth to deserving non-profits, like the health facility, which serves 35,000 patients a year.
The health center’s CEO Mari Kaptain-Dahlen says a task force will help decide how to spend the money.
According to Yield Giving’s website, more than $14 billion has been donated to more than 1,600 organizations, including Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Central Iowa, Goodwill of the Heartland, and the Quad Cities YWCA.
The Biden administration is proposing giving Iowa an estimated $8 million to help address the opioid epidemic.
President Biden has requested Congressional approval of $1.5 billion for state opioid response grants.
The Biden administration is also requesting approval of more than $1 billion to combat fentanyl trafficking at the U.S. - Mexico border.
Eligible Iowans may now go on the Iowa Democratic Party’s website
and request the presidential preference cards. The cards are replacing the in-person calculations of past Iowa Democratic Party’s Caucuses.
Both parties in Iowa will hold Caucuses on January 15, 2024. However, Republicans will again have a straw poll vote to quickly determine which presidential candidate wins the Iowa GOP’s Caucuses.
New national party rules forbid Iowa Democrats from any form of voting that would yield results that night. The Iowa Democratic Party will begin distributing presidential preference cards on January 12 and the results will be announced March 5.
Iowa Democrats have hired a vendor to count the cards. You need to be a registered Democrat to participate.
Governors criticizing an NCAA policy on transgender student athletes may put their universities at risk of “penalties or ramifications” if those institutions disobey the policy, according to a sports law scholar in a report in the Argus Leader.
On Monday, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem and eight other Republican governors sent a letter to the NCAA asking it to bar transgender women from women’s sports. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was not a signatory to that letter.
Joshua Lens is an assistant professor of recreation and sport management at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He wrote an article on NCAA transgender sports participation for a recent edition of the Missouri Law Review. Lens says the NCAA is a private, voluntary organization and when colleges join, the NCAA has a right to enforce its rules.
The NCAA adopted a policy last year allowing transgender student-athlete participation to be determined by the policy for the national governing body of each sport. The policy is being implemented in three phases, with the final phase beginning next year.
