Monday Mid-morning Mix

First, we hope you had a great Easter weekend. The weather more or less cooperated. Yesterday afternoon was perfect.

It was hard to find anything in the papers this morning that might relate to our work at St. Luke's, but if you've noticed lately, the papers are a little smaller these days. Changing habits of news consumption and a bad economy have taken their toll on the amount of print journalism that you can pick up on a Monday.

But there were two important pieces from Sunday's Tennessean that are worth a look. First was this story that discussed the trend of more people filing their own taxes this year. The United Way/IRS VITA program is indirectly mentioned in the story as a resource for those who wish to file with some help free of charge. St. Luke's VITA program is still going strong. As of March 31, volunteers had helped 322 people with their taxes resulting in returns of $588,789! That's a powerful injection of money back into West Nashville.

The second piece or series of pieces dealt with the recent discussions about how to determine poverty levels. You can find the views of Bill Sinclair of Catholic Charities of Tennessee here, the editorial voice of the Tennessean here, and St. Luke's VITA volunteer Todd Liebergen here.

We hope your week is off to a great start.