The 812

There are almost a thousand agencies around the country called "community action programs", whose mandates are to reduce the extent and impact of poverty in a given area, and date to the 1960s War on…

Any roads outside Bloomington, Ellettsville or Stinesville are the jurisdiction of Monroe County. Today, we talk to the County Highway Department about how they manage the condition of more than 700 …

The 812 is back after an extended summer break with a new season!

Our premiere guest of season 4 is a fellow traveler. He too started a local government reporting series...and he just finished high sc…

Shelli Yoder returns to The 812, now as the Indiana Senate minority leader (a title she got unexpectedly the day after she was last here in December). Whatever plans she mentioned then for this legis…

On June 27, the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre will host a screening of the original, uncut, 1954 Toho Studios film Gojira, in Japanese with English subtitles. There will be a special presentation before th…

Steve Bonchek, whom everyone just calls "Roc", is founder and principal of Harmony School, the independent, non-religious school not funded by the state, which is about to celebrate its 50th annivers…

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the episode scheduled for today has been delayed until tomorrow, Tuesday, June 3. Look for it in your podcast feed then!

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When last here in December, Nathan Ferreira was the director of real estate development for the Bloomington Housing Authority. He's now executive director of the BHA, and at a trying time for governm…

People and Animal Learning Services, or PALS, is a nonprofit center, dedicated to providing meaningful, therapeutic hands-on experiences with horses for individuals with disabilities, veterans, senio…

NOTE: The 812 will take Memorial Day off; new episodes resume Wed., May 28.

Stormwater needs to be channeled somewhere -- lakes, rivers, retention ponds -- or it becomes floodwater. If there aren't di…

Children have very real-world needs, and sometimes face problems that adults would have trouble dealing with. That's why the city's Commission on the Status of Children and Youth exists. The commissi…

City councilmember Sydney Zulich (D-6) returns to the show to talk about:

• downtown beautification, including planters and the new art going up at last on traffic control boxes; 
• some of the logic behin…

There's bus service to Ivy Tech and Cook at long last. A dozen new fully-electric buses in the fleet. And, this summer at long last, the first experiments with a free downtown circulator. John Connel…

We talk shop with our counterpart in the state’s other major college-dominated metropolitan area. The city of West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University, only became a second-class city like Lafay…

Judy Sharp, the Monroe County Assessor, has seen it all in her decades in office, and is back with an update on property taxes. We talk with her about the debate between whether assessors should be e…

Liz Feitl served as a union organizer and leader at IU and then with United Way of Monroe County for decades. Seven years ago she won the Toby Strout Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Bloom…

The murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 exploded into the national consciousness and raised many questions. One of the most important was: knowing that our society has p…

To the present. Miah Michaelsen is an old hand at the intersection of government and the arts. She's been at the Indiana Arts Commission since 2015, where she's now Executive Director. Before that, s…

We speak with Amy Oelsner, the founder and director of Girls Rock Bloomington, which teaches girls from ages 8 to 14 all the elements of a rock and roll band. Girls Rock has been the beneficiary of g…

We've been highlighting some of the programs of the Center for Sustainable Living, an organization that acts as an umbrella for nonprofit ideas that might be too small to be their own 501(c)(3). One …