FYI FYI (July 28, 2004)

WELCOME ABOARD ...Lucy Berman has joined the Menlo Park El Camino office of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage as a sales associate. Berman spent 25 years as an art dealer, including eight years as owner of the Lucy Berman Gallery in downtown Palo Alto. Immediately prior to joining Coldwell Banker, she worked with her husband in a plastic bag business, which they sold in 2002. Berman is a vice president of the Palo Alto Art Center Foundation board and co-chairman of the facilities committee at Congregation Etz Chayim. She recently was part of the team that negotiated the purchase of the YWCA property on Alma Street for the congregation.

MINIMUM WAGE NOT ENOUGH ... Single-parent families cannot subsist on wages earned from a full-time minimum wage job, and even with state or federal assistance such families can barely scrape by, according to a new study by a national advocacy group. The group, Wider Opportunities for Women , recently released the results of the study, which surveyed 10 communities in 10 states nationwide. In each community, the study focused on one three-person family consisting of an adult, an infant and a toddler. Of the 10 communities surveyed, the sample family in the lowest-cost location, New Orleans, needed $27,660 to be self-sufficient. In the highest-cost location, Boston, the sample family required $59,544 to subsist. In California, a sample family residing in Davis needed $40,196 in order to have their basic needs met. None of the families surveyed would be able to survive on the income from one parent working a full-time minimum-wage job. The income from such a job, on average, only covers 34 percent of single parent families' basic costs of living, the study found.

JOIN THE CLUB ... Robert Stevens of Menlo Park, co-founder of Learning Magic/Earthquest, is a new member of the board of directors for the Cleo Eulau Center in Palo Alto. The center, named for a retired Stanford-based social worker, helps children and adolescents develop their capacity to rebound from hardship and adversity. The agency serves eight Bay Area schools. Stevens received an engineering degree from the University of Florida in 1969 and an MBA from Stanford University in 1971. He has been a full-time volunteer for Beyond War, an educational foundation based in Palo Alto, and is now providing free consulting to start-up companies and nonprofit organizations.

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