Boston Neighborhood Network News

0:00Hello Boston, welcome back to BeInN News where we bring you community stories you can only find here. I'm your host Adele Chang, thanks for joining us. Taking the message straight to students front doors, Mayor Michelle Wu and Boston Public School staff went house to house, trying to bring students who have dropped out or misclassed back to school this fall. Open opportunities for a bright future, a weight Boston Public School students starting this new school year. And on Friday, Mayor Wu, Superintendent Mary Skipper and volunteers visited families of BPS students who have dropped out our experience in chronic absenteeism and encouraged them to return to school and take advantage of all the benefits of BPS education gives them. It is not too late for these students to get back on track. That's why we are knocking on doors, making sure that they are connected, making sure they have a chance to finish school. We'll be there for them, we'll show them a pathway and it's definitely a pathway

1:02to us graduation. We'll knock on doors and directly be parents and students to make sure they can get back on track and so hope. Graduating high school is an early prognosticator of what lies ahead for these young people who are our future. We can help students who we thought didn't have a chance come back to school. They can talk to people who know the district, get into the right school, graduate and have a chance at a career that will sustain them in their family. And Boston needs the talent so we can't afford to lose these young people at all. Giving every young person in Boston the opportunity to obtain a good high school education is of major concern for all educators. It's imperative that we never give up on kids. Each one of them because when a student drops out it really limits their opportunity to have the life that they want. And so I think today is an opportunity for us, for the young people that we knock on that door and they answer it for a better future.

2:04Reporting from Roxbury, this is Rich Rosenthal for BNN News. One young local entrepreneur is carrying her father's legacy one bottle at a time. After losing the owner of Nantucket perfume company, his daughter stepped in to keep the family business going. My name is Caroline Harding and so my dad founded the company in the early 80s. We've been in business for a little over 40 something years now. He started the company just kind of on a whim. He was traveling and met somebody that introduced him to fragrance and he realized he had a natural gift for it in the early 90s. We were in Aspen, Colorado, San Francisco, Maui, kind of all over. And then when my brother and I were born he wanted to consolidate a little bit. And so he just had the one shop on Nantucket. And so we had our shop there up until 2021. My dad passed in 2019, which was when I took over the brand. I spent my whole life shadowing him and it was always kind of our thing. Like every Saturday morning I'd be up and by the front door ready to go to work before he even was. Like I loved it.

3:05And so he taught me everything that he could and I just was mesmerized by it. And so when he passed there were so many unanswered questions that I knew because I spent so much one on one time with him in the shop. So my mom kind of really stepped into that role of taking care of the actual business administration things and then any fragrance questions or customer questions that's kind of where I came in. We don't use any alcohol, any fillers or any synthetic. So they're all pure essential oil based. So people smell it when they get close to you or when you walk by. It's almost like second skin. So it's not so overpowering. So people with allergies can still wear them. People who get headaches from fragrance. We even allow nurses to wear these to work at hospitals where they're told they can't because of allergy patients. In 2021 after COVID we, our lease was up in our shop and we were trying to find another location on man's tuck it. But after COVID real estate was just a little crazy. And we decided to renovate the basement of our house actually and make it our little shipping warehouse. This one is my favorite. It's called JSH. This is actually the last fragrance that my dad and I ever meet together.

4:06So this one's really, really special to me. There's peaches, mango, vanilla, sandalwood, coconut and jasmine. So we source everything as authentically and purely as we can. For example, my Egyptian musk, I import directly from Egypt, my Indian sandalwood, I import directly from India and so on and so on. My dad cultivated so many different relationships with different manufacturers and producers. And then after he passed I was able to maintain those relationships. This definitely brought me and my mom so close. I feel like I have an older brother and so our family dynamic was always kind of like my mom and my brother were really close and me and my dad were really close. We were all so connected and very open and a very close family. But there was always kind of that unsaid natural dynamic between us. So when my dad passed it felt really difficult for me to still feel kind of included in that dynamic. But my mom and I kind of being thrown into the deep end together and struggling and suffering

5:10and figuring it out together really like so much, so many tears and sweat went into putting this back together and putting ourselves back together and maintaining this brand in the way that my dad wanted it. I feel like when I took over I did a rebrands right before I graduated school because I was really struggling to feel connected to the brand because it felt like something that my dad built that I was kind of just like stepping into his shoes and like continuing on which felt really difficult. And I had this dream, this is so kind of cliche, but I had this dream and my dad was in it and he, it was really brief but he was just basically like make it your own. Like it's mine but it's yours too. He left so many sticky notes and so many journals and books and I would kind of just like find myself flipping through them and reading through them and then be in the store mixing something and like here almost my dad's voice through his words tell me like miracle blends

6:11really beautifully with Bergamo or this musk would blend really beautifully with an amber. And like it just kind of keeps me grounded and reminds me that he's still with me and that just because he's not here physically his words and his thoughts and all of his values are still in me and I get to express it through this. So I just feel really lucky that he left me such an incredible gift and something that feels so connected to the both of us even though he's not here anymore. I would love to get it back to where my dad had it with the different locations across the country. I feel like people don't have the opportunity to really immerse themselves in fragrance. Like I said earlier it's such a personalized unique experience. I think scent is so correlated with memory and having a scent that is personalized to you and then you go somewhere and your friends are like oh that's Caroline's smell. I feel like that is such a personal thing and I think that fragrance shopping feels really

7:12rushed and really pressured. It's not meant to be like oh well everybody's wearing black opium or everybody's wearing jadour so I should just do it too. It should be like this is the scent that people are going to know is you. But I think I would really love to start focusing more on our house blends and man-tucket perfume companies fragrances rather than the inspired by and build off of what my dad started and just I don't know make his dreams come true a little bit more. There's some of Boston's most unique city workers and they get around on four legs

8:15to the city. We're taking you inside the Boston Parks Department stables for a look at the horses helping patrol the city's parks. They get snacked weather out here too. We can't be them well during the ground what we call current. So we did a stable tour today behind the scenes action basically on what goes and is taking care of the horses where they live when they're not in patrol and are since what we do with them. So there are equine parkers as we like to call them. Part of it is transportation. Part of it is that community engaged me yet. We have a lot of work to do with the horse, I can share that a lot. They help with other aspects of the job too. Visibility. Well for us looking out into the cows and not in for the cows to see us.

9:18Again, that behind the scenes that adds like a little more personal interaction with the horses that they might not necessarily get to be coughing up to ask for us in the parks. It's like a public thing they know it's not mine. They get to see a lot and ask questions that they might not be comfortable doing otherwise. So my favorite part is basically having people come and see us behind the scenes. There's having especially the children who interact with parker-ainders make it a scene of some of the horses and have to take care of them. I'm a close. I grew up in Boston from Dorchester. One of the reasons I love my job is I get to expose the horses. I've cheated people who might not have had much connection with horses before. We give a lot of people who this is their first time meeting a horse. So maybe it's with this recreation or a job skill. There's so many things that people might not be in their homes. But the horses that they can control would be a horseshoe and saddle fitting that riding

10:22is a lot of stuff. I just want people to come and come and see us out in the parks and ask us questions about the parks, the nature, the history. We want people to come and explore the park and get to learn about the parks before people can build and invest in the park and help protect themselves. Music, food and tradition took center stage at the Asian American Day Festival bringing the community together for a day of pride and connection. Boston Common came alive this weekend with color, music and culture as they gathered to celebrate the 16th annual Asian American Day Festival. Presented by the Asian American Association of Boston, it's greater Boston's largest outdoor cultural celebration featuring performances, food and more than 80 vendor booths, spotlighting Asian small businesses and nonprofits. The day was about entertainment and about connection. Everybody's here from a different nationality, a different background.

11:26We're all enjoying each other's past history and it's something that we should enjoy all of our lives. It was an opportunity to share in each other's cultures, to see the similarities that exist between all of us in this nation of immigrants. These festivals are extremely important to see culture, to experience culture, to meet people from all sorts of different cultures. Right now we're here meeting people from all parts of Asia and experiencing their food, their culture, their ideas and this is extremely important because we are world citizens and this is the only way that we can really find cooperation and find similarities and without that relationship we can't work together. This year's celebration was a way to preserve cultural identity, even generations removed from home. It's important to preserve the Asian culture because Asian culture includes many, many countries.

12:27It's not only China, it's Korea, it's Japan and we see it all here, Mongolians and we all came together today to celebrate the Asian culture because we still need to keep this culture alive in America. America has been a melting pot of many, many ethnicities for the many years, for hundreds of years and even though we live here, we go to schooling here, we still need to preserve the culture from where we came from. For some, the day was a reminder that Boston's diversity isn't just something to observe, it's something to celebrate and cherish together. I'm proud to be Chinese and I enjoy coming to these activities because then we get to connect with other people and I love going to these cultural activities because we can learn about other people's culture and make friends and build community together. From Boston Common at the 16th Annual Asian Festival, this is Rich Rosenthal for BNN News. Well, that's all we have for you tonight, Boston.

13:31For more BNN News, visit bnnmedia.org to watch our previous broadcast and full length event coverage. Thanks for watching for BNN News. I'm Adelchuk.