CVPIA is a social justice organization committed to serving, advocating for and uplifting Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities in California’s Central Valley. They strive to create safe spaces for all NHPI identities, foster cultural connections, amplify NHPI voices and support resource navigation—all in solidarity with other marginalized communities. Today, CVPIA serves over 1,500 community members across 11 Central Valley counties On a warm April day in M

Volunteers pause for a moment atop a morning's worth of work at Kaweah Oaks Preserve, one of SRT's monthly stewardship days open to community members of all ages and abilities. The drive to Kaweah Oaks Preserve takes you deep into the Central Valley, past peach trees and grapevines, surrounded by mountains and a big blue sky. It’s where the Sierra Nevada snow melts into rivers, where farms feed the world and where generations of families have built their lives. The land's ove

Kingsburg is a Swedish theme town with a downtown decorated in a Nordic motif, complete with a Viking and Dala horse restaurant. The water tower originally dates from 1911 and was modified in 1985 to resemble a giant coffee pot after a resident visited Stanton, Iowa, and saw its similarly modified water tower. It is 122 feet tall and visible from Highway 99. The 60,000-gallon vessel could fill 1.28 million coffee cups. The coffee pot is lit at night. As you drive along State

The Merced mural adorns a wall at Applegate Skatepark. The mural was painted in collaboration with Urbanists Collective. Patty Pratt has left her mark, very literally, on the Central Valley. As an artist, muralist, designer and sign maker, her life’s work is to spread beauty, creativity and community in Merced and beyond. “I’ve been an artist all my life, and I started painting murals in Merced in 1999 when they were not quite legal yet,” Patty said. Today, the murals are n

There’s a concept in Japanese art called “kintsugi,” which means “golden repair.” It’s the process of fixing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer, making the piece even more beautiful. As a philosophy, it considers breakage and repair to be part of the process rather than something to be disguised. Like other immigrants before them, the Japanese faced times of broken hope and broken trust in their new home. Japanese immigrants began arriving in California in the 1880s, f