Articles on PR for People

Babies with pre-natal drug exposure get special care

Barbara McMichael

January 26, 2016

In the 1980s, Barbara Drennen was a foster mother who specialized in caring for premature newborns in Kent, Washington. One day, she was assigned a baby who had been prenatally exposed to drugs. “The baby came to me on oxygen, then had to be readmitted to the hospital, then came back to me on a ventilator.”

To give this medically fragile infant the attention it needed, Drennen converted the lower part of her house into a 24...

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Local

Author shares love for animals with young readers

Barbara McMichael

December 19, 2015

Peg Kehret might be our generation’s version of Dr. Doolittle. The best-selling children’s author, who lives in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, shares her home with a dog who is deaf and two cats, one of which is blind. She uses hand signals to communicate with her dog Lucy, and she’s careful to leave a clear path for Mr. Stray to navigate sightlessly but safely between bed, food, and litter box. Her other cat, Dillon, sits on a certain...

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Green

Keeping packing material out of the waste stream

Barbara McMichael

November 20, 2015

Marilyn Lauderdale had been working at an IKEA store in Renton, Washington, for 15 years when she transferred to their in-house furniture assembly team.

In her new position, she quickly noticed that cardboard and plastic packing materials were recycled, but other packaging – including copious amounts of expanded polystyrene foam – was not.

An innocent question about whether it could be recycled led her, she says, “down...

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Beauty

Beauty: More than Skin Deep

Barbara McMichael

July 01, 2015

In 2011, a year after her husband’s suicide, Amber Martini walked into Testament Tattoo in Leavenworth, Kansas. “I had been emotionally frozen and I wanted to feel something,” she said in a recent interview.

Her husband, Army Sergeant Ralph Mena, Jr., had loved tattoos, and this was a way she could honor his memory. She worked with tattoo artist Clinton Burkes to develop a design that expressed her grief, her anger, and her...