This Independence Day weekend, we're paying tribute to all the folks who grow the good food we eat, who are taking steps to grow their own, or maintain their properties with organic standards in mind. 
So we're playing an encore presentation from our annual pilgrimage to the Northeast Organic Farming Association's Organiconn conference - which was held earlier this year at Wesleyan University. 
We caught up with NOFA's director, the event's keynote speaker, as well as a number of other guests promoting organic practices and programs that are enhancing our state's environment and public health, while engaging our youngest citizens to participate and enjoy the fruits and veggies they can raise and eat from their own personal, school, or community garden.

We'll engage the new Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at the University of New Haven - Lorenzo Boyd - who also heads up the UNH Center for Advanced Policing, for the first of a couple of conversations we're planning around police practices, movements to de-fund police agencies, and the crossover points where racial diversity intersects with community policing.

Then we'll talk arts and humanities with the director of CT Humanities - and find out how this decades old agency is reinventing itself as a digital and community resource, while supporting and funding intriguing programs and projects across the state.

And we'll close with our partners at the CT Coalition Against Domestic Violence. If anything, the COVID pandemic has made things harder for the thousands of intimate partner and domestic abuse victims across Connecticut, so we'll touch base and get a snapshot of what's been happening in terms of prevention and response over the past few months.

Today we're welcoming back the founder of Guardian Ad Litem Services, a liaison agency that exists between its clients and their "unique, interrelated networks" - courts, mental health service providers, physicians, state agencies, guardians, nonprofit organizations, hospitals and conservators as they launch a brand new program called Family Empowerment NOW.

The we'll bring in the CEO and Board Chair of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, also talking about an incredible new initiative addressing the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial inequity called Stepping Forward, along with a commitment of $26 million to address these issues.

And we'll close with the founder of Second Thoughts CT, a group of Connecticut residents with disabilities, who along with seniors, and advocates strive to be Connecticut's disability-rights voice standing in opposition to state legislation that would legalize assisted suicide.