(upbeat music) - Next on "You Oughta Know."

We'll hear from a local pediatrician about some back to school challenges your child may be facing.

Plus, she took a chance betting on herself and her career as a full-time artist.

See how it paid off.

And this nonprofit is providing guidance and resources to young people in Delaware.

(upbeat music) Welcome to "You Oughta Know."

I'm Shirley Min.

There's an African proverb that says, "It takes a village to raise a child."

That motto is what fuels One Village Alliance located in Wilmington, Delaware.

The nonprofit works to fill the gap and provide resources in communities lacking them.

(bright music) - Here at One Village Alliance, we definitely wanna open a mind.

We want people to experience new things that they never experienced before, learn new things that they never even knew existed.

- By educating individuals, families, residents, even youth, we give them the power to go and advocate for themselves.

- In order to build a healthy life, you really have to look at your environment.

So having those third spaces that provide positive recreation, that's really one of the best ways to uplift the community.

(bright music) - One Village Alliance is a global social justice organization that I founded right here in the Delaware Valley with a mission to grow historically marginalized children and their families through education, entrepreneurship, and the arts.

We're here to help them realize their potential, give them the tools and resources to help them achieve that.

(bright music) We provide services through three pillars in the community.

So one is direct services to school age children.

Really, age seven and up.

And we do academic-based mentoring, tutoring.

We provide summer camp at no charge.

We have a phenomenal journey that takes them around the world in a summer.

They get to experience those things through literature, math, money and numbers, the culinary arts, and history through the lens of Black, indigenous, people of color all over the world.

The second thing is family strengthening.

So we engage whole families in the process with the assertion that it truly does take a whole village to raise a healthy child, strong family, and thriving community.

The third thing we do is public policy advocacy, working with children and families on the ground, mobilizing communities to get them involved as decision makers and power players in their own lives.

So everything from limited access to food, to community beautification, to laws and policies that are working against the health and wellness of children and families that have been marginalized for so long.

- It has definitely been a great experience over my life.

I've been involved in Around the World summer camp.

That was my very first job where I was a camp counselor.

It was amazing.

I'm meeting the kids, inspiring the youth with my business ventures.

And now I speak at conferences, I speak at schools.

It was in my blood to do something more, be more powerful, and help my community more.

- We have different programs running through here.

I'm an artist.

If I ever wanna come use one of the studios, I can come through.

I know it's a safe space.

I know that I might meet somebody else cool.

There's people providing a backbone for young entrepreneurship.

'Cause some people, they're just looking to better their lives.

Just looking for that outlet.

And this space is open and welcome to that.

- The equity gaps that we see, they're by design.

So we have to build and commit to a counterculture that bridges those gaps through humanity, not through privilege.

- Being in these environments that started off when I was young, these huge conferences that shaped me to be the person I am today.

So it's definitely been a great journey, and I'm excited.

I'm grateful impacting so many families and youth that we can't.

It's very sentimental to me.

That's why I'm here, and I love doing this work.

(bright music) - We're an important partner to get those resources to the community in a way that there's real impact.

- Summer's over.

So I checked in with my favorite pediatrician to find out what parents need to know with the kids back in school.

"You Oughta Know" is back with our favorite pediatrician, Dr.

Rob Walter.

Dr. Walter.

- So happy to be here.

- So good to see you.

- This is great.

New year.

- New year.

It's back to school, and I am sure that you are being inundated with questions from parents about issues that kind of come up every school year.

But this year, what are you hearing?

- We start out with the flu.

The flu is here, and the vaccine just came in.

So very excited that we now have the flu vaccine.

We always get the same question.

"Well, my kid had the flu last year, he got the vaccine."

Well, it doesn't mean you can't get the flu, but you'll less likely to get it.

If you get it, it will be less severe, less ER visits, less hospitalizations.

And also the bottom line is the more flu vaccines we give to little kids, the less elderly people in the United States die.

So if you wanna save grandpa, then vaccinate your kids.

- The other issue is cell phones.

So my son's getting a cell phone this year.

What are some of the concerns that parents are expressing to you about cell phones?

- When I think of cell phones, I think of sleep.

Kids are keeping their cell phones next to their bed or under their pillow, and it really is affecting sleep.

And sleep affects mental health, sleep affects everything.

And then there's cyber bullying.

But also now in schools, the big hot item lately for this coming school year is, what do we do about the cell phones in the school?

Used to be that at lunchtime, everybody was playing and talking to each other, it was loud, even in colleges.

Now it's silent 'cause everyone's on their phone.

The state of Pennsylvania has given money that you can get magnetic pouches that you can put 'em in for the day and they unlock 'em at the end of the day.

So no cell phones all day.

I know a lot in Delaware also, they have like a wall hanging and everybody puts their phone in.

And that way during the class time, they don't have their phone.

This is a new generation, and parents have never dealt with this before, and they are the role model though.

So I say to the parents, "Put your phone in the other side of the room and make sure you're not on it because that sets a strong message to the kids."

- The final thing I wanna talk about is these nicotine pouches, which they are marketed under a bunch of different brand names.

They're supposed to be marketed for 21 and up, but the primary users here younger than.

- There's like 10 flavors.

Cool mint, cinnamon.

I don't think they're going after the 56-year-old crowd.

And it's a lot of nicotine.

And since they're not tobacco base, they're really not regulated.

They kind of fall in the cracks there.

You just put this under your upper lip and you can get, you know, up to like 12 milligrams of nicotine.

The cardiovascular problems with hypertension and your heart racing is really worrisome.

It can increase...

If you have anxiety or depression, it could increase that.

But the biggest thing is, we're gonna create a generation of nicotine addicts.

And nicotine, pound for pound, is more addictive than heroin.

So it really is concerning that this is put out there.

I mean, it seems like we just got over the e-cigs and the vaping, which still a big issue, but they're starting to regulate it.

And now this, and big tobacco owns most of these, so it really is...

It's maddening.

It's like whack-a-mole.

But I think parents need to realize this.

And they're a little white, they don't look like much.

They need to think about it, ask about it, and make sure they know that it can be really dangerous.

- And what is scary is they're largely undetectable.

I mean, they're so tiny.

- Right.

- You wouldn't even know it was in someone's mouth.

- Your teenager could be talking to you and he's got it under there.

Your child could be talking to you while he is on his phone and you wouldn't even even know.

- And not sleeping.

- And not sleeping, absolutely.

Absolutely.

- All right.

Dr.

Rob Walter, thank you so much for your expertise.

- Thank you.

Anytime.

And good luck out there, all your parents.

It's gonna be a good year though.

Go Eagles!

(laughs) - Who doesn't like to play and get messy sometimes?

Well, there's a place in Pitman, New Jersey where being creative and exploring your inner artist is encouraged.

Welcome to the PaintGround.

(bright music) - I have an old house and it needed the basement dry locked.

So I did that during the pandemic, which made all the basement walls this super crispy white.

And I wrote the words "paint ground" across the basement wall.

I invited my kids down there to start on the walls.

Then my daughter started inviting her friends.

Then we threw some parties and we put in black lights, and the whole thing just kind of evolved.

So then I went back to work and I couldn't corporate robot the way that I had been doing.

So I quit and used what I had in savings and open this place.

So the PaintGround is really a great place for everyone.

Our paints is all skin safe, non-toxic paint.

So it's very safe for the children to play with.

It's all water-based, made right here in the USA.

- [Guest] (indistinct) yellow.

It's like a (indistinct).

Is that your favorite color?

You wanna try... - Once you get here, you're gonna pick your package.

We offer a couple different packages.

You get your poncho and you get shoe protectors and you get safety goggles, and then you meet with your paint tender.

And your paint tender guides you through the experience.

We have a bunch of painting accessories and tools.

We do a lot of texture art.

'Cause here, it's not about your ability to draw, it's not about how well you do shading or can you make a cat or whatever that looks like for you.

It's just about the experience of making art.

Some children just want to play in the paint.

So we ask that the parents just give the kids the space just to create.

I think that there's so many different kinds of art.

Art is so subjective that it allows kids just to really create whatever they think art looks like.

And just to let go, let the mess be okay, let it be okay to wash it off.

You're in the black lights.

There's such a dopamine rush when you're under a black light with all of that neon paint hitting you that, you know, you can't help but smile and just, you know, have a little, a boost of serotonin.

So, it's great for all ages.

(bright music) We decided to partner with local artists.

A lot of the artists that are on this walls have been doing art for a long time.

Some of them, it's their very first time ever putting art on a gallery wall.

We've sold a bunch of pieces for some artists, and that's been exciting too just to be able to put some money back in their pocket and to be able to help them live their dream.

- You may have come across her work on TikTok.

Despite her fears, Tisha T. Taylor turned her passion into a business.

(bright music) - My most recent art show was at the community gallery, and I've really enjoyed being in that group show 'cause a lot of those artists, we have come full circle.

I had three pieces in the show, and one in particular is my modern day Red Riding Hood.

And what that means to me is that if you look at that painting, the background is missing the wolf.

The significance of the wolf not being there is because I am away from my fear, have gotten away from my fear.

My first memory of my art was my grandmother was a professional watercolor artist and I stayed with her while my mom was hospitalized.

And then I also remember my first contest that I begged my art teacher to not put me in.

And I didn't realize that I was actually talented and I won the contest.

So, that was exciting.

I went to creative and performing arts high school and I went to Moore College of Art and Design.

Honestly, I was very naive.

I thought that the whole world was waiting for me to graduate.

So when I got out and there weren't any jobs, I was very discouraged.

I started trying to sell my work on the parkway and I saw a girl doing face painting.

Her line was literally around the corner, and that's where I decided I was starting my own journey as starting my own business, face fanning and balloon twisting.

When COVID hit, I was secretly kind of doing a little bit of art here and there, but not painting.

And I came home from my job and I said, "Universe, whoever is in charge, show me a sign that you want me to do nothing but art."

And I came across a guy that had a storage locker of just nothing but art supplies.

And from there, I began to paint.

But then I realized, I can't work my jobs now that everything is shut down.

I just have to go full time with it.

So, that's exactly what I did.

I went full time.

I went on TikTok.

I went on any platform that I could paint live while the world was shut down.

And I would advertise that I painted portraits.

So I do like to paint people.

That's my passion.

Why do I paint outside?

I absolutely love being outside.

If you call me on the phone, I'm usually outside.

(Tisha laughing) Like, something about the atmosphere of the trees rustling and just the interaction with people behind me.

It's fun to network, and you never know where it leads.

But you have to really interact with the people that are watching.

And I started to form a huge community that was supportive.

Oh, thank you.

You're so sweet.

- Nice to meet you.

- You too.

(upbeat music) What happens if I try to like deceive the eye?

I like to paint what looks like denim, but it's not denim.

So that made people like really become fascinated with my art.

I wanted to bring my popup concept to the canvas, but I had to try to figure that out, how does that look.

So that was my intention, to try to make it pop up 3D dimensional.

I would say, for the testing phase of trying to come up with my three-dimensional look, it actually took me about five months to figure that out.

The painting behind me, the motivation for that was that I wanted to see if I can paint metallic.

That's always been very difficult for me.

When you're challenged with a specific subject matter with art, you need to just tackle it.

Don't avoid it.

I've come out with my travel bags, my luggage, some shirts.

I would love to get into other things further down (indistinct).

(bright music) How do I feel now that I'm a full-time artist?

Number one, it's freeing.

And two, you have to learn how to market yourself, you have to learn how to do business, talk to customers.

And it's not easy.

It is not easy, but it's also very rewarding at the same time.

There's nothing like working for yourself as an artist.

(bright music) - Let's get closer to the farmers, distillers, millers and more that work with Philly's favorite local restaurants.

Tucked in the hills of Elverson is the distillery making revivalist gin and resurgent whiskeys.

Let's meet the brothers behind it all.

- Hi, I'm Don Avelino.

I'm co-founder of Botanery Barn Distilling.

- And I'm Scott Avelino, also co-founder of Botanery Barn Distilling.

At the time, the Philadelphia, you know, the craft scene, craft beer was hot, and the craft spirits were just kind of up and coming, craft cocktails.

The old, traditional, you know, aviations, the Manhattans, the old fashions.

And so the whole craft distilling scene kind of disrupted the Philadelphia cocktail scene.

It was more about the show, the artistry of the mixologist, and how they were preparing the cocktail and what spirit they were making with that cocktail.

Everything had a story, everything had some artistry to it.

And that's what craft distilling really is.

There's a lot of craft distilleries out there, but, you know, being one of many, you have to find a way to stand out and to be unique.

- We knew that we wanted to do gin because we were actually at a craft distillers conference, and they handed us a little sample of gin.

And I wasn't a gin person at the time, and I expected it to taste like a Christmas tree.

And when it didn't, it really blew me away.

And so we thought, "Wow, gin doesn't have to be a Christmas tree.

It could be anything we want it to be."

So it took us, I think a solid six or seven months of trial and error before we finally got it right, started bottling, and then started selling for the very first time.

- This originally was a dairy barn.

And during the '60s and '70s, this area was a hotbed for the hippies.

And this was vacant, this building was vacant.

So they squatted here for quite some time, like a small little commune.

And they lived upstairs.

They apparently had some good times.

We preserved all of their paintings and then graffiti upstairs on all the beams.

Then after that, after they left, it was kind of left or dead again.

And that's when we grabbed it and it totally renovated.

It took about a year and a half to do.

And as we were renovating it, a lot of it, you know, by ourselves and with some of our distillers that happened to be carpenters at the time, we were putting in orders for our copper pot stills.

And just about the day we got done with the renovations, the distills arrived and we were ready for business.

So this is our new gin, and we're pretty proud of this.

This bottle represents more than just the gin to us.

This bottle represents, really, the garden.

Your kitchen garden from here in our own backyard and from around the world.

We looked at all the different botanicals.

We really wanted to pin down botanicals that had a purpose, and we call them ethnobotanical.

Ethnobotanicals are botanicals that have been used for a millennia for different holistic culinary and medicinal reasons.

And we landed on the botanicals, which are really interesting for this gin.

First, we have rose hip and rose petal.

We have hemp, hemp seeds, ashwagandha, which is huge in diabetic medicine.

We have lemon verbena.

There's no citrus peel or anything like that in this gin.

The lemon verbena, the leaf stem alone really gives a nice citrusy flavor to it.

And then the fruit in this gin is a stone fruit.

It's a plum.

And it's just a such a unique combination of botanicals.

It's just something very interesting that really, you know, basically was our diving board.

- Since we're located on a farm, we have a septic system.

So unlike other distilleries in urban areas, we can't dump our wastewater down a drain.

So we built a cooling system.

Our equipment requires a lot of cold water to recondense the alcohol vapor.

And so we built a system where we have reservoired water that moves around through a chilling machine and comes in, cools our equipment down, and goes back into that reservoir that we've created and recycles again.

So because of that, we save 30,000 gallons of wastewater a month.

And then the other part is our spent grains.

So once we finished a distillation process on our whiskeys, we have a list of local farmers that love to come get that and they feed that to their hogs and their cattle who love the feed.

It's usually still warm when they get it and it's very high in protein, so it very beneficial for the animals.

- So our garden gin really starts out, the concept was, let's take root to fruit.

Meaning, we're gonna take different plants, different botanicals in different stages, whether it's their root, it's the stem, it's the leaf or it's the fruit of the plant.

And basically, we source them from local sources here in Pennsylvania but also around the world, and we bring them in in a dried format.

And then when we're ready to make a gin, we have basically a still full of neutral grain spirit, which is very high proof alcohol.

And what we do is we have these large tea bags, if you will, and we put one bag full of all the different botanicals and we steeped that in a cold maceration, which means it's just, you have room temperature, and then we'll add a second bag of like juniper berries because juniper is the main ingredient engine.

Once it's done macerating, we take the bags out and then we turn on the stills, we distill it, and it comes out, and it's ready to bottle the next day.

- Yeah, lots of restaurants that I can't do it justice, so you gotta jump in here.

But like fearless restaurant group with all the White Dogs and Autograph and the (indistinct) and Louie Louie.

You know, like Harvest Seasonal Grill, their whole, you know, chain, and The Cage and Audubon and Warminster, even park in Rittenhouse Square, we do a lot of business with them.

And that's just to name a few.

I don't wanna leave anybody out.

There's... You know, we're... - Yeah, they use some really cool stuff with our product.

- Absolutely.

- So... - There's some really interesting mixologists out there, a lot of different bars and restaurants that are just making some just creative cocktails.

I mean, it's even better than dessert now.

(bright music) - In this week's Flicks, Patrick Stoner talks to the director and stars of "His Three Daughters" about their new movie.

- [Katie] The plan is, we all will take turns watching over.

You know she hasn't done a shift, right?

- Oh, yeah.

- You don't find that strange?

Once we get here, she steps back from all responsibility.

- Your life is perfect.

You got your kid.

Probably gonna pop out a bunch more.

- No, nothing pops, there's no popping.

That's not the way it is.

- Okay, whatever.

It looks like popping to me.

(bright music) - [Patrick] Director Azazel Jacobs seems to be very Chakavian in his film, "The Three Daughters."

These are three very dissimilar types waiting for their father to die, all taking place in a New York apartment.

First question, how to keep it from being stage bound?

- I mostly thought about how time moved to make sure that it really took advantage of what film could do.

I thought that when you're facing passing and you know what's going to happen, time, at least in my experience, has shifted and changes in a very different way where, you know, the days count in a different way, the hours count in a different way and the minutes count in a different way.

I think that's what I was, first and foremost, trying to chase with this film, was how time moved, not like in real life, not how a stage could.

I was the editor in this one and I wrote over a certain rhythm of not only how characters spoke, but also how this film was gonna cut so I could know, "Okay, I would need this many angles to collapse time in this way or to allow time to stretch out in this way."

- Because the language and the punctuation was so specific on the page and we are all there to serve the rhythm that he had in his mind, one of the elements being that he wanted time to feel like this world was functioning in a time and space of its own separate from the world as you do- - [Patrick] Exactly, yes.

- [Elizabeth] Going through hospice.

And so it was really about us creating a rhythm during rehearsals and understanding the rhythm of the language together as also as being people who are related to one another.

- I do think that it's true what Lizzie is saying of wanting to compress time in the sense of the hospice of it all.

That's a third kind of space, right?

It's not actually that sense of real time.

And also what Aza did that I think we really responded to is he really heard it musically more than anything, and he even had musical notes written out so that there was a tempo and a paced to it all.

- The dialogue revealed a lot of facts.

The subtext was actually much more interesting than even the dialogue.

(indistinct) - Katie is certainly preoccupied with practical matters and she's talking a lot about practical matters, but she's definitely speaking to a person she thinks she sees.

She's not actually seeing the person who's in front of her when she's doing that.

I think that's very revealing.

And so I just felt when I read the script that the relationships were really specific.

And I think Aza just kind of captured something that felt very real.

- Thank you all very much.

I appreciate it.

- Thank you for the questions.

- Have you read all those books, sir?

- Absolutely.

(Carrie laughs) - Thank you.

- And that is our show.

I hope you'll join us next week.

Goodnight, everyone.

(upbeat music)