The Leelanau Conservancy, For Love of Water and the Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail are three of more than 50 grant recipients that will be named throughout the month of December in what has become a much-anticipated philanthropic drive for Cherry Republic to protect Michigan’s environment and farmland.

Taste the Local Difference (TLD), Michigan’s local food marketing agency and a social enterprise of the Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, is facilitating a state funded grant called Building Healthy Communities (BHC) that creates local change for better health.

Cherry Republic plans to hire as many as 200 additional “elves” to help meet the anticipated gift-giving demand at its Empire Distribution & Fulfillment Center this holiday season. The workers yet to be hired are in addition to the seasonal retail staff and mail order phone representatives already lined up for this busy time of year.

Lissa Edwards can remember Glen Arbor before it had sidewalks, or much asphalt. “Everything smelled like hot sand and sumac,” she laughs, over a glass of Chardonnay. “Every once in a while a certain smell takes me back to those days. I spent every summer in Glen Arbor in the 1960s. This town is deep in my DNA.”

Drs. Cyrus Ghaemi and Katie Krezoski-Evans have joined Dr. Nicole Fliss at Munson Healthcare’s family practice in Empire, which serves infants to elders. We posed the following questions to Krezoski-Evans and Ghaemi in order to get to know them.

Jeff Katofsky, who purchased Sugar Loaf resort last November, will return to Leelanau County on Friday, Oct. 20, and meet with the public at 11 a.m. at the Leelanau County Government Center where he will field questions about the path forward for the long-shuttered ski resort.

The Tin Can Tourists free open house is open to the public on Saturday, Sept. 16, from noon to 3 p.m. at Indigo Bluffs RV Resort, which is located 3 miles east of Empire on M-72.

Cherry Republic’s Bob Sutherland plans add new retail with attainable housing units upstairs, more parking and a septic field in 2019 to accommodate Glen Arbor’s growth.

Meet Jorene Williams, Dejie-ann Smith, and Joycelyn Mclean, college students from Jamaica who are summering near the Sleeping Bear Dunes while they work the checkout registers at Anderson’s Market and Compass Rose Bakery.

Nobody knows the value of sharing creative expression quite like Rebecca Willis. Willis and her partner, Jim, love living in Empire, but found themselves at a loss for space when it came to working on their various art projects. In a decision to improve their situation, the couple found a spot in November 2015 that they originally saw as a personal studio, but additionally opened to the public during the 2016 Asparagus Festival as “JoJo and Bucky’s,” a place where tourists and locals alike can shop while also seeing working artists in action.