Anyone affected by Alzheimer’s and dementia will be interested in a Monday video series featuring the highly regarded expert and presenter Teepa Snow. Ms. Snow is known for being funny in a very respectful way in order to humanize this debilitating disease. Friends, family members and caregivers of any age can learn from these videos how to better communicate with or relate to those suffering from dementia.

The Martha’s Vineyard Women’s Network will offer a $2,500 grant to a Vineyard-based business person who wishes to improve their business skills, grow or improve an existing business, or start a new one.

The grant, offered for the second year by the four-year-old network, is open to all Vineyard business people, men and women, members and nonmembers. The winner will be announced at the year’s final Martha’s Vineyard Women’s Network program on May 17.

You’re late for work, the caffeine hasn’t quite kicked in yet, and your morning dose of NPR is gently waking your brain up on the car radio. Or perhaps it’s the end of the day and you were too busy to read the papers, so you tune in for the radio news on the hour. At some point you stop to wonder, who are the faces behind the voices?

Kerry Alley of Oak Bluffs sees a parallel between some of the hardships being experienced by Brazilians on the Vineyard these days, and those of a century ago when the Portuguese arrived on the Vineyard. “There were a lot of them,” Mr. Alley said of the earlier immigrants. “They did all the work nobody else would do.

“They faced some of the same prejudices.”

Last week I spoke at the renowned South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. SXSW, as it is usually written, began as a music, and then film, festival and is one of the most “happening” events on the planet. Recently, a third component joined film and music: “Interactives.” This means cyber-stuff and all that 21st-century jazz. Although I have a lifelong terror and ineptness in this arena, I accepted a surprise invitation to speak at an “interactives” panel, and headed for sunny Texas, optimistic I would feel right at home.

The year 2010 was one of significant chal lenges and accomplishments for the Island Housing Trust. The accomplishments include the successful completion of 12 green affordable homes, and the reassessment and development of governance practices and a strategic business plan. The challenges include clarifying the trust’s value to the community and its role in relation to other housing organizations.

Sheriff Christopher S. (Huck) Look would have been pleased by the fellowship that arose at Tuesday’s service at the Edgartown Whaling Church. All his grandchildren, his family, many of his friends and a lot of his colleagues in the profession from across the state were there. Police chiefs and officers from every Island town, and many from afar, came to pay tribute.

Beldan Radcliffe alerted the Gazette last Friday that she heard pinkletinks at Pilot Hill Farm on March 10, followed by Karen Huff, who heard peepers, her “favorite sound,” around Farm Pond on March 11. Welcome, harbingers of spring!

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides; Sheriff Christopher Look both absorbed the sun’s warmth and shared it generously. On Feb. 22, in Hollywood, Fla., the sun set for Christopher Stetson Look Jr. when he died peacefully with his beloved wife Marjorie at his side.

S lavery is an ugly part of our past that we would gladly forget. But what if you were to discover that slavery is not a thing of the past? What if you were to discover that slavery exists today in every part of the world, including our own country? I was stunned a few years ago when I began to understand the magnitude of the global human trafficking issue. Experts say that 90 million people are living as slaves somewhere in the world.