Welp, LoCO fans, my time here at Humboldt’s favorite news site has come to end. I’m sorry I don’t have one last banger to drop, but that’s life sometimes, ya know?

The Outpost was my first job ever working in the media, and it sure was fun. During my time here I came to know a community that is fiercely devoted to itself, and one that seems to truly value what happens in it. 

I want to thank the readers for clicking on the story links and making fun of me whenever a typo slipped through. Someone has gotta keep us in check. 

I want to thank the commenters for keeping me simultaneously enraged and entertained — Thunderdome was cool and all, but some of you are out of hand.

I want to thank Humboldt State University — and in particular the Journalism and Mass Communication Department — for providing me with a pretty solid education. It only took me like 10 years of messing around in the mountains of Colorado and Yosemite to figure out that I wanted to write the news. 

I want to give a few special shout outs to some members of the community who I have come to know. Nezzie Wade and the Affordable Homeless Housing Alternatives group. Nezzie is an amazing woman who is at nearly every single government meeting when it comes to discussing plans for the homeless and is constantly fighting on their behalf.

I want to shout out Sgt. Leonard Lafrance of the Eureka Police Department, who in my eyes can be upheld as a model for what community policing can look like moving forward, amidst calls for police reform. Lafrance is in charge of the Community Safety Enhancement Team, which works with the City of Eureka and Department of Health and Human Services caseworkers to address the needs of the homeless population in a way that I have seen involves compassion and an end goal of an actual solution — not just the repetition of streets to jail back to the streets. 

I also wanted to shout out and say thank you to all of the extremely brave women of the Yurok Tribe. Some of them have talked to me about their fight against sexual harassment and years of trauma and their current fight to be able to work in a safe environment.

I want to thank my co-workers for being extremely helpful and welcoming in my time here. You guys are hilarious and obviously care very deeply about what is going on in your community. 

I will definitely be back in Humboldt some time in the near future, so it’s not goodbye. See ya soon. 

via GIPHY