Our next door neighbors have been having some hard times. Jane, the mom, hurt herself six months or so ago by falling down some broken stairs, busted her tailbone. She’s been in a lot of pain, can’t walk too well, and has been out of work since then. She was recuperating, and then she fell [...]
Thanks to our friend Jayne we got some tickets to the big press welcome party at Elitches (Denver’s biggest amusement park, located in the Central Platte Valley near downtown). Thousands of people, music, local politicos, free beer and food. Most of our evening was spent watching adults playing midway games for free, and then walking [...]
There are a lot of reasons to eat less meat, including personal health, the impact on climate change, and other environmental impacts, including pesticides and waste in rivers and waste in the water table. And then there’s the issue of factory farms in general, and the question of how to assure that giant meat producers [...]
I joined the Designers Accord this past week. What is the Designers Accord? According to founder Valerie Casey, it “is a call to arms for the creative community to reduce the negative environmental and social effect caused by design.” I think of it as a more modern version of the hippocratic oath for designers. It’s [...]
Christopher Hitchens is both exasperating and, occasionally, correct. I tend to disagree with his conclusions on many topics while finding his analysis pertinent to the discussion. For instance, he published a column on Slate this past week titled “Maintained in China: Burma’s Foul Regime Depends on China” that correctly points out that Chinese support is [...]
Len Edgerly sent me a link to a podcast by Andy Goodman called Storytelling for Good Causes on the Social Innovation Conversations website. The presentation was given at Stanford University last fall to a group of social innovators over the age of 60. It runs about 45 minutes long, but is definitely worth a listen, [...]
Paul Polak of IDE talks about the ruthless pursuit of affordability in all of the design work that his organization takes on. Of course, the IDE $20 water pump is a great example of how we can bring the poorest of the agricultural poor up from $1/day to $2/day, thereby taking them out of destitute [...]
When I left Sapient (five years ago now) one of the commitments I made to myself is that I would do work for organizations dedicated to changing the world. I’ve been fortunate to work with several non-profit/NGO organizations that are engaged in socially progressive development. One of these is International Development Enterprises (IDE). IDE has [...]
I saw this on the worldchanging blog today: www.worldchanging.com/archives/005521.html According to their website at storybases.org, the purpose of the organization is as follows: To nurture the oral heritage of minority cultures in a digital world by combining: • A trustworthy participatory process that engages and empowers the youth, dispersed communities and displaced members of minority [...]
Two years ago I worked with the American Friends Service Committee to create a three minute movie honoring the dead in Iraq, both American and Iraqi. It’s part of their “Eyes Wide Open” project, where they display a pair of boots for each American serviceperson killed in the war. I’m very proud of the movie; [...]
