Can Your Jewelry Save the Earth? Pictured colorfully above, in a rainbow assortment are Relief Beads, which were created to raise awareness and money to aid refugees in Darfur.Relief Beads, is selling handcrafted bracelets made from sand in Ghana, Africa. “Each purchase helps to fund Relief International’s medical clinics for women and children, educational programs for students and counseling for victims of violent acts.” To make this good cause even sweeter,
I work in a school district where over 75% of the children are on the free and reduced lunch program. To be eligible for such a program, family income must fall below 130 percent of the Federal poverty guidelines for free meals, or family income must fall between 130 and at or below 185 percent of the Federal poverty guidelines for a reduced price meal. The current Federal Poverty Guideline is $21,200 for a family of four. Most of the children on this program eat both breakfast and lunch at school. Unfortunately, the nutritional quality of these meals is poor, as they are packed with processed foods.
Today is Blog Action Day, and this year the focus is on poverty. Here are some ways you can help people in need, as you shop for your own needs:
Numbered above:
TOMS Shoes for Tomorrow, Giving Gifts to the Poor as You Shop: Starting from May 2006, TOMS Shoes for Tomorrow has given well over 10,000 pairs of shoes to children in Argentina and 50,000 pairs in South Africa through the purchases of caring customers. They’ve recently been nominated for the Cooper Hewitt People’s Design Award and they Need Your Vote! In 2008 TOMS plans to give 200, 000 pairs of shoes to children around the world. For each pair purchased, TOMS will give a pair of shoes to a child in need.
I’ve been trying to support Blog Action Day 2008 on the blogs on which I write. This year’s topic is “Poverty” and this video I think is a sobering reminder that we parents can contribute to the fight by simply watching what we
Ever tried to buy fresh produce in an inner city grocery or convenience store? Good luck. Urban farming is one approach to addressing the “food deserts” so common in poor urban neighborhoods. St. Louis’ City Seeds Urban Farm goes a step further, though, and creates opportunities for “addicted and chronically mentally ill homeless” to build life skills and self-sufficiency, and to increase food security in the city.
Located downtown near Union Station, City Seeds employs clients of the St. Patrick Center, a non-profit that “provides opportunities for self-sufficiency and dignity to persons who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.” Combining hands-on farming with horticultural classes, the farm attempts to empower these people with skills they can use to build independence.
The farm’s workers aren’t the only economically disadvantaged people that benefit from its harvest, though. Vegetable seedlings grown in the farm’s hoop houses are distributed to community and backyard gardeners. And, the farm also serves as a distribution point for a pilot food distribution program that provides rural farmers with access to inner city markets: a low-cost CSA-type program provides weekly boxes of fresh produce to residents in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods for $7 a week.
Blogging, social news, peer-to-peer philanthropy, microblogging, social networking, wikis, video sharing, and more. These are the new agents of change.
Back in May, we penned the original 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media. Though most of those first 10 are still relevant, the pace of innovation and advancement on the social web means many more have emerged in the past five months that deserve attention. These are the tools and resources that individuals, corporations, and nonprofits alike can use to communicate, create, and connect on the social web…for social change.
1. Blog It Out: When the die is cast on social media and final judgments are made, blogging will reign supreme as the single greatest force in Web 2.0. Whereas social networking is broad and shallow, blogging is deep and focused. That’s the power behind Blog Action Day, which takes place this Wednesday, October 15th, 2008. It’s a day when bloggers the world over draw attention to a single issue and (hopefully) inspire action. This year’s topic is poverty. And given the current financial crisis, it would seem many bloggers have gotten a head start.
2. Twitter Green Events: In the first 10 Ways, we wrote about the Twitter greenstream, a tagging mechanism that organizes and aggregates Twitter messages (Tweets) about doing green things. What’s evolved since then is the widespread use of unique Twitter tags at events. Most recently, we covered West Coast Green by tagging our Tweets with #wcg08. This helps people at the event to find and meet up with fellow Twitter folk. It also enables those who aren’t attending the event to follow what’s going on and what’s being said in real time. There are a couple ways to do this. One is to follow through Twitter Search (formerly Summize), where you can track keywords and tags. Another is to send a Tweet as follows: “track word: [insert keyword]“. And then you’ll start receiving all Tweets with that tag or keyword directly into your feed.
…participating bloggers will post an article which deals in some way with green issues. A financial blog might address eco-friendly investing. An automotive site could choose to focus on hybrids or plug-in vehicles. It’s all about the Earth — and diversity of opinion.
Well, Blog Action Day is here, and we’re proud to be
Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls… come right in for another edition of the Greenest Show on the Web: the Carnival of the Green! Fresh off of a stellar performance at Ms. Malaprop, the Carnival’s here at Green Options this week to amaze and delight you. But don’t wait around — the show has a limited engagement here, and then it’s moving on for a stint with our friends at Greener Magazine.
