Green Options

Yoga Journal is pleased to offer a scholarship program for those that need assistance attending this winter yoga conference in San Francisco. This scholarship program is intended for yoga teachers, with limited income, who currently teach (and volunteer) yoga to underserved populations within their community.

Yoga Journal shares how practicing yoga changes lives daily. These upcoming “Share Your Yoga” conference scholarships are intended to support the participation of yoga instructors that earn a low-income that is active in contributing their unique teaching abilities to those that can not afford it. Below are the application instructions.

Out of the mouths of babes… Leave it to a group of children (Kids for Peace) to come up with this incredible, life-affirming, peace-spreading, goodness-sharing idea.

For one day — August 8, 2009 — children around the world are invited to perform simple, yet important, little acts of kindness.  Their goal this year is to have one million children participate in the Great Kindness Challenge.

Very rarely do brands get it right when inserting themselves into historic moments in time. Brand-building generally only works around events where advertising is expected and even then it is, at best, tolerated as part of the environment.

If you’re going to change the world, wouldn’t you like it to be epic?

Stacey Monk, Co-founder and CEO of Epic Change, does, which is why she and Sanjay Patel decided to launch their unique approach to sparking social change by converting people’s “epic” stories into financial resources they can use to improve their communities, their lives – and the world.

Rooted in the best practices of successful businesses and charities, their somewhat novel approach to funding uses donations to provide interest-free loans to finance community improvement efforts, which they repay by generating revenue-driving projects based on each epic story, and then recycle by duplicating those ideas in other communities, effectively spreading hopefulness and change to everyone their program touches.

I had the opportunity to talk with Stacey to dig a little deeper into their change model, and this impassioned former management consultant with a degree in Public Policy from the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University boasts an impressive resume, but her most compelling attribute by far is a genuine desire to promote positive change and a dewey-eyed hopefulness that makes me believe she can.

Too often, volunteering abroad seems to come with a big price tag. If you’ve looked into international volunteering programs, you’ve probably noticed that most of them expect you to pay through the nose just to volunteer your free time and effort. These programs have their merits. However, if you’re living or traveling abroad and willing to go out on a limb, you can find great international volunteer opportunities without the cost.

Editor’s note: Looking for a travel experience a bit more exotic (and meaningful) than the traditional trip to the beach or lakeside resort? Our friends at email tip service Vital Juice Daily have some suggestions today.

If you’re jealous of Angelina Jolie’s exotic globetrotting to save the world, you might consider a volunteer vacation (Brad Pitt not included) … help yourself while helping others! What could be better than that (besides

[...]