To spur conversation, I often go to the “would you rather” questions – and most I make up on my own, but I happen to have handy a set of Table Topics and sat last night with a friend picking out cards from the stack like a magician. I thought I’d share the questions we pulled with you, for your response. Mine, are below. Seemed like something fun to do to step out of the box and think about questions that are different from my regular life and normal conversations I have with people.
How do YOU step out of your box and comfort zone to explore the confines of your imagination?
1. What would you like to be said about you at your funeral?
That I was loved and going to be missed and that I put my fingerprint on the world and helped make it better, even if just for one person.
2. In what era would you most like to have grown up?
Discovery of America. I know chance of survival on the Mayflower and subsequent colonization would be hard, but still, would have loved to be one of the original explorers of America.
3. What event past, present, or future, would you like to witness in person?
A thank you to the the lovely Joanna Lord(fellow Vermont lover, social media maven and beach dweller) for passing along to me this week’s Poetry Wednesday poem.
***I was at a loss. Got all caught up in trying to find something perfect and was going to give up on the day and then I tweeted a quote:
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” – Mary Oliver #quotes
And Joanna sent me that poem and it’s PERFECT. Why do we insist things be perfect and then trick ourselves out of stuff? Happy to NOT have gone to bed without writing this post.
Just a reminder, Poetry Wednesdays are a chance to get out of my head and find beauty and simplicity in something other than cause or the hectic schedule I create around giving back. So I hope you enjoy…
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Well it’s been hard work and taken me just about 3 week, but I’ve finally visited all 10 branches of Ahon sa Hirap, Inc. (ASHI), my host MFI, that service Kiva loans and I have to do it folks. I’m smitten with one particular branch. They are all amazing, seriously, but one has got just a little bit more than the others.
The Island Branch is the most remote branch in Rizal, still on Luzon Island. It takes a transporter boat to get there and it’s the last stop of 12 the boat makes. This means from the Central Branch of the region it’s 2 jeepneys and the boat for a total of about 90 minutes. It’s called Talim Island, and it’s simple and clean and just, wow.
Once on the island there are no cars! Tricycles can get you some of the places, but not everywhere and so people are walking, the air is cleaner, it’s a beautiful place.
Tourists? Haha. I don’t think so. It’s not a beachy island, it’s a fisherman and crafts island. The Philippines has over 7,100 islands. Talim Island is just one of many in the archipelago.
The borrowers are some of the most successful in all of ASHI, which I credit to two main things. One, lack of distractions. Without an SM MALL around every corner, these families have a chance to save and not spend their money. Two, determination. It takes guts to make it on an island, where opportunity for business growth is minimal. These women have chosen to live somewhere remote, it’s make it or break it.
I’m headed back this week for a day or two to meet more Kiva Borrowers. I can’t separate loans JUST from this branch, but if you’d like to make a loan to a ASHI-Kiva Borrower, all of the current loans on the site can be found here.
In looking for a video for this Friday’s “TGIF Video” I wanted to find one visually stunning. I turned to a resource I often look for in finding new websites, companies, people who are at the forefront of making change and pushing the envelope: The Webby Awards.
The Webby Awards honors excellence on the Internet and is part of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The awards take place during Internet Week in NYC, June 1-8, 2009. I’ve always had a conflict precluding me from attending and this year is no different. One day.
Conservation International’s PROTECT AN ACRE campaign is the winner in this year’s Activism category. Their mission is:
Conservation International (CI) is an organization based out of Washington DC that is committed to creating a global movement that will help protect and sustain Earth’s plant and animal diversity. One of the many tasks they have set themselves is the problem of climate change. Unknown to many is that deforestation, and more specifically, the willful destruction of tropical forest areas for farming and other purposes, contributes up to 20% of the world’s carbon emissions.
Atmosphere BBDO was tasked to provide the interactive component of a campaign that would inform the public about deforestation’s link to climate change, and provide them with a way to help. A micro site was developed where people could protect a piece of forest by purchasing one or more acres from a communal forest area shared by all. Their name would then be attached to their acre for all to see. The rest of the site was dedicated to the education of climate change with respect to deforestation, notably in the form of a video introduction by Harrison Ford, the campaign’s spokesperson, and founding member of CI. To date many thousands of acres have been protected by people from all over the world.
Did you know every 4 hours a forest the size of Manhattan disappears? How could you not want to get involved in something like that? $15 dollars protects an entire acre of land. If you’re in the moment, go with it, donate now!
Traveling anywhere in the world, how can you not look around and want to conserve and preserve everything our planet has to offer. To do your part, check out Conservation International and find ways you can discover, learn, explore, act and give. You can also subscribe to their YouTube channel here.
I’m often asked where the desire to “give back” comes from. If it was something deeply rooted by my parents or something innate inside of me. My family and upbringing in Pittsburgh was very community-based and I was nurtured to pursue any hopes or goals I had.
That being said, through being nutured, I believe it was something always inside of me. Just a part of my DNA. I like to say I was a “little girl with big glasses”, at St. Edmund’s Academy in the Sq. Hill part of Pittsburgh and it was the 4th grade when I asked my teacher, Mr. Sciulli, why our school didn’t recycle.
My first love: The Environment
Now this was Pittsburgh. In the 1980’s. No one really talked about recycling yet and I honestly don’t remember why I got hooked on the idea. Mr. Sciulli told me if I was interested in the idea, he would help make it happen. I took him up on it and within months the program was up and running. I got separate bins for classrooms (being pre-blue bin era) and collected the paper at the end of every week to put aside. The janitors were in on it and helped out.
Cans were easier. We weren’t allowed soda and so there weren’t very many around. Teachers had some, but I don’t remember really worrying about cans. I was worried about paper. It seemed like we threw so much away!
It worked. Both in my school and soon enough it seemed like we were on the cusp of a bigger movement (first sign I’m a early-adopter maybe?) because the City of Pittsburgh started recycling too. It seems like such a necessity in any city what with so much trash and increasingly population, how imperative it is to reduce, reuse, recycle whenever possible.
Since those days of Pittsburgh, I’ve lived in Vermont and California, two bastions for environmentalism. I thought it was a give-in, this recycling thing. Thinking about the effects of the products you used on the environment.
Perhaps, that is why it’s all the more shocking and jarring to see recycling not done in New Orleans. That’s right. No recycling.
Did I shock you? Good. NONE is overkill, there is SOME, but not ENOUGH. But since the storm, very very little. And the citizens have to pay for it. And the City does nothing to subsidize or bring it back to the mainstream.
I understand the City was decimated. And it’s hard enough to get people back on their feet let alone focus on the environment. From the beginning of the recovery post-Katrina, officials said “we don’t have time” to focus on recycling all of the materials from neighborhoods where houses were being demolished. “We have to get rid of the debris to build again.”
In August, it will be four years since the Hurricane and plenty has still not been rebuilt. Makes you think about all the trash and landfills that accumulated four years ago.
But the lack of recycling is worse than the City not pushing for it. There is a general malaise about the situation from the people. From the professional business types to the low-income areas. Styrofoam is served LOUD & PROUD here. Plastic cups and togo cutlery. Cute indie coffee shops, restaurants, hotels – styrofoam! No recycling bins ANYWHERE. How is this possible?
My question to New Orleans is this:
How can you rebuild for the future with such blatant disregard for the future?
Yes, I’m madly in love with New Orleans. That much has been made clear. But I want to make it crystal that in my digging in the nooks and crannies of NOLA, I am well aware that much is broken here. There are a lot of programs and initiatives that start with the best of intentions but don’t get off the ground, or don’t get enough funding or local support. I wanted to share some of the biggest challenges and frustrations I’ve seen so far. Because there are so many things broken with New Orleans, I’m going to have to break this into pieces. Today, I’m going to cover infrastructure and transportation.
Cars
New Orleans is more of a car-dependent city that I ever would have guessed. It’s depressing. Because the public transportation and alternative transportation options and infrastructure are so poor (see below), most people drive everywhere. I have met a few people without cars and they “get by” but it’s not a perfect system. Zipcar doesn’t operate in New Orleans and I haven’t found another option for car-sharing. People proudly say that you can drive anywhere in New Orleans in 15 minutes or less, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
The streets and sidewalks are a mess. It’s hard to find roads without holes or ditches in them and sidewalks are uneven, in disrepair and unmaintained. There are a lot of signs indicating the City is “Rebuilding” but it’s hard to pick out a spot where I’ve been and could remark that the quality of the road was in good condition. This affects all modes of transportation. Drivers are constantly swerving to avoid potholes. Lane separators are a joke. They are faded or nonexistent and most streets that are two lanes are only two lanes in theory and more than likely 1-3 at any given time. It can be like driving in a developing country.
Street signs are of particular disrepair. Maybe one of three times I see a street sign I’m looking for. The rest of the time they are gone, fallen to the ground or hidden by tree overgrowth. It’s hysterical and frustrating at the same time. How can a city really make it THIS difficult for a visitor to make their way around? Freeways are just as bad as city streets. Exit numbers and names I get from say, Google Maps, don’t match what I see in practice. The city needs to invest in street signs, the big attractive ones you can see from blocks away.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend Power Shift ‘09 and moderate a panel on how food production and consumption affects climate change. It was based around a documentary made by Participant Media called Food, Inc. (coming out summer ‘09 watch out!) with online components by Take Part. As one of only two agriculture panels during Power Shift ‘09, the room was packed for the 9AM start time. Two rows of people sitting in the middle aisle, all seats taken, lines down the far sides. It was immediately apparent that the three panelists; Patrick Woodall from Food and Water Watch, Meredith Niles Cool Foods Campaign and Chantal Wei-Ying Clement from the Organic Consumers Association have incredible insights about what we can do to change our consumption habits and be more aware of how food is produced in this country. Take Part’s blog post about the panel can be found here.
As moderator, I always want to be aware of moving the conversation forward, keeping a dialogue, and staying on time and topic. Having attended umpteen conferences and panels myself, it’s crucial to be aware of how your audience is reacting to the topic and being conscientious towards the fact they picked to attend your panel over the others offered at the same time slot. I also like to make sure to give take-away points at the end, so that each person leaving the room could walk out and give, in an elevator pitch, a summation of what was discussed.
Since there were about 30 concurrent panels going on at the same time, I knew we had a somewhat self-selected group in the room. No need to preach about the benefits of organic food, buying local, bashing big companies. Instead we could focus on how to motivate a larger group of people to be involved in the movement and grow the dialogue about the role of farming in the scope of how it affects climate change. To do this, I asked the audience and panelists to think about each clip from the movie, we showed four, and each question in three pieces. One, as an individual. What choices we make every day about the food we consume. What is important to us above all else. Two, as a consumer. What we buy, where we buy it, what we do with friends and family and how we articulate our opinions. Three as a tax-payer, as a voter, as someone to whom Washington is responsible to. All three pieces need to go together to make an effective campaign.
Sometimes in life, everything just comes together. Power Shift 2009 is one of those instances for me. Let me play out for you the last week.
Last Friday: I was on twitter and saw the following tweet from @jake_brewer:
Last weekend before #PowerShift09. 131 hours till we open the doors of the DC Convention Center and start building a massive stage. 2:43 PM Feb 21stfrom TwitterFox
Having not heard of the conference before I looked it up online. I saw it was in Washington, DC and ran from 2/27-3/2. I knew that I would be in Pittsburgh on 2/27 and could quite frankly drive to DC for the conference. I’m also looking for new opportunities professionally and you never what can come from putting yourself in a new environment.
Backstory: I met Jake last May at the Cause Marketing Forum when he was at Idealist. I was in a session and taking notes on my computer and twittering and he came up to me after the session and said that I was the only other person in the room except for him taking notes digitally. Everyone else was using pens and notepads (this is true of many conferences I attend with a lot of nonprofit people there). Since I was at a socially-conscious tech startup and he was at Idealist, we exchanged information and kept in touch all year mostly through social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I saw that in the fall he left Idealist for the Energy Action Coalition and sent him a note of congratulations on the new position.
Fast forward to late November and I was asked to moderate a panel at the California Endowment called “Social Media, Social Justice” and one of the panelists was Jessy Tolkan, Executive Director of the Energy Action Coalition. After the panel, Jessy and I got to talking and we ended up going for a drink with two of my favorite and fellow LAisters to Trax at Union Station and talked about election night, the EAC and what they had planned for 2009.
Did I shock you? Good. NONE is overkill, there is SOME, but not ENOUGH. But since the storm, very very little. And the citizens have to pay for it. And the City does nothing to subsidize or bring it back to the mainstream.
