Online Storytelling & Cause Marketing: An Interview with Jonah Sachs of Free Range Studios

Before I left for Peru, I did an interview for the Big Vision Podcast with Jonah Sachs, the Principal of Free Range Studios, an advertising and marketing firm with offices in Washington DC and Berkeley, California that specializes in non-profits and socially responsible businesses. They created the award-winning film, The Meatrix, about factory farming, and the hilarious film, Store Wars, about the importance of organic farming.

I thought I'd share the transcript of the interview (done by CastingWords) with you.

Jonah Sachs: We were founded as Free Range Graphics, but we are actually called Free Range Studios now. Free Range Studios is an advertising and marketing firm that specializes in progressive non-profit and socially responsible businesses, but we are best known for our online storytelling. We do a lot of print design; we started in website design; what we do that people see the most is online storytelling.

As we've grown up with it, and we've been doing it since about 1998, it has suddenly become the sort of thing that everybody is talking about now, is how do you do online advertising content that is entertaining and engaging. We've been doing that in the non-profit and social activism space for this whole time. Up until now, we've really found that it is an advantage that cause marketing has over traditional marketing, just in that people like to pass along educational or cause-related messages more than they do traditional advertisements. With so many new people entering the space, hopefully, we'll be able to keep that edge. I know that corporations are really desperate to get into it as well.

We have offices in Washington DC and in Berkeley, California, and there are about 25 of us now. We work for clients across the board from non-profits like the ACLU and Greenpeace to more political causes. We did John Kerry for President, before that, Howard Dean for America. We also work with some socially responsible businesses like Green Mountain Coffee Roasters; we are working with Annie's Organic right now, and so a broad mix of people who are trying to make the world a better place.

Britt: How did you get started?

Jonah: I started Free Range with a friend of mine, Louis Fox, when we were 22 years old. We've been friends since we were seven, so we already had a very long collaborative history. Louis is a traditional artist and I was in the journalism field. We wanted to combine our talents and felt graphic design would be a good place to start. We had been working on films as kids for a long time; we liked the kind of mass communication. We also were both committed to social activism and felt shut out of the advertising world because we felt it was a really interesting medium, but we also felt that it wouldn't be right to spread messages that we did not believe in.

When we started in Washington in 1998, we had an idea that we would just give it a shot. We put up a website; we did not even have any practical experience in the field, but we put up a website and said that we only serve progressive non-profits. We hadn't started political or socially responsible businesses at that point. We just sort of put it out there, and it's a very small community and a very loyal community, especially in Washington, of progressive people. People really responded well to that, and that has been our niche ever since. We've stayed true to that even though some opportunities have come up to leave that, but that is what really gets us excited.

Britt: One of your most famous campaigns is "The Meatrix." Can you talk a little bit about its evolution?

Jonah: Well, I forget now how when we did it. 2002? When we first got together to do The Meatrix, we actually had this idea to do a Gratitude Grant to our clients as a way of just saying thank you and also getting more known in the field, so we put out this call for grant applications and said, we'll give away a free flash movie. We also did it because we wanted creative control over our project. We hadn't really had full creative control over a project yet, so we figured if we gave one away to a worthy cause, we could really get our creative thinking completely unfiltered through it.

We got about 75 applications and one of them came from Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, which is called GRACE. They wanted to do something about factory farming, and that has really been an issue that has been close to Louis' and my heart for a long time. It really combines so many different problems in society, from environmental concerns, labor concerns, animal rights concerns, health concerns and we just saw it as this great nexus of all these different things that if we could solve this problem -- which we probably never could completely solve it, it's so endemic to our society -- but if we can address it, then we are addressing a lot of different issues.

We said, "All right, let's take on this issue," both, because it's really important from an intellectual, social point of view, but also it's a great challenge creatively because it's such an unappealing, difficult message to get out there and groups in the past have really struggled to get people to look at this issue because it's unappealing, it's gross, it's ugly and so we said, "Let's take on this greater challenge and see if we can come up with something that talks about the issue in a different way."

We spent about three months really digging through tons of different ideas that we had and kept running into the same roadblock, that it was just kind of a downer. You were not giving anybody anything by telling him or her their food came from a terrible place; you were just kind of bumming them out. Maybe the hardcore people who are into this issue would be interested, but no one else would.

One day, we started talking about how important it was for people to realize that factory farming was so bad, that we had to create this fake world in which food comes from a happy farm. You were looking at food labels and how it has nothing to do with the reality; it's so bad we cannot even really look at it, and so we started saying, "Oh, you know that's a little bit like The Matrix. That got us thinking about that scene where Keanu Reeves is plucked out of that pod when he was first woken up, and I thought, that is like a factory farm.

One thing that we've gotten to learn over the years, is that when you start trying to build metaphorical bridges between an issue and a piece of pop culture, which is the best way to move anything anyway, if the bridges start getting built in a "meant to be" way, there is no reason that one bridge should also lead to another because maybe it's like The Matrix in this way, but why would it be like The Matrix in five other ways, too? When they start falling into place like that, and even down to the name, The Meatrix, was actually the last thing we came up with.

I remember sitting in a concert, we had everything done except the name. I don't know why, but we just couldn't think of the right name for it. When the name came, it was like it was pre-made and meant to be that way. It just felt right that there were so many metaphorical connections between the two and I think that people saw that.

We get instant feedback about how successful our stuff is because the web provides numbers, hard numbers about who sees what you do. We often know when we hit something just right; it will resonate with other people. We knew when we put The Meatrix out, in a lot of ways that we had hit something that resonated and was just meant to be. I think that we really succeeded also in making it kinds of consumable, fun and funny without trivializing the issue.

We've been trying since then to learn all those lessons and continue to make more stuff like that. Sometimes it's very successful, and yet there is no real formula for it. Each issue need its own creative thinking, and a lot of times we aren't able to come up with something like The Meatrix, but sometimes we are, and that is what is really fun.

Britt: That is one of your best known success stories. What's a lesser known success story?

Jonah: One of the really early ones that we did was a piece for Amnesty International about conflict diamonds. Amnesty was trying to push a bill that was in the House of Representatives trying to stop what they were calling "blood diamonds" or "dirty diamonds" or "conflict diamonds," which come from parts of the world where there is civil war and people are enslaved and tortured to bring diamonds out of the ground.

This was back in '99 when Flash was pretty rudimentary, you couldn't do a lot with it. We put together a Flash movie that was a spoof of the famous De Beers Shadow Hands commercial that took you back and not only showed the ring being put on the finger, but went in reverse and showed where the diamond came from.

This was in the days where anything that moves on the Internet was exciting, so we had a real leg up. We put it out there; we also put it on CD and ran a whole campaign to distribute it on Capitol Hill. It got into the hands of every member of the House of Representatives and that ultimately was part of the successful campaign that Amnesty ran to get a Clean Diamonds Act passed. That really changed the way the diamond trade worked in this country. That was a really good example of not just raising consciousness, which The Meatrix did, but actually kind of making change happen on the ground.

We also do some much more traditional kind of activism stuff. We design the home page and the website for the ACLU. Just in some really subtle ways that only maybe web designers can really appreciate, change the structure of how people are lead through that experience so that they can more easily take action and more easily become involved. In this world the name of the game, in a lot of ways, is collecting email addresses, getting donations and that is the metric by which a lot of these non-profits measure themselves.

Hopefully, they're not doing that at the expense of measuring the change they are making in the world too and some do, but a lot of the work that we do is really to help our clients build the organization, not just the message, so that they can get more signatures, get more on the email lists and hopefully build them into big supporters. You have to make all kind of different tools that do that, whether they are storytelling tools or just regular web tools. Now we are starting to combine a little bit more of the community web stuff with the storytelling stuff so that we can not only bring people in, but also give them stuff to really do online. That is what everyone is trying to do now, of course, with the Web 2.0 stuff.

Britt: What has been the biggest challenge of this work?

Jonah: In the eight or nine years that we've been doing this, it has been a hard time in terms of concrete victories for progressive causes and progressive ideas. I think that in terms of consciousness raising, in terms of pop culture adopting a lot of stuff that was maybe thought of as environmental fringe or as progressive, civil rights kind of fringe, I think it has penetrated pop culture a lot more. You can look at the covers of Vanity Fair, Newsweek or Time and everyone wants to run the next story about Al Gore or about global warming becoming accepted as fact. As far as real change on the ground and real political victory, it has been a really hard time, and keeping staff motivated, keeping ourselves motivated, sometimes it just feels like it's a losing battle.

At the same time, we've always felt that if you can raise consciousness and if you can get people familiar in speaking the language of progressive politics, then eventually it will come around. In a lot of ways, conservatives built their base starting on the real cultural and not necessarily political level. That's what we're trying to do now.

I definitely see the most hopeful thing that has come about since we've started doing this is just that everyone is now on the Internet and something like The Meatrix can be seen at the level of a primetime television show without being filtered through corporate interests. We kind of have the means of production now in our hands and the means of distribution, which is really amazing. We tried to make a documentary film in 1994 and we needed another $45,ooo just to work on the editing machines. Now, we've have it all in our laptops and we can make anything we want to make.

I think that there is a democratization that is going on despite the big losses that we've suffered on the global and political scale. There has been a real democratization and a diffusion of power. People are starting to talk to each other, spread ideas, spread issues, and hopefully, if that doesn't get hijacked by corporate advertising and stays true and real, people will raise their consciousness further and further and momentum will keep building, and this work will be worth it.

Britt: How do you keep inspired and not get burned out?

Jonah: I think in some ways a lot of the food for our souls comes from just the creative process. Everybody that works here is creative in some way, and many people in the traditional way that you think of creativity; coming up with fun ideas and coming up with fun visuals. In a lot of ways, taking each challenge in a little bit of a vacuum and saying, "Okay, maybe we're not going to save every endangered species at the moment, but let's really work on this particular species. How can we tell the story in a way that's never been told before?"

Meeting that small creative challenge is very nourishing. Then seeing your solution to the creative challenge being seen on a grand scale, see it come up on CNN, watch it get 100,000 views on the Internet or something like that, that's very fulfilling. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have changed the world the way that you ultimately hope to. Every once in a while, maybe once a year, we'll get a major victory and we'll feel like, "Ah, we've really changed something here." I think it's kind of a balance of both keeping track of the change that we are actually making in the world and just feeding our own creative spirits and having fun and coming up with fun story ideas.

Britt: What advice would you give someone who wants to use their design or marketing skills for positive change?

Jonah: First of all, there is definitely a large industry out there and a large potential client base of non-profits and socially responsible businesses, who are doing this kind of work, and there is whole industry that exists to serve that. I think a lot of people think there is no money whatsoever in a non-profit field or that non-profit means non-funded. Yes, it's not funded at the same level and a company of our size in the corporate world would certainly bring in a lot more money than we are. But I think the work is out there.

Penetrating the communities and the groups that you are interested in working with, as a volunteer or networking through those people and being truly passionate about the causes that you want to work on does buy a tremendous amount of credibility with the potential clients that you're working for. That's really what we did; we did a lot of really cheap, free work at the beginning for causes that we could speak passionately about. We weren't like every other design firm because we understood the issues and we really cared. You can't fake that kind of passion.

I think, if you really want to use your creativity for things you believe in, it's first really important to figure out, "What do I believe in? What's the one thing that I could work on?" Maybe you're working on corporate advertising stuff, but you want to do one pro bono project, or you want to do one cut-rate project a year. Find the one that you're most passionate about and really learn to speak that language of the people that you want to work with. I think that's really appreciated, because everyone in this world is taking some kind of financial hit for their passion, so they're very loyal to others that share their passion. That would be my main advice for it.

I think, also, whether or not you are able to do full-time cause-related work, the other thing that could help keep the creative soul alive is to make sure that the work that you are doing is not necessarily doing harm. Maybe you're not totally psyched about every piece that you're working on, but when a flag does go up in your conscience that maybe I'm spreading a message that's actually harmful, or is untrue or manipulates people in a way that's not helpful to the audience, just start taking small stands where you can to not do that kind of work. Funnel your creativity to something that at least you feel is neutral to begin with.

We've always advertised ourselves as simply working for progressive politics and non-profits. But at the beginning to get going, we definitely picked and chose some small, local business and stuff like that to keep ourselves sustained. It's all about making compromises and making sure that you're staying afloat, but also staying at least on a neutral level where you feel that you have integrity in what you're saying.

Britt: Is there anything else you would like people to know about your work or the work of Free Range Studios?

Jonah: The one thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how when we started doing this we always dreamed of a time where people wouldn't necessarily tune into primetime television and see their show with the advertisements that supported those shows, but they would actually tune into any station on the Internet that was completely free of corporate control. And one day that would be so mainstream that people wouldn't even be thinking of it as an alternative kind of thing. We hoped that we would become part of the vanguard of the alternative network.

Amazingly, much faster that I thought it was going to happen, it has begun to happen. But nobody is at the vanguard of it. Everybody is doing it and everyone's creating their own stuff, and the best stuff is rising to the top. That's both really exciting to see that the dream is coming true so quickly, but also it's scary too that we can't control it in any way and we can't stay on top of it, maybe saying The Meatrix or Store Wars comes out and is very popular, but we can't promise our clients or promise anybody that we can consistently repeat it because it's inherently a chaotic, democratic world out there of entertainment now.

I kind of regret that we don't get to be the dominant player in it, but then no one does. But also, I think that this is just the best time there has ever been for everybody to just jump into the mix and start using their social networks to promote the kind of message that they have that they're interested in getting out there -- cutting something together quick and dirty, making it fun, putting it out and experimenting with different messages.

I've found that it's not that difficult to get thousands of people, if not millions of people, to see your piece if there's some decent entertainment and some social value to it. I think this is just the best time anyone's ever had to sit down at their computer and get the word out there about whatever they happen to be thinking about. There's really nothing to stop it from diffusing on the Internet. It's a really good time, certainly, to be creative.

For more information about Free Range Studios, go to freerangestudios.com.

Meatrix
Jonah Sachs
marketing
cause
storytelling

GOOD Magazine

While on the plane to and from Peru I had A LOT of time to read. I read my new issue of Ode, With All Our Strength by Anne Brodsky, and a new magazine, GOOD. I'd been looking forward to GOOD for a while after Green LA Girl wrote about it, and after talking to Christine Soto at the GOOD Magazine booth at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp. Christine was nice enough to send me a review copy before I left on my trip.

It is a big, beautiful magazine printed on thick paper with lots of photos and illustrations. It feels like a print version of Current TV (Al Gore is an Associate Publisher) with short, visual articles like Peter Allsop's review of the movie Our Daily Bread, Zach Frechette's description of the NYChildren photo series, and portraits of Dan Barber (creative director of the Stone Barnes Center for Food and Agriculture), Peter Diamandis (founder of the X Prize Foundation), Marjora Carter (founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx), Chris Simcox (executive director of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps), Matt and Jessica Flannery (founders of Kiva), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and Amanda Congdon (former vlogger for Rocketboom).

One of my favorite articles was "The American Family Grows Up" by Neil Pollack which describes how, "middle-class American families are being forced to live, almost entirely, without a net", which he exemplifies with a story about his son putting a rock up his nose. The family's Blue Cross insurance has a "surgery deductible" and, "according to Blue Cross, sticking a tube up a child's nose to extract a rock is 'surgery.'" They had to pay $600 to have it removed.

The photos from the Border Film Project taken by migrants and minutemen were pretty cool, I appreciated the 8-page visual guide to the midterm elections, and the No Senator Left Behind chart comparing US Senators' educational background and salary with the average person's educational background was fascinating.

Overall, I enjoyed the magazine and turned down lots of page corners of things I wanted to remember, or go back to later. My only concerns with the mag are that 1. only about 25% of the articles were written by women, and 2. It has a very young feel to it. I am 37 and I felt like an "old" reader. I hope that folks older than me will want to read it, too.

I sent in my subscription. It's $20 and 100% goes to the charity of your choice: Ashoka, City Year, Creative Commons, Donors Choose, GenerationEngage, Millennium Promise, Oceana, Room to Read, Teach for America, WITNESS, World Wildlife Fund or UNICEF. I chose UNICEF.

Photo from GOOD Magazine Flickr Stream.


Good Magazine
magazine

Back from Peru

Hello Have Fun * Do Good Readers!

I just got back from an amazing two-week trip to Peru. I'll start posting Have Fun * Do Good news soon, but in the meantime, here are a few photos from my trip:

Peru
Machu Picchu

Mom in the Movement: Lisa Russ of the Movement Strategy Center

How do you balance working for social change, with the work of being a mom? Lisa Russ, the Associate Director of the Movement Strategy Center, shares the joys and challenges of being a new mom working for social change.

The Movement Strategy Center is a nonprofit organization in Oakland, CA that is committed to advancing the next generation of leaders for a sustainable progressive movement. The Center helps to build local, regional, and national networks of young activists, across interests, constituencies and geographies.

You can listen to the interview on the Big Vision Podcast.

How do you balance your work at the Movement Strategy Center with the work of being a mom?

Someone said to me, before I had Zach, that every organization should be full of working mothers because they are the most efficient people around. I wasn't a working mother then, I wasn't exactly sure what she meant, but I knew from seeing her that it seemed true. It definitely has changed my sense of time. Being a working mother means doing everything as quickly, and well and efficiently as I can.

I was worried before I had him that I would be one of those mothers who is always late for day care because I'm not someone who has ever been able to leave work on time. But I'm not late to get him because you really cannot be late to get your kid at daycare, because they charge you, and also it means a lot to me to be there on time for him. He looks around for me, and gets excited for me to come. I have become a person who actually leaves work when she is supposed to. That's a big change. And I work at night, and I work on the weekends,and I feed Zach while I'm checking my email. There's a lot of multi-tasking, but I've always been a multi-tasker, so that comes pretty naturally.

How has being a mom changed your work?

Before I had Zach, I was definitely a busyaholic, you know a workaholic, busy-addict kind of person running around and running around and people were like, "What are you running away from?" and, "Why are you so busy?" and I was like, "Nothing, I'm happy, this is the way I am!" There was so much to do, and I felt driven by my work and really rewarded by it, and not just paid work, but also all these volunteer things and other community stuff -- feeling really involved and feeling engaged. Whenever I felt like I could do something that was going to have some kind of impact, that gave me a lot of energy.

Becoming a mother has meant that I don't have the time or energy to do that. It's a huge change for me to go from being out almost every night and from being busy almost all the time, and obviously as a mother I am still busy but it's a very, very different kind of busy. Being with Zach is tremendously rewarding for me in a different kind of way. So, I think that some of the things that, it turns out, I was running away from, have kind of caught up to me. Something I probably share with a lot of people who do this work is, feeling like I was doing something meaningful was my way of coping with fear about the world, and despair about the world. By working on whatever project, I could keep one step ahead of the fear and the despair.

Having Zach really brought into focus for me this tremendous stake in the future that I hadn't had in the same way before. Before I was like "OK, whatever, maybe we are going to burn this planet to hell and we probably deserve it, but who cares?" in a way. Not literally, but it's like what we are doing as a species to the place where we live is so unfathomable that in a way there was a throw up my hands aspect to it, even though I was engaged in what I could do to prevent that, or work against that tide. Within a few months of Zach being born, I was just getting all these really strong fears about him not making it to adulthood. He was born two months before Katrina, which sort of crystallized for a lot of people fears about global warming, and also fears about the inadequacies of our government and our systems to respond to needs.

I think that sort of started a wave of panic about the future, and of feeling like, really thinking about him not making it. And of course this year, after Katrina there also has been the bird flu scare, it has also been the 100th anniversary of the earthquake, the war in Iraq and then this war between Israel and Lebanon, and Israel's own war on Gaza, on Palestine -- so there has just been a lot of like Armageddon in the air and I definitely, for maybe six months of Zach's life, got preoccupied by this fear.

So, just having spent so much of my life managing that fear through work, it was really intense to all of a sudden sit with that fear in a new way. The other thing that happened as part of the transition to motherhood was understanding global life through the eyes of a mother and a parent. I think I'd always thought, whatever, you could certainly look into Palestine and think, "Oh my God, those mothers, how are they feeding those kids? And those fathers, and how do they feel?" But the level that it hits me in my stomach now when I imagine what it must feel like during the air raids in Gaza and Lebanon to not be able to keep your child safe, and to be laying there with your child and not be able to say, and mean, "Everything's going to be OK. I can protect you." That is so fathomable now.

I really empathize with what I can imagine people are going through and just get really horrified by it. So in terms of what this means about the work, my work at its core is about building movements for social change and social justice. I have to do that work, because I have always had to do that work, and now I am driven to do that work from an even deeper place because of feeling both a fear about the present and the near future. A hope about it, too -- my hope for what the world (although I have to dust it off and fan the fire) it's also there, and I want to feed that hope and I want to bring Zach into a hopeful world.

So keeping myself going and keeping myself engaged in the work is really important, and I can't do it in the same way I used to--going to lots of events and getting the same charge that I used to. A friend of mine is doing civil disobedience tomorrow, and when he first told me about it I was like "Yeah, of course I'll do that with you." It's about Israel and Lebanon and I was like, "I'll definitely do that, I'll definitely do that." And then I realized, "Oh the time it is, I will be in jail when I need to be picking my kid up from school, so I cannot actually do it." Which is just another example of -- engaging means something different now, and I think I'm still struggling to really know what that means, and I know on a heart level it's going to be a deep and rich kind of engagement, and it's a new engagement.

One aspect of this that people have been working on and thinking about, and it's pretty obvious, is just, "What do you do with your kids?" I just went through a funny experience of wanting to go to a training, a several day training, leadership training, that was on-site a couple hours away and didn't provide child care. So I was like, "How is a nursing mom supposed to go?" Being a nursing mother means that you have to see your kids -- if they are young, all the time, and if they are older like Zack, at least a couple times a day, or once a day.

Negotiating my autonomy and my closeness with Zach and how it relates to me going out into the world and doing other things -- I think it is really common for mothers in this work to struggle with that. I guess what I want to say is when Zach was first born it was like, "Oh, you have little baby, and of course you take time" and then it was just sort of, "OK, come back and be back and just do this stuff." That's what I would have expected of myself too, and not really realizing it's still really hard to go to events at night. It's still a huge thing for me to go away overnight to lead trainings, or be a part of workshops. It's all these underlying questions about creating the change that you want to see, and what that means in terms of what kind of house Zach grows up in.

I don't think that that means that Zach needs a mommy who's there all the time, but it also means to me that he feels a sense of safety and security that I am there when he needs me. I think for every person, finding that balance is one of the cruxes of this parenting puzzle. Everybody has to find it in their own way, and every kid is different. I think what's hard to realize -- what was hard to really know before I had a kid -- was that we all have ideas about what it's going to be like before we have a kid. "I'll always do this, and I'll never do that and only cloth diapers and no TV and no sugar" or whatever it is. I think everyone is transformed by parenting. I certainly was. So even who I thought I was, even while pregnant, is different than who I am now, and Zach is his own self. It turned out for example, I used to be the kind of person who definitely judged other parents as lame when they wouldn't go out at night. I thought that was really weird, or when they seemed like a slave to their kid's nap schedule or sleep schedule. And then Zach came along and it turned out that from a very young age, Zach needed to be home at night, and night for Zach meant by 5:00, 5:30 PM.

I'd be invited to an event that'd be from 5-7 PM and people would be like, "Oh this must be great for you. This seems like a really child friendly time schedule," and I'm like, "You would think so, and I would have thought so, but the truth is that Zach needs to be home and Adam's still working, and I'm still nursing and it's a real hard time for me to leave him, even with a babysitter, a friend or whatever, and so I actually can't go." And now that he's fourteen months that is much, much, much less true, but that's been a very long time in coming, and it's only really recently that I have a lot more flexibility in the evenings and at night to get around.

So in terms of this balance thing it's sort of this question thing about how much I'm there, how much I'm leading, how much I'm following Zach's lead, and I'm obviously still very much learning, but it's a lot more complicated and individual than I ever could have seen, or that I realized before I started

In addition to generous maternity leave and child care at events, how can nonprofits best support working moms?

That's a great question. Yeah, I can name a couple things. Generous maternity leave and child care at events is really important. Other things I would say are really important, or have been very important for me, have been a flexible work schedule. I came back part time and I work three quarter time. And I'm flexible about that too. That doesn't mean I'm never working, whatever, the off hours. But childcare is so expensive that it's really hard, basically on a nonprofit salary, even a generous nonprofit salary, it's almost impossible to pay for full-time childcare. Most people need to piece something together and have some kind of flexibility.

Being able to work part time at a schedule that I could make work around my day care was completely critical. We go to a wonderful daycare that is set up for working families that is actually not that flexible because they need to keep some things in place that works for working families. So I needed to be flexible on my side to be able to leave work early, to be able to get the kind of schedule that we could afford at the daycare.

The other thing that's really important for work, last week I got a call from the daycare that Zach had contracted a daycare virus and that I had to go pick him up right a way so he wouldn't keep spreading it. So I finished what I was doing, closed my computer, and left. And when I was telling someone, "Oh yeah, I had to run out and get Zach." They were like, "Was work OK with you leaving?" And I was like, "Well what would I have done if they weren't?" But it really made me think. Of course I had things I had to cancel and manage, but that was up to me to do.

It's both being able to set a schedule that's realistic for me to be able to parent and work in an ongoing way, and also to have flexibility when we need it to handle sick kids and other things that come up. I mean sick providers come up too. So I guess once, you're in the petri dish of group child care, things are really unpredictable, and just a workplace that to whatever degree rolls with those punches is really important.

Two more things I want to add to that list. One is about trave, and like I said, traveling with a kid for work is hard, and not traveling because you can't, because you have the kid, is also hard. But we at the Movement Strategy Center have tried to really take the heat off the parents to need to travel, and I mean one question that's huge that needs a lot of wrestling with is really what that means for the non-parents and how much more of the work their absorbing. I think that's a really important question, and we've been very mindful of that, or tried to be. I think we're still on a learning curve. We've tried to make travel schedules for parents as minimal and realistic as possible, and that's been very important.

The other thing that's been really wonderful here is just the work culture and welcoming the kids in, whether it's the kids stopping by the office, or just curiosity about the life of parenting and our children. I was the third, of the three of us, who had kids within a year. And I think when Taj had Kiyomi first, it was much more of a strange thing and a novelty, and now it's become more understood. I guess what I'm thinking is that our work culture has changed in a way, our whole organizational culture - the things that we talk about, the firsts that we share in staff meetings, or whatever, and just the way we think about like, oh we're going to go do something together as a staff. Is it a happy hour, or is it a lunch?

It's just sort of all these little things that have made it really wonderful to be here, and I've been able to really feel like a part of things, and I think so has Zach. But it's a subtle change. Like any sort of "diversity" issue, it is best addressed through numbers. There's three of us out of eleven or twelve now that are parents so there is kind of a critical mass. I've thought so many times about the things I've said and done before I was a parent, not understanding where the other parents were coming from.

Have there been other moms in the movement who you've been able to lean on for support?

Oh yeah. Right when I was coming back to work and I started having a panic, I sent an email out to about seven or eight people saying like, "Oh my god, oh my god. Daycare tomorrow," or I actually remember what it was. I was still at home with Zach, working part time, but I had to go to San Francisco and facilitate a full day meeting and be away from him for the first full day, which of course now sounds like nothing, but he was only four months old and it seemed really hard and I was in a real panic about it.

During each of these milestones I've been able to reach out to people, and working mothers, especially working mothers who have been working in the social change, social justice movement, have been hugely important to me. As each new things happens it's so overwhelming, and it's really hard to jump across the chasm of never having left Zach for a day, or never having left Zach for most of the week, and I still haven't done the leave Zach overnight, but I'm getting to the point where I need to do that for work.

Having these other moms with some perspective over time has been enormously helpful for me. I don't think I could be here right now without them having carved the way and shown that it's possible, and let me see them as really being vibrant, brilliant, amazing workers as mothers, even as they've been tremendously engaged parents who've had to make different kinds of decisions during their years as mothers. I'm thinking about two who have kindergarteners now, so that gives me a nice long view.

Do you have any advice for new moms working for social change?

The biggest thing on my mind right now is being gentle with yourself. I think part of what mothers have to offer other people in the movement is a slightly slower approach to life. I know for me that transition from really fast to pretty slow was a hard one, and I really needed to find ways to be gentle with myself, to adjust to the new pace, and to not try and push myself to hard either in work or things outside of work about what I should be doing, where I should be going, how I should be feeling. And I guess what I really needed for that was the support of my co-workers and my friends and other parents.

I guess the piece of advice that I can offer is, it's been the most intense transition of my life, and whatever you can do to make space for yourself to have that transition, and find the people and places that are supportive of you finding your way as a mother, rather than pushing the expectation that you should be the same, you should be delivering at the same level, the same kinds of things. Just chose wisely. Choose who is around you, and what you're listening to, because the pressures are really intense and you're going to need a lot of love and a lot of support for you to find your own new way.

I think part of the reason I even started with this story is about the intense fear and feeling about the world in a different way, is because for me, I really know that that is going to allow me to be even more valuable working for social change over time with this degree of feeling that I now have, and this connection that I have with mothers all over the world. As you change shape and pace and view, just recognize, you will be equally amazing and even more brilliant and gifted in ways that you never knew, and so just trust that process and enjoy it. It's amazing.

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Celebrity Gossip Without the Guilt

I consume way too much celebrity gossip. I've got Pink is the New Blog and A Socialite's Life in my feed reader; buy US Weekly and People to "send to my grandma" (which I do, after I've read them); will flip back and forth between Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood if I'm home alone (my husband is a sensible man who thinks America's celebrity culture is gross), and don't even try to schedule anything the night of the Golden Globes.

So how happy was I when the blogger, Eco Chick, wrote a post about the celebrity-filled Rainforest Action Network benefit gala (oh, to have been there), and mentioned the blog, ecorazzi, which highlights green celebrities. Fun!

Check out the eco-celebrity sites from their sidebar:

Daryl Hannah
Woody Harrelson
Leonardo DiCaprio
Ed Begley, Jr.
Ed Norton

Like any good addict, am I deluding myself that this is the "good" celebrity gossip. Probably. Did I add it to my Bloglines account. Yep.

Collage from MyHeritage Face Recognition. Click here to find your celebrity look alike.

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Solutionary Women: Nola Brantley of the Scotlan Youth and Family Center

Nola is as old as the Center she works for, thirty, and over the past two years, she has become an expert on sexually exploited minors in Oakland and has watched as the population grows.

"It's increasing, and not only is it increasing, the young ladies are getting more savvy. Because some of them that went in at 14, now they're 16, or 17, and they're actually recruiting 12 or 13 year olds. So they're getting a little bit more savvy because a mass number of young people have been involved in it now for the past several years, and there's organizations like CAL-PEP [California Prostitutes Education Project], who have been doing work with prostitutes for thirty years, and they're even blown away by the number of young girls involved in prostitution."

Last month, I had an opportunity to interview Nola, who is the Director of the Parenting and Youth Enrichment Department, and the Coordinator of the Sexually Abused and Commercially Exploited Youth Program at the Scotlan Youth and Family Center. When I asked her why teenage prostitution is so prevalent in Oakland, she said,

"Because they can do it here. . . Pimps identify this as a good place to pimp underage girls. Underage girls identify this as a place to prostitute where they most likely won't get caught, or if they do get caught, consequences won't be a big deal, and men who like to buy sex, men or women, it's mostly been men, who like to buy sex from underage girls, know that Oakland's a good place to get a girl under 18 who's a prostitute.

We have girls that come from out of state to prostitute in Oakland who are under 18, and I've asked them, 'Well, how did you end up in Oakland?' and they'll say, 'Don't you know that everywhere else, coming to Oakland to do your thing is a big thing?'"

Some of the things that Nola has found helps the girls she works with are having an advocate that they can trust present from the time that they make contact with police, and having a safe place to stay for an extended period of time. Unfortunately, Alameda County doesn't have a safe house, although it is an essential component to the girls' being able to change their lives, as Nola explains,

"If there was a 14 year old girl, let's say she's a foster care youth. So she doesn't have a mother, father, any stable family. She's a foster care youth, which means she's part of the system. She's staying in a group home, let's say. And say she's out there prostituting and she has a vicious pimp. And she wants to get out of it, but she knows that she can't just stop because he won't let her. And she knows that he'll come right to her group home and kick the front door in and drag her out of it. There's no place to send her where she could be safe, like a refuge. You know, there's no place in this whole County, for girls in this County, where we can say, 'Okay, you want to get out? Okay, you're going to be able to go to this place, this is a place where you can stay, you can get your life together.' We don't have that yet, and so that's something we're working towards. We have some things in the works, but it just can't happen fast enough when there are 12 year old girls out there prostituting. It can't happen fast enough."

Despite the challenges, there are success stories:

"One of the things that I do is, I go out with the Oakland Police Department when they do prostitution sweeps, and when they bring in prostitutes under the age of 18, then I have to be their advocate on the scene. Probably about a year and a half ago now, I was on a sweep with the police, and they brought in a young girl, and she was from out of state, and she ended up going to Juvenile Hall, and she hadn't given her right name. So she was in Juvenile Hall for about a month, and we were getting ready to send her off to a program in LA called Children of the Night, it's a volunteer program for prostitutes who are under 18 who want to make a life change and have their school on-site, and stuff like that, it's a comprehensive program.

Well, the day before she was supposed to go, a report came through from the state showing that she was a missing person and showing what her real name was. I ended up being able to get in contact with her mother, and her mother came down to come to the court date in this County. It turned out she had all kinds of warrants in the state she was from because she was involved in a big prostitution ring out there where there was a female madam who was prostituting all these girls under 18. It got busted, and everyone was in danger. It was just crazy. She was in a lot of mess. So they decided to let the warrants go as long as she went through the program that was recommended by this County, and she ended up becoming a 600, which is a minor who would be on probation though Alameda County Probations Department, and we ended up finding a placement for her in a group home that was out of this immediate area, and that we had had success before with other girls. She was in Juvenile Hall for like two or three months and the whole time she was in the Hall, I was able to keep in touch with her, go visit her, and I was able to keep in touch with the family, who was out of state. Then she went to the group home, and she's been there for a year now, and she's doing well.

She's going to school, you know, she's been able to go home on five day passes to visit her family, and she had come from a history of abuse, too, within the home. So she ran to the streets in the beginning, because of the abuse in the home, to prostitute. She prostituted in her state, she ended up out here prostituting, and then through the intervention of the program, she was able to turn her life around, and she has completely cleaned her life up. Her mom's even saying that soon she thinks that she'll be ready to come back home, and her mom moved from where they lived at previously so that when she comes back home she'll be coming into a different environment. . . . She had a lot of risk factors that presented themselves, that said that she wouldn't get out of the life, that she'd be someone that might stay in the life for the rest of her life, and she completely turned it around."

Nola's passion for her work, comes from a very personal place,

"I was sexually exploited [as a minor], and I was preyed upon by a police officer in San Francisco who was supposed to be working a court program that interacted with high school students, and he actually ended up sexually exploiting me over the course of the next year, and he did eventually exploit another minor too, and ended up getting kicked off of the police force. I didn't realize that I had been sexually exploited until I first started to get into this work, and when I realized I had a personal experience with it, it really gave me a passion, and really made me want to get involved, because I understood how much the girls don't understand they're being exploited at the time that it's happening. For a lot of these girls, their stories, and their situations were so, so horrific.

Not a lot of people can do this work, because not a lot of people could even deal with what they have to do as they listen to these girls' stories. You think most of these girls, they're just troubled girls. No, most of these girls that are out there, they have some horrific stores, like, 'My mom died and I was passed around to three relatives,' 'I was molested by an uncle.' It's not anything small. They have really huge stories of past trauma and past abuse, and just all kinds of things. I got kind of attached to the population, too, and I wanted to see the work play itself through. I want to see the numbers in the city of Oakland decrease, so I'm committed to sticking to doing this until there's a drop. As long as it's increasing, I'm not going to walk away from it."

If you would like to get involved in your community around these issues, here are a few steps Nola suggests that you take:

"The police department is one avenue, although I wouldn't say it's the only avenue. Because through the police department, they have units that work with the community. So that's a really good place to start, like if you started to go to those community meetings that are held by the police department, and it's by a non-uniformed person, then that would be a really good place to start and organize and say, 'Where in our city are we seeing this happen? What's the best response to this?' Because it is going to be different city to city. . . Now, if it's folks here in Oakland, and they want to help with this, they can call me, here at the Scotlan Center, because basically, for the city of Oakland, even for the County of Alameda, right now we're like the clearinghouse for people who are interested in working with sexually exploited minors.

Also, you can go to local community service agencies, if you're in a different city, and try to find out if they're already working with this population, and if they are, how you might be able to help. I mean, one way you can just help, which is really general, it doesn't matter where you live, is just by raising awareness. Talk to a young girl about what's the difference between a pimp and boyfriend. You know, talk to a young girl just about a healthy relationship. Or just take time to mentor a young girl, because you can prevent this too, just by reaching out to a young person, and I keep saying girl, but there are lots of boys being sexually exploited, too.

If there's nothing happening in your city, and you want to start something, then have a meeting with some of the different systems, like maybe your juvenile probation department, your police department and your social services agency, because these are going to be the three main systems that most of the minors that are involved in exploitation are going to end up running through. They're either already foster youth, or they'll get arrested, or they'll end up at Juvenile Hall."

You can contact Nola Brantely at the Scotlan Youth and Family Center at (510) 832-1490 or by email at nolabrantley AT yahoo DOT com. You can hear this interview in its entirety on The Big Vision Podcast, and if you know a Solutionary Woman who you think should be profiled, please contact me at britt AT brittbravo.com.

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The International Museum of Women Wants Your Story (Men Too!)

After including Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women in my post about Giving Circle Book Groups, someone from the International Museum of Women asked me if I would post the submission guidelines for Imagining Ourselves, "an online global exhibit featuring art, photographs, essays and film by young women in their 20s and 30s answering the questions, "What defines your generation?"

They are accepting film, audio, images and text on these issues:

War & Dialogue: Women's Perspectives
Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2006

Let us take you beyond the headlines and show you how war is affecting the lives of young women around the world-both in conflict zones and outside them. As a result of recent fighting, millions of people are living in diaspora, migration is the trademark of this generation; what is it like to start a new life in a new place? We are interested to hear your personal experiences, your thoughts on media stereotypes of certain religious and ethnic groups, and your views on how violent conflict has affected your life. What are the positive contributions young women are making towards resolving wars- both in their own countries and globally? The media doesn't tell us all the stories, especially once the world has moved on to the next hotspot. Tell us yours.

Young Men: How Do We See Each Other?
Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2006

We have spent all this time finding out what women around the world think about the world and the issues affecting them. But now we’re taking the time to ask young men the same question. We want to know how young men regard young women when it comes to the topics we have explored so far in Imagining Ourselves. Browse our exhibit and give us your views.

Themes to consider:
Love – dating and marriage,
Money – balancing work and family and equal pay for equal work
Culture & Conflict – migration, devotion and conflict
The Future – charting a path

Motherhood: A Life-Changing Experience
Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2007

One of the most life-changing experiences in a woman’s life is that of having and caring for a child. These days women are having children later and some are not having children at all. Family structures around the world are changing, yet mothers are most often the parent who will stay at home with young children. Child birth itself is a risk for many mothers around the world. Did you know that the 530,000 annual deaths that arise from pregnancy and childbirth complications are preventable? Share your stories on motherhood with us, and discuss your ideas on better maternal healthcare worldwide.

Image & Identity: Culture behind clothes

Deadline for submissions: May 1, 2007

Appearances aren’t everything, or are they? Join us in exploring the world of self-expression. Some people express themselves through the style of clothes they wear. Clothes can express a part of who we are or the culture we represent. A lot of young women today are also becoming increasingly aware of the importance of sustainability. Are green, recycled, or eco-chic clothes a part of your wardrobe? In a time when going to the plastic surgeon is as easy as booking an appointment at the dentist, what kind of body image do young women have today? Send us your answers to these questions and your work. We are looking for original clothing designs, photographs, film, essays and more. These months are all about exploring the different ways we shape our identity (express ourselves), whether it be through our culture, the music we listen to, or the clothes we wear. How do you express yourself?

Film Festival: A cinematic experience online
Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2007

Take part in this unique experience – a two month film festival – online! This is an amazing chance for up and coming women filmmakers to have their work viewed by a worldwide audience. We are looking for all types of films – documentaries, short films, animation, music videos, basically any kind of film you can think of, they just have to be made by a female director.

For more information about how to submit your story, click here.

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Square Foot Garden

I spent the weekend getting my garden ready for Fall. It is a small space that up until now I have only planted flowers in, but I think I am going to try putting in some winter vegetables. In Northern California you can still grow veggies like lettuce, spinach, leeks and chard.

If you have only a small space for a garden, I saw this link on Hugg.com to a post that describes how to build a square foot garden (photo above).

I thought this was a really cool way to have a garden in a small space, and could be a great tool for school gardens.

Photo from Frostcall.com

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Giving Circle Book Group: Books by Women Visionaries and Their Organizations

I've posted a couple of times about giving circles, groups of people who get together to learn about an organization's work, and pool their donations to have a greater impact. Because I love to read, I've been thinking it would be cool to have a Giving Circle Book Group where the group reads an inspiring book by a nonprofit, or an individual affiliated with a nonprofit, and then gives to that cause.

If you're interested, here is a starter list of books by visionary women and their organizations:

Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam by Zainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund. Salbi is the President of Women for Women International, an organization that helps women affected by war to rebuild their lives.

With All Our Strength by Anne Brodsky. Brodsky documents the inside story of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). According to their site, "RAWA is the oldest political/social organization of Afghan women struggling for peace, freedom, democracy and women's rights in fundamentalism-blighted Afghanistan since 1977."

Imagining Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women, an anthology edited by Paula Goldman for the International Museum of Women.

Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall. Jane Goodall has founded so many things including the Jane Goodall Institute, and Roots and Shoots, a community service program for young people. (This was my favorite book of 2005).

Paradigm Found: Leading and Managing for Positive Change by Anne Firth Murray. Murray founded the Global Fund for Women.

Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe. Mother and daughter founded the Small Planet Fund to support the citizen-led solutions that they document in their book. (2006 isn't over yet, but so far this is my favorite book of the year).

Book cover image via Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative.

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Basic Blogging for Women Workshop

In early July, I posted about a Basic Blogging for Women Workshop I'd be teaching this fall, but after talking to some prospective students, I decided that it was important to find a space where everyone could be on a computer, so I changed the date and the venue so that we can be in a computer lab.

If you:

* Have something you want to say and share with other people
* Want to join an online community of like-minded people
* Are looking for a new communication tool for your nonprofit or business
* Enjoy learning in a supportive, low-key environment

This workshop is for you!

Basic Blogging for Women Workshop
Taught by Britt Bravo
Sunday, October 22, 2006
1-4 PM
Center for Digital Storytelling
1803 MLK Jr. Way in Berkeley

$95 early registration fee if received by October 9th.
$125 if received after October 9th.
Enrollment is limited to 9.

You will learn about the different types and uses of blogs, why it is as important to read blogs as it is to write for one, how to add photos to your blog posts, and how to increase your blog traffic. Each student will create a Blogger blog during class.

Britt Bravo writes for three blogs: her personal blog, Have Fun • Do Good, NetSquared, and for BlogHer, where she is a Nonprofit and NGO Contributing Editor. She also produces her own Big Vision Podcast. In order to create the positive change she wants to see, Britt helps individuals and organizations realize their "big vision" for a better world with her business, Big Vision Career and Project Consulting. Britt has worked with nonprofits and socially responsible businesses for over 15 years and has helped hundreds of people to realize their big visions.

Email Britt at britt AT brittbravo DOT com to register.

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REFUND POLICY

I totally understand that things happen that cause you to not be able to come to the workshop, but because I am a one-woman business, when you register for a class you are agreeing to this policy:

To request a refund, send a MAILED notification of your withdrawal from the class. I cannot accept or acknowledge notifications sent by email or phone.

1. If your withdrawal notification is postmarked 10 or more days prior to the workshop date, you will receive a refund minus a service fee of $25.00.

2. If your withdrawal notification is postmarked less than 10 days to the workshop date, no refund will be given unless the class is full and I have someone on a waiting list to take your place. This policy applies regardless of the reason for your withdrawal, even if the reasons are beyond your control.

3. If the workshop is cancelled because I did not get a minimum enrollment number, you will receive a full refund.

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Volunteering Can Be Good for Your Job

A study for the nonprofit Womens Way found that women who volunteered improved their leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills. According to the Womens Way press release,

"The correlation of women’s professional growth and development with their philanthropic involvement makes a strong business case to employees and employers about the importance of investing in community involvement as a professional development tool."

I've been doing volunteer work for a long time, and although I'm not entirely sure that it has improved my leadership, communication and problem-solving skills, it always improves my mood, very often teaches me something and occasionally has led to a new job.

Here are some BlogHers who are giving back through volunteering, or using their blog to advertise do * good opportunities:

Rocks in My Dryer puts the word out for Operation Special Edition, a program that provides volunteer doulas for pregnant women whose husbands or partners are deployed when they give birth.

bekka writes about volunteering at the Algiers Regional Branch Library in New Orleans where she sorted through books that thousands of people sent to the New Orleans Public Library System after Hurricane Katrina.

Sarah Lynn Seaton participated in a Women Build with Habitat for Humanity last May in Knoxville. I thought it was a cool idea to have a team of women building a house together. You can find a Women Build project near you here.

Shop Girl tells her readers about a Women of Wardrobe fashion show fundraiser happening in Houston today. Women of Wardrobe is a volunteer branch of Dress for Success, an international nonprofit that provides suits and other work clothes to low-income women.

KungFoodie is volunteering with Girls Inc and helping out with their fall fundraiser Women of Taste. She is asking Bay Area food bloggers to link to the Girls Inc. web site with one of the Women of Taste banner images, and to let their readers know that volunteers are still needed.

And One Good Bumblebee is designing products to to sell for Nest, a nonprofit that supports women artists and artisans in the developing world by providing micro-credit loans to be used for the purchase of the supplies necessary to start or run their art or craft-based businesses.

Image via VolunteerMatch

Hat tip to Joanne Fritz for info. about the study.

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It's Not Possible to Know What's Possible

Click to Play

This is a 14 second video made with my digital camera of trees in the Redwood Regional Park in Oakland. I made it to test vlogging for the first time, and I chose this quote from Hope's Edge by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe to go with it:

[H]ope does not come from convincing ourselves the good news is winning out over the bad. Nor does it come from assessing what's possible and going for that. Since it's not possible to know what's possible . . .we find new energy in this very truth. In the awareness of possibility itself--always unknowable--we are free to focus on the world we want.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by Bigvision with a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Six Steps to Everyday Activism

Global Warming. Election Fraud. Genetically-Modified Food. Cancer. AIDS. Poverty. War.

Sometimes it’s hard to get up in the morning and be fearless, to have courage, to care. That’s why I started interviewing women (and men) for the Big Vision Podcast, and my Solutionary Women series on BlogHer who get up in the morning and have a big vision for a better world as their alarm clock.

After talking with women like Mary Brune, who co-founded MOMS (Making Our Milk Safe), Alli Chagi-Starr, who co-founded Art in Action, Ilyse Hogue, the Campaign Director for MoveOn.org, and Anna Lappé co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen and Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet I have taken away six steps we can all take to make a difference.

1. Be passionate. What do you really care about? What would you really like to see change? It can be something big, like equal access to education, or small, like healthier lunches at the school down the street. What topics do you naturally want to learn more about? Mary Brune’s daughter, Olivia, keeps her motivated to do her work, “As a nursing mother, I find it unbelievable that there are toxic chemicals in my breast milk. Even so, I know that breast milk is superior to any other choice. But will that always be true if chemicals are allowed to remain unchecked and unregulated in our marketplace? I’m motivated to make sure that Olivia and all children of the next generation continue to enjoy the benefits provided by mother’s milk.”

2. Educate yourself. Spend time learning about the issues you care about, volunteer at organizations related to your interest, and be sure to ask the people you want to help what their ideas are for solutions. In her book, Paradigm Found: Leading and Managing for Positive Change, Anne Firth Murray, the co-founder of the Global Fund for Women, said that when the Fund started, it was ahead of its time because, “We would listen to the women building these programs, and we would respond to them rather than set agendas for them to follow.”

3. Take small steps. We can’t all be Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem or Dr. Vandana Shiva. As Ilyse Hogue says, “Social change is about what you choose to do everyday, how you interact with your neighbors, where you buy your groceries, who you’re voting for, where you keep your money in the bank, what kind of car you’re driving. . . . I think that is where it starts. . . . It’s not what action you take, but it’s taking action that makes the difference.”

4. Have a big vision. Many of today’s problems are long-term problems with long-term solutions. As Alli Chagi-Starr, Events Director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights' Reclaim the Future Program wisely notes, we need to realize, “that we are seed planters. We are going to probably die before we see all those seeds become trees, and it doesn’t matter. You just have to keep planting and know that other people will come along and water those seeds and that those trees are for our children’s children.”

5. Find like-minded people to share your vision. Online services like VolunteerMatch, Idealist, Craigslist and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network make it easy to find volunteer opportunities and events near you. Giving circles like Dining for Women can help you combine having fun with doing good, and will allow you to raise more money for the causes you care about. Social networks like the Omidyar Network can connect you with folks who want to collaborate with you on your vision.

6. Believe that you can make a difference. Anna Lappé often is asked whether one person can really make a difference when the challenges we face are so huge. “People often say they feel like just a ‘drop in the bucket,’” Lappé says, “with the sense of futileness that the idea conveys. But it’s probably more accurate to say people feel they’re a drop in the desert—their drop dissipates before even touching ground. If you think about the idea of a bucket as a container that holds all of our drops, you’d sense how fast a bucket can fill and that--you never know--you could even be the one drop that pushes the water over the edge.”

It is easy these days to get discouraged and say that we are powerless to create change, but really, that kind of attitude is a luxury from a different time. Now is the time for all of us, in whatever small way, to get up in the morning with a big vision for a better world. Time’s a wastin’.

Photo by Adriano Bravo.

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Birthday Blog

On August 19th, this blog turned 1 and I turned 37. Wahoo! I celebrated by spending the day at the Craigslist Nonprofit Boot Camp where I heard what I think will be my quote for the year in a speech by Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights,

"You have a dream inside yourself, and it is an impossible dream. That is why the Creator gave it to your crazy ass. If it was easy, She would have given it to someone else."

The next day I continued celebrating with a trip to the farmer's market, lunch at Cafe Gratitude with friends, and a cupcake at the Teacake Bakeshop.

I have a lot to be grateful for this year and a few "impossible" dreams for the year to come.

My dream for the writing I do for this blog, BlogHer and NetSquared, and for the interviews I do for the Big Vision Podcast is to somehow make a difference, to live up to how one friend described Have Fun * Do Good as, "inspiring people by seeing the efforts of others in hopes that they will be moved to act themselves."

Thanks to all of you who read this blog and pass posts on to friends. You have my gratitude.

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Greenwashing Organic Milk

I have to admit that I'm a half and half organic shopper. When a pound of asparagus is $12 or a red pepper is $3, not so much for me, but I always try to buy organic milk 'cause the whole having hormones and antibiotics in my milk thing really grosses me out. I usually buy from Horizon, largely because I can find it in most stores, until now.

The Organic Consumers Association, nonprofit public interest organization, has called for a boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products and the Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group based in Wisconsin, filed a legal complaint last Thursday with the USDA against Horizon Milk.

According to the Cornucopia Institute's press release:

The crux of the controversy, which has smoldered within the organic industry for over six years, stems from a small handful of industrial-scale dairies, managing 2000-10,000 cows, that are allegedly producing milk in feedlot conditions without adequately grazing their cattle as required by law.

As consumers, we need to be selective about what we boycott 'cause given where most of our food comes from these days, there wouldn't be much left to eat if we boycotted everything that should be boycotted(!), but I'm going with this one because as the green wave grows, I do think it is important for corporations that are jumping on the green bandwagon to be held accountable and not be allowed to slap the word organic or green on just anything.

The OCA is also boycotting Aurora Organic Dairy because of its, "intensive confinement of dairy cows." Aurora Organic Dairy supplies milk to Costco's "Kirkland Signature," Publix's "High Meadows," Safeway's "O" Organics, Wild Oats' organic milk and Giant's "Nature's Promise". Didn't you just know when Safeway came out with the "O" brand that something was awry? Sigh.

I'm going to try to buy Straus Family Creamery based in Marshall, CA. The Cornucopia Institute gave them 4 out of 5 "cows" on their Organic Dairy Report.

Update: The afternoon after I wrote this post I went to my local grocery store and low and behold, they weren't carrying any Horizon products and had replaced them with Organic Valley products from La Farge, WI. The Cornucopia Institute gave them 4 out of 5 "cows" too.

Photo Credit: Meet Watermelon Helen by Lady-bug/Lisa

milk
horizon
organic

A Small Group Can Make a Big Difference

I've been thinking a lot lately about everyday activism, things that we can all do to make the world a better place. Last month I wrote a post, Cocktails and School Supplies, about a fundraising event in Los Angeles that our friend Meg produced to collect money and school supplies for a school Covenant House (a shelter that houses homeless and runaway youth) is opening in Tijuana. Her event raised over $2,000!

Last weekend Meg, a group of young people from Covenant House, and other volunteers and Covenant House staff members went down to deliver the supplies. I thought I would share Meg's story of their trip as an example of the difference a small group of people can make, and the difference your check can make, even if it is small, when you donate to a charitable organzation. As Anna Lappé said in my interview with her, even if you feel like what you are doing is a drop in the bucket, your drop, combined with others, could be the one that makes the bucket spill over.

After being stopped going into Mexico by border guards who turned us around (apparently carrying cargo into Mexico without a permit is a no-no no matter how noble one's intentions) we rallied and headed to a border crossing to the East that let us through. We were late getting to the school and the kids had been anxiously waiting for us for hours so we rushed to set up and get the supplies organized in a way that would ensure that everyone left with something and all the supplies were used.

After about an hour we started the party and kids and their moms arrived to pick up clothes, do arts & crafts projects supervised by the Covenant House youth (we brought 19 CH youths with us on the trip) and of course pick up school supplies and backpacks! We were able to hand out 210 backpacks and had about 20 left over to leave with the school for children who missed the event. Each backpack was STUFFED with school supplies that many of you generously donated and the money that we raised allowed us to rent an extra van and bring over a thousand bottles of water along on the trip. We also filled the school's storage unit with supplies that will be used throughout the year.

It is difficult to convey the true scope of these peoples' living situation. All the land around the school was originally landfill and part of the city dump. Some 20,000 people have colonized the area, erecting crude shelters out of scrap metal, wood and cardboard where they now live with their families and children.

The women who run the school are extraordinary and next up I'm hoping to raise enough money for them to build a permanent house on the site for volunteers who want to commit a year to living and working with the community.

If you would like to continue to support the school, contact Margaret Farrell (MFarrell@covca.org). She can accept donations and tell people how to get involved. If you want tips from Meg about how she made her fundraising event such a success, ask your questions in the comments of this post.

Photo Credit: "Outside the School" by Meg Martin.

Tijuana
education
activism
Covenant House

Solutionary Women: Majora Carter (You Have to Hear Her Speak!)

Unfortunately, I didn't get to interview this week's Solutionary Woman, Majora Carter, but I did get to hear her speak last May at a Solutions Salon put on by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. And she was incredible.

Majora is the the founder and Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit working to implement, "sustainable development projects for the South Bronx that are informed by the needs of the community and the values of Environmental Justice." She is a 2005 MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, and it shows.

You can watch the video of her speech (she gave the same talk at the Solutions Salon as at the TED Conference) on the TED site here.

You have to watch the video of her talk.

You just have to.

Photo: majora from John Berrie's Flickr photo stream.




Marjora Carter
environment
justice

Pink M&Ms & Fair Trade

A friend recently forwarded an email to me about a promotion M&M will be continuing this year with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. During September, October and November (October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month) you will be able to buy pink M&Ms and a percentage of your purchase will go to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. The M&M web site still has 2005 dates on its promotions page, so I'm not absolutely sure that they will be repeating the campaign.

Either way, as someone who likes to bake cupcakes, I was pretty excited about using pink M&Ms, but then I decided to do a little research on Global Exchange and CorpWatch about M&M/Mars Incorporated.

I was disturbed to find out that according to Global Exchange,

In 2001, the U.S. State Department, the International Labor Organization and others reported child slavery on many cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, source of 43% of the worlds cocoa. Subsequent research by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture revealed some 284,000 children between the ages of 9 and 12 working in hazardous conditions on West African cocoa farms. Of these children, it was reported that some 12,000 child cocoa workers that had participated in the study were likely to have arrived in their situation as a result of child trafficking.

In response to the child slavery allegations, a CorpWatch article, via AlterNet, "Africa, the Dark Side of Chocolate" states that,

In 2001, following an avalanche of negative publicity, the major chocolate companies agreed to a voluntary protocol to eliminate child labor on West African farms rather than face binding legislation from Congress that would have required them to label their products "slave free" -- a label none of the major chocolate companies would have qualified for.

And according to Global Exchange, "while this is a positive step, the Protocol and Joint Statement leaves poverty untouched and make continued slavery a possibility because they don't insure fair wages for adult workers."

I'm not saying to boycott pink M&Ms (don't take money away from the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation!), but consider participating in Global Exchange's M&M/Mars campaign and write, call, fax or email M&M/Mars Incorporated and ask them to start selling Fair Trade Certified chocolate.

TransFair USA also has a big list of companies that sell Fair Trade certified chocolate, if you would like a chocolate alternative.

Update 9/28/10:  Here's a more recent post about Fair Trade chocolate, Nine Fair Trade Chocolate Bars.

Photo credit: M&M's for Breast Cancer by Sadaqah

chocolate
fair trade
m&m

Find a Farmers' Market in Your Town

Daryl Hannah has a nice piece about the importance of buying your veggies at farmers' markets on her vlog, dh love life.

She links at the end to farmersmarket.com to help you find a farmer's market near you. They have five listed for my city, Oakland. I've listed them at the end of this post.

My husband and I went to a new farmers' market in Oakland, the Temescal Farmers' Market, a couple weeks ago, where I took the photos of the beets and tomatoes, and almost all of the produce there was organic, which was a real treat.

The Temescal Farmers' Market and is on Sundays, year-round, from 9 AM- 1 PM in the DMV Parking Lot at 5300 Claremont Ave.


Check out these heirloom tomatoes. Yum!

Farmers' Markets in Oakland via farmersmarket.com

East Oakland CFM
73rd Avenue & International Blvd
Oakland, CA 94621
Contact: Shene Bowie/Victor Johnson
(510) 638-1742
SEASONAL
Friday, 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.


Kaiser Hospital-Oakland CFM
3801 Howe Street
Oakland, CA 94901
Contact: Allen Moy
(800) 949-FARM
YEAR-ROUND
Friday, 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m

Oakland Grand Lake CFM
Grand & Lakepark Way
Oakland, CA 94901
Contact: Barbara Ambler-Thomas
(800) 897-FARM
YEAR-ROUND
Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

Oakland Mandela CFM
5th Street & Mandela Parkway
Oakland, CA 94610
Contact: David Roach
(510) 776-4178
YEAR-ROUND
Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

Oakland Jack London Square CFM
Broadway & Embarcadero Streets
Oakland, CA 94520
Contact: Tom Dorn
(800) 949-FARM
YEAR-ROUND
Sunday, 10:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

oakland
farmers
market
organic
local
food