Colorlines.com created an amazing infographic to detail Hurricane Katrina a decade later. Take a good look at it. How does this article and image make you feel? How does it inspire you to take action?
Here are some images from the infograhic, but check out the entire article and illustration because it is fantastic!
In our early years, we had a Monday Spotlight series where great new organizations and projects were highlighted because of the incredible work they were doing. One of those projects was Sofar Sounds in the A Little LA Monday Spotlight. At that time, music in a room was only a unique idea of music being brought into intimate living spaces around Los Angeles. Now this music project is much larger.
Sofar brings people together and allows them to communicate in a common way; music. Communication does not have to be A to B. Communication can be A, B, C, and D, communing together to enjoy a common love. This type of communication for common cause is a way to Social Change.
It is pretty easy to get involved with Sofar. Go to the website. Sign up. Get notified about upcoming shows. Their, ‘How It Works‘ page will be more helpful though.
Here is an informational video about them:
And here are a couple of our favorite videos:
Recently Project Kinect was contacted about this fantastic infographic about Copenhagen, a biking heaven. Take a moment to go through it. There is so much information about the steps the city has taken to become such a successful bike friendly city.The entire article can be found on IceBike.org.
At Project Kinect, we love biking. Here is another love of ours we discussed in October, 2014: People for Bikes.
Recently on a project with Peacework, we were introduced to Periscope. If you haven’t heard about it yet, let us have the excitement to introduce you to it. Periscope, similar to Meerkat, is a new social media platform that allows you to broadcast an event, meeting, conversation, or whatever, live for a much wider audience. The app also allows viewers to become interactive in the conversation by adding insight, asking questions, or just emoticons. We suggest you play with it and begin sharing it because we see it as an amazing vehicle to build bridges among diverse communities.
Here are some tools to help you better utilize Periscope:
by Stephanie Riedel
While you probably recognize, “that’s what she said!” as a joke, here in Madison it’s also a show that’s changing lives. Thought up in 2011 by Molly Vanderlin of The Bricks Theatre along with friends Miranda Hawk and Karen Saari-Pausch, they imagined a show where women could come together to find strength and share stories of their lives on stage with an audience.
Every show starts with a theme such as resolution, mother-load, lie or perfection and a group of six to ten women. Rehearsals start with a meet and greet where the women discuss the theme for that show and read what they have started writing. For the next month the cast breaks up into smaller groups that meet once a week to workshop what they’ve written with Molly leading them.
The whole process is emotional, powerful and sometimes extremely difficult. Even the most benign stories can lead to some pretty powerful places as the women explore them, which is exactly what makes this show so special. Past stories have included buying your first house as a single woman only to find you’ve got a roommate: a mouse; starting new Christmas traditions after your old ones were torn apart by divorce; that time you were in college and ended up working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club; having your first orgasm at fifty while coming to terms with a marriage that brings you both joy and absolutely no sex; coping with migraines that seek to destroy all the relationships around you; and being an adoptive mother trying to maintain her place in her child’s life as they meet their biological mother for the first time in India. Stories are unique to women, but reach out and transcend gender, race and age.
The women who perform are always from the community. Some of them have experience in performance, but not writing, others are writers, but not performers, still others have never done anything like this in their lives. The one thing they have in common is they are all terrified and they are all brave.
This August is their ninth show, themed Crave and marks the third year in the That’s What She Said run and this show may be the most important one yet with stories of addiction. Rehearsals start July 13th and the show runs August 20th-21st with eight women performing at The Brink Lounge (701 E. Washington Ave). Tickets are $15 and can be purchased at the door, or at brownpapertickets.com.
***For more information check out the group’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/TWSSBricks, or call (608)358-9609.
It is a tragic shame that Vu Le and his website, Nonprofits With Balls have just been introduced to our staff. We know that it is extremely difficult to keep reading this when you want to click the link to his website, but please refrain. We probably shouldn’t even be adding these sentences because you have already clicked it. If you haven’t, go ahead, click it. We’ll even put it here to make it easier for you to click…. Nonprofits With Balls.
Vu Le is extraordinary. He is a hot sexy unicorn to us for his candidness, ability to point out where real positive social change is and isn’t happening, and his humor about it all. Life is funny!
His website says this about him:
Vu Le is a writer, speaker, vegan, Pisces, and the Executive Director of Rainier Valley Corps, a start-up nonprofit with the mission of developing and supporting leaders of color to strengthen the capacity of communities-of-color-led nonprofits and foster collaboration between diverse communities to effect systemic change.
Vu’s passion to make the world better, combined with a low score on the Law School Admission Test, drove him into the field of nonprofit work, where he learned that we should take the work seriously, but not ourselves. There are tons of humor in the nonprofit world, and someone needs to document it. He is going to do that, with the hope that one day, a TV producer will see how cool and interesting our field is and make a show about nonprofit work, featuring attractive actors attending strategic planning meetings and filing 990 tax forms.
Known for his no-BS approach, irreverent sense of humor, and love of unicorns, Vu has been featured in dozens, if not hundreds, of his own blog posts at nonprofitwithballs.com. He is also the humor columnist for the awesome nonprofit online magazine, Blue Avocado. Vuenjoys talking about himself in the third person.
What’s with the name “Balls”?!
You may be thinking, “Why ‘Nonprofit with Balls’? Isn’t that sexist?! Why not ‘Nonprofit with Balls and Ovaries,’ you sexy sexist pig?!” The title comes from an experience he had, described here. Please read that entire post before writing him an angry email. Also, it refers to all the balls that we nonprofit professionals have to juggle: clients, board, staff, volunteers, funders, auditors, payrolls, budgets, cashflows, trainings, annual events, etc. We are all knee-deep in balls. We have balls coming at us from every direction. Sometimes we “drop the ball,” but no worries, since there is never a shortage of balls in this line of work.
Take a look at this video from Many Network. It is a great display of Le’s speaking ability and candor about what nonprofits really need to be successful.
In February of 2013, the very talented Amanda Palmer gave a Ted Talk in Long Beach, California. It needs to be revisited and we must remember that people are built to help others. If we ask and share for what we need, humanity will answer us. If you have not seen this video, enjoy! If you have seen it, then we suggest revisiting it.
Here is where you can find more about the Art of Asking.
On Monday, June 29th, Project Kinect’s founder, Gregg Potter, produced a program on WORTFM to illustrate the organization and have a conversation about positive social change and community engagement. He invited Sara Alvarado from the Alvarado Group, Amy Kesling from Sustain Dane, and Tariq Saqqaf, from the Madison Mayor’s Office to have an in-depth discussion on, ‘What positive social change looks like on an individual level?’ These change agents will discuss different definitions of positive social change and how each of them identify as an agent of change. The goal of this open dialogue is to build capacity to agents of change in Madison in the diverse life roles we play.
In a city like Madison, we must celebrate our social change and always remember how individually, we all make a difference.
You can listen to the show now on WORT’s Website.
We love satire! We have acknowledged this before. The Daily Show and Jon Stewart are great examples of how satire can capture large amounts of people and get a message across. Sometimes though, Jon Stewart excuses himself from his comedy and acknowledges when something just needs to be dealt with seriously, without humor. The recent terrorist attack in Charleston, South Carolina by an American was one of those moments.
We have a lot of obstacles in our country where positive social change is needed. Thank you Jon Stewart for acknowledging this. We will miss you when you depart.
We also love Elite Daily! John Haltiwanger published a fantastic article on white privilege in the shadows of the Charleston tragedy. The article does an excellent job of using one of the victims to illustrate how he is reminded of white privilege. He also references Jon Stewart.
**Photo credit goes to Weaselzippers and a good call out!
Life gets challenging in unique ways when working internationally. You find yourself in a different landscape with different cultural norms, often different languages you may not understand, and different methods to accomplish the same goal. I feel I have become pretty good at rolling with the changes and ambiguity of this work, however, this last month has challenged me in ways I never expected.
I’ve been with a group of university students from New York. We have been volunteering at an orphanage in Northern South Africa. The moment my group first met with the matriarch of the community, we were inspired and moved by her candid approach to the circumstances at the orphanage. The essence of what she said to us was, “Find your light.”
Despite my optimism and constant ability to be patient and open, I tend to lose my light. I lose it in logistics, outcomes, and other people’s needs. I feel this is normal and not negative but since Mgogo (grandma) said this to us, I’ve been unsettled by it. This last month has had me questioning, how can I keep my light all the time? What if our light was constant just like a happy thought in Neverland? So I’ve been trying.
The first weekend here, I got thrown into a situation of selflessness, courage, but mostly need. The community was putting together a funeral for a young mother who lived in the informal village next to the orphanage’s campus. It is tradition for the younger men to be very involved with funerals. Most men my age have passed away from AIDS in this community, so I was needed to be a pallbearer and then assist in burying the coffin. While shoveling dirt in front of family and loved ones, I couldn’t help thinking, “How do I find my light in this?”
Fortunately it has been easy. I find my light in the faces of these children who always have love to give. Despite being refugees, being raped, losing parents to HIV/AIDS, and some being HIV positive themselves, they are always giving love and able to receive it. One woman in my group described these children as, “warriors of battles we will never know.” As I venture into the day care today, I will remember this and hug my heart alive.
I also have been able to find my light in my Peacework participants. These ten courageous young adults have left the comfort of their homes to come volunteer in the most non-traditional of circumstances. They are up at 5am to get 200 children ready for breakfast and school while handling their individual projects, which are more challenging than most jobs they will be offered out of college. Even though they are tired, overworked, often ill and homesick, there are always smiles on their faces.
I believe to make our light the most available, we must better know that human connections are important. We must acknowledge that we are apart of nature and that real human connections are the key to unlocking the light that we already own. The light must be accessed but it is always there. We must train ourselves how to reach it when we need it; Just like a happy thought in Neverland to fly.
How do you access your light? Who helps your light appear immediately? How often do you connect/see/interact with them? Do you make their light appear?
I get reminded all the time that just like food and water, I need interaction with certain people. I try to be conscious of this and work it like a muscle. We must train ourselves on what connections are healthy and assist us in finding our light so it is always available. I don’t think this strategy will change the world, but anything is possible when bettering us on an individual level.
Good luck on finding your light!
