Arfdigita
BookCrossing
Breast Cancer Awareness Stamp
Calendar Women
Community Policing
Edible Schoolyard
Freedom Writers Diary
Fishing Has No Boundaries
Giraffe Project

The Giraffe Project

"Craig Kielburger didn't just listen to the stories of child slave labor and complain about how awful it was. He didn't wait for someone with more experience and training to 'fix the problem.' He stuck his neck out to take on a challenge. . . ."*

* John Graham. It's UP to Us. Langley, WA: The Giraffe Project, 1999:4.

Global Ideas Bank

The Global Ideas Bank is a web site devoted to solving the problem of how creative people with good ideas can share with one another. The site compiles over 2000 ideas from different 2472 schemes from different sources and publications in lists by category. Typical categories are Social Innovations, Children and Education, Relationships, Housing,Work & Unemployment, Crime & the Law, Health & Therapy, Environment and Ecology, Communication, Politics, Death and Dying, and Promoting Social Inventions.

Read some sample ideas.

Breast Cancer
Awareness Stamp

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No U.S. stamp had ever had its net proceeds above the cost of postage earmarked for a cause, and Bodai initially faced great resistance. This came not only from the Postal Service, but even from breast cancer research groups who feared they would lose existing research money.

Bodai persisted. As John Joss reported, the stamp "never would have happened without Bodai's persistence." Ultimately as a result of Bodai's efforts, 250,000 letters were sent to Congress, who approved the stamp in 1997. It first appeared in July 1998.

Within two months, 33 million were sold.

(Some of this information came from John Joss, "Stamping Out Breast Cancer," Front Lines, Modern Maturity, March-April 1999.)

Modest Needs

BookCrossing.com

It's bad news for the fish, but the goal of Fishing Has No Boundaries is to open up the great outdoors for people with disabilities through the world of fishing. Bobby Cammack, founded the group in 1986 after he encountered a problem getting in and out of a boat with a broken leg. The first event was held in 1988 near Hayward, Wisconsin with 80 people attending from seven states. From this first initial event it has now grown into a national organization with 13 chapters in eight states, helping thousands of disabled individuals participate fully in this recreational activity. Check out the web page for the latest events.

What if young people in at-risk neighborhoods had cameras to document their world?

Street Level Youth Media

From Chicago's Street-Level Youth Media web page:

Everything we are today started from a simple idea. What if young people in our west side neighborhood had video cameras to document the world as they saw it? What stories would they tell? What could they teach us?

Teens from the local high school took the idea and ran with it. That first summer they made forty videos about everything from gangs, to their families, to the gradual gentrification of their neighborhood. They threw a giant community block party and installed their videos on seventy monitors up and down the street. This first Street-Level Block Party drew national attention and inspired an entire community to celebrate the talents and dreams of their youngest residents.

With the success of this first effort, a new idea arose. What if there was a place in the neighborhood where Street-Level students could teach other kids how to make videos? What if there was a safe place to come in off the street and actually do something about the problems? That place was the first Street-Level storefront. Located across the street from Wells High School and on a corner where four gang lines converge, the storefront became known throughout the city as "that video place run by kids." In fact, the first pilot program, Neutral Ground, demonstrated how media can transform a community.

How far would you go
to raise $500,000 to fight leukemia?

Would you take it all off but your pearls? Would you do it if you were a doting grandmother, an active church member, and you'd never see 50 again?

The Ladies of Rylstone, England
Alternative Women's Institute Calendar
(Use Back key to return.)

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Parents at Arlington High in Indianapolis have a new way of policing teen events: dads. About two dozen fathers of kids in the school wear identifying tee shirts in school colors labeled "Security Dad." They come to the games, dances, and other teen events. If there's trouble, the dads are there to stop it.

Whenever kids start to become unruly, the dads approach them. They seldom have to do more because this is not just a guard, it's "Kisha's dad." Said one dad, "With an officer they think, 'Hey, I must be in trouble.' With us, they smile and say, 'Hey, what's up?' And we love it."

PAWS

You want to talk about BIG PROBLEMS?

Think elephants.
Think movie stars with fur and claws and really big teeth.

Mistreatment of performing animals was the problem Pat Derby identified more than 25 years ago when she worked as an animal trainer on the sets of many popular television shows (Flipper, Daktari, Gunsmoke, Lassie) and Disney films, as well as working with the famed Lincoln-Mercury cougars, Chauncey and Christopher. She was shocked to discover what she describes as "a profession rampant with cruelty, ignorance and lack of concern about the animals."

But how can an individual solve a problem as big as that?

Read about the PAWS solution.

THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARY: How a Group of Teens Used the Power of the Pen to Wage a War Against Intolerance

High school teacher Erin Gruwell faced a room of "unteachable, at-risk" students. She led them to study the diary of Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and then to write their their own diary entries. Her efforts to reach them resulted in a book written by the students, followed by book tours, TV appearances, and a change in students' beliefs about themselves. And they raised the funds to bring Zlata for a visit to the U.S. For more, read the book. Here's an excerpt.

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Three students from MIT and the Tufts University School of Veterinary Science traveled across 15 states in a 40-foot RV, showing animal shelters across the U.S. how to use a web-based software program. The three traveled to more than 40 shelters in an 11,000-mile trip.

The student volunteers take digital images of shelter animals and post these on the Web site with information about the animals.

Arfdigita Online Pet Adoption Center (Use Back key to return.)

Have you ever thought of starting a holiday? If you think it is impossible, read up on Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa is a festive, non-religious celebration, founded in 1966 by Dr. Maulana "Ron" Karenga, currently a professor at California State University, Long Beach. Beginning December 26, Kwanzaa is a time for African Americans to celebrate their heritage. It lasts for seven days. Each day focuses on one of seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.

Dr. Karenga modeled Kwanzaa after historical African fruit festivals in ancient Egypt. In this and other African celebrations, he found shared characteristics: gathering of the people; reverence for the Creator and creation; commemoration of the past, especially ancestors; re-commitment to our highest ethical and cultural values; and celebration of life's goodness.

A disabled child cannot automatically play with the same toys as children without disabilities. In the 1960s in Sweden, some parents of disabled children were finding it hard to find toys their children could use. They began to share toys, passing them around when their own children outgrew them.

They developed the idea of forming a source much like a library, where kids could check out toys rather than books, then bring them back on their due date. Out of that idea grew an international organization called Lekotek ("play library"). Not every U.S. state has branches yet, but the organization seeks volunteers to expand its sources. They loan toys, software, and computer games, sponsor parent groups, and engage in activities in schools to help foster understanding about disabilities.

Link to Lekotek.

Solar Cookers

Something as simple as a way to cook food without using firewood can change a nation. In emerging nations, people can spend much of the day searching for firewood. A creation that is, at base, aluminum foil and glass, can change that.

Famed restaurateur Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley not only works with her own elegant dinner house, but also with King Middle School where kids grow their own vegetables through a project called the Edible Schoolyard Project. The school has 780 students and a half acre farm plot where once there was asphalt on the school property.

In an interview with Online Chef, Waters, who received an "Excellence in Education" Award from the U.S. Dept. of Education in the1998-99 school year for her work with this project, said:

"We're planting a half acre plot on the school property and showing the children how to take care of the land. The garden will supply the school lunch program and the students will do all the harvesting, cooking, and serving of the food. We've remodeled the cafeteria kitchen which hasn't been used in 17 years and, eventually, we will be building a new lunchroom and kitchen. We want to make this a model project to show the students where their food comes from, to respect both the food and the land that produced it, and, hopefully, to use this as the model for all institutional food service."

She may get her wish. The Edible Schooyard web page reports : "In 1999-2000, the Berkeley Unified School District, inspired by the success of the Edible Schoolyard, adopts a policy of incorporating organic produce to the greatest extent possible in their meals programs."

Reported on CBS Sunday Morning

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Sam Keen, author of Learning to Fly, turned his fascination with the circus trapeze into a program called Upward Bound for troubled kids and abused women. He explained what he thought they could gain from "learning to fly" in an interview with Scott London.

Many of the abused women in the program were afraid of loneliness and of not being able to take care of themselves, so they stayed in abusive relationships. Trapeze helped them to discover that being alone and independent is less frightening than an abusive relationship. They also learned something about trust. One woman said to me, "I don't trust men. I think they're after me all the time. But having people on the safety lines, helping me on the board, and catching me has made me reevaluate my attitude."

Troubled kids typically talk about getting high: "I never knew there was another way of getting high except by drugs." They talk about how much better trapeze is because they don't get hung over and feel ashamed. They also increase their self-esteem by doing things they didn't think they could do.

At Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, genealogical volunteers provide information available in their area to those who live far away. This program was started by two researchers who saw the need for such a service. The site grew very rapidly from just a statewide service to an international one. The volunteers of this movement have agreed at least once per month to do a research task in their local area as an act of kindness.

Using photography as "a gimmick to get to the kids," (according to Walter Bodle, co-founder), Youth in Focus reaches kids by letting them photograph their own world.

During the program, students are given 35-mm cameras, rolls of film, access to a darkroom, and assignments every week. Each one also has a photography mentor who is a professional or serious amateur photographer. Students are asked to produce two exhibition-quality prints by the end of the term. The program encourages students to document their own neighborhoods and families. Their images are then displayed in area galleries, coffee shops and community centers.

Co-founder Walter Bodle says that what the program really aims to do is "send a message to these young people that they matter, that they can be successful and that there's a safe place to do it."

(Initially based on an article by Mieke H. Bomann at the American News Service.)

When the old crime-fighting method of arresting criminals seemed unable to stop the flood of crime across the nation, police officials turned to a different approach--collaboration with the community to both prevent and punish crime. The approach was initially advanced by Herman Goldstein in the late 1970s. His strong advocacy and the work other influential criminal justice academics and practitioners changed the face of policing in the United States and Canada, and now, even other countries. For more detail go to the home site of the Community Policing Consortium.

"Every individual matters, every individual has a role to play, every individual makes a difference."
--Jane Goodall

Roots and Shoots

Roots & Shoots is a youth organization developed by Dr. Jane Goodall. In local groups, Roots & Shoots members plan and implement projects based on their group's unique interests, resources and community concerns. Roots & Shoots projects address one or more of the following three themes:

• Care and concern for the environment
• Care and concern for animals
• Care and concern for the human community.