Drawing Strength from our Ancestors

Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres talks about how her mother’s example and a belief that ancestors continue to accompany our struggles helps her and the indigenous movement in Honduras to continue to mobilize against injustice, state violence and corporate abuses.

Thriving Communities and Thriving Ecosystems through the Bee

I wanted to connect as many ‘honey peoples’ as possible because I felt that they had been forgotten. The ‘bee custodians’, as I like to call them as opposed to beekeepers, had held the space for bees throughout our previous generations. And yet the hunter-gatherer is pitched at the bottom of the strata of livelihoods.

3 Lessons for Building a Great Community: From a Very Small Town

Millbrook is located 15 miles northeast of Poughkeepsie in upstate New York. As of 2016, the population stood at 1,413. It’s a small village, but offers some big ideas when it comes to building a great community. Here are three important, scalable lessons offered by the small community…

Meet the German Network that Supports and Develops Sustainable Co-Housing Projects

The Mietshäuser Syndikat was launched to support self-organized, social housing projects. It connects successful, established projects with emerging ones to provide help, while at the same time reducing re-commercialization by ensuring all inhabitants co-own all real estate assets of all cohousing projects.

The Values of Values in Talking Climate #2 – Finding Common Ground

In last week’s blog, I looked at how the most constructive starting point from which to discuss climate change and energy issues is with what people value, and understanding and affirming this. In this week’s blog I want to share with you more on how to identify shared values that resonate between us – between the big, broad us.

Why I Love the Slow Bicycling movement

The end of the 19th century gave us one of the great advances in transportation history, the modern bicycle. Alas, the early years of the twentieth century gave us the speedometer. And while the speedometer was far from the worst technological development of the 1900s, a fixation on speed was an unfortunate detour for several decades of bicycling history, especially in North America.

Why the Resistance can’t Win without Vision

The tsunami of words and feelings about Trump has dominated the media and is likely to continue. The question is: Will reactivity to Trump continue among activists, or are we ready to channel our passion into more focused movement-building for change?

Reimagine, Don’t Seize, the Means of Production

One of the most difficult systems to reimagine is global manufacturing. If we are producing offshore and at scale, ravaging the planet for short-term profits, what are the available alternatives? A movement combining digital and physical production points toward a new possibility: Produce within our communities, democratically and with respect for nature and its carrying capacity.

Stereotypes

Even though many stereotypes have blurred, some parents today continue to hold narrow views of what it means to be a girl or boy.  We may be shocked and disgusted by stories from the #Metoo movement but perhaps such actions are the result of stereotypes that encourage boys to be dominant and girls to be submissive. 

Oregon-based Opportunity Village Eugene Addresses Homelessness with Tiny Houses

Opportunity Village Eugene (OVE) is a “tiny house” community in Eugene, Oregon, that provides secure accommodation for around 35 people who were previously homeless. OVE provides residents with more than just affordable shelter — being part of the village offers the dignity of having a private space…