Protest in support of Dhondup Wangchen; Photos: SFTHQ

In the early hours of the morning, she will sell this bread on the main square of the Indian town of McLeod Ganj. This little town is famous all over the world for being the residence of the Tibetan government in exile and of the Tibetan community’s most known and respected member, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

It is a colorful community made of displacement. Travelers abound, mixing with the Tibetan and Indian populations. If you look closely enough, you’ll see signs of protest everywhere: the ubiquitous “I Love Tibet” bags, organizations such as Students for a Free Tibet, and the Tibet Hope Centre. Recently, Lhamo Tso, the subject of this article, spoke at the organization, Learning and Ideas for Tibet.

Dhondup Wangchen; Photo: SFTHQ

Lhamo Tso’s story is a microcosm of what lies behind the smiling faces of many of the Tibetan people travelers encounter in McLeod Ganj. Lhamo Tso’s husband, Dhondup Wangchen, was arrested by Chinese authorities in March 2008 for making a documentary film about Tibetans’ opinions of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

He spent some time on a dangerous journey through Tibet, and was arrested along with his helper shortly after they successfully managed to smuggle the tapes of the extensive interviews he had conducted out of the country. He was charged with inciting seperatism and since his arrest his family have had no opportunity to see him or communicate with him. You can find out more about Dhondup’s exceptional film here.

Lhamo Tso is a remarkable woman, who independently supports Dhondup Wangchen’s parents, the four children she has with him, and a niece. She speaks clearly, with conviction, and relentlessly about her husband’s arrest, citing that he has committed no crime in documenting people’s opinions. She recounts that he has been denied medical treatment and legal representation by the Chinese authorities.

Dhondup Wangchen was kept in detention for two years, and finally sentenced to six years of imprisonment in January 2010. Two different Chinese human rights lawyers offered to represent him, following which both were threatened with the suspension of their licenses. Dhondup has been beaten, tortured, and has contracted Hepatitis B in prison, and has been transferred to a hard labour camp. Lhamo is fearful that he will not survive the ordeal, especially considering the fact that he is denied medical treatment.

The Tibetan Women’s Association has made a documentary about Lhamo Tso’s life, called “Lhamo Tso: Behind the Sea,” that you can watch here. Lhamo Tso and other women who have lost partners and family members need support. You can help to contribute to an international movement petitioning for the release of Tibetan political prisoners at Free Tibetan Heroes International pressure has been known to reduce the sentence of political prisoners, and your voice can make a difference. If you have a blog or a Facebook profile, you can help make a difference in Lhamo Tso’s life and in the lives of many women like her. Your voice counts, and people like Dhondup Wangchen and Lhamo Tso need you to speak out for them.

Community Connection:

Want to learn more about Lhamo Tso and Dhondup Wangchen? Visit the Reporters without Borders website.

Kids in Gaza Camp; Photos: Author

I recently met up with Jordanian blogger and social activistAli Dahmash and Mohammad Yousef, a Jordanian engineer living in Ryadh, to talk about social issues affecting their country.

“Let’s start with some figures,” Ali said. “Jordan has the highest number of Palestinian refugees: around two million. With the Iraq war, Jordan has been hosting more than 500,000 Iraqi refugees. Poverty levels reach 13% and 50% of the population is under 30.”

According to Ali, the country’s most poverty-stricken regions are in central and southern Jordan. “Palestinian refugees are among the most needy,” he explained. “They have no citizenship or national ID; therefore, they can’t work anywhere, [and they] can’t get health insurance nor social security or free education.”

Where the UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] is involved, schools were built and healthcare centers have been opened. But while the UN is helping the refugees, the UN itself is ignoring all the UN resolutions against Israel. Same applies to the WHO and World Food Organization: they spend millions to support Palestinians and at the same time they work with pro-Zionist organizations.”

Sharing a border with Palestine makes Jordan’s heavy involvement in the Palestinian issue inevitable. “The whole idea of activism grew stronger during the war on Gaza,” explained Ali, “and the shipping company Aramex launched a campaign to collect every kind of donation from Jordan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia: people from all ages, children, women, men helped and drove near the airport to sort the boxes going to Gaza. The spirit was truly overwhelming.”

A nursery sponsored by volunteers.

“Most activities are aimed at youth empowerment and social awareness,” said Mohammad. “Although charities are the leading organizations, grassroots activism is getting stronger.”

Ali and Mohammad have helped me make out a list of volunteering opportunities in Jordan.

Ruwwad

Ruwwad specializes in local community development, domestic issues, and education opportunities. They have built a local library, a gym, an Internet lab, a police station, and a post office. Many volunteers (Jordanians and non Jordanians) work with Ruwwad to provide language and handcraft classes, even lessons on how to create blogs. Also, many schools in Jordan take their students on volunteering trips to Ruwwad.

Gaza Camp in Jerash

“A group of seven people, including myself,” said Ali, “founded an NGO in the Gaza Camp in Jerash, one of Jordan’s most populated and poor refugee camps, to boost business opportunities. 23,000 people are living in one square kilometer and none of them have a national ID or passport. Our idea is to encourage established enterprises to launch their projects here, [thus] securing a regular income for the refugees. We will extend this initiative also to other poor areas in Jordan.”

Ibdaa

Ibdaa(‘Talent’ in Arabic) sponsors gifted children in different fields such as music, education or any talent they might have, with the goal to give them the chance to cultivate their abilities. “I, myself, have participated in one of their projects,” told me Ali, “and I’ve collected the money to buy a laptop for a girl who was starting university.”

Kitabi Kitabak

Kitabi Kitabak (‘My Book, Your Book’) works closely with the UNRWA and Ibdaa, and specializes in building libraries for children. “Some of the children I met didn’t even know what color pens are!” said Ali. Kitabi Kitabak has built libraries in refugee camps in Jordan, Palestine, and Syria.

Zikra

Zikra is an initiative that promotes an “tourism exchange” where people get to know each others’ cultures by mutual visits to their respective communities. “You can provide money or workshops to the local community in exchange for a trip where residents will teach you their traditional crafts and make you experience their lifestyle,” explained Ali.

Nakhweh

Nakhweh– “your means for giving back to communities in the Arab world,” Nakhweh– was started by a group of young Jordanians, who set up this website to encourage people to get involved in the life of local communities. They list all opportunities available and help volunteers find what best matches their interests, enhancing individual participation in the vulnerable areas where they feel most comfortabl.

Ali’s devotion to his projects is remarkable: “Social activism is growing in Jordan, maybe not as much as in other countries, but I hope we are on the right track. And thanks to social media like Twitter and Facebook, it’s much easier to get in touch.”

Community Connection:

If you’ve got some downtime from volunteering in Jordan, you might want to use Baxter Jackson’s article “In Jordan, Forget Lonely Planet; Bring the Bible” as your guide to religious sites. And if you love art, then check out Sarah Irving’s article, “Modern Art in Amman, Jordan.”

Photo: Michael Hite

Cold? Think twice before bundling up in a blanket or sleeping bag, as doing so just may result in a warrant for your arrest.

At least it could in Boulder, Colorado.

How and why does the city of Boulder–especially known for its laid back vibe–appear to be criminalizing its homeless population?

The answer–though somewhat baffling–has to do with an anti-camping ordinance, which outlaws sleeping outside with any sort of shelter besides clothing. The law has resulted in Boulder police issuing over 1,600 tickets in the past year, reported The Boulder Weekly reported recently.

Sticking Up for Shelter

Boulder’s only homeless shelter shuts down during summer months, and can only accommodate 160 individuals in the winter–less than 25% of the city’s individuals living on the streets.

Last November, it was this lack of space that led David Madison to be turned away from the Boulder County Shelter. That night, Madison returned to the streets with a sleeping bag to shield himself from the bite of the 11 degree Colorado air.

When the police found Madison, they deemed him guilty of camping. The only reason? His frost-covered sleeping bag.

Should America’s homeless population be left to choose between hypothermia and jail?

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) doesn’t think so. On June 28th, the ACLU filed a suit in Boulder, calling the anti-camping ordinance unfair and unconstitutional. In a letter sent to the Boulder City Council, the ACLU wrote:

“The City of Boulder has no legitimate interest in criminalizing its residents who are without a home, forced to sleep outdoors in the cold, and merely want to cover themselves in order to survive.”

The ACLU has suggested that the city amend the ordinance to clarify that using a blanket or sleeping bag “by itself” is not shelter. Furthermore, it explained:

“While we continue to believe that the arrest and prosecution of Boulder’s homeless residents under these circumstances violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, it is not necessary to wait for a court ruling in order to conclude that these arrests and prosecutions are senseless, and bad public policy.”

Amen to that.

Homelessness by the Numbers

The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates that approximately 3.5 million people, 1.35 million of them children, are likely to experience homelessness in any given year. The number of families in homeless shelters even jumped 7% from 2008-2009.

With those statistics, the Obama administration–along with the support of volunteers throughout local communities–has taken on several initiatives to help to those without shelter.

On June 22nd, Obama issued a statement vowing to end homelessness within 10 years. The plan, called “Opening Doors,” grew out of a federal law signed in 2009, requiring the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness to develop a plan of action. Though their ideas have only recently been defined on paper, many remain optimistic about the administration’s commitment to this cause.

How Can I Help?

The National Coalition on Homelessness outlines four ways you can help America’s homeless: Contribute, Advocate, Reach out, and Educate, or “CARE.” For more information on each of these activities, visit the organization’s website.

If you’d like to support the ACLU’s efforts to decriminalize homelessness in Boulder, please sign this petition put together by Change.org.

Community Connection:

Want to work hands-on with people affected by homelessness? Check out our Urban Volunteering series, a guide to volunteer opportunities in cities around the world.

It can sometimes feel frustrating to me as a writer who is deeply interested in social change, that the extent of my intervention can only be what seems like passive reporting. Many times, writers want to push the boundaries of what their writing can make possible.

Recently, I found out about a very interesting way to come more actively involved as a writer–a special kind of interventionist journalism called “Peace Journalism”.

Peace journalism, first introduced by the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, is a counter to war reportage. Peace journalists follow the central agenda of conflict resolution quite consciously and deliberately in their writing.

The peace journalist acts as a third party that can facilitate peace and conflict resolution by representing all sides of a conflict in a non-aggressive manner, highlighting the sources of the conflict and the various social and cultural differences between the parties in order for them to be able to understand one another, and by focusing on peace and human creativity to uphold human rights and help the readers to become aware of the situation as it really is and not as propaganda would have them believe.

Galtung’s approach

Professor Galtung, who is influenced by Gandhi, and runs Transcend (a peace and development network) describes his approach in an interview with The Kyoto Journal:

The basic pillar of my approach is to sit down with all the parties in the conflict. Not together, only one at a time. They should not meet if the conflict is hard. They should only meet when they are ready for it, and they’re usually not. So you sit there and try to have a dialogue without any predetermined end.

Photo by: PalFest

What you do is to try to understand the inner logic of the person you’re with, to the point where you almost feel that the borders between the two of you start disappearing. On some occasions, during this process, the other person has often exclaimed to me: “It’s amazing, you understand me better than my own deputy prime minister!”

Such responses have convinced me that peace workers can train themselves to establish this deep kind of communication. Of course, sometimes I have to restrain myself, and not point out that perhaps the deputy prime minister wants to replace his boss, and so needs a certain border between them. I, on the other hand, have no interest other than understanding the positions of the persons I’m working with. Often, this can make it easier for the peace worker to work with a leader than even his closest advisors.

With the continuing changes in communications and the media, this becomes even more complicated than it originally seems. Media coverage of a conflict situation greatly shapes the readers’ perspective about the issue.

Of course, Professor Galtung, as proposer of peace journalism, is dealing with conflicts at a completely different intensity level, but what can a fledgling journalist do to make his work approach this intervention?

The basics

Here are some basic things that can help a beginner understand peace journalism and the aspects it covers:

1) Understand that everyone has an agenda and that under the guise of objectivity a lot of reporting ends up as war propaganda.

2) This kind of journalism often leads to reporting without representing cultural contexts properly and results in “black and white” labeling. To counter this, you can think above the usual questions, “How many were killed today?” and “Who is winning?” by asking two additional ones: “What is this conflict about?” and “What are possible solutions?”

Photo by: ctrouper

3) Peace journalism tries to open the doors of objectivity by showing both positive and negative efforts from both sides of the conflict and very consciously adopts its own agenda, that of peace and conflict resolution. Isis International provides some amazing insights and practical advice about how to develop this in your writing,

4) Peace journalism is not about plight syndrome but very consciously tries to approach the most positive solution possible for the conflict or plight at hand.

5) Leaders are not quoted without their claims being first evaluated and language is never melodramatic or sensational. Another page you can see for advice and guidelines is Transcend’s own for principles and guidelines for its writers.

Publications

Of course, not all publications will encourage intervention, but there are some whose editorial policy solely focuses on this approach.

The International for example, takes the peace journalism approach to report about Politics, Commerce, Environment, Health, Culture and Rights with the following editorial policy:

The International avoids the use of labels such as “left-wing,” “right-wing” or “extremist” because they greatly increase disparities between people over time. Instead, we explain the reasons behind people’s ideas and impartially analyze the possible solutions to improve human condition.

To someone who wants to intervene in addition to report, this seems like a responsible and sustainable way to go about dealing with an issue that concerns the welfare of people and facilitates social change. The positive possibilities seem infinite, if handled the correct way.

Community Connection

Has anyone had experience with peace journalism? Share your experiences and thoughts below.

Just getting started as a travel journalist? Check out the Quick and Dirty Guide to Successful Travel Journalism. Hoping for funding? Emma Jacobs shares 31 Travel Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants to Fund your Next Trip Abroad.

Sarah Palin, the new feminist. Photo: Bruce Tuten

Last week, the Southern Baptist Convention officially denounced divorce. Their Bible-thumping decree couldn’t help bring back fond memories of SPC’s 1998 proclamation that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

Newsweek’s front cover featured an article by Lisa Miller titled, “Saint Sarah–What Palin’s Appeal to Conservative Christian Women Says About Feminism and the Future of the Religious Right.”

And The Atlantic’s July/August cover story, by Hanna Rosin, brazenly countered “The End of Men-How Women are Taking Control of Everything.”

Something’s stirring here and it sounds a little familiar.

Women getting too powerful? Let’s lay down antiquated, selective inerrantist proclamations to make Rush Limbaugh-listening men and the women who love them feel better about their lives.

While we’re at it, let’s make a role model out of an insipid Alaskan pro-life talking head who will gladly espouse conservative, gender discriminatory doctrine under the guise of femininity and (go girls!) women’s power.

Real power

For the first time in history, women have the undeniable opportunity to be equitably powerful, to make all of our own choices in our lives and have the same opportunities as men.

According to Hanna Rosin’s article, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in US history this year.

Photo: quinet

And for every two men who get a college degree in 2010, three women will do the same.

Women live longer and are, arguably, better suited for the modern post-industrial age. According to Rosin, the attributes most desirable today, “social intelligence and open communication… –are at a minimum, not predominately male”.

Women don’t even need a 1:1 ratio of men to biologically procreate–not to say anything of the complex roles of parenting.

The gap

Despite these statistics, there is still a prevailing wage gap between men and women. One that can still be attributed to gender discrimination. As of 2006, women earned 76.6 cents to the dollar to men. African-American women earned 64 cents to the dollar, and Hispanic women’s earnings dropped to 52 cents per dollar earned by white men.

Not only are wages inequitable, but women continue to assume most child care and the upper echelons of society are still male-dominated.

Barbara J. Berg, author of Sexism in “Amerca: Alive, Well, and Ruining our Future” writes:

Under then-President Bush, we saw cutbacks in programs vital to women’s health, reproductive rights and education. Much of this was done covertly, but when it was brought out in the open it was justified as budget-cutting for the war. The emphasis on the individual at the expense of government programs was also a feature of [Bush's] administration. There has been increased violence in our popular culture on the one hand, and a hypersexualization of women and girls on the other, in our post-9/11 society…There have been reductions in childcare facilities and vast food insecurities (a euphemistic term for hunger) due to wage decreases, the reduction of food stamps and the like. Something often overlooked is how many women’s studies and women’s history programs have been put on the chopping block because schools had to make reductions and these are among the first [programs] to go. This hurts the awareness of what is happening to women’s rights.

Unfortunately, the story of how circus elephants are trained in learned helplessness resonates as I write this. When young, the elephants are attached by heavy chains to deep stakes in the ground. After ineffective struggling, the elephants give up, learning they cannot pull free. From that point on, even if the elephant has a slender rope loosely tied, it will not try to escape.

As Gavin de Becker wrote, “Because it believes it cannot, it cannot.”

Don’t turn your back

It feels the women’s movement is now being used against us by the Christian Right, bottling their brand with the fresh new label “female power”.

And Sarah Palin is their number one spokeswoman. God help us all.

In Lisa Miller’s Newsweek article, Sarah Palin has become a pro-life role model, if not “prophet, ordained by God for a special role in the cosmic battle against the forces of evil.”

Tell that to Sarah Palin. Photo: juliejordanscott

She’s giving pro-life talks to women’s groups and pro-life organizations around the country. Despite other pressing issues (economy, war, oil spills…) abortion is still a hot issue.

In 2010, 11 states passed anti-abortion laws and 370 anti-abortion bills were introduced in state legislatures, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Sarah Palin has even started to describe herself as a feminist (gasp! dirty word) due to her family values and devotion to her children.

Palin says old feminism is a relic of “the faculty lounge at some East Coast College.”

The new feminists–the women who follow Palin–aren’t third wave feminists. They aren’t focused on birth control, sex ed, gender discrimination, or choosing between work and family.

According to Miller, these women, instead, seek to “submit to male authority and conservative theology while assuming more visible roles in families, churches, communities, and the world.”

Staying submissive to men and conservative theology while being powerful isn’t just a non-sequitur. It’s hollow, just like the puppets these women, who are a loudmouth spout of men’s values, end up being.

Outrage–or lack of

Despite the fear of the power the Christian Right have on America– the Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant demonimation in US and have 16 million members alone–the group to be worried about are the Buchanan-coined “silent majority”.

By not getting more outraged that we –women– are likely paid less, treated poorly or ignored, stripped of our ability to choose, denied medical rights and childcare, and generally discriminated against while we’re in the population, college, and workforce majority, we do the worst damage to feminism.

Photo:Frerieke

We set ourselves back, other minorities back, and the rest of the world’s women back, by not demanding the right to make all of our own choices and have access to equal opportunities.

So what can we do?

Educate ourselves about the history of women and the incredibly complex relationships between the sexes, stay aware of introduced legislation and write your congressmen/women, demand raises and equal treatment in the workforce, and support our fellow women’s choices, whatever they may be.

You can also check out the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Association for Women’s Right in Development for more information about events that fight for equality around the world.

Community Connection

Tell us what you think. Any ideas? Arguments?

Do you think that Feminism is Dead and James Chartrand Killed Her?

All photos courtesy of Maggie Soladay/Above photo: SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster with a case worker at Vatsalya’s female sex workers clinic in Ajmer, India.

Building teams of professional and amateur writers/journalists, photographers,  and filmmakers, SalaamGarage organizes trips around the world to tell the untold stories of people whose lives have been improved and often saved by the work of partner NGOs.

I took a class with trip designer and leader, Maggie Soladay in 2008, a year after SalaamGarage had begun. On the last day, we went around the room and discussed what we would be doing after the class.  She outlined the premise of SalaamGarage.

I remember my awe and envy; all I had to say for what I was doing next was continuing to teach basic writing to college freshmen.

Sex workers clinic in Ajmer, India.

India

The first Salaam Garage trip was to India in 2007, where writers and photographers toured some of Vatsayla’s programs, including the women’s self-help groups; HIV/AIDS clinics; a health clinic for female sex workers; and the Udayan home for former street children, orphans, and other underprivileged children.

Maggie Soladay said,

I thought I was there to tell a story about a small boy whose mother had died from TB as she begged outside a hospital with her three kids.  The youngest child was tiny, limp, and nearly dead from TB as well when he was rescued by Udayan.  Instead, this bright girl named Soniya walked up to me after class one day and I knew my photo documentary chose me. Soniya’s story floored me; she and her two sisters had been found living under a bridge, orphaned 5 years earlier. Now they are doing great in school and couldn’t be more sweet, beautiful or safe.

Vietnam

The next trip was three months later to Quang Tri Province in Vietnam, a region devastated by some of the Vietnam War’s fiercest bombing. The land is still littered with unexploded ordnance.

The group traveled from Hanoi to Hoi Anand, and then into villages served by PeaceTrees Vietnam. PeaceTrees Vietnam has cleared over 400 acres of land and planted over 40,000 indigenous trees.  The SalaamGarage team was the first group of American writers and photographers allowed to enter the Quang Tri province through Peace Trees Vietnam.

SXSW

More recently, Amanda lead a panel at SXSW, “Citizen Journalism and the Little NGO that could”, explaining how travel to the developing world can be support for communities and local organizations and how a tweet or status update can impact people forever.

Participant Eduardo Sciammarella interviewing Santosh.

Future Trips

Guatemala and Ethiopia are on the schedule for 2010 with spots open for both trips.  There is a $500 deposit for the spot and fees for all trips; however, scholarship opportunities are available along with fund raising advice from the founders.

In Guatemala, the group will be working with Agros International,  a group dedicated to giving indigenous people land ownership and greater economic and community stability.

In Ethiopia, SalaamGarage will be working with the Hamlin Fistula Hospital and Foundation; the foundation helps women with childbirth related injuries, giving them physical therapy and a chance to live a normal life again.

As soon as I can, and not soon enough, I will be going on one of the trips. It would do so much more than appease my desire to travel and see as much of the world as I can. I would get a chance to be a part of something that could change the world by raising awareness and funds for the NGOs and, I have a suspicion, change my own life.

Community Connection

Find SalaamGarage on Twitter and on their website. Read more about the power of citizen journalism in Tim Patterson’s article Response: Travel Writing as a Political Act.

Photo: ydhsu

The common attribute of the people we studied–including Jane Addams and Sara A. Collins Fernandis –was that they all saw a social problem, wanted to fix it, and got off their ass, brought people together, and did something about it.

The not-so-subtle message for students in the social work program was that we were expected to pick up the banner of social change and run with it. What I’m saying is that until recently, my model of activism has very much been rooted in, well, activity.

But after reading a recent article in Fast Company magazine about “slacktivism,” I’m beginning to think that passive forms of activism might not be as contradictory as they seem at first glance.

“Slacktivism” is the term that has been coined to describe quick actions, like texting to make a donation or “signing” an online petition. One of the entries in Urban Dictionary conveys obvious disdain for slacktivism, defining the word as “[t]he act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.”

I don’t know about “obviously pointless.”

Photo: Lisa Brewster

If you take a look at how much money was raised for Haiti via text messages (more than $16 million by Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti as of May 11, for instance), you’ll be inclined to at least think twice about “slacktivists.” And though you can find plenty of naysayers about the futility of online petitions, organizations like Change.org and MoveOn rely on them to demonstrate support and pressure the government and other interest groups to take action on issues as diverse as gay rights and the oil spill.

Slacktivism does have limitations; the collection of money and signatures is only useful, for example, if they’re directed to legitimate causes and are managed/implemented properly. And critics complain that “slacktivists” never have to get their hands dirty… just check out this group… on Facebook no less (Hey! Click to join our group “Slacktivism is an OUTRAGE!”).

But I think slacktivism is a valid form of activism. At the very least, it gets people interested in an issue that they might not have been aware of before… even if they don’t roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.

The film documents the journeys of the political musicians Michael Franti, Fat Mike (NOFX), Paris, and Anti-Flag, whose music and message have “enraged, enlightened and inspired a new generation of activists around the world.”

Sounds Like a Revolution – HD Trailer from Deltatime Productions on Vimeo. /  Feature photo – Scott Penner on Flickr

Sounds Like a Revolution also features songs and commentary by a variety of artists, including Pete Seeger, David Crosby, The Dixie Chicks, Steve Earle, Ani DiFranco, Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins, Ice T, and Rage Against the Machine.

The world premiere is going to be on Wednesday, June 16th at 8:30 p.m. at the NFB Mediatheque in Toronto (150 John Street, Toronto, ON). Visit NXNE.com for ticket information.

Community Connection:

If you are into music, check out Matador’s Music Festival page!

Kate Metzler, right; volunteering with the Culinary Corps in New Orleans; Photo: Julie Schwietert

Kate Metzler wears a gold shark tooth on a chain around her neck.

In a way, it seems like a relic from an East Coast, 1980s childhood, but for Kate it’s also a reminder of the mission she’s focused on every day: saving sharks. And shark fins, specifically.

Metzler is a socially and environmentally conscious chef trying to raise awareness about shark fin soup. Fascinated with sharks during her childhood, much of which was spent on Cape Cod, her interest in one of the ocean’s most reviled animals has only deepened over the years. She reads extensively about sharks and has swum with sharks on an environmental expedition.

But it’s her work as a chef that has made her more attuned to one of the most persistent and lethal threats sharks face: the desirability of their fins.

Though Metzler has not made shark fin soup, she has become aware of how pervasive the shark fin trade is–and how lucrative it is, too.

“Yes, shark fins are sold openly in Chinatown [in New York],” she tells me, explaining how the gelatinous fins are skinned and dried for sale. They might as well be a tidy stack of gold bars; single fins can sell for as much as $20,000.

MatadorU student Mike Collins, a former commercial fisherman, confirms that a haul of fins is not unlike pulling up a net full of cash. “When the Blue Fin Tuna started becoming scarce most of the tuna boats in Maine jumped on the ‘finning’ band wagon.” At the height of the shark fin craze, he said, fishermen were taking in $42 per pound of fin.

Photo: mocvdleung

The fins are repurposed as a delicacy, and the going rate for a bowl of shark fin soup can top $100. And while you may not remember the last time you saw fin soup on a menu, an August 2009 post on the blog Animal Tourism says you don’t have to look all that hard: San Francisco has at least 69 restaurants serving shark fin, while New York City has at least 56.

Cash aside, it’s at the table, over soup, where things get dicey. The soup’s popularity dates back to the Ming Dynasty, and shark fin is purported to have medicinal benefits. It’s also supposed to kick start your sex life. Shark fin soup is a dish that represents so many things, among them, status and adherence to cultural traditions.

Matador contributor Valerie Ng has had shark fin soup “on a few occasions, always at family restaurant outings (usually for special occasion like a birthday, wedding, or anniversary).” For a long time, Valerie wasn’t aware of how fins were procured or the consequences of “finning.”

When she learned more about the process, she stopped eating the soup, though has felt awkward at gatherings where it is served. “I’ve never had to pay for it myself,” Valerie says, but that hasn’t made the moral and ethical dilemmas easier for her. “It does pain me to see leftover bowls of the soup, and sometimes I feel compelled to help myself, so as not to let them go to waste,” she explains. And yet, her parents boycott the soup and have asked organizers of family outings not to order the soup on occasion.

Metzler hasn’t tried the soup herself–she’s thinking about it, reasoning, “How can I talk about this issue if I’ve never even tasted the soup?”–but as a chef, she can explain its role as an ingredient. “It’s basically used as a thickening agent,” she says, “but the actual flavor of the soup comes from a lot of other ingredients, not the fin itself.”

Mike Collins has had shark fin soup on several occasions and describes it as having no flavor at all. “It is just cartilage,” he says, confirming what Kate suggests about the other ingredients: “It is [everything else that] goes in the soup that has the flavor.”

Photo: Hector Garcia

Here’s what happens when shark fins are cut with the soup bowl in mind. The shark dies. Whether by drowning (it can no longer swim) or by having its position in the food chain completely upended, the definned shark has no chance of survival.

And the fin is usually the only part that is saved. While Mike said whatever other parts were saved would be used to bait lobster traps when he was a fisherman, Kate explained why shark steaks and kabobs are not all that popular: shark meat’s high ammonia content means that unless it has a fast transition from sea to table, and is cared for with exceptional attention in the process, it poses significant health hazards to the person eating it.

For all these reasons, Kate is on a mission to get chefs to commit to not serving shark fin. She’s turned off by groups like PETA and Sea Shepherd and her face contorts when I mention something about activism. She’s not even entirely comfortable aligning herself with the few groups that have taken on the shark fin issue because she’s uncomfortable with their preachy tone. “I don’t want to tell people that making shark fin soup or eating it is wrong,” she says. “I just want to make them aware of related issues so they can make their own informed choices.”

Community Connection:

Have you eaten shark fin soup? Have you ever had a culinary experience that caused a conflict with your environmental values? Share your experiences in the comments.

Last week I scheduled a hair cut and felt a little selfish. I’ve read for weeks now about the catastrophic April 20 BP oil spill, feeling enraged and powerless. Thanks to Abbie Mood’s article, I contacted the Sierra Club about volunteering. Still, I wanted to do more for the Gulf.

I didn’t realize trying a full bang would help.

When I arrived at my local salon, the thoughtful manager had informed all the stylists about Matter of Trust, put up flyers for clients to learn more, and set up a designated lined trash can to collect all the clippings.  My hair cut yielded about two cups of hair.

The Stats:

According to Matter of Trust, one gallon of hair can soak up a quart of oil in a minute. It makes sense that hair would be natural and effective at collecting oil; that’s why we shampoo.

Salons and individuals can sign up to donate. Hair leftovers are made into oil mats and socks.

Fur is also excellent at absorbing oil. Professional and home groomers can donate fur and farmers can contribute wool and alpaca fleece.

Have panty hose or Spanx laying around? Send them too. The hair and fur are stuffed into the recycled hosiery.

Matter of Trust’s natural fiber recycling initiative in the Gulf has caught on. The average salon cuts approximately a pound of hair per day; groomers sheer about 3 pounds a day.

As of Thursday, May 20, 2010,  BP has contacted MT requesting information and hundreds of thousands of pounds of hair, fur, fleece, feathers and nylons have been donated from all over the world.

See it:

Watch Matter of Trust’s super quick demonstration of hair soaking up oil:

(Music: “My Other Love” by Pretty Lights)

You can also check out this other Matter of Trust video to see how the whole process works.

(Music: “Via Con Me” by Paolo Conte)

The Future:

Last year, 2,600 oil spills happened around the world. Keep collecting your hair and pet fur, frequent salons and groomers that donate, and ask your local salons and groomers to donate if they don’t already.

Community Connection:

Sign up here to donate hair, fur, hosiery, or money to Matter of Trust. Let us know if you donate or plan to donate!

Send before/after photos of yourself, friends, and pets after donating to nancy (at) matadornetwork (dot) (com).

Photo: Rachel Strohm

An idea is nothing without funding–and that funding is often secured by writing a two to three page proposal and budget detailing your plans and goals.

As a writer, activist, and the daughter of a foundation director, l know that careful and meticulous grant writing can go a long way in the effort to implement real change.

1. Be realistic.

Don’t propose the work of 30 volunteers if you’ve only recruited the help of three. Don’t say you’ll commit 40 hours per week if you already have a full time job.

Think long and hard about what you can commit, but also consider opportunities for growth down the road. Funders want to see that you’re thinking long term, even if their money is used for preliminary set up, structure, or supplies.

2. Be concrete.

Your budget should include basic items like office supplies, rent, salary, fringe benefits, telephone, or any other relevant expenses. This applies to your goals section, too. Try to quantify ways to gauge your progress and success.

For example, instead of “We hope to ensure greater access to clean water,” you might say, “we hope to ensure that 10 more communities in X region are given clean water access by Y date.”

3. Fill an unfilled niche.

A vital part of securing a grant is being able to answer the question, “Why is my idea different?” Make sure what you are proposing isn’t identical to a project or organization already in existence. Be creative in your thought process, and confident that your idea is one-of-a-kind.

4. Do your research.

Photo: juhansonin

Some foundations have very specific limits regarding what or who they fund. For example, a funder might only be interested in election issues during an election year. Community foundations may be constrained by geography, funneling all of their money towards local groups and individuals. Other funders do not accept unsolicited proposals.

Don’t waste time by applying for a grant for which you don’t even qualify. The solution to this all too common mistake is simple: read the foundation’s website and grant guidelines carefully. If a funder is open to taking questions, then by all means, call or e-mail them.

5. Edit, edit, edit.

Crafting a succinct and clear proposal is crucial to successful grant writing. Why trust an individual who doesn’t even take the time to edit his or her application for spelling or grammatical errors? If your proposal is well-written, it will not only demonstrate professionalism, but it show your ability to complete your project with the same degree of thoughtfulness and attention to detail.

6. Utilize resources.

The Foundation Center is a great resource for both new and experienced grant writers. The Center provides online access to a huge database of funder profiles, and has offices in several major cities.

Use of their books and the help of a knowledgeable employee is completely free of charge if you visit the Center. The Foundation Center also offers courses, such as “Introduction to Grant Writing,” for very reasonable prices.

7. Learn from your mistakes.

Securing funding is difficult, but seeing a project through is just as challenging. Some days, it may seem that obstacles triumph.

One of my favorite grant-funded projects ended up being a total flop; we ran out of resources to keep our new website–which featured “found footage of war”–up and running past the grant period’s deadline. Still, the project allowed me to connect with many wonderful people, learn about myself, and test my limits.

Keep on trying, and if you grow from the experience, you will not have failed.

Community Connection:

Learn about other successful organizations by reading some of our organizational profiles, including these:

SheJumps

What Took You So Long?

Collective Lens

But it also marked the launch of a historic march from New Orleans to Detroit by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) to resurrect Dr. King’s dream of ending poverty in the United States.

The March to Fulfill the Dream seeks to highlight the critical issues facing tens of millions of poor people in the United States, including lack of affordable housing, health care, and living-wage jobs.

The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is a national coalition of over 125 grassroots anti-poverty groups; it’s also the largest led directly by the poor. But whereas the original Poor People’s Campaign traveled east to D.C., the March to Fulfill the Dream is heading north to Detroit.

Why Detroit?

Detroit is the site of the upcoming U.S. Social Forum, which 10,000 people from all over the nation are expected to attend. The city was chosen both because it has become a symbol as ground zero of the recession and because some of the leading examples of a creative new economy are emerging there.

Detroit is the face of some of the toughest economic statistics in the country—high unemployment, foreclosures, a gutted industrial base—an extreme case of what millions of people are facing across the United States.

New Orleans, in which the campaign will host actions for its first few days, faces similar issues, which were exacerbated after Hurricane Katrina.

Viola Washington, a New Orleans residents and Katrina survivor, said, “Dr. King’s dream is as relevant today as it was during his lifetime. More people than ever before are living in poverty surrounded by an unprecedented concentration of wealth and abundance. We are organizing to finally realize the dream of racial equality and economic justice in the United States.” Washington is with the New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization, a PPEHRC member group.

Along the way, the caravan will stop in two dozen cities where they will join local demonstrations and teach-ins. The campaign hopes to unite poor people’s groups and their allies from across the country to build a diverse and nonviolent anti-poverty movement.

A few cities on the itinerary are significant for the role they played during the civil rights movement. Marks, Mississippi was where Dr. King launched the original Poor People’s Campaign in 1967. Other cities with a link to civil rights history include Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and of course, Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr. King was supporting striking sanitation workers when he was killed.

Why are ‘rights’ in the title of the campaign?

The PPEHR Campaign takes its inspiration not only from Dr.King, but from the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has at its core a set of social and economic rights (including housing, health care, and jobs) in addition to civil and political rights.

“The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro– live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

For information on the march, visit March to Fulfill the Dream.

The U.S. Social Forum is June 22-26.

Community Connection:

Detroit may have made an appearance on the list of America’s worst neighborhoods, but Matador writer Katie Hammel shares several reasons why her hometown deserves some love in Detroit Is for Lovers.

Photo courtesy of trail2010.org

Felipe Matos, 23, born in a slum in Brazil, is one of the top 20 community college students in the United States and has just been accepted into Duke University.

Gaby Pacheco, 25, whose parents brought her from Ecuador at 7 years old has three education degrees and dreams of teaching music therapy to autistic children.

Carlos Roa, 22, has been here since he was 2, served in the military, and wants to become an architect.

All three have their dreams on hold.

They are part of the 65,000 high school graduates each year who face uncertain futures because of their undocumented status. For most of them, the United States is the only country they know, since they emigrated at a very young age. But no matter how much they excel in school or sacrifice their lives in the military, they won’t have the ability to apply for student loans or become professionals.

Felipe, Gaby, and Carlos are joining the ranks of undocumented students coming out of the shadows and risking deportation in order to share their struggles and ask for the right to contribute and participate in society. They are joined by Juan Rodriguez, 20, whose parents fled Colombia due to threats to their safety when he was 6, and who after getting US residency with the help of his stepmother a year ago, will finally be able to pursue a degree at the University of Chicago.

The four of them decided to embark on a “Trail of Dreams,” walking the long journey from their home in Miami to Washington, D.C. in order to share their experiences and advocate for the DREAM Act. Reintroduced in 2009, the act would provide conditional legal status for undocumented students who arrived as children and meet certain criteria like attending college or serving in the military.

They have been walking since January 1, 2010, accompanied by marchers in support of the cause. They are currently headed into North Carolina. The group has faced hatred and racist banter from KKK protesters, and marched onto the steps of the office of one of the most notoriously anti-immigrant sheriffs in Georgia. They have brought school children to tears, and inspired mothers to fast in solidarity. People all over the country have been moved to participate in their cities and towns, or virtually on Twitter, and through petitions.

Juan Rodriguez writes on the Trail of Dreams blog:

We must never forget our story that has brought us thus far, nor the stories of those that we carry with us from our lifelong interactions. We must not forget the people of Haiti, who need our support and compassion in this time of plight. We must not forget the fasters in Homestead who are risking EVERYTHING so that we may find peace and security amongst the love and warmth of family. I will walk on… “and as we walk, we shall make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.” -Rev. M. L. King, Jr.

You can follow the walkers on Twitter @trail2010, add your name to the campaign, and follow the journey on their blog.

Community Connection:

Read more about Gabriela Garcia, the author of this article, in Matador Member to Watch: Gabriela Garcia.

Photo: Rachel from Cupcakes Take the Cake

One of the most popular articles we’ve published on MatadorChange is How to Start a Successful NGO in 10 Steps. The article, written by photographer and NGO-preneur Ryan Libre, has had more than 200,000 views since it was published in September 2008.

Every day we receive comments on this article, often from people in “developing” countries who are fired up on solving local problems with local solutions. They view starting an NGO as an excellent way to do just that.

They’re right, but the challenge they all face is funding. If dollars were distributed on the merit of good ideas alone, well… you wouldn’t need an article like this one.

If you’ve got a sweet idea about an NGO, non-profit, or small business that could change your community–or the world–here are a few ways you can bootstrap your start up with some funding methods beyond the usual approaches.

1. Set up a blog.

If you’ve got a great idea but no one knows about it, how do you expect to get funding for it? Setting up a blog is almost as simple as having an Internet connection… and it’s free.

Start establishing your Internet presence by setting up a simple blog on WordPress. Matador’s got dozens of resources to help you understand exactly how to do this on our Blogging Tips Focus Page.

Essential information includes: the name of your organization; your mission; who you’re working with and/or serving; what need you’re fulfilling; and why no one else is filling it. Provide a way for visitors to get in touch with you if they want to ask questions. Let them know how they can help.

2. Broaden your web presence.

Screenshot of Matador member Misty Tosh’s NGO’s website

What evidence can you provide that you’re already working to solve the big social problem your NGO, non-profit, or small business is going to address?

Flickr and YouTube will let you compile and present visual evidence that you are (1) who you say you are, (2) where you say you are, (3) working on what you claim to be working on.

Flickr and YouTube accounts are free and they’re essential to building and broadening your web presence. They also can be integrated into your WordPress blog easily.

Beyond Flickr and YouTube, set up a Twitter account. Connect with other social entrepreneurs who have started their organization or who are in the process of setting one up. Share ideas and contacts; provide each other with support. Connect with journalists and other people who may be interested in your enterprise. Ask for their support.

3. Now, start raising funds.

It used to be the case that starting an NGO or non-profit required non-stop grant writing.

While grants remain a significant source of operating income, the Internet provides many more tools you can use that will supplement your organization’s financial flow:

ChipIn: ChipIn is a free widget you can embed on your blog to raise money for your cause.

Screenshot from ChipIn

People who want to support your fledgling organization donate money using their PayPal account by clicking on the ChipIn button that now appears on your blog. You can also add the ChipIn widget to your Facebook profile.

Matador has used ChipIn to raise funds for our Brave New Travelers scholarship.

Kickstarter: Kickstarter’s a bit like ChipIn, but with a twist- you set a fund raising goal for your project and you have to meet our goal within a certain period of time in order for the donors’ money to be released to you.

Screenshot of Irina Zhorov’s project on Kickstarter

There are two other catches: (1) You have to have a US bank account and address in order to set up a Kickstarter account and (2) Kickstarter makes its money by taking 5% out of your funded project.

But if you’re agreeable to those terms and if you have a network of people you can reach out to to contribute, it can be an effective fund raising platform. Charyn Pfeuffer, who was profiled on MatadorChange recently, recently funded her $20,000 international voluntourism project on Kickstarter and Matador contributor Irina Zhorov is currently fund raising for a project on Kickstarter, too.

Grow VC
Grow VC is a brand new venture capital funding platform for entrepreneurs who are launching start-ups with a mobile or web-based focus. If your project falls into that category, read about this new funding option on the Grow VC website or in this article from TechCrunch.

Amazon Affiliate Program
You won’t be able to fully fund your start-up as an Amazon affiliate. You likely won’t even make enough to buy coffee for a week, but if you use this program as part of a diverse set of passive income sources, you might just cover some basic operating expenses, like simple office supplies.

There are all sorts of catches, but if you’re approved, the program is easy to use. Read all about it in Amazon’s overview.

Google Grants and Google for Non-Profits
Google has all kinds of resources that relatively few people know about, and Google for Non-Profits is one of them. In addition to its grants program, Google offers in-kind AdWords advertising to non-profits. All of their relevant resources can be accessed on the Google for Non-Profits page.

Community Connection:

Do you have experience funding a non-profit or NGO? Want to share your tips? Leave your advice in the comments section.

I used to think pit bulls were born mean.

I had never met one, but I accepted the opinions of my parents and the adults around me. I didn’t question the prejudice, despite a lack of evidence.

Looking back, I recognize my prejudice originated no differently than other types of bigotry. Last week, Matador raised similar prejudice and stereotype issues in Leigh Shulman’s article “On the Front Porch with a Gun, Waiting for the Black People to Come” and Ricardo Arthur’s “Barraku: Black Culture in Japan”.

My attitude towards pit bulls didn’t change until I met my now-husband.

In a discussion about possible future pets, my husband said the only dog he would consider adopting was a pit bull. I questioned his reasoning, only to grow ashamed when he described all the positive, loving experiences he had with the breed.

Bigotry checked, I began researching the breed.

I fell in love.

I learned that violent acts attributed to pit bulls are not innate to the breed; violence is a manifestation of the way pit bulls are treated and raised. Despite the media’s portrayal of the breed as inherently aggressive dogs with a proclivity towards fighting, pit bulls will not act more aggressively than any other dog if not abused.

The real pit bull

Pit bulls do have three characteristics easily exploited for dog fighting. It’s no surprise that with these characteristics, bull breeds can be trained to harm:

Zoey-Photo by Author

1) Very high intelligence.

2) Strong desire and determination to please their owner.

3) Physical strength and stamina.

Cosmic intervention brought our pit bull, Zoey, to us. A vet technician acquaintance told us about a really sweet dog about to be euthanized. Zoey had been abused, neglected, and left to die in the street after being run over by a car.

Despite her cruel beginning and months of physical rehab, she is the sweetest, happiest dog I’ve ever known. Check out the recent “Meet Matador Pets” article for an example.

Since adopting Zoey 18 months ago, I’ve spent even more time researching the breed and connecting to other pit bull owners and rescue organizations.

I’m saddened when pit bulls are associated solely with hardcore gangsta rap, Sarah Palin, and Michael Vick. I cringe whenever someone uses the term “pit bull” as a descriptor for aggressive tenacity; it’s not only ignorant, but that bad word in writing: cliche.

Pit bulls in the news

Historically, the pit bull was championed as a family dog. Petey from the Little Rascals was a pit bull and Helen Keller’s dog was believed to be a pit bull. Understand-a-bull.com keeps a list of heroic pit bull stories and Cesar Milan published a list of celebrity pit bulls.

Karen Delise, founder and director of research at the National Canine Research Council, has been researching fatal dog attacks for 20 years.

She obtained official documents and data from as far back as the 19th century and interviewed animal control officers, police, and medical examiners to complete two books on dog attacks and pit bulls, “Fatal Dog Attacks: The Stories Behind the Statistics” and “The Pit Bull Placebo: The Media Myths and Politics of Canine Aggression”.

According to Delise’s results, the overwhelming majority of dog attacks were by dogs who were treated inhumanely and interacted negatively with humans. There was no evidence of a particular breed or type of dog behind the majority of dog attacks.

In temperament tests conducted by the American Temperament Test Society, pit bulls received a passing rate of 82% or better- compared to only 77% of the general dog population.

Michael Vick’s former dogs

Even pit bulls that have been fought are still not permanently aggressive. After the football star Michael Vick pleaded guilty to conspiring to run a dog fighting operation, officials confiscated 50 pit bulls on his Virginia property.

The dogs had been chained to car axles. The ones that didn’t fight were beaten, shot, hanged, electrocuted, and drowned. Many people, including animal rights groups, called for the animals to be euthanized because of their alleged vicious nature.

Instead, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson ordered each dog to be evaluated individually, not by breed stereotype, and required Vick to contribute one million dollars to the dogs’ lifelong care.

Typical pit bull- coral11

Only one dog was found to be too aggressive to save and had to be euthanized. Another was too injured to keep alive.

The other 48 dogs were placed in foster homes and animal sanctuaries, with a handful being adopted.

Despite their past, the dogs recovered from the torture. According to a St. Petersburg Times article about Michael Vick’s former dogs:

More than a year after being confiscated from Vick’s property, Leo, a tan, muscular pit bull, visits cancer patients as a certified therapy dog in California. Hector, who bears deep scars on his chest and legs, recently was adopted and is about to start training for national flying disc competitions in Minnesota. Teddles takes orders from a 2-year-old. Gracie is a couch potato in Richmond, Virginia, who lives with cats and sleeps with four other dogs.”

Breed Specific Legislation (BSL)

Prejudice isn’t just affecting public perception. Throughout the nation and world, breed specific legislation is building momentum in policy debates. Breed specific legislation bans or restricts pit bulls and other “aggressive” breeds.

Denver, Colorado banned pit bulls in 2005. As of March 2009, the city of Denver euthanized at least 1,667 pit bulls in gas chambers. Pit bull owners had two choices when they enacted the ban: inhumanely euthanize their family dogs or send them away.

Denver is not the only place that’s passed BSL.

Cities and regions across the US, Canada, and 14 other countries have banned, restricted or are considering breed specific legislation. Air France, Continental Airlines, and British Airways also embargo pit bull type dogs on their flights due to safety concerns.

Reasons BSL doesn’t work

The laws may originate out of concern for public safety, but BSL hasn’t worked and doesn’t work for six reasons

1) Dog attacks aren’t disproportionately pit bulls; it only seems that way because of media portrayal.

2) The laws don’t fix the real issue: encouraging responsible pet ownership and punishing abusive and irresponsible owners.

3) Banning pit bulls creates a black market of mis-bred and abused dogs.

Pit bull at the pound- meagan

4) Defining breeds is problematic. A dog can still be defined as a pit bull or other banned breed if they carry certain physical characteristics, even if the dog is a mixed breed. The pit bull breed, for example, can encompass the American Pit Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, dogs with mixes of these breeds, even the American Bulldog and Bull Terrier.

5) It’s more expensive. According to Prince George County’s assessment of BSL, it costs $68,000 to confiscate and euthanize a single pit bull. Gas chambers, like those in Denver, lessen the economic blow, but millions of dollars are still spent enforcing the ban. Those dollars could be allocated to promoting responsible pet ownership, punishing abusive owners, and contributing to other important issues like education and health care.

6) 4 million dogs are euthanized per year in the United States. With BSL, dogs are confiscated that actually have homes, adding to the number of dog deaths per year.

Outlawing and discriminating against pit bulls and other breeds is shallow and harmful. Negative group think and propaganda is no reason to hold a prejudice based on race, gender, religion, nationality…or breed.

What you can do:

Support your local pit bull rescue through donating, fostering, and volunteering.

Adopt a pit bull if you believe the breed works for your lifestyle.

Follow these tips to see if BSL is being proposed in your area.

Write your congressman about the issue.

Visit these websites and blogs for more information:

Dog Politics, Stop BSL, Anti-BSL, Understand A Bull, Pitbull Lovers, Molosos y Terriers, KC Dog Blog

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

How do you feel about BSL and pit bulls? What associations do you have with pit bulls?
Are you considering bringing a dog into your family? Read “So You Think You Want a Dog? Four Questions to Ask Yourself Before Buying a Dog.”

I first heard about Bike the US for MS over beers at a taquería in Blacksburg, Virginia. I met members of the team who told stories about their recent cross country trip and described the stoke of slow travel, connecting with locals, and challenging their stamina for MS research and awareness.

Bike the US for MS has raised over $60,000 for Multiple Sclerosis research over the last three years, hoping to contribute $100,000 by this summer’s end.

Beginning June 1st, 2010, the  Bike the US for MS team will bike 3,800 miles in about 60 days, from Yorktown, Virginia, to San Francisco, California, along the TransAm and Western Express. They’ll average 70 miles per day, cycling through small towns that aren’t usually seen on interstates.

It’s the updated great American road trip. The fun is still in getting there, but the 1950’s Chevy Bel Airs have been traded for serious road bikes, and the travelers have social purpose and a desire to connect with people and place.

Here are photos from the team’s 2007 and 2009 across the US trips. All photos courtesy of Donald Fraser.

1. The coast-to-coast trip begins in Virginia.

2. The team riding for MS. There are approximately 400,000 people in the US with multiple sclerosis (MS) – with 200 more people diagnosed every week. MS is estimated to affect more than 2.5 million people worldwide.

3. The bikers average 70 miles a day, burning thousands of calories. Energy bars and water= survival.

4. The team camps outside or stays with whoever will host them.

5. Team member stops at Logan Pass.

6. Camaraderie is inevitable after two months together.

7. Connecting with locals.The team also performs service projects for MS patients, like building ramps and raking leaves.

8. Hitting another state-Wyoming.

9. Riding. Riding. Riding.

10. Part of the team posing at the Grand Tetons.

11. Breaking for North Cascades National Park.

12. On the road again.

13. Stopping for a break.

14. Going through Washington Pass.

15. The team finishes in Oregon, 2009.

16. The Bike the US team, 2009.

How to Help:

The team still has room for more 2010 cyclists (four at press-time). Fill out this application if interested.

They encourage local cyclists to join the team for a day, week, or whatever suits them. The team is always looking for hosts or people to hang with on the journey. For more information, contact info@biketheusforms.org

To donate to the team or sponsor individual cyclists, go to BiketheUSforMS.org’s main page.

To connect with the team, visit their website, blog, twitter, facebook, and youtube.

Community Connection

Check out our Road Bike-Cycling focus page for more bike-related articles, like Debra Corbeil’s piece, “And They Stoned Me: The Joy of Cycling Ethiopia”.

One more deep breath and another step. I can see my goal.

I’m so close and then I’m there: the first person of the morning to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro. The sun breaks through the clouds and lights up the glaciers. I’m lucky enough to have arrived before the hoards of other climbers.

The five days of walking, two blisters and 5, 895 meters were completely worth it.

However, the thrill of my success was tempered by concern. During the climb, I grew wary of how the porters accompanying us were treated.

We had two guides and many porters with us; they carried our tents, our food, and equipment. They taught me some Swahili. Our head guide even pulled an extra sweater from his pack when I was freezing.

Without these men, I would not have accomplished my goal.

Porters in Kenya-Ai@ce

As I got to know the porters who walked with us everyday, I learned about the conditions they worked under. I found out that they crowded into the kitchen tent to sleep after we ate and subsisted on the group’s leftovers for food. Many of the porters had no warm clothes, only t-shirts and open-toed sandals.

I saw men tossing supplies over bushes at a checkpoint to pass weight inspection before picking up the items on the other side.

According to the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project,

“The Kilimanjaro National Park recommends that a porter carry 20 kg for the company, but the average reported weight is 23 kg and can be as high as 30 kg.”

The Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project

I explored the streets of Moshi on the day after our climb and came across the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project. All my suspicions were confirmed. They told me that porters are often underpaid, underfed and not properly equipped for the conditions on the mountain.

We found out that most of the porters never receive the portion of the tip meant for them. (We made the mistake of giving our tip to the head guide and expecting he would divide it among the men.)

The Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project is dedicated to improving the conditions of the porters who climb Kilimanjaro. They teach classes, provide first aid certification and lend warm clothing to porters for their climb. The organization also educates the public about the porters’ working conditions and gathers information to help monitor travel companies’ treatment of porters.

Even though climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro was an amazing experience, I now know that it is ethically important for travelers to be aware of the working conditions of porters before using their services.

After learning more about the porters during our five days on the Rongai Route, we donated two sleeping bags and our coats to the porters.

What you can do

Consult a list of companies that treat their porters with respect.
Visit the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Our own Matador associate editor, JoAnna Haugen, co-founded a fund for Machu Picchu Porters.

On Thursday February 4th, a case against the big manufacturers Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Church and Dwight, and Reckitt-Benckiser was taken to court in an effort to force them to uphold a 1971 New York state law requiring them to list the chemicals in their products (as well as the chemicals’ health risks) on the label.

Ingredient disclosure requirements are almost non-existent in the United States, considering that federal environmental laws do not currently require companies to report the chemicals they use.  If the activists win this case, the companies will at least need to report to the state.

Groups such as the American Lung Association and the Sierra Club, in addition to health and environmental activists, are fighting for the public’s right to know what kind of chemicals they are bringing into their homes, and the potential risks associated with the chemicals.

The outcome also has the potential to make an impact at a national level, considering that the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works recently held a hearing looking into the public’s exposure to toxic chemicals, and found that the chemicals have led to health problems. The Soap and Detergent Association responded by saying “the research is flawed.”

Many companies have argued that they have disclosed ingredients on their websites as part of an initiative launched last month.  Environmental advocates responded by saying that some ingredients are too vague, listed simply as “fragrance” or “dye.”

Take Clorox, for example.  Clorox recently began disclosing ingredients on its website, but that doesn’t mean the list is easy to find, or easy to understand.  Once I did find the list, I still had to do some research to find out exactly what alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride (found in Formula 409 All-Purpose Cleaner)  is and what it does.

Companies internationally are preparing to comply with Europe’s new chemical regulations (known as REACH), making it seem that the United States is beginning to lag behind in this area.

What can I do to protect myself?

Until companies are required to disclose their chemical ingredients and potential health risks, you might want to try more natural cleaners, which actually work just as well.

There is a great list of 10 tested and true green companies on our very own Matador Goods, all of which are healthy for you and the environment.

Care2.com has an informative article about how to make a non-toxic cleaning kit from household ingredients including baking soda, vinegar, and (a good) liquid soap.

Another useful resource can be found at About.com: Housekeeping, which describes how you can clean just about anything with vinegar, lemon juice, and baking soda.

Community Connection:

For more green products, check out our green products focus page.

It takes some major cajones and altruism to kayak one of the world’s most dangerous rapids for the sake of conservation efforts.

Not only did the Epicocity Project, led by Andy Maser and Trip Jennings, and a National Geographic team successfully navigate the Rio Roosevelt.

They blogged and tweeted live while doing so.

Seriously.

Situation DIRE! Biting flies covering every inch of us! Hot. Rain. Coffee supply low. Nearing insanity. Send cold beer ASAP! #riverbr 4:26 PM Dec 5th, 2009 from Twitter.com/Epicocity

The goal of the Epicocity Project’s Brazil Expedition was two-fold:

1)      Create a biodiversity inventory of the Rio Roosevelt, a 300 mile stretch of nearly inaccessible rapids filled with giant whitewater fish. A proposed 2012 damn will forever change the ecosystem of the area.

2)      Utilize social media live from the Amazon jungle via SPOT messenger tracking and satellite phones.

Is this the new wave of social media in conservation?

Via the team’s Rivers in Demand website, viewers were able to follow along the real-time SPOT messenger tracking map and read the EP’s Twitter feed.

Because the team experimented with this new SPOT technology and partnered with Under Solen Media, the team had the opportunity to raise awareness about the threat to rivers, fish species, and local fishing communities in an intimate, innovative way.

Why this matters

Folks at home can feel part of conservation efforts in real-time. Emotional disconnect doesn’t happen as readily when we know a conservation/relief project is happening in the present, when we can see latitude-longitude coordinates on a live map and follow tweets like the one below.

Just arrived at the monster fish basecamp. Fabio the angler already fishing for rumored 80 kilo catfish! http://bit.ly/669uAu #riverbr 9:37 AM Dec 5th, 2009 from Twitter.com/Epicocity

The team’s biodiversity inventory will be crucial to remembering the area’s biological history if the proposed dam is built in 2012 and the ecosystem is destroyed. Thankfully, the team’s use of social media has increased coverage of the threat and will hopefully trigger more outrage at the government of Brazil’s proposed degradation of the Rio Roosevelt.

Find out more about this and future projects at the Epicocity Blog and Rivers in Demand Site and follow the team’s Twitter feed and Facebook page.

Community Connection

Feel inspired? Find out more about volunteering abroad and giving back.

Photo: ProComKelly

It certainly has been a tough week for the “liberal agenda” (term noted with dripping sarcasm), what with the Massachusetts let’s-sink-healthcare-completely race results.

Plus, there’s the San Francisco trial of two couples challenging California’s ban on same-sex marriage, where a proponent of Prop. 8 declared he “thinks gays are more likely to be pedophiles and that allowing them to wed would lead to the legalization of polygamy and incest.”

Oh my God.

But, some good news yesterday – Cindy McCain, wife of former GOP Presidential nominee and anti same-sex marriage crusader John McCain, has come out (no pun intended) against Prop. 8, which would lead one to assume she is, in fact, in favor of gay marriage.

Better yet, this video whipped up by San Francisco Chronicle’s Mark Fiore breaks down more than a few preconceived notions about “family values”:

Yeah, really, whose marriage is it anyway?

On January 14th, these celebrities (along with a team totaling 16 people) summited Mt. Kilimanjaro in an effort to raise awareness for the more than one billion people worldwide without clean water. Mt. Kilimanjaro rises 19,341 feet above Africa, making it one of the highest peaks in the world.  Getting to the top is certainly no easy task, no matter how many hours per day you have to work with a personal trainer!

Feature photo: activefree/Video found on YouTube

Between monetary donations and gear sales, nearly 6 million liters of water have been donated.  According to the Summit on the Summit website, just 1 cent = 1 liter of clean drinking water.

Even though the hike is over, you can follow @SOTSK on Twitter for news and updates about the water crisis in our world.

There is also a great Summit on the Summit website, with everything from the celebrities’ heart rates and O2 levels  at the top to how you can get involved and support the cause.

You can also watch the documentary of the adventure on MTV (no, not our MTV, the other one!) on March 14th at 9 p.m./8c.

Community Connection:

Read Julie Schwietert’s article, Celebs plan Kilimanjaro cake walk to raise money for clean water, for more about the challenge.

Photo courtesy of Amazon Watch

MatadorChange has been following the ongoing saga of Chevron’s shenanigans since last May, when our colleagues at the environmental group Amazon Watch forwarded us a letter from Emergildo Criollo, a representative of the Ecuadorean community of Cofan, which has been devastated by Chevron’s oil extraction activity.

We’ve written several articles about Chevron and other big oil interests, including Shell, since that time, and we’ve been following developments in what has been called the largest class action environmental lawsuit in history.

Amazon Watch notified us recently that Chevron has a new CEO. On January 1, 2010, John Watson, Chevron board member, was appointed head of the company.

With more than 30 years of his career invested in Chevron, environmentalists critical of the appointment wonder whether Watson can really lead the way in cleaning up the company… not to mention the countries and communities it has harmed.

On It’s Getting Hot in Here, a youth climate action blog, writer Nick Magel observed:

“…John Watson is the very man [who] orchestrated Chevron’s takeover of Texaco, and with it the 18 billion gallons of toxic waste water and 17 million gallons of crude oil deliberately dumped in Ecuadorian rainforest communities. Given Watson’s intimate understanding of Chevron’s toxic legacy there is no question he knows what is necessary to clean up their mess and compensate the communities that have been living with the effects of Chevron’s contamination for decades.”

Magel went on to issue a challenge, asking “Will Watson build a tenure on human rights or legal fights?”

Amazon Watch has released a video of Ecuadorean people who ask Watson to take charge and lead Chevron in a new direction. You can watch that video below, and then read on to learn about the petition campaign led by Amazon Watch and how you can get involved:

The petition being led by Amazon Watch reads as follows:

Dear Mr. Watson:

As the new CEO of Chevron, climate change and the environmental and human rights impacts of Chevron’s operations are the two issues that will define your tenure at the helm of one of the world’s largest oil companies. Chevron has fallen behind other businesses and many political leaders already taking a leadership position on climate change. Furthermore, your company is drawing increasing criticism for failing to rectify its massive human rights and environmental disaster in Ecuador. Taking the following steps will demonstrate a true commitment to environmental responsibility and respect for human rights – which will only strengthen your company’s future.

We the undersigned call on Chevron CEO John Watson to:

Clean up Chevron’s toxic legacy in Ecuador, compensate affected communities for health and environmental impacts, and provide affected people real access to health care and potable water.

Develop a global environment and human rights policy that will prevent similar tragedies in the future.

Adopt aggressive strategies to provide clean energy to a carbon-constrained world.

To sign the petition, visit ChevronToxico.

Community Connection:

Educate yourself about oil! What Cuba Taught Us About Peak Oil is just one article from our archives that addresses oil as a dwindling resource.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of the Ku Klux Klan.  Raised in a middle class household, King experienced racism throughout his childhood.  As he got older, he started hating white people, even though his parents continued to tell him that he should not.

In September 1944, King entered Morehouse College, and everything began to change.  He met white people who shared his ideas of justice, and he joined the Intercollegiate Council, a mixed race organization.

His path eventually led him to the ministry, and after receiving a doctorate, King and his wife moved back to the South, ending up in Montgomery, Alabama.

On December 1, 1955 one of King’s parishioners, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger.  A few days later, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his first speech.  The rest, as they say, is history.

In tribute to a man who changed the United States, if not the world, forever, I have compiled a collection of inspiring quotes spoken by Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must all learn to live together as brothers.  Or we will all perish together as fools.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.

Hate begets hate; violence begets violence.

There is within human nature an amazing potential for goodness.

It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the appalling silence of the so-called good people.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice and brotherhood.

But we simply cannot have peace in the world without mutual respect.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. They know how often I have been jailed, how frequently the days and nights have been filled with frustration and sorrow, how bitter and dangerous are my adversaries…They fail, however, to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Community Connection:

For more about Martin Luther King, Jr. and other inspiring people, read 10 Revolutionary Acts of Courage by Ordinary People.

Photo: Marc van der Chijs

Compared to paddler David Miller, rock climber Abbie Mood, and runner Sarah Menkedick, I’m probably the most sedentary member of the Matador team, but even I know that climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro is no Sunday stroll.

But this little tidbit from ABC News, in which it’s reported that five celebrities will be doing a Summit on the Summit “charity climb” of Africa’s tallest mountain, makes the arduous trek seem exactly that.

Emile Hirsch (of “Into the Wild”), Jessica Biel (of, well, you know), Lupe Fiasco, Isabel Lucas and Elizabeth Gore will step off on Thursday, aiming to reach the summit in an effort to “use star power to help raise awareness about the need for clean water worldwide.” Fans of these celebrities can follow the climb and donate “as little as a dollar” to raise money for the cause.

Exhibit A; Arranged by Hal Amen

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for celebs using their status to do good. And anyone with 20-20 vision can see (Exhibit A) that Biel has a body that’s in way better shape than mine. But climbing Kilimanjaro takes a bit more skill and effort than putting together a charity ball, designing a reusable bag for Whole Foods, or even running the New York City Marathon… especially if they’re shooting video and Tweeting at the same time, as they apparently intend to do.

Curiously absent from the article and from the Summit on the Summit website is information about how (or whether) the stars have trained for the ascent.

Though I wish them the best of luck and hope they raise a ton of money in the name of clean water, I’m curious to see how they handle the climb.

Community Connection:

Matador member CaliforniaKid7 intends to summit Kilimanjaro this year. Read about his 2010 resolution in Summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2010.

Stiv Wilson, a surfer and environmentalist from Portland, Oregon, was invited to participate in the mission by Dr. Marcus Eriksen of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as a Surfrider Foundation Ambassador.  

Wilson is currently the chair of the Portland, Oregon Surfrider Chapter, working on plastics issues and advising Surfrider’s national Rise Above Plastics campaign.

Why does he want to go?

“I’m a surfer and an environmentalist.  I see plastic floating in the ocean every time I surf. Within the past year, media coverage of The North Pacific Gyre has become prolific, but what the greater public doesn’t know yet is that four other gyres exist in our world’s oceans.  This debris collects because of the way in which ocean currents swirl.  We need to study them all.”

What is he going to do out there?

While onboard, Wilson will be shooting a ton of video and photographs, as well as conducting interviews with researchers and scientists.

During and after the voyage, Wilson will publish articles about his findings on the Huffington Post, Wendmag.com, and on the Surfrider Blog.

Wilson will also be creating “media deliverables” for Surfrider to help spread awareness about the plastic pollution in our oceans, including a curriculum for teachers, short videos, and photos for outreach materials (in addition to the press coverage on Huffington Post and Wendmag.com.

How can you help?

Participation in the voyage will cost $5,000 plus an additional $1,000 for a plane ticket.  The fee will also help fund plastic in sediment analysis, fish tissue sampling (checking for toxins), and marine debris density testing in the Atlantic gyre.  The budget also includes carbon offsets.

Surfrider National has agreed to pay $2,500, leaving Wilson to raise the remaining $3,500.

That’s where you come in.

He has set up a website for donations on Kickstarter.com, where more information can also be found.

Community Connection:

Read more about trash, including the Great Pacific Trash Gyre, in Carlo Alcos’ article, The World’s Most Offensive Landfills.

On December 19, 2008 Tim DeChristopher, a then 27-year-old University of Utah student, strolled calmly into a Salt Lake City Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office and into a room where the drilling rights of 149,000 acres of pristine public lands, including parcels located near Arches and Canyonlands National Park in Southern Utah, were being auctioned off to the highest bidder.  

DeChristopher, wielding paddle number 70, won the leases on 13 parcels of land and drove up the prices for other parcels by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What separated DeChristopher from the other bidders in the room was that he had no intentions of actually paying for these leases.

He had shown up at the BLM office that morning to join others in protesting the sale and soon found himself in the auction room, wielding a paddle and attempting to block the sales in this highly contentious auction.

Announcement of the public land sale drew strong objections from many business owners, conservationists, archaeologists, the National Park Service, members of Congress, and even celebrities, including Robert Redford. Several environmental groups also filed lawsuits in an attempt to stop the sale, believing the land sale would threaten some of Utah’s most precious and scenic redrock desert.

Some of the parcels were adjacent to national parks and critics of the sale felt the views from America’s most cherished parks would soon be spoiled with oil rigs.

A few hours into the auction, oil and gas company bidders became suspicious of bidder 70 after he won the many of the controversial parcels surrounding Arches and Canyonlands National Park. DeChristopher was soon removed from the auction and questioned by federal agents.

On April 1, 2009, DeChristopher was served up a two-count felony indictment and now faces up to 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.

Shortly after the auction, DeChristopher quickly evolved into a folk hero.

DeChristopher does not regret his actions and says he will deal with the consequences. In an interview with the Mountain Gazette he stated:

“Anything else, whether it’s prison, or missing out on school, or whatever, is not nearly as big of a risk as just continuing on this path of destruction that we’re on right now. I didn’t know that it would be effective at the time, I just knew that there was a chance that I could protect the land. I knew that I could live with the consequences, but I couldn’t live with knowing that I saw a chance to make a difference and didn’t take it.”

DeChristopher’s actions worked.

On February 4, 2009, newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar revoked a majority of the sales, including most of the parcels that DeChristopher had won and thoroughly rebuked the previous administration’s hasty reviews of the contested sites.

Despite this, DeChristopher still broke the law and is being tried for violating the terms of a federal auction. He will plead that he interfered with the auction in an act of civil disobedience. His actions were in protest of the Bush administration’s oil and gas policies, which he felt were worsening climate change and threatening the health of everyone on Earth.

Follow DeChristopher’s battle at Bidder70.org.

What do you think of DeChristopher’s actions? Is he a folk hero or a criminal? Share your thoughts below.

Community Connection:

Find out what gas companies have done in other countries when 60 Minutes’ exposes Chevron’s environmental atrocity in the Amazon.

Imagine waking up everyday only to be brutally beaten and raped.

For most of us that idea is a nightmare, but that was reality for a young Somaly Mam. Growing up in extreme poverty in a village in Cambodia then sold into sexual slavery at the age of 12, she saw her friends murdered and very young girls abused. After several years, Mam was lucky enough to escape. Her tenacious spirit and undying will led her to commit the rest of her life towards rescuing and rehabilitating other survivors.

Several years later on the other side of the world, Jared Greenberg and Nicholas Lummp were two college roommates fed up with the lack of action about an illegal industry that was only less profitable than narcotics and weapons. Greenberg and Lummp decided to raise $1 million towards this cause, but had no idea how they were going to do it. They went to the one place that information about virtually anything can be found – the media – and found out about Somaly Mam.   Somehow the email from Greenberg and Lummp was not only read by Mam, but answered by her as well, and within days they were on a plane traveling to Cambodia.

In Cambodia, Greenberg and Lummp met with Mam, toured the shelters she had created, and met some of the survivors. Inspired by a woman Greenberg calls an “incredible leader”, “passionate”, and “positive”, and with Somaly Mam’s vision of creating an organization in the U.S., the Somaly Mam Foundation was born.

By the fall of 2007, the Somaly Mam Foundation was having a launch at the U.N. What started as two college kids and a human trafficking survivor was turning into a non-profit that was really going to make a difference. People and organizations began to back the foundation, and it became obvious that this whole thing was getting too big for Greenberg, Lummp, and Mam to handle alone.

Enter the current executive director, William Livermore, in Spring 2008. Formerly of Lexus Nexus with a specific interest in building legal systems in developing countries, Livermore brought in a corporate skills set that would take the foundation to the next level.

Programs

When Livermore became involved, his priority was to develop a purpose and focus, which became counseling and empowering survivors to get the skills needed for reintegration into society once they have been rescued from slavery. The Somaly Mam Foundation does this through rescue and recovery, education, and reintegration programs.

The rescue and recovery program gets women and young children out of sexual slavery and into one of AFESIP’s (the organization Mam founded in Cambodia before the Somaly Mam Foundation) safe houses, which provide food, shelter, and medical care. The Somaly Mam Foundation (SMF) then focuses on educating the women. Livermore believes that creating an educated community with sustainable employment will make a significant dent in the human trafficking industry.

Lastly is reintegration. Previously, SMF has previously taught the women skills such as sewing and hair styling, but Livermore has realized that for the long-term success of the organization, there needs to be a compromise between Western market needs and more traditional employment. The SMF is currently planning to launch a micro-financing program in early 2010 that will provide survivors with money to start their lives over and encourage financial independence.

The Somaly Mam Foundation also believes in the importance of creating hundreds, if not thousands, of role models for survivors to look up to through the Voices for Change Initiative. The Voices for Change Initiative empowers survivors who have gone through the recovery, education, and reintegration process to counsel newly rescued victims and be a stand for others’ recovery.

Getting Involved

Greenberg and Livermore agree that spreading awareness about the human trafficking industry is the biggest way for people to get involved. For obvious reasons and current restrictions, it is not possible for volunteers to travel to Cambodia and interact with survivors, so both Follow Somaly Mam on Twitter @SomalyMam or the foundation on Facebook.

Sign up at Somaly.org to get ideas for letters/emails to send to your friends, newspaper, and legislature. If you’re a blogger, write about it. Hold your own fundraising event.

SMF recently partnered with the Body Shop and a portion of the sales of every Soft Hands, Kind Heart Hand Cream will benefit the fight against human trafficking. Mam has also written a book about her experiences called The Road of Lost Innocence.

But don’t think that human trafficking only happens “somewhere in Asia” – it happens right under our noses. There have been cases of human trafficking reported in all 50 states in America, and despite the fact that having sex with a minor is illegal is every state, there are still a few that don’t have human trafficking laws.

To get involved with organizations fighting human trafficking within the United States, check out the Polaris Project or Children of the Night.

Community Connection:

Learn more about human trafficking in 10 Shocking Facts About Global Slavery in 2008, or about the sex tourism industry in Asia in The Shameful Truth About Sex Tourism.

Found these fantastic photos in my inbox this morning. I’m not sure where they originated, but God bless the folks who had their camera at the ready because I just love some good spelling errors, especially from self-righteous people like these:

All photos, unless otherwise noted: Asociación MAPU

For five weeks this past July and August, I volunteered with Asociación MAPU in Esquel, Argentina.

The many projects being undertaken by the organization have a common thread: the imperiled land rights of the indigenous Mapuche people.

Here’s what I learned…and more importantly, why you should care.

Background

The Mapuche, and other peoples inhabiting the far south of South America, held out against European influence and incursion into their traditional territories for centuries. In Argentina, this autonomy lasted until the 1870s, when the government waged its “Conquest of the Desert.” The stated aim of the campaign was to “exterminate the Indian savages and barbarians of the Pampas and Patagonia.”

Photo: author

By 1884, thousands of Mapuche had been killed or displaced.

Suddenly, the Argentine government had huge tracts of “liberated” Patagonian land on its hands. Much of the new territory was “gifted” by President Uriburu, through legally questionable means, to individuals who had provided financial assistance during the conquest.

Over the intervening century, some of this land was acquired by corporations and used for timber production, mining (a whole issue unto itself), and other forms of natural resource extraction.

Many landholdings, on the other hand, went unused, fenced off by their “owners” (both the means of acquisition and the exact boundaries of these estates are dubious at best) yet producing value for no one.

Symbolic Struggle

Such is the case with Santa Rosa, a 535-hectare plot lying about an hour’s drive north of the town of Esquel via Route 40. It is claimed to belong to a much larger holding (181 thousand hectares) owned, through various subsidiaries, by the Italian fashion multinational Benetton Group.

Rosa and Atilio

In August of 2002, a local Mapuche couple made the decision to “reoccupy” the Santa Rosa estate. Rosa Rúa Nahuelquir (the name parallel is purely coincidental) had recently lost her job in Esquel due to the closing of a textile factory, and her husband, Atilio Curiñanco, had grown up near Santa Rosa.

Their desire was to “return to the land,” leading a simpler life as the generations of Mapuche before them had. Procuring the supplies needed to construct a small dwelling, keep a few head of livestock, and undertake subsistence farming, they and a handful of friends journeyed to Santa Rosa, stepped over a rusted wire fence that had toppled to the ground long ago, and began establishing the “Santa Rosa community.”

One month later, they were forcefully evicted.

Their possessions were either confiscated or destroyed. This was carried out at the behest of the Benetton-owned Southern Argentinean Land Company.

In the years since, the community has been embroiled in a sluggish legal battle to determine who maintains right of possession over the Santa Rosa estate. Various details regarding the process, in which the organization GAJAT (website in Spanish only) is providing the community with pro bono legal counsel, can be found in this blog. For an illustrated timeline of events affecting Santa Rosa, from 1882 to the present, click here.

Suffice it to say that, although Rosa, Atilio, and other community members successfully (re-)reclaimed the estate in February of 2007, the future of Santa Rosa remains tenuous.

Why You Should Care

So, why do the struggles of a small band of Mapuche in some obscure corner of the globe matter to anyone but themselves? A callous question, but the answer is significant.

First anniversary of the reoccupation

If you’ve studied anything about modern indigenous issues, the story above should sound poignantly familiar. Whether you’re talking about the Anangu in Australia, the Lakota and other tribes of North America, the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, or any number of other peoples whose traditional territorial claims are being denied, one fact emerges: Violations of indigenous land rights are an enduring plight of global scale.

These often impoverished communities stand alone against federal governments and international corporations who, motivated by the potential for immense profit, exploit the land with little regard for the environmental degradation or cultural and human casualties that result.

It’s clearly not a fair fight.

Yet each legal victory, no matter how small, becomes another link the chain of precedent that will influence how future land issues are judged.

If this little community eking out a living on a speck of land in the vast Patagonian plains can succeed in asserting its territorial rights — as provided for in the Argentine constitution — the reverberations of their victory will bolster similar efforts by other indigenous groups in Argentina, Chile (where Mapuche face even harsher oppression)…and perhaps the world.

How You Can Help

Asociación MAPU works directly with Santa Rosa, members of GAJAT, and other supporters to ensure that word of the struggle gets out to those who can help.

If you’re planning to travel to Patagonia, consider a volunteer stint with this Matador member organization. You can also volunteer virtually — their greatest current needs are for translators from Spanish to English and animators for the creation of short films, as well as people experienced in community development and/or microfinance to lend a hand with a microloan project.

Information on providing financial support can be found here.

Otherwise, peruse the Santa Rosa website, investigate the issue for yourself, and help spread awareness of this local issue with global implications.

Community Connection:

Hal offers more advice from his South American volunteer experiences in the series “Volunteer Voice,” including:

Tracking Down a Chance to Give Back

10 Tips for Surviving the Transition

Volunteering as a Springboard for Travel

Photo: aussiegall

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Colin Beavan, a.k.a. “No Impact Man.” In case you missed it, here’s Beavan’s story: for one year, Beavan decided to go green… so green that he wouldn’t use public transportation. Or toilet paper. Or, at the most advanced stage of his experiment, electricity.

In my article, I wondered aloud whether Beavan was admirable or a bit off his rocker. Secretly, I thought he was a bit of both. He was clearly committed in a way that few of us are to really lessening his impact on the environment. But to drag his wife and daughter along for the ride–a bit unwillingly, it seemed– raised questions for me about how our personal commitment to various kinds of change impact the people we love if they’re unable or unwilling to make the same commitment.

Ultimately, Beavan’s wife came around, as she details in this article in Business Week.

But not everyone was convinced, and New Yorker environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert lit into Beavan as a way to approach the question, “What’s wrong with eco-stunts?,” which was also the title of her article.

Kolbert’s article opens by giving readers the Beavan back-story. Beavan, she says, wasn’t much of an environmentalist. He didn’t know much about global warming. But as he was casting about for a book project, he seized upon the idea of the no impact experiment, which he presented to his agent “[o]ver lunch at a pricey midtown restaurant.” She goes on to describe Beavan’s year of lessening impact, in a tone that’s often snide, concluding–after ripping into Thoreau (yep, THAT Thoreau) and a string of other environmental “stunt” artists–that Beavan is a “tad disingenuous.”

To support the claim, she says:

“Beavan is, after all, a man whose environmental activism began over lunch with his agent…. [E]very day Beavan bikes to the Writers Room…and plugs in his laptop. Meanwhile, Michelle [his wife] scooters off to work at the offices of BusinessWeek, and Isabella [their daughter] spends the day at the (presumably electrified) apartment of a sitter…. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.”

She concludes by noting that poor people around the world were generating far less impact than Beavan during this time, implying that his experiment was somehow meaningless by comparison.
*
My problem with Kolbert’s analysis is its holier-than-thou undertone. Who cares if Beavan’s year of no impact was a stunt? He surely decreased his carbon footprint far more than Kolbert (who,it should be noted, writes for a magazine supported by big oil advertising). He’s brought attention to issues of overconsumption and waste. Maybe he’s inspired other people to try their own no impact experiments or, at the very least, to scale back some of their excess.

Does Beavan have to live in slum-like poverty or forgo restaurant lunches with agents (which is, after all, where many meetings with agents take place) to be an environmentalist?

If we each took just one of the steps that Beavan took, we’d dramatically reduce our collective negative impact on our planet. But if we’d rather sit around and call scaling back a stunt, then we’re not likely to avert some serious problems that will affect us all.

Community Connection:

And on the theme of holier-than-thou’ism, check out contributing editor Christine Garvin’s article, “6 Ways to Not Be a Holier-Than-Thou Traveler.”

The Mad as Hell Docs’ RV, Photo courtesy of the author. Feature photo: Progress Ohio

The question was posed to a panel of doctors in a high school auditorium in Sequim, Washington.

Answers varied, but all had the common thread that the current health care system is broken, inefficient, and corrupt and that the best solution is universal single-payer health care.

The town-hall style meeting was a sort of dress rehearsal for a small group of physicians from Oregon that call themselves the “Mad as Hell Doctors.” Early Tuesday morning the doctors embarked on a nation-wide tour in their custom-painted 1986 Winnebago nicknamed Winnie. Later that day they held a rally and public forum in Seattle, along with some good old-fashioned street theater.

Over the next three weeks the Mad as Hell Doctors will hold press conferences and rallies in over 20 cities across the U.S.

Their destination is Washington, D.C. and their mission is to bring the message of single-payer universal health care to leaders in Washington. Along the way they hope to put the idea of the single-payer back onto the table and into the public discourse. They will arrive on September 30, then hold a demonstration on October 1 on the steps of the Capitol. They hope to get a meeting with President Obama, to whom they wrote letters in advance.

Paul Hochfield is the doctor leading the delegation. He is an emergency room doctor who believes that the insurance and big pharmaceutical companies have undue influence on the health care discussion. “What I’m mad about is not health care,” he says. “What I’m mad about is the way our political process is being manipulated by the industry.”

Dr. Robert Seward, an internal medicine physician from Portland, is mad that Americans are going bankrupt just trying to pay their medical bills. The United States is the only industrialized nation where medical bankruptcy occurs with any frequency. According to the August 2009 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, over 60% of all bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were driven in part by medical expenses.

“This study provides further evidence that the US health care system is broken,” according to James E. Dalen, M.D., M.P.H., University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson. “Medical bankruptcy is almost a unique American phenomenon, which does not occur in countries that have national health insurance. These long-time advocates of a single payer system give us another compelling reason to work toward this goal as a nation.”

The Mad As Hell doctors’ argument is simple: the for-profit health system is inefficient, costly, sub-standard, and immoral. Single-payer is more efficient and has been shown to work in other countries. Their RV is emblazoned with their logo and along the top the words that summarize their position, “Remove Profit, Control Costs, Ensure Everyone, Single Payer Now!”

Their website states: “We believe there is only one way to control costs, one way to remove profiteering from the system, one way to reclaim the care of our patients, and one way to be sure everyone is covered: we must replace our current pay-or-die system and with a comprehensive, publicly financed, privately delivered, Single Payer system that puts people first.”

The doctors claim that a single-payer system would “save $500 billion a year by eliminating private administrative costs. These savings are then used to close the current insurance gap and cover everyone.”

What do they think of current proposals being put forth in Congress? They say they are a patchwork of inadequate proposals that are at best temporary solutions. At worst, they do little to go to they root of the problem yet still leave millions Americans without health care.

One of the PR figures behind the Mad As Hell Doctors Tour is Gary Jelinek, who was Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign manager. “It just struck me that the best-positioned people to talk about health care reform would be doctors,” Jelinek said. “They’re between the patients and the insurance companies.”

Several national organizations, including Physicians for a National Health Program, Health Care Now, and Single Payer Action are putting their support behind the tour. The doctors hope to be joined by a “Care-A-Van” of hundreds or even thousands of passionate supporters bringing their own vehicles by the time they roll into D.C.

To help raise awareness and to get people involved, the doctors will be blogging from the road and posting video updates to their website, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (@MadDrs) pages. They call it “an unprecedented hybrid of reality television and political activism.”

It is sometimes hard to believe that there are other positions besides the passionate “Yes public option!” and “No public option!” chants that have defined our national health care ‘debate’ this season. These days it is rare to hear a pitch for single-payer universal health care in the mainstream media, let alone a discussion of its merits or defects. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t people working hard to keep single-payer on the table and in the light of day. The Mad As Hell doctors have seem to have organized a creative and visible way to bring something fresh to the passionate political discourse on our national health care system.

Community Connection:

If a health care bill doesn’t pass and you’re one of the many Americans without insurance, be sure to check out our article on the Top 12 Places People Go for Cheap Health Care.

Photo: ingridtaylar

A couple months ago, we featured the photographs of artist Chris Jordan in the popular–and highly controversial–photo essay, “Intolerable Beauty.”

When I last spoke with Jordan, he was thinking about a new project. Exhausted by the stress of the “Intolerable Beauty” project, which confronted him daily with our tendency toward excessive consumption and waste, he knew he’d be moving on to a new subject soon.

But that new project wouldn’t be escapist in any way because “Intolerable Beauty” also taught Jordan just how profoundly art could exert an influence over public opinion and personal lifestyle choices.

So it wasn’t too surprising when we received a message from Anna Brones, Matador member and senior editor at Wend Magazine, alerting us to Jordan’s next project: a visit to Midway Island, where he’ll be photographing the Pacific Garbage Patch, described here in this video from ABC News:

Dubbed the Midway Journey, Jordan’s new project will involve not just his own artistic interpretation of the problem of human waste; he’s bringing a few other artists along with him.

From their perch on Midway Island, Jordan and his colleagues will bear “witness [to] the catastrophic effect of our disposable culture on some of the world’s most beautiful and symbolic creatures,” especially albatross.

“But even more,” Jordan writes over at the Midway Journey blog, the artists are “embarking on an introspective journey to confront a vitally relevant question: In this time of unprecedented global crisis, how can we move through grief, denial, despair and immobility into new territories of acceptance, possibility, and wise action?”

Jordan explains more about the project in this video:

A Message from Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.

Follow along on the Midway Journey blog or by adding @midwayjourney to the people you follow on Twitter.

Community Connection:

Matador contributing editor Carlo Alcos includes the Pacific Garbage Patch–also known as the Great Pacific Trash Gyre–in his list of the World’s Most Offensive Landfills.

Photo: gailjadehamilton

What if new media could be the powerful engine for true, meaningful action in the areas of health care, the environment, global development, cultural diplomacy, and opportunities for youth? And what if young social entrepreneurs were the catalysts of such change?

These are the key questions motivating the New Media & Youth Action Conference, scheduled for Tuesday, September 1, 2009 from 10 AM til 3 PM in New York City.

The event, which is free, will feature keynote speakers, breakout sessions for brainstorming, and a networking “power hour,” where you can meet other like-minded activists and share ideas about issues of mutual interest.

For more information or to register, click here.

Community Connection:

To learn more about how Matador members are using technology to support youth development and cultural awareness projects, be sure to read about the Roads Scholars program, founded by Matador member, Digital Vagabond.

Feature photo: artefatica; Photo: ubrayj02

One night last April, Diana Oppenheim committed a peculiar act of vandalism. Dressed in black clothing and bandannas, Oppenheim and three of her friends sneaked into the playground of Darwin Elementary near Logan Square. Their target sat in one corner of the lot, a wooden bench flanked by two empty planters.

Armed with trowels and bags of potting soil, the four set to work. After 10 minutes of digging and transplanting, the formerly barren planters sported clumps of bright yellow daffodils. It was Oppenheim’s first experience with guerrilla gardening.

Originally popularized in British gardener Richard Reynolds’ manifesto On Guerrilla Gardening, the guerrilla gardening movement is taking root in Chicago. Informal groups with names like Trowels on the Prowl and SOIL are taking horticulture to the streets, covertly planting flower and vegetable gardens in public lots and neglected planters around the city and its suburbs. Bit by bit, these Green Age graffiti artists aim to reinvent Chicagoland’s landscape, while making us take another look at how we use urban space.

As might be expected, guerrilla gardeners don’t face the kind of opposition that their spray can cousins do. While Oppenheim does all of her gardening under cover of night, the 23 year old graduate student says she’s not worried about being caught (Oppenheim claims to have received “only positive reactions” from passersby). Instead, she says, she gardens at night to leave a morning surprise for neighbors.

“For me, it’s a statement,” said Oppenheim. “You walk by this ugly plot every day, you don’t notice it. Then one day you wake up and notice something beautiful that came here overnight.”

Charlotte Briggs, a.k.a. GenkiTango375, talked about guerrilla gardening’s fun factor. After discovering Reynolds’ book last year, Briggs, an academic administrator, banded together with neighbors Carla Hayden and James Moeler under the name Trowels on the Prowl. Since then, the three have planted on street corners and alleyways all around their neighborhood in the near north suburb of Evanston, announcing upcoming actions and taking credit for strikes under code names online.

“A lot of people who are interested in [guerrilla gardening] haven’t quite caught yet that it doesn’t need to be organized,” said Briggs. “It’s all tongue in cheek. You play it up, it makes it more fun.”

Photo: ecodallaluna

But Trowels on the Prowl’s actions do have a serious side. Briggs, Hayden, and Moeler practice guerrilla gardening as a type of community activism, planting in broad daylight in hopes of inspiring local residents to take ownership of their community by taking action. According to Moeler, as the trio continued to garden together, they began to realize that more passersby had started picking up litter in spots where the group had planted.

“If you look at an urban wasteland, it’s almost like the beer cans belong there,” said Moeler. “If you’ve taken the step of beautifying it, people go ‘Oh, that plastic bag, I should pick that up’.”

Last year, Briggs, Hayden, and Moeler discovered what has since become their biggest battlefield, a vacant lot on the corner of Chicago and Main in Evanston. The lot was originally planned for development, the future site of a luxury condominium and retail complex.

Late last summer, however, Cole Taylor Bank foreclosed on the land and stopped construction, leaving a bare field surrounded by a tall chain link fence. When Briggs and Hayden found out, they decided that the lot would be the perfect place to do some gardening.

To get past the problem of the fence, they turned to one of the signature weapons of the guerrilla gardener: the seed bomb, a meatball-sized ball of compost, seeds, clay powder, and water that gardeners can throw over walls, fences, or other obstacles, enabling them to sow seeds in otherwise off-limits areas.

In September, Trowels on the Prowl held a public workshop at Brothers K coffee house in Evanston, where community members helped to make over 700 seed bombs using donated seeds and scavenged flower heads. The following weekend, they met at Brothers K again before marching together to the lot and hurling the seed bombs over the fence using lacrosse sticks and slingshots. By spring, the lot was speckled with daisies, black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace and other wildflowers.

When Briggs returned to photograph the lot this June, she found it freshly mowed. The flowers were gone, stripped out with the grass.

Then, a few days later, a word appeared on the fence, the letters woven through the chain links in red and green ribbon: “Park.” For Briggs, it was a sign of a community mobilizing for action.

“People are unhappy about the sight of that lot, but they’re also starting to look at all the things that it could be,” she said. “They’re all talking about, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have some benches there? or ‘It would be really fun to have community gardens’.”

As far as Trowels on the Prowl is concerned, the mowing was nothing more than a temporary setback. On July 8, the trio struck back, seed bombing the lot again and posting signs with anti-mowing messages like ‘Who’s killing the flowers?’ and ‘Let the prairie grow!’.

With the group’s actions now garnering more attention, formerly uninterested Evanston officials have begun to speak up. On July 20, Evanston Alderwoman Melissa Wynne, who represents the ward containing the lot, told the Chicago Tribune that she thinks the guerrilla gardeners’ goals may be “unrealistic.” “I really don’t want to say, ‘Don’t mow the lot,’ because I don’t want it to look neglected,” Wynne told the paper.

For her part, Briggs refuses to admit the possibility of defeat.

“I think that when we see areas with dirt and weeds, it’s a healthy impulse that we have, that we’re disturbed by that,” said Briggs. “I think we must be hard-wired to care.”

Community Connection:

You don’t have to be a guerrilla gardener to beautify your own patch of the city. Check out Ted Scott’s “Four Easy Apartment Garden Projects.”

Photos courtesy of author.

The Spot

“3 Miles of Golden Sands!” reads the sign as you enter the town of Hayle, in Cornwall. And the beach is spectacular, with the artistic haven of St. Ives at one end of the bay and Godrevy lighthouse (the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse) at the other.

As you look along the length of the bay, the only interruption is the broad mouth of the River Hayle as it leaves the town and breaks away into the Atlantic Ocean. This geographic feature makes the Victorian port such a special place for kitesurfers: at the right state of tide, the estuary provides a vast expanse of flat water and offers a haven for kiters to escape the chop of the open sea and glide unimpeded across the glassy estuary.

If any proof were needed that “The Bluff” (as it is known, on account of the pub overlooking the spot) is a world-class kitesurfing spot, then how about the fact that five-time kiteboarding world champion Aaron Hadlow cut his teeth here? Hadlow, acknowledged to be the most innovative and progressive rider the sport has ever seen, took his first shaky forays into the world of kitesurfing at The Bluff.

The Ban

Sounds idyllic? Well, it was. Until Dutch insurance giant ING bought much of the docklands in the town and began to plan a new residential and business development, including a marina.

For reasons that confound logic, ING decreed that kitesurfing would be likely to “impede the safe passage of vessels entering [the estuary]”, and banned kitesurfing within the jurisdiction of the harbour, which also extends out into the sea (how a vast financial institution can lay claim to a postcard-perfect estuary is another question entirely).

Although there may have been a case for a ban if these concerns were in any way legitimate, they do not stand up to any kind of scrutiny:

The entrance to the harbour is only navigable by shipping at high-tide. At high-tide there is no beach, so kitesurfers cannot launch their kites. The estuary is generally never suitable for both kitesurfing and shipping.

Hayle is not a busy harbour. ING’s own assessment declares that, “only a handful of… commercial [boats] use the harbour in the winter months as prevailing winds are onto the north coast and conditions over the Hayle bar at the harbour entrance prevent safe navigation.”

There have never been any accidents involving kitesurfers in the estuary or elsewhere in the Bay.

Local kitesurfers are further infuriated by ING’s policy of stonewalling and scaremongering. ING and their agents continually put off meetings and offer contradictory reasons for the ban. They have also threatened the British Kitesurfing Association with legal action for not making it clear on their website that kitesurfing is banned at the The Bluff.

The area is now patrolled by harbour officials on jet skis who send you on your way if you stray into the area and may follow you back to your vehicle and make a note of your details to pass on to the police. It all seems a bit heavy-handed doesn’t it?

Anecdotally, comparable waterways in southwest England have no problem with kitesurfers sharing the water with other vessels. The markedly busier and smaller harbours of Padstow and Exmouth are both bustling commercial ports (used throughout the tide), and have a harmonious relationship with the kitesurfing community.

And so Hayle’s “3 Miles of Golden Sands!” are now more famed for their reflection of how big business can whimsically flex its muscles to devastating effect rather than for the perfect golden playground that used to attract kitesurfers. Maybe next time you’re weighing up insurance options and ING pops up, you could spare a thought for the ex-kitesurfers of The Bluff and glide on by….

More Information

An anti-ban group has been set up on Facebook, and can be found here.

Kernow’s (Cornwall’s) Kitesurf Club provides general information about kitesurfing in the Cornwall area, as well as updates about the ban. Check out their website here.

Community Connection:

Have you discovered Matador’s newest blog, Matador Sports? Our resident adventurers and Sports editors are sharing how-to guides for getting started in a variety of sports and profiling some of the most on-the-edge athletes out there!

Photo: The author at her NGO in Indonesia.

I recently started an NGO, 4th World Love, that focuses on community development in distant lands and I’ve learned a few lessons on the front lines of grassroots NGO’dom.

Here are a few bullet points to consider after you’ve already got your cause, your website, and your plan.

Start by remembering this one – don’t forget to laugh – because in the end, if there is no laughing-til-you-cry, it’s just not worth it.

1. Communication Is Primo.

Once you’ve got your organization’s base set up, there will come a time when you must get back home to raise money, make money, and ponder new ideas. Once you’re gone, things can quickly go downhill unless you set up a chain of command, with loads of communication.

We appointed a local Field Director and Field Coordinator before we left with very specific instructions (we need a cash flow report once a month, make sure the volunteers sign this waiver before they start the program, always text back confirmation when you get information).

Things like this keep the program from bursting at the seams. It’s hard when the village has no internet, but with texting at the fingertips of most third world’ers, we’ve had no problem staying in touch… even though there are multiple black outs per day.

REMEMBER: You have to set the parameters in order for them to be followed. Period.

2. And, Then There’s The Exact Opposite – Miscommunication.

Everyone from the village becomes a friend; therefore, they want to text and e-mail all the time. This is fantastic because updates and passing information along is crucial to NGO success. What isn’t great is when everyone starts ignoring the chain of command and breaks free of the system to share their trivial issues.

Better to set up a precise method of relaying information before you leave. Better yet, create a job description document so everyone knows who is responsible for sharing what. You wanna tell me that a baby who had cleft palate surgery is doing well– that rocks. But, if you wanna tell me all about the late petty cash report… well, that gets the smack-down.

REMEMBER: Set up proper channels and make sure your appointed directors are clear with everyone involved about the rules and their specifics. If you don’t, expect chaos.

3. Fundraising – The Ultimate Challenge.

This little diddy is the hardest part of NGO’dom. Where do funds come from? You can’t expect people to keep giving cash, especially in an economy like this.

Therefore, one must get incredibly creative.

We came up with an idea for a contest – Donate $100 to win a free trip to Indonesia was the one we ran last year; this year we’re doing the same thing, but in Baja. People really respond to this idea because there’s a chance for them to win something crazy-cool…not just donate a bit of cash.

But just because they did it once doesn’t mean they’ll do it twice.

Again, thinking cap goes on. We started producing Pilates/volunteering retreats in Mexico where all profits go to fund 4WL – and the cost of the trip is a write-off. Pretty brilliant.

We also scour local villages for things we can sell (handmade scarves, cool bamboo bags and boxes, and organic soap). But we’re gonna have to amp it up a level and get more than just individual sales – we’ll have to go gangbusters, and try to sell mass quantities from the samples we currently have. Get the order and then worry about getting them made. All profits fund local projects.

REMEMBER: Most people who say they will donate DO NOT. It’s the random folks who really kick in the dinero. Bless them all.

4. Bring in Volunteers…or Not?

The intrepid souls who traipse the world working for free are the backbone of any NGO. They storm in with good ideas, piles of energy, and the will to get things done.

However, they can be a full time job for those running things back on the home front.

Dozens of e-mails have to be answered from online volunteer shout-outs, money has to be wired, transportation has to be coordinated, home stays have to be arranged, and thousands of questions have to be answered. The key is to develop a system for managing it all.

Let’s say someone e-mails, curious about 4WL. Instead of getting really detailed at the top, I just send them a Volunteer 101 sheet, an article I wrote about the village, a volunteer form for them to fill out, and the permanent volunteer schedule.

If they plow through all that information, as well as the highly detailed website, and then blast back specific questions, then I know they are legit and might actually make the trek to Indonesia. If they just ask evasive generic questions and haven’t taken the time to really get deep with our materials, then they aren’t worth the effort.

They probably just sent out a blanket email to 50 orgs and still have no idea what they want to do. I’m not saying don’t be nice, I’m just saying read between the lines.

REMEMBER: Hold their hand, but only if they hold yours back.

5. Establish Your NGO’s EXACT Cause.

Folks ask all the time, “What is your cause, exactly?” Until my last scouting excursion, I wasn’t able to pinpoint it. But, now I can – we focus on community development. Pure and simple.

Whether it’s through organic farming initiatives, carpentry workshops, cleft palate surgeries, English lessons, a new t-shirt business, opening a small café, or teaching photography and video skills – it doesn’t matter. We do it if the village requests it.

I can’t imagine rolling into a township and hearing all of the various ideas and dreams and then shutting someone down ’cause we just do “healthcare” or “AIDS prevention.” Though both noble causes, we’re about more than one thing. And, getting to that determination took some hard digging on the soul front. Even though we lived it, wrote it, and hatched the very idea, crafting the exact statement that surrounds the sentiment took some time.

REMEMBER: Think hard about your cause before you start promoting, because you will be fronted and you most definitely need an answer. A good, telling, inspiring one.

6. Boil Down New Ideas.

Phase 1 is complete. Now it’s time to take it all to the next level and take stock in your recent progress. What is the next level, especially since everything is running so well? Maybe you want to expand your efforts into another village; perhaps you need more volunteers and on-site facilitators; you might even want to start another fund raising scheme.

At this point, it’s time to take it all to paper because a wing and a prayer might have worked for the first round of goodness, but now, things bear a little more investigating. We just put together our first 4WL newsletter and it was incredible to have all our happenings laid out in one super-fly PDF. Not only did it help all our supporters get the inside tip to all that were doing, it helped us hone in on where we’re headed in the near future…and what might be missing in the right now.

Bottom line, you must share the intel. Take loads of pictures when you are on site. Follow up with volunteers and get them to send you testimonials that you can post on your website and share. Plot, plan, scheme, dream, share– it’s the only way to ratchet up the vibe you’re trying to create.

REMEMBER: Make people proud to be a part of your organization and they will go to war for you…as you would for them.

7. Don’t Forget About Personal Sanity.

All of this work is draining and can be heavy on the soul. Am I doing enough? Where do I get new ideas? Will I ever be able to pull it all off? All these questions keep me and my partner-in-crime awake at night, but the more balance we try to create in our own personal lives, the better off we are.

If I work out every day, my energy soars and I’m off-the-charts productive. If I go out til the wee hours drinking and do a midnight slam down of pizza with ranch dressing, well the next AM ain’t so great.

Finding my own personal level of balance is crucial in making all these great things happen.

You also have to have a level of self-promotion that would make most cringe. I’m certain people get sick to death of my weekly e-mails about new far-flung contests, retreats, and excursions. But, you never know, I might just hit them at the moment they are fed up with their own existence and are looking to make a change.

Be it within you, your network, your village, or your organization’s plans for the future, that’s what it’s all about – making a difference in the world and feeling really, really good about it.

REMEMBER: To a person who makes $20 bones a month, every single penny counts, and if you put your energy in the right place, in the most positive spot, then you will reap rewards like no other. Might not be a penny, but it will shine like one.

Community Connection:

Wondering how to start an NGO? Ryan Libre gives you a primer in How to Start a Successful NGO in 10 Steps.

Photo: bowena

Hari Kondabolu isn’t the only comedian who used the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as a point of departure to create some powerful stand-up about race, ethnicity, identity, and human relationships.

But Hari, who holds a degree in comparative politics from Wesleyan University, is willing to go out on a limb in his routines by “speak[ing] truth to power with confrontational and personal material” rather than simply poking fun at others.

In this interview by Colors NW, Hari and fellow comedian Ahamefule Oluo talk about the ways comedy can be used as an effective way to raise social consciousness about profound human issues while having a good time:

Community Connection:

For a more philosophical take on how we can be more conscious, check out Matador editor Sarah Menkedick’s article “Travel Is For Idiotic Idealists: Three Americans Held in Iran.”

Photo: Silent vigil in Ioannina, Photo courtesy of author

We have wrapped up the volunteer portion of our trip. It was kicked off by being picked up by local animal activists in Athens and taken to the ONLY licensed animal shelter in a city made up of millions of people.

The amazing people at the KAZ shelter run the facility on a shoestring, doing as much as they can to help forgotten and discarded animals who have nothing but love to give. We brought the shelter hundreds of dollars in medical supplies, and I was excited to give a personal donation I knew would definitely be put to good use.

After departing the Athens shelter, we headed up to the mountain town of Ioannina. There is no animal shelter in Ioannina, a town of 150,000 people, but there is a handful of concerned citizens who dedicate their lives, their homes, and their finances to help homeless animals.

We spent most of our time at the homes of these dedicated activists, helping prepare for a protest about the poisoning of stray dogs in the city. Having been an activist in America, it was exciting to experience this feeling in a foreign country, and even more exciting to see how well it was received. Young and old alike welcomed the information and took the time to read it. Our group took great pleasure in seeing our work first hand and found it very motivating to continue on.

I personally took great pleasure in leafleting outside the mayor’s office, the man everyone knows is responsible for executing the rash of cruel poisonings on the animals. I handed a leaflet to everyone I could who was entering the building in the hope it would cross his desk.

A silent vigil was held on the evening of our fourth day in Ioannina. We were thrilled with the turnout. Many more people came in support than I had imagined and numerous media outlets appeared.

We also built feeding stations and placed these in strategic locations around the city where strays congregate. The most surprising was the scene at the local university, which looked like inner city projects in the US. We were surrounded by concrete buildings riddled with graffiti, trash, and teens with no real concern for the pack of starving animals with whom they shared this space.

We were shocked to see a small puppy stroll out from behind a bench and head right toward us, not yet afraid of humans as many of the older pups were (not than any of them live long – the average age is 18 months before they are poisoned or hit on the road).

I began chatting with one of the students and he explained that many people dump puppies at the university, thinking they will be taken care of. He said there are new litters every week. He pointed me in the direction of the dumping site, and I spent a good hour searching around what would be considered a trash dump in the US. No puppies were found but I did make friends with various cats that were starved for attention.

I am sad to say this portion of the trip is coming to a close. I have greatly enjoyed the interaction with the local activists. I have formed lifelong bonds with even the ones who I was unable to have a conversation with because we share a passion that we hold deep in our hearts.

Community Connection:

To learn more about the organization with which the author volunteered, visit Inside/Out. To create your own volunteer experience, browse through Matador’s member organizations, which offer volunteer opportunities around the world.

A protest against the death penalty in Paris. Photo: World Coalition Against the Death Penalty

In the United States, capital punishment–or, put more bluntly, the death penalty– remains a deeply divisive issue.

In other countries, however, Amnesty International reports the death penalty abolition movement is gaining support, and they signal Togo legislators’ unanimous repeal of capital punishment earlier this week as the most recent proof of this trend.

Togo is the 15th African Union member nation to abolish the death penalty for all types of crimes, though it’s not likely to be the last: Mali is considering a similar move.

To see a full list of the countries that reject the death penalty as a form of punishment for all crimes, click here.

To learn more about the death penalty abolition movement in the United States, visit the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which offers 10 ways you can take action to help abolish the death penalty. To read up on the death penalty abolition movement in other parts of the world, visit the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

All photos by David Ranc

But the actions of a few can change the world. Two people who firmly believe in the power of “just doing it” are 25 year old Sebastian Lindstrom and 29 year old Evan Fowler, who teamed up to create the What Took You So Long Foundation.

The movement aims to help grassroots NGOs by giving them publicity and access to a global network of unskilled and skilled volunteers. The WTYSL Foundation also wants to inspire young people by example, beginning with a 14,200 kilometre trip from Marrakesh to Johannesburg, which kicked off yesterday.

In the spirit of true international cooperation, Lindstrom and Fowler are traveling with five young colleagues, all 25 or under, from Japan, the USA, and Hong Kong. They will be using public transport and visiting 20 small NGOs en route.

An experienced documentary film maker, Fowler has his own media company and will be filming the journey. There will be updates on the website, blog, and Twitter as well as the team’s photos and journals, where the group will document the efforts of people who make a huge difference in the lives of locals but who are unknown outside their own small circles.

“I met an amazing Dutch guy… when I took a group of Hong Kong students to Ghana recently,” says Fowler. “He is virtually a one-man band, living and working in a tribal community on the border with Burkina Faso. He has set up a small charity to help kids who’ve been abandoned because their parents died of HIV/AIDS. I asked him if he had applied for any funding and he told me the paperwork would take up too much time which could be spent with the people he needs to help. And they probably wouldn’t give him funding anyway. It’s people like Eric that we want to tell the international community about.”

Lindstrom, a former Swedish Special Forces soldier, has already set up one NGO, the Light for Children in Ghana, which he founded in 2005 after a three-month stint as a volunteer in the country. Light for Children recruits young volunteers from all over the world to help disadvantaged children in Ghana’s Ashanti region.

One such volunteer is young British lawyer Rhianydd Griffith who ended up getting in touch with Lindstrom and helping in an Ashanti orphanage after Googling “volunteer Ghana.” At 24, she was older than some of the other students, but the experience changed her life. “A lot of young people lack confidence,” she says. “But doing something like this shows you that you really can make a difference.” Volunteering has had a big impact on Griffith, who now works for a corporate social responsibility law firm in London. “I’d tell anyone thinking about taking a gap year to combine travel and volunteering,” she adds.

Lindstrom and Fowler met while studying at Hong Kong University. They hit it off immediately, discovering a mutual interest in environmental and social issues. They both wanted to mobilise Hong Kong students and show them what could be achieved by a group of motivated and determined individuals.

Inspired by actor Ewan McGregor, Lindstrom and Fowler first discussed a motorbike trip through Africa to help small NGOs but decided against the plan. “It wasn’t very environmentally sound,” says Lindstrom. Fowler agrees. “And we wanted to interact with the locals, to live with them and learn their stories. That’s easier to do using public transport than on motorbikes. And it’s cheaper.”

The 10 week trip is the first one for the WTYSL Foundation, but both men hope it is the start of things to come. “We want to encourage other young people to do this,” says Fowler. “To show them an alternative way of traveling. And if a group wants to do something similar in India or South America we are there to give advice and help.”

“We are going to share positive, hopeful stories,” adds Lindstrom. “We are not going to dwell on the stereotyped clichés of misery and hopelessness, because Africa isn’t like that. It’s full of positive, enthusiastic individuals who are striving to achieve their hopes and dreams. We can learn from them as much as they can from us.”

Lawyer and volunteer Griffith has the last word. “Sebastian is totally inspirational. He taught me you’re never too young; you just need to be brave. And I’ve learned that what you do and what your team does, even on a small scale, really can change the world.”

To follow WTYSL’s journey, visit the organization’s website.

Community Connection:

WTYSL isn’t the only group currently journeying across Africa to collect hopeful, positive stories. Read about sisters Chioma and Oluchi Ogwuegbu and their “Celebrate Africa” trip.

Photo: A few of Greece’s many stray dogs. Feature photo: jturn; Photo above: simobran

We are a group brought together by inside/out, a unique adventure travel company that provides humanitourism™ trips for people who want to volunteer on meaningful international projects while pursuing active adventure.

We will be spending the majority of our time in Ioannina, in Northern Greece. Animal welfare in Ioannina has been a hot topic lately due to continuous poisoning of stray animals in the town.

Poisoning is just one of many atrocities allowed in Greece. Hanging is a common practice for disposing of animals no longer needed, especially hunting dogs. Just last month, five dogs were hanged from an olive tree, four bundled together and one by itself. The dogs were hung in such a way that their paws barely touched the ground. The vets who visited the crime scene estimated that the animals experienced eight hours of torture before dying.

Photo: alex kuruz

To fight cruelty and help strays, small grassroots groups are cropping up all over Greece. Many buy food and pay for veterinary services out of their own pockets, help to re-home dogs both locally and abroad, and some are even opening small shelters on their own properties.

Fortunately, young people are taking an interest in the animal rights movement. Organized protests are starting to be utilized and a local TV channel now airs an animal welfare program.

To do our part while we are there, we will spend much of our time working on feeding stations for the massive stray population and providing hands-on care to animals in shelters to prepare them for adoption. We’ll also do community outreach, distributing educational materials on sterilization, anti-cruelty practices, and responsible pet ownership, as well as producing a demonstration with local activists.

As we travel to different to Ioannina, Konitsa, Papingo, and Kavasila, all in the Zagoria region, we will connect with locals. I am excited to meet all these wonderful people who dedicate their time to improve the lives of the animals. Between each of these volunteer experiences, we will be white water rafting, kayaking, and trekking between the villages some days.

Photo: OxOx

What makes this trip more unusual is that the five of us have never met. But we share a common bond– a love for animals– and we refuse to turn a blind eye to the injustice occurring in Greece. We refuse to go on with our daily lives like nothing is happening.

We want to get out there, get our hands dirty, and make a difference far beyond this 10 day trip. I am certain lifelong bonds will be formed and with the collective knowledge of this group of power-hitters, new ideas will be created.

Community Connection:

Interested in other ways you can volunteer to improve the lives of animals? Read about Mexico’s Todos Tortugueros turtle rescue project and Thailand’s opportunities to volunteer for the protection of elephants.

Computer users in Rwanda. Photo: Colleen Taugher

“Gordon Brown claims Rwanda would never have happened if Twitter had been around….”

That was the first tweet I read when I checked my Twitter feed this morning.

“Bold claim,” I thought, before taking my first sip of coffee.

“Utterly ridiculous statement,” I said out loud as I took a gulp and thought about it some more.

*
The tweet, posted by @krishgm, a host for London’s Channel 4 news, referenced an article in The Guardian in which British PM Gordon Brown said the following:

“…the internet era [is] “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution. For centuries, individuals have been learning how to live with their next-door neighbours…. Now, uniquely, we’re having to learn to live with people who we don’t know.

“People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents, to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you’ve got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world. That flow of information means that foreign policy can never be the same again.

“You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.

“Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.”

*
I agree about the power to “speak across continents,” to form communities and networks that aren’t based on geography, but on common concerns. And that’s why I’m an ardent proponent of Internet technologies as a critical tool of social change.

But to think that the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the thousands of other atrocities happening in the world right this second could have been prevented or could be controlled simply by exposing them and pressuring governments to take action is an argument I find both terribly naive and untenable.

Brown’s comment reflects a certain elitism that overlooks the fact that millions of people in the world have limited or no access at all to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or even a basic Internet connection. The people most likely to be affected directly by atrocities can’t tweet about them to the rest of the world– they don’t own the means to do so.

Even those who have access, notes the Digital Divide, tend to be using platforms and tools that are “low-quality and merely ‘localized’ versions of products and services intended for the rich.”

So how are we to reallyinterpret the true significance of technology as a tool for social change? Weigh in with your opinions in the comments below.

Community Connection:

Don’t know what Twitter is? Get some background information here.

Photo: .faramarz

Photo: .faramarz

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei raised the stakes on Friday when he defended President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the rightful winner in the country’s June 12th elections.

The supreme leader threatened “bloodshed and chaos” to Iranian citizens who defy his ban and take to the streets for Saturday’s anticipated protests.

Despite the threats, Iranians who want a better future are planning to rally on Saturday in the face of serious risk.

The stern warning has echoed fear of a massacre resembling the one that left 2,500 dead and 10,000 wounded in the Beijing’s Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

Here are five reasons we should support and applaud Iranian protesters on Saturday:

1) The protesters have the momentum.

Iranian activists have already accomplished much with the massive protests over the past week. They have captured the attention of the world, and posed a formidable challenge to their leadership and the rigged election. They have sent a message to Iranian leaders that they will not follow a government they did not choose.

Photo: mrarasmus

Friday’s harsh threats from the supreme leader are a last resort to quell the unrest and now the ball is in the people’s court.

If they have the courage to call his bluff, risking physical harm to themselves, it will represent a tipping point for the country.

2) The Iranians want our support.

You may have noticed in some of the most prolific photos of the protests this week, many of the signs are in English.

Iranian protesters know that the rest of the world is watching and with English signs, like “Where is my vote?”, they are sending us a message that they are not violent people, they want democracy to succeed and they want the improvements that it will bring to their lives.

3) It’s not about the opposition leaders anymore; it’s about the people.

The supreme leader’s threats are directed at all Iranians, but he specifically said that the responsibility for the chaos and bloodshed come Saturday would be on the hands of opposition leaders.

In other words, he’s ordering the opposition leaders to call off the rallies. Problem is, the time when that was possible has already passed.

Mr. Hossein Moussavi. Photo: Hamed Saber

On Tuesday, Mr. Hossein Moussavi, one of the main opposition leaders, urged his own supporters to cancel their plans to rally and it had no effect.

Hundreds of thousands showed up against his intentions and when the numbers neared a million, he joined them.

This shows that it’s ordinary citizens, not high-powered politicians fueling this unrest. It is the people–and a large section of the Iranian establishment– demanding a fair election.

4) Regime change can only come from within.

As much as Western governments would like to replace the totalitarian regime in Iran, real revolution must come from within. Outside governments like the US will never be able to successfully change a sovereign government like Iran through embargoes and political pressure.

More importantly, in Iran, the single biggest subject that unifies the most radical sects of the government is “outside power”, i.e. America vying for influence. In other words, the more western governments attempt to influence politics from the outside, the more we are emboldening politicians like Ahmadinejad and fueling hatred of America at the political level.

Photo: .faramarz

If successful regime change comes to Iran, it will arrive in the hands of Iranians.

5) There is so much future to fight for.

70% of Iranians are under the age of 30. A change in government now could have dramatically positive results for the lives of all young Iranians. Now is their chance.

The people of Iran have been entangled by the oppression of their government and the prejudice of the West for too long.

Just as many Americans cringed at the thought of foreigners perceiving our people by the measures of our government and foreign policy during the W. Bush years, Iranians too are frustrated by the fact that their people are judged by the decisions made by their government. This is an opportunity to change all that.

Just as we in the United States changed our leadership and elected Obama to open people’s minds back up to what we stand for, Iranians could do the same thing if they succeed in bringing new leadership to Iran.

The time is now.

So I urge you, regardless of where you are in the world, or what country you’re from, support the people of Iran on this fateful day. Make sure everyone you care about knows what’s happening and understands how high the stakes are for these people, who so desperately want a real democracy. To begin, here are six ways you can help.

Photo: .faramarz

When something significant is going down in another country and you’re halfway around the world, it’s hard to feel that you can take any action that will make a tangible difference in the lives of people who could benefit from your support. Here are six things you can do right now to help people in Iran who feel that the presidential election in their country was not carried out fairly.

1. Get the facts.

Before you take any action, make sure your facts are straight. With news coming out of Iran at head-spinning speed and from multiple sources–not all of which are reliable–it’s critical that you inform yourself about what’s been occurring in the country over the past week.

Read widely. Opinions, perspectives, and first-hand accounts from the country vary dramatically depending on the source. Some places to start? Al Jazeera, Andrew Sullivan’s “The Daily Dish” blog on The Atlantic’s website, Der Spiegel, the BBC, and National Public Radio.

2. Become part of a critical mass.

Don’t reinvent the wheel: there are already dozens of non-profits, NGOs, and activist groups that have mobilized organized actions that will only be effective if they achieve a critical mass of participants.

Avaaz is currently organizing an exit poll to phone Iranians, ask for whom they voted, and publicize the collected data to the international media. The organization has set a goal of raising $119,000 USD to conduct the poll, and is aiming to collect donations from more than 10,000 participants in the next 24 hours.

3. Take to the streets.

Protest in Tehran; Photo: .faramarz

Street protests CAN make a difference. You don’t have to be in Tehran to take to the streets, though. Marches, protests, and demonstrations of solidarity are being held all over the world, including Washington, D.C. and Portland. Google your city, “Iran” and “solidarity” to learn whether an event is planned for your area.

4. “Green” your online profiles.

It may seem silly, but changing the background color of your avatar is an outward sign of solidarity that’s visible to Iranians with Internet access. Imagine how you’d feel if you knew millions of people were thinking of you while you were struggling for your political rights, even if they couldn’t do much that would make a tangible difference in your circumstances.

The color that has been chosen to support Iranian activists is green. To “green” your profile, follow these instructions:

1. Go to http://www.picnik.com
2. Upload your photo.
3. Click “create.”
4. Click “effects.”
5. Click “night vision.”
6. Save and add to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Alternately, you can download this icon, courtesy of dlayphoto.com, and use it as your temporary avatar.

5. Be a smart follower on Twitter and Facebook.

Just as Twitter and Facebook are being used by Iranian activists to organize action and disseminate information, the same platforms are being used by the opposition. Evaluate accounts related to Iran and the elections carefully.

One legitimate Twitter feed to follow is @IranSolidarity, who’s collecting and retweeting information and updates from multiple sources.

6. Start thinking about the bigger picture and the back story.

Photo: .faramarz

Don’t let your activism become a form of neo-imperialism.

As one American blogger noted, it’s easy to get riled up about injustice abroad, but easy to overlook more subtle forms of oppression in our own backyards.

Iran is more than the cause du jour.

Let Iran be your impetus to commit to action everywhere, especially at home. Make your activism part of your daily life.

Community Connection:

If you missed Ryan Van Lenning’s article about citizen diplomacy in Iran, be sure to take a few minutes to access it here.

All photos courtesy of Peace Action West.

There are a lot of words Westerners associate with Iran, but citizen diplomacy is probably not among them. Your typical news report on anything dealing with Iran might mention nuclear ambitions, sanctions, or Ahmadinejad’s latest display of rhetoric.

But these phrases have little connection to the experiences of Rebecca Griffin, who recently returned from Iran, where she carried messages of peace from American citizens. Griffin is political director of Peace Action West, and I sat down with her to hear about her experiences first hand.

Griffin with an Iranian woman who asked, “Weren’t you scared to come here because of the media?”

In a climate where 35% of Americans named Iran as the number one threat to America, citizen diplomacy might be far from many people’s minds. Rebecca Griffin thinks that just means pundits and fear-mongering media are doing their job well. She believes that is even more reason to engage in diplomacy.

Griffin’s organization, Peace Action West, recently launched a campaign called Citizen Diplomat, which put out an appeal:

“Politicians and pundits in both the United States and Iran build support for an approach to the world based on force and aggression by dehumanizing the ‘enemy’ and exploiting people’s worst fears. But regular people like you and me can take their power away by putting a human face on the US and Iran and showing that ordinary people in both countries support each other and want to build a strong, respectful and peaceful relationship. By demonstrating that Americans and Iranians are more alike than we are different. Share your personal hopes for peace with Iran in a recorded message, and I will make sure Iranians see them. It is much harder to advocate for sanctions when you know a child who will go hungry, or bombings when you know families who could be killed. Thank you for sharing your positive hopes and vision for friendship with Iran.”

That appeal went viral online and Americans from all parts of the country sent in written statements and recorded audio and video of themselves addressing Iranians with messages of peace and good will.

”The responses were very positive and encouraging on all sides,” Griffin said.

Griffin gave CDs of the various messages to people and groups she met in Iran. She found Iranians she met to be very welcoming. For some, she was the first American they had ever met in person.

Griffin interviews Ashkan using a Flip camera.

Griffin said she was motivated because “there is a new window of opportunity” and a new mood in the country. Add to that new media technologies that make it easier to communicate globally.

Her goals were to show Iranians that the average American wants peace, to show both Americans and Iranians another side of each other, and to mobilize citizens to pressure politicians to back away from confrontation and engage in diplomacy.

While in Iran, Rebecca met with American Studies students at Tehran University and with members of a group called Miles for Peace, a group of Iranian citizens who bicycled through Europe carrying their own brand of citizen diplomacy.

Griffin with members of Miles for Peace

They traveled for 70 days through 18 cities and met with European mayors and citizens. Griffin noted that both she and members of Miles For Peace found it uplifting that ordinary citizens of both nations were educating and advocating for peace and mutual respect.

I asked her about President Obama, who just returned from his own tour of the region. “Obama’s speech is significant,” Griffin says, “especially when [compared] with any previous administration.”

Obama highlighted diplomacy without preconditions and a new path forward, as well as Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy, while warning about a nuclear arms race in the region.

Griffin said that it is a step in the right direction with regard to healing relationships with Muslim countries. “But,” she continues, “the people of the region want to see action, not only talk. They are waiting to see.”

There is a lot of mistrust between the two nations. Iranians remember our activities in the region, as Griffin was continuously reminded. For example, while many Americans are probably unaware of the CIA’s (and the British) role in the 1953 coup that overthrew elected Prime Minister Mosaddeq, this information is part of standard history lessons for Iranians.

School girls in Iran.

Iranians also remember the United States’ role in the Iran-Iraq war, a bloody 8-year conflict that injured over a million people and is not far from the minds of even young people, who were just children at the time. The United States played each country off one another, but heavily aided Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, giving him the green light to attack over Iran’s border. The United States not only gave billions of dollars in aid, but also intelligence, weapons, chemicals, technology, agricultural credits, and special forces training.

“All of this still feels very present to them,” Griffin told me.

She also told me a story of a taxi-cab driver who told her group he wants peaceful relations with the United States, and even wants different political leadership. But he added that he would pick up a gun to defend his country, who he called “mother,” if threatened or attacked by the United States.

Griffin said this belies the claim that if we just pressure Iran enough through sanctions, its citizens will turn against its government. The United States has often used the strategy of sanctions as punishment against countries, from Cuba to Iraq, in an attempt to make conditions worse for both the government and the people until—so the theory goes—the people will rise up to force a change of regime or change of behavior on the part of its political leaders.

The path to trust and a healthier relationship between the United States and Iran is an uphill one. There are many obstacles to normalizing relations with Iran. Alongside Ahmadinejad’s and Supreme Leader Khameini’s provocative statements and the fact that U.S. bases, troops, and naval warships are surrounding Iran, Congress is sending the wrong message, sometimes at odds with Obama’s.

At the same time, Obama is making diplomatic gestures and trying to change the tone, Congress is talking about harsher sanctions and drafting bills to punish companies that sell to Iran, actions Griffin sees as counter-productive. Peace Action West and its members are pressuring their representatives to support diplomacy and take advantage of an opportunity to move away from confrontation.

When I asked her how she responds to those who would say she should leave diplomacy to the diplomats, Griffin says, “Of course there has to be high-level diplomacy. But speaking as citizens is a lot less loaded of an interaction. When you speak person-to-person,” she notes, “you realize how similar you are.”

It may not be the solution, but it is part of the solution.

Whatever Obama’s administration does with regard to Iran, Griffin stressed the need to get past the one-sided narrow version of each other that each country has, mostly gained through the mainstream media and the government. Especially in the age of blogging, alternative media, and global travel, Griffin counsels citizens of both nations to “learn more about each other and to facilitate communication.”

If only the pundits and politicians would get out of the way.

To find out more about Rebecca Griffin’s trip and how to get involved, visit Peace Action West’s Citizen Diplomacy.

Community Connection:

To learn more about current Iranian politics, read about the ways in which women in the region are influencing political and social space.

On Wednesday and Thursday, people in 20 cities around the world–including Denver, Miami, Helsinki, Paris, Madrid, Torino, Stockholm, Ottawa, and Melbourne–gathered to express their solidarity with Peruvian protesters who were attacked by federal special forces in the remote region of Bagua last week.

My husband, Francisco Collazo, was at the New York City demonstration to document the diverse group of people who showed up at the Consulate of Peru in photographs:

1. A homemade sign expresses a protester’s beliefs.

After posting some of the photos on our blog, a commenter remarked: “Some people actually solve problems, others just make signs and pretend to make a difference.”

The comment rankled and I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon.

It’s easy–and important, too–to question the privilege that we have as protesters responding to an episode as serious as the attacks on the indigenous communities in Bagua from a distance. We’re not at any real risk.

Maybe this guy got arrested on a civil disobedience misdemeanor…

2. This man chained himself to a door.

but that’s hardly akin to putting one’s life on the line in a remote area of Peru. And granted, it’s not comparable to the work that Gregor MacLennan is doing in Bagua, gathering testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to the attack and informing the international media of what’s happening on the ground there.

Still, I think the anonymous commenter is cynical.

We can’t all be on the front lines gathering testimonies and providing direct aid. We have jobs and families and obligations that keep us tied to where we are. But we can gather together in our own communities with people who share a deep concern for fellow human beings experiencing crisis and injustice to let them know that their tragedy is being witnessed and that we won’t be silent. We can bring our signs and get together to say “We haven’t forgotten you” and to tell perpetrators of injustice “We hold you accountable.”

We can chain ourselves to the doors of our elected and appointed representatives to draw attention to world problems and say, “We expect you to intervene.”

And you know what, Mr. Cynical? Holding signs and chanting “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” (“The people, united, will never be divided”) doesn’t just make us feel better.

Today, just 24 hours after it launched an online petition calling the president of Peru to protect and uphold indigenous rights, the activist group Avaaz had collected over 113,000 signatures. In response to this action and the worldwide pressure put on President Alan Garcia by all these crazy protesters with their signs, the Peruvian legislature announced that it has temporarily suspended two of the free trade decrees that provoked the people of Bagua to protest and precipitated the full-on attack by Peruvian Special Forces.

Just look at what a few homemade signs can do.

Photos courtesy of Amazon Watch

[Editor's Note: This article contains extremely graphic images that may not be appropriate for all audiences. Please use your discretion.]

For people around the world who have limited access to traditional forms of power, the peaceful demonstration is often an effective means of bringing local and international attention to life and death issues that would otherwise go unnoticed.

This was true during the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., when African Americans dressed in their Sunday finest and sat at lunch counters, waiting to be served but knowing they wouldn’t be.

It was true two weeks ago in California, when supporters of gay rights gathered together to stage a sit-in in front of San Francisco’s City Hall.

And it was true on Friday morning, June 6, when several thousand Awajun and Wambis, indigenous Peruvians, continued their 56 day road block in the remote area of Bagua to protest free trade agreements that have opened ancestral lands to private companies for resource extraction without their input or agreement.

But traditional authority has little tolerance for these patient, often silent, forms of protest.

And so, around 2 AM on Friday morning, Peruvian Special Forces surrounded demonstrators set up along a roadway with steep embankments on either side. While the demonstrators were sleeping, police came in from both sides and even from above–by helicopter–trapping the indigenous groups and demanding they cede the land they were holding.

When the demonstrators refused, police fired tear gas, grenades, and bullets into the group, killing at least 25 civilians and wounding more than 150.

Gregor MacLennan of the environmental advocacy group Amazon Watch arrived in Bagua shortly after the attacks to begin collecting the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Based on the reports he collected, MacLennan reported:

“All eyewitness testimonies say that Special Forces opened fire on peaceful and unarmed demonstrators…. This was not a clash, but a coordinated police raid with police firing on protesters from both sides of their blockade…. Some have reported seeing the police throwing liquid on the cadavers and burning them.

“Also local residents have given accounts of having seen police throwing bodies of dead civilians into the river in an apparent attempt to underreport the number of dead. We’ve also received accounts that some of those injured were being detained by security forces and denied medical attention leading to additional deaths. There are many people still reported missing and access to medical attention in the region is horribly inadequate.”

Amazon Watch is currently monitoring events in the region and has established several opportunities for you to take action:

1. Send a direct message to Peruvian President Alan Garcia and the government to support the four-point agenda presented by the indigenous groups: (a) immediately suspend violent repression of indigenous protests and the State of Emergency; (b) repeal the Free Trade Laws that allow oil, logging, and agricultural corporations easy entry into indigenous territories; (c) respect indigenous peoples’ constitutionally guaranteed rights to self-determination, to their ancestral territories, and to prior consultation; and (d) enter into good faith process of dialogue with indigenous peoples to resolve this conflict.

2. Make a donation of any amount to a fund that has been established to provide emergency medical care and legal services to those directly affected by the violent raid.

Photo: irene.

When I was watching Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s address to the California legislature last week, I wasn’t sure I could believe my eyes or ears: The Terminator, er, Governator, almost sounded emotional as he talked about “seeing the faces behind those [budget] cuts,” which he’d made with his executive power.

“It’s an awful feeling,” Governor Schwarzenegger said, describing the sound of protesters outside the Capitol building and recounting the tales of civil servants, Alzheimer’s patients, and children who will be affected directly by cuts to the state’s three largest areas of spending: education, health care, and the prison system.

In addition to critical services, the governor announced that he plans to shut down 220 state parks as a cash-saving measure to help correct the $24 billion budget deficit.

Acknowledging that legislators’ decisions about the budget will likely be the most difficult choices they’ve ever faced, Schwarzenegger said that the state will run out of money if they don’t make those tough calls by June 15.

He’s right, of course– the only way the budget can be reined in is by making hard choices. But closing state parks doesn’t just affect people’s ability to enjoy California’s abundant natural resources; it will also affect their health and quality of life. As The Gaia Conservancy noted, state parks may actually help bail out the foundering economy. When local tourism is promoted, money goes directly to the state.

You can view the full speech in the video below:

Community Connection:

Want to take action? The Gaia Conservancy is sponsoring an online petition, which you can sign here. You can also view other resources and calls to action on the California State Parks Foundation’s Facebook account, which is here.

And if all your efforts don’t prevent California’s state parks from being closed, check out Matador contributor William Moss Wilson’s article about California’s best treks… some of the urban options may surprise you!

Photo by reurinkjan

Photo by SirenSongs

Lhasang Tsering la is no Dalai Lama.

Born in Tibet and brought into exile at a young age, he forfeited an opportunity to study medicine in the US, joining the armed Tibetan resistance force instead.

For the past thirty years, he has been fighting for Tibetan freedom non-stop.

There are few who would dare disagree with the Dalai Lama, a man who has come to represent the very embodiment of peace.

Yet Tsering la is outspoken in his rejection of the Dalai Lama’s “Middle-Way” Policy and makes no point of hiding the fact that he thinks the Buddhist spiritual leader is failing the Tibetan people.

He accuses the Dalai Lama of being the “cause of loss of clarity of purpose,” which is as close to open criticism of His Holiness as you will hear any Tibetan say.

Nevertheless, Tsering la believes that the Dalai Lama’s support is 100% necessary for the unification of the Tibetan people and for the success of any sort of plan for independence.

The Mosquito Plan

Tsering la is unequivocal in his call for Tibetan independence. For him, so-called “autonomy” is not an option. Tibet is not, and never has been, a part of China.

So how does Tibet go about challenging China? It would be a victory as improbable as that of David over Goliath.

Photo by Luisa Sperry

Tsering-la admits the impossibility of any sort of military solution; China has more armed troops than there are Tibetan people.

A political solution is also out of the question as China enjoys veto power as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Tsering la has developed what he calls “The Mosquito Plan,” united action by those people under Chinese colonial power in targeting the market-oriented economy from within China.

He envisions power outages in factories, supermarkets, and office buildings across China, repeated disruptions to Chinese communications and infrastructure.

Annoy China? That’s the plan?

Initially it sounded outrageous, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

The key is to embarrass China. “People will do for hurt pride what they will not do for love or money,” says Tsering la.

He thinks China’s situation is already unstable. His hope is that he can push the monster nation to the brink of imploding.

World War III?

Tsering la highlights Tibet’s mineral wealth and natural resources as central to China’s interest in Tibet. Additionally, he points to the huge land mass as a way for China to ease its population burdens, citing the daily migration of Chinese ethnic groups into Tibet as proof.

His message is clear: China needs Tibet, not the Tibetan people.

But Tsering la sees the issue as reaching far beyond that of Tibetan sovereignty. China is the source of all of Asia’s major rivers, making half of humanity dependent on China.

Photo by Luisa Sperry

In the coming decades, population in South Asia promises to continue to explode as environmental degradation worsens.

Tsering-la foresees the possibility of a war between China and India over increasingly valuable fresh water resources.

For the sake of humanity, I can only hope he is wrong.

As you may have guessed, Tsering la is not a Buddhist. He left me with what he calls his “Four Humble Truths.” They are as follows:

* Freedom is a basic necessity

* Freedom is not free

Feature photo: art es anna

Photo: British MP George Galloway speaks to the media as he arrives in Gaza. ISM Palestine Feature photo: gloucester2gaza

That is George Galloway’s goal–to organize a 500 vehicle convoy with as many people to deliver $10 million dollars in aid and medical supplies for the people of Gaza through the Egyptian border.

Ambitious? Yes. Realistic? Absolutely.

George Galloway, controversial member of the UK Parliament and founder of the Viva Palestina campaign, is on a whirlwind tour of major U.S. cities to raise awareness about the situation in Gaza.

Viva Palestina: A Lifeline from the United States to Gaza, is the second round of a remarkable feat that Galloway and hundreds of concerned global citizens pulled off this spring.

Photo: ISM Palestine

Starting from Britain, volunteers drove a mile-long convoy of over 100 vehicles through Belgium, France, and Spain, ferried across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, then drove westward across the North African desert. A month later, and over 9,000 miles traveled across nine countries, Viva Palestina arrived in Gaza with 12 ambulances, a fire engine, buses, a boat, and hundreds of trucks full of medicine, food, blankets, clothes, tools, and gifts for children.

This is the material from which epic movies are made.

George Galloway is a leftist MP, elected several times in the British Parliament. The outspoken Galloway is no stranger to taking positions contrary to prevailing political winds. He opposed the Iraq sanctions in the 1990s and campaigned to prevent the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is optimistic and determined about his new campaign. “There’s a new atmosphere in the US over Palestine,” he says; “the phenomenal response to this tour demonstrates that.”

At a speaking event hosted by MECA (Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance) in Berkeley, California on May 20, Galloway told the audience about the stumbling blocks along the way, including the arrest of nine volunteers detained under British Anti-Terrorism laws even before the caravan got underway.

Photo: Viva Palestina convoy arrives in Gaza. ISM Palestine

Crossing the borders of North African nations was no simple task either. Galloway was struck by how little support there was–even among Arab governments–for the people in Gaza. Egypt– partly because the U.S. gives it billions of dollars in military aid every year– was not very enthusiastic about the trip. But it was through their border at Rafah that the convoy finally reached Gaza.

Libya was the one Arab country that genuinely supported the effort, giving the campaign free fuel and accommodations. The border between Libya and Algeria was opened for the first time in 15 years, allowing the caravan to go through. Galloway told the audience that Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi asked him how many vehicles they had in the convoy.

Galloway answered, “110.”

Gaddafi responded, “Now you have 220.”

In contrast to their political leaders, the citizens of each country displayed solidarity. Galloway described how people went miles out of their way to bring the convoy supplies to carry to the people of Gaza.

Since Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) took control of Gaza in 2007, it has been subject to an international blockade, Israeli restrictions, and a ban on exports, causing a humanitarian crisis for the 1.5 million people who live on that isolated strip of land 25 miles long and six miles wide.

Despite a cease-fire in June 2008, Israel did little to reduce its military blockade. In the context of worsening conditions, the cease-fire began to seriously unravel on November 4, when Israel made an incursion into Gaza and killed six Palestinians, followed by an air strike, calling it a preemptive measure to remove a threat. Hamas fired rockets into Israeli territory. On December 27, 2008, Israel began aerial bombardment on Gaza in response, followed by a ground invasion.

It was the intensification of collective punishment for the people of Gaza. As Karen Koning AbuZayd of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees reported in January, “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and– some would say–encouragement of the international community.”

Organizations ranging from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and UNICEF to the International Committee of the Red Cross have expressed alarm over the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the blockaded Gaza Strip. Tony Blair said in March that Israel must lift the blockade immediately. “I don’t think anybody can come here and not be appalled by what is happening,” Blair declared.

George Galloway and hundreds of others certainly were appalled and are doing something about it. The U.S. convoy is set to depart on July 4, U.S. Independence Day. Co-leading the U.S. campaign is Ron Kovic, long-time peace activist, Vietnam War veteran, and star of the Oliver Stone film, “Born on the Fourth of July,” in which he was portrayed by Tom Cruise. After that, the next convoy is set to depart October 4, traveling via Europe and Asia (about 3,500 miles over 18 days).

The plan: volunteers will fly to Egypt, buy the vehicles and medical supplies in Cairo, and then head for the Egyptian border with Gaza. If things go as planned, the people of Gaza will receive much needed humanitarian aid and international solidarity from the people of the United States.

Talk about travel with a purpose.

For more background information on the situation, visit GazaSiege or ElectronicIntifada. For more information about the humanitarian convoy, visit Viva Palestina.

Photo: David Gilbert, Amazon Watch

How many activists does it take to shut down the main entrance to the headquarters of the 2nd largest U.S. oil corporation?

Six.

Well, six, plus dozens of supporters and organizers of an international campaign called The True Cost of Chevron.

The purpose was to draw attention to Chevron’s environmental and human rights abuses from Richmond, California– the location of one of its largest refineries– to Ecuador, where a judge is set to decide this fall on the long-standing lawsuit that seeks damages of $27 billion for toxic environmental pollution in the Amazon rainforest and its communities.

The setting was Chevron’s annual shareholders’ meeting in affluent San Ramon, California, about 30 miles from its second largest refinery in Richmond. It was too close for me not to miss.

Photo by author

Blocking the entrance was not the goal of the demonstration. Rather, it set the stage for two events that marked the day: First, proxy shareholders came from the many countries around the world where Chevron operates to share the stories and concerns of their respective communities with the Board and Chevron CEO David J. O’Reilly (the 15th highest paid U.S. oil CEO).

Second, the announcement and discussion of “An Alternative Annual Report” entitled “The True Cost of Chevron” that is in striking contrast to Chevron’s own 2008 Annual Shareholder Report, which highlights its remarkable financial success, boasting nearly $24 billion in profits last year. “What Chevron’s annual report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns, or the global movement gaining voice and strength against Chevron’s abuses,” reads the alternative report.

Organized by a broad coalition of organizations, including Amazon Watch, Global Exchange, Justice in Nigeria Now, CorpWatch, Richmond Progressive Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, and Crude Accountability, the Alternative Report chronicles abuses in Nigeria, the Philippines, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Burma, Canada, and the USA.

It covers everything from Chevron’s successful lobbying of high-level political connections to air pollution, toxic spills, industrial accidents, discriminatory labor practices, human rights abuses, and environmental and health devastation. Its demands to Chevron are clear and simple: clean up your mess, clean up your act, stop aligning yourself with dictatorships and militaries, pay your fair share, and be transparent.

I was among several dozen activists who accompanied the proxy shareholders to the security gate, where they were sent off with good cheer and warm solidarity. Soon after the shareholders went in, six local activists from Unconventional Action if the Bay Area and Rising Tide locked down the main entrance lane by locking their arms in PVC tubes painted yellow with the words “Chevron kills.”

Photo by author

They were soon joined by myself and dozens of others lined up behind them, claiming a space for speakers to explain why we were there. Chevron security forces and San Ramon police did not attempt to remove us. Perhaps they decided not to take action in order not to draw more negative media attention than Chevron is already getting.

The coalition of organizers also produced a clever subvertisement campaign called “Chevwrong” that mirrored and mocked Chevron’s latest “Human Energy” ad campaign. Images of representatives of communities around the world are shown with a quote, such as “I will try not to breathe polluted air” along with a factoid highlighting a particular abuse in a specific region.

The week prior to the meeting, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the appearance of these images wheat-pasted on billboards and poles around town. CBS Outdoor had refused to sell ad space on its billboards. When contacted, the CBS spokesperson said that it was against policy to have attack ads that were negative in character.

Alongside this was a form of subvertisement theater organized in large part by long-time activist David Solnit, author of Army of None. The alternative campaign is meant to speak the truth about the real effects of Chevron’s actions behind the fancy rhetoric of Chevron’s greenwashing campaign. Instead, Chevron’s “Human Energy” becomes “Inhumane Energy” and the subvertisement images read, “I will expose greenwashing,” and “I will expose toxic pollution.” Activists held the ads up to frame their faces behind the subversive words and chanted in unison, “I will expose–green washing! Will you join me? Yes, I will!”

Photo by author

While the shareholder meeting was taking place, speakers from Amazon Watch, National Lawyers Guild, and individuals like Antonia Juhasz–lead organizer and editor of the Alternative Report–and Rebecca Solnit, author of the much-praised Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, highlighted the grievances against Chevron and the need to keep putting pressure on the big oil giants. One member of Iraq Veterans Against the War told about how he was reassigned from his communications/intelligence duties in Iraq to protect oil pipelines.

At about 10:30, the shareholders came out and shared what occurred in the meeting. It was reported that Chevron’s CEO David O’Reilly told them that the campaign’s Alternative Report, which he claimed he had seen, along with their grievances “are an insult to Chevron employees, and should be thrown in the trash.”

Speakers ranged from the Mayor of Richmond, Gayle McLaughlin, who reported that “Chevron’s response is emblematic of its approach to local communities—a systemic disregard and mockery of the communities in which it operates,” to Christine Cordero of Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, who said:

“While our communities suffer from Chevron’s toxic emissions, catastrophic spills, leakages, and explosions, David O’Reilly speaks of his hurt feelings. This is about the health of communities and, ultimately, the long term of health of O’Reilly’s corporation if he continues to choose to do nothing and ignore the costs of Chevron’s operations in the Philippines.”

Paul Donowitz of EarthRights International added that “Chevron chose to turn a deaf ear to the communities who bear the crippling consequences of its operations. Chevron’s complicity in human rights abuses in Burma, the billions in project revenues flowing to the brutal Burmese military junta who use these profits to oppress their own people are more evidence that this is a company that cares for only one thing – its bottom line.” A dozen or so people from the Burmese community, including a robed monk, were there to oppose Chevron’s actions in their country.

After the speakers finished their reports, the rally was concluded with the chant “We’ll be back! We’ll be back!”—echoing Ecuador representative Mr. Criollo’s promise that “we’ll keep fighting until the end.”

1. People of all ages…

2. People from all walks of life…

3. People from different tribes…

4. People from different countries…

5. brought together by the same sense of resolve…

6. brought together by the desire to take action.

7. They stood and they sat…

8. and they said, “We won’t be silent.”

Photos 1-5: David Gilbert, Amazon Watch

Photos 6-8: Thomas Cavanagh, Amazon Watch

Community Connection:

To read about the outcome of the Shareholder Meeting, click here. And to get the back story on Chevron, be sure to review Matador’s coverage, which you can access by clicking on “Related Posts” below.

Emergildo Criollo

Avujathse gi ke’ima chiga’bian puiyi’ccu EE.UU suma.

Ja’nu gi va San Francisco kanjen tui gi cundaseya mingae amazonia’su a’indeccu Chevron tson’jen’chune.

I send a cordial greeting to the citizens of the United States in my native language.

My name is Emergildo Criollo, and I am a representative of Cofan village. Today, I am in San Francisco [California] to participate in the annual meeting of Chevron, where I will let the public know the truth about what has happened in my territory since Texaco initiated its operations in the Ecuadorean Amazon, as well as the history-making lawsuit that we are leading in pursuit of justice after 15 years.

The village of Cofan is located along the banks of the Aguarico River. When I was a boy, we drank clean water and hunted animals in the forest. We fished in the river, which was uncontaminated. Before, we lived free of pollution. We had enough food for our families, and enough natural medicine from the forest. With these medicines, we cured illnesses as we’d always done, according to our traditions. But with the arrival of Texaco in 1964, we could no longer use these medicines because new illnesses began to appear as a result of contamination.

It was in 1969 when I saw an oil spill for the first time, which soon flowed into the Aguarico River. Seeing this, we–the members of the Cofan–could no longer live there because there was no place to source clean water. So we moved further into the forest, establishing what is known today as the community of Cofan Dureno.

But the company pushed farther and farther into the forest, drilling more oil wells. We even had a well, Dureno 1, which was inside our own community. That well affected our people tremendously. There were spills and massive water accumulations. The flames of refinery towers were visible day and night. Animals abandoned the forest and fish disappeared from the river.

My two sons died drinking contaminated water. My aunt died of mouth cancer. She also drank contaminated water.

The company is to blame for all of the contamination. They must take responsibility for their actions and begin to clean up the contamination that still exists.

The five nationalities–Siona, Secoya, Kichwa, Huaorani, y Cofán– have organized.

Even now, the people from each of these groups continue dying from cancer. It’s for this reason that I write this letter- so you know how Texaco (now Chevron) affects people with its petroleum operations.

The company entered the Amazon without anyone’s permission, destroying the forest and leaving contamination and unknown illnesses in their wake. Today, the company is hiding the truth, saying that oil spills haven’t caused contamination and that they’re not cancer-causing agents. But I know that’s not true because this illness was never in our community before. And I know that my two sons and my aunt would still be alive today.

Chevron must take responsibility for cleaning up the open pools and sediments in the ground water supply so that my children can drink clean water and breathe clean air. Chevron took natural resources from the Ecuadorean rain forest, but those of us who live here have only received contamination, sickness, and death.

Everything the company says is totally false. I know because I’ve seen and experienced the effects of their actions first-hand. Texaco, now Chevron, wants to maintain a clean image. But for me, the image of this company is stained with oil.

I invite all of you to visit the Amazon where Texaco operated. You can see for yourself. You can see firsthand the contamination. You can say so to Chevron and demand that they accept responsibility.

Today, I’ll be entering Chevron’s headquarters to attend the annual meeting of the company’s shareholders. I’m going to talk face-to-face with the company. I’m going to defend my village and demand justice.

I ask the citizens of the United States to join with the 30,000 residents of the Ecuadorean Amazon in solidarity.

We have been fighting for more than 15 years for the company to clean up the damage it’s done to the environment.

And we’ll keep fighting until the end.

Translated from the Spanish by Julie Schwietert Collazo. To read the original version of this letter in Spanish, click here.

Community Connection:

To learn more about what’s going on with big oil this week, check out this article. And to learn how Chevron’s putting responsibility on consumers (and not the company), read about the company’s most recent greenwashing ad campaign. Finally–and most importantly–to learn how YOU can take action, please visit ChevronToxico.

Photo: oxfam international

If you don’t know Majora Carter, you will soon.

Carter, founder of the New York City-based Sustainable South Bronx, is a leader in the urban environmentalism movement. She’s a MacArthur Fellow and frequently appears on who’s who and “most influential” lists, widely admired for her ability to engage disparate interest groups to work together on a single cause.

Carter’s work, first as the founder and director of Sustainable South Bronx, and more recently as the president of the Majora Carter Group (a consulting outfit), as a policy advocate, and as a TV and radio show host, has raised urban awareness about environmental issues.

But her accomplishments notwithstanding, Carter’s vision of environmentalism may end up dividing more people than it unites.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, Carter was asked “How do you make green matter in the ghetto?”. She replied:

“If you’re speaking to someone whose first priority is survival, no one is going to give a crap about the polar bears—nor should they.”

The question was intended to invite conversation about environmentalism as an elitist movement, which has been confined, as the interviewer put it, “to the latte-sipping set.” True, as is the case with so many “movements.”

But the framing of the question and the response it elicited from Carter are troublesome because they imply that environmentalism forces a choice between polar bears and people, between latte-sippers and instant-coffee-from-corner-bodega drinkers.

I agree with Carter’s claim that the environmental movement has, to its detriment, overlooked urban communities and poor people. And I agree that the environmental movement needs to make its arguments and calls to action less theoretical and more tangible, relevant to people’s own daily lives.

But choosing between polar bears and people? It’s a false opposition, Majora. A true environmental movement can–and should–work on saving both.

Community Connection:

It’s true that cities could form the core of a dynamic environmental movement. Check out Six Reasons Why Cities Can Be Sustainable Places and join the conversation.

A student at Escuela Taller’s forge

Mompox, Colombia may be a UNESCO World Heritage site, but if you stopped for a short visit, you’d hardly know it. Located on the banks of the Magdalena River, Mompox is geographically isolated, and for the rest of Colombia–especially the government, Mompox is out of sight, out of mind.

There are some magnificent colonial structures here, and a marker designates the spot where Simon Bolivar (or “The Liberator,” as he’s known) set off on various journeys to secure the region’s independence from Spain.

A local fisherman

It’s rumored this is the town that inspired Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional town of Macondo… and the longer you stick around and the more you observe, the more inclined you are to believe that.

But at first glance, there’s not much to recommend Mompox. The streets are dusty. If the weather’s been bad, staple foodstuffs might not have arrived from the other side of the river, though there’s always plenty of Aguila beer.

Unemployment is high, so lots of men spend their days lounging along the river, listening to the same track of songs spool off the bar’s blaring sound system.

They talk about better days–the ones before the dam was built up river, when their fishing and farming actually yielded something to support their families.

9th graders in Mompox

It’s depressing to think about, really. The kids stare at you blankly when you ask about their future plans. College? Dreams?

Many of their parents have left Colombia to look for work in Venezuela. Some of them don’t have electricity. Despite their incredible intelligence and talent, their prospects aren’t promising.

And yet, behind closed doors, there’s lots of homegrown social change going on, led by people who love their community, don’t want to leave it, and aren’t willing to wait for the government to solve their problems.

People like Alvaro Castro.

Castro, an architect by training, is the director of Escuela Taller (“The Workshop School”), a vocational training program that works with both teens and adults to improve their academic and employment possibilities. Castro describes Mompox as a 21st century town stuck in the 18th century. “From the perspective of an architect, this is marvelous,” he says. “But from a social perspective, it’s a disaster.”

Culinary students

Castro oversees an ambitious and diverse cluster of projects that are intended to help some of the town’s most vulnerable citizens: sexually abused children, adolescents from poor families, and former paramilitary members.

The school has several workshops around town; tucked away behind colonial doors, teens learn culinary arts and hospitality service under the direction of a professional chef; 20- and 30-something year old men learn blacksmithing and woodworking; and young women and men are instructed in the art and science of metallurgy, keeping alive a tradition of filigree jewelry making that has made the town famous in Colombia for more than 100 years.

“The purpose of Escuela Taller’s programs,” Castro says, “is twofold: first, to involve young people in education and work, and second, to rescue and sustain our culture by teaching students our traditions.”

A group of students practice in the school’s forge.

The town’s annual budget of $6 million USD is hardly enough to cover all of Mompox’s basic expenses, much less fund programs like Escuela Taller. When I was there, the local nursing home had been operating without any money for eight months. Keeping such services up and running is a job that nobody envies, but which is fulfilled by people in key positions around town by relying upon good will, creativity, and a long credit line.

Castro’s programs–the cost of which exceeds Mompox’s budget several times over– are largely funded by the Spanish government. The investment pays off: 70% of the school’s graduates go on to find work in their field of study, though their jobs often take them beyond Mompox’s watery border.

There’s lots more Castro would like to do– his most ambitious dream is to collaborate more closely with the local government so students can get hands-on experience renovating their own town through the skills they’ve learned, a goal that seems reasonable enough but which is frustrated by bureaucratic red tape. For now, though, Castro’s happy to go home at the end of each day knowing Escuela Taller’s programs are helping his town and its next generation.

Community Connection:

Some of the most interesting social change programs are projects no one outside the local community has ever heard of. What sorts of projects have you seen on your travels? What are the characteristics of successful social change organizations? Share your experiences in the comments.

Interested in visiting Mompox? Matador’s own Richard McColl owns the guest house, La Casa Amarilla, right along the riverbank.

Photo: Luxerta

I was listening to the radio as I was driving home from work. When I parked in front of my apartment building, I couldn’t get out of the car. The host was describing Saro Wiwa, a writer and an intellectual who had devoted his life to activism when oil giant Royal Dutch Shell began impinging upon environmental and human rights in Nigeria’s Ogoniland. His vision was to engage RDS through a peaceful, non-violent movement.

That movement attracted enough support and international attention to make RDS and the Nigerian government uncomfortable. In 1995, after having been arrested with eight other activists on unfounded allegations of murder, Saro Wiwa was brought to trial and sentenced to death by hanging. As if the execution was not enough, Saro Wiwa’s body was burned with acid and dumped in an unmarked grave.

No individual or group ever took responsibility for the torture and execution of Saro Wiwa and the other activists, as well as the exile of Wiwa family members that occurred after the murder.

Royal Dutch Shell, of course, carried on with business as usual.

The story of Saro Wiwa’s life and death was compelling, and I made a note to stop by the library the following day so I could read some of his work and learn more about him.

And then, September 11 happened.
*
I thought about that broadcast this weekend, when I attended PEN World Voices Festival’s panel discussion between Ken Saro Wiwa’s son, the journalist and government adviser Ken Wiwa, and the American novelist Richard North Patterson, whose most recent novel is based loosely on Saro Wiwa’s life and death. The two men convened, along with moderator Okey Ndibe, a Nigerian novelist, to talk about Saro Wiwa’s legacy.

Ndibe started the conversation by sharing his own recollections of Saro Wiwa. He was “ebullient” Ndibe said of Saro Wiwa, and he “always carried a book” and his signature smoking pipe. Ndibe recalled a man full of life and passion, even in the midst of struggle.

Photo of Ken Wiwa by Francisco Collazo

Wiwa acknowledged Ndibe’s vision of Saro Wiwa, but added that he believed his father also carried a weight of sadness, which came from the sense that he hadn’t achieved enough in the struggle, or that the efforts of the movement were not making progress quickly enough.

Over the course of the conversation, the three men agreed that the ambitious agenda of social, environmental, and economic justice advocated by Saro Wiwa was, if seemingly solitary for Saro Wiwa himself, also profoundly visionary. Today, climate change, desertification, land rights, and the effects of corporatocracies on communities might well be considered the core issues of our time. Saro Wiwa was largely responsible for putting them on the world’s radar screen.

In his final statement before the military tribunal, Saro Wiwa said:

I have no doubt at all about the ultimate success of my cause, no matter the trials and tribulations which I and those who believe with me may encounter on our journey.

The legacy Saro Wiwa left for us all, agreed Ndibe, Wiwa, and Patterson, was to always keep trying, to stay true to one’s ideals and goals even when no progress or support seems imminent, to stay engaged in the struggle.

It’s a message that’s a meaningful reminder for anyone engaged in social justice work, and one that had particular resonance on the day of the panel discussion. After more than 12 years, the Center for Constitutional Rights recently announced that Wiwa v. Shell will open in a federal court in Manhattan on May 26, 2009. After jury selection, the trial is expected to take 4 to 6 weeks.

To stay current with developments in the case, visit the CCR’s Wiwa v. Shell website.

And to learn more about the background of the case, take a few minutes to watch this video:

But mainstream media outlets are finally starting to take big oil to task, exposing its corporate social responsibility mantras as little more than hot air.

Chevron, according to a “60 Minutes” report that aired last night, is the third largest company in the United States, with oil interests all over the world. Drilling far from home, the company has responded to the U.S.’s unquenchable thirst for oil. While reaping a tidy profit–despite the economic downturn, Chevron managed to increase revenues by 25% (to $263 billion USD) in 2008 — Chevron has consistently engaged in business and environmental practices that have had very real and devastating consequences for communities and ecosystems in South America, Africa, and on other continents.

Photo: Kayana Szymczak, via chevrontoxico.com

Chevron’s dirty work has been especially damaging in Ecuador, where the world’s largest environmental lawsuit in history–with more than 30,000 litigants–is getting underway. Chevron, which started oil prospecting in Ecuador in the 1960s, took the money and ran, leaving a trail of environmental hazards–including leaching waste wells–in its wake.

To learn more about the situation, check out “60 Minutes’” full report in this video:

Watch CBS Videos Online

And to learn more about what you can do to hold big oil accountable for its environmental and human atrocities, check out Amazon Watch’s action alerts.

Ramirez, who read from his recently published novel, Mil y Una Muertes (A Thousand Deaths Plus One), spoke afterward about the importance of Nicaraguan intellectuals and writers telling their country’s history from their own perspectives–rather than only allowing that history to be told from the outside.

But news from Nicaragua this week suggests that intellectuals and writers may not be the only Nicaraguans writing or making history.

Dan..

TIME Magazine is reporting that an indigenous group along Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast has called for secession from the country. Journalist Isidro Hernandez explained:

“Frustrated by broken promises of autonomy and generations of exploitation by outsiders, traditional leaders on the rural Atlantic coast are calling for a clean break from Nicaragua and the creation of the Communitarian Nation of the Moskitia (named after the region’s indigenous people).”

The indigenous groups of the coastal region have historically been geographically, socially, politically, and economically marginalized.

Two weeks ago, Hernandez continued, indigenous leaders approved the call for secession, and sent a message to the leftist government of Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, telling him that if the secession is not granted, their group is prepared to fight for their freedom.

The indigenous leaders also sent a letter to the United Nations in which they requested support and protection, expressing their belief that they are living in a state of emergency.

The call for secession poses a unique problem for President Ortega, who claims to have indigenous blood and who has supported secessionist movements around the globe, including those in former Soviet republics and a relatively weak Puerto Rican independence movement. To date, President Ortega has not commented publicly on the secession movement gathering momentum in his own country.

To keep up with developments on this issue, you can visit Nicaragua’s Spanish language newspaper, El Nuevo Diario, or its English language paper, The Nica Times, both of which are online.

The highlight of opening night at Havana Film Festival New York was the presentation of Freddy Vargas’s 12 minute film, “Hispaniola,” which won HBO’s Best Short Film Competition Award in 2007 at the New York Latino Film Festival.

Vargas, born in the Dominican Republic and currently living in New York, returned to Santo Domingo to shoot “Hispaniola,” a docudrama that ambitiously–and successfully–tackles a number of themes relevant to Dominican society today, including racism, relations between Haitians and Dominicans, immigration, and economic challenges in the developing world.

The film depicts two families from drastically different economic, social, and cultural backgrounds. There’s the well-to-do family of a gruff Dominican politician–all light-skinned–who live in a beautiful home, albeit one that’s enclosed behind a gate. Right across the street is a family of Haitian immigrants, who have come to Santo Domingo to work. While they construct the home of a verbally abusive Dominican, they cook and sleep on the worksite and worry constantly about being deported by immigration, as they’re in Santo Domingo without papers.

The families, of course, would never cross paths were it not for the young sons of each group. While playing with the family’s maid in his back yard, the baseball of the politician’s son bounces outside the gate and across the street, into the hands of the excited young son of the workers. Remarkably, the politician’s son hasn’t yet been indoctrinated by his father’s ideology, and he invites the Haitian boy to play.

When the father comes home, though, he explodes. What is a black boy–a Haitian!–doing in his pool, in his yard, in his home? In the final scene, immigration swarm onto the worksite, picking up the Haitian family and carrying them away. Implied is the possibility that the politician called to report them.

It’s a tense, explosive 12 minutes, and one that accurately portrays painful truths about current social problems on the island.

Yet as interesting as the film is, so too is Vargas’s story of making it.

Vargas confronted a number of obstacles for such a short film. Following the screening, he explained,

“There was opposition from the government. The producer chickened out. A couple of the actors dropped out the night before we started filming. And then, a top filmmaker in the Dominican Republic said ‘I’ll help you out, but don’t put my name on it.’”

For someone who doesn’t know much about the Dominican Republic, the issues depicted in “Hispaniola” might not seem to warrant so much opposition from so many different sources.

But race in Hispaniola, the name of the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is anything but simple.

As Vargas explained to me after the screening,

“During the dictatorship, Trujillo [the Dominican dictator who ruled from 1930-1961] denied that Dominicans had any African heritage. He emphasized our European roots instead. And this ideology continues to influence Dominican society in many ways.”

Vargas’s goal in making “Hispaniola” was to raise consciousness about identity and race relations in the Dominican Republic, and to advocate social change by inviting conversation about these issues.

You can watch the full version of “Hispaniola” here.

Photos: Francisco Collazo

On display in Museo de la Memoria (Museum of Memory) between March 23 and May 30, I made it to the opening on the eve of Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia (National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice), a holiday dedicated to the remembrance of the dictatorship and the atrocities and deaths attributable to it.

Family photos enlarged to the size of picture windows present a “before.” Before as in before the Argentinean dictatorship between the years of 1976 and 1983 that snuffed out the lives of as many as 30,000 people.

Above: Maria Irma Ferriera – missing since age 22, murdered January 7, 1977, in a family photograph from 1970.

To the right of each of these moments caught on film among family and friends are their modern counterparts. People who have aged in the interim, the ones who remain, recreate each scene under the careful direction of photographer Gustavo Germano.

Husbands, wives, parents, and children who once were there leave haunting spaces in the images. The gravity of the loss is apparent in the eyes of those in the enormous, full color prints. Many of the subjects gaze directly into the camera with sobering expressions.

The disappeared were from all walks of life. Children were taken from mothers who were suspected of having subversive views – the mothers killed and the children given to the military elite.

The following are some photographs I took of the exhibition along with translations from the program. The missing are named with their age at the time of their disappearance or murder.

María del Carmen Fettolini (age 29)
María Eugenia Amestoy (age 5)
Fernanado Amestoy (age 3)

(in this photo, you can see Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo viewing the work)

María del Carmen was born in 1947 in Nogoyá. Childhood sweetheart and wife of Omar Dario Amestoy, she was a kindergarten teacher in a Catholic school in Nogoyá.

At the age of 29, María del Carmen was brutally assassinated by Army forces and Federal Police along with her husband, Omar Dario Amestoy, and their small children, María Eugenia and Fernando. At six in the morning, tanks and trucks surrounded their house at 668 Justo Street while they slept.

Cars, submachine guns, shouts, grenades, tear gas. María del Carmen, Omar, and their friend Ana María Granada had no means of defending themselves. They tried to hide the children. The adults died riddled with bullets. The children, María Eugenia and Fernando, were asphyxiated by gas. Five month old Manuel, son of Ana María Granada, hidden in a blanket inside a wardrobe, was the only survivor. He recovered his identity in 1995.

In this 1974 photograph, María del Carmen on the right smiles next to her mother in law, Aurora Yturbe, her cousin Martín and her two children, María Eugenia and Fernando. Sunday lunch with the in-laws.

As of March 2009, the families continue to seek justice.

Orlando René Méndez (age 29)
Leticia Margarita Oliva (age 30)

Orlando René was born in San Salvador (Entre Rios) November 10, 1946. Leticia Margarita Oliva was born in Plaza Huincul (Neuquén) August 26, 1948. They were married in April 1970. Their only child, Laura, was born five years later.

Orlando “Toto” worked in an air conditioner factory and was a guerrilla soldier. On October 21, 1976, he was arrested during a meeting with this organization. His 11-month old daughter was with him. They were both transferred to the Navy Mechanics School. Orlando arrived dead.

María Álvarez, also detained there, looked after the baby for several hours. By night, the child was abandoned at an orphanage where, after several days of searching, her mother was found and they were reunited.

After the arrest and murder of her husband, Leticia abandoned activism and moved to another city. December 27, 1978, two years after Orlando’s arrest, an armed commando group invaded her home.

Three year old Laura was in the house with her babysitter. The soldiers waited six hours for Leticia to return from the clinic where she worked. As soon as she entered, they blindfolded her, beat her, and took her away. This is the last image Laura would ever have of her mother, who she would never see again.

In the photograph, Orlando and Leticia with Laura in the house of her grandparents days before the state strike of March 24, 1976.

As of March 29, 2009 Orlando and Leticia are still missing.

Eduardo Raúl Germano (age 18)

Eduardo Raúl was born February 20, 1958 in Villaguay. The oldest of four brothers, at 16 he was elected president of La Salle Student Center and started an activist group.

In July, 1976, he was detained nine days in the hidden detention center in Paraná City Army Squadron Communication Center (CCD). Once freed, he moved to Rosario where he lived in hiding. On December 17, 1976, he was arrested once again, this time by the Argentinean Army and Santa Fe Province Police.

For days he was tortured in the CCD, known as “El Pozo,” or the hole. Investigations following the dictatorship and verified recently by the Museum of the Memory in Rosario reveal that Germano was murdered December 23, 1976.

Rosario Chief of Police, Augustín Feced, organized a simulated terrorist attack in the Fisherton neighborhood to blow up the tortured bodies of Eduardo and his girlfriend. Eduardo “el Mencho” or “the Mensch,” was buried January 4, 1977 in an unmarked grave at La Piedad Cemetery, which was later turned into a mass reliquary.

In the photograph: 1969. The family goes on vacation to Uruguay. The Argentinean police demand an identity photo of the children before permitting them to cross the border. The photo was taken in a studio in a nearby town.

As of March 2009, Eduardo is still missing.

The artist is the subject on the left of each photo here.

Visit Germano’s website to see more photos. Even if you can’t speak or understand Spanish, these photos need no translation.