Our Be the Change Project is small-scale and locally-focused. We do a lot of gardening, teaching about and tinkering with appropriate technologies, experimenting with simple living, and doing service in our area to help our community thrive. In the past few months we have had the great pleasure of employing two “tools” to help make our dreams of a more connected, more just, more fruitful, and more fun world.
The first is the Kickstarter of the Permaculture world called, We the Trees. Like Kickstarter, Indiegogo or other crowd-funding sites, We the Trees offers a platform to share projects and get funded. The difference is that it focuses on Permaculture or Green-themed projects from raising money to attend a Permaculture Design Course to purchasing a solar oven for a non-profit. An added bonus is that the site was started by friends of ours (one of whom, Christian Shearer, created the Panya Project in Thailand) and any money generated by the site (they take a 9 percent cut, like other crowdfunding sites) supports good people doing good work. We are currently using We the Trees to raise money for our first two Neighborhood Micro Nurseries (look for another blog post about that soon). Check out our effort at We the Trees.
The second “tool” is not really a tool per se but an organization that provides seed money to small start-up projects. The Pollination Project gives away $1,000 every day to social change agents whose projects focus on community, permaculture, arts, leadership development, and so on throughout the world. We found out about them from two friends and since we received a Pollination Project grant for our “Edible Hood Program” another friend of ours has also gotten funded. Amazing!
Check out both of these tools and good luck being the change in your neck of the woods.
Kyle Chandler-Isacksen is an urban homesteader who runs the Be the Change Project in Reno, NV with his wife and two young sons. Their home is electricity, fossil fuel and car-free. Kyle is also an avid natural builder offering a great three-week workshop this summer. Find out all about it at House Alive.
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