Innovation in the Streets: It’s Transportation Month
- Stef McDonald wrote in Living, Transportation and News
Let’s face it: getting from point A to point B isn’t always easy. Or fast. Or convenient. Or green. Think about how often we gripe about getting to where we need to go, whether it’s commuting to work, running to the grocery store, or driving to your kid’s T-ball game. Transportation can be a real bitch.
GOOD HQ is in Los Angeles, which recently reclaimed the honor of being named the worst city for traffic in the U.S. You can imagine the conversations by our water cooler. We started to talk about transportation in our city and then other places—and then other countries. We’ve decided to put our attention to the issue of Transportation for the month of May.
Illustration by Kate Slovin
Neighborday Recap: The 10 Best Things That Happened This April 27th
- Hannah Wasserman wrote in Culture, News and Communities
This past Saturday, April 27th, marked the first annual Neighborday. In 22 countries around the world, thousands of people reached over their fences and got to know their neighbors. Like many of you who hosted Neighbordays, we found out that the community really wanted and needed this excuse to get together. We were floored by the enthusiasm, creativity, and doing we saw from the GOOD community. Thank you all so much for your participation. You truly made Neighborday a success!
Here at GOOD HQ we do a lot of top 10 lists, so I’ve crafted an initial top 10 best things that happened on Neighborday 2013. These are in no particular order and I am still getting in a bunch of pictures and stories, so don’t be surprised if this becomes a top 100 list by the end of the week. Have your own top moments? Share them in the comments and/or send to neighborday@goodinc.com
View the full list 10 Best Things from Neighborday on good.is
10 Days Till Neighborday: How Are You Celebrating?
- GOOD HQ in Culture, News and Cities
On April 27, GOOD community members everywhere (in 34 states and 12 countries so far, but our list is growing!) will be celebrating Neighborday. From potlucks to street clean-ups, people have inspiring plans to be social the old-fashioned way—spending quality face-to-face time with the friends and neighbors in their communities.
Will you join us? With only 10 days left, we’re hoping you’ll sign up and create your own Neighborday with our toolkit. It’s easy—check out the map above to see where people all over the country are celebrating and read on for inspiration to create your own.
Illustration by Tyler Hoehne
Infographic: Do You Know Your Neighbor?
- GOOD HQ and Oliver Munday contributed in Culture, America and News
Being neighborly isn’t just giving a smile and nod to your neighbors when you see them on the street. It’s a way of life—a way to build a real social network that can connect you to hyper-local current events, political action, and groups you can join to make your community a better place to live and work. What are ways we can improve how we engage with our communities?
Murals and Math: One School’s Solution to Graffiti
- Ellie Balk wrote in Education, New York and News
The act of painting murals is empowering. Once a student makes a mark on a wall, it becomes his or hers. When you walk down the busy street of Graham Ave, almost every wall is covered in random tags. We help the students create public art that means something and has significance. Students living in Brooklyn need this kind of connection to their communities because when the students invest in their communities, the communities invest in them. These murals are also made for the neighborhood. The results are not only beautiful images, but also sparked conversations.
Push for Good: This Week’s Guide to Crowdfunding Creative Progress
- Alessandra Rizzotti wrote in Push For Good, News and Food
Innovation makes the world go around, so why not crowdfund it? The best thinkers and ideamakers are the those that can make collective progress, so if we support their causes, projects, and ideas, we can be a part of bettering the future of our planet.
Maybe you don’t know what causes you care about yet, or maybe you’re still searching. Consider this a guide of the goodness you can get behind. Take a look at GOOD’s curated Kickstarter page, which we’ll be updating regularly, and check back every week for a round up of our favorite projects from the crowdfunding world.
Continue reading on good.is for more details
IIllustration by Jessica De Jesus
Announcement: The New GOOD Pets Hub Launches Today!
GOOD Partnerships wrote in Culture, News and Lifestyle
Starting today, we’ll be bringing you more than cute and fuzzy posts about cats and dogs. We’ll provide food for thought, including content like:
- Pet Diaries: Our continuing column features comedians, authors, musicians, and other pet owners writing about how their relationships with their neighbors and communities changed after pets came into their lives.
- Profiles about animal shelters and nonprofits that are finding inspiring ways to get their communities involved.
- Stories about people who are driven by curiosity to fuel change in their neighborhoods.
- A series elevating the extraordinary pet research that’s helping to improve the lives of our companions, including mapping the dog genome, studying dog happiness, tracking cat ancestry, and working on ways to help sustain a bright mind for dogs as they age.
- A GOOD Guide to keeping your pet healthy and happy in an urban city.
- Infographics that will include scientific facts about pets.
- And Maker Challenges, which will result in donations to a pet welfare nonprofit or shelter.
Illustration by Jessica De Jesus
Push for Good: This Week’s Guide to Crowdfunding Creative Progress
- Alessandra Rizzotti wrote in Culture, News and Goodness
Innovation makes the world go around, so why not crowdfund it? The best thinkers and ideamakers are the those that can make collective progress, so if we support their causes, projects, and ideas, we can be a part of bettering the future of our planet.
Maybe you don’t know what causes you care about yet, or maybe you’re still searching. Consider this a guide of the goodness you can get behind. Take a look at GOOD’s curated Kickstarter page, which we’ll be updating regularly, and check back every Saturday for a round up of our favorite projects from the crowdfunding world.
Tell us what projects you’re getting behind in the comments below. Push progress forward, and do it for our collective good.
Illustration by Jessica De Jesus. Image from Vintage Printable.
Infographic: Mapping Our Oil Pipeline
- Focus the Nation and Oliver Munday contributed in in Environment, Energy and News
It’s Energy month at GOOD, so we’ve teamed up with Portland, Oregon’s Focus the Nation, an organization that’s empowering youth to make smart environmental choices in their communities. This infographic is part of a series exploring our use of energy resources.
Where does gasoline come from? Believe it or not, it’s not just one system that makes it possible for you to fuel up at your local gas station. From gathering pipelines that include oil wells on land and tankers overseas, to hundred-mile-long crude oil trunk lines that transport from gathering systems to refined product lines, oil still doesn’t reach the consumer until storage and distribution terminals are involved. And, in case you’re picturing these pipelines as similar to the water pipes in your home, oil pipes can range in size from 2 to 42 inches in diameter, and are owned and operated by companies that are regulated by federal and state governments.
In the United States alone, there are roughly 150,000 miles of crude oil pipelines, 55,000 miles of which are trunk lines and 95,000 miles of which are refined product pipelines. Perhaps the most well-known American trunk lines are the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, and most recently, the Keystone XL Pipeline, which has become a point of contention in our federal government. Click on the infographic above to see how an oil pipeline system works.
This month, challenge a neighbor to GOOD’s energy smackdown. Find a neighbor with a household of roughly the same square footage and see who can trim their power bill the most. Throughout February, we’ll share ideas and resources for shrinking your household carbon footprint, so join the conversation at good.is/energy.
The GOODEST: Hyper-Detailed Calculations of a Carbon Footprint
- Alessandra Rizzotti and Jessica De Jesus contributed in News, Climate Change and Energy
The GOODEST can be so many things, but why not just narrow it down to one thing each week? We’ll change it up and keep it fresh. After all, we consume so much daily, so for the weekend, why not just take away one great learn and do from the week?
Why Carbon Footprints Matter: What I Learned From My Hyper-Detailed Calculations
Saul Griffith, co-founder of renewable energy company Otherlab, figured out his exact personal carbon footprint—from every glass of wine, to a new pair of underwear. What he found out about his own personal impact was pretty grim…
Will you measure your carbon footprint?
This post is part of the GOOD community’s 50 Building Blocks of Citizenship. Follow along and join the discussion at #goodcitizen.
Also, this month, challenge a neighbor to GOOD’s energy smackdown. Find a neighbor with a household of roughly the same square footage and see who can trim their power bill the most. Throughout February, we’ll share ideas and resources for shrinking your household carbon footprint, so join the conversation at good.is/energy.
Illustration by Jessica De Jesus. Image from El Bibliomata
Infographic: From Energy Production to Electricity Consumption
- GOOD Partnerships and Focus the Nation and Oliver Munday contributed in Environment, Energy and News
It’s Energy month at GOOD, so we’ve teamed up with Portland, Oregon’s Focus the Nation, an organization that’s empowering youth to make smart environmental choices in their communities. This infographic is part of a series exploring our use of energy resources.
Powering on your computer is more than just pressing a button. The flow of electricity is made possible from multiple energy sources, whether they’re imported and exported fossil fuels, like natural gas, petroleum, and coal, or domestically-produced nuclear electric power and renewable energy. Check out our latest infographic above that shows how the electricity around us flows from source to consumption. You can follow the U.S. electricity flow from production on the left to consumption on the right, with energy’s measured in quadrillion British ton units (Btu). With all this electricity wasted, it is clear we need to conserve our energy sources.
What is primarily fueling the activities of our modern economy today are the fossil fuels which have stored the sun’s energy over more than a millenium, coupled with nuclear power, which has been around for only the last five decades. If the United States is to prepare for a more sustainable future, it must start turning to renewable energy to meet our energy needs, using sources like hydroelectric power, biomass, geothermal, solar-photovoltaic, and wind.
To learn more about the Energy discussion on GOOD, visit our Energy hub and follow Focus the Nation.
The GOODEST: Coal, The Poison We Never Talk About in School
- Alessandra Rizzotti and Jessica De Jesus contributed in Environment, News and Climate Change
The GOODEST can be so many things, but why not just narrow it down to one thing each week? We’ll change it up and keep it fresh. After all, we consume so much daily, so for the weekend, why not just take away one big learn and do from the week?
This might be shocking but…
Coal is The Poison We Never Talk About in School
James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and arguably the world’s foremost climatologist, has called coal “the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on the planet”, yet kids think it’s just a 19th-century phenomenon.
Can you DO anything about it?
Of course, and we’re going to help you through it. Energy month at GOOD begins now, and each day we’ll be sharing how you can contribute to a better climate reality. Get on the Energy hub to learn more.
Illustration by Jessica de Jesus. Photo via (cc) Flickr user -0-.
The GOODEST: Make a Pro Bono Commitment
-Alessandra Rizzotti and Jessica De Jesus contributed in Business, Culture and News
The GOODEST can be so many things, but why not just narrow it down to one thing each week? We’ll change it up and keep it fresh. After all, we consume so much daily, so for the weekend, why not just take away one great learn and do from the week?
Help Your Company Add a Pro Bono Service Program
Public Architecture wrote this downloadable letter so that you can urge your CEO tomake meaningful work a part of actual work.
Will you fill out the letter and send it off? Tell us here.
Illustration by Jessica de Jesus. Original image from Auctiva.
Announcing The Great American Teach-Off 2013: Nominate an Innovative Teacher to Win $10K
- GOOD Maker wrote in Education, Great American Teach Off and News
GOOD and University of Phoenix are proud to announce the launch of the second annual Great American Teach-Off for teachers in grades K through 12.
This program is a nationwide competition to celebrate U.S.-based elementary, middle and high school teachers that are engaging students to learn effectively and graduate successfully. Whether these teachers have innovative teaching methods, create unique classroom projects, or organize inspiring after-school programs that encourage community involvement in their school, we want to hear more about them!
Here’s how it works: Nominate an outstanding teacher currently teaching in grades K through 6 or 7 through 12—it can be a teacher you’ve had, your child’s, or even yourself—by February 15 noon PT. We’ll select the finalists based on how they foster creativity in the classroom, help students learn beyond the classroom, and impact the greater school community.
We’ll announce the top 20 finalists on March 4 noon PT. Finalists will share videos responding to a short list of questions about their teaching experience, and the GOOD community will vote for their favorite teacher over the course of five weeks. At the end of five weeks, the top voted K through 6 teacher and the top voted 7 through 12 teacher will each receive a $10,000 classroom grant.
Dedicated teachers that are pushing students to learn and think in different ways deserve to be recognized. Give these teachers the chance to further learning in their classroom by nominating them in The Great American Teach-Off by February 15 noon PT. Watch profiles of last year’s winning teachers, Terry Dougherty and Daryl Bilandzija to get inspired.
You can join the conversation with this challenge on Twitter at @GOODmkr and @TeachOff via #teachoff.
This post is brought to you by GOOD with support from University of Phoenix
The GOODEST: Five of Our Favorite Things to Learn and Do
- Alessandra Rizzotti and Jessica De Jesus contributed in Culture and News
We’re picking five great things to highlight from this past week, plus a community member that’s making waves on our online platform.
Illustration by Jessica De Jesus. Original photograph by David Gonzalez
