Rural Development, The Charakha Way – Gandhi Would Be Proud

By on November 10, 2015   /   Featured Post, Leadership   /   Leave a comment
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Charkha Weaving Cooperative in India

(This post is authored by Rohit Parakh who is Global Chapters Lead with Rang De and has been an active and pivotal part of the fight against poverty in India. He recently went for a field trip to one of Impact Partners organizations, Charkha. Here is his story.) I was recently reading the book India of My Dreams by Mahatma Gandhi which is a collection of his writings and speeches and one of the key points he makes in the book is for India to truly develop its villages have to progress. And for its villages to progress, the poorest amongst the villagers need to be empowered to earn decent wages to help them move out of poverty. He also extensively spoke about production by masses rather than production for masses which could contribute to large-scale unemployment and poverty. It is a testimony how miserably we have failed to live his dreams of India, that after nearly 70 years of Independence we have a situation that in 75% of rural households (nearly 50 crore people), the main earning member of the family earns less than Rs 5,000 a month (i.e. less than Rs 170 a day). Prasanna, who decided to […]

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Gender Gap Reprieve for Women Patrons of a Brooklyn Bar

By on November 6, 2015   /   Featured Post, Heart   /   Leave a comment
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Women enjoy drinks at 77% in honor of the gender pay gap.

How much should a woman pay for her drinks at a bar? Whatever the menu price is, right? Well, not at this venue. The Way Station, a bar in the Prospects Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, had another idea this past summer. In order to address the glaring gender pay gap in which women in the U.S. earn about 77 to 78 cents to every dollar a man earns, The Way Station charged women just 77 percent of their bar tab on July 7th (7/7). Talk about ladies’ night. I have three sisters. The majority of my staff and friends are women. I thought this would be a great way to even the playing field even if it was for one night only.” –Andy Heidel, owner of The Way Station Heidel’s goal, he said, was to get people talking about the issue, which appeared to happen on the discounted ladies night held earlier this month. “This is much bigger than I expected,” Heidel told the Guardian while taking a break outside from a packed standing-room-only bar. And according to the Guardian, once Heidel realized he would have to turn people away, he asked a neighboring bar to join the cause. “I wanted […]

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Women Flip the Script on Hollywood

By on October 29, 2015   /   Arts, Featured Post   /   Leave a comment
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Sandra Bullock in Our Brand Is Crisis

Sandra Bullock’s latest character, “Calamity” Jane Bodine, is a ruthless political consultant given to rattling off guileful quotes from Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. She’s damn good at her job, tends to pull frat-boy pranks when on a bender and couldn’t care less if she doesn’t have a date lined up. In Hollywood shorthand, she’s as ornery as Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke and wilier than George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven. And if Jane Bodine sounds two steps beyond tomboy, that’s because she was a he in the original script for Bullock’s new film, Our Brand Is Crisis, in theaters Oct. 30. Inspired by pugnacious political hit man James Carville, the role called for a swaggering archetype–Clooney was once attached to the part–which is exactly why Bullock wanted it for herself. For generations, top actresses fed up with playing the adoring wife or eye candy have bemoaned the relative dearth of meaty roles for women–the kind that bring Meryl Streep awards acclaim on an annual basis. Despite Bullock’s Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side and a worldwide box-office take of nearly $5 billion, she struggled in recent years to find challenging scripts that didn’t ask her to don another […]

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Facebook expands plans to beam free Internet access to Africa via solar-powered drones

By on October 26, 2015   /   Featured Post, Innovation   /   Leave a comment
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Facebook plans to bring internet access to rural areas of Africa.

Facebook is expanding its plan to beam internet to remote areas of the Earth, using a solar-powered drone flying high above the ground. The social networking giant has been working on the internet connectivity project since 2013, and a new partnership with French satellite operator Eutelsat Communications aims to get more people in Africa online by using satellites to beam internet specifically to areas where connectivity is currently impossible due to the gaps between mobile networks. The system, which will launch in the second half of 2016, will provide Internet access to entire communities in 14 countries across West, East and Southern Africa with Eutelsat’s AMOS-6 geostationary satellite. In order to get the job done, Facebook and Eutelsat will share the capacity and employ cost-effective equipment to build a network of satellites, Internet gateways, and terminals. This is all part of Facebook’s Internet.org project, which aims to provide free basic Internet services to areas of the world where access would otherwise be unaffordable or unavailable. And that’s more areas than you might realize. Currently, according to the Pew Research Center, most people getting online in Africa and other so-called emerging markets are using their mobile phones to do so. Around […]

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Would This Neighborhood Exchange Box Work on Your Block?

By on October 22, 2015   /   Featured Post, Heart   /   Leave a comment
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Neighborhood Exchange Box

If someone were to set up a telephone booth sized box on your street filled with unwanted items — such as books, toys and small knick knacks, perhaps — and then topped it off with a “Free” sign, what do you think would happen? If Switzerland is any indication, passersby turned salvagers and recyclers would appear out of nowhere, sifting their way through other people’s unwanted discards, thinking up ways to put their newfound discoveries to good (re)use. Some would even add their own unwanted items to the box. Neighborhood exchange boxes have helped Geneva, Switzerland reuse 32 tons of goods thus far thanks to a program called BOÎTES D’ÉCHANGE ENTRE VOISINS–a box for exchange between neighbors. But can it work in other cities? Started in 2011, people leave items that they do not want, and take items that they do want. It’s that simple. Or is it? The environmental benefits of increasing reuse are obvious, but from the project creator’s perspective, there’s more to the Neighbourhood Exchange Box program than just going green. It’s also part urban art and part social experiment, providers of unusual opportunities to create social and cultural links between people in a neighborhood. The program […]

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Turn Your Purpose Into a 6-Figure Business

By on October 12, 2015   /   Featured Post, Leadership   /   Leave a comment
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6-Figure Purpose

A Message from Carolyn: I know making an impact in your world is important to you. I also get how hard you work to build your business or launch an idea or project so that it can generate the income and the influence you dream of so you can give back BIG. I want to make sure you don’t miss this event for visionary entrepreneurs just like you. I’m joining 28 transformational leaders who have built 6- and 7-figure businesses on exactly how they were able to achieve massive impact with their businesses. I will be speaking on “Creating a Million Dollar Message to Maximum Impact”. My friend Lorna Li is the producer of this summit. She is on a mission to inspire 100K entrepreneurs to build businesses and create projects that make massive positive impact – it’s called 6-Figure Purpose to 7-Figure Impact on October 16 – October 31, 2015. All the speakers are going to share with you actionable, authentic, heart-based business strategies on how you can: Inspire millions of people through social media, elevate awareness and transform our global culture Adopt the success-oriented mindset that millionaires attribute to creating prosperity The keys to overcoming failures and obstacles that have […]

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Can You Do the Minimalist Fashion Challenge?

By on September 30, 2015   /   Arts, Featured Post   /   Leave a comment
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Project 333: Minimalist Fashion Challenge

Dress With Less! Starting October 1st: The Minimalist Fashion Challenge. If you are tired of finding nothing to wear in your jam packed closet, try this 90 day challenge. Invite a friend to join you, and see what happens when you dress with 33 items for 3 months. You’ll be very surprised with the results. Check out the rules here. Welcome to Project 333. This page will tell you everything you need to know to get started. After living with only 33 items every 3 months for more than 3 years, I can say that with confidence. Do you want more evidence that living with less is easier than you think? Ask these people! The Basics When: Every three months (It’s never too late to start so join in anytime!) What: 33 items including clothing, accessories, jewelry, outerwear and shoes. What not: these items are not counted as part of the 33 items – wedding ring or another sentimental piece of jewelry that you never take off, underwear, sleep wear, in-home lounge wear,  and workout clothing (you can only wear your workout clothing to workout) How: Choose your 33 items, box up the remainder of your fashion statement, seal it with […]

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Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ Wife, Pledges $50 Million To Rethink Schools

By on September 23, 2015   /   Family, Featured Post, Leadership   /   Leave a comment
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Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder and Chair, Emerson Collective, and widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, speaks at the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., on Monday, April 29, 2013. The Global Conference convenes chief executive officers, senior government officials and leading figures in the global capital markets to explore solutions to today's most pressing challenges in business, health, government and education. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

The system of public high schools in America really hasn’t undergone any kind of serious transformation in 100 years. Steve Jobs reinvented the personal computer, the animation studio, and the music player. Now his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, wants to rethink high school. On Monday, she unveiled XQ: The Super School Project, a $50 million campaign to conceive of and create the next American high school — or a “Super School.” The project launches with an open call for submissions closing on November 15, from which the project will choose winning proposals to fund. The challenge is deliberately open-ended, providing few specifics on what would constitute a “Super School.” Contestant teams are asked to submit comprehensive plans for teachers, administration and evaluation. The XQ site points out that education is in need of disruption, stating that: “In the last hundred years, America has gone from a Model T to a Tesla,” but public schools have stagnated. XQ’s chief creative officer Russlynn Ali, the former assistant secretary of civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, told the Washington Post that change is long overdue. The system of public high schools in America really hasn’t undergone any kind of serious transformation in […]

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Yang Lan: MAKERS Celebrates 20 Women of the 1995 UN Conference on Women

By on September 18, 2015   /   Featured Media, Featured Post, Leadership   /   Leave a comment
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Yang Lan

  To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1995 UN Conference on Women in Beijing, MAKERS is featuring 20 incredible women who participated in the largest ever international gathering of women. Yang Lan, a television journalist and entrepreneur, is the co-founder and chairperson of the Sun Media Group, a Hong Kong-based multimedia company. Yang created the first current-event program in China, and has been a successful media personality in China since her days as a university student. Often compared to Oprah Winfrey, Yang has built a substantial media empire that includes the television shows “Yang Lan One on One and Her Village,” as well as an online magazine and website that attracts nearly 200 million Chinese women a month. In 1995, Yang was a graduate student studying at Columbia University in New York when she returned to Beijing over the summer to act as a master of ceremony for the Welcoming Ceremony of the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. Be sure to watch the trailer for the upcoming documentary, “Once and For All” and join the conversation with the hashtag #OnceAndForAll. Source: MAKERS Team  

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Enough of Us vs. Them

By on September 16, 2015   /   Family, Featured Post, Heart   /   Leave a comment
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belief-disbelief

Hello Open Minded One That Can See the Forest for the Trees, There is nothing more disruptive to the progress of the green movement than separating the so-called good guys (environmentalists, activists, green businesses, etc.) from the bad guys (corporations, capitalists, conservatives, etc.). After over a decade of being entrenched in green marketing and environmental work, I have seen enough barbs thrown at “them” – and where did that get us? As polarized as our government, that’s where. I must confess I too took shots in the early days. But like a one-night stand, it feels good in the moment, but leaves you empty in the morning. The truth is we’re all in this together. We all breathe the same air. We all want our children to be happy and healthy. Why can’t we start there? Why can’t we come from the premise that we are one human family? Sounds too lofty? Not really… The last few years, I have had the unique experience of consulting with a corporation some love to hate. What I found out is there are deeply devoted people inside working hard for the environment in every way they can. Go figure? Nelson Mandela once said, “If […]

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