social justice | Women of Green

30 Under 30 in 2016: Young Leaders Unleashing Learning For All

By wogwpa1358 on January 5, 2016 / Featured Post, Innovation, Leadership / Leave a comment

Tags: holistic education, rethink schools, social justice, women and education, women entrepreneurs, women's leadership, young women enterpreneurs

Maggie Dunne, Forbes' 30 Under 30 Education 2016 List

We shouldn’t need hot-button issues like the deeply flawed college admissions race, DREAM Act and emerging landscape of K-12 digital learning to remind us that educational opportunities matters — to all of us. Luckily, it’s self-evident to the women and men who earned a spot on the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education. Their spirit of innovating in education is deeply original. They range from edtech entrepreneurs such as literacy champions Matthew Ramirez, cofounder of WriteLab, and Quill’s cofounder Peter Gault, and Rebecca Liebman, whose LearnLux focuses on financial literacy. Zaption’s Charlie Stigler has trained his focus on video learning as a dynamic teaching tool. Cassandra Tognoni of BookReport uses data to help districts figure out best practices for spending and saving, and Christopher Pedregal has $7.5 million in funding to crowdsource learning to Socratic’s 8.5 million customers. Increased access to learning for all startups are prominent in this year’s list. Heejae Lim, founder of Talking Points, built an app that bridges the language barrier between teachers and non-English speaking parents, while Sarahi Espinoza Salamonca’s app helps undocumented students find money to go to college. Chelsey Roebuck, cofounder of Emerging Leaders in Technology and Engineering (ELiTE), left the consulting fast track to […]

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10 Incredible Moments in 2015: A Landmark Year in Climate Action

By wogwpa1358 on December 30, 2015 / Featured Post, Leadership, Nature / Leave a comment

Tags: ecological sustainability, environmental justice, environmental sustainability, social justice, women and nature, women and the environment, women's empowerment

We’ve really been on a roll this year. And when I say we I don’t just mean 350.org the organization. I mean this big, broad movement we’ve built together—you, me, 350’s many partner organizations, the hundreds of local groups we work with every day and all the many individuals around the world who take action in ways large and small. This was such a landmark year that we had a really hard time picking just 10 things for the list below. In fact, it really seems like we’re getting close to a sort of climate-action tipping point. Of course, we’re not kidding ourselves into thinking that the fossil fuel industry is going to sit back and let it all happen. (In fact, the Secretary-General of Europe’s coal lobby recently accused the European Commission of being “in cahoots with protest movements” and called for the creation of a “less ambitious” climate plan in 2016). People and companies that benefit from the status quo will pull us backwards if we let them—so we can’t let them. Can you help us continue this fight in 2016? Next year, we’re taking on the fossil fuel industry more directly than ever, as well as keeping the pressure […]

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This Was A Turning Point For Me

By wogwpa1358 on December 18, 2015 / Featured Post, Leadership / Leave a comment

Tags: eco moms, ecological sustainability, environmental justice, environmental sustainability, healthy families, social entrepreneurs, social justice, women and the environment, women in sustainability, women of green

Carolyn Parrs, Founder of Women Of Green. ©2015 Jennifer Esperanza

We all have turning points in our lives. People we meet. Stories we hear. Experiences that mold our life purpose. I’d like to share one of mine with you. It’s about a young mother named Liberty. At the age of 24 she gave birth to her second child, a beautiful, nine-pound baby boy she named Indigo. When he was just three weeks old, significant green mucus started forming in Indigo’s mouth. Liberty took him to the doctor and thinking it was thrush, he prescribed antibiotics. One week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Nothing changed. After seeing more and more doctors who prescribed more and more antibiotics, still nothing changed. Liberty was lost. Five months later, Indigo developed a hole in his tongue “the size of a quarter,” says Liberty. “Red, open flesh that made it impossible for him to nurse or to eat in general. I had to force feed him with an eyedropper every hour and a half with the breast milk I was pumping every two hours.” Can you imagine? While in and out of emergency rooms for months on end, Indigo’s condition worsened. Eventually, Liberty found a medical specialist that treated environmental conditions. After extensive testing, Indigo was […]

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Imagine Whole Foods At Dollar Store Prices

By wogwpa1358 on December 14, 2015 / Family, Featured Post, Health / Leave a comment

Tags: eco moms, food sustainability, green business, healthy families, Organic food, social entrepreneurs, social justice

Buy health food for the price of fast food

Imagine Whole Foods at dollar-store prices—a new company called Daily Table is shifting the power back to people of lower income, so they too have the option of eating right. This has long been the frustration of healthy food – that for some reason eating properly is saved for a wealthier segment of society. This isn’t the way it needs to be. With over 30 per cent of the national food supply wasted in the U.S., there is plenty to go around at affordable prices. This was the realization of Doug Rauch, former president of Trader Joe’s and CEO of Conscious Capitalism, when he founded Daily Table, a not-for-profit grocery store. (According to their website, “there are plans to open additional stores in both the greater Boston area and additional cities across the country.”) The first location opened in Dorchester, Boston on June 4, 2015 and as the very first line of Time’s article reads in large bold text, “Tons of items are under $1.” Doug Rauch, former president of Trader Joe’s, has founded a new low-cost health food store called Daily Table. The first store opened in Boston on June 4, 2015. “The answer here isn’t a full stomach, […]

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Massive, Self-Sustaining, Urban Farm to Replace Detroit Blight

By wogwpa1358 on November 25, 2015 / Family, Featured Post / Leave a comment

Tags: ecological sustainability, environmental sustainability, food sustainability, green business, our communities, social entrepreneurs, social justice, urban farming

Recovery Park, Detroit, replacing urban blight

Gardening isn’t just for people living on farms or in suburban neighborhoods with sprawling lawns. As more people seek to beautify their urban living environment and grow their own organic food, urban gardens are springing up around cities all over the U.S., and the world. Detroit is taking this one step further by transforming 22 blocks of blight on the east side of the city into a massive urban farm. The 60-acre farm, which will be known as “Recovery Park,” will consist of 35 acres of city-owned property and other land purchased for the project. It will house a vast set of greenhouses and, at its 3-year mark, is expected to employ some 120 people. The project will cost about $15 million. RecoveryPark already operates 2 urban farms where fruits and veggies like radishes, greens, and edible flowers are grown and then sold to restaurants in the city. [1] The city of Detroit is lined with empty buildings that often revert to the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA). Some houses go for a piddling $500 in an effort to bring young people into the fray to rebuild and revitalize the city. Many buildings, however, have little chance of being purchased […]

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Rural Development, The Charakha Way – Gandhi Would Be Proud

By wogwpa1358 on November 10, 2015 / Featured Post, Leadership / Leave a comment

Tags: ecological sustainability, green business, social entrepreneurs, social justice, women entrepreneurs, women's empowerment

(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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Filmmakers Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis traveled the world to find a climate-change hero close to home

By wogwpa1358 on November 7, 2015 / Featured Post, Nature / Leave a comment

Tags: climate change, ecological justice, environmental justice, environmental sustainability, social justice

Thia Changes everything - Naomi Klein on the set

Canadian journalists Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis traveled the world filming This Changes Everything, (we’ve featured the trailer, below,) the film adaptation of Klein’s book of the same name. They visited the site of one of hundreds of coal power plants proposed for India, met with anti-austerity protesters in Greece, and captured a solar-power boom in China. But when the Straight asked Lewis for his favorite example of a hero in the fight against climate change, he suggested someone closer to home. “Crystal Lameman,” Lewis declared in a phone interview. “She is just one of this generation of kickass young indigenous leaders.” The film follows the member of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation as she contributes to a unique fight against the Alberta tar sands: a legal challenge arguing that developments, measured cumulatively, constitute an infringement on First Nations people’s constitutional guarantee to a traditional lifestyle. “She is on the front lines of the fossil-fuel frenzy,” Lewis said. In her narration of the film, Klein explains how those boundaries are shifting. “I remembered a phrase debated by the U.S. government in the 1970s,” she says. “It was suggested that some places may have to be ‘sacrifice areas’. If we’re going […]

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