Episode 1. Greg gets Brutes TRASHED in San Francisco's Mission
Time commitment: 3 hours Materials: ~$14 10 trash bags - $6.49 6 Pairs of gloves – $4.99 each Transportation - $1.10
Project Description
BRUTE LABS rolled up their sleeves on Saturday the 26th of September to clean up the streets in the Mission district of San Francisco. Traveling south-east from 17th and Shotwell st, the team scoured over 2.5 miles of city neighborhoods through the Mission district collecting, sorting and recycling trash on the street. Passers-by paused from their cell phone conversations to deliver enthusiastic thank-yous which helped motivate the team to collect an entire pick-up truck load of garbage in just over 3 hours. Special thanks to Justin To for truck duties and to Dorothy Wu for getting her BRUTE on with us for the afternoon.
Brute Labs will be scaling our RUN! project to 4,500+ kids in the bay area.
Project RUN! gives elementary school students incentives to run extra laps in their PE classes, with raffle tickets to win an iPod shuffle for every lap they run above the required.
"British inventor Josh Silver, a former professor of physics at Oxford University, has come up with a game-changer of a product design with his water-lensed glasses. His vision: help 1bn of the world's poorest to improve their vision by 2020.
Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.
The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription."
A big thank you again to all who helped support our Myanmar Cyclone Relief project by buying a t-shirt and/or contributing your time and energy to the project.
Below is a brief update on what IDE does, and how they were able to impact the lives of 141,115 poor families with your support:
IDE focuses their efforts on rural small farm households earning less than $2/day living in the most densely populated areas in both lower and upper Myanmar. Seventy percent of Myanmar's 36 million poor live in rural areas and earn their income from small-plot agriculture.
IDE in Myanmar is using the market-based approach to beating poverty and improving smallholder farm incomes pioneered by IDE in the 1980's. IDE is helping thousands of poor farmers increase their incomes substantially through the purchase and use of affordable, income-generating technologies such as a foot-operated small-plot irrigation pumps, low-cost drip kits and innovative water storage systems. Innovative water pumps allow Myanmar farmers to grow vegetables into the dry season, and sell the excess in local markets to pay for food, medicine and school fees for their family.
Last year IDE helped 141,115 poor families increase their collective income by 32 million dollars.
"President-elect Obama talks about the economy in this week's Democratic address."
Obama will apparently continue the radio addresses that have been a mainstay since FDR, but it's clear that he has embraced the internet as a medium for mass communication. 1800 videos uploaded garnering 110 million views is certainly impressive.
To me, this represents a leap forward in accessibility. Now if we could only get everyone access to the internet...
Dave Eggers on ushering in a new era of participation in our schools
For those of you out there who haven't yet partaken in a TED Talk, welcome to the fold. Many other wonderful and enlightening talks to consume on their site.
Dave's (full) speech was an awesome example of a creative way to give back to local schools. Check out their hilarious Pirate Supply Store/after school tutoring center over at 826 Valencia in SF.
Brute Labs' JUMP! and RUN! projects were our first endeavors in this vein.
I thought I'd mark my return to posting on our blog with a gem of a speech given by Dr. King. It's a sermon he gave to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1967 about civil disobedience and it's called 'But If Not.'
Strong words but it's tough to miss the honesty in his voice:
"I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live. You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.
You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.
Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.
And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
You died when you refused to stand up for right.
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
You died when you refused to stand up for justice.'
Below is an excerpt from Rebecca Shostak's excellent interview on Rumplo.com:
"Rumplo: First off, awesome shirt, thanks for making it. Can you tell us a bit about the design of this T-shirt and how it is connected with your goal of supporting relief efforts in Myanmar?
Rebecca Shostak: My original vision for this shirt was to bring attention to several issues related to Myanmar and also the culture that we live in here in the United States and especially California. Many of us never consider the implications of the items we buy and wear, the people behind them, and the resources used to bring them to us. In making this shirt I wanted to bring attention to the fact that the shirt is comprised of cotton and ink, cotton being one of the major exports of Myanmar, and ink, a powerful materialization of words and thoughts. These two raw materials coming together create the shirt, and in buying and wearing the shirt a person is actually making a difference to the lives of the people in Myanmar. I am hoping that the design will not only allow its wearer to realize they can and will make a positive difference, be it ever so small, in the world around them, but also begin to think consciously about where the other products that they wear and use come from and what kind of impact they have on our environment. If we can be more collectively conscious about where things come from and what the implications of buying and wearing them are, I believe we will be headed in the right direction to solve many of the problems we face together today." -http://rumplo.com/blog/post/9-a-tee-for-myanmar
Statistics about the distribution of water were striking to me after seeing this graphic. With some of the members of Brute Labs and their friends embarking on a well drilling project in Ghana, the implications of their accomplishment resounded with me upon learning more about the future problems we may come to have with clean drinking water...and the particular plight of certain areas of our globe.
Some other stats to put the Well Done! project in perspective:
-Only forty-six percent of people in Africa have safe drinking water.
-The lack of water and the lack of hygiene is one of the biggest problems that many poor countries have encountered in progressing their way of living. The problem has reached such endemic proportions that 2.2 million deaths per annum occur from unsanitary water - ninety percent of these are children under the age of five.
-The main reason for poor access to safe water is the inability to finance and to adequately maintain the necessary infrastructure. Overpopulation and scarcity of water resources are contributing factors.
* I.A. Shiklomanov, Appraisal and Assessment of World Water Resources, Water International 25(1): 11-32 (2000)
WFP says high food prices are a silent tsunami, affecting every continent
It's particularly refreshing to me when I see the World Food Program site that has solutions, and not just problems.
(Source: http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2820) "- in the short term, WFP will seek full funding for targeted food safety nets and mother-child health programmes in extreme situations, scale up school feeding and use it as a platform for urgent, nutritional interventions;
- in the medium term, WFP will offer its huge logistics capacity to support life-saving distribution networks – every hour of the day, WFP has 30 ships on the high seas, 5,000 trucks on the ground and 70 aircraft in the sky, delivering food to the hungry; it will also expand cash and voucher programmes and support local purchases from small farmers, helping them to afford inputs and sustain livelihoods;
- and in the longer term, it will support policy reform and provide advice and technical support to governments engaging in agricultural development programmes; at the same time WFP will pursue local purchase contracts that can help farmers increase investment and yields."
It's rare that I watch a 76+min long video on my laptop. My consumption of information and media is usually more fractured than that.
When I started to read an article about Randy Pausch, I was immediately drawn to the story... but I lost my patience hearing about his amazing lecture second hand.
After listening to what he had to say on YouTube, I'd have to agree that he delivered one of the most inspiring speeches I've ever heard. Given his situation, I'm even more impressed.
There are a lot of great thoughts in his 'last lecture' that I could talk about for days. I'll tease you with a few that resonated with me, in the hopes that it increases the likelihood that you'll find the time to watch as well.
-it's amazingly rewarding helping others achieve their dreams (*Brute Labs is what taught me this lesson) -given enough time, everyone will amaze you in their own way -everyone should get a feedback loop and listen to it -don't complain, just work harder -be good at something, it makes you valuable -be prepared, luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity
And to round it out, yet another reason why I... "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world..." -Margaret Mead
