Comparing Countries in the Middle East

Experts always say that you can't really compare countries in the Middle East because they all have unique political, social, religious, and economic realities. Some folks in the Belfer Center, where I work, made this chart comparing attributes of countries in the Middle East (and some of Asia) so we can quickly see the differences and similarities. It lists the leaders and how long they've been in power, as well as population data, unemployment rates, and other interesting numbers measuring freedom, corruption, and government effectiveness. Take a gander when you can. Some quick fun facts from the Legitimacy and Accountability section:

- Iraq gets the best grade for level of democracy, but the lowest for government effectiveness
- Qatar ranks lowest in perception of corruption
- Kuwait is ranked highest in freedom of the press, followed by Egypt and then Jordan

Sources are listed at the bottom of the chart. To view a larger version of the chart, click on the image below or check out the original blog post here.

Save the South!

Officials are saying the recent tornadoes that swept through Alabama and seven other Southern states this week have left damage at least as bad as the aftermath of Katrina. We can only hope that the disaster relief efforts will be better managed this time. I almost cried this morning after seeing pictures of the wreckage on the New York Times website.

This guy is standing on his front porch.

If like me, you're wondering how to help, here is a short list of organizations to consider donating to. Notice that the United Way is taking clothes and food, in addition to money. I am planning to send them a package of clothes next week. Let me know if you'd like to contribute.

United Way of West Alabama: 2720 Sixth St. No. 100, between Lurleen Wallace Boulevard and Capitol Park, 205-345-6640. The United Way could use donations of nonperishable food items, clothes, tarps, and feminine hygiene products. You can also make cash donations, all of which will stay local, by credit card at www.uwwa.org.

Feeding America: Feeding America distributes food to local food banks providing meals to states hit by the tornadoes. Donate to them here.

St. Mark United Methodist Church: 1421 McFarland Blvd., Northport, Alabama, 205-339-5990. The church is currently serving as a shelter for the displaced, and you can send it nonperishable food and clothes. If you're in the area, they could also use volunteers with medical training.

Red Cross: The Red Cross has already set up temporary shelters across the damaged states and is providing meals and medical assistance to families. As usual, you can donate $10 to their relief effort by texting "REDCROSS" to 90999. You can also donate online or by calling 1-800-RED-CROSS.

The Salvation Army: The Salvation Army’s Emergency Disaster Services is also providing food to the displaced. You can donate $10 to them by texting "GIVE" to 80888. To donate online, go to salvationarmyusa.org, and to give via phone, call 1-800-SAL-ARMY and say you'd like to designate your funds for the "April 2011 Tornado Outbreak."

This list came from GOOD magazine. More here.

Pesky Millenials

In this piece, Daniel Pink, author and expert on making workplaces more awesome, discusses how we might cater to millenials' desire for constant feedback by providing workers with more than the annual performance review. How much can meeting once a year or even every six months really help someone? Now that I'm not in the organizing world, getting feedback on the regs, I totally sympathize with this notion. Academia, I'm finding, is pretty weak on feedback, accountability, idea sharing, and pretty much all the things that I learned were important in my organizational development classes in college.

In this other article, Pink addresses the benefits of giving employees time to do what they want. Google and others have proven that allowing employees to be creative can lead to great ideas like G-mail, so why haven't more companies caught on? This is something Wyatt and I have been talking about a lot. It seems like a no-brainer.

As a former solider of the non-profit world myself, I wonder how organizations can make space for their employees to do some creative thinking, without the incentive of bottom-line payback. Given the chance and the space to be more creative, non-profit workers might come up with brilliant new campaign strategies, reporting software and fundraising tools. The problem is, most people have too much work to set aside time for non-essential work. They need the management to mandate creative time, and even then, I've known folks who would probably keep working on their regular work. It's so lame! We're missing out on so much potential. Let's democratize the workplace. Creative time and regular feedback for all!

AMAZING Social Enterprise Opportunity

The Harvard Social Enterprise Conference is on par with TED as far as mind-blowing, world-changing conferences are concerned. And, it's entirely student-run. This year it will be March 5-6, 2011. Check it out.

More on Entrepreneurship

Don't keep looking for jobs, make one.

Help me crowd-source my birthday?

A Brief History of Challenge or Crowd-sourcing Contests

(borrowed from a paper written by my colleague Michael Maltese)

For centuries, wealthy individuals, organizations, and governments have offered prizes to address specific challenges from engineering to mathematics. One of the more famous such contests dates back to the British Longitude Act in 1714, when the British government offered prizes for measuring longitude to varying degrees of accuracy. In 1773, just three years before his death, clockmaker, carpenter, and inventor John Harrison claimed the top prize by inventing what is widely considered to be the first accurate chronometer.

Centuries later, French hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the pilot who made the first nonstop flight between Paris and New York City. This financial incentive compelled a number of the most highly skilled pilots in the world to take on the challenge. Out of obscurity, Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year old air mail pilot, succeeded in winning the prize in May 1927, ushering in the new era of commercial flight. Since then, a number of challenge competitions have been held with great success, especially the Clay Mathematics Millennium Prizes and the X Prizes, the first of which awarded $10 million to the first team to launch a reusable rocket that would spur technological development of low-cast space flight. Companies like InnoCentive now work with companies to crowd-source their more difficult challenges, and in the field of social entrepreneurship, Ashoka now runs a number of contests focused on social and economic challenges.

These competitions imbue the belief that the best solutions can come from anywhere. Moreover, they cost-effectively leverage the collective problem-solving power of a large number of individuals, some who may not even be knowledgeable about the specific area, and focus their attention through a prize incentive. As the Orteig Prize demonstrated, these bottom-up contests leverage far more money and brainpower towards solving a problem than if an organization decided instead to find experts and fund their research.

Since the piece above was written, we discovered OpenIDEO, a project of the human-centered design firm IDEO that invites individuals to solve some of the world's greatest challenges by participating in every stage of the design process. A current challenge on the site asks how we might improve access to clean water and sanitation in low-income urban communities.

Coming from a grassroots organizing background, I find this system for soliciting solutions to be the next best thing since knocking on doors and showing up at native plants meetings to find campaign volunteers. So I thought I might apply this innovation creation station idea to a current challenge in my life: deciding what to do for my birthday.

When I turned 16, my high school friends threw me a surprise Rocky Horror Picture Show themed birthday party. Yes, they did. Perhaps because that was so unique, I didn't try to organize anything particularly exciting until just last year, when Melanie and I organized a trivia party. (notice Wyatt's shirt, a party favor)

You wouldn't think that a bunch of 20-somethings who don't all know each other would sit still in a tiny living room long enough to play 4 rounds of homemade trivia but it went surprisingly well. It was also potluck and the food was delicious.

So the question remains,

how can I throw a party that is at least as much fun as last year's?

That is your challenge dear readers! Please help the cause by commenting on this post and leaving a suggestion or voting on one of the ideas below.

Here is what has been suggested so far:

- Stone Soup party, everyone brings an ingredient for the soup
- Mad Libs
- Apples to Apples (we would make our own cards at the party)
- A special concert, ideally including the Macrotones and the one and only Nariman Moghtaderi
- A video scavenger hunt (it's WAY too cold to do this in January in Boston unfortunately)
- Bring your favorite food that you've never made (maybe too stressful?)
- Pub Crawl
- Beck Hansen Party - each person must personify a line from a Beck song, i.e. "cocaine nosejob", "devil's haircut," or "hot sex in back rows"



Hit me up! The deadline is December 27th. The party will be sometime in late January. Winners receive an invitation to and/or VIP pictures from the event.

An idea a day

I find myself full of ideas these days. Some might be good, others not so good, but I think it's time to start keeping track of them, in case any of them are worth anything. Feel free to comment and tell me that I'm a genius, a lazy dreamer or a complete lunatic.

1. Healthy Gift Basket Subscription
You can buy people gift basket subscriptions of almost any kind these days: Beer of the Month, Cheese of the Month, Bacon of the Month and even dog treat of the month. Why not cater to the health-obsessed, tree hugging, my-body-is-a-temple folks with a green, good for you, health food gift basket. Sounds questionable, right? But, what if each month was a different yummy and not bad for your surprise, like fair trade organic chocolate, vegan energy bars, assorted detox teas or locally grown root vegetables with a recipe on how to use them? It would be like SELF magazine but edible. Also interesting: herbal remedy club



2. Vest with personal heating unit
Tired of hunching your shoulders against the wind? Ever feel like if you could keep the spot between your shoulder blades a little warmer it would make the winter much more tolerable? I have a preliminary design for a special warming vest. It comes with a reusable heating pad that you can warm in the microwave in two minutes, then pop in a pocket in the back of the vest. Wear it under your coat or when you go to sleep. It will keep your neck and upper back warm for more than 30 minutes. Perfect for walking the dog or setting out on your commute in the wee hours.



3. Alternate Economies to Fight Climate Change
Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't look like we're going to pass a Cap and Trade bill in America any time soon. Still sea levels are rising, weather is changing, we're destroying communities in the name of coal and doing myriad other things to ensure our future is not so promising. There is a lot to be done legislatively to fix our future, but we can't count on the government alone to get us out of this deep fried pickle. We need corporate buy in. We need more companies to invest in a clean energy future, more investors to invest in clean energy companies and all parties involved to create those green jobs everyone's been talking about. We need to create economic alternatives for people in communities that rely on dirty energy.

But why trust companies to be charitable? And creating incentives takes money and the government time. In Appalachia, where people have an intense love/hate relationship with the coal industry, there has been some success in luring businesses in to create employment alternatives but not nearly enough.

Instead of trying to create incentives for companies to go to the people who need them, why not make new companies? We could train community members in the art entrepreneurship, identify needs in the communities and create common sense business solutions to address them that are both environmentally and economically sustainable. It might sound crazy but I think it's a sweet idea.




More soon...

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Learning: It's what's for dinner

This week I learned that the internet is far from carbon neutral. The energy necessary to maintain ever growing servers might as well be the mountain top removal of the future, another problem that could go largely unnoticed and unchecked for decades. Ugh.

I'm still on this big entrepreneurship kick and I wonder if someone can create a creative business to alleviate the issue. I've started to think of social entrepreneurship as the answer to all social problems, especially in this time of high-unemployment. For example, what if, instead of fighting with coal companies in West Virginia about the value of environment vs. jobs, we just gave local communities the tools they need to create their own companies and economies? Surely there must be some alternative to the coal economy.

Seeing people speak at Harvard has been neat, although I do it so often now I didn't go to the Obama rally today because I didn't feel like seeing another person talk at me. But - back to the positive - I am learning a lot of new things.


At a recent talk called "Understanding the Yemeni State," I learned that part of the reason the U.S. and Yemen butt heads is that Yemen is unwilling to give up its unusual security arrangement. The official army is only about 60,000 troops and the government relies heavily on tribal reserve units for big conflicts and to keep tabs on the country's hard-to-patrol areas. Additionally, poetry is a huge part of the political process in Yemen and there is a long tradition of using words rather than coercive force to influence actors. Throughout Yemen's history, leaders who were not especially eloquent would hire poets to help push new policies forward.

Thursday, I went to a seminar about the floods in Pakistan, said to be one of the most devastating natural disasters of this decade. Even though not that many people died, the flood wiped out much of the livestock in the poorest region of the country, where people typically don't have titles to their land and assets are held in livestock. It's been estimated that it will take $30 billion to replace what's been destroyed. Only a few billion has been pledged by the international community so far so basically, the situation is really bad.

Rescue efforts in Pakistan have been hindered by poor record keeping and a lack of access to real time data. A lot of villages affected by flooding just simply aren't on the map and neither are the nearest hospitals. Luckily, there is a small group of civilian computer engineers working on the problem. More about that here.

Much of the discussion at the seminar addressed challenges to emergency preparedness and response. Harvard Kennedy School's Dutch Leonard discussed issues with the current trend in actions by the international community: underinvestment in prevention, overinvestment in recovery and the tendency of Western countries to abandon people mid-recovery. I was shocked to hear him say that, while the earthquake in Haiti happened almost a year ago, not a single US dollar has made it to Haiti yet. What!?! Apparently, if we help countries decentralize both emergency preparedness and response efforts, we can expect better results in the future. Bangladesh has done a good job in this category as a poor country that has managed to address natural disaster preparedness, in their case for cyclones. So, that was all kind of neat to learn.

Wednesday, we had our second ever Article Club meeting, co-hosted by Wyatt and Kaz. The article was about friendship and we ended up talking a lot about how Facebook impacts friendship and how strong friendships, or lack there of, influence the divorce rate in America. I enjoyed our discussion, but I'm hoping the next article has nothing to do with the internet. I still like to think it does not completely rule my life. We had around 15 people in attendance, lots of chili and lots of chocolate chip cookies. Drew, an Article Club member and recent Portland, OR transplant, has a great little blog of daily poems that incorporate the top Google hits of the day.

GOOD magazine has an interesting blog post about the word "like", and how it is not an "Americanism inflicted on us by the Valley Girls of the eighties" but rather an older habit used by English-speakers all over the world. Les Janka, an avid anti-"like" advocate, will be disappointed to hear that.

It's starting to get chilly again in Boston and already I am fearing the worst. I'm remembering what it's like to feel the draft blow through my living room as I, wrapped in all the clothes I own, hold my nose to keep it warm while trying to read a book. I thanked God every time I walked outside this week and discovered that, although my house was freezing, I did not in fact need to be wearing long underwear. Cory Branan recently tweeted that he was starting a petition to move New York to the South. Can I do the same thing with Boston? I think Boston in North Carolina would be ideal.

If anyone has any tips for baiting mouse traps, please hook a sista up. More than a year into our epic battle against the rodents, they've gotten too smart for us and stopped going in the traps. I recently resorted to buying poison but they appear to be too smart for that too. Little bastards.

The Good and Bad in the World

There are definitely many perks to sucking at the teat of academia. Between the hours spent at the computer, listening to the cellulite congeal on my thighs, I get to meet interesting people and hear some of the World's leaders and leading experts talk about how they're trying to make this planet a little bit better.

Yesterday, in preparation for an event with a high-ranking Turkish official, I had the privilege of leading a combined American/Turkish security delegation through part of the campus. It was nothing short of hilarious. Imagine two big American State Department guys, a Boston-born ex-cop and a Virginian ex-military, as well as two tall Turkish security officials, one young, smiley, tall and lanky with longish hair, the other with a square face, was mostly silent and smoked a cigarette at the first opportunity. In the same two minute-span on our walk back from the school, the American guys made fun of me for being an environmentalist and the one English-speaking Turkish guy complimented me on my shoes. It's nice to know that someone in the world thinks my beat up Target flats are "fresh."

Friday, I sat in on two events with Jordanian businessman, all-around superstar and founder of ARAMEX Fadi Ghandour. ARAMEX is essentially the FedEx of the Middle East. People like to think that you can't easily do good business in the region, let alone start and new company, but Fadi has proven this assumption wrong several times over. He was also instrumental in founding one of the first successful Arab social networking websites, which spawned a flurry of web-based start ups in the Middle East after it was bought by Yahoo in one of the largest acquisitions of a knowledge-based company outside of the U.S. AND, he's into social entrepreneurship. More specifically, he sees entrepreneurship as a way to solve social problems that governments are failing to address, much like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood have done. Hamas initially won votes in Gaza because it provided essential services that no other entity would. If businesses can tackle the needs of their communities in the absence of government support, gangs and terrorist organizations won't have to. Now that's good stuff.

Earlier last week, we hosted two events to highlight both sides of the current peace talks between Israel and Palestine. Both speakers said nothing is going to happen- surprise, surprise. However, good points were made at both events and I will report on them when I have my notes in front of me.

As one might imagine, given that the events were in Cambridge, Mass, there were only protesters at the Israeli speaker's talk. This guy scared the crap out of me when he pulled a Palestinan flag out of his pants. I thought it was a gun at first. Despite my personal feelings on the conflict, I found his disruption of the event really off-putting and unprofessional, especially since he held the flag backwards for much of the event.

There are more strategic ways to make a point.

This weekend, Wyatt and I went to Berklee's Beantown Jazz Fest on Columbus Avenue. Highlights included lots of free stuff, tasty ethnic food, and two great bands from New Orleans: Jon Batiste Band and the Wild Magnolias. The latter came with Mardi Gras Indians in tow.

Tonight, Noam Chomsky was on "On Point" on WBUR addressing my recent fears that the Tea Party will take advantage of less-than-straight-thinking Americans in this fragile economic time and smother our country just as Hitler did in Germany. Chomsky doesn't think things will happen just like that but he did say the comparison was worth considering. Eek. The show was also good fodder for my campaign to get "On Point" a better interviewer than Tom Ashbrook. I swear that guy is the most socially awkward host on the radio. He kept trying to talk over poor 81-year old Noam and he just comes across as a big tool. Sorry Tom. I love your show but show a little more tact

Kurt Vile, Haiti and OK Cupid Profiles

On a solid recommendation, I've been listening to a lot of Philadelphia's Kurt Vile. I have a feeling he's going to be instrumental in getting me through the winter. A little bit like Atlas Sound with a Devendra Banhart twist. Vile matches simple, eccentric lyrics with very intricate, distorted but welcoming melodies that make you want to curl up with a comforter and stay in bed all day.

For anyone who's interested in the current political climate in Haiti there was a great piece in the New Yorker recently that discussed Wyclef's rejection as a candidate and the country's prospects for progress post-earthquake. Thirty percent of Haiti's public servants died in the earthquake. Try running a recovery project with that staff scenario.

On a lighter note, Campus Progress has a fun little article on what white people, black people and middle eastern people like, according to their OK Cupid profiles.

Who's really progressive?

Interesting ideas on progressives divesting from the Democratic Party courtesy of my friend Tyler Zimmer in his blog post "Kucinich Sucks." Look for it on Pink Scare, in the list of blogs on the right. (My blog isn't letting me make hyperlinks anymore...sad face.)

...and then the most amazing thing(s) happened

I haven't blogged in forever and there is A LOT to catch up on. I'll try to be as brief as possible for, as it is written in Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, "vigorous writing is concise."

1. Congress passed the health care reform bill! F-ing Finally! Details here.

2. My five year quest to find out what's wrong with me and finally get well might finally be over. I learned today that I have Lyme Disease, four associated infections and dysfunctional ligaments in my neck, similar to what someone with whiplash might have. I also learned that all of these can be drastically improved or eliminated with less than six weeks of treatment. Score! Knowing that I might not have to feel like I'm 80 years old up until the day I turn 80 is a pretty amazing feeling for me. In addition to all the muscular pain, I've recently had a lot of fevers and an intense earache. I'll be really excited when that's gone. Try making someone a large cappuccino when it feels like your head is exploding out of your ears. I'm pretty sure I'd rather go to a Creed concert.

3. I found the neat blog of a woman named Heidi who writes about the intersection of her own food, travel and other things she likes. She started it after realizing she had 100 cookbooks and never really used them so she has put them to use and takes a lot of pretty pictures of the results. She is also vegetarian and a lot more chic than moi. I can't seem to link it to my blog but it's called "101 Cookbooks." Google it.

4. Saturday, with a little help from Wyatt, I tore my garden apart in preparation for the growing season. I'm looking at growing zucchini, cukes, peas, collards, radishes, beets, tomatoes, squash, salad greens and a few other treasures. We currently have some striped zinnia sprouts in the kitchen.

Babies in the kitchen:

An aerial view of the front yard: This is roughly three times the size of last year's growing operation. The cinder block square is a (ghetto) raised bed filled with compost from the backyard. Go Team Compost on the second floor! The white things in the other beds are milk jugs. Since we don't have a hose, the milk jugs will serve as irrigation systems. With holes punched in them, they will help deliver water under and around the different plants. One of our neighbors reportedly told Eleanor it looked like we were growing milk. From the street, it really does.

Many thanks to my Ula coworkers for helping me save all the jugs. I have a few more that I'll be using to germinate 'maters and other goodies as soon as I get some more soil.

5. Album of the week is Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby. Side A to B, that album's a gem. Listen to "Crazy Feeling."

COP15...party on America

After accepting his Nobel Peace Prize and noting the irony of it in his speech, President Obama heads to the climate negotiations in Copenhagen today. The likelihood of useful language leaving his lips is unlikely but I wanted to share with you this chart from the NY Times which breaks down the different stakeholders at the talks and what they are hoping to achieve.

I am not expecting a lot to come out of the talks, especially from the American contingent. Most probably can't tell you which Scandanavian country Copenhagen is in.


But, if you want to use your brain and help out, there is something you can do.

You can sign up for the Energy Action Coalition Rapid Response team here. There are only a few days left. Make a couple phone calls and feel better! And, if you're sick of seeing protesters get arrested and want to know what's really going on, check out live video coverage and tweet feeds at theuptake.org.

I keep telling myself we will get what we want, with or without a strong international treaty.

An update on the awesome work of MassPowerShift here. Good work Dan!

Fur Coats Repurposed as Street Art

Read about it on the GOOD magazine website.

Shoutout to MAPS

Mass Powershift (MAPS) pulled off a flashmob dance (which included "Call on Me" and other legendary dance party jams) at Government Center in downtown Boston yesterday.

They officially kick off their campaign this Sunday with their first sleep out, part of an effort to get the Massachussetts legislature on board with 100% renewable energy for the state in 10 years, before Copenhagen! Yes, they are sleeping outside, every sunday, from now until December 7th. No one ever said saving the world was easy.

See pics from the dance and read more about the campaign here.

La Blagoteque

It turns out the French are good for something other than food and wine, namely www.blogotheque.net

Given my poor French reading comprehension I can't tell you all that much about the site, who funds it, etc. What I can tell you is they have made several sets of sweet music videos with really good bands. Some are on the streets of Paris, others are on a boat and some are in a van driving around the lower east side in Manhattan. They are all done in one shot and with pretty good sound quality. My favorite is Beirut doing "Nantes" on the streets of Paris but there are several gems and others that are just neat, e.g. Arcade Fire doing "Neon Bible" in an elevator and Vampire Weekend singing two songs in Paris. I also really like the Wombats singing "Let's Dance to Joy Division" while driving a small motor boat with ridiculous sunglasses on.

I also want to share this awesome flash dance from the Aussie Powershift. Thanks Dan! It starts slow so wait a minute before you dismiss it. It's pretty freakin' rad.

Micropatronage

Many are familiar with the concept of micro-lending (a.k.a. microcredit) or giving people small loans to start local businesses. My hero Muhammad Yunus pioneered this idea with the founding of the Grameen Bank in his home country of Bangladesh. He found that many potential entrepreneurs, women in particular, lacked the start up capital needed to start small businesses. In many cases it was a matter of $20 or less, needed to buy materials to make baskets or other products that could be sold for profit. Yunus found that these small loans were effective in launching sustainable small businesses,and the recipients were very good about paying off the loans. In terms of fighting poverty, the rate of return was excellent.

In 2005, Brooklyn start up Kickstarter.com put a twist on this concept, pioneering micro-patronage: a way for anyone to financially back creative projects, in big or small way, via the internet. The projects are pretty diverse in scope and practicality. One woman wanted to raise $365 to send a homemade postcard everyday for a year. She's offered to send postcards to the people who give and its been so popular that she has raised more than her original goal. Another man is trying to raise $25,000 to complete a floating mobile clinic. A doctor and marine biologist, he's enlisted the help of 19 other doctors to sail to remote locations around the world and offer basic medical services. Artists and social entrepreneurs have struggled for centuries to find funding for their creative endeavors and it just makes sense to use the internet as a platform to do so.

I would love to use Kickstarter for my organizing film idea. Once you have a profile for your project on the site, you can e-mail blast, share and tweet the hell out of the link and anyone who likes your project can give online. It even syncs up to your Amazon account so you don't have to enter credit card info.

To get started on the organizing film, I figure we'll need upwards of $5,000 for a camera, mics and editing equipment (if I can't acquire these things otherwise). We will also need cash to buy some TV news footage. To take advantage of the Kickstarter model, I will need to figure out what I might offer people in return for their patronage of an organizing documentary. It seems the best Kickstarter projects offer patrons something in return. One musician offered givers upwards of $100 the chance to join him for some homemade gumbo and a preview of some unreleased tracks in his New Orleans home. I'm not sure I can lure people in with my shep pie so if you have ideas readers, let me know.

HANDSOME FURS and the youth climate movement

(this image is what comes up when you Google image "save the world," by the way)

Tonight I had dinner with my former intern Dan at the Other Side Cafe, a place that would be one of the best in Boston, if everything there was $2 cheaper. Anyway, we had a blast discussing everything from love to meeting facilitation to the awesomeness that is GOOD magazine. The most recent issue is all about water. There is an article about overfishing and they rep Food and Water Watch in their action section. Seriously though, that magazine is one of the best I've ever seen, in both content and design.

Dan and I were discussing the importance of the Energy Action Coalition in the broader climate movement when we struck gold: why not start our own training program? We were talking about how really, everyone should be pumping money into Energy Action to maintain and expand their training and organizing programs. Powershift rules and there are a lot of schools out there with big potential for climate and sustainability work who just lack the support they need to start a campaign.

I'm thinking back to the living wage campaign at Vanderbilt which finally took off, after 5 years, when students from Georgetown came to share the lessons learned from their successful campaign. While their campaign is remembered for the nine day hunger strike that ultimately won it, the end result came from years of good organizing- recruitment, leadership development, strategic planning and well run meetings. With help from USAS, some of the student leaders from Georgetown joined other living wage activists in traveling around the country to train and assist fledgling campaigns. This was/is known as the Living Wage Action Coalition (LWAC) and it helped us steer the Vanderbilt LIVE campaign in right direction. Within 6 months of their visit we had a strong coalition, an article in the New York Times and a real shot at helping our workers win a living wages.

What we need is a proper LWAC for the climate movement, a resource for emerging student climate groups. If we are really trying to build a movement here, why not train as many people as possible to be as effective as possible? It my understanding that Energy Action used to visit and offer training to their chapters but have stopped, presumably due to funding constraints. Groups like Greenpeace, PIRG, Wellstone and others offer training in group building and grassroots organizing, but there are any existing widely-known programs that are exclusively, or even mostly, students training other students. In the context of the Youth Climate Movement, such a program would ideally be an arm of Energy Action so groups could sign up for trainings while at Powershift.

It doesn't seem like this kind of a program would be terribly difficult to manage. What do you need? A website, phones, Facebook and some funding for travel and 1-2 staff people. No big deal. Brilliant! We're starting tomorrow.

In other news, I recently saw Handsome Furs, Dri and the Cinnamon Band at Great Scott. It was a killer show and one of the few I've been to in some time where I didn't feel really old.

The Furs, a man and wife, are amazing to watch. As they played (guitar and keys/drum machine respectively), they looked at and moved around one another as if they might jump out of their clothes at any moment and start making wild, passionate love on stage. And there was so much straight up rocking out. Beautiful.

Dri was a lot like No Doubt at times, only their blonde lady singer sounded more like the woman from Beach House than Gwen Stefani.

The Cinnamon Band is from Staunton, VA of all places. I've driven through that town a million times on 81. Its alright. Their lead singer has zero stage presence but they're music's got something. The singer's got a 'lil country in him and the drummer plays drums with maracas. I recommend "To Cool You."

I want to start a band called The Youth Climate Movement.