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Mass Challenge D-Day Tomorrow

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 22, 2012| 4 Comments »

The Mass Challenge Awards Ceremony takes place tomorrow night at the Boston Convention Center. Erik is one of the 26 entrepreneurs who are finalists in the Class of 2012. He first read about Mass Challenge on this very blog the day before the deadline for applying!

The whole family is excited that Erik has done so well. Suzanne and John (both entrepreneurs) will be sitting at his table at the big event. Erik’s mother, lately arrived from Sweden, will be strolling the baby around South Boston with a little help from yours truly.

The Awards Ceremony includes Governor Deval Patrick. Orlando Jones will moderate. And I am a particular fan of speaker Gerald Chertavian.

A native of Lowell, Chertavian so appreciated the mentoring he received in high school that he served as a Big Brother in college and for years after. Having sold his own entrepreneurial company, he decided to give back by building an organization to give young low-income but motivated people a paid year to prepare for the workforce through internships and training.

For more on the unique approach of Chertavian’s nonprofit YearUp, now in many U.S. cities, look here.

YearUp photograph of Gerald Chertavian

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A Weekend in Fall

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on October 22, 2012| 2 Comments »

The fall color is the same pretty much every year, and yet it’s always amazing.

I walked around Concord and Cambridge, parked near a West Concord brook to go to the street fair (where a woman at Dabblers reminded me how to cast off in knitting), and hung out with an entertaining two-year-old.

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Healthy Ecosystems, Healthy Economy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Cathryn J. Prince has a story in the Christian Science Monitor about a research ecologist who thinks we can have our cake and eat it too: that is, have a strong economy and a sustainable future.

Prince writes, “As head of the conservation biology department at Antioch University New England in Keene, NH, [Tom] Wessels isn’t against chopping down trees or clearing land to farm. He just wants to see more people embrace sustainable forest and land management practices.

“Wessels, trained as a research ecologist, says economics plays as much a role in protecting the environment as does saving energy. Think how the adoption of fair trade principles for growing and selling coffee have changed the economics of that industry. Forests can benefit in the same way.

“ ‘Adam Smith, the father of modern economic theory, wrote about this in Wealth of Nations,’ Wessels says. ‘People will act out of self-interest, but they can support each other doing it. …

“Market forces can help to conserve forests and farmlands, says Wessels, who also serves as chair of the Vermont-based Center for Whole Communities. …

“ ‘We are incredibly frivolous about our energy use,’ Wessels says. ‘Any organism or population that is energy wasteful gets selected out of the system.” Charles Darwin explained this when he wrote about survival of the fittest, he says. Survival of the fittest also means survival of the most adaptable, and the most energy efficient, he says. …

“Partnering with more than 400 organizations in 47 states, Whole Communities aims to help create communities where people rely on each other for their food and other needs.

“For example, Wessels would like to see Detroit become a different kind of urban jungle. The city has lost about 50 percent of its population since the late 1980s. Empty lots abound. But now community gardens have begun to fill these open tracts with food crops. The Detroit Food Policy Council and the city government want to make Detroit food secure by 2020 – meaning that everyone will have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food.

“ ‘A lot of our focus is around food security,’ Wessels says. ‘Detroit will become a model for other urban areas.’ ” More here.

Photograph: Cathryn J. Prince

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Entrepreneurs at Struggling High Schools

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I came across a nonprofit organization called BUILD on the website of the accelerator incubator MassChallenge (where Erik is among 26 finalists who will be honored at Tuesday’s awards). BUILD helps inspire students to graduate from high school by getting them engaged in an entrepreneurship project.

“MassChallenge Partner BUILD Greater Boston is gathering a select group of entrepreneurs to mentor student business teams in some of the city’s lowest performing high schools.

“BUILD is an exciting 4-year college success program that uses entrepreneurship to motivate disengaged students to excel academically, graduate from high school, and succeed in college. …

“To help students become college-eligible, BUILD also provides tutoring, test prep, mentoring, and college planning advice. Entrepreneurship is the hook — but college is the goal. Over the past 13 years, 95% of BUILD seniors nationally have been accepted to college, with 88% accepted to 4 year colleges and universities.

A student team calling itself “the Dream Team and their mentors, including MassChallenge Alumni Shonak Patel, won 1st place at the Youth Business Plan Competition at Northeastern University on June 2, 2012, receiving $1,500 to start their business.”

According to the Bay State Banner, the Dream Team’s product is an “inspirational iPhone case, made of bamboo and customizable to have the purchaser’s own dream etched into it.” More here.

See video highlights of the competition from the Boston Business Journal.

“Being a BUILD mentor gave me the opportunity to use my passion for entrepreneurship to inspire greatness in others.” — Shonak Patel, Charlestown Mentor and MassChallenge Alumni. 

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When Volleyball Transforms Poor Kids

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 18, 2012| 1 Comment »

Today I want to highlight Taylor Barnes’s story in the Christian Science Monitor about the transformative effect of volleyball among poor Brazilian children.

But first an admission that the topic of volleyball reminds me (incongruously) of the movie A Thousand Clowns, in which an out-of-work writer goes around New York City fulfilling lifetime ambitions such as  standing on Park Avenue at dawn and hollering, “All right, all you rich people; everybody out in the street for volleyball.”

OK. Got that off my chest. Back to Brazil.

“Roberto Bosch’s volleyball school was getting nowhere,” writes Barnes. “Then he invited kids from the slums to join for free.

“The gangly [Bosch] joined his first volleyball club at age 12; before he was old enough to drive, he was already under contract and being paid for playing the sport. In college, Betinho, as he is known [in Rio], dropped out of his classes in economics to travel with a professional team. When he competed in the youth world championships in Italy at age 20, he was considered the best player on earth.

“But health concerns made him leave pro volleyball just as his peers were graduating from college. Soon he found he was struggling to find a new direction for his life. …

“His wife suggested he start his own volleyball school.

” ‘Given that I was really depressed, really low at the time, I didn’t think I was capable’ of running a school,’ he says. Still, he set up a volleyball court on Rio de Janeiro’s glamorous, celebrity-studded Leblon Beach.

” ‘In the beginning, it was one old net, three old balls, and one student, which was my wife,’ he recalls. …

“Then Betinho had an idea … Why not go to the public schools and offer volleyball lessons to students free of charge?”

Students from the favelas and shantytowns jumped at the chance. As the school’s reputation grew, wealthy children signed up, too. Volleyball became the great leveler in Rio. And Betinho found a purpose in life, better than the first.

More here.

Photograph: Jimmy Chalk
Roberto Bosch teaches beach volleyball on Leblon Beach in Rio de Janeiro. His students come from both local slums and wealthy neighborhoods.

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Witness Tree Project

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 17, 2012| 2 Comments »

Following up on my tree entry a couple days ago, I want to tell you about what two Rhode Island School of Design teachers decided to do with one ancient tree.

“An old elm tree that met its end two years ago at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline might have been headed for the chipper, but two faculty members at Rhode Island School of Design had a better idea,” writes Cate McQuaid in the Boston Globe.

“The elm, designated as a witness tree by the National Park Service because it was present as history was made, provided material for the Witness Tree Project, taught each fall by RISD associate professor of American studies Daniel Cavicchi and artist Dale Broholm, a senior critic in the school’s furniture design department.

“Undergraduates took two classes, one in history and one in woodworking. They visited the site, studied Olmsted, often recognized as the father of landscape architecture in the United States, and made objects inspired by what they learned.” More.

Photograph: Dale Broholm/RISD, Witness Tree Project
Wood from the Olmsted Elm after it was processed at a saw mill in Lunenberg last summer and made ready to start a new life.

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Singing and Dancing in the Cemetery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Being in the middle of an earthquake just now (a baby one), I got the urge to post about a cemetery.

Peter DeMarco wrote in the Boston Globe a while back about a lovely dance performance in the famed Mount Auburn Cemetery.

“The 100-member cast of ‘A Glimpse Beyond: A Unique Celebration of Life and Death’ leaves no one out: dancers, musicians, poets, puppeteers, sopranos, jazz singers, gospel choirs, and actors — some garbed as masked ‘spirit owls,’ others portraying the recently departed — join to make audiences ponder what lies ahead in the great beyond.”

According to DeMarco, the show was designed so that audience members could walk along, following the narrative as it unfolded “across the various graves, groves, and lush contours of America’s first garden cemetery.”

Bree Harvey, the cemetery’s vice president of external affairs, told the reporter that the performance was suited to Mount Auburn because “ ‘it’s a place of peace and tranquility, a place to commemorate the dead and console the bereaved and celebrate the lives of those buried here.’ ” More.

“Glimpse” reminds me of “When the Saints Go Marching in” and the New Orleans jazz parades that commemorate a life.

Back to the earthquake: John retweeted  prompt info from @NewEarthquake on twitter: “4.5 earthquake, 6km SSW of Lake Arrowhead, Maine. Oct 16 19:12 at epicenter.” It took NewEarthquake only four minutes to report. In case you haven’t gotten into twitter yet, it is truly the place to go for breaking news.

Photograph: Pamela Joye
“A Glimpse Beyond: A Unique Celebration of Life and Death” brought a 100-member cast onto the grounds of Mount Auburn Cemetery

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170 Years Ago in Concord

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 15, 2012| 3 Comments »

We had to cut down a sick sugar maple near our house. The arborist counted the rings: 170.

170 years ago Thoreau walked around this neighborhood. Maybe he walked under the tree’s branches. Maybe at this time of year, he kicked up its fallen leaves. The abolitionist John Brown visited a house on this street, too.

Come to think of it, 170 years ago was roughly the period that Concord’s “genius cluster” hung out together, as author Susan Cheever describes the Concord writers in her book American Bloomsbury.

Somehow looking at the rings on a tree that you more or less took for granted makes you think about historical characters that always seemed in the distant past. You imagine that you might have had a nodding acquaintance with Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and various Alcotts if they hadn’t unfortunately died a few years before you came to town.

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Churches

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 14, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Suzanne and Erik loved attending Glide Memorial when they lived in San Francisco. It’s a big, welcoming Gospel church. It calls itself “radically inclusive,” and having been there several times, I can attest to that.

“A radically inclusive, just and loving community mobilized to alleviate suffering and break the cycles of poverty and marginalization.”

Lots of hugging goes on. Homeless people participate, society ladies, political celebrities, gay and straight … Perhaps you saw the church in the Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness, based on a true story.

Besides the extraordinary choir, which is the initial draw for many churchgoers, we liked the congregant testimonials about what Glide has meant in their lives. Some people had been through pretty dark times, and Glide had been one piece of the road out.

Today as my husband and I drove home from a visit to Providence, we put on a radio broadcast from a Unitarian Universalist church, where a friend sometimes reads the announcements on air. The minister introduced a new-to-the-church idea, which I hope works out as well in Boston as it does at Glide.

He called it My Story and gave his own spiritual story as his first example, inviting parishioners to let him know if they wanted to do the same in upcoming weeks.

If nothing else, it should help the service be more interactive. And it should let members get to know each other better, especially if they are brave enough to share their rough times, the things they don’t bring up at coffee hour.

By the way, life’s difficult passages may be well served by our favorite bit of wisdom from Glide: “A setback is just a setup for a comeback.”

How many friends and even public figures would you like to tell that to?

Photograph: http://www.firstchurchboston.org

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Outdoor Experience for Kids

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

Shawn and Laura Sears were touched by inner-city kids with too many strikes against them and invited a few for an outdoor camping experience. The outing was so satisfying all around that they just kept doing it.

Marilyn Jones has the story at the Christian Science Monitor.

“Leaving college with liberal arts degrees – his in psychology, hers in geology – Shawn and Laura applied to Teach for America and were eventually placed to teach in one of the poorest regions in the country.

“Today, celebrating 14 years together (getting married along the way in 2004), they’ve seen the seeds sown during their experiences in Mississippi grow to fruition in the founding of Vida Verde Nature Education, a nonprofit outdoor education camp they’ve now run for 11 years.

“Located on northern California’s spectacular coast between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, this free camp for children from low-income families has served more than 7,000 kids from the inner cities of Oakland, East Palo Alto, San Francisco, and San Jose.

” ‘We help them let go of much of the negativity they often carry,’ Shawn says. ‘It’s nonstop fun, and they get to just be kids for a few days. Three days later, they’re transformed.’ ”

Read more.

Tony Avelar/Special to the Christian Science Monitor
Laura and Shawn Sears founded Vida Verde to give groups of students three days of exposure to and hands-on experience in the outdoors.

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Farming Seaweed

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 12, 2012| 3 Comments »

I like win-win stories like this one from National Public Radio. It’s about a new crop with a lot of monetary potential — and distinct advantages for the environment.

“It doesn’t require any land or fertilizer. Farming it improves the environment, and it can be used in a number of ways. So what is this miracle cash crop of the future? It’s seaweed.

“Charlie Yarish, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, loves seaweed. In nature, he says, when seaweed turns a rich chocolate color, that means the plant is picking up nitrogen, a process called nutrient bioextraction. …

“Many plants and animals cannot survive when there is too much nitrogen in the water, but seaweed is able to ‘capture’ the nitrogen, as well as contaminants in the water.

“A United Nations report says that nearly 16 million tons of seaweed were farmed in 2008 — most of it in Asia. Yarish helped a company called Ocean Approved start the United States’ first open-water kelp farm in the Gulf of Maine in 2006 … Now, he’s helping to create a seaweed farm off the coast of Connecticut.

“Bren Smith owns and runs the Thimble Island Oyster Company, off the coast of Branford, Conn. After his business was hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene last year, ruining about 80 percent of the shellfish crop, Smith started looking around for something more resilient to farm. That’s when he found Yarish, who agreed to help set him up in the seaweed farming business. …

” ‘There’s no barns, there’s no tractors. This is what’s so special about ocean farming. It’s that it’s got a small footprint and it’s under the water. I mean, we’re so lucky; I feel like I stumbled on this just great secret that we then can model and spread out to other places,’ ” Smith says. …

” ‘The plan is to actually split it into a couple different experimental markets — one for food, one for fertilizer, one for fish food. I’m [also] working with a skin care company in Connecticut, and then one for biofuel,’ Smith says. He’s even hoping he can someday fuel his own boat with biofuel from the seaweed.”

Craig LeMoult has the whole story here at NPR, where you also can listen to the audio.

Photograph by Ron Gautreau
Oyster fisherman Bren Smith on his boat.

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Canners Offer to Preserve Neighbors’ Fruit

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

How great an idea is this? Somerville’s League of Urban Canners gleans neglected fruits from city lots and neighbors’ trees and turns them into jellies, jams, and preserves.

Writes Kathleen Weldon in the Boston Globe, “The group is the brainchild of Sam Katz-Christy of Somerville, who was struck by inspiration last fall after receiving 10 pounds of plums from a neighbor who happened to have an unusually productive backyard tree. Armed with little more than a cookbook and a bit of courage, he and his family preserved their windfall in glistening Mason jars. The committed locavore, who commutes by bike to his job in Cambridge’s Central Square, began to notice just how much unused fruit was hiding in plain sight among the squares and one-way streets he traveled. His daily rides became a treasure hunt.

“After recruiting a posse of workers from his network of food-loving friends, he began knocking on doors, offering an unusual deal to the owners of neglected one-tree orchards: the League would pick their crop, can the harvest, and give residents back 10 percent of the results. The volunteers keep the rest.

“The initiative has proven remarkably successful. More than 220 sites are currently listed in the League’s database, representing more than 3,500 pounds of collected fruit. …

“Though at first the League expected to reap mostly apples and grapes, soon it became clear that Somerville, Cambridge, and Jamaica Plain were rich with ripe possibilities from mulberries to pears, raspberries to quince. A single tree in Harvard Square yielded 245 pounds of apricots, which turned into countless jars of jam.” Read more.

Suzanne loved the mulberries growing in our neighborhood when she was about five. I wonder how we might get our hands on mulberry preserves.

Mulberry season is long past, but there’s still plenty of produce out there, as evidenced by the hardy farmstands at the farmers market today.

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Dept. of Agriculture Funds a Theater

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds a wide range of activities to boost the economic strength of small towns and rural areas. It doesn’t just fund farmers, although farmers may benefit from a more vibrant rural economy.

To that point, here’s an story from the Philadelphia Inquirer by Howard Shapiro on how the USDA is helping a New Jersey theater.

“A little semiprofessional theater amid the farmland of Hammonton, N.J., has become the beneficiary of more than a half-million dollars in grants and low-interest loans from a most unlikely arts angel: the U.S. Department of Agriculture. …

“The Agriculture Department money is coming directly to the theater in three acts, so to speak: a $23,000 grant to improve its historic building and its ticketing and computer programming; an $89,000 20-year loan at 3.5 percent interest, mainly to enhance stage equipment; and a 30-year loan of $482,000 at 3.38 percent interest, to buy its building.

” ‘It’s an unusual project for the USDA to finance,’ said Howard Henderson, the department’s rural-development director for New Jersey. “This is a fascinating way we’ve been able to benefit a rural community.’

“The Rural Development program, financed by Congress, exists to strengthen or help establish facilities in rural communities that will improve downtowns, provide services, and encourage local activities. But money usually goes to such projects as firehouse restoration or, as in New Jersey’s northern Sussex County, a plan for hospice units.”

The Eagle Theatre applied for the money because, according to Henderson, everyone around Hammonton knows how active the USDA has been in supporting growth. More.

Photograph: http://theeagletheatre.com/about-us/

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Rare Scots Dialect Spoken No More

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve written several posts on the threat to languages that have few speakers — and on the linguistic preservationists racing against time. (Here, for example.)

Why does language extinction matter, you ask? Because language embodies so much about culture. We are poorer in being ignorant of how different people live and in having a chance to learn taken away from us.

Now the last speaker of a rare Scots dialect is gone. Writes the Associated Press, “In a remote fishing town on the tip of Scotland’s Black Isle, the last native speaker of the Cromarty dialect has passed away, taking with him a little fragment of the English linguistic mosaic.

“Academics said [October 3] that Bobby Hogg, who was 92 when he died … was the last person fluent in the dialect once common to the seaside town of Cromarty, 175 miles (280 kilometers) north of Edinburgh.

“ ‘I think that’s a terrible thing,’ said Robert Millar, a linguist at the University of Aberdeen in northern Scotland. ‘The more diversity in terms of nature we have, the healthier we are. It’s the same with language.’ …

“It’s part of a relentless trend toward standardization which has driven many regional dialects and local languages into oblivion. Linguists often debate how to define and differentiate the world’s many dialects, but most agree that urbanization, compulsory education and mass media have conspired to iron out many of the kinks that make rural speech unique.” More.

Photograph: Am Baile-High Life Highland/Associated Press.
Bobby Hogg, who recently passed away aged 92.

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Gardening Flash Mob

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

In a sign of moving with the times, the 54-year-old Littleton, Mass., Country Gardeners now call themselves a flash mob when they descend on public spaces to pull weeds and trim bushes.

Writes Grant Welker of the Sun, “The club of 34 active members — ranging in age from 30s to 90s, and all women — might not turn as many heads as a flash mob that quickly forms in a public setting, and there’s surely no dancing or singing involved. But it does serve more of a purpose.

“This group plans its mobs, shows up at the arranged time, works its gardening magic, and then disappears again, leaving a beautified space in its wake. …

“On a recent Saturday at 1 p.m., a group of five assembled at the Littleton Cemetery at the intersection of King Street and New Estate Road, fixed up a butterfly garden and, within about an hour, was gone, with some of the same members on to the next project. There were three mob-gardening sessions that day: at the cemetery, and then at Littleton Cafe at 3 p.m., and Common Convenience on Littleton Common at 5 that afternoon.” More.

Now, without calling these cheerful efforts at all staid, I can’t help thinking that a little singing and dancing wouldn’t hurt. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of pulling a flash mob on a flash mob?

You could find out when the gardening flash mob was scheduled, then show up with a brass band and baton twirlers to encourage the workers in the town common.

Or what about something around Halloween, with the surprise mob descending on the cemetery clean-up wearing costumes and handing out candied apples while “Monster Mash” plays on someone’s iPod?

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