Oregon Discussions

Twitter, Technology, Food & Hunger in Portland

One of the breakout sessions at last weeks Springboard Innovation's Social Innovation Forum was a brainstorming session about technology and hunger. Of course as people started talking, some of the talk was about Twitter (a microblogging site), though most people had no heard of it yet.

Blanka (who'd not heard of Twitter) mentioned something about farm food on Sauvie Island and then Don S, one of the participants who had not heard of Twitter actually came up with the genesis of a pretty interesting way to use social media (Twitter) to help get unwanted fresh foods from farms (and grocery stores and restaurants) to food pantries and various distribution centers.

First created a Twitter Portland Hunger account.

Then a decentralized and open distribution network could look something like this...

(Request for Pickup) Local farmers, grocery stores, restaurants (aka Provider) would be given a quick demonstration how to user Twitter (ie text messaging on their cell phones) to say they have a pickup of whatever type of food. (what, how much, where, time, notes)
(Pickup Verification) The first person to respond (aka Delivery) to the @portlandhunger request for food pickup will pick and deliver the shipment. It's up to the person doing food pickup to determine which food pantry, church, or food bank they prefer the food be distributed thru. This will hopefully mean people (delivery) closest to the (provider) will be in position to most quickly get the food items to the closest distribution point.
(Pickup Confirmation) Provider will reply to Delivery openly so others following can see the food is being picked up.
(Pickup Authentication) Delivery (and if desired Provider) person confirms pickup of food.
(Food Drop Off) Delivery person provides drop off location once food has been delivered to food pantry, food bank, or church)

So, the farmer/grocery/restaurant participants would have the least technology knowledge or responsibility in this process. The people with the most responsibility would be the Twitter Delivery people who would track the food from pickup to final destination delivery.

It's a 100% open system, no groups, organizations, businesses, or people own it or control it.

It's simple, if you can text message, you can do this.

It's flexible, and it's emergent.

More thoughts and ideas?

Last comment added: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:34:15 PST

DNO (directors and officers) & Liability Insurance

A founder of an NPO asking questions about DNO and generial liability insurance. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I was wondering if you could circulate a question to our fellow PAGAC members for me. Doing research on directors and officers insurance as well as liability insurance. We are wanting to hear from other local nonprofits about their own experiences. Is it affordable and worthwhile for small organizations? What companies around town specialize in this? Any advice would be helpful.

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Homowo Library, Resource Center Planning

A discussion thread for online planning the building of a library and resource center in Ghana.

Last comment added: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:07:05 PST

G.R.O.W. 2008 Conference: Sharing, Notes & Follow-up

Last Saturday January 26, Portland State University's Master of International Management program and World Affairs Council of Oregon's Young Professionals group jointly sponsored a one-day leadership conference entitled "G.R.O.W. 2008 – Growing Real Opportunities in the World by Beginning Locally." Over 180 people attended with the primary objective of the conference being to unite the nonprofit and business communities of Portland to tackle key global issues centered on human rights, economic development and education.

http://www.growconferences.org/

The "G.R.O.W. 2008 - Growing Real Opportunities in the World by Beginning Locally" one day leadership conference was held at Portland State University, Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 327, 1825 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon 97207 on Saturday, January 26 from 8:00 am – 7:00 pm, during which for only $30 the event provided all day access to skills development sessions, project plans & include breakfast, lunch and reception.

The conference was a true collaboration between institutions - businesses, nonprofit and public and excellent opportunity for networking. Speakers with diverse backgrounds lead G.R.O.W. 2008 participants through interactive skill development breakout seminars, inspiration-building talks, and nonprofit project plan sessions. Speakers for the event included: Nick Macdonald, Mercy Corps; Brent Hample, India Partners; Dennis Ceru, Babson College; Elliot Maltz, Willamette University; Maria Wulff, World Affairs Council of Oregon; Martin Moll, AKT; Michael Paul, The Commerce Bank of Oregon; Perry Gruber, Intel; and Titus Herman, Goodwill Industries of Columbia Willamette.

Last comment added: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:07:56 PST

Will Click For Art: Online Marketing Workshop for Artists and Organizations

From the technically outlandish to the tactical and the practical, how can artists market themselves online and maybe even enjoy doing it? Online marketing: what works, what doesn't, how to do more of the first and less of the second. Discover oodles of free online resources that will bring more and more visitors to your web site. Web 2.0, what is THAT all about? Luddites and technophobes, maybe they are on to something? Time for a new web site, now what? What is the one single most important thing to consider when you are building your web presence? Good principals of user interface, information architecture and navigation structure that will not make your teeth sweat. Peer web site reviews if time and desire allow. Presenter: Mark Grimes. Friday, January 25, 2008 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Location: Art Institute of Portland, 1122 NW Davis Street, Portland, OR 97209.

RACC Marketing Workshop Workspace (please feel free to add your own links)

Or any related ideas and thoughts here in this discussion thread...

Last comment added: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:06:03 PST

Help Oregon schoolchildren to experience African music right here in Oregon

We have been issued a challenge from the Oregon Community Foundation. I am the Executive Director of Homowo African Arts and Cultures and was one of the founders of this nonprofit organization in 1976. We have been given the challenge of raising approximately $7,500 over the next month. If we can do this, we will get $5,000 to match it. This is so important, since this money will be used to underwrite the costs of bringing a six piece group of musicians and dancers who come from Ghana into schools at a low cost to the schools.

Since the budget cuts, many schools don't even have assemblies any more because of the cost. We have found that for many children- if not all- this is an experience they will remember all their lives! People tell us all the time that they remember when Obo Addy and his group came to their school. We know it opens their eyes.

It will mean so much if we can do this.

Last comment added: Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:20:49 PDT

An Adapting Mosaic

Hi all,

Greetings from an occasional visitor. My deepest admiration for the committed global social entrepreneurship embodied at <Ned>. Exciting and important work!

My own work is for a conservation organization that takes a more regional, ecological perspective, seeking to foster “sustainable” transitions along the West Coast of North America, especially in the food, forestry and fisheries sectors. (See Wikipedia entry for Ecotrust.)

Please allow me to toss around some exploratory ideas. I started with the notion that I would write about food but feel the need to back up a little before getting to that topic. Apologies in advance if this post attempts to clumsily cover too much ground.

The title of this post comes from one of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) scenarios. The two scenario axes defined in the MA are: global vs. regional development, and proactive vs. reactive approaches to policies about ecosystems and their services. “Adapting mosaic” is the name for the regional, proactive quadrant.

“Dichotomies impose a false and sharp polarization on the world,” writes Edward de Bono. That’s pretty much my feeling about how the global/regional story has played out over the last few decades – especially with respect to the Washington Consensus and its subsidized promotion of “free trade” as an unalloyed good.

Where I live, in Portland (and in many other places as well), excitement about diverse local foods and concerns about peak oil have led to a resurgence of interest in regionalism. I see this trend as a healthy one, but not, of course, at the expense of the kind of global communication, cooperation, and initiatives taking place through <Ned>.

I think it behooves us all to consider and to articulate the real, important, and beneficial aspects of both globalism and regionalism. That way we’ll be prepared when we see either a hijacking of these values/ideas to support other objectives or, conversely, a backlash against them. I know that some committed supporters of local food are sensing the emergence of a backlash. How much of that feeling is valid? More on that topic below.

Since regionalism is my work these days, I’m going to take the regional perspective and flesh it out a little. There’s a list of points that’s been evolving in my head about why regionalism is real, important and beneficial. (Are those the criteria?) It’s very rough, and certainly incomplete as well. This list might be titled: “why place/scale matters”.

We might receive better feedback – we make better decisions when the consequences of those decisions are transparent and readily available, which generally means closer in time/space.
We might reap the benefits of modular design – greater potential for innovation; reduced brittleness that comes with overconnected systems.
Closer alignment with nature’s services – nature self-organizes into ecoregions/bioregions.
Support for bio-cultural diversity.
Important knowledge is place specific – thus the value of indigenous and local/traditional knowledge.
We reduce the energy embodied in the transport of goods – (all other things being equal, which of course they never are).
Money spent locally tends to support small businesses rather than big corporations, which in turn supports healthy communities – studies in the ag sector, for example, show that small farms and community health go hand in hand.
We might reinvigorate civil society – “What holds people together long enough to discover their power as citizens is their common inhabiting of a single place.” – Dan Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place
We care about where we live – “Of all the memberships we identify ourselves by (racial, ethnic, sexual, national, class, age, religious, occupational), the one that is most forgotten, and that has the greatest potential for healing, is place.” – Gary Snyder

In the U.S., this type of thinking – natural boundaries and so on – re-emerged in the 1970s among bioregionalists like Peter Berg and Gary Snyder. Coming into the Foodshed was a seminal 1996 paper that extended the discussion, and “local food” has become the centerpiece of the trend to regionalism.

To complete this survey, here are some of the primary articles that are thought to challenge the trend to local foods.

The Economist, Dec 2006: Good food? and Voting with your trolley (I pointed out one problem with these articles, here: Feeding the world.)

The (London) Times, Aug 2007: Organic farmers face ruin as rich nations agonise over food miles

NY Times (James McWilliams op-ed), Aug 2007: Food that travels well

There have been rebuttals to these articles by:

Michael Shuman: http://www.bioneers.org/node/217 8

Tom Philpott: http://grist.org/comments/food/2 007/08/16/eatlocal/index.html

David Morris: http://www.alternet.org/story/60 670/

(I wrote about some of these topics, in the form of comic-filled newspaper inserts, back in 2003: http://sectionz.info/Issue_3/ind ex.html.)

Hopefully this post sets the stage for discussion of some of these ideas/issues, here and elsewhere on <Ned>.

With deep respect for the <Ned> community,

Howard Silverman

Last comment added: Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:31:30 PDT

PAGAC: microfinance, microloans and microenterprise

A brief welcome to members of the Portland Area Global Aids Coalition.

Ann Pickar/UU Global Aids Coalition, Theresa Burks/World Affair Council of Oregon, and Mark Grimes/ned.com wanted to invite PAGAC members into this thread to have an open discussion about microfinance, microloan and microenterprise solutions that are working in Africa and around the world.

Here are a couple web sites that <Ned> has done some microfinance work with already.

<Ned> Prosper

<Ned> Kiva

Have you had some personal experience with microfinance, microloan and microenterprise that you could share?

Outside of Grameen Bank and Mohamed Yunus, what else do you know about the loan instruments?

Have you heard specific things that work best when it comes to microenterprise?

Questions, comments, ideas?

There are no comments.