World Pulse is an organization that strives to bring a voice to women around the globe using new technology and media. One example of this was in the My Camera and Me against a Regime video – a video that was uploaded from a mobile phone by a women who was arrested during a Sudanese protest. World Pulse allows for an online area where women can come together to find and share their success stories.

For World Pulse LIVE, Martha Llano from Colombia, Beatrice Achieng from Uganda, and Sarvina Kang from Cambodia were selected to come to the US to discuss how they are using new media and technology to facilitate them as grassroots leaders.

The women told powerful stories of how they found their voices. In Martha’s talk she spoke about the dangers of living in the Columbia cloud forest and how she had learned to overcome the dangers. When people told her she should carry a gun, she refused, saying “I will not take a gun to speak for me, because I have my own voice and words”. She emphasized the importance of thinking globally and acting locally.

Sarvina told her story of being the only literate individual in a family of 35. She was the only girl in her family and her village to go to college and now has her Master’s in NGO leadership. She emphasized the importance of education for women in creating change and preventing social problems like sex trafficking.

Beatrice told her story of growing up in Uganda and her emphasis on HIV prevention and education. She emphasized how if you give hope to one girl, a grassroots leader will emerge. She told the story of how when her last brother died of AIDS, her mother lost all hope because only men can own land in Uganda; however, after she told her story on the World Pulse platform, the World Pulse members emphasized that they were behind her and she stood up to her village for the land and was able to keep it.

When asked what the women thought would be most beneficial to their communities in spreading their voice, all three women emphasized that their was a lack of technology in their communities, and solar panels would be an easy remedy.

World Pulse LIVE is also available launching an online tour for individuals who are not able to attend the event in person.

My most recent photo project – a humorous look at our obsession with new products and technology.

I first thought of it when I didn’t have TV and started laughing at the idea of putting up an iPod instead. I thought it was funny.

The presentations are from a wide variety of sectors discussing reporting and communicating corporate social responsibility including:

• LEGO’s VP of Sustainability on ‘No one reads our CSR reports, what are we going to do now?’
• Vodafone’s Head of CR on ‘How to strike a useful balance between global strategy and local issues.”
• Presentations from ArcelorMittal and Henkel are also available

Ethical Corporations aim is to encourage debate and discussion on responsible business through publishing, conferences and independent research and advisory work.

In addition to the annual conference, they also host a variety of training workshops and publish a magazine.

A controversial new power line has been proposed in an unlikely spot – buried under almost the entire length of the Hudson River. The proposed transmission line, known as the Champlain-Hudson Express, would be funded as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. If built, the line would begin north of the Canadian border, and run 370 miles along the bottom of Lake Champlain, down the bed of the Hudson all the way to New York City and continuing under Long Island Sound to Connecticut.


Not only would this produce an extreme ecological impact on the unique environment of the Hudson River, but the project has many other controversial aspects. These include its status as a renewable energy project, the lack of inclusion of the First Nations people in the decision process, its questionable economic benefits, and the necessity of the project to obtain a “Presidential Permit”. Read more…

This week, world leaders met in New York to discuss the MDGs. I had the opportunity on Tuesday night of listening to Bolivian President Evo Morales give a talk entitled, “Nature is not for sale: The rights of Mother Earth.” The President discussed Bolivia’s struggles with climate change and that in order to save humans, we must first save the earth. We need to rethink our current economic model and find a way to pay our ecological debt. It was inspiring to hear a world leader talk on that level.

Last night I attended Bring Your Own Cause. BYOC is a networking event for individuals interested in international development. The evening hosted a number of interesting organizations. Both Community Lab and the Oxfam Action Corps NYC hosted the event.

This year’s assembly took place over 3 days and hosted speakers from around the world and networking session to engage youth with non-profits who are working towards spreading the MDGs.

I was able to attend the MDG Campaign Night and Dinner on Wednesday night. At the dinner, youth learned of a number of non-profits who are working for the MDGs. Non profits that were present included 350.org, Engineers Without Borders, Oxfam, Habitat for Humanity, and Amnesty International among others.

I was preset with Oxfam America. Oxfam America is currently collecting signatures to tell President Obama to deliver a US strategy to end global poverty and recommit to meeting the MDGs by 2015. Right now, President Obama’s leadership is needed to bring US foreign assistance into the 21st Century so that we can more effectively use taxpayer dollars to drive greater results for people in need.

The dinner was sold out and a number of youth from countries all over the world were present to learn about the organizations working towards the MDGs.

The following 2 days of the conference hosted a number of speakers from the private sector, non-profits, the UN, and government organizations. One of the most impressive organizations I heard from was from Jing Zhou, founder of Girls In Tech/China and Girls 2.0. GITchina‘s sole mission is to spread this message by providing a platform on which women in technology can connect, empower and learn from one another. With the increasing importance of technology and its convergence with other professions, the necessity to educate, celebrate and support women in this field has become impossible to ignore.

I was also very excited to hear from Ishmael Beah, former child soldier from Sierra Leone and author of  A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.  Ishmael stressed the importance of education to create change. After the war in Sierra Leone made him an orphan and led him to a life as a child soldier, he had the opportunity to address the UN in the 1990′s and share his terrible experiences as a child growing up in those conditions. He was then adopted by an American women and was enrolled in school. Because he did not have any of his former transcripts from his war torn country, the school did not want to enroll him. However, after writing an essay on why he did not have transcripts, the school let him in. He credits his access to education for changing his life and believes the education is the core to all the MDGs.

The morning started out with speakers from the Ashoka discussing social innovation. Ashoka is a global association of social entrepreneurs — men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Their global community develops models for collaboration and design infrastructure needed to advance the field of social entrepreneurship and the citizen sector.

Stuart Yasgur introduced Ashoka’s fellowship programs and some examples of social entrepreneurship that Ashoka has sponsored in the past including sustainable forest exploration in Indonesia and Cows to Kilowatts in Nigeria.

The keynote of the morning was Rich Lechner, VP of Energy and Environment at IBM. Rich discusses IBM’s focus on optimizing all aspects of an organization and discussing sustainability in terms of economic sustainability, operational sustainability, and environmental sustainability. He gave examples of smart grid, smart water, and smart traffic systems that IBM has helped instigate. An interesting statistic that he put forth was that 85% of CEOs believe sustainability will optimize business and lower costs; however, only 35% of companies actively measure sustainability. Although Rich’s understanding of sustainability was questionable at times – I felt he was replacing optimization with sustainability – he did provide some interesting examples of optimization around the globe.  Rich’s powerpoint is available on the Pratt Center’s website - http://prattcenter.net/energy-matters-workshop-materials.

The morning finished with the “Making Sparks” panel. Micah Kotch, Director of Operations at NYC ACRE moderated the panel made up of

• Bryan Berry, Project Manager at NYSERDA, 
• Arrun Kapoor, Principal at SJF Ventures,
• Ann Li, Director of the Center for Economic Transformation, NYC Economic Development Corp.,
• Diana Propper, General Partner at Expansion Capital Partners, and
• Russell Tencer, CEO of Wind Products LLC.

Arrun Kapoor recommended the book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers for any new start up.

Since 2001, the U.N., the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) and other human rights groups have worked to address the rampant exploitation and slavery of workers, typically children of the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which produce about 60 percent of the world’s chocolate. But despite nobel efforts, the groups’ agreements have done little to improve conditions. About 3.6 million West African children work on cocoa farms, many of whom make very little to no pay while under horrific conditions. This dire situation has led some to refer to cocoa produced in these regions as “blood chocolate.”

So why has nothing changed? Blame chocolate and agricultural companies like Mars and Cargill, who process 400,000 tons of cocoa each year and demand that prices stay low. Chocolate companies “have been able to control initiatives meant to eliminate forced, child and trafficked labor in West Africa’s cocoa industry.” Companies purchase cocoa through small farmers at a very low cost, refusing to pay prices that comply with Fair Trade practices.

However, European Union members and several other countries of the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) (not including the United States) signed a new agreement last week at a United Nations conference. The agreement reestablishes countries’ commitments to making the $10 billion abuse-ridden cocoa industry more sustainable and fair to workers, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). But this move will only help improve conditions so much. Things can’t really get significantly better until the world’s largest consumer of cocoa, the U.S., finally decides to take the cocoa high road.

The U.S. ambassador to Ghana recently announced that since January, the U.S. has been importing much more cocoa than ever thanks to two new processing facilities built by ADM and Cargill, one of the top five global processors of cocoa beans. U.S. cocoa imports are expected to increase, too, as American businesses are busting down the door asking for new contracts in the impoverished country. In the past year, there’s been 100-to-200 percent more requests from Americans seeking to do business in Ghana, the second-largest producer of cocoa after the Ivory Coast.

This means small farmers in Ghana and the Ivory Coast will be pushed to produce more cocoa. Unless they are protected under Fair Trade contracts, rampant exploitation and slavery of workers will most likely continue.

Change.org has a petition that you can sign to Tell Big Chocolate CEOS You Want Fair Trade Cocoa!


Democracy Now! also has a video up on YouTube from their “Chocolate’s Bittersweet Economy”: Cocoa Industry Accused of Greed, Neglect for Labor Practices in Ivory Coast story describing the chocolate industry in Western Africa:

New York City is widely considered an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and high-rises, diesel fumes and traffic jams, garbage and pollution. But in the groundbreaking work of contrarian environmental thinking that is Green Metropolis, David Owen declares New York City as the greenest community in America. In Green Metropolis, David Owen conceives a new environmentalism, turning what we think we know about the environment on its head and re-envisioning a sustainable future that looks less like Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond and more like the populous megacities of Hong Kong or New York.

The exhibition “Critical Mass,” will examine the complex issues arising from the unprecedented rate of urban growth projected to take place over the next 20 years, primarily in the informal settlements of the global south.

The National Design Triennial: Why Design Now? exhibition explores themes of Energy, Mobility, Community, Materials, Prosperity, Health, Communication, and Simplicity