Hanna Brady's Blog – April 2010 Archive (9)

I've known about Kiva for awhile, but in catching up with my EVOKE missions I had an excellent reason to finally get involved. Joining the EVOKE team was also inspiring. One point of Kiva is that every little bit helps, but it's nice to be part of a slightly larger small piece.



I made my first loan to a group in Cambodia:



http://www.kiva.org/lend/195342



I went to Cambodia painfully briefly three years ago. There's so much… Continue

So the alternate currency I want to talk about it the Time Bank. The currency is in Time Dollars and it trades one hour of work for another hour of work.



It's a neat idea meant to strengthen the community as well as present a new currency. See if there is one near you!



http://www.timebanks.org/



I don't know how grand a scale this can work on, and I think it would take some work to have it expand beyond a local level. It also… Continue

The field is perfectly black. The only light comes from the densely scattered stars. Without ground lights they shine with surprising intensity for those of us used to streetlights or even headlights. A murmur goes through the crowd as they shift on their feet. It's a bit chilly - this November has been mild, but outside at night the cold can enter your bones. The sounds of the river come clearly through the air.



Somewhere on the next hill a light appears. In a moment a string of them… Continue

EVOKE has gotten me thinking about a number of issues to do with saving the world and social innovation, and it's opened some basic questions. I'd like to see what you come up with, dear agents.



Is it possible to save the world? Have we gone too far? Are there enough people that want the world to be a better place to make it so?



What would be the "win" conditions?



Is it the world that needs to be saved, or are we talking about saving the human race? (i. e. I think one… Continue

For my Learn8 I picked TOGA: The Green Pharmacy:



http://srdis.ciesin.org/cases/indonesia-001.html



This case study describes a village persevering in finding plants that will survive in their poor soil. They ended up with a group of plants called TOGA, family medicinal herbs, which includes turmeric, lemon grass and mangosteen.



There are a few lessons here that I like. The first is keeping in mind the… Continue

So, in my first blog on Act 2 I got the supplies to make a mini garden.



http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/act2-a-beginning



And here we are getting into phase two, so to speak. The beginning:

The middle:

and the end:

There are lettuce… Continue

So in Act 1, I followed Patrick Rothfuss. He's a fantasy novelist and raises a lot of money for Heifer International. More info here:



http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/act1-unorthodox-but-here-we-go



And in my first update I said I was going to hear him speak:…



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My father made the round table tall enough for him to sit comfortably at. Our family is small, and so we can all sit here together. The house is different, a little smaller than the one I grew up in, but the yard is larger. My mom’s had time to get a vegetable garden going, but she never was very good at growing delicate plants, so we have lots of strawberries and peas, but we had to get the lettuce from the farmer’s market. The day is warm and the windows are…

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So I finally had time to come back to Evoke today, and I got a good look at how much I have to do to catch up. It is a rather hefty task. But I have to start somewhere.



I live in the US, North Eastern Ohio, and the food security here is very good. Poverty, more than food scarcity, is what threatens our food security, I think. That said, there are always things that can be improved, and plenty of neat projects.



On the national scale the US senate just passed the… Continue