Sarah Shaw Tatoun's Blog – April 2010 Archive (11)

Seven and a half billion. That's how many people share our planet in 2020. That's a hard number to grasp, so we've decided to show people just how much it is in drops of industrial waste water. How much water is 7 and a half billion drops? 375,000 liters. What can you do with 375,000 liters of pure water? Grow 17 kilos of roasted coffee, make 15 hamburgers, refine 250 kilos of sugar, or build 2 or 3 cars.



Of course we can't use our water for any of those things-- even if we wanted to.… Continue

Although I've had friends caught in the middle of natural disasters (the Los Angeles earthquake and the Prague floods), most of my personal experience of threat has been from people rather than nature. From being near Detroit and having a father working in the city during the riots in the 60's, to sharing a neighborhood with warring gangs in Los Angeles in the late '70's and early '80's, to living half a mile from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, everything I've… Continue

I discovered Manna Energy Foundation among Ashoka's Change Makers finalists. Their web page declares a revolutionary agenda: "The Manna Energy Foundation represents a revolution in philanthropy,

with the vision that positive change can come from a combination of both

philanthropic action and social enterprise.

Our goal is to positively impact the

lives of one… Continue

It's late June, and now that my husband and I have celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary and my parents have marked an incredible 76 years together, we're about to celebrate the anniversary of a much younger relationship: the opening of our net positive energy co-housing project 4 years ago.



The idea was born long ago, in 2009 or 2010. I was looking for a place near my parents, but my eyes kept straying, instead, to the rustbelt cities of Ohio,… Continue

It's true that as women have joined the workforce it's become the new 'norm' for middle-class families to have two incomes. (Working class women have always worked, as do the poor.) Elizabeth Warren has done some of the best research on the subject. You can hear one of her best lectures here: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.



On the other hand, the the women's movement gave a lot of women AND men the opportunity… Continue

I'd like to make a treadle-powered washing-machine generator. I have no idea how much power it would actually produce, but I'd love to be able to at least partially charge my lap-top battery with it. I often sit at the computer most of the day, and treadle-power would give me some much-needed exercise along with meeting at least some of our energy needs at… Continue

Food security in Prague is less of a problem in some ways than in many places: many Czechs own or rent a 'country cottage' -- often little more than a garden shack, on small plots in 'garden colonies'. During the growing season it's common for relatives and neighbors to stop by with extra produce that would otherwise go to waste. Many are also adept foragers, with mushroom picking being almost a national sport.



However, since the Revolution in 1989, food security has begun to be… Continue

I'm currently dividing my time between the Washington DC area and Prague, CZ. If anyone in the region has a cellphone to contribute to the Hopephones project and can get the phones to me I'll be happy to deliver them to the Bethesda, Maryland collection center near where I live in the DC area. I'll be stopping off in Hamburg before I leave on April 26th, so you can also get phones to me there if that's more… Continue

It's early March, and, not unusually these days, it's already beginning to feel like spring. That's very bad news for some countries (though we've done a lot to reduce both global warming and the effects on the worst hit countries) but in our climate here in Bohemia, it's not so bad.



It's one of the days of the week when the multi-generational co-housing my husband and I moved into the year I turned 62 has its joint meals. One thing we both love about these meals is… Continue

I've been a part of a number of 'experiments in money' over the course of time. The first one was as a member of a residential coop when I was 17. We had a group house where about 20 people lived. For a low rent we all contributed 'work-credits' intended to be the equivalent of about 4 hours of work a week. We bid on the jobs we wanted to do-- which ranged from picking up food for the group meals at wh***sale outlets outside the city to cooking meals, to washing the floors. Jobs… Continue

My colleagues and I have been waiting for this year for a long time. When I first started talking to people about starting a 'wide-open-book' social innovation business one of the ideas we came up with was to have a special '2020 Vision' department designed to train people's creativity using the newest… Continue