You are hereCommunity Action
Community Action
Chiron Studies Teach Out (May 13-17)
Chiron Studies Teach Out
A free celebration of highly democratic and participatory approaches to teaching and learning.
May 13-17, 2013 in Portland's South Park Blocks
Social Sustainability Month 2012: Line-up of Events
Opening Ceremony
Hosted By:
Social Sustainability Month Planning Committee
Monday November 5th, 5-7pm
Location: Womens Resource Center (WRC)
Join us for an evening of free food, freshly
harvested tea, and a collaborative envisioning of what it means to be socially
sustainable.
Restoring the Oak Savanna on PSU campus: One of the
rarest plant communities on earth
Hosted By Sustainability Leadership Center
Friday November 9, 1-2pm
2013 Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference to be Held at PSU!
This year's conference will be held at PSU! Check it out and consider attending....or presenting!
Music Is a Day Job!
Partnered with the local musicians’ union, a handful of PSU community development students have been working together to raise awareness for the Fair Trade Music campaign. Fair Trade Music (FTM) is similar to other fair trade movements in their struggle to establish an agreement of fair compensation from venues or clubs to the professional musicians hired to perform nightly. The current practice within the live music scene is to mainly offer exposure to bands in return for their hours spent practicing, promoting, traveling to a gig and performing.
Setting the Table: A Food Forum on Equity, Sustainability, and the State of Food at PSU
Come join the Sustainability Leadership Center and the Food Action Collective for:
"Setting the Table: A Food Forum on Equity, Sustainability, and the State of Food at PSU"
Community Friends: A VBC Outing with the Social Sustainability Taskforce & Arisana Tolomei
Last Wednesday, May 9th I had a lovely day with members of the Social Sustainability Task force, the Ecoreps and friends, learning how to make bottle bricks for our upcoming Peace on EarthBench project for PSU's Village Building Convergence 2012. It was great fun stuffing "clean" trash into 20 ounce plastic bottles and inspiring to see just how much trash could be compacted into such a small container.
Re-cap: April 20th, Beyond Paper & Plastic Dialog - Incarceration
The Sustainability4All’s Beyond Paper & Plastic dialog on April 20th was both informative & inspiring. The topic was on incarceration & how it affects Black families. I had always been aware of how the legal system (including police, courts and private prisons) is prejudiced against & condemn more African-Americans than Caucasians, and how minor drug charges can turn normal people into hardened criminals and results in unfair loss of rights afforded to citizens. But I had never connected the two until this panel showed me that this was a systemic problem.
Spotlight: PSU's Upcoming Village Building Convergence Projects - get excited!
On Friday, April 27th, PSU’s Social Sustainability Taskforce (SSTF) of the Sustainability Volunteer Program met up to continue discussing project ideas for the upcoming Village Building Convergence (VBC). What is the VBC you ask? Well, in short, it is a Portland-based, week-long festival that is essentially about bringing communities together to work on neighborhood improvement and place-making projects. While the VBC is now in its 12th year, this is the first year that the PSU campus is registered as an official project site.
Earth Week Re-cap: Intercultural Sustainability Exhibition Spotlight - Slovakia Presentation
The Wolf Private Nature Reserve has an area of 21.24 hectares and is situated in Prešov region, in the Čergov Mountains. WOLF has aquired the forest from a private landowner. The amount that was necessary for buying the forest - 3.2 million Slovak crowns - was raised by the fundraising campaign "Buy Your Own Tree" and help of supporters from 19 different countries across the world. WOLF has been the owner of the forest since 1998 with no human interventions taken in this forest ever since.
Energy Conservation and Art
First, I hope you've been keeping up with our rankings in the RecycleMania competition.
I've always been someone particularly interested in science and numbers, but I've always loved art that captures the beauty in engineering and technology (some of my earliest memories of art are my dad's beautiful stipled pen and ink works of power plants he'd visisted as an electrical engineer). And I think it's often over-looked in environmental work and sustainability that creative expression can be an powerful way to communicate our principles and values. It's also a way of putting technology and human scale in perspective with nature. That said...
I have another GOOD find to share with you. They recently highlighted the work of Mitch Epstein, an photographer whose recent work focuses onAmerican power. This slide show from the Guardian really does an amazing job of pairing his beautiful photgraphs with statements from the artist and environmental facts.
It's also a great tie-in for announcing a unique aspect of our Energy Challenge (beginning April 1st, stay tuned for more details - the EcoReps are hard at work planning!). During the month, we're not only going to be encouraging residents to conserve electricity and educating them about the science behind electricity. We're also going to be hosting a month long submission period for your creative expressions of conservation. Whether it be poetry (Haiku or otherwise), art (photography, painting, sculpture, etc), or any other form of creative expression you wish.
We hope to display submissions at the conclusion of the Energy Challenge and even offer a prize! Please contact me (energy@pdx.edu) for submission details. As the energy challenge gets under way, we'll post more information - but for now get the word out there!
