La Leche League Oxford runs a Maternity Clothes Library, for a small fee per item (currently £2) maternity clothes can be hired and kept for the whole pregnancy. They have many sizes and styles available as well as smart wear for that special night out before the baby arrives. They also have a small number of breastfeeding clothes available.

This idea is something I’ve never come across before, but such a simple and meaningful one. The idea of a library of (fill word in here) extending beyond books like this one, has such great potential to help out communities and individuals in need.

http://www.llloxford.org.uk/LLLmcl.html

Imagine you are walking around your city, and you see an amazing piece of street art in the wall of a building. You go next to it, like in a museum, and take a look at the tag next to the piece of art, identifying the artists, the techniques he used, and also, if you have your iPod in hand, an audioguide track recorded by the artist himself, talking about his art and inspirations.

That’s exactly what we did in Lisbon, with the World’s First Ephemeral Museum. We cataloged more than 100 pieces of street art in 3 major neighborhoods around Lisbon, and with your mp3 player and map in hands, that you previously downloaded from the Ephemeral Museum Website, you can walk the city streets like a real museum.

Every important piece of street art is tagged and identified. This way people could enjoy and understand more Street Art while walking through the biggest museum in the world, the streets of Lisbon.

We are working to open new galleries in Madrid, Barcelona, and São Paulo.

http://www.museuefemero.com/

Cardboard Citizens changes the lives of homeless and displaced people through theatre and the performing arts.

Mission:
- Present plays performed by homeless and displaced people, to share experiences and problem-solve together.

- Work in partnership to widen the reach of the company’s work and underpin its support for participants.

- Make theatre for general audiences so a wider public can share in the company’s learning and understanding of the issues faced by homeless people.

- Enable excluded people to develop skills and confidence through projects and workshops.

- Meet the practical needs of homeless and displaced people, supporting them in matters of housing, education, employment, health, career and personal development.

Vision:
- Cardboard Citizens strives to be a world leader in its field, creating great theatre that makes a real and positive difference to our society and those living on its margins.

- They know that theatre can be a catalyst for change, growth and learning for participants and audiences.

- They are working to further develop theatre projects in and out of hostels for a wide range of audiences, focussed on the lives of homeless and displaced people.

- They will be supporting people in diverse ways, helping homeless people to play their part in the world, and society to understand how life is lived on the margins.

- Their ambition is to enable every hostel resident in London to be able to access the company’s work, as audience or participant.

- And to offer all homeless or displace people who become involved with the company individual help and support.

- They will produce theatre-based and site-specific productions on a regular and sustainable basis, telling stories of the excluded.

- Every audience member at a Cardboard Citizens show will learn about issues affecting the displaced and homeless people they work with.

- The company will be fully engaged in national and international networks, where appropriate joining in alliances and campaigns to bring unheard voices to the fore. 

- All their partners, peers and friends will have the opportunity to share best practice, knowledge, skills and expertise, and to travel further with us on Cardboard Citizens’ future journey.

http://cardboardcitizens.org.uk/p1.html

The inaugural Maker Faire Africa was a gathering of inventors and entrepreneurs from around the globe. One of the main purposes was to showcase African ingenuity to world. Taking place in Accra, Ghana, Maker Faire Africa had local artisans as well as Makers from as far as Liberia, Malawi and Uganda.

http://makerfaireafrica.com/

In the Summer and Autumn 2007, thousands of people living and working in the town of Middlesbrough, Tees Valley participated in a project to increase local food production and reduce food miles. Along the way, young, old, rich and poor worked together, growing food and realising new relationships with local food producers and existing growers in the town and its surrounding area. Their goal has was to pioneer a new sustainable future – not just for Middlesbrough but also for other post-industrial communities across the UK

They were also working to raise awareness of the benefits of and opportunities for growing and securing food for our towns and cities. Local growers need to be connected to existing and new markets, a new relationship needs to be struck between urban and rural, and communities need inspirational and educational ‘soil to plate’ experiences.

Middlesbrough Council and David Barrie, senior producer for Dott 07, have led the project, working in close partnership with Groundwork South Tees, Middlesbrough Primary Care Trust, more than 15 primary and secondary schools, many local community and voluntary sector organisations, and existing allotment growers in the town. It was driven by Bioregional’s commitment to the concept of one planet living, developed in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund and endorsed by the Minister of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The groups from the schools identified locations in which to grow food and the produce they would like to cultivate. Then, in May 2007, about 1,000 people began growing fruit and vegetables in containers at locations across the town. They received support from local horticulturalists, allotment growers, farmers and food producers. Between June and September, this new team of urban farmers brought their harvested ingredients to a ‘kitchen playground’ event: three week-long blocks of activity in which people prepared, cooked and ate dishes based on ingredients that they had grown themselves. The frenzy of food production culminated in September in a ‘Meal for Middlesbrough’ – a banquet for 1,500 in the town’s main square. Participants in the growing project created the menu from produce they’d harvested. Local producers provided meat and vegetables to supplement the meal, which was cooked and eaten in the open air.

Finally, several containers grown in Middlesbrough were presented at the Dott 07 Festival and participating groups prepared food for visitors in a special-edition kitchen playground.

A fantastic sustainable idea which involves everyone from the local community and has endless amounts of benefits.

http://www.dott07.com/go/food/urban-farming

RockCorps was launched as a social business in the United States in 2005 by 7 friends: Stephen Greene (CEO), Grady Lee (COO), Haley Moffett (Head of Production), Chris Robinson (Creative Director), Toby Garrett (Producer), Paul Hunter and Noel Eisenberg. Volunteers have earned their tickets to RockCorps gigs in cities across the US including New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Oakland, Houston, Chicago, Portland OR, Baltimore, Washington DC and Miami.

In 2008 RockCorps partnered with Orange and Sony Ericsson to bring RockCorps to the UK. The first concert took place on September 26th at the Royal Albert Hall featuring Busta Rhymes, Ludacris and John Legend. In 2009, RockCorps has grown in the UK with gigs at the Manchester Apollo and again at the Royal Albert Hall. 2009 also saw the the first RockCorps show in France at Le Zenith theatre in Paris.

RockCorps has over 450 charity and non-profit partners in the US and Europe. All of the volunteering events are done in partnership with and for the benefit of local charities.

All of RockCorps funding comes from its brand partners. Orange is RockCorps’ lead partner in the UK and France, both supporting the programme directly and also delivering communications campaigns to help spread the word and inspire a new generation of volunteers. Young people have to give 4 hours of their time to put back into the community, and for their hard work they get given a ticket to a music gig with big name artists playing – the idea is as simple as that.

I was at the Royal Albert Hall for this year’s RockCorps and the atmosphere was amazing, everyone having a good time and feeling good about helping out with the community.

As the idea of RockCorps has already spread from America to the UK and now to Paris, it’s surely only a matter of time before it starts heading to Asia? Japan for instance, where the elderly make up a big part of the population could easily be the type of place where RockCorps works its magic, with the young helping the old.

Give, Get Given.

http://www.rockcorps.com/

http://www.orangerockcorps.co.uk/

In partnership with Channel 4, Landshare is a service that allows people who are either a landowner, grower or helper to post a listing on the website, offering their services or needs. The concept of land sharing and making use of unused spaces, especially in built up cities such as London really brings back the ‘blitz spirit’ that started to emerge during the war. Self sufficiency and food production is a sensitive issue these days due to the problems with landfills, supermarkets, food prices and even nutrition values. There’s great demand for allotments and garden spaces in London (10 years in some cases), so there is obviously huge demand and tiny supply. Landshare and other websites such as yours2share are trying to solve this problem.

The idea seems so fundamental, land, food and cooperation, and yet maybe the English attitude to gardens and land ownership is very different in other cultures? Portland, Oregon in America for example, is a place where land use is currently a big issue, with 20,000+ acres of land currently vacant and farmland is restricted due to controversial regulations. Land sharing could make use of unusual spaces more effectively in cities like Portland, especially when regulations are currently in place, everything from back gardens to local parks.

http://landshare.channel4.com/

Transition Towns start off when a small collection of individuals within a community come together with a shared concern.

They begin by forming an initiating group with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative. A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look at problems squarely in the eye and address them.

After going through a comprehensive and creative process of: awareness raising, connecting with existing groups in the community, building bridges to local government, forming groups to look at all the key areas of life and kicking off projects aimed at building people’s understanding of resilience, 15-20 year projects are formed.

This results in a coordinated range of projects across all  areas of life that strives to rebuild the resilience towns have lost as a result of problems such as cheap oil and carbon emissions.

The communities also recognise two crucial points: that they immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there’s no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope, if we collectively plan and act early enough there’s every likelihood that we can create a way of living that’s significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment.

Examples of existing Transition Towns can be found here. From the UK to Australia to New Zealand to Italy to Japan, Transition Towns are currently evolving everywhere.

http://www.transitiontowns.org/