The Realist Idealist

The buying power of the casual consumer can be harnessed to impact the environmental actions of business. We can get companies to make choices that are sustainable and transformative. And we can do it with the carrot …not the stick.
Watch this video (highly recommend the longer version) to see exactly how it works.

CarrotMob is [...]

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I recall very well in college how a relatively small (though seemingly ubiquitous) cohort of do-gooders on campus made a lot of the best things happen. At least things that I thought were “best.” Organizations like Alternative Spring Break, Habitat for Humanity, Manna Project and others that were making incredible things happen, were all [...]

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Gas prices won’t be going down for a while. But at least we as consumers can ease the pain by voting with our consumer dollars, and patronizing oil companies that are devoting at least a small share of their revenue to sustainable practices.
HIP Investor has rigorously evaluated and rated the top ten oil companies (HIP [...]

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A colleague just introduced me to BrightKite.com and as I’ve been playing with it all I can think of are the nearly infinite possibilties for it.
First and foremost the service is going to need to be integrated with others so that it doesn’t exist in a vaccum. Don’t know if they plan an API [...]

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My friend Asheen - who I’ve never met in person, but whom I respect greatly through a list-serve on which we both engage - sent this photo out today. His title: “An alternate universe.”

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My $600 Bush-proffered economic stimulus hit my bank account a couple weeks ago and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out how to spend it.  Actually, “give” it, is probably a better way to think about it.
A quick run through of my living room will reveal a glaring emptiness (actually there are two large [...]

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Making good things (actually) happen is hard.
On any large scale, trying to make the world a bit better place is messy and complicated and almost always full of the same back-room shenanigans chronicled throughout the political, business, and tech sectors, but with one not-so-small difference: everyone involved acts like it’s not, and almost no one [...]

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…with me.

It does feel a little weird to post something from elsewhere that is essentially about yourself, but that said, I think the work that PIR/.ORG is doing to promote do-gooders on the web is great.  Put simply, I’m thankful to be a small part of it, and raise a bit of awareness of them [...]

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I’ve heard a lot of talk around the nonprofit sector in the last 6-9 months about “blogger strategy” and “leveraging the blogosphere.” That is to say, a lot of people are talking about how to get bloggers to write (positively) about them and/or their organizations.
The same has been true at my own organization as I’ve [...]

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…what would it be? Are we hard liquor or something smoother? Billy Bob at the bar takin’ down a Coors Light or James Bond sipping a martini over a game of cards? More like gin and tonic or rum and coke? Fruity? Shaken? Umbrellas? Stirred? Olives?
Whether you are one to partake or not, this is [...]

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