The Realist Idealist

…for anyone who stops by the site tomorrow.
Can’t wait to resume blogging after the madness of the election ends.  For those that I haven’t talked to, or can’t tell from my Twitter feed to the right, I’m in North Carolina for the final days of the campaign trying to turn out a victory for Kay [...]

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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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After being on the road for a week or more I always return home (wherever that may be in a given year) with a wealth of new ideas on my mind.  It’s a timeless tradition for the weary traveler as the myriad airports and jets provide plenty of time (usually more than we’d like) for [...]

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This is awesome.

Salad greens, cherry tomatoes, and chili peppers! Organic! And here’s the really cool thought - hook it up to a solar panel and set it up in sub-saharan Africa, and this could bring vitamins and nutrients to the extreme poor. OK, maybe not feasible on the cost front, but scale it [...]

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Obviously, I think food supply issues are a serious concern, but I’m not about to jump on board with this article from Scotland’s Sunday Herald:
More than 73 million people in 78 countries that depend on food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) are facing reduced rations this year. The increasing scarcity of [...]

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So Jake has been trying to convince me to start blogging. To tell you the truth, I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes kinda girl, so putting your thoughts out there for the world to see is a whole new experience for me. The topic that I have been itching to put my fingers to the [...]

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I spent this past weekend in freezing cold Yale attending the 2nd of three sessions of StartingBloc as an official StartingBloc fellow.
StartingBloc educates, empowers and connects emerging leaders to drive positive social change across sectors.
I think one of the coolest things about this program [...]

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As I’ve started fundraising for our programs in Rwanda, people have continuously asked me “Well, what is your fundraising strategy?” I desperately want to pull out a glossy and laminated booklet that outlines our diversified set of donors and fundraising approaches, complete with detailed timelines and cute little bar graphs.
Instead, I sigh and say “Well, [...]

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Jake has kindly asked me to share my experience of getting a nonprofit up and running in the States. In fact, his exact wording was:
“So, Elizabeth, I’ve been thinking. People don’t really talk about how difficult, stressful, and unglamorous it is to start up an organization. After seeing what you’re going through, I think that [...]

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Sometimes, I feel like I am the man without a plan (as in Amartya Sen’s review of Easterly’s White Man’s Burden).
Every once in a while I am reminded that I am not the only one.
Mark Mathabane, author of Kaffir Boy (roughly translated, Kaffir is the Bantu equivalent of “nigger.”) came to speak last week [...]

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