WiserEarth Help Desk

Problem: Because of New Orleans everything’s changed. New Orleans has made urban issues in the United States into international issues. It shone a light on race and class in the US and exposed it to the whole world, so we have a new raising consciousness around race and class issues. Even Newsweek says we have to start a fight around this and ask why a part of the US looks like the Third World. And the reality is that this is happening in all urban areas across the US especially where there is a major...

Action: To advocate legislatively and at the grassroots to show the damage that charter schools are doing to the public school system   Services offered by the project: Teach-ins (4, one in each quadrant of the city) to educate residents about issues relating to privatization of local public schools; Study group on privatization; Media activism, media blitz to put pressure on local media to write about this work; Protests (4 to date); Providing testimony at public hearings.

Problem: O Núcleo CIACAC um trabalho que existe desde setembro de 2001. A iniciativa se deu porque o núcleo atingiu um estágio no qual não era mais possvel continuar sem registro. Todas as possibilidades de receber ajuda em nome da coordenadora, haviam se esgotado. Frequentando a ComCat, como Gestora, Neuza Nascimento começou a perguntar aos outros usuários como poderia ser feito isso. Um dia em conversa com o gestor Israel Evangelista, Neuza soube que havia algumas instituições que financiavam peq...

Action: Legalizar o grupo.   Serviços oferecidos pelo Projeto:   O projeto teve o objetivo de transformar o grupo, que era informal, em pessoa jurídica.

Problem:   No ano de 2003, o projeto foi implantado em duas comunidades: Morro Santa Marta (Botafogo) e no Morro dos Macacos (Vila Isabel) com 30 alunos em cada comunidade com o objetivo inicial de capacitar jovens para o mercado de trabalho através de oficinas de mosaico. Em 2004, houve mudanças no patrocínio e foi escolhida a comunidade do Morro Santa Marta para sediar o projeto em função dos problemas com o tráfico que a outra comunidade possuia. O número de alunos foi reduzido para 20 e o objeti...

Action: Objetivos iniciais do projeto Contribuir para o exercício da cidadania e de atividades produtivas nos setores sócio-econômicos; elevar o nível de qualificação, competitividade, empregabilidade e auto-sustentação do jovem morador da comunidade no contexto sócio-econômico em transformação.  Serviços oferecidos pelo Projeto:   Técnicas de pintura confecção de mosaicos cidadania meio ambiente gestão sexualidade teatralização de situações cotidianas empreeen...

Problem: Attaining --and maintaining-- financial stability is very difficult for grassroots civic groups/projects; more generally, the world faces a Democracy Deficit. Our world, increasingly globalized, hightech, fast-paced, accelerating, faces unprecedented challenges from Climate Destabilization to Peak Oil; yet the internet has been underutilized as a means for facilitating bottom-up, decentralized, yet coordinated actions. Both principle and pragmatism argue in favor of harnessing the fuller pote...

Action: Thresholdware is software which allows citizens to coordinate intentions and actions on a mass scale. It works by securely and privately storing individual commitments, and then putting the aggregate of those individual commitments into coordinated action when a specific critical mass or threshold has been reached. These can include financial transactions, such as fundraising commitments, or "action transactions'" such as strike votes, product boycotts, civil disobedience, provisionally joini...

Problem: BRIEF: Concentration of wealth, corporate domination, war, poverty, hunger, environmental devastation.   From Website:   Common good banks are designed to save the world from corporate domination and give control back to the people.   Here's how (follow links for details): Establish community-based democratic economic systems, as a seed for the world of our dreams Community Division, a nearly independent local common good bank, with investment priorities and distribution of...

Problem: Small cities and towns across America face many challenges. Towns that are close to significant natural resource amenities face increasing development pressures from urban professionals plying their trades via the Internet and enjoying the great outdoors, and from burgeoning retirement populations seeking the high quality, low stress way of life found in these picturesque and desirable places. Other communities suffer from youth exodus, crumbling infrastructure and antiquated economies, and a...

Action: A community is a special place full of stories of the people who live there. Collectively, these stories are a big part of the community’s character: its heart and soul. In a way, planning is like writing the next chapter in a community’s story. As we enter the 21st century, there are signs that citizens expect to have a greater role in community decisions. In The Next Form of American Democracy, Matt Leighninger wrote, “[C]itizens seem better at governing, and worse at being governed, than e...

Problem: In the expansion of infrastructure and development to sustain the coal industry, local interests and concerns with the effects of this expansion tend to be seen as being less important than corporate, state and economic interests. The expansion of the coal industry will have significant environmental, social and economic impacts on these regions, particularly those in which the mining industry is in an exploratory phase and is yet to be developed. Increasingly, however, such expansion occurs ...

Action: The Coal Communities Listening Tour is an engagement and consultation project with members of coal dependant and affected communities to ground future campaigning on coal expansion in a thorough and robust knowledge of the concerns, issues and needs of the these communities.   Above all, this project starts with listening.   A team of researchers and students from Six Degrees, Review Group: Conservation Review

Problem: Government is the organizing instrument of society and to make sure that it is acting in the best interests of its citizens, it is managed and controlled by representatives of the citizens who are directly accountable for their performance to the citizens: Representative Government.How to create and structure such a representative government hasn't totally eluded people to date but it could do with some improving.Many of the existing structures carry burdens of historical trappings, most ofte...

Action: Small groups in every constituency, in every nation, must organize now around a standard, new, simple platform and present themselves for election on that platform at every opportunity.The consistent platform will enable and speed the education of the citizenry of all nations, regions and communities. Those who do not wish to stand for office can be powerful in demanding that anyone they vote for adopt the Standards of LIFE as part of their own agenda and commit to promoting them in any way t...

Problem: The process by which elections are conducted is an area in which we can learn a lot from how our fledgling democracies have evolved over recent centuries. It is in the election and campaigning process that we can see the most egregious flaws emerge to pollute the ideals of representative democracy.

Action: Between 30 days before the election date and the day of the election, all voters cast a vote that allows them to specify 1st and 2nd choices from the available candidates for a seat in the assembly. Candidates with sufficient 1st choice votes to qualify (by passing the quota defined as the half the total votes divided by the number of seats available; e.g. for a body with 7 representatives, at least 7% of the total votes) are duly elected, in order of the number of 1st choice votes received.T...