Resources

Governance

Minciu Sodas
Minciu Sodas is an open laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers. We bring together our individual projects around shared endeavors. We remake our lives and our world by caring about thinking. Minciu Sodas helps your enterprise work openly to integrate constructive people around your purposes. Our laboratory focuses our minds on the questions and answers that get things done.

Dalai Lama Foundation
The mission of the Dalai Lama Foundation is to support the development of our shared global capacity for ethics and peace, based on a non-dogmatic ethic of compassion. The Foundation has been established, with the Dalai Lama's endorsement and advice, by friends and students who have known and worked with him for many years. They articulate an ethic of mutual respect and care based on a recognition of our shared humanity. By applying the principles of innovation, leverage and measurability we learn from best practices from the business world, we will ensure that that voice makes a difference.

Cyptorights
CryptoRights is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization (NGO) dedicated to promoting global justice through the protection of human rights and humanitarian workers, journalists and the information they collect and communicate for the public good; and the preservation of freedoms for security professionals who do open research on security and safety issues in the public interest.

Bay Area Research Wireless Network (BARWN)
The Bay Area Research Wireless Network (BARWN) is a Bay
Area Wide wireless network dedicated to research into the development of very low cost,
high bandwidth network infrastructure and applications that can use it. No longer does it cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to move data via high speed wireless links tens of miles. This technology has great potential to tie communities together, help with emergencies and erase the "digital divide."

Healthcare

Partners in Health
Partners In Health strives to achieve two overarching goals: to bring the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need of them and to serve as an antidote to despair. Their mission is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone with a dedicated team of health professionals, scholars, and activists that will do whatever it takes to make them well.

World Vista
World VistA was formed to help make healthcare information technology more affordable and more widely available both within the United States and internationally. World VistA extends and improves VistA for use outside its original setting through such activities as developing packages for pediatrics, obstetrics, and other hospital services not used in veterans' hospitals. World VistA also helps those who choose to adopt VistA successfully master, install, and maintain the software. As the group of VistA adopters and programmers grows, we work to develop it into a collaborative, consensus-based, open-source community.

Education

Teachers Without Borders
Teachers Without Borders is a non-profit 501(c)3, non-denominational, international NGO founded in 2000, devoted to closing the education divide through teacher professional development and community education. They work primarily, but not exclusively, in developing countries, in order to build self-reliance, health, and capacity.

Anywhere Books
Print-on-demand is a natural application for the developing world. Anywhere Books is a US-based nonprofit dedicated to deploying mobile print on demand solutions for development. Using common office technology and digitize books and information, we develop "digital bookmobiles" that can bring targeted information where it's needed.

Ecology

Institut für Globale Friedensarbeit (Tamera Ecovillage)
Tamera is a peace project in Alentejo, southern Portugal. The project's research work deals with new ways of healing both humans and nature. The aim is to develop a cultural model for a non-violent lifestyle: a "Healing Biotope." They see this as an intentional community of people, animals and plants mutually enhancing each others life-energy - a place where they are no longer restricted by fear or violence. A Healing Biotope is also as self-sufficient as possible in the areas of nutrition, ecology, water, energy and medicine.

Tlholego Ecovillage
The Tlholego Ecovillage was established in 1991 in South Africa to address the challenge of rural sustainable development. Over the past decade, one of the Tlholego founders, Ashoka fellow Paul Cohen, has helped to establish a rural 'living and learning centre' together with previously disadvantaged farm workers and city folk from the area. Tlholego has evolved through a process of practicing, learning and teaching ecologically sustainable approaches to land use, housing, food security and ecovillage development within our local community and watershed.

Eco Yoff
The conference declarations from the Third International EcoCities and EcoVillages Conference, held in Yoff in January 1996 gave birth to the Yoff EcoCommunity Program (EcoYoff). We vowed to create a sustainable development laboratory community for the year 2020 in the old fishing village of Yoff, near the international airport of the capital

Ecoearth Alliance
The EcoEarth Alliance seeks to promote best practices providing global access to information and resources with regard to developing integrated, multi-sectoral approaches to community-based sustainable development. Their view is that an integrated, multi-sectoral approach to community-based development is necessary to overcome challenges in one area or sector of community life and reinforces solutions in other areas. Once people within a community have been trained they can carry out and maintain improvements and share their new abilities with others.

Auroville
Auroville is a place in south India where, for more than 36 years, an increasing number of people from all over the world have been quietly and painstakingly working on the construction of a new township, a new way of living, a new way of being. Today, the Auroville project is quite well established, having found ways of collaborating with the villages in its bioregion, with the Indian authorities, with many non-governmental organisations and world bodies worldwide.

Gaviotas
Gaviotas is a village of about 200 people in Colombia, South America. For three decades, Gaviotans - peasants, scientists, artists, and former street kids - have struggled to build an oasis of imagination and sustainability in the remote, barren savannas of eastern Colombia, an area ravaged by political terror. They have planted millions of trees, thus regenerating an indigenous rainforest. They farm organically and use wind and solar power. Every family enjoys free housing, community meals, and schooling. There are no weapons, no police, no jail. There is no mayor.

Sustainable Village
The Sustainable Village is a "social enterprise", many of us volunteering. All profits are donated to fund micro finance and micro enterprise projects in developing countries. As a way of further helping the villagers and undermining the roots of poverty, they help import the products back. These are mainly fair-trade items, organic, and made with renewable energy - no or little pollution resulting in their creation. They provide sustainable solutions assisting projects in developing countries concerning energy generation, safe water, public health, long-distance communications, sustainable agriculture, and micro-enterprise employment.

Ecosa Institute
The Ecosa Institute is a full immersion study in sustainability and ecological design developed. It founder Tony Brown after first came to American to study and work for Paolo Soleri at Arcosanti where he worked for thirteen years on conceptual designs for a new vision of urban settlements.

Arcosanti
Arcosanti is an experimental town in the high desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. When complete, Arcosanti will house 5000 people, demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. Arcosanti is designed according to the concept of Arcology (architecture + ecology), developed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. In an Arcology, the built and the living interact as organs would in a highly evolved being. This means many systems work together, with efficient circulation of people and resources, multi-use buildings, and solar orientation for lighting, heating and cooling.

Green Century Institute
The Green Community Network seeks to build on the experimental project called Arcosanti. As a way to extend the Arcosanti/Arcology vision GCI is working on three main projects the first has involved the development the Paradox Conferences at Arcosanti. These conferences began with a focus on Cyberspace and futuristic studies and have evolved into an exploration of Sustainable Development as well. Paradox IV is planned for Sept. 2005. The second component is a web-based resource exchange, publishing and outreach program promoting sustainable development and new community models. This information collecting and indexing process will be used to help build Califia a San Francisco Bay Area Ecocity Project for 7000-10,000 residents to showcase and test sustainable development designs and technologies, and new community models.

Green Star
Greenstar delivers solar power, health, education and environmental programs to small villages in the developing world -- and connects people in those villages, and their traditional culture, to the global community. They work with people in traditional cultures to express the voice of the community to the world through original music, artwork, photography and video and other arts. That voice is connected with respect and dignity to the land, to families, to language, tradition, to the past and to a clear vision of the future. Income from this priceless "digital culture" is used to fund an ongoing, community-driven process of literacy, local business, education and training, public health, and environmental programs.

UCSC Agroecology Center
The Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems is a research, education, and public service program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, dedicated to increasing ecological sustainability and social justice in the food and agriculture system. On the UCSC campus, the Center operates the 2-acre Alan Chadwick Garden and the 25-acre Farm. Both sites are managed using organic production methods and serve as research, teaching, and training facilities for students, staff, and faculty.

Jane Goodall Institute
Founded by renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, JGI is a global nonprofit that empowers people to make a difference for all living things. We are creating healthy ecosystems, promoting sustainable livelihoods and nurturing new generations of committed, active citizens around the world.

Synergy California
Synergy California is positioned as an international project team that turns mature ideas and designs into reality. Our mission is the continued promotion, development and deployment of demonstration projects that introduce renewable and sustainable technologies that can build a long-term-partnership with our Planet. Ecological design incorporating solar energy systems and other regenerative technologies are the basis of our work. Our company provides information, pathways, and solutions to virtually any architectural, developmental or energy problem. Every problem becomes an opportunity for an elegant solution. Executive summary.

Organic Farming Research Foundation
The Organic Farming Research Foundation is a non-profit whose mission is to sponsor research related to organic farming practices, to disseminate research results to organic farmers and to growers interested in adopting organic production systems, and to educate the public and decision-makers about organic farming issues.

Economy

Ashoka
Ashoka's mission is to develop the profession of social entrepreneurship around the world. Ashoka invests in people. It is a global organization that searches the world for social entrepreneurs—extraordinary individuals with unprecedented ideas for change in their communities. Ashoka identifies and invests in these social entrepreneurs when no one else will. It does so through stipends and professional services that allow "Ashoka Fellows" to focus full time on their ideas for leading social change in education and youth development, health care, environment, human rights, access to technology and economic development. Ashoka has invested in more than 1,400 Ashoka Fellows in 48 countries. Those Fellows have transformed the lives of millions of people in thousands of communities worldwide.

Grameen Bank
Grameen Bank (GB) has reversed conventional banking practice by removing the need for collateral and created a banking system based on mutual trust, accountability, participation and creativity. GB provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh, without any collateral. At GB, credit is a cost effective weapon to fight poverty and it serves as a catalyst in the over all development of socio-economic conditions of the poor who have been kept outside the banking orbit on the ground that they are poor and hence not bankable. Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of "Grameen Bank" and its Managing Director, reasoned that if financial resources can be made available to the poor people on terms and conditions that are appropriate and reasonable, "these millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits can add up to create the biggest development wonder."

Culture and Tradition

Nigerian Arts
Nigeria-Arts.Net is the largest database of Nigerian artists and creativity on the Internet. In these pages you can read artists biographies, view or hear work samples and find direct contact information. Browsing these pages, you will experience the richness and diversity of Nigeria's creative community and have the opportunity to interact with its members.

AR<T Foundation
AR<T is developing an “instrument” in the form of a monumental work of conceptual and
realized Art... designed to influence Dharma, at its moment of decision, for the highest—most
Heavenly outcome—of the up and coming dimensional shift in our levels of consciousness.AR<T will also attempt to gather the tribes of Humanity and pass, with collective intention,
what has remained, or has remembered, as “dharmic” into this new life form.

Act Alive
ActALIVE is an arts coalition founded by Janet Feldman, Director of KAIPPG/International, the international wing of a Kenyan HIV/AIDS NGO. The coalition is composed of groups and individuals who use or advocate the use of arts to address HIV/AIDS and related issues like poverty, human-rights, and sustainable development. The coalition has 200 members (individuals and organizations) from 20+ countries at present, and we are actively networking with like-minded groups, hoping to collaborate and partner on projects of mutual interest.

Youth Alliances

African Youth Initiative
African Youth Initiative (AYI) is an African youth-led Information and Communication Technologies for Accelerated Development (ICT4AD) initiative to help bridge the digital divide in Africa, and to provide a sustainable livelihood for the people of the continent with the aim of fulfilling the desire to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to address the continent’s problems, while tapping on the abounding energy of young people, AYI has representation in ten (10) African countries and keeps expanding with the aim to have representation in all African countries by the end of the year 2004. Among other involvements, AYI has already started pilot ICT4AD clubs named CatchITYoung in Ghana to demonstrate its commitment.AYI was created to address the problem of duplicated and uncoordinated youth-led efforts in Africa by serving as a hub for youth-led initiatives - using ICTs as a veritable platform.

TakingITGlobal
TakingITGlobal, is a network of tens of thousands of young leaders, in over 200 countries, creating positive change in their communities and around the world. The www.takingitglobal.org web site is the home base, providing online resources for youth empowerment.

Youth for Technology Foundation
YTF works to integrate technology into disadvantaged communities in an effective, sustainable way to achieve real access and outcomes for people to put technology to work to improve lives. YTF realizes the importance of digital inclusion of youth in the field of education, sciences, culture and communication.