Category: Direct Action

An Awesome Foundation

The Awesome Foundation wants you to do something awesome, seriously! This is a great idea, a bunch of people put in some cash (in this case $1,000) and then others submit project ideas revolving around ways to make your city better!

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is an ever-growing, worldwide network of people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.

The Foundation distributes a series of monthly $1,000 grants to projects and their creators. The money is given upfront in a paper bag full of cash by a group of ten self-organizing “micro-trustees,” who form autonomous chapters around geographic areas or topics of interest.

Check out The Awesome Foundation

Students Go Green

TD Bank has historically had issues with the environment, today they are starting to reverse that attitude. Indeed, they are now encouraging students in Canada to come up with ideas on how to be more green.

TD has announced the Go Green Challenge that will have students submit videos on ways to respect the environment. Students who submit their ideas have the chance to win cash to help turn their idea into action.

Let’s hope TD starts encouraging green investments amongst its customers too!

How the TD Go Green Challenge works:

Teams of two to four students from the same school are invited to submit a short video that explains a sustainability challenge facing their university or college and how they would address it.

A panel of judges, including singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer, will select the top three teams based on their proposed on-campus environmental initiatives.

The TD Go Green Challenge is open to all legal residents of Canada who are currently enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program, full or part-time, at an approved Canadian college or university.

Read their press release

Never too Old to Learn

If you thought that just because you’re old doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Apparently some people have the idea that age limits learning ability. New research has started to counter that myth, here’s a study that shows that people in their early 30s tend to have optimal facial recognition skills.

That conclusion is dramatically different from what researchers previously thought – that this ability peaked in adolescence, said Laura Germine, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who specializes in this disorder.

In a study published in the online version of Cognition, Germine, Ken Nakayama, a psychology professor at Harvard, and Bradley Duchaine, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, detailed their results from a series of online experiments with about 60,000 participants.

They asked participants to take a series of tests involving face recognition of six young men. In another series of tests, they were also asked to learn and then recognize a series of women’s and children’s faces.

“People in their early 30s are best at this task,” said Germine in a phone interview with the Star. “Someone at age 16 and age 65 do about the same. Their face-recognition abilities are similar.”

Read more.

Heroes of Toronto

Every year a Toronto blog looks at the heroes of the past year. For 2010 they have a great collection of people both individuals and groups that made Toronto a better place in 2010.

This year has been cruel to independent booksellers, and for much of 2010, it looked as though the Toronto Women’s Bookstore was doomed to the same bleak fate as its comrade in biblio-cool, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, which closed its doors in July. After a desperate community request for support in December 2009 was followed by a “so close, but so far away” update in February, it seemed as though the store might be gone for good when it closed “for renovations” in May.

But, as it turned out, the renovation notice wasn’t a stall. The TWB had been sold, and its new owner—former staffer Victoria Moreno—came equipped with visions of reinvention and repair, including the addition of an in-store cafe (with Wi-Fi!), a nice outdoor garden space with seating, a revamped website to increase online sales, and the establishment of community-building social nights and customer purchase tracking to aid in personalized recommendations. Under its new management, the former not-for-profit would also start operations as a traditional for-profit business.

Torontoist’s collection of heroes.

No Fast Food Day (Eat Real Food)

Some people find fast food to be rather delicious despite the lack of nutrition that it provides. If you’re one of those people today is a good excuse to try something new as today is No Fast Food Day!

This December 17th marks the first No Fast Food Day (Eat Real Day), a day to consider the social, environmental, labour, health and animal impacts of eating processed and pre-cooked fast foods.

By signing this, you commit to skipping chain fast foods on December 17th, and replacing them with something nutritious from your local store, market or restaurant. Make it fun and enjoyable. It doesn’t have to cost more either.

We have a broken food system. Let’s do something about it, and start a discussion. Let’s get the economy and our government to act for health.
…And see how the alternatives tastes.

Check out there Facebook page.

Show your commitment to no fast food here.