Help Santa Keep His Home This Christmas

ice melt
The David Suzuki Foundation has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the lack of ice coverage at the North Pole. Where Will Santa Live? is a fun spin on a serious issue and looks like a good way to talk about ice coverage while keeping the conversation entertaining.

“We’re asking Canadians to do something novel and give a gift to Santa this holiday season,” says David Suzuki. “We have to help Santa, the elves and the reindeer evacuate the North Pole and find a suitable temporary workshop in Canada.”

Why give?

We hope you'll forgive us for having some fun with a beloved holiday figure. But climate change is no laughing matter.

Global warming is a serious problem, and poses a very real risk to all the winter traditions and experiences we as Canadians hold dear.

By supporting our “Where Will Santa Live?” campaign, you will be helping us develop a clean, renewable energy plan for Canada, affect climate policy decisions at a national and provincial level, and provide more resources to Canadians on how to go carbon neutral at home and at work, among many other initiatives.

Learn more about our work to turn back climate change and how you can take action to be part of the solution.

30 Ways in 30 Days

30 Ways in 30 Days is a December long project that encourages people to do a small good action everyday.

There are (obviously) 30 small things that you can do everyday to make the world around you a little better. Today’s action is to Like We Day on Facebook.

When you ‘Like’ We Day on Facebook, $1 will be donated to Free The Children—an organization that empowers youth to make a difference. By joining their community, you’ll be helping to raise $1 million dollars for education, health, alternative income, water and sanitation initiatives in the developing world.

Using Food to Better the World

The West End Food Co-op in Toronto is looking to incorporate food production and consumption into bettering their local neighbourhood.

The West End Food Co-op has 500 members so far, including 20 farmers. Dinner expects another 1,500 to sign up by the end of next year. (Membership costs only $5.) Until their first general meeting, there won’t be an operating plan. But, they have some basic ideas of how it will work:

• The kitchen will be used as a mini processing plant for farmers’ excess product, so vegetable farmers can drop off extra bushels of tomatoes and the co-op cooks will stew them into pasta sauce, label them and sell them in the store, for example.

Twice a week, the kitchen will be used for community programming, teaching Parkdale groups how to cook and preserve. In exchange for a break in the rent, the Community Health Centre upstairs expects to hold workshops here.

The prices in the co-op will be more expensive than No Frills, to ensure the farmers make enough to remain on the farm. Since Parkdale is a poorer part of town, the co-op will distribute “co-op bucks” to its community partners, like the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre. The Parkdale Community Health Centre plans to fundraise to buy “co-op bucks” for its clients.

The members will decide what to do with any profit the co-op makes, whether to invest in a new freezer or pay for another community program.

Read the full article.

Public Bike Share Coming to New York?

It’s no secret that we here at Things Are Good like bikes and bike sharing (we may have even posted about it once or twice…), and now some more good news concerning bike sharing has come in. New York City is looking to set up North America’s largest bike sharing programme complete with 10 000 bikes! New York’s bike share will be funded through corporate sponsorship and will create around 200 jobs in the city. The bikes, which are the same as Bixi’s bicycles in Toronto and Montreal, will be manufactured in Canada by Cycles Devinci.

The rest of the article can be found at NPR.org.