By the time Kevinee Gilmore was in college, it seemed like she really was beating all the odds. In the foster care system since she was 13, the oldest of five, she’d never expected to succeed in school, not to mention graduate from Cleveland State with a Bachelors degree in social work.
Continue reading Awesome project: A safe haven for aged-out foster kids in Cleveland
Linda Wallen has always been an artist. A longtime Pittsburgh resident, she spent her early career painting portraits of “the rich and famous,” and then “retired into” teaching French and Spanish (through art) to elementary school students. But it was in the 1990s that her interest in public art really took off, after a trip to Barcelona.
Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: The incredible multicolored pigeons of Pittsburgh
What do you do when your city repossess over 1,000 streetlights in your underserved neighborhood, literally putting the lights out on you? Build your own. Only better, and greener. Bring in, that is, community-owned solar power.
Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: Let the light shine in — to Parker Village, Detroit
Reverend Leah Lewis, J.D., grew up in one of the first African American families on her block in pre-white-flight Cleveland Heights, Ohio — but lived her first decade blissfully unaware of the racism that had shaped and was shaping her country. Her family welcomed in friends from all over the world, and her neighbors, a lovely elderly couple of European decent, adored her.
Have you ever tried slacklining? You know – tying a rope between two trees (or over a canyon) and using your arms to balance you as you walk across? It’s great exercise, great for fine-tuning all those little muscles in your body whose names no one knows, great for promoting mind-body balance, great for calming and focusing the mind, and great for bringing adventurous folks together in communities. In other words, it’s super fun.
Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: Building a park for legal slacklining in Boulder, CO
Compost NOW is a free residential food waste collection project in New Orleans. Master Composter Lynne Serpe and her team of volunteers partner with the New Orleans Public Library to build on the community library model of reuse and resource sharing in a place that’s convenient to everyone, across all demographics and ages.
Melissa Wong and Sandra Hong were both coming from men’s worlds: the tech industry, and the restaurant industry, respectively. They knew firsthand that there was a need in their community for a space designed by and focused on women. Hong had already founded Brooklyn-based Girl Party – a once a week series for unconventional gatherings, and Wong had been running a regular women’s networking and peer mentorship meet-up. When a mutual friend put them in touch, they hit it off right away, and decided to see what they could build together. New Women Space was born.
Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: Making space for women, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Christine Dimmick, who founded natural products company Good Home out of her Chelsea kitchen in 1995, has been in the natural products arena for a long time. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple of years ago, she realized it was time for an even deeper clean, and an even closer look at her life and her world.
Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: Spreading love and healing on Governor’s Island
Did you know that there are currently about 50,000 vacant residential properties in Detroit? If you add commercial spaces and storefronts to the list, that number skyrockets to 80,000. That’s about 25 square miles of vacant and blighted property, out of the 139 square miles that make up the city. Which tells us something about how dire the situation has been, and for how long.
But what do you hear, when you hear these numbers? We hear possibility.
Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: Billboard art to fight blight in Detroit!
Architect David Briggs first got interested in the Gowanus Canal because it happened – in all its stinky, historical glory – to be on his jogging route. The infamous federal Superfund site is hard to miss. During the last century, it was an unregulated dumping ground for industrial wastes ranging from slaughterhouse blood to tanning chemicals to chemical fertilizer byproducts.
Oh, and sewage. Continue reading AWESOME PROJECT: Help Gowanus take on toxic sludge, climate change, unethical developers, and Brooklyn gentrification