Announcement of Spring 2013 Grantees

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Kindle Project

New grantees mean new opportunities. It means new ways to look at problems and solutions. It means new inspirations, models for change, and it means new networks to explore.

Taking the ripple effect of our work evermore far and wide our grantees are making big splashes with prodigious accomplishments and progress;

• The Tar Sands Blockade is galvanizing direct, non-violent action in clever ways to oppose the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline,
• Haymarket Books has a boldly diverse line-up of book releases this month, including several books by Howard Zinn, Göran Olsson’s Black Power Mixtape:1967-1975, and Tariq Ali’s The Stalinist Legacy: It’s Impact on Twentieth Century World Politics,
• The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in partnership with Drilling Mora County accomplished the unprecedented goal of passing the first U.S. ban on fracking and oil drilling in Mora County, New Mexico,
• Project Survival Media is developing a catalogue of climate solutions from youth documentary teams around the world,
• The Yes Lab is tinkering away in the edit room on their new titillating film, The Yes Men Are Revolting. They are also working their fannies off on their Action Switchboard, a dynamic platform connecting tools and change agents. Both projects are sure to whet your civil disobedience appetite.

There’s an endless number of methods and practices that we can use to respond to the social, economic, and environmental concerns of our time. This season’s grantees, both new and alumni, are taking on solutions based approaches with a combination of youthful tenacity and tried and true wisdom.

Kindle Project Fund of the Common Counsel Foundation is pleased to introduce you to our lineup of inspiring change-makers for our Spring 2013 Grant Cycle.

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Agriculture Implementation Research & Education is working to cultivate as many fields and gardens with as many crops and as many people as possible in various communities throughout the Middle and Upper Rio Grande. For schools, service corps, and community groups we offer sustainable agriculture presentations, demonstrations, and workshops. To address our contemporary context of climate change and food insecurity, we also maintain a “living seed library” of locally adapted seeds for agricultural expansion and success.

Be Present, Inc. empowers individuals to build strong communities together, supporting collective and transformative leadership. For the past 30 years, we have used our Be Present Empowerment Model® to train people from diverse backgrounds to be more effective leaders and communicators for the well being of themselves, their families, schools, organizations, workplaces and communities. The result is sustainable change at the individual, organizational and societal levels, in communities around the US.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund assists people and communities to assert their fundamental rights to democratic local self-governance and sustainability, and to recognize the rights of nature. Through grassroots organizing, our Democracy Schools, ordinance drafting, and legal counsel, we have assisted over 140 communities across the countries to develop first-in-the-nation laws banning fracking, factory farming, sludging, water privatization, and industrial-scale energy development. Through this work, we have become the principal advisor to communities struggling to transition from merely regulating corporate harms to stopping those harms by addressing the key legal barriers – including corporate constitutional “rights” – that stand in the way of local self-governance and sustainability.

The Community Midwifery Fund makes high quality, culturally competent midwifery care more available, especially for low-income women and women of color. Its goal is to improve birth outcomes for mothers and babies and address racial disparities in maternal and infant health. Since its founding in 2011, the Community Midwifery Fund (CMF) has awarded over $200,000 to 11 organizations and projects that: increase the number of new midwives and doulas of color, expands access to quality, community-based midwifery care for low-income women and women of color, advocate for the inclusion of midwife and doula care in state health care exchanges, reclaim and support traditional birth practices within different cultures.

On stage, using pre-recorded voice overs and video interaction, Dynasty Handbag is a performative exorcism of deranged characters and failures born from a patriarchal, consumer-driven society. Dynasty Handbag is the alter ego of performance/video artist, Jibz Cameron. She has been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years” and “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice. Her work as ‘Dynasty Handbag’ has been seen in such esteemed institutions as The New Museum NY, The Kitchen, DTW, MOMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, PS122, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and also in international dives both great and small. She is the recipient of numerous awards, and an adjunct professor of Performance and Theater studies and comedy theory at TISCH NYU. Her unique and obscure work is best understood through first hand witnessing. Check out her website to get a taste of her flavor.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) was created in 1977 in response to White House scandals. Our mission is to ensure government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers and empowering citizen activists. GAP serves as a lifeline to employees of conscience and helps them release critical information that serves the public interest and the common good. Now in our 34th year, GAP has advanced to become not only the nation’s leading whistleblower support organization, but also an important government and corporate accountability organization both domestically and internationally. GAP’s change-oriented methodology includes representing whistleblowers, creating an effective advocacy agenda surrounding their concerns, and developing, then implementing, broad whistleblower protection policy reforms with extraordinary reach in the United States and abroad.

Haymarket Books was founded in the year 2001 to publish original progressive nonfiction works of interest to scholars, activists, and readers interested in books related to the history of movements for social change in the United States and engaged in contemporary political debates. Among our authors are Wallace Shawn, Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Amira Hass. We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886 which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday, reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today around the globe. Haymarket Books, a nonprofit publisher, is a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change

Founded in 2001, High Mayhem Emerging Arts is a not-for-profit emerging arts facility, record label and multimedia production collective based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We challenge the homogenizing effect of pop-culture groupthink by providing opportunities for and fostering collaborations with underrepresented “experimental” artists. High Mayhem curates performances and organizes workshops year-round with musicians and performance artists who come from near and far. We seek out other brave explorers (and welcome those who have discovered us) to join us in producing innovative and thought-provoking experiences for our communities. Further, we encourage and organize collaborative experiments across disciplines; new forms emerge from mutated traditions and pure invention.

Honest Appalachia is a website and resource for whistleblowers in Appalachia who wish to reveal proof of corporate and government wrongdoing. Our mission is to use web-based technology to support and defend whistleblowers, journalists and other citizens in Appalachia as they seek to hold powerful institutions and individuals accountable to the public. The website, which was inspired by Wikileaks, is focused on local and regional issues in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Its efforts will focus on a broad variety of institutions, from coal and gas companies to banks and zoning boards to local and state governments. Honest Appalachia is operated by a team of freelance journalists, computer programmers and transparency activists in Appalachia and beyond.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research was founded in 1985 to further public involvement in and control over environmental problems through the democratization of science. IEER provides policy makers, the media, and community and grassroots leaders with technical training and scientific and policy analyses on environmental, energy, and security issues. IEER work has made important contributions to campaigns to stop nuclear weapons production, improve cleanup of nuclear weapons production sites, help get justice for sick nuclear weapons workers, and stop commercial nuclear reprocessing and the use of plutonium fuels in commercial nuclear power plants.

MIX is a structure for interaction and collaboration among inspired individuals, entrepreneurs, innovators, businesses and organizations. Through monthly events that showcase talent and local re- sources, MIX provides an avenue for personal contact and networking. Through innovative web tools, social media and micro- stimulus, MIX provides a mechanism for the development of ideas, businesses, and projects with corollary opportunities for promotion, recognition and start-up funding.

Planned Parenthood of New Mexico’s Santa Fe Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Project empowers youth to avoid teen pregnancy by increasing access to accurate sexual health information and providing more channels for youth to be involved with their families and community. This multi-pronged initiative uses multiple programs to ensure that students have the information and support that they need to avoid teen pregnancy and succeed in their academic and professional careers.

Project Survival Media is a global youth media network producing short photo and video documentaries on survival and ingenuity in the face climate change. We assemble media teams around the world, empowering and training young people on the art of powerful story telling. Currently, we work a team in India and a team in Kenya, but we hope to add 5 more teams in: Burundi, Chile, Egypt, Ireland, and Mongolia. We also work in the US with young people who are passionate about media and climate change to provide photography and videography to environmental justice organizations.

Tar Sands Blockade is a coalition of affected Texas and Oklahoma residents and organizers using nonviolent direct action to physically stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

United Roots was created through the convergence of several Oakland organizations that provided safety net, arts, media, environmental awareness, leadership, and workforce programs for youth in order to connect them to education and employment. Founded in 2010, United Roots engages and supports Oakland youth by providing: arts and media training to instill confidence and develop talents; career and workforce development to cultivate professional skills; community engagement to connect youth to service providers and employers; and wellness services to allow youth to heal and grow.

The Yes Men are an international band of rogues best known for their exploits in “identity correction” — impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. They do this (a) in order to demonstrate the absurd logic that keeps bad people and rotten ideas in power, and (b) because it’s absurdly fun. Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of economic policies that place profit before people and the environment. The Yes Lab is a think tank and training for activist groups to develop high-impact media projects, of the sort the Yes Men have doing for the last 12 years. Yes Lab sessions help small groups of activists, campaigners and organizers to conceive and execute disruptive, productive events that keep people reminded of what’s wrong, what could be right, and what’s in store if we don’t change our ways.

Grantee Feature: Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Kindle Project

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) first became of interest to us when we heard about their Democracy School program. The Democracy School is an accessible and in-depth training for participants to become competent in the rules and regulations around building their own healthy, self-governed communities. For those whose lives and lands are under serious threat by laws that favor corporations over people and nature the CEDLF Democracy School is one of the most important and invaluable resources we’ve come across.

Last year, two Kindle Project staff members attended a Democracy School in New Mexico. They came back with a wealth of knowledge, but also with a greater understanding of the kinds of barriers that most of us face when acting as community and environmental advocates.

The video below tells the story of how the Pennock family lost their sixteen year old son, Daniel, to health complications from walking past fields of toxic sludge on a daily basis. Daniel’s father described the need for the Democracy Schools in a perfectly succinct way: “People don’t understand what their rights are.”

Paving the way for personal, community and collective empowerment and decision-making, CELDF’s work is truly a revolutionary offering.

Below, you’ll read a more in depth explanation of their programs and a special interview between CELDF’s Emelyn Lybarger and Alexis Eynon, who attended a Democracy School in New Hampshire. They share a compelling and personal testimony to the importance and effectiveness of CEDLF’s work.

If your community, or the community of someone you know, is facing serious land and health threats due to corporate interests in fracking, hydrocarbon extraction, and toxic sludge (to name a few) you will want to visit the CELDF website. There are ways that they can help!

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The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is a public interest law firm that conducts grassroots organizing to advance community rights and sustainability. Their mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature. They work with communities across the country facing corporate threats such as shale gas drilling and fracking, unsustainable agriculture, and unsustainable energy development, providing assistance in grassroots organizing, public education and outreach, and the drafting of ordinances.

As part of their work, they teach Democracy Schools, which are weekend workshops that lay the educational groundwork for their organizing. As the only organization assisting communities to ban harmful corporate activities by addressing our larger structure of law that elevates corporate “rights” over community rights, the Democracy Schools are central to CELDF’s work.

In the Democracy Schools, CELDF examines why corporations, hand-in-hand with government, are able to override local, democratic decision-making even on activities as harmful as drilling and fracking. They explore how it is that we live under a constitutional structure of law that purposefully places the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities, and nature. And further, they examine why communities facing unwanted corporate activities such as fracking, find that their state environmental agencies, rather than helping them stop fracking, are instead issuing permits to corporations to frack.

The Democracy Schools also explore what other communities are doing as they come to understand how our structure of law and governance puts the interests of corporations over and above the interests of people, communities, and nature – standing in the way of community self-governance and sustainability.

Whether a community faces drilling and fracking, the privatization of its water, sludging of its farmland, factory farming, or a host of other corporate harms, the structural barriers in place preventing the community from stopping such threats are the same. So rather than fighting individual “site fights” again and again, CELDF’s work has evolved to concentrate on building a grassroots movement aimed at changing our structure of law and governance from one that protects and promotes commerce and corporations, to a structure that secures and defends the rights of people, communities, and nature to achieve environmental sustainability and local democracy.

The Democracy Schools help reveal how this structure of law works, and from there, help communities “re-frame” the threat they face from a solitary “site fight,” to a broader structural problem whereby our legal system protects fracking and the rights of corporations to frack (or sludge, factory farm, etc.) over the interests of communities and nature.

Unsustainable Energy: A Community and Civil Rights Issue

An interview by Emelyn Lybarger of CELDF

CELDF’s Emelyn Lybarger

Alexis Eynon, from Thornton, NH, learned about CELDF and our Democracy Schools from neighboring communities organizing to stop the Northern Pass – an energy development project including 180-miles of high transmission wires and steel towers reaching 140 feet in height, creating a permanent scar on some of New Hampshire’s most pristine locations.

Alexis teaches art at a middle school near her home. Like many others, she moved to Thornton – into a home she built herself – because of the area’s stunning landscape and easy access to the outdoors. Home for 1,800 residents, it’s a small New England town, with a local economy based on tourism. The Northern Pass would be devastating to the community.

Alexis Eynon

Alexis recognized the threat Northern Pass posed, and began educating herself so she could help stop it. In November 2011 she listened to Democracy School on-line and attended two more Schools.

We interviewed Alexis to ask her about the impact CELDF and Democracy School had on her and the organizing she did in Thornton.

CELDF: Why did you attend a Democracy School?

Alexis: I heard about the Northern Pass and began researching it. What I learned did not bode well for our community—we are already seeing property values plummet, and a realty office recently closed nearby.

I heard about rights-based ordinances being presented and adopted in surrounding communities, like Plymouth, Sugar Hill, and Easton. Those ordinances established community rights to clean air, water, local self-governance, and a sustainable energy future. I wanted that for Thornton.

CELDF: How did attending Democracy School impact you?

Alexis: What I learned in Democracy School certainly wasn’t Social Studies I learned in 7^th grade! It became clear why we don’t have a democracy and why corporations get away with causing harm to our communities. It was eye-opening: This is how our society operates, and this was the intention of the “founding fathers” all along – a society based on commerce, regardless of cost.

As I watched other communities trying to stop Northern Pass through traditional regulatory avenues, such as attending hearings, and compared that to communities focusing on rights-based organizing, I could see what Democracy School taught, playing out.

The impact it had on me was that I had to do something – and CELDF’s rights-based organizing is actionable and challenges the status quo in a way that traditional organizing does not.

Campton Pond/Dam & Welch-Dickey – Part of the beautiful region that Alexis is working to protect

In my town, I witnessed folks speaking against Northern Pass, but doing nothing to stop it. I had to run a rights-based ordinance because otherwise Northern Pass will kill our town! I began working with our Select Board and walking door to door. Some folks were very supportive, while others just didn’t seem to care. It was frustrating. But CELDF was helpful in educating and strategizing with us, and we received support from neighboring communities who have done this work.

Our ordinance didn’t pass at Town Meeting last month. But I think it’s paved the way for next year—it brought a lot of attention to the issue, and our reframing it from being just about one project to actually being a civil rights issue has gained traction.

CELDF: What were the top two things you learned in Democracy School?

Alexis: This unsustainable development, costing us our communities, is intentional. And today, haven’t we come full circle? Aren’t we now in the place the revolutionaries were in when they threw off the yoke of England?

Also, this IS a civil rights issue! Why can’t we say NO to what we don’t want and YES to what we do want? Why do corporations have more “rights” than we do? It’s NOT RIGHT!

CELDF: Why are you committed to doing this work?

Alexis: This is my home – I care about this place and the people here. I care about the injustices happening to communities across the country, and they are unacceptable to me and must be stopped. It won’t be stopped, though, until hundreds of people like us stand up and make it stop. I’m adding my voice to the collective yell.

Tecumseh, NH at sunset–more reason for Alexis’ work

CELDF: What do you envision for your community?

Alexis: I envision conversations in Thornton about our values, what we care about, why our energy future is so critical. I want us talking about what things are going to look like in seven years and in twenty years. What do we want? What are we willing to fight for? Let’s put the rubber to the road and start moving and start doing something about this.

Alexis is one of the founders of the New Hampshire Community Rights Network, a statewide organization established to bring together coalitions across the state doing rights-based organizing. This network of communities will drive community rights into the New Hampshire state constitution. To learn more about CELDF, Democracy School, and the Community Rights Networks, visit our website: www.celdf.org.

Grantee Feature: Center for Genomic Gastronomy

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Kindle Project

Over the past few years, a unique cultural climate has developed around food. Food obsession, facilitated largely through a boom in network TV cooking programs, countless online food bloggers, and a rise in artisanal quality food products (and even home producers), has become so commonplace that a new sect of society has been born: ‘foodies’. This vast audience with a cult-like devotion to food has elevated chefs to celebrity status, and created an incredible network of people all tuned-in to revere and receive any information they can about the innovative uses of food.

Simultaneously, the food justice movement has gained leverage and expanded exponentially, and the timing and setting could not be more primed for broadcasting their message. With Community Supported Agriculture continuing to gain in popularity and the work around California’s Proposition 37 in 2012, to name just a couple examples, the movement has a broad reach. The culture of food and the need to pay attention to its transformations is at the forefront of the mission of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy (CGG). By capitalizing on both the trends of the foodie movement and the urgency of the food justice movement they are raising awareness about the hazards of biotechnology in our food system in amazingly creative ways.

By taking a systems approach to food, and combining that with their background in biohacking, the brains behind the CGG are nudging us to consider food in ways we never have. They have taken this weird science under the microscope, and broadcast its gritty truths with social and environmental relevance.

The CGG’s work is exceptional, in that it encourages us not only to think about and understand the effects of the potentially hazardous and altered food we’re eating, but to actually eat it. In their TEDXDublin talk, CGG co-founders said, “when you change people’s tastes, you change their assumptions and expectations.” By combining art, food and technology in such phenomenon’s as glow in the dark sushi, these folks are breaking the barriers of food justice education and information sharing in ways that we’ve never seen.

In this video we get a glimpse into how to interact with some of CGG recipes.

Below, one of the CGG’s co-founders, Zack Denfield, explains to us their latest endeavors and projects. The bizarre and fascinating works of this group are constantly asking us to question the origins and the futures of the foods we eat.

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FoodPhreaking & Cobalt-60 Sauce
by Zack Denfeld

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an independent research institute that explores the genomes and biotechnologies that make up the human food systems on planet earth. Our mission is to map food controversies, prototype alternative culinary futures, and imagine a more sustainable, just, biodiverse and beautiful food system. The Center presents its research through public lectures, publications, meals and exhibitions.

So far in 2013 we have been primarily conducting research, and are now starting the process of bringing this new body of research out of the studio and into the world. In addition to running a pop-up food hacker lab in Portland, Oregon in May and June we are currently scheduled to exhibit our projects publicly at the Portuguese Architecture Triennale in September and the San Jose Museum of Art in October.

What follows are snapshots of two projects. The first project, Cobalt-60 Sauce, documents an historical food controversy that is not very well known. The second project, FoodPhreaking, is a new publication we are releasing that looks at current food practices as a guide for imagining open source food cultures of the near future.

COBALT 60 SAUCE

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is very interested in documenting and reexamining the hype, hope and controversies that surrounded food & biotechnology in the recent past. Cobalt-60 Sauce is a project that examines mutation breeding, and documents some of the radiation-bred plant varieties that are served as food on a regular basis. We have written a bit about mutation breeding, and have created work with and about mutagenic varieties, but this is the first time that we will bring together many mutagenic plants to grow an cook with.

The hype and hope surrounding mutation breeding in the 1950s and 1960s parallels more recent developments in the life sciences, including transgenics and synthetic biology. Starting in the 1950s novel plant varietals have been created by exposing plants to radioactive materials such as Cobalt-60, with the hopes of inducing “interesting” mutations, and thereby speeding up the slow process of selective breeding. After being exposed to radiation, mutagenic plant varietals were chosen based primarily on observable phenotypical characteristics. Compared to synthetic biology and transgenics, this process of designing life was much less instrumentalized and precise.

Today, many mutagenic plant varieties have been approved for sale as food but their history is largely unknown by the general public, and even by contemporary biotechnologists. Luckily, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) keeps records of the many mutation bred varieties that have been created by different countries. The Center’s project, Cobalt-60 Sauce, is a barbecue sauce made exclusively from mutation bred plants that were exposed to Cobalt-60 and which can be found in IAEA’s META database.

We are bringing this research to the public in the form of an installation. The Cobolt-60 Sauce installation has four main components. On one table, mutagenically bred plant varieties (such as Todd Mitcham’s Peppermint) will be growing. The second table will showcase a 3D landscape model of a larger demonstration garden proposal. The third table will exhibit a crate of the Cobolt-60 Sauce. The packaging lists the mutagenic plant varietals that are used to make the sauce and points to the IAEA’s META database. A warning label explains that the mutation-bred plant ingredients have not gone through the rigorous human or environmental health testing that many commercialized transgenic plant varieties undergo. Is this risk acceptable? Lastly, there will be a screen on the wall showing a film that presents the history of mutagenic breeding.

We are interested to see how collecting these disparate plants in one demonstration garden, and one sauce leads to new conversations and critiques. The idea of trying to ‘Engineer Biology’ is not a new one, and Cobalt-60 Sauce offers an opportunity to pause and consider one historical precedent as we continue to debate emerging biotechnologies.

FOODPHREAKING

One goal of our organization is to make connections between gastronomy, ecology and open culture. The FoodPhreaking journal is a publication that aims to connect foodies who care about sustainability with scientists and hackers who care about open culture. For the first issue (Issue #0) we decided to collect 40 concise examples of what FoodPhreaking might be, and what it most definitely is not. Regular readers of the Center’s blog supplied us with links to examples of critical amateurs and hobbyists obsessed with exploring the food system, and recent failures in the global food system. These examples have been grouped into themes such as Culinary Civil Disobedience and Proprietary Food Science.

FoodPhreaking issue #0 is currently being printed using a 2-color risograph process with gold and neon pink ink. We love well crafted print publications that inspire readers who are moved by flipping through ink on paper. However, for ease of use and distribution a creative-commons-licensed digital version of the book will also appear on our website later this month.

Here are a few of the page spreads:

We hope you are in touch if you run into interesting examples that we should include in future issues of the FoodPhreaking journal.

Cobalt-60 Sauce looks at a controversy from the recent past and FoodPhreaking examines the present to imagine a better food future. These are just two of the projects that are migrating from research phase to dissemination phase. You can follow many more upcoming projects by visiting our website or joining our mailing list.

Grantee Feature: Yansa

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Kindle Project

So often in our top-down instant-gratification culture, singular and simple solutions are employed to address multifaceted and complex problems. For sick people, we have pills from big pharmaceutical companies. For debt problems associated with consumerism we have credit cards. For global warming, however, many of us seem to understand it to be a fairly ornate issue. Perhaps the top down approach is not going to fit the bill on this one, unless the large companies at the top have some way to profit from the action and implement streamlined solutions.
There is a real and imminent threat of mega-corporations using new renewable energy technology for their own fiscal benefit often leaving local communities in the dust (as we’re seeing in Brazil and Canada to name just a couple examples). Smart methods of practical change that involve everyone are of utmost importance – and this is what drew us so strongly to Yansa’s work.

Yansa’s mission is to provide communities with the means, tools and training to operate their own wind farms. Providing technology, training and capital, they help communities to invest in and use their own sustainable energy sources. The electricity generated from the wind farms is sold to the national grid of the host country, bringing profits straight back to the community. Yansa, has figured out how to solve problems on multiple levels. Through their intelligent and effective pairings of mixing environmental sustainability, responsible investing opportunities, and helping to build strong social structures, Yansa is a true champion of innovation across sectors.

Below, Yansa’s Development Coordinator, Amy Spellman, shares her personal narrative of how she came to work for such a special organization and the professional and personal revelations she’s had along the way being a part of this group. Her awareness of this multi-layered approach and her thoughts on why they are so important point straight back to Yansa’s mission.

Yansa’s projects are humble in scale, authentic in spirit, and immense in impact. Check out their website for more information.

Reflections and Updates from the Field
by Amy Spellman

When a group of friends that shared a concern for social, economic and environmental justice issues came together to form Yansa, their vision was to use it as a vehicle to drive a just transition to renewable energy through community-based projects. These projects would serve to empower marginalized communities through a model that expanded economic opportunities and emphasized social impacts. From the beginning, our team has been ever expanding and includes many different types of people; indigenous activists, wind development experts, social impact investors, academics, and it’s our diversity that enables us to create successful partnerships and sustainable projects.

I joined the team in 2011 after stumbling upon a job board post for summer interns at Yansa. I had little free time but Yansa’s profile matched so perfectly with my background and passions that I applied anyway. Writing this blog as Yansa’s Development Coordinator, I have managed to expand that two-month internship opportunity into two years of experience and engagement that have been pivotal to my own growth. I am fortunate to be involved with each Yansa project, in cultivating the rich relationships that come along with this work and in seeing some of the original goals of our founding members translate into concrete successes.

Our initial Yansa project began in the city of Ixtepec, an indigenous community in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. Before the formation of Yansa, co-founder Sergio Oceransky had lived in Denmark and Germany, where he witnessed the success of community-base wind farms in Europe. He was instantly convinced of the potential for viable community wind projects in indigenous and other historically oppressed communities and founded Yansa to realize this idea. During a trip to Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico, he saw how wind corporations were violating indigenous peoples’ rights and taking over their land. He moved to Oaxaca to provide access to information and support to communities fighting to regain control over their land. Community leaders then approached Sergio, proposing a partnership to building a community-owned wind farm in Ixtepec.

For its part in the partnership, Yansa provides the technical, managerial, and financial assistance required for the wind farm. In return, the community would be the backbone of the project, engaged in every step and eventually taking over full operation. They would direct the process throughout all phases of development and implementation, which would include social and economic programming supported by profits from the wind farm.

This distinct collaborative development model, defined by partnership and long-term sustainability is what truly inspired me when I joined Yansa and it is what has kept me dedicated and engaged ever since. Community partnership and localized ownership are essential components of our projects and differentiate them from others in the wind development field. Our community partnerships foster trust and transparency while ensuring the fundamental economic, cultural and political rights of the community members we work with.

Community collaboration has been a rewarding and successful process but it has not come without challenges. In the early stages of our project in Ixtepec, we discovered a strikingly low rate of participation by women in decision-making processes or governing bodies, especially associated with land use. This was in part due to land ownership historically being passed through men who have traditionally worked the land. To make our process truly inclusive we insisted on finding a way to engage women in the project without disrespecting the existing norms and social fabric. Segio was adamant that the wind was a collective resource that belonged to everyone, not just those who own the land. He insisted that in order to proceed with the partnership, all stakeholders, including women and other non-landowning groups, must have an opportunity to participate in the process. To address this, we proposed the creation of the Women’s Forum that would convene regularly to discuss issues connected to the project making their voices heard in decisions involving the wind farm. The male dominated governing bodies were receptive to this and together with Yansa, they helped commence the very first meeting of the Women’s Forum.

The forum is the first independent women’s organization ever formed in Ixtepec outside of religiously or politically affiliated groups. This represents an important transition to a more inclusive process of participation for women in the community. Initially driven and guided by Yansa’s staff, the forum is now completely self-sufficient, with a core group of dedicated women meeting every week to ensure their involvement within the decision-making and community collaboration process continues.

Reflecting on the success of the Women’s Forum in writing this blog has been inspirational. My work from home can sometimes feel isolated from events on the ground. I can get bogged down in emails and deadlines and forget why I have committed myself to this collective effort. I am appreciating, perhaps for the first time, that what seem like small victories are actually concrete, tangible changes that my colleagues and I hope to inspire. Our original mission was to support a ‘just transition’ to renewable energy but to really achieve such a monolithic goal we need to support many small ‘just transitions.’ Transitions that allow once marginalized voices to participate fully in decision-making processes that effect their lives, making partnerships more equitable and fair; these are the small advances that can catalyze larger, structural change and build a foundation that supports durable and sustainable models for change in the future.

Grantee Feature: Center for Land Use Interpretation

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Kindle Project

As you’ve likely heard, a meteor landed on Earth last Friday. As I write this, people in Russia and Kazakhstan are dealing with the bizarre aftermath of this otherworldly event, a stark reminder of the fragility of the planet we live on. For decades to come, Russian and Kazak kids will perhaps revel in hunting for meteorites, relics of this disturbing albeit natural incident.

It is only natural for human beings to take an interest in collecting tokens of matter that have fallen from the sky, real and tangible pieces of natural history. However, what happens when our fragile planet is marked not only by out of orbit incidences, but by what we do to our planet ourselves? What about the relics that get left behind from our experiments? And not only what happens with them, but what can they teach us about the past and about where we’re headed?

Enter the field of Aviation Archaeology, a fascinating emerging field of study exploring the connection between land and sky, and how aviation experiments from the past have impacted and been documented in the planet’s landscape. The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a self-ascribed “research organization involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues”, is making a public display of Aviation Archaeology’s findings in their most recent exhibition, Down to Earth: Experimental Aircraft Crash Sites of the Mojave, taking place in Los Angeles, CA.

CLUI is a champion of questioning and documenting the United States’ terrain. They look at the landscape of the country and dissect it. They take forgotten fields and locations and make them known. They investigate the bizarre places that we, as humans, have altered, and make them part of the American landscape. They are creating a map for the seen and unseen oddities of this transforming planet, a map of human impact on Earth, in our country.

CLUI’s mission and how they execute it is nothing short of a wonder. Their website’s incredibly interactive Land Use Database is just one example of how they effectively educate the public of their work in ways that are at once creative, engaging and historical. Supporting them felt so important to us because we had never heard of anything like it. They’ve taken on the arduous task of being archivists in ways that few others are. They are also the point at which independent historians and archeologists (like Peter W. Merlin, described below) can converge to share their unique work. As we continue to need to ask the questions about what we’re doing to our planet, why we are doing it, and what the consequences will be, CLUI is helping us find these vital and obscure answers.

Below, Matthew Coolidge (Director, CLUI) writes about the Down to Earth exhibit, and teaches us why Aviation Archaeology is an important field to pay attention to.

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Down to Earth: Thoughts on Airplane Crash Sites and Aviation Archeologists
by Matthew Coolidge, Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation

The Center for Land Use Interpretation addresses a wide range of topics. Since all human activity plays out on (or over, or under) the ground, everything humans do can be considered from a “land use” perspective, if you consider the term very literally, as we do. From this infinity of possibilities, we select themes to explore through our programming based on a number of criteria, some objective, some maybe less so, but always because they seem relevant to the conditions and times we are in, as a society, today. They often deal with the technologies of the modern world that sustain our way of life, and examine their effects on the land, culture, and collective psyche, hopefully revealing new perspectives and notions about things we take for granted, or do not think about much at all.

Aerospace, and the “sky/land” interface, is one of a few dozen recurring subjects for us, since its direct and indirect impacts are one of the dominant features of contemporary life in a global world. It’s a technology that can seem abstract and esoteric, so we often try to bring it “down to earth,” as they say, to address it by finding actual, physical places, which can be visited, that can be “ground truthed,” to tell the story. And we try and find new and unusual ways in to a subject, often by finding experts in the field who are driven more by passion, then by economics.

Crash sites are usually remote, and sometimes have an area that is noticeably bare, like this one, near Harper Dry Lake, west of Barstow, California, where a supersonic B-1 bomber prototype crashed in 1984. CLUI photo, 2012.

A good example is a new exhibit we just opened at our space in Los Angeles, about experimental aircraft crash sites in the Mojave Desert. The exhibit depicts and describes eleven incidents, selected to represent the range of advanced technology over 70 years of jet-powered flight, from a 1948 crash of a “flying wing” to a 2009 crash of an advanced fighter plane, now part of the US Air Forces. The show is about technology, but more about the poetic implications of these “high impact” land use sites, arbitrary drop points from above, that happened, literally, by accident. And why some people find them interesting enough to devote much of their free time to seeking them out, an activity known broadly as “wreck-finding,” and more officially, now, as “aviation archeology.”

Since the “Right Stuff”- era, Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles, has been the principal place for testing experimental aircraft. As a result, the landscape around it is peppered with crash sites – more than 600 in the western Mojave Desert alone. While many of them occurred inside restricted military spaces, many more occurred on private and public land outside the reservations. Some crashes occurred next to homes, and state highways. Sometimes the pilot ejected safely, sometimes not. These are complicated and often tragic places. In all cases though, despite having been cleaned up by authorities immediately following the crash, fragments of the planes can still be found on site. They are monuments of disintegration, dissolving back into the ground.

The exhibit has been something we have been wanting to do for over a decade. It is based on the work of Peter W. Merlin, someone who I met in the mid 1990s, when I was working on an exhibition about the Nellis Range in Nevada, and a book about the Nevada Test Site. Though still quite young, Peter was already well on his way to becoming one of the nation’s experts on exotic aircraft development, and failure, and the history of the most secure aviation test site in the nation, popularly known as Area 51, located inside the Nellis Range. Even then he was one of the go-to guys for Discovery Channel producers to interview about what was “really” going on inside this notoriously secret place. The thing was, he knew about that place as well as anybody who wasn’t sworn to secrecy, so he could talk about it. And he found out by sleuthing through non-classified sources.

Peter Merlin shows Aurora Tang of CLUI some of the small plane fragments still on the ground from a crash of an experimental high-performance jet, the X-31, less than half a mile from a house and a public highway, near Boron, California in 1995. In this case the pilot safely ejected. CLUI photo, 2012

Unlike most people who were drawn to that place though, it wasn’t the conspiratorial secrecy and the UFO theories that motivated him, it was a fascination with aircraft, and the missing chapters of aviation history that these secret test sites concealed. While access to the site and to official records was largely out of the question then, he found that visitation to crash sites outside the restricted areas was possible and provided material evidence of what landed there.

Over the past 25 years, he, often aided by his friend Tony Moore and others, has located and visited more than 100 crash sites of historic aircraft, flown out of Area 51, and Edwards Air Force Base. In nearly every case he was told the site was “lost” and that everything had been removed anyways, so there was no point in trying to find it. But he found them, using clues from interviews with pilots, FOIA requests, and research in archives. Mostly though by days of repeated searches in the field, wandering around, lining up historic photos with subtle geographic features, like hills the distance, or small desert washes, while looking at the ground for incongruous fragments.

There is an established subculture of wreck-finders, some of whom publish books on small presses, and blog about their discoveries on the web. Pat Macha, for example, has been leading excursions into the mountains and deserts of California to find wreckage, mostly of civilian and old military training aircraft, for decades. Pete is not only interested in trophy hunting, and the personal thrill of discovery, though that is no doubt a factor – his backyard in Palmdale has a shed full of carefully bagged and logged pieces of hundreds of planes, including U2s, Blackbirds, and Russian Mig’s – a fragmentary history of aviation indeed. The best pieces he finds though go to museums, such as the Air Force Flight Test Center Museum at Edwards, where his partner, Tony Moore, now works.

Titanium fragments of an A-12 “Oxcart,” found by members of the CLUI at a crash site near Wendover, Utah, in 2011. The Oxcart, one of the most advanced aircraft ever made, was a flying camera, built by the CIA to replace the U2, and flown out of “Area 51″ between 1962 and 1968. It was later developed into the more familiar SR-71 Blackbird. This crash occurred on public land, in 1963, when the plane’s existence was still a closely-guarded secret.

Pete, who met Tony while he was working as a baggage handler at Burbank Airport, also works on base now, as one of two archivists and historians at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, still the nation’s leading location for experimental aircraft testing. He is now a respected member of the aviation history community. He is a great example of how impassioned “amateurs” are often the experts, especially on subjects that lie beyond the well-worn paths, and the confines of academia.

For more about the CLUI exhibit Down to Earth: Experimental Aircraft Crash Sites of the Mojave, go to http://www.clui.org/section/down-earth-experimental-aircraft-crash-sites-mojave

For more information Peter W. Merlin’s work, see http://www.dreamlandresort.com/team/peter.html

And his books: X-Plane Crashes – Exploring Experimental, Rocket Plane and Spycraft Incidents, Accidents and Crash Sites (Specialty Press, 2008), Breaking the Mishap Chain: Human Factors Lessons Learned from Aerospace Accidents and Incidents in Research, Flight Test, and Development, (NASA, 2012), and Crash Course: Lessons Learned from Accidents Involving Remotely Piloted and Autonomous Aircraft (NASA, 2013).

Grantee Feature: Citizen Koch

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Kindle Project

We knew about Citizen Koch Directors, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, from their Academy Award Nominated film Trouble the Water (2009) and from their work with Michael Moore on some of his groundbreaking films (Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11). This pair obviously has documentary cred, but when we heard they were making a new film about the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision and its alarming fallout on the American people, we pounced on the chance to support them.

Citizen Koch illustrates the twisted and powerful influence that the Koch brothers have had on voter suppression in the United States at large. The film takes an in depth look into the lives of individuals in Wisconsin uncovering truths and stories from people where these brothers’ deep and creepy pockets and the Supreme Court’s decision had the greatest impact.

Madison, Wisconsin, 2011. Photo credit: Matt Wisniewsk

While we haven’t yet seen the whole film, many noteworthy reviews have acknowledged the importance of this project and its effective contribution to the arduous task of overturning the Citizen United ruling. This compelling piece of authentic storytelling by those directly engaged with the dramatic erosion of democracy in the United States is beyond a wake up call, it is a call to action.

Though the film’s incredibly busy crew was still buzzing with the success of their premier at Sundance, we were lucky enough to catch up with one of the Director’s, Tia Lessin, this month. She shares with us about not only their revelatory experiences at Sundance, but also their pressing and personal motivations in making this film, and where she sees the movement going from here. We are so honored to share her experience with the Kindle community and bring your attention to Citizen Koch, a brilliant example of social and economic justice education. Get involved here.

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Reflection on CITIZEN KOCH
by Director, Tia Lessin

Last month we premiered our film CITIZEN KOCH at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. What an adventure! We are so grateful to Sundance for giving us a chance to introduce this new documentary to the world, to the Kindle Project and other supporters for making the film possible, and to the audiences who attended the first screenings and so enthusiastically responded to the film.

One of the more memorable and satisfying experiences of Sundance are the Q and As after the screenings—an opportunity to engage in person with some of the best audiences in the world—and ours were especially lively. And you never know who will turn up.

A woman approached us after our second screening and told us that she had been an invited guest at one of billionaire Charles and David Koch’s biannual fundraising retreats–a secret convening of the country’s wealthiest conservatives, Tea Party-aligned politicians, and right wing pundits –plotting how to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the outcome of elections. I took a step back. But instead of taking issue with the film, this stylish well-dressed woman told me: “you have it right—it is indeed a state by state strategy they are undertaking.” I asked her if she would take me as her plus one to the next retreat, but she declined with a laugh. I hadn’t been joking.

Outside the Koch retreat in Palm Springs, CA, January 2011. Photo credit: Tia Lessin

In January 2011, the Koch’s private security goons kicked me out of the gathering in Palm Springs, California. But that didn’t shut us down, in fact that experience compelled us to make CITIZEN KOCH. While the beginning of the money trail that corrupts democracy hides behind well-guarded banquet halls in private resorts, its corrosive consequences are glaringly apparent in workplaces, at family tables and in statehouses across America. And that is where CITIZEN KOCH begins.

Shortly after being ejected from the Koch fundraiser, we got a call from Carl’s brother, who works as a public university professor in Wisconsin. He told us “you should be filming what’s about to go down here.” Newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker, bankrolled by corporate money including the Koch fortune, had proposed eliminating collective bargaining rights for public employees, and tens of thousands of Wisconsinites were storming their statehouse in protest. Carl and I grabbed our gear and set out for Madison.

We came to understand the political drama unfolding in Wisconsin to be part of a concerted and nationwide strategy by extremists to super-enfranchise the wealthiest people and corporations through allowing unlimited (and undisclosed) donations, and to undermine the already diminished power of working and poor Americans with the passage of voter ID laws and efforts to break unions to diminish their ability to spend politically. Wisconsin was at the cutting edge of this strategy: we repeatedly heard Republican operatives say that Gov. Walker’s Wisconsin was “a model for the country,” that his moves against organized labor would help pro-business Republicans gain control of elected offices throughout the country.

Following this story also gave us a chance to make sense of why so many working class Republicans support an agenda promoted by America’s wealthiest. We have long wondered what it would take to change that dynamic, and in Wisconsin, we found out.

As protesting crowds rattled Madison’s Capitol rotunda, we were struck by the widespread outrage Gov. Walker had provoked. It was coming not just from the usual activists, but from a groundswell of citizens who understood that Walker was betraying Wisconsin’s legacy of democratic values. We met state workers—staunch, life-long Republicans—who had concluded that Walker’s radical policies would undercut their families’ modest standard of living and dishonor their life-long commitment to public service.

Neither of us live in Wisconsin. Carl grew up in the Midwest, I grew up in Washington, DC. But as we watched and listened to a growing chorus of politicians and strategists like Tim Phillips from the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity cast aspersions on public employees, it felt personal. My parents were both federal civil servants — my father at the EPA regulating carcinogens, my mother at the justice department administering federal funding to state and local law enforcement agencies. Carl’s father was a public university librarian, and his mother taught in an elementary school. They all chose government service for the security it brought to our families, and also because on some level for them it fulfilled a sense of commitment to the common good. When did they become the enemy? When did WE become the enemy?

In our first feature length film, TROUBLE THE WATER, we documented the aftermath of the breaching of the levees in New Orleans. Making that film, we saw first-hand what an America with no government services looks like—not just in the days and weeks after the disaster, but in the years leading up to it.

Today, the dismantling of the public sector and the vital services it provides has become the cornerstone of a political ideology embraced by the Kochs and others on the extreme right. Looking back, post-Katrina New Orleans now seems a logical extension of their vision for America.

The most frequent question we encountered during our Q and A sessions was whether or not we thought outside spending in electoral politics was still an issue: after all, Barack Obama withstood a barrage of corporate money in November 2012. We believe that Obama’s victory was a false positive. Moving beyond 2012, we expect money to become an even greater influence as Koch Industries and other corporate interests continue to move aggressively to neutralize the Democrats’ ground game (ie take out organized labor) and pour money into state and local races where the laws that define how our Democracy functions are passed. The big spenders are doubling down for the next election, and beyond.

In December 2012, as we were finishing CITIZEN KOCH in preparation for Sundance, the Kochs made an announcement that they were postponing their next fundraising retreat: “We are working hard to understand the election results, and based on that analysis, to re-examine our vision and the strategies and capabilities required for success…it will be several months before the state data necessary to complete this analysis is available.”

As Dee Ives, a nurse at a veterans home in Wisconsin and a lifelong Republican, told us the morning after her Governor was re-elected after outspending his opponent 8-1: “Watch out America, they’re coming for you next.”

Grantee Feature: New Energy Economy

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Kindle Project

Want to know how to erect a national monument? Ask the folks at New Energy Economy (NEE). As I write these words, there is quite likely a conversation happening somewhere in Washington about the Rio Grande del Norte and its consideration for National Monument status.

When I spoke with Mariel Nanasi, NEE’s Executive Director, about the evolution of this project, she explained a complex and powerful fusion of grassroots organizing, activism and art. At the point when the coalition of many organizations and individuals working to protect the Rio Grande had been so immense and enduring that many of the involved parties were close to a state of burn out, a seemingly unlikely suggestion was made. As these organizers were considering the various legislative strategies they may employ to implement the monument status, a funder approached Mariel and proposed they make a book about the people of New Mexico and their love of the land to help their cause.

I must admit, at this point in her story I had a quick moment of skepticism wondering how a book could have an impact on changing legislation, especially a book that was essentially a love letter from the people of the region to the land. I loved the idea, and I love the book, which can be viewed online here, but wondered about the kind of impact it could have.

As Mariel told me more, my skepticism was instantly washed away. Her accounts of being on location and the tales of the people she photographed showed me that this was no ordinary project, and gave me confidence in the power of this unique collection of human sentiment to move the hearts of the politicians who would come to see it, including President Obama himself.

Having a river and a region considered for National Monument status is indeed a serious task. In Mariel’s words, “I have never worked on a project that was more about love of place.” To learn more about how this love of place was transformed into this vast accomplishment, read Mariel’s testimony below. Join us and the NEE team in waiting with anticipation to hear the decision of our county’s legislators on the future status of this precious land.

New Energy Economy has been a part of the Kindle community since 2010. Their work spans from placing solar panels on local business to advocating at the legislative level for clean energy standards in New Mexico to empowering Native communities to make clean air decisions. Their website is filled with information and resources, be sure to check it out.

newenergyeconomy.org

Protecting the Rio Grande del Norte
by Mariel Nanasi

I was approached by a friend who had been working in coalition for years to bring about the permanent protection of the Rio Grande del Norte. He was worn-out and asked me if we could work together and strategize anew.

Biologically diverse and spectacular, the Rio Grande del Norte is a swath of northern New Mexico wilderness spanning 236,000 acres. It is a rich wildlife habitat that offers a paradise for backcountry hiking and fishing, traditional land uses like hunting and gathering, an outstanding place for observing nature in all of its splendor, and a refuge offering solitude and spiritual rejuvenation. Multiple attempts to advance legislation over the past 10 years in the House of Representatives and Senate to conserve this vital area had died.

How could we spice up the organizing efforts? How could we reach the people in power to act quickly and effectively? We figured out that the key to shaking the political stagnation out of its legislative gridlock was to touch the hearts of our sympathetic Congressional delegation and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and have them ask President Obama to invoke his powers under the Antiquities Act to declare the Rio Grande del Norte a National Monument.

Our first idea was to create a photography book that depicted the way a diverse people interact with and love the Rio Grande del Norte. The breadth and depth of bi-partisan support for preservation of the Rio Grande del Norte transcends age, ethnicity and profession. I wanted to communicate how despite our individual differences that our lifestyle, traditions, livelihood and culture are all tied to this land.

We took photographs of Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglos. We showcased anglers in the water, a falconer, hikers, veterans, artists, a health insurance agent, a stock broker, farmers, business owners, students, a brewer, ranchers, tourists, writers, a bank teller, hunters, and more. We pictured them in the place they love doing what they love. It was one of the most fun projects I have ever been engaged in because people were unabashed advocates for the place they treasure.

A collage was made of the people photographed and we bought advertising on the outside of buses that featured the collage with a bold and simple message: “Join Us and Protect The Rio Grande del Norte.” We sent a delegation of three people featured in the book to Washington to hand delivery the book to our Senators and Congressmen. We got unanimous Resolutions passed by the City of Santa Fe and the County of Taos in support of permanent protection, and those governing bodies sent their Resolutions to the Congressional delegation. We were strategic in choosing key stakeholders to meet with and show up at events (even tennis tournaments and parties) and intercept the Congresspersons and let them know how much we wanted the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument.

You can see for yourselves if we were successful in getting our message across. In a joint letter to President Obama, Congressmen Heinrich and Lujan referred to the book by saying: “The Rio Grande del Norte: One Hundred New Mexican Speak for a Legacy showcases the faces and voices of 100 New Mexicans who work, play, cherish and live near the Rio Grande del Norte; and they share, in their own words, why these public lands must be protected.” Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar’s response to the Congressmen, on behalf of President Obama, called the book “an excellent representation of the magnificence of this special place.” The book is prominently displayed in Senators Bingaman (ret.) and Udall’s offices and when Ken Salazar autographed my copy he wrote: “Thanks for the dream.”

People noticed, the coalition was reinvigorated, and the whole campaign was much better off. We interacted meaningfully with those we photographed and in turn they became advocates. We took creative and artistic risks, and leveraged the umph that we generated.

The Rio Grande del Norte is a national treasure and we expect it will be declared a National Monument under the Antiquities Act by President Barack Obama any day now. On the hundredth year anniversary of the State of New Mexico, a National Monument designation is a fitting way to honor our people, our state.

You can see The Rio Grande del Norte: One Hundred New Mexican Speak for a Legacy at: http://newenergyeconomy.org/protecting-the-rio-grande-del-norte/

Announcement of Autumn 2012 Grantees!

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Kindle Project

As the year draws to a close and 2012 may or may not signal the end of the world, we thought it only fitting that we wrap up this calendar year with a bang. Kindle Project Fund of the Common Counsel Foundation is pleased to introduce you to our Autumn grantees, whom we are so excited to welcome into our Kindle nook. These organizations and projects make up a strong network of dynamic risk-takers, pioneers, edge-walkers and community builders in some incredible fields that need our focused attention.

With nine new and six returning grantees on our docket this winter, we have an exciting year ahead. We hope you will be as thrilled as we have been to learn more about their work, the people within these groups, and the movements that they are helping to grow and shift. From and with them, and with you, we’ll be learning about topics ranging from money in the US electorate to the creative use of gastronomy in the food justice movement, and so much in between! The creative and committed endeavors represented by our November 2012 grantees is nothing short of inspiring, a loud and clear call to action on so many fronts.

With voices strong, minds open, and brains collaborating, we are certain you’ll want to join us in 2013 as we get to know these folks and their work. Keep in touch with them here on our blog, check out their blogs and websites, and remember to stay informed with all kinds of Kindle news on our Facebook page. You can also visit the Nexus page on our website to see this list along with our Spring grantees. What a great year!

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Amazon Watch
Founded in 1996, Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization that works to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. We partner with indigenous and environmental organizations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems. We believe that the most effective way to defend the Amazon is to support and advance the rights of indigenous peoples, whose territories encompass over one quarter of the Amazon rainforest and who have lived in harmony with its abundant biodiversity for millennia.

Bidoun
Bidoun Projects is a unique platform for the exchange and debate of new and unexpected ideas about Middle Eastern art and culture. Through the production of reportage, curation, and educational projects we encourage audiences to reconsider a region too often presented in a one-dimensional manner.

Center for Court Innovation
Founded as a public/private partnership between the New York State Unified Court System and the Fund for the City of New York, the Center for Court Innovation (the Center) helps the justice system aid victims, reduce crime, strengthen neighborhoods, and improve public trust in justice. The Center combines action and reflection to spark innovation locally, nationally, and internationally. The Center’s Tribal Justice Exchange launched the Peacemaking Program in the fall of 2012 in partnership with the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Peacemaking is a traditional Native American form of dispute resolution that promotes healing and restoration.

Center for Genomic Gastronomy
The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an independent research institute that explores the genomes and biotechnologies that make up the human food systems on planet earth. We are dedicated to the advancement of knowledge at the intersection of food, culture, ecology and technology. The Center presents its research through public lectures, research publications, meals and exhibitions. The Center has conducted research and exhibited in England, Germany, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Singapore and the US.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation
The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a nonprofit organization which seeks to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription that can be read to better understand who we are individually, and as a nation.

Center for PostNatural History
The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin. Since its founding in 2008 the Center for PostNatural History addresses this goal through the acquisition of living, preserved and documented specimens of postnatural origin. These specimens are shared with the public through the Center’s exhibition and research facility in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as traveling exhibitions that address the PostNatural through thematic and regional perspectives.

Citizen Koch
Citizen Koch is a feature length documentary about the influence of money in US electoral politics. Set against the Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Citizens United and the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy movements, the film explores the consequences for democracy when private interests determine who is elected to deliver public good. (Photo Credit: Matt Wisnieski.)

New Energy Economy
New Energy Economy was established in 2004 to create economic opportunity in New Mexico with less carbon pollution and more clean energy, and is grounded in principles of environmental justice. We are mobilized to secure a future without coal. New Energy Economy’s efforts include grass roots organizing, public policy leadership, smart litigation, targeted lobbying, media outreach and community-scale implementation projects. We work in partnership with diverse allies on policies that encourage job growth, investment and innovation in a more efficient, sustainable and equitable energy sector. We have focused on the policy level as well as on-the-ground meaningful energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

New Mexico Environmental Law Center
New Mexico communities that face big problems – existing or proposed landfills, mines, oil and gas wells, chemical plants, water grabs, incinerators, etc. – turn to the New Mexico Environmental Law Center. For twenty-five years, we have provided free and low-cost legal representation to our state’s low-income communities, Hispanic communities and Native American communities to ensure that everyone in our state —no matter their economic circumstances—has the ability to participate effectively in the decisions that will impact their environment and health. In our efforts to protect the people and environment of New Mexico, we have tackled some of the biggest companies in the world, including Chevron Mining, Freeport McMoRan, Intel, General Atomics, and ConAgra. Together with our clients, we will continue to work towards a state where every New Mexican can enjoy clean water and healthy air, cultural practices and a quality of life that is not degraded by contamination.

Other Worlds
Other Worlds is a collaborative that works to inspire hope and knowledge that another world is possible, and helps build it. It compiles and brings to light political, economic,and social alternatives that are flourishing throughout the world, and helps the public open up new pathways to adapt and replicate them.The team of five women is currently focused on three programs: (1) Harvesting Justice, strengthening and publicizing the transformation of food, land, and agricultural systems in the Americas; (2) Another Haiti Is Possible, offering alliance to social movements in Haiti as they work to raise a more equitable and just country from the rubble of the 2010 earthquake; and (3) Alternatives Education, documenting and broadly sharing victories and alternatives surging around the world. All Other Worlds’ work has an emphasis on women.

People’s Grocery
People’s Grocery operates at the intersection of public health, economic development, and food systems. Our mission is to improve the health and local economy of West Oakland through investing in the local food system. Using West Oakland as a model of leadership development, micro-enterprise creation, urban gardening, and health project development, we aim to support and develop a thriving network of like-minded change-agents in cities across the nation.

Santa Fe Art Institute
The Santa Fe Art Institute promotes and presents art as a positive social force. Community-based and international in scope, we believe that art plays a central role in civic life and that artists’ voices are essential to understanding our complex world. We support creativity, and enable access to the arts through residencies, public lectures, workshops, exhibitions, school- and community-based arts education, and outreach.

Seed Broadcast
Seed Broadcast is a generative project exploring grassroots food and seed sovereignty through collective inquiries and hands-on creative practices. Throughout the year, we initiate community projects to examine critical issues surrounding seed and food sovereignty, visit local farms and gardens to experience what is happening first hand in the field, and engage in creative strategies to dig deeper into the real, often unheard, stories of local agriculture. Seed Broadcast believes that local communities hold a genius of place that nourishes the core of sustenance. We seek to reveal this innovative knowledge, while pollinating creative practices, which animate the saving and growing of local seeds, to provide an avenue for the revitalization of localized, sovereign, food sources.

Women on Waves
Women on Waves, a Dutch non-profit organization was founded in 1999. On the invitation of local women’s groups, Women on Waves sails with a Dutch ship to countries where abortion is illegal. Outside the territorial waters, the abortion pill can be provided safely and legally to women with unwanted pregnancies. While in harbor, the ship also hosts several programs, such as contraceptive distribution, counseling, education and workshops for different professionals organizations. The ships campaign in Ireland (2001), Poland (2003), Portugal (2004), Spain (2008), and Morocco (2012) created enormous public interest. The campaign in Portugal catalyzed the legalization of abortion in February 2007.

In recent years Women on Waves initiated safe abortion hotlines in Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Poland, Thailand and trained grassroots women’s organizations in several African countries. Additionally, we develop art projects, engage in legal actions, give sexual education and medical knowledge workshops.. In 2006, we initiated Women on Web, a telemedical service was set up to support women around the world access safe medical abortions.

Yansa
Yansa partners with indigenous, peasant, and fisherfolk communities that live in areas with a lot of wind, in order to build community wind farms as a driver for robust and diversified local development. We also support their struggle against land grabs by energy corporations. Yansa’s aim is to help communities build sustainable economies, maintain control of their land, and determine their own social and development initiatives. We believe that by cultivating social capital through community ownership of projects, the transition to renewable energy can be accelerated, unfolding more efficiently, democratically, and sustainably.

Announcement of Kindle Project Photography Awards

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Kindle Project

We are honored to announce the recipients of our first
Kindle Project Photography Awards

Agnes Thor
Marie-José Jongerius
Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

This award has come out of a partnership between Kindle Project and Capricious Magazine, wherein we collaborated in an international call for submissions for their 13^th issue focused on the theme of water.

As our global landscape continues to oscillate unpredictably with climate change and powerful emergent social movements, water resource is at the forefront of our minds. From water scarcity to excess, the contentious access between the haves and have-nots, from floods to drought, water is the issue of our time. Our longtime support of the arts and of social and environmental justice movements, combined with Capricious’ impeccable reputation and eye for emerging photographers made our collaboration with Capricious a natural one.

Chosen from hundreds of submissions, we used our combined and varied expertise to carefully consider many talented photographers. Our committee of four (Sophie Morner, Sadaf Cameron, Karen Codd, and Arianne Shaffer) met in Brooklyn, NY at the Capricious office to deliberate over images from around the world. We considered which photographers represented Kindle Project’s and Capricious’ fused missions. We chose those who had promising bodies of work that contributed to the conversation on water, eliciting powerful intellectual and emotional responses.

Each photographer we chose spoke to the high aesthetic standard of Capricious and to one of the central missions of Kindle Project: to bring about awareness and change through art. These unique and careful representations exhibited artistic skill and the breadth by which photographers are tackling perspectives of water in its many forms.

Playful and political, these three awardees have submitted exemplary works that are well deserving of recognition and congratulation.

CAPRICIOUS No. 13 – WATER coming this December to bookshops internationally, and online. And made first available through Art Basel and NADA in Miami, FL.

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Agnes Thor
www.agneskarin.se

Agnes Thor, born in 1986, works as a photographer in New York City. Originally from Sweden and with a BA in Photography from School of Photography in Gothenburg she often works with photographic docufiction. By combining motifs from different places and times and taking landscapes and people out of its context, she creates new visual stories based on reality but with a fictional content. Her work is greatly influenced by nature and it either functions as a background and subject. Another strong influence and subject in her work is the area and population surrounding her childhood home in the countryside of Sweden.

Her works have been exhibited worldwide, most recently at the Terra Cognita Festival in The Netherlands and in a solo show at Kumla Konsthall in Sweden. In 2010 her first book Aurora Borealis was published by Mörel Books. She is currently working on a larger project revolving around life and death in combination with smaller projects during her travels.

Marie-José Jongerius
www.edgesoftheexperiment.org

In my landscape pictures I look for bounderies, limits and edges between nature and the manmade world. Where are the interfaces between the organic and the artificial world, and do they fail or succeed. I want to tell stories about mankind not by making pictures of them, but by making pictures of the traces they leave behind in the land.

The photographic essay, “Edges of the Experiment,” explores the liminal relationship between natural and man-made environments. Taken at various locations across the American Southwest over several years, these images attempt to locate interfaces between organic and artificial worlds as tangible borders that question sustainability on both sides of the line.

Marie-José Jongerius observes geography with an attentive eye for those remarkable details that make up our daily lives, and asks the viewer to consider where we live and how we relate to our respective environments.

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs
www.tonk.ch

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (both *1979) studied Photography at the University of the Arts in Zurich. They started collaborating in 2003 and have been working together since.

Their practice combines Photography with sculptural, performative and installational parts. Since 2005 they have been exhibiting their work internationally, Solo Shows include PS1 MoMA (2006), Swiss Institute NYC (2008), Kunsthaus Aargau (2009), EX3 Firenze (2010), Kunsthalle Mainz (2011) and MaMM Moscow (2012).

Their first Artist Book, “The Great Unreal”, published by Edition Patrick Frey, 2009, won numerous prizes and is now in its 2nd Edition.

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The Kindle Project Photography Awards are made possible through the Kindle Project LLC.

Feature: Josh MacPhee

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Kindle Project

Josh MacPhee is an understated artist with a loud series of movement building messages. Through his prints he conveys justice themes focusing on labor, nuclear energy, revolt, and democracy, to name a few. Through his refined use of traditional printmaking and his contemporary eye for design, Josh is creating media that educates and asks the audience to interact with critical subjects.

This print of Josh’s sums up the spirit of his work for me. Entitled, The City is Ours, his caption reads, “It’s really us little guys that make the city work. Let’s start acting on it!” His messaging is clear: It’s about collaboration, community, collective effort and the coming together of motivated individuals to make things better. He is a kind of artistic savant that bridges worlds of art, activism, craft and design.

Aside from Josh’s impressive print collection, he is one of the founders of Justseeds, a design and printmaking cooperative that includes artists based out of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Their body of work is an exhibit in itself, making known that even as we steep deeper into the digital era, traditional printmaking, hands-on care and craft are still of timely use in today’s context. This work is a simultaneous act of preservation and exercise of history.

As a member of Occuprint, (which he describes in detail below), he is a part of a global movement of creative message makers. Designers and artists were key catalysts in bringing a voice to the Occupy movement and Josh was, and still is, on the forefront of that important effort.

From Josh’s writing below you’ll get a deep sense of who is, what drives him, and how he is accomplishing his artistic goals with humility, intuition and leadership.

http://interferencearchive.org
http://www.justseeds.org/artists/josh_macphee/
http://www.justseeds.org/blog/judging_books_by_their_covers/
httt://s1gnal.org
http://antumbradesign.org/
http://occuprint.org/

An Update by Josh MacPhee

Posters from the exhibition at Interference Archive, “RadioActivity!”

For the past nine months my primary project has been building the Interference Archive here in Brooklyn, NY. Like all my projects, it is a collaboration, with my two primary partners Kevin Caplicki and Molly Fair, as well as with dozens of other activists, archivists, artists, designers, researchers, and students who have been involved in different aspects of the project. Interference Archive explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements. This work manifests in public exhibitions, a study center, talks, screenings, publications, workshops, and an on-line presence. The archive consists of many kinds of objects that are created as part of social movements: posters, flyers, publications, photographs, moving images, audio recordings, and other printed matter. Through our programming, we use this cultural ephemera to animate histories of people mobilizing for social transformation.

Promotional Masks for the exhibition at Interference Archive, “RadioActivity!”

Right now we are knee deep in posters and ephemera from fifty years of anti-nuclear movements around the world. On October 4th our next exhibition opened, “RadioActivity! Anti-Nuclear Movements from Three Mile Island to Fukushima,” in which we showed the connections between the movements of the past to the contemporary mass movement in Japan struggling against the re-opening of nuclear power plants post-Fukushima. By connecting with activists and organizers in Japan, we hope to play a small role in jump-starting a movement here in North America in order to ask serious and difficult questions about the safety and future of nuclear power locally and around the world.

The archive was initially envisioned with my partner Dara Greenwald, who passed away in January after fighting cancer for a year and a half. My work on Interference is both an attempt to continue the work we began together, and to keep myself focused while I try to heal and learn from losing her.

In a similar curatorial and collecting vein to the archive, I am a co-editor (with Alec Dunn) of a journal called Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics. We just recently released our second issue, and are hard at work on issues 3 & 4. In early September we did a mini-speaking tour of Boston, Providence, and Brooklyn, and in late September another one of Northern Virginia, Washington DC, and Baltimore.

When I’m not helping to run the archive or working on Signal, I’ve been designing prints, posters, and books, as well as trying to develop and improve my writing. I have created a number of new screen prints in the past 6 months, which can be seen on my Justseeds page. Justseeds, an artist cooperative I am a part of, recently held our annual retreat here in Brooklyn at the Interference Archive. We are 25 socially-engaged artists and printmakers who have been building a cooperative platform to both sell our work and support each other as artists, activists, and people.

Homage to Catalonia covers

I’ve also designed over twenty book covers so far this year, some for important books by some great authors, including Silvia Federici, David Harvey, Vijay Prashad, and CLR James. With Morgan Buck, I am in the early stages of turning this work into a design cooperative, Antumbra Design. Book cover design has become a passion over the last couple years, and beyond designing, I’ve been collecting and writing about covers from all over the world. Every week I post a new blog entry on Justseeds as part of my ongoing series “Judging Books by Their Covers.” I’m currently working on a longer piece for print about the dozens of book covers of George Orwell’s classic work of Spanish Civil War reportage, Homage to Catalonia. In other writing news, I have a longer format critique of Kickstarter being published in the Fall 2012 issue of The Baffler.

The cover I recently designed for the new edition of CLR James’ classic critique of Soviet bureaocracy, State Capitalism and World Revolution.

I was very active in the cultural work being done as part of Occupy! in late 2011 and early 2012. The group I was a part of, Occuprint, engaged in the largest propaganda campaign I’ve ever been involved in, printed 60,000 posters, 75,000 stickers, and 30,0000 broadsheets in support of the movement. Now that the energy of Occupy is much more diffuse, we are focusing in on—and experimenting with—becoming a graphic think tank for various threads of activism and organizing happening in New York City and around the country. We just held a design critique/charette with activists at the Free University held at Madison Square Park. It was a great sprawling conversation and brainstorm session, where visual ideas were shouted out, discussed, and sketched onto giant pads of paper. Occuprint will begin holding sessions like this on a monthly basis in October.

Occuprint’s design critique and charrette around “debt”, in Madison Square Park, NYC.

On a more personal note, I decided in July I really needed to be healthier and get myself back into shape. This has largely consisted of riding my bike about 10 miles every morning around the wonderful Prospect Park, and riding out to the ocean at Brighton Beach to swim a couple times a week. It’s been fabulous. I love the ocean, it is so vast and intense it always puts me in my place!

Unsustainable Energy: A Community and Civil Rights Issue

An interview by Emelyn Lybarger of CELDF

FoodPhreaking & Cobalt-60 Sauce by Zack Denfeld

Reflections and Updates from the Field by Amy Spellman

Reflection on CITIZEN KOCH by Director, Tia Lessin

We are honored to announce the recipients of our first Kindle Project Photography Awards

This award has come out of a partnership between Kindle Project and Capricious Magazine, wherein we collaborated in an international call for submissions for their 13th issue focused on the theme of water.

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs www.tonk.ch