Americans get their pick of backbreaking farm jobs.
The United Farm Workers, the organization famous for their successful grape boycotts and union drives in the 60's, '70's and 80's, have launched a campaign to set the record straight about migrant farm workers and their role in the US economy.Read more
With sites like Kiva and Kickstarter, microlending has become a term we are familiar with. It is a way of supporting people in poverty and cultural producers (respectively) on an incredibly small scale. Together, however, these small loans are able to make a difference in people's lives, for both the lender and the borrower, without the intervention of traditional funding and lending organizations. Read more
Liberian women force warlords from power and are promptly forgotten.
With few exceptions, history tends to forget those who make change without resorting to violence. Case in point: the 2003 toppling of Charles Taylor, brutal dictator of Liberia. Taylor, who is currently on trial for war crimes, famously won the 1996 presidential election after a decade-long civil war with the campaign slogan "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him."Read more
The Fundred Project aims to de-lead New Orleans by changing the exchange rate.
The Fundred Dollar Bill Project was started by artist Mel Chin when he visited New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Mel realized that the hurricane was only the latest disaster to hit the city, and he started talking with people about the grossly elevated levels of lead in the soil – levels that are doing serious damage to children every day. Read more
City worker strike in Ontario leads to a surprising new landscape.
Unforeseen circumstances often shift our perception. Landscape is a particularly under-recognized area of thought, as we tend to ignore the fact that lawns (except our own) are in need of maintenance. They just get cut, and our city parks continue to be useful to us, without most ever acknowledging that it is a city worker's job to push that mower. Read more
Acorn is rolling out a campaign to connect local volunteers with people facing foreclosure.
This is what the internet is for:
The community organizing group Acorn unveiled the campaign with a spirited rally on Friday at a Brooklyn church and will roll it out in at least 22 other cities in the coming weeks. Through phone trees, Web pages and text-messaging networks, the effort will connect families facing eviction with volunteers who will stand at their side as officers arrive, even if it means risking arrest.Read more
What do we mean by the “commons”? The commons are spaces where we interact with other people.
(Crossposted at Social Media for Social Change (SMSC), a collaboration between the Action Mill and faculty (Jeremy Beaudry, a super-smart friend of the Action Mill) and students Ona Krass, Hunter Augeri, and Alie Thomer from the College of Media and Communication. SMSC is a design research project that investigates how networked technologies and social media may be used to create hybrid public spaces — bridging the physical and the virtual — where civil discourse and meaningful democratic participation are facilitated, organized, and nurtured at a grass-roots level.)
In our work at the Action Mill, we talk about “taking action in the commons” as an important component of social change work. But what do we mean by the “commons”? The commons are where we interact with other people. Public spaces are only commons when there are people interacting in them – people who don’t already agree with each other, or aren’t already part of a group.Read more
With few exceptions, history tends to forget those who make change without resorting to violence. Case in point: the 2003 toppling of Charles Taylor, brutal dictator of Liberia. Taylor, who is currently on trial for war crimes, famously won the 1996 presidential election after a decade-long civil war with the campaign slogan "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him."
The Fundred Dollar Bill Project was started by artist Mel Chin when he visited New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Mel realized that the hurricane was only the latest disaster to hit the city, and he started talking with people about the grossly elevated levels of lead in the soil – levels that are doing serious damage to children every day. 
