Brighter Planet: Vote, vote vote!
I’ve never wanted to be a politician, the idea sort of makes me shiver, but today I will campaign for your votes. VIS recently submitted a grant application and project description to the Brighter Planet website. Brighter Planet is an online foundation of sorts that allows different grassroots, carbon fighting projects to submit brief descriptions and then let’s the public decide which project will win a grant of upto $5,000. And this happens every month. People can already vote for VIS at www.brighterplanet.com. You do need to take a whole minute to create a quick account, but otherwise it’s simple and hassle free. And then you can vote three times by Jan 15th. At the end of the second full day of voting we are leading 109 to 24 and typically these online elections gather about 5000 votes, so we definitely need your help.
We’ve got some tough competition: a project of Al Gore’s has been submitted opposite of us and we can be certain that he will use his full marketing muscle to win. But while Mr. Gore might have money to throw at marketing and networking, we’ve got a ton of friends and allies of the project, who have friends of their own. This is the thing of viral facebook statuses, quick gchats to encourage all of our friends and networks to take three minutes to vote for a real, radical project that wants to wrest the power of renewable energy from the hands of politicians by taking up hammers and doing it ourselves.
So as oft as you can over the next month, please help us promote VIS and our bid for the Brighter Planet January project winner!
East Wind Update
We traveled 1,000 miles crashing along I-64 most of the way: reading The Phantom Tollbooth, staying with extended family and laughing a lot. We were going out on our first visit to the community since they agreed to host Villages in the Sky 2010 and we knew that it was going to be critical. When we got to East Wind Community things were shaky: the community was dealing with FDA inspectors and long time members struggling with cancer. But still people were eager to talk to us, to ask questions, voice their concerns about the project they were donating 40 acres of their land and other community resources to and, overall, to reassure us of their support and enthusiasm for Villages in the Sky. We held a couple different meetings to talk about what we wanted to do with the festival, how we wanted the festival to interact with the community and to hear how the community wanted to interact with us. Questions of resource sharing and guest worker hosting were raised and the community, while maintaining an overall generosity, made clear its boundaries. In addition to finding some clarity around the relationship between VIS and East Wind, we met steam power experts interested in powering our build up camp, self-appointed protectors of the trees and many eager members ready to get involved!
They Might be Architects
Turns out we are not the only ones interested in pirate ships for kids and tree houses. Paxus went to visit Al Ross who is the senior associate at the architectural firm Flansburgh Associates. At Al’s home there was an impressive small pirate ship which he had designed and built in the back yard as well as a respectable tree house (digital pictures coming soon). Al and his firm are willing to assist VIS in the development of a master plan for the tree house village and supporting structures.
The plan is for Al Ross and David Croteau (who is the president of the company) to come to Missouri around Feb 22 thru 24 and do a site walk thru and review our survey of the magic meadow area (which will hopefully be completed by then) as well as a document on our goals for the project. With these inputs in hand they will create a draft master plan which shows where tree houses and other structures can be (both in year one and year two) given what we want the functions of the festival to be.
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