Sharing is an easy way to improve one’s feelings of well-being without needing a lot of money. However, most people have resistance to sharing due to basic trust issues. Will the person return my item? Will they take care of it? Enter this very practical book from NOLO press in Berkeley to help facilitate sharing and live a better life by pooling community resources.
And as the yellow sun faded from the sky, someone would get the extension cords, others would bring out the chairs from their homes as a couple men would bring out a television and fifteen or twenty people would sit outside in the evening’s heat and watch. These people were poor. Sharing was a way of life for them. And you know, they seemed happy.
In the Sharing Solution, you’ll learn that sharing is work. There is a certain amount of trust required and sometimes agreements need to be drawn up. But you will save money, however even if saving money isn’t your goal, you’ll make friends and we can never have enough of those.
There are four hundred or so pages on sharing in The Sharing Solution and they cover just about every aspect of just about anything you’d care to share, from ride sharing etiquette to running a co-op. The book is full of practical advice and though not everything here will apply to everyone, I think there is plenty here that anyone can use. If you want to save some money, make some friends and go a little green, give this book a look. You won’t be disappointed.
In order to help you out with your gardening, The Coop Maison Verte has organised a series of workshops related to gardening techniques, local food and food conservation for April and May. They are all free, bilingual, and will all take place at the coop, 5785 Sherbrooke street West.
Seed saving April 13th with Nel Ewanè, agr. Msc. from Action Comuniterre 7 to 9 pm
Beekeeping workshop April 14th with Alain Péricard from Rucher Apis 7 to 9 pm
Community Farming information session April 15th with Dave Merson from Ferme Mange-tout 7 to 9pm
Compost 101 May 2nd with Julieta from Eco-Quartier NDG 7 to 9pm
Green Smoothie workshop May 3rd with Ildiko Brunner from Raw in Montreal 7 to 9:30pm
Vermi composting workshop May 10th with Philippe Robillard from Pousse-menu 7 to 9pm
Sprouting and fermentation workshop May 12th with Philippe Robillard from Pousse-menu 7 to 9pm
We hope to see many of you at the Launch party of our Green Neighborhood Plan for Plateau East. Register by April 8th!
Several sites in the Plateau East are working to promote active transportation (walking, cycling and others) and increase the quality of life in the Plateau East.
The Green Neighborhood Plan proposes hundreds of courses of action in order to guide the district and the actors in the progressive development of the Plateau Area Green East.
Discover the upcoming changes for the neighborhood. See how our neighborhood will change!
The Green, Active, and Healthy Neighbourhoods project in the Plateau-Est, or Green Plateau-Est, aims to redesign streets and public spaces in order to prioritize walking, cycling, and other modes of active transportation. The project, launched in June 2010, involves a series of participatory activities for citizens during which design solutions for the following priority sites will be proposed and discussed.
> Mont-Royal Avenue East
> Key destinations for neighbourhood youth
> The Masson district
> The STM and Ford district
The project is made up of three phases (Understanding, Exploring, and Deciding). The Green Neighbourhood Plan for the Plateau-Est will be launched in Phase three. The launch is scheduled for mid-april 2011; the exact date will be revealed soon.
This is a highly recommended article for anyone struggling with building a community. The differences between a “collective” and a “community” are well thought out.
The task of constructing meaningful community today is daunting, but crucial. In an increasingly centralized and desensitized world, the only recourse of the honorable is to decentralize, and to reintroduce the model of independence once again. This starts with self sufficient communities and solid principles. It starts with unabashed and unwavering pride in the values of sovereignty and liberty. It starts with a relentless pursuit of balance, and truth. It starts with an incredible amount of hard work…By exposing the masses to another option, a better option, we undo years of lies, and lengths of chain. If there was ever a perfect moment to begin this battle, now is the time.
NDG Skill Share Gathering – Saturday February 26th, from 12 – 4pm at the NDG Food Depot, 2121 Oxford Ave (corner de Maisonneuve)
Éco-quartier NDG and the NDG Food Depot are teaming up to offer a sharing of practical skills to live more happy, creative, and sustainable lives. Learning is plentiful, everywhere, and need not come with price tags or expert degrees. We are all teachers. We are all students. We want to live with enthusiasm, so let us learn with vigor! Coming together as a community, we discover there is a wealth of knowledge and talent waiting to be shared.
The theme for this skill share is ‘Lets Do It Ourselves’ – as a community creating a sustainable environment, learning to reduce our expenses, and having fun together! Come one, come all, the curious, the enthusiasts, the students and the teachers!
Some examples of workshops being offered: fun with wild fermentation, sprouting, vermicomposting, make your own herbal salve, learn a natural beauty care from your grocery bag and much much more! Please register at ecoquartier@gmail.com or call 514 486-2727.
A profound and inspiring article…I’m sure the federal reserve banking system, which lends us our own money and charges us interest for the privilege, would NOT agree!
Heidemarie Schwermer, a middle-aged secondary school teacher just emerging from a difficult marriage, moved with her two children from the village of Lueneburg to the city of Dortmund, in the Ruhr area of Germany…
“I began to realise that I lived with so many things I didn’t need. So I decided that I wouldn’t buy anything without giving something away. That’s how it started. Then I began to really think about what I needed, clothes for example, and noticed that I could easily get by with what I could hang on ten coathangers. Everything else I gave away. I had so much stuff in the house that was superfluous. Getting rid of it was a relief.”
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Ideally, Schwermer would like to lead by example and give other people courage to change their attitudes towards money and how they live in and contribute to society. The pressure to buy and to own, she feels, has intensified in recent years. Consumerism is essentially about “an attempt to fill an empty space inside. And that emptiness, and the fear of loss, is manipulated by the media or big companies.” There is a fear, she says, that in not buying or owning an individual will fall out of society. The irony, she claims, is that material goods can never plug a spiritual hole and shopping and hoarding are more likely to isolate people than bring contentment.Does she intend to start a revolution?
“No, I think of myself as planting the seed,” she says. “Perhaps people come away from my lectures or seeing me being interviewed and decide to spend a little less. Others might start meditating. The point is that my living without money is to allow for the possibility of another kind of society. I want people to ask themselves, ‘What do I need? How do I really want to live?’ Every person needs to ask themselves who they really are and where they belong. That means getting to grips with oneself.”
Does she really think that she can convert other people to her life philosophy? “Yes, that’s our future. One day we will all live without money, because we don’t need it and because it is only a burden. We’re the way we are because it’s how the system allows us to be. We can buy everything we want but we need so much less than we realise. If you think that the capitalist system we live in now is the only system, well that’s just ridiculous.”
“We are going to run out of oil in ten years. We don’t have infinite resources. That just isn’t sustainable.” Is her own itinerant lifestyle sustainable? She thinks so.
Do you wish you had more green space in your neighborhood? Are you motivated and willing to improve the quality of life in your alley? Join us!
The Éco-quartier NDG is launching our first forum on green alleys in NDG. Greening projects can only come to life thanks to the will and participation of alley-way users and owners, while encouraging a vibrant community. Learn how to engage in this exciting movement and share your vision for your alley! Bring your neighbours!!
Wednesday, 26 January, 7:00PM to 9:00PM @Coop la Maison verte,, 5785, Sherbrooke Street West
The first Zeitgeist film (2007) was excellent. I am looking forward to seeing this new one, particularly now that the filmmaker has picked up the torch of sustainability.
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy.”
Time: January 17, 2011 @ 7:00pm Location:Rialto Theatre, 5723 ave. du Parc, Montreal
‘In Transition’ is the first detailed film about the Transition movement filmed by those that know it best, those who are making it happen on the ground. The Transition Town movement is about communities around the world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity, imagination and humour, and setting about rebuilding their local economies and communities. It is positive, solutions focused, viral and fun.
Check out the trailer:
The screening will be followed by a talk and discussion about the burgeoning Transition Town movement with Michel Durand of Villes en Transition.
The hand-writing is on the wall: sharing is a growing trend that will only accelerate with further economic contractions, resource scarcity and climate change.
We will have to figure out a new way to co-exist and this is the answer. Meet the economic revolution…
According to the survey below of 500 respondents, 60% made the connection between sharing and sustainability, citing “better for the environment” as one benefit of sharing.
The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where “access” trumps “purchases”, and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrows, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences.
