100,000 Homes Campaign, an ambitious campaign to spark a ""national movement to house America's most vulnerable homeless people"" by reframing the issue as a health crisis and transcending entrenched mindsets to figure out how to effectively collaborate and how best to allocate existing financial resources.

Curated Archive 2013

John Warner and Amy Cannon have been working assiduously to transform how chemistry is taught and practiced through their non-profit, Beyond Benign, since 1999.

Bioenergy Value Chain, or Abellon Clean Energy, is a comprehensive clean-energy system: they buy excess agricultural waste from local farmers (typically either burned, causing air pollution and respiratory illness, or ineffectively composted, releasing methane), and turn that plant material into efficient and clean-burning ‘pellets’ that can then power industrial plants, businesses and small homes.

SUMMARY: Cooperafloresta, using both rediscovered traditional ecological knowledge and modern agricultural science, Cooperafloresta is accelerating the natural succession of flora and fauna in agriculturally degraded areas of Brazil, going further than 'organic agriculture' and Biodynamics by using agroforestry techniques to bring major environmental and socio-economic benefits

For over 25 years Francesco Piazzesi and his team have developed a truly comprehensive, elegantly integrated model combining community empowerment, local technical capacity building, a novel financing system, and cutting-edge but culturally appropriate “green” building techniques.

This innovative materials science company uses local agricultural waste as feedstock to grow fungal mycelia that can be formed into a host of byproducts, from packaging materials to building insulation and car bumpers.

SUMMARY: Ento is introducing insects to the Western diet. As agricultural productivity cannot keep up with global food demands, edible insects potentially have positive environmental benefits globally as well as on human health.

SUMMARY: Fundacion Paraguaya aims to eliminate poverty in Paraguay using a bottom up strategy that combines granular analysis and data collection, grassroots financing, precise targeting of services, and coordination on a national anti-poverty effort.

Healthy Watersheds for Clean Energy symbiotically addresses poverty and deforestation by mobilizing communities in remote northern Nicaragua to monitor and police their forests and to practice ecologically-sound agriculture by working with them to install non-polluting, low-impact micro-hydro electrical generation facilities, showing them that the electricity and clean water is dependent on the vitality of the forests in their watershed.

SUMMARY: MASS Design Lab is a research project of MASS Design Group, exploring the integration of public health, economic development, environmental performance and education into a comprehensive formalized architectural strategy through a rigorous assessment process and immersive community component.

SUMMARY: Olazul, a non-profit organization working to improve coastal community livelihoods in developing countries, is developing a more sustainable model of shrimp farming, and contributing to the restoration of ocean ecosystems as well as increasing support for marine conservation.

Inspired by the disinformation surrounding the 2010 BP oil disaster, Public Lab emerged to help Gulf communities undertake grassroots mapping efforts, using balloons and digital cameras to self-map over 100 miles of coastline.

SOIL, a non-profit based in Haiti, provides locally-built dry toilets complete with a system for collecting, hauling and composting solid human waste and turning it into valuable fertilizer, reducing risks to human health from exposure to raw sewage while generating local employment and improving agricultural productivity by enhancing the soil fertility of degraded farmland.

SUMMARY: TBS River Regeneration works to restore river systems and local rural economies in India by drawing from ancient water wisdom, empowering local communities to build small traditional rainwater harvesting structures (johads) as well as by developing local and national awareness and education programs.

SUMMARY: The Green Chemistry Commitment, an initiative to get university chemistry departments to commit to integrating Green Chemistry into their academic curricula and transform how chemistry is taught and practiced in order to eliminate the numerous devastating neurotoxic and carcinogenic chemicals that characterize modern life and damage the global ecosystem, replacing them

SUMMARY: The Loowatt System, a self-contained human waste collection and processing system that, rather than being faced with the typical costs of centralized sewage treatment systems, creatively converts human waste into energy and fertilizer, improving local health conditions, while providing economic opportunity.

SUMMARY: Voltree Acoustic Early Detection Sensor System harvests power from a living tree to convert its chemical activity into small amounts of electric current and to 'read' its levels of dehydration, disease, fire risk, even potential seismic activity and CO2 levels, anticipating emerging challenges in agriculture and forestry in order to prevent such things as insect infest