December 17, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves energy, Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Disability, Environmental, Food Waste, and Inter-personal Contact.
Casserole Club (http://www.casseroleclub.com/) is a community-led network where members who cook a little extra are matched up with other local users to share it with, with a particular focus on those who find it a little extra difficult to cook.
The tool provides an opportunity to get to know local people, encourages people to cook fresh, healthy meals, gives them a reason to try out new recipes and could reduce food waste. It also makes it easier to help members of the community that are less able. We like the practical, facilitate approach it takes, and the fact that it builds local social capital whilst tackling environmental issues, but we wonder how you could make the social aims more implicit and whether this would make it appeal to an even wider audience.
Casserole club is currently running in Reigate and Banstead, Tower Hamlets and Barnet and we hope to see it grow in the future.
September 10, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and social.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Community, Environmental, and Inter-personal Contact.
Have you ever made one of those journeys that take forever, where there’s nothing to do but stare at the countryside and dip in and out of radio stations as you weave up the motorway. With BlaBlaCar (http://www.blablacar.com/) that can now be a thing of the past. BlaBlaCar is a trusted community marketplace that can help you make some extra money by filling up the empty seats in your car. So not only will you make back some of your petrol money and have someone more interesting to talk to than the voice in your head, you’ll also help to save the planet. So far BlaBlaCar reports that it’s 3 million members have shared over 1.8 billion miles and shaved almost 500,000 tonnes off of our global CO2 output, making this a really great example of environmental behavioural change for the masses.
August 6, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community and Education.
As part of the yearly series of Priceless London Lates presented by Mastercard, spanning London Zoo, The Victoria & Albert Museum and The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum Lates (http://bit.ly/ZXvdVh) provide a fun and nostalgic experience for big kids looking for an alternative night out in the city. Filled with after-workers and friday night socialisers clutching beers whilst rehashing the science lessons of their youth, the Science Museum pits itself as a quirky alternative to bars and pubs for over 18s.
We think Lates, as well as being a cool night out, are a great device for kick starting adult learning, taking grownups back to school with all the fun of not being a child.
June 25, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining.
Issues: Community and Education.
For anyone who didn’t catch the latest BBC Two series “Toughest Place To Be A….” our first question is why not?
Based on the simple premise of taking British workers halfway across the world to do their jobs in some of the planet’s most challenging conditions, this programme has seen a bus driver, a paramedic, a firefighter, a fisherman and many more cross oceans to find out just how much tougher their jobs could be.
As well as being incredibly interesting TV, we think this programme is also an excellent device for encouraging cross cultural awareness amongst TV watching Britain. Helping to teach people about new cultures while highlighting similarities between ourselves and people who we might ordinarily never get a chance to met. We think this is a quite and clever way to encourage cultural awareness, acceptance and empathy in a mainstream audience without lectures, lessons or force.
It’s an idea we’d like to experiment with on Historypin (http://www.historypin.com/) more too, connecting people around the world with shared interests, hobbies and jobs.
April 30, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Digital Inclusion, Education, and Environmental.
Would you know where to find some parsley growing wildly near you? Strawberries? Rosemary? Pears? If not, it is time to think about starting your urban foraging journey. ‘Edible Cities’ is a not-for-profit organisation, created after an observation that there are many fruit trees and edible plants around our urban environment but we do not really use the resource properly. They decided to create an intuitive service platform which offers information based around a map on wild food growing near you, as well as allowing users to contribute to the archive of food sources on the website. The results have been very positive, successfully increasing people’s awareness of their local environment, encouraging them to eat food that would otherwise go to waste, getting people doing exercise outside and eating healthy locally grown food, all in a fun and accessible way.
April 16, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community and Environmental.
Can “Fun Theory”, as demonstrated in these previous posts (wearewhatwedo.org/good-ideas/piano-stairs/) be used to break down the barriers between strangers? The 21 swings project (http://www.dailytouslesjours.com/project/21-balancoires/) , created by Daily Tours Les Jours, suggests it can. Taking over the high traffic area in Montreal, a set of musical swings was set up, each sounding a different note, and when they were all swung together, acted like a giant musical instrument. Super-fun to use, the swings encouraged outdoor play, gentle exercise, and, perhaps most noticeably, the idea of cooperation. Speaking on their project, Daily Tours Les Jours said, “We believe we can achieve more together than separately.” The project provides a different perspective on connecting citizens with public space, and provides a meeting and talking point for people of all ages and backgrounds. It reminds us of a couple of other projects that involved putting pianos and pingpong tables in public places around cities.
February 5, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and social.
Issues: Community, Education, and Poverty.
When Skateistan’s founder Oliver Percovich first travelled to Afghanistan in 2007 he was met with groups of local children very eager to learn how to skate. What began as informal lessons, and Oliver giving away the boards he brought with him, has expanded into a real skateboarding scene in Afghanistan and the development of an International non-profit charity providing skateboarding and educational programming in Afghanistan, Cambodia and Pakistan.
The charity works with anyone between the ages of 5-18 but tries to keep a focus on street working children and girls. In the charities own words, ‘Skateboarding is simply “the hook” for engaging with hard-to-reach young people’ and from there they work to provide the children with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment programs.
http://skateistan.org/
January 15, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: job providing and social.
Issues: Community and Local Business.
TaskRabbit (www.taskrabbit.com) is an online and mobile marketplace that allows you to outsource your chores, getting people in your neighbourhood to do them. People in your area, already approved by the site, bid to complete the small jobs with the lowest bid accepted. Its great if you can’t be bothered to assemble your Ikea furniture, need someone to walk your dog or wash your car. In turn, you are providing creative ways for people to make money in a sour economy and many of the workers and users testify to building strong, friendly relationships with the new neighbour who weeds their garden or what have you. The workers do not need a high level of qualification, just ample energy and enthusiasm. TaskRabbit is based in the US but similar services are popping up everywhere including TaskPandas (http://www.taskpandas.com/) and Sorted (https://getsortedapp.com/) .
August 21, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Fun.
Issues: Community.
The Waitrose Community Matters initiative makes giving to charity a bit more fun: shoppers get to pick the local causes that the individual stores donate to by dropping a token in one of three boxes. You’re only putting a green disk in a box, but for some reason people love it.
Every month, each branch donates £1,000 (£500 from Convenience shops), which is split between three local charities, while once every quarter waitrose.com donates £25,000 to be split between three national charities. Waitrose divides these donations proportionally according to their customers preferences, as indicated by those awesome green disks.
August 7, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool and Fun.
Issues: Community and Disability.
By taking away all natural and artificial light sources the restaurant Dans le Noir? gives their customers the unique experience of eating completely in the dark. Guests are led by the blind staff to their tables and have to eat everything from soup to pasta in the pitch black.
It is marketed as a novel eating experience, helping you “experience your sense of taste, smell, and sound like never before”, but it incidentally helps you experience what it’s like to be blind or visually impaired, at least for a few hours.
It puts us in mind of the dolls teenagers are given to experience the responsibilities of having a baby: but instead of the experience being something forced upon you by a matronly Sex-Ed teacher who insists you “know what it’s like”, it’s something droves of people are paying for as its positioned as an interesting culinary delight.
July 6, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, and Fun.
Issues: Community and Inter-personal Contact.
If a brief had been written that set out to find a way to get young people to gain an appreciation for old films, an understanding of the society, politics and culture of different periods, and a shared interest with people of older generations, Secret Cinema would be a perfect solution. Hoping to create an environment where you can live the films rather than just watching them, complete with elaborate sets, actors in character to interact with, and restaurants and bars of the era, Secret Cinema gives moviegoers a chance to cultivate appreciation for the old films in a new way.
June 29, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Fun.
Issues: Community and Health.
Most of us have at least one guilty pleasure reality show we hate to miss, but there can be benefits beyond escaping into entertainment, especially if your go-to show happens to be Strictly Come Dancing. By inspiring viewers to learn to dance themselves, and providing a publicly visible space for people of different generations and backgrounds to interact and have fun together, Strictly Come Dancing has had some majorly positive impacts. Plus, who doesn’t love those costumes?
