Social Media for Social Change

My online buddy and urban gardener extraordinare TJ sent me a link to the garden site myfolia.com. He’d read my recent kidoinfo post on how we’re kicking our home garden up a notch this year in an effort to grow more of our own food; thus saving money, eating locally, being kinder to the earth, etc. As a newbie gardener and social media enthusiast, I was immediately smitten with the site.

Friends with plants

Myfolia.com is kind of Facebook for plants, with members creating profiles of and blogs about their gardens, and plants both tagged by name and sorted by growing zone. You can post cute badges to your own site, which display what you’re growing and direct people back to myfolia.com so they can set up their own accounts (viral!) Other sites like Greenthumbr and You Grow Girl serve similar purposes: allowing gardeners to share their advice, successes and stories. All of these sites are building communities of people who are interested in growing their own food. Many also share concerns about the environment, the effect factory farming and the use of pesticides is having on the earth, and where the food they’re eating actually comes from.

Green scene

An article in March’s New York Times documented the burgeoning interest that 20-30 somethings are showing in farming gives some insight as to why gardening and social networking are becoming intertwined. Tech-savvy young adults are choosing to live off the land, but don’t necessarily want to be off the grid. The politics of food production and the resultant impact on the environment are becoming more widely known, encouraging young activists to collaborate and take action as they are wont to do. And going green is trendy: Farmer’s Markets and locally-grown produce stands are cropping up faster than you can “friend” a rutabaga.

Even folks without a lot of land are getting into the gardening scene, which means container-gardening city-slickers can seed, weed, and RSS-feed. The proliferation of Community Supported Agriculture, Greengrocers, and the popularity of the 100 Mile Diet mean that people are paying more attention to where their food comes from and opting out of the factory farm paradigm regardless of their location. Locally-focused sites such as Local Harvest and (in my case) the New England Small Farm Institute and Farm Fresh Rhode Island help educate and guide people in their food purchasing choices, empowering health and environment-conscious foodies to shop smarter.

With plenty of online support and information available, growing your own produce and purchasing foods locally have become increasingly viable choices for folks newly interested in their food’s agrarian roots.

Ransom Family Action Plan:

• Grow a big garden of delicious foods
• Compost
• Purchase rain barrel
• Buy local

One of my new favorite sites, Techsoup, is hosting an online forum “Online Activism: Social Media Tools for Social Change” (great title!) on Wednesday, May 14th. TechSoup is a content-heavy site where non-profits can get access to technology resources, product discounts, donated equipment and all sorts of other great stuff.

Here’s a description of what’s taking place:

Dive into the conversation with hosts Heather Mansfield, owner of DIOSA Communications and Online Community Manager for Change.org and Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager for the Humane Society of the United States, as they explore the ins and outs of using social networking sites and strategies for determining how, why, and when to use different applications to broadcast your message. In discussing the dos and don’ts of effectively fundraising and promoting your cause, we’ll also look at lessons learned from successful (and not so successful) online campaigns.

The online event is happening all day, so there is no need to register but you can read more about it here. I will definitely be participating, so come join in the discussion next week!

I’m definitely a self-proclaimed Crazy Bird Lady in the making. May 17th is the Audubon Society of Rhode Island’s Bird-a-thon fundraiser and as members, we got an invitation from Jeffrey Hall, Senior Director of Advancement, to donate to the cause.

What’s interesting is that Jeffrey has set up a website through Firstgiving.com, a site that allows non-profits to quickly and easily build online fund-raising pages. Firstgiving confirms with the IRS that the company is a non-profit in good standing, then handles the transactions of incoming donations and tracks financial goals. Its simple design and ease of use and makes online fund-raising possible for even non-techy companies. Here’s Jeffrey’s page.

Not that birders are necessarily non-techy. In fact, birding is fast becoming a surprisingly high-tech past time; inadvertently becoming part of the new “Science 2.0″ movement that’s opening access to scientific data across the globe. With inexpensive GPS now available and “Lifelist” software for tracking personal bird encounters, even amateur birders can locate and record sightings, which benefits the scientific community as a whole. The site eBird, launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, encourages users to log their sightings in their database, thus harnessing the collective eyes and ears of (tens of!) thousands of volunteer field researchers.

From eBird’s site, a description of how their data gathering works:

The observations of each participant join those of others in an international network of eBird users. eBird then shares these observations with a global community of educators, land managers, ornithologists, and conservation biologists. In time these data will become the foundation for a better understanding of bird distribution across the western hemisphere and beyond.

Many birders are also avid photographers, which naturally segues into committed bloggers (blogger Lillian Stokes took the image above) and hardcore flickr users. And with its real-time mass communication ability, Twitter seems like it would be a natural social media choice for people observing, tracking, and recording birds. Especially given the updates are referred to as “tweets”.