FarmHack offers farmers new opportunities to work together on tools and innovations that will make our farms more sustainable and efficient. We also seek to collaborate with engineers, designers, architects and other non-farmer allies who want to help strengthen sustainable agriculture. Mainstream agricultural research and development tries to solve farmers’ problems with top-down, chemical and energy-intensive inventions. FarmHack seeks to solve problems by helping our community of farmers to be better inventors, developing tools that fit the scale and their ethics of our sustainable family farms.
The issue of the deterioration of the sense of community in American society has been pointed out in the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse And Revival of American Community, and is a core issue in improving the country’s standard of living. Cooperative home ownership helps build “social capital” by changing the relationship of “neighbors” from a loose network of independent people we live next to, to an interdependent network of individuals working to improve their living conditions.
We are a community based progressive media collective geared towards empowering, giving voice to and connecting communities who have historically been oppressed and marginalized. We focus on news and events the US corporate media systematically ignores as they cater to their corporate interests. We are uninfluenced by corporations or mainstream American political parties (Democrats/Republicans). We are influenced by a strong desire to give back to the communities we serve. We don’t believe that Journalism and Activism are mutually exclusive. We are activists telling the stories that need to be told in order to empower and educate the marginalized masses!
A couple of weeks ago, I [Alex Glustrom] showed some pictures of the destruction in Japan to some of the kids at my youth center and we then created this video.
Engage University is an alternative summer study program that immerses college students in a variety of community development initiatives across the U.S. I’m excited to create the curriculum for a program that will provide students with the opportunity to learn about structures of power and marginalization in a domestic context.
