News From: Animating Democracy, A Program of Americans for the Arts

Animating Democracy’s most recent funder portrait, Art as a Strategy for Change, by Ann McQueen features the Compton Foundation. Discover how Compton supports the arts, including individual artists and filmmakers, with the explicit intention of amplifying critical issues in a way that blends the personal, political, emotional, and intellectual. This portrait is part of a series of brief papers and podcast interviews featuring funders who are supporting arts and culture as a creative strategy to achieve community building and development goals, civic engagement, or social justice goals.

•View the full portrait
•Listen to a podcast interview by Ann McQueen with Executive Director of the Compton Foundation Foundation, Ellen Friedman, and Program Director at the Compton Foundation, Jennifer Sokolove
•View the profile for the Moxie Institute

Earth Day Live Event

This Earth Day, join Green For All and the League of Young Voters Education Fund for #Earthdaylive. #Earthdaylive is a 2-hour live broadcast featuring some of the most innovative people, projects and organizations working to protect the environment and create opportunities for all communities. Featuring music, videos, and live interviews, it will be an engaging look at the problems our communities face, and the people creating the most effective solutions. You can tune in here from 3-5pm ET.
Click here to learn more about how you can get plugged in on protecting the environment and making your community more sustainable.

Last year we told you about a student-led, nationwide movement on college campuses called the Real Food Challenge, which works to get their schools to shift 20 percent of their food spending toward local and sustainable food systems. Currently, the vast majority of the $5 billion spent annually on campus food goes to large, industrial food companies.

Today Real Food Challenge announced an enormous victory in its efforts. One of the nation’s largest campus food-service providers, Sodexo, has entered into an agreement with the organization to open up its books and adhere to what a spokesman calls a “rigorous and comprehensive set of standards” for its food purchasing. On all 600 Sodexo-contracted college campuses and in 100 high school cafeterias, the $20 billion company will work with student leaders to evaluate the food it is serving using four key criteria: local and community-based, fair, ecologically sound, and humane. They will do so using the Real Food Calculator, an assessment tool developed by Real Food Challenge student researchers and associated food experts.  More>

We are proud to announce the release of two reports that Green For All and American Rivers collaborated to produce.  The first report assesses the landscape of career opportunities for workers with applicable skills to conduct operations and maintenance of green infrastructure practices. The second report identifies barriers to operations and maintenance and recommends strategies to address them.

Staying Green and Growing Jobs: Green Infrastructure Operations and Maintenance as Career Pathway Stepping Stones
This report reveals that water utilities investing in green infrastructure can outsource O&M work to workforce development programs that train individuals in green infrastructure – in fact, some already do.  Operations and maintenance work gives disadvantaged community members access to jobs and career on-ramps while performing the work required by water utilities.

Staying Green: Strategies to Improve Operations and Maintenance of Green Infrastructure in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed 
This report highlights existing information related to the cost of green infrastructure maintenance, identifies the significant barriers to effective operations and maintenance of these practices, recommends strategies to improve operations and maintenance, and provides resources and case studies that local governments can use as models.

We are currently calling for applicants for our Fall 2013 Residency Session.
Please take a moment to think of potential candidates – folks writing on important social justice and environmental issues — who might benefit from a two-week writing stint.

The Fall session runs from September 20 – November 14, 2013 and applications are due June 3, 2013.

Application Guidelines

Please download the 2013 Application Form and guidelines on how to apply:
Mesa Refuge Application Form and Guidelines Download

So much of our work is about connecting with people. At Resource Media we’ve learned through experience that the most potent communications efforts come with pictures. The right pictures. It doesn’t matter whether you are perched on Madison Avenue, or occupying Wall Street. Pictures are the pathway to people’s emotions, and emotions are the trigger for connecting with hearts and minds. Today we are launching a new initiative aimed at making us all better at visual storytelling.

Seeing is Believing is the culmination of two years of research into the art and the science of using pictures to influence, move and motivate people.  We are happy to be sharing this new guide with you today. But in many ways, this is only the beginning. Our goal is to host a learning community that can trade tips and techniques gleaned from real world application of the principles we offer here. In addition, as we learn more from our own work, we will continue to share it with all of you through blogs and tip sheets at visualstorylab.org.

We aim to create a visual lab in the truest sense, a place where we can all experiment and honestly assess what works and what doesn’t as we harness the power of pictures to create change.

Taking its name from brimstone, the elusive element medieval chemists believed would transform base metals into gold, this award focuses on the transformational properties of storytelling, and aims to increase understanding of the ways storytelling can promote change in individuals and communities.

The grant supports a model storytelling project that is service-oriented, based in a community or organization, and to some extent replicable in other places and situations. It is our hope that projects receiving this award will have impact beyond their own communities, organizations, or clients, inspiring excellence in applied storytelling work and communicating to new audiences the humanitarian possibilities of storytelling.

Many different sorts of projects can be considered for the award, including community, organizational or institutional programs, curricular activities, short residencies, and projects combining complementary art forms. Projects may involve various kinds of stories, including traditional tales and myths as well as personal and ad hoc narratives. Although oral storytelling should be central to the project, the work need not be conducted by professional storytelling performers. Educators, therapists, naturalists, internal or external organizational practitioners, etc., personnel appropriate to the situation may carry out the project, so long as they can draw on suitable storytelling expertise and experience. We are looking for responsiveness to the standards of good practice in the field of the project.  More>

Echoing Justice Report

In a media environment dominated by stereotypes and special interests, network driven communications strategies powered by grassroots organizing are more vital than ever. Use the share button to join the conversation on narrative strategy, infrastructure and resources to win the framing contests of the 21st century. Resources for Echoing Justice were provided by the Surdna Foundation, the Akonadi Foundation, and the Frances Fund.

TREC Invites Your Participation in a Survey of Salaries
of North American Environmental Groups

Training Resources for the Environmental Community (TREC) is pleased to invite you to participate in a survey of the salaries paid to people working in the environmental sector across North America.  A TREC service since 2006, this is the largest and most comprehensive salary survey undertaken for our industry.

The survey will collect information on salaries for 55 staff positions common to environmental organizations, from entry level to Executive Director. Comprehensive reports for both US and Canadian groups will be generated from the survey results.

All organizations that complete the online survey will receive the full report, in either Canada or US versions, at no charge.