Upgrade Party for Haiti

Our East Coast Grain'ers just hosted their first "Upgrade Party" to raise money for Haiti. Women brought in their unwanted clothes and bought clothes from each other to "upgrade" their wardrobe the triple bottom line way - good for people, cheap, and re-used.

In just a few short hours, we raised over $200! All the proceeds went to Partners in Health to help provide medical supplies on the ground directly to those in Haiti.

Sami is now working with DC's Art Commission to host a larger event at their next salon to raise more funds! So stay tuned!

Room by Room Video!

Harken Productions just put together an awesome video of Sami's Room by Room summer program for the City of Providence. Check it out!

Thank you Michelle Le Brun for putting this together!

Congratulations Earthkeeper Hero Sami!!

Brit and Sami were in New York celebrating with the other Timberland Earthkeeper Heroes, including newest Hero, Grammy Award-winning musician, humanitarian and Goodwill Ambassador to Haiti, Wyclef Jean! Congratulations Sami!!

Read more about Sami and her work with Nate Bastien as Earthkeeper Heroes here.

Room by Room Wrap Up

After an intense 6 week eco-design bootcamp, Sami just wrapped up Room by Room - the healthy home make-over show with inner city teens!

Each student had a $100 budget to make over their rooms to be healthy and beautiful in an affordable way.

Check out below a clip from some of the last day's silliness and some of the pics from the final presentations.

Getting set up for final presentations! Aileen and Melvin's!

Jaymin and Donnie's Goods just before final presentations!

Room by Room finale!

Doing some filming for the intro of the show!

As a Timberland EarthKeeper Hero, Sami has been blogging about her experiences here! Stay tuned for video clips from the show!

Thanks RISD Views!

It was cool to find Grain mentioned on a number of pages of the Spring 2009 RISD Views magazine. Firstly, our Sustainability Systems Strategist, Sami Nerenberg (also the youngest adjunct faculty member at RISD) contributed an inspiring article (pages 10-13) entitled Changing Design / Designing Change. 

Reminder: Sami needs your vote on Ideablob this week. Please support her amazing Room by Room project here. 

Secondly, Grain was grouped with our friends at Ecolect and Dawn Danby of Aylanto in a section called Designing a Sustainable Future (page 28). 

Finally, there was a nice little mention of the summer program that I led at the Seattle Art Museum last year called Re+Vision: Design Your (Neighbor)hood (page 33). 

Download the full magazine here. Thanks again RISD!

Go Time! Please Vote!

Thanks to all of YOU, we're in the FINALS - but now the real competition begins! Please vote again for our Room by Room pilot here!! Or if you haven't already, please take a minute to sign up!

As an exciting update, Room by Room has gotten a grant! As part of the stimulus package, the Workforce Investment Act has chosen Room by Room as one of its pilot projects to provide job training for at-risk youth!!

Plus we have a sweet new video! See above. :-)

Thanks for VOTING!!!

Ideablobbing to the Finals

We are proud to announce that Sami has made it to the finals for her Room by Room pilot show on Ideablob!! This means she has a 1 in 8 chance of winning $10,000!!!

Voting starts again May 22nd so rev up your engines friends and get ready to vote! Competition is SUPER tough and we will need all the support we can get. 

Sign up to be a "Network Node" to message all your friends starting Friday. 

Or be a "Blog Master" to write and comment on blogs across the web to link to Ideablob!

To sign up, contact Sami : sami (at) graindesign.com

Woohoo!!!

Heroes and Pilots: Vote Here

Our very own Sami Nerenberg is set to take off on her pilot eco-home makeover show, Room by Room! After Timberland has chosen her as an EarthKeeper Hero of 2009, this summer, 10 inner-city teens will compete in six weeks of eco-design bootcamp to be the best eco-designer and win their very own healthy home make-over!

Within the home one can find environmental burdens such as lead paint, mold, pests, and toxic cleaning products under the sink that can lead to things like learning disabilities, asthma, and even cancer. These burdens fall hardest on low-income often minority communities. It's her goal to share ways to make healthy, beautiful and affordable changes that we can all do during this time of uncertainty and rebuilding.

With the Majora Carter Group as her media consultant, Timberland as her publicity outlet, RISD and Brown University as her cohorts, this project is set to take off!  But she needs your help!

Vote for her idea on ideablob here so she can win $10,000 to pilot the show!!!

Brick by brick, block by block, Room by Room, together we can help to restore and redesign this nation!! Design for America!

Timberland's EarthKeeper Hero!!

Good News! I've been recruited by Timberland as an Earthkeeper Hero for 2009!  What does this mean?  Well, Timberland has partnered with a social network called Changents.com to develop the Earthkeeper Heroes program.  Together, they are "talent-scouting" around the world for six high-potential green agents of change from Generation Y and providing a promotional/consumer engagement engine to "break" these individuals onto the global environmental scene.  I am one of the six! 

The objective is for Timberland to position its Earthkeeper brand and ethos as a vehicle that helps individuals become the catalysts of environmental change around the world.  For me this means more horsepower to drive exposure for my work in Design for Social Entrepreneurship at RISD and my upcoming summer project! 

Please check out my story area on Changents and if you care to stay updated on my adventures, "back" me! 

What is Good Design Now?

This months issue of Metropolis Magazine is a special product issue titled What is Good Design Now?. We were happy to see our Sami Nerenberg quoted in the Products for a New Age article (p.96-99). When asked about her recent studio Design for Social Entrepreneurship at RISD Sami said:

"There is a real hunger to work on these projects. Two years ago I was part of a minority at RISD interested in these issues. Today students are looking at our economy, looking at where consumerism has led us. They want to shift away from producing excess and do something that makes them feel useful."

It was also cool to see (in the same article) the Baby Incubator by Design that Matters that James worked on with Mike Hahn while at RISD. See his contribution on the Grain website here.

Hello Intern!

In partnership with Brown’s Environmental Justice outreach group and RISD, Grain is developing an illustrated book depicting Rhode Island stories of Environmental Justice. The final result of the project will be used as an educational tool for afterschool programs on environmental health and possibly used for the upcoming Community Environmental College. 

To work on this project, Grain has adopted an intern! Please welcome Bee as we introduce her here. Bee will be working with Sami Nerenberg to illustrate the RI stories throughout the Spring semester.

 

Bee (Beeyun Sally Jo) is a senior in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from South Korea, she moved to Germany when she was in 6^th grade. She considers herself a balanced by-product of this global epoch and as a designer believes it is her responsibility to create projects of socially redeeming purposes. With her core interest in e-waste management, in partnership with Brown University, she is currently developing her Degree Project to create an active e-waste collection system on the RISD campus.

Bee’s experiences include interning at SIEMENS (Frankfurt), INNOCEAN advertising company (Seoul), and Teaching Assistant in RISD's foundation classes. She is also a part of RISD’s Respond|Design group, a community of artists and designers to create better solutions to environmental and social problems.  

As a small taste of what is to come, below is a quick sketch Bee did to visually depict the term "environmental justice." Stay tuned for more...

Design for Local Sustainability

Check out the final projects of Sami's Design for Social Entrepreneurship class at RISD on their website! Amazing work!

Social Entrepreneurship Workshop at A Better World By Design

Over 60 participants showed up for the Social Entrepreneurship Workshop led by Grain at the A Better World by Design Conference in Providence last weekend. The workshop asked participants to think about the many un-met design opportunities that could service communities here in the US. Content for the workshop was based on Sami Nerenburg's current studio at RISD, Design for Social Entrepreneurship. It was great for us all to be back at RISD/Brown. 

Sami ended the workshop with an inspiring quote from President-Elect, Barack Obama, that I would like to share again here:

"I ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand."

Sami also participated in a panel discussion entitled Social Entrepreneurship with Alan Harlam, Director of Social Entrepreneuership at the Brown Swearer Center, Caitlin Cohen, Co-Founder of Mali Health Organizing Project, and Marina Kim from Ashoka's Global Academy University Program. To read more about that check out her guest blog on NextBillion.net here.

Thanks to everyone who participated and to A Better World By Design for inviting us!

Sami Nerenberg to teach new RISD studio: Design for Social Entrepreneurship!

The Rhode Island School of Design has asked our Sami Nerenberg to develop and teach a new course in RISD's industrial design department! Her answer? An innovative new senior studio: Design for Social Entrepreneurship. Reading the course description (below) it sounds like it will be an amazing and inspirational experience for the lucky RISD students who get to take her class. Makes me want to go back to school! We'll keep you posted as the course develops.

Design for Social Entrepreneurship (DeSE)
RISD Fall '08

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. This course aims to cultivate social entrepreneurial designers by investigating the power of product, system and service design to create positive social and environmental change. Looking at both international and domestic issues, this course asks, how can design and design thinking be used to solve the world’s leading problems to achieve triple bottom line sustainability—environmentally, socially, and economically? Structured around holistic thinking, collaborative and individual design work, with mentorship from experts in the field, this course uncovers how to design products and/or services, wrap a business around it, and create tangible positive impact in our world today.

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