UTNE Reader

A Chicago arts program preserves the city’s most famous music. It causes the most ardent supporters of arts in the schools to hesitate: “We want to give your children the blues.

”In what may initially seem a backwards idea, the Chicago School of Blues has couched a message of positivity in a program that combines the history, music, and movement associated with the blues. The traveling program has been taking this message to Chicago-area schools, cultivating the self-expression and freedom that is so often lost with shrinking arts budgets. In the process, it is preserving an art form that is forever woven into the historical fabric of the city.

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Co.exist

Without an Internet connection or robust smartphones, many people around the world don’t have access to instantaneous information. Question Box–a mobile phone connected to an operator–can help villagers from settling bar bets to answering serious questions about health and farming.

Ask, and you shall receive. When it comes to information in much of the developing world, this simply isn’t true. Connectivity is like air in industrialized nations: We take it for granted that we can go online with a question in mind and search a good portion of human knowledge to find the answer.

But the next time you’re in a bar settling an argument by checking IMDb on your smartphone, think about how people in other parts of the world have to resolve these questions, or even more important ones. Rural areas without decent roads or schools, never mind an Internet connection, have little to link them to the outside world. For these places, there is now Question Box.

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Co.exist

Many cities in America are facing the slow decline of their main streets and shopping areas. But a new program in Oakland might be the key to reviving vibrant, local commercial centers. All it takes is a little free rent and some entrepreneurial spirit.

Old Oakland, a historic district in downtown Oakland, California, has long struggled in its quest for vibrancy. It’s not that the neighborhood is in an inconvenient location; it’s close to the Oakland convention center and multiple transportation hubs. And it’s not because the area is ugly–it contains some beautiful buildings. But the combination of a down national economy and Oakland’s local struggles (the city has a 16% unemployment rate) have left retailers scared to open new shops and restaurants in the area.

Local entrepreneur Alfonso Dominguez has at least three reasons to be passionate about the area–he owns a taqueria, a restaurant, and a bar in the district. After spending too long staring at empty storefronts (and storefronts taken up by offices), he decided to do something.

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Positive News International

For his 12th Birthday, Cooper Berella asked if he could curate an art show. The show which opened in  September is called “Stop It!!” and features works from around 100 contemporary artists on the theme of bullying. A portion of the  proceeds will go to two anti-bullying organizations: GLIDE, or Gays and Lesbians Initiating Dialogue for Equality, and the CHIME  Institute where Cooper goes to school, an organization dedicated to inclusive education where kids of all abilities learn together.

Cooper said he chose an anti-bullying theme because it resonates with him. As a young child, he was diagnosed with autism, a  developmental disorder that makes him easily distracted. The now gregarious Cooper shows few outward signs of the disorder.

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Springwise.com

Detroit Soup raises money for creative endeavors through a monthly public dinner, where the diners also select which project to fund.

It’s no longer uncommon to see creative endeavors funded by the crowds. What is unusual about Detroit Soup’s approach, however, is that the funding — and selecting — of projects takes place via a monthly public dinner.

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Big Think

Crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo have become a huge phenomenon in the tech & geek space in 2011. The idea behind those platforms is pretty simple. People who want to raise money for a project, product or cause set up a campaign and the community decides if they want to back those projects or not.

This is especially interesting when you have an idea for a product. In the olden days you needed to build a prototype and probably go to the bank or investors to raise money for the production. This was tricky as it was also hard to find out if the market would want to buy the product or not. Hence, you needed to do intensive market research to make sure your product would not catch dust on the shelves. All in all, a tedious process that prevented many smaller or “weird” ideas from making it on the market.

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Yes! Magazine

How residents of America’s most famously down and out city are building livelihoods that also rebuild their communities.

For nearly a decade, Gloria Lowe was a final-line inspector for Ford Motor Company, checking new Mustangs as they rolled off an assembly line in Dearborn, Michigan. She worked at the River Rouge Complex, a hulking, mile-long structure that, back in the 1930s, employed as many as 100,000 people. By the time Gloria started working there, just a fraction of the workers remained. (Since the year 2000, metropolitan Detroit has lost about 200,000 manufacturing jobs, despite experiencing a slight gain since 2009.)

Then one day, in 1999, Gloria was on her way back into the plant after parking yet another Mustang when an automated, two-thousand pound metal door came loose and crashed down on her head. She was diagnosed with left-side nerve damage from the top of her brain down through her feet, and later, with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Bradenton Times

The U.S. Postal Service will celebrate the beauty of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge with a Priority Mail® stamp. In the stamp artwork, the bridge rises from the vivid blue water of Tampa Bay and is silhouetted against an orange sky. Tiny vehicles on the roadbed reveal the massive scale of this modern-engineering marvel.

The bridge was one of the first major concrete-and-steel, cable-stayed bridges in the United States. Completed in 1987 after a freighter collided with its predecessor, the main bridge and approach spans stretch more than four miles across Tampa Bay and link the Gulf Coast communities surrounding St. Petersburg and Bradenton.

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Co.exist

Most opportunities for service involve painting schools or serving food. But many Americans have skills–accounting, design, communications–that would be incredibly valuable for nonprofits and would make their volunteering more rewarding.

Service is a fundamental pillar of American society, and its roots go back to the origins of the nation. In the mid-1800’s Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans help each other in times of need and wrote, “I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare, and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another.”

From the highest levels of government, we are encouraged to serve. In April 2009, Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, a $5.7 billion measure to expand 16-year-old AmeriCorps, a program created under President H. W. Bush in 1990. AmeriCorps was a revamp of the longstanding VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program, created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and the Civilian Conservation Corps established by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. The first volunteer center was established in Minneapolis in 1919, and, way back when, Benjamin Franklin began the first volunteer firefighting company in 1736. America’s history in service is deep and continues to evolve.

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Springwise.com

Tonic Health hope to make patient data collection more engaging and reliable by using a game-like iPad-based platform.

A few months ago we saw smartphone technology being used to help medical professionals record and share data with Mobisante. Now, Tonic Health hope to make patient data collection more engaging for patients and reliable for doctors, by using a game-like iPad-based platform.

Tonic Health believe that switching from clipboards and paper forms to an interactive, game-like iPad interface is more enjoyable for patients, which therefore enables doctors to obtain higher response rates to surveys, better patient screening, and more accurate data, both cheaply and quickly.

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