And The Winner Is …

As we venture into the new year 2010, various media provide us with run-downs, top 10’s, count-downs, etc. of the most notable events of the past year.  My favorite was contained in an electronic greeting card I received from Kate Klaus Kelly, a delightful virtual assistant I’ve had the pleasure to work with this past year.  Here’s the link:  http://www.americangreetings.com/ecards/view.pd?i=505648072&m=9050&rr=y&source=ag999 

In fact, Kate is the overall winner this past year in the greeting card category, getting all three major year end events spot on in my book (Christmas, my birthday and the New Year greeting) - timely, and in absolutely hilarious form, each one.  They were so fun, I just had to share them all.  (Didn’t know American Greetings had it in ‘em …!!)  Here are the other two  for you to enjoy as well:

My birthday greeting : http://www.americangreetings.com/ecards/view.pd?i=504979802&m=9050&rr=y&source=ag999

Christmas (the best by far):  http://www.americangreetings.com/ecards/view.pd?i=504563311&m=9050&rr=y&source=ag999 

Wish you had been so cleverly funny, too, don’t you?  (THANKS KATE!)

May you all have a meaningfully fulfilled and - especially - an incredibly enjoyable new year!

More Alternative Holiday Gift-Giving Ideas

I recently wrote about Legacy-Level Holiday Gift-Giving Ideas.  (If you missed it, you can read it here.)  What makes something legacy-level gift giving?  Much like  legacies themselves, this level of gift-giving makes a positive difference - particularly, hopefully, a sustainable or long-term one and/or one that keeps on giving.  

A number of the gift ideas in that article may not have seemed to make a tangible, sustainable difference directly.  The point was to give with a small environmental footprint. So the legacy aspect of it was in what the gift ideas don’t do - they don’t add to waste and overconsumption, so they help promote long term environmental sustainability. 

While ultimately practical and maybe not what folks would think of as really “sexy” or “magical” gifts, I just found a similar article that provides some additional alternative holiday gift ideas - as in alternative energy approaches.  See Great Green Gift Ideas That Will Save You Money and Help the Environment to check out these practical, alternative gems.

So maybe you don’t want to use one of these gift ideas to that fabulous new person you’re dating and whose heart you’re trying to win.  They may still be great for family members, those people on your list who “have everything” — or even as gifts for yourself (and that fabulous new date may well be practical and environmentally minded …).  Since these gifts are good for environmental protection and ultimately help create a more sustainable planet, you may well be regarded as a real visionary and trend-setter - indeed, an impressive enlighted leader in your own right - through a very practical approach to legacy-level gift giving.  That demonstration of leadership might just create a following, with people replicating your example, making your gift idea one that keeps on giving as well.

Legacy-Level Holiday Gift-Giving Ideas

This holiday season, remember the 4 R’s: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle and Rot. Not words you think of when it comes to the holidays? You can easily begin to incorporate these terms of environmental conservation into your gift-giving plans.

What do the 4 R’s really mean? Many people understand them to be equal alternatives, when really they form a hierarchy. The best first step is to Reduce the amount of material consumed, and therefore the energy used and waste produced in making it. Next in line is to Re-use goods and material that no longer serve their original purpose, but can serve another one with minimal process until their useful is exhausted. This is the one that is probably the least used or most mis-used in what has become a worldwide throwaway society. How many one-use items will you throw away today alone (think coffee cups, other beverage and food containers plastic bags)? Recycling is only third in line — its benefit only kicks in when it’s not possible to avoid consuming new materials to begin with or to re-use them. And while a great thing to do, recycling requires use of additional resources for transportation to processing facilities and for the recycling process itself. Think: “an ounce of prevention vs. a pound of cure.” Finally, Rotting (composting organic materials) is always available but is primarily an activity of the agrarian age gone-by that too few of us utilize. It happens naturally in landfills and our water supply, with little benefit and the need to expend energy to clean or reclaim those resources after compostable items are discarded or washed down a drain. That valuable organic matter could instead be going back into the soil to enrich it.

So, how can you make a difference in this arena, especially during the holidays? Here are some suggestions:

Reduce by just limiting the amount of stuff — plain old consumer goods and consumables — you purchase and interact with this holiday season. Your savings account and waistline will thank you. And you will reduce the amount of packaging and overall energy expenditures involved (including your own personal life energy). Let simplicity be the watchword — meaningful quality rather than quantity in gift-giving. The Story of Stuff also sheds some important light on issues of over-consumption and the true cost of things you may otherwise consider a bargain. When you think you’re getting a deal and can therefore buy more — think again about the hidden costs … and buy less.

There are many ways to Re-use other than to save wrapping paper and make last year’s paper greeting cards into gift tags (although those are good ideas, too). Gifts don’t have to be shiny and brand new to be significant and meaningful. They can be hand-crafted, one of a kind wonders (a different way to say homemade, but heck, what’s wrong with homemade?) Some examples are shown below.

Hopefully, you are already utilizing the environmental conservation practice of Recycling. Of course it’s hardly a new concept. Prior to synthetics, mass production, and particularly the end of WWII, conservation and recycling were the way we lived. Goods made from nylon, real rubber and many metals were rationed and reused. The environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s brought the practice back into “fashion” after the “throwaway society” heralded by Life Magazine in 1955 —. The invention of disposables was a way to free up the modern housewife (and baby, just look how encumbered we’ve become!) Fortunately, Earth Day and the movement that followed created a whole new (old) way to look at what it means to waste, and what we consider trash (which, as they say, is often someone else’s treasure). So when you shop for that holiday party, take your own cloth shopping bags, buy beverages in glass and aluminum containers that can be re-fashioned into new items, and consider using recyclable corn cups and bamboo plates for informal gatherings. The latter can go into your compost.

Which brings us to Rot. Don’t forget being generous to your compost bin or pile. You can easily create the gift some beautiful rich fertilized soil for your plants and garden beds when discarding anything organic — from the morning’s coffee grounds and eggshells to all your veggie and fruit trimmings and peelings. Bigger gatherings, more food = more of this precious organic matter that may go to waste without a consciousness of how valuable it is. Learning how to compost is easy. Even winter and snow don’t need to stop you. Think of it as your gift to the planet and future generations on a very basic level … because it is.

The 4 R’s are a back to the future, or maybe forward into the past (?!) concept at its best!

Here are some other specific gift ideas that can keep you in the holiday spirit in a down economy, as well as, add to your environmentally friendly practices:

1. Give Services instead of Goods. You can give a gift certificate for salon or spa services, a car wash, a gardening service (like tree-planting or mulching the planting beds around the house), or organic cooking lessons. You can also give the gift of your own time, energy and expertise. Giving someone a book of coupons representing anything from computer training to your help doing household chores can be a very meaningful … and useful gift.

2. Give the Gift of An Adventure or Event. This is my personal favorite. At this point in my life, I’ve got enough stuff. But sharing time and experiences with people I care about means a lot to me. A card redeemable for lunch with a friend is worth a lot. My husband and I create trips and adventures (from local to international) to share with one another — which also supports the economies of the places we visit.

Here are a couple of photos from our recent honeymoon / “staycation” in our hometown of Key West. We had great fun being hometown tourists. Yes, we’ve chosen to live in this paradise at the end of a long road (which has its trade-offs folks), but I’m guessing your hometown paradise has great things to recommend it, too. Re-watch the Wizard of Oz if you need more of a reminder.

Gift certificates in the form of tickets to the movies, a concert or a local playhouse can be great fun especially if you get to be one of the ticket holders. This is also true for local attractions — to play golf (or mini-golf), enjoy a water park or spend the day at a botanical garden or museum. Memberships in local nonprofit organizations — producing the gift of involvement — are also an option.

3. The Gift of Personal Treasures. You may have family heirlooms, antiques, collectibles, artwork or jewelry that someone else would treasure, too — especially since it once belonged to you. This is true also of crystal, wood carvings, geodes or similar pieces of nature as art. They contain part of your story and lots of sentimental value, two things you can’t buy anyway.

4. Special or Healthy Edibles. This is when “homemade,” or hand-crafted with heart, is something especially good. Pies, cakes and cookies, barbecue or hot sauce (perhaps complete with the old family recipe) or even fresh or dried herbs from your garden are easy on the environment and convey your heartfelt wishes through the effort you put into exercising your culinary skills. Making up a few batches as gifts probably won’t take more time than trudging to and through the shopping mall, and it will be time more pleasantly spent by you, especially if the weather outside is frightful. And you never know what the effort might produce – see our Legacy Story this issue.

5. Gifts of Social Good – another of my favorites. I decided a couple years ago to make gifts in the names of family, clients and friends, that make a contribution in the world. Farm girl that I am, one of my favorites is Heifer International, an organization that provides needy individuals and families with the gift of sustainability by providing them with numerous farm animals that can then be used to produce commodities like dairy products, wool, honey, etc. — not to mention offspring, which the beneficiary agrees to pass along to another member of the community in effect “sharing the wealth.” Some of the other organizations we support are:

• www.GENI.org — an organization focused on linking renewable energy resources around the world using international electricity transmission in attempt to answer the question: “How do we make the world work for 100‰ of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?”
• www.FINCA.org — which provides micro loans that give poor women the opportunity to work their way out of poverty; and
• www.WomenForWomen.org — which helps women survivors of war rebuild their lives. (This one is particularly special to me since my own mother was a survivor of WWII who came to the United States to rebuild her life and work).

Each one is an amazing legacy story of its own, and we’ll tell them here by and by. For this holiday season consider making a donation to one of them, or any other organization that moves your heart, in the name of someone you care about. You’ll be making an important difference at the same time.

People Want to Believe You Can Make Money And Make Sense - And It’s True

In fact, going into the future, it’ll probably be the best way to make money.  If we even need money - ah, the utopian dreams of my youth.  Consider …

There was the Agrarian Age - the age of farms and self-sufficiency.  Then the Industrial Age - assembly lines, mass production of goods, the throw away society, plastics, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, myriad forms of pollution, Global Climate Change … modern, progressive futurists we may think we are, we still live so very much in that age.  

Then came the Information Age - when we all began to have access to news and information from around the globe that we never had before, ushered in (oh so long ago now folks) when stories of the Viet Nam War were shown, graphically, on television.  War on TV for the first time - now sensationalized mayhem day in and day out on all major news stations - trying to keep us glued so as to sell us more and make us bigger consumers. 

Fortunately, during this era the internet was opened up to regular Josephines like us (yes, Al Gore DID do that - he didn’t invent it as the ridiculing comments would have it, but he did open up access to it for we the people.)  And baby look at what we know now. 

These past eras ushered in one where we have greeds like Bernie Madoff, and making money through mathematical formulas compounding penny size trades by the second and derivative securities concocted by the best and brightest from MIT and similar institutions of higher learning - instead of creating value added products and services to save the planet. But that’s another story.  Fortunately, these days of massive info access also ushered in greater transperancy in just about everything - from knowing much of the in’s and out’s of the fall of Enron and Worldcom and the big three auto makers (unfortunately too late to circumvent the harm their poor decisions wrought), to knowing all the ingredients in the products we purchase so can make better informed choices.

People are wondering what comes after the Information Age. 

Well, I think it is the Age of Integrity. I certainly hope it is.  As in, an age of wholenesss - we’re all one in this universe, so let’s pull this planet altogether and create from what’s best, what adds the most value to the most people, eliminate waste, become unconditionally constructive and compassionate, go back to being citizens rather than mere consumers to be marketed to and parted from our dollars, euros, yen, rubles, etc.  Integrity also as in ethical - doing the right thing for the right reasons and vowing to become ‘obedient to the unenforceable - doing what’s right because we all begin to develop a higher sense of consciousness and know it’s the right thing, not because someone’s going to punish you if you don’t.

If we can pull that off, we have a future.  In business there is (finally!!) a new push toward social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism.  It’s been growing as a grassroots effort for some time, mainly on websites, blogs and in chat rooms around the world wide web.  These subjects are now being taught in some of the great university business programs  (it’s about time): the Harvard Social Enterprise Initiative, Stanford Center for Social Innovation, and Berkeley Center for Responsible Business, for example. 

As reported recently by Axiom News, people are eager for conscious capitalism focused businesses.  Word is getting out (geeze what has taken so long?) that people yearn for higher meaning and greater purpose in life and work than just financial results - elevating work to a spiritual practice, integrating the practical with the very personal.  Author and Professor at Boston’s Bentley University, Raj Sisodia understands this - and is teaching it.  His new book, Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose makes the case.  

And none too soon.  What do you think?

Legacy projects are taking this form of social enterprise.  Whether as a corporate responsibility project cooperatively begun by existing business owners and their staff ,or a personally developed social change philanthropic project begun by individual social entrepreneurs - more and more people are doing this work.  It is my great pleasure to get to support them in consciously developing their projects, incorporating sound business, management and marketing principles for long term viability, and with an eye toward making a positive contribution.

What joy that is! So, if you, too, believe you can make money and make sense, how will you help usher in the Age of Integrity?  I’d love to know your thoughts and ideas, and how you’ll implement them!

68% of Americans Know We Can Do This - And We Can! Now Tell Congress To Get It Done

Two fascinating bits of news I ran across today:

As reported in Solar Nation, 68% of people in this country believe that passing strong clean, renewable energy legislation to address climate change will result in new jobs (as opposed to job loss).  And why would investing in creating and developing new green technologies not result in new jobs?! 

This is great news because the Senate is currently deliberating the Waxman Markey climate change legislation that came out of the House of Representatives a couple months ago.  If you want to let your Senators know how you feel about the U.S. taking a global lead in reducing the use of fossil fuels and addressing climate change, you can easily find and contact them here.

The second piece of good news is of the we have the technology variety.  Well, so many of them, but this one is amazing.  This isn’t some pie in the sky notion - creating these new clean technologies.  We now have the Algeaus: the first car with a gasoline engine (as opposed to diesel engine as in bio-diesel), to cross the United States powered by fuel derived from algae.  This story is being told in a film called The Fuel Film a winner in the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.  And what a legacy story that is!! World changing in a big, positive way.  Take that big oil!

Remember photosynthesis?  The process by which plants take up carbon dioxide and, using sunlight, produce oxygen? Well algae can do it and produce fuel - more fuel than any crop based ethanol or other biofuel.  Take that big agriculture!!

More about the film and the car:

 
But there is more to know and do, so oh!, now maybe we can move some of our tax dollars being devoted to oil and corn subsidies and pass them along to the production of clean, renewable energy sources?! As a consistent form of support they can count on so the needed business infrastructures can be built around them?  The kind of leadership being shown by the developers of this news and these technologies is the kind we need in our government representatives - focused on a more positive future for us all and following generations.

That would be a significant impact and a great thing.

A Living Legacy of Chocolate Chip Cookies Designed To Carry On

Over seventy years of chocolate chip cookies is a legacy project that most everyone can relate to.  Not seventy year old cookies, relegated to a museum.  Rather a process of serving warm, just out of the oven cookies for people to enjoy week after week over that time.

Just goes to show everyone can contribute something – and with the right planning, what lives on beyond your lifetime can simply be an extension of what was joyfully given during it.  Candace “Dacie” Moses provides us with an example of just how big even a small gift, made sustainable, can grow to be.

Dacie Moses was a librarian at the Carleton College in Northfield, MN, in the U.S., where she was awarded an honorary master of arts degree in 1969.  But her real claim to fame, both in the legacy she defined and lived, as well as what she left for future generations is the Dacie Moses House.  During her life, Dacie invited students to her house for freshly baked cookies, Sunday brunches (for up to 50 people), to hold conversations, watch TV or play the piano, snack from her refrigerator or call home from her phone.

Valuing the creation of community around warm chocolate chip cookies and conversation, Dacie did one more thing before she died in 1983 at the age of 97: in her will she donated her house to the Carleton Alumni Association.  She
instructed that it be used as it was during her lifetime – available as a hostel for students and alumni, that the upstairs apartment be rented, and that the rents received be used to maintain and improve the property.  In a separate trust, she provided funds to pay for supplies needed to make sure the freshly baked cookies remain available and to cover the cost of the Sunday brunches.

Two students still live there each year, overseeing and caring for the house, which continues to be a student and  alumni gathering place.  Her own bedroom and private bath are rented out as a hostel to Carleton visitors.  The legacy Dacie lived, lives on to benefit others.  It now even has its own website, a following on Facebook, and a video on YouTube that chronicles Dacie telling her own living legacy story.

The following tribute was written about this legacy:

“Let it (Dacie’s home) become a place of ministry, the rarest kind of ministry, a ministry not of preaching or persuasion or programming, but of simple hospitality - for this was the ministry Dacie performed over
all those long and faithful years… In the hospitable space of Dacie’s house we have always been free to be who we are without embarrassment, inadequacy or shame.” 
(from the Carleton VOICE, Vol. 46, No. 3, p.34, by Parker J. Palmer, alumni 1961)

From the conviction of her values, her joy in life and a little bit of property, Dacie Moses created a lot in her life that she consciously designed as an enduring legacy.

Doing something similar requires only that you

• take stock – of what you value, what brings you joy and what you have to contribute,
• develop a structure for it,
• find and coordinate the advisors you’ll need to make it happen, and
• get it going in a way will live on when you choose to step away. 

At Creating Legacy, we help you put that all in place.  From a local community project to a global enterprise, the difference is only a matter of scale built on your unique desires and circumstances.  Who would you like to impact, and how?  I personally take great joy in helping people make that happen.

Just what might your legacy be?