Stop Injustice: 5 Weeks for Freedom is a major awareness and advocacy campaign to support International Justice Mission’s work and give a voice to victims of modern-day slavery and other forms of injustice. A team of ordinary people is giving up 5 weeks to cycle 1800 miles of the Underground Railroad – a route that reminds us that change happens when ordinary people do what they can to stop injustice, that the evil of slavery has been defeated once, and that, together, we can do it again.

Over the 5 weeks of the campaign – June 28 to July 31, every major city along the tour route will host events featuring music, celebrities, the tour riders and more, to raise awareness of modern-day slavery and other forms of violent oppression – and empower people to take action to stop injustice.  You can even track where the riders are, at any given time, which is a really fun feature of what they’re doing!

The cycling tour is led by Venture Expeditions, a non-profit organization committed to mobilizing support for humanitarian work through major cycling and climbing tours.

International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that brings rescue to victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. Every day, IJM lawyers, investigators and social workers partner with local governments in 13 countries to rescue victims of violence and secure long-term aftercare; prosecute their perpetrators; and ensure that local laws, police and courts protect the poor from violent abuse.

As today’s leading casework-based human rights organization, IJM is bringing rescue and transforming justice systems and communities around the world. Learn more at www.IJM.org.

Mission Year is an organization we have done a lot of work with and believe in.  People ranging in age from 18-29 apply for this year long program.  They spend the next year of their lives volunteering in urban neighborhoods, assisting non-profits in the area, learning to live in community, meeting their neighbors, and living simply.

They address social justice issues by learning to identify disparities in power and working creatively to bring resolution.  There is an amazing curriculum that accompanies the year long experience, in order to bring about the maximum benefit of the program.

Mission Year asked one of their alum, Travis, to share how Mission Year changed the way he lives his life, and this is what he had to say:

I could easily write several pages on how MY changed the way I live my life. Obviously, the city taught me about poverty, social injustice, racial reconciliation, simplicity, economics, and how Christianity looks in the city. What I learned could never be learned from reading a book or watching a television show; it had to be learned through experience. The city changed the way I viewed the poor, money, minorities, community living, health care, education, law enforcement, and many other related issues. But the craziest thing about the city and Mission Year was that it brought me closer to God by showing me things I can still do in my home town, at school, or anywhere God chooses to put me.

If you’re interested in exploring the possibility of your own Mission Year, or know someone who might have an interest, email or call Sarah: sarahq@missionyear.org  888.340.9327.  They’re getting ready to close applications for the fall, so go visit them now!

We have vegetables!!! And lots of them!  Currently we are harvesting tomatoes (cherry, heirloom, and Roma), green peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, green beans, potatoes, and egg plant. Our corn is finally starting to come in and we are starting to see some okra, black eyed peas, and snap peas.

I think the one thing I am learning about gardening is that our job as the gardeners is really just to support the growth that is taking place daily in the garden. Our veggies and plants are growing like crazy, they just need some structure and boundaries and support to help them grow to their optimal potential.

Last Saturday was a gardening day with a large group of us and we noticed some problems. Our cherry tomatoes were out of control. Our eggplant was sagging over because the actual vegetable is really heavy. Our black eyed peas were twisted and crawling all over the place. And finally our area of squash/zucchini/cucumbers was overtaking the entire garden, while many of the vegetables were rotting on the ground. We needed some serious support systems!

We started looking for rope and support poles and figuring out a plan. We used everything we could find in our old shed and someone even ripped pieces of their t-shirt apart for ties. We googled ideas to help revise our squash area. We came up with a plan to raise all the squash vines in the air along ropes so that the vegetables wouldn’t rot on the ground below. (We’ll see if this works and I will update you all on the next blog. You can see the picture below.) We staked up the egg plant and tied up the cherry tomatoes to 6 foot poles. It was a hot and productive morning.

What I am realizing is that these plants are getting everything they need to grow from the Creator, and all they need from us gardeners is a little tending and support along the way. My garden and I are not that different.  I need support too.

Last week at my job I basically had one of the worst weeks of my life, working 12 hour days, learning a new computer system, feeling like an idiot, and not sleeping well because I was having nightmares about the next day. It was horrible, and when I look back at last week, I realized that the whole time I had my husband cooking me dinner when I got home late, taking care of baby bottles every night, rubbing my back while I cried myself to sleep, and ultimately I made it. I made it through my week, and the reason I did was because I had my supporter. He is my one constant person. No, he can’t do my work for me, but can steadily support me in the tough spots of life. So, this is my thank you to my sweet best friend and biggest supporter in all of life.

“CouldYou? has done an excellent job of mobilizing people with passion, resources and skills that engage in meaningful partnerships to bring sustainable change in Africa.”

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana on May 31st, 1982, Patrick spent his early years growing up in North Carolina. Toups made his way to East Carolina University where he studied as a sculptor. There he developed a great passion for the sculptural process and was introduced to the field of art. Being surrounded by an experimental environment pushed Toups to develop a flexible yet pragmatic approach to viewing, perceiving, and making art.

After receiving his Bachelors of Fine Arts in May of 2005, Toups displaced to the job field. Working in central Florida as a head of department for American Bronze Fine Art Foundry, he became acquainted with the business side of art. During this time Toups indulged in research and development for his newer methods and materials that have been utilized in his most current bodies of work.

Leaving Florida, Patrick set out to Atlanta, Georgia in search of his Masters degree. Studying at Georgia State University, Toups parted from his education and is now building a private studio to continue his sculptural investigations.

Toups has a long track record of exhibiting across the southeast as well as internationally.  Among many of his goals and accomplishments, Toups aspires to be an educator of the Fine Arts – any way possible.

“I choose the material, the material chooses the way, the way becomes the art, art is the idea.”

Plywood People-Gisele Nelson: Have you always been interested in art?  When did you start creating?

Patrick Toups: I have always been interested in building with my hands; art is just a way in which I can title the things I create. Some of the earliest forms of my creativity can be traced to the days of fort building and pumpkin carving. Not until my early 20′s did I recognize my eye for composition and drive to see out a vision would be a way through life.

Plywood People: How did you decide to work with rust?

Patrick: That has a multifaceted answer. When choosing to work with materials such as iron and steel, rust becomes a common sight around the shop. Any material containing the element iron is inevitably going to oxidize and produce rust; it is only a matter of time. The interesting thing to me is after many years around this natural process of oxidation, I began to notice how metal objects around the city, such as light posts, handrails, and fencing, are over time rusting and what that rust looked like. As a result, these man made objects produce oxidation stains that can be found everywhere along sidewalks and walls throughout Atlanta.  What’s so important about that? you might ask, nothing immediate. Just a small look at some the effects we have on the environment and how as time marches on to create a byproduct of both natural occurrences and unnatural invention. For me, it symbolizes a record of energy exchange.  Oxidation is the loss of an electron from a molecule. When I decided to use cast iron objects mounted in canvas and then use the natural qualities of those materials to produce oxidation stains, I wanted to record the exchange of energy as well as make a reference to visual stimulus that can be found all over the city.

Plywood People:  What is the process you go through when you’re creating your artwork with the rust and canvas?

Patrick: The process I use when creating this work is very extensive. In fact, the rusting itself is the easiest step; you could even say it comes naturally. But to get to that point many man-hours are placed into the foundry process. The act of metal casting is ages old and dates back to before the Greek Empire. The show at One-Twelve Gallery has two concepts driving the work. One side is the obvious subject matter of oxidation but the other has to do with the process in how the iron shapes were created. Foundry work has been both passion and profession for me. At every turn I have tried to streamline the iron casting process so that I could innovate new ways of manipulating both the material and methods to my advantage and to produce artworks. This show is partial narration of contemporary cast iron methods that I have been innovating over the last nine years. I utilize both the waste and the product from the process so the viewer can conclude on their own what the process might have been like when It was happening.

Plywood People: Are there any artists or mentors that have played a role in developing your talent?  Who are they, and how have they helped you to improve?

Patrick: I have mentors, many of which derive from academia during the days I was building a foundation of my skill sets. From them I learned of the determination and drive that I would need to forge my own way. Of course inspirational ideas only go so far and one must provide for themself, so the best mentors I have are both my successes and failures.

Plywood People: What are your next steps moving forward?  Where are you hoping to go from here?

Patrick: The show at One-Twelve Gallery was a 3 year chapter finally closed for me. The art on those walls represent a thesis to myself in spite of all the opposition I endured to complete a long awaited vision. It gave me an opportunity to say everything I needed about an overly jaded process while at the same time accentuate all the raw natural qualities of a material I love. So the next step is to move on, and I already have, by about a year now. There is a new body of work that I have been pursuing through research and development, and now that I have cleared my mind of unfinished business, I have started work on several large-scale steel sculptures with heavy emphases on the cohabitation of both organic and industrial forms. With any luck I can get my work into the best gallery of all, outside.

Green Mountain Coffee is what makes it’s way into my coffee maker every morning.  They understand what it takes to brew a delicious cup of coffee.  They purchase beans grown high on a mountain, in warm soil fed by gentle tropical rains. They are constantly on the road, visiting the world’s finest coffee-growing regions and meeting the people behind the beans.

Green Mountain Coffee also takes part in a corporate responsibility venture called Brewing A Better World.

• At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day, and almost half — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. (Source: www.globalissues.org)
• Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases — that’s over 30,000 per day and one every 3 seconds. (Source: 80 Million Lives, 2003 / Bread for the World / UNICEF / World Health Organization)
• If climate change trends continue as expected, by 2080, an additional 1.8 billion people could be living in regions where water supply is scarce, and the number of people affected by malnutrition could rise to 600 million. (Source: United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2007/2008)

Learning statistics such as these has prompted GMC to work hard to create positive and sustainable change consistently through both business practices and community outreach.  They have seen how our research and grantmaking in supply-chain communities has increased families’ health and economic well-being. They’ve also seen how they can leverage their purchasing and partnering power with suppliers to help improve working conditions and protect the environment.  They work to provide sustainable employment and foster a dynamic, healthy, vibrant workplace, and are committed to reducing waste and using energy responsibly.

We encourage you to check out their website to see the other things they’re doing in their coffee growing communities to fight poverty and hunger.

The thing that excites me most about what I do is I get to remove barriers. When it comes to making places – communities – work, I’ve come to see that it ultimately is all about how well that place allows for connections to happen. Some places the traffic is horrendous. Other times there are high concentrations of blight or deteriorated infrastructure. Many times the problem is more vague and there is just a knowable lack of a sense of place – or as is often said, there is no “there” there.  And it turns out that 100% of the time the problem is that there are barriers in place – some intentional but mostly unintentional – that are at the very root of the problems in the community, that are keeping it from being a well functioning place.  From redesigning a soon-to-be abandoned Army base into a thriving new town center to creating a new development plan for the Buckhead commercial and office district in Atlanta, where there are few physical barriers, there are barriers in place in terms of this being a community for many different stages of life, incomes and ages. Those may not seem like logical barriers but the more a place becomes the commodity of smaller and smaller segments of the greater community the more you have a place that has the potential to be “vanilla” and long term is not equipped to weather sure-to-come demographic, economic and social shifts.–Aaron Fortner

I’ve been a gainfully employed placemaker and urban designer for about 14 years now and in that time I can definitely say I am doing what I want to do and am able to make the dreams and ideas that I have come alive. As I think about this idea of pursuing ideas and making them a reality I realize that for me there has been one single and distinctive perspective that has enabled me to make this all a reality.

I can remember at an early early age – 8 – that I loved cities and I wanted to know everything about them. I grew up in Tampa and that was the city I wanted to know the most about since it was proximate. I wanted to know what every building was about, when it was built and what if any past lives it had. And where there were not buildings or active uses I wanted to know if something was being planned or proposed for the space. At the age of 8 I made my parents subscribe to not 1 but 2 local papers so that I could have access to information on all the latest plans and proposals for the city.

While most kids my age were laughing through the funnies, I would study the city plans communicated in the business section. I loved the mornings when there was an article complete with maps and renderings of the newest proposed office tower, park, district, neighborhood or whatever. I had to be the only kid in 3rd grade that was waiting to watch the late night news to hear if the City Council had approved the bond package for the latest great idea of a project that would transform the city.

And even before the ripe old age of 8 I can remember being 6 and asking my mom and dad to drive through neighborhoods I had never been to on the way home from church so I could see places I had never seen before. Occasionally they would even grant my request to stop and go into houses that were for sale just because I was eager to know their layout and whether or not I thought they were cool. I can imagine the discomfort of my parents now that I understand that open houses are the byproduct of a group of people who are trying to sell the home and not some kind of children’s museum or after-school program.

At the time I knew that this made me quite different from my friends but I couldn’t help it. This was just who I was and what I was naturally interested in. In my college years this life-long passion and curiosity would lead me on a more intentional pursuit for purpose first through engineering courses, then architecture and finally a city planning and urban design curriculum.

What I now know in hindsight is that I possessed from an early age the perfect perspective on who I was and what I was passionate about. That perspective was not an emerging business plan or a great strategy for a modern day design of the city. What I always had that I still have to this day is an unquenchable thirst to know everything there is to know about what makes places work. Ultimately this is what I was after as an 8 year old and this is what I am still after as a 35 year old.

I believe that in the world of idea chasing it is imperative to truly know who you are and what you are really after. Because I think if we can do that then we can always be making our ideas happen. At the heart of every idea for me is this pursuit of making amazing and beautiful places. Does it mean that I’m always successful and that everything task I undertake is a smash hit? Nope. But because what I’m ultimately after is the pursuit of knowledge of how to make places work, even my failures reveal to me a lesson-learned which then serves to turn the failure into a success.

I’m not after a job, a program or a tool. I may end up using and being very excited about all of these things, but they are not ultimately what is at the heart of the idea – these are just extensions of it. Making ideas happen doesn’t mean I can only do so if I get the right job or if somebody hires me for the right project. For me, I am always able to use the resources and opportunities of my situation to make my ideas happen. As a child I had the legos, lincoln logs and long reams of papers and markers to make every idea I had happen. As a citizen of my community I get to use my home, my block, my sidewalk, my street and my neighborhood as the opportunity to make my ideas happen. My garden is not just a garden; it is me making my ideas of what make great places happen. My house is not 5 feet from my neighbor’s house because of a developers profit margin but it is the direct manifestation of my pursuing those things that I believe lead to great places. I am a part of leading a monthly neighborhood gathering of neighbors not because I am part of a civic association but because it is what I can do to make great places happen in my community.

Peel back the layers of ideas until you find the distilled and pure idea that lies at the heart. When you know that you can then be pursuing the idea at all times, in all situation and for the rest of your life. And only then will you truly be able to have an idea that is always happening and that can fully reward you for its pursuit.

When I read, I generally have pretty strong feelings one way the other about a book within the first few pages.  The really good ones, I have to pace myself as I read, because I’ll fly through them in a matter of hours.  I don’t want to put them down.  The problem is, if I read them too quickly, I miss half of their importance.  I force myself to ONLY read one chapter in each sitting, so I have time to think through their concepts and take from them what is going to help most.

This is how Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky was for me.  I didn’t want to put it down, and I find myself thinking about his concepts on a regular basis.  Have you ever had a BRILLIANT idea, that you just KNEW would change the whole world if you could just figure out the best way to implement it, or get it in front of the right people, but somehow 3 months later, nothing has been done with it, or worse, someone else did something with it?  One of these 2 scenarios happen all the time to a million good ideas.  Implementing the practices laid out in Making Ideas Happen, can help see ideas through to their completion, give insight into when it’s time to let go of an idea or save it for later.

It’s become the text book for our office.  I refer to it, re-read the underlined passages, try to remember what he said about note-taking or Insecurity Work, etc., and then work hard to implement his ideas, because they just make sense!  As an organized person and a lover of order, I appreciate how succinctly he answers questions that I didn’t know I should be asking, and he offers really practical insights into how to work to get to desired outcomes.

Read the book, then tell us what your favorite concept was from it.  We’d love to hear what you liked best!

As a community addressing social needs, we are always searching for social problems with the hope to match them with entrepreneurial creativity to organize, innovate, and manage ideas that produce change. We hope to foster conversations and collaboration between the privileged and those in need through educational environments, sustainable ventures, community places, social experiments, storytelling projects, cause marketing campaigns, and new consumption patterns.

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This is why we have started our Social Innovation List.  We want to give a quick reference point to some great businesses and organizations that are meeting some of these needs.  Every month we will feature five new creators that you need to know about that are changing our world. Please let us know if you know of a social innovator we should consider featuring in the future.