Would you be interested in working with us to actually launch this project?  Please contact us.

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In practice, Speakeasy is not a new concept as many multilingual individuals are already serving as informal interpreters for their family members and friends, but often with uneven results and compromising privacy.

Speakeasy leverages the widespread use of cell phones and connects non-English speakers to guides promptly, reducing the undue burdens placed on callers’ families and friends. It provides individuals access to critical social services and resources while they learn English and acclimate to their new society.

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Oakland’s blessing, and sometimes bottleneck, is its passionate, empowered and diverse social sector that results in some neighborhoods having 4+ community garden organizations, and others having none.  Meanwhile, Oakland has far fewer community gardens per capita than many major cities of its size.  We assembled a team to address this longstanding structural obstacle to increasing urban agriculture and food security in Oakland, CA.  We are exploring partnerships and business models for a Community Garden Management Organization that will be a pilot project to test the limits of what would be possible if one entity dealt with all the headaches of land ownership and asset management so that community members could get to the important work of strengthening the ties within the community by working together to create more urban agriculture and food security. Our goal is to launch a pilot project in collaboration with the existing urban agriculture organizations, public agencies, and philanthropy by the end of 2013.

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We pulled together a project team and jointly developed the concept for Housing Checkup as a submission to the 2013 Knight News Challenge on Open Government. We were one of 40 semi-finalist out of 880 submissions.

Everyone deserves to live in a safe and healthy home. Housing Checkup provides tenants and their advocates access to a property’s complete health history, such as landlord information, current code violations, and past health and safety inspections.

Imagine the place you call home is hazardous to your health. Nearly six million families in the U.S. live in substandard housing, according to the National Center for Healthy Housing. These are homes without adequate heat, broken plumbing, fire, electrical dangers, pests, mold, or chemical hazards like lead and asbestos.

More than 535,000 children have high blood lead levels, largely as a result of poorly maintained walls and windows with lead paint. Moisture and mold, cockroach infestations, degraded carpets, and poor ventilation can all contribute to asthma. Damaged wiring and non-functioning fire prevention systems can be life-threatening. And some communities face these harsh realities more than others. We believe that everyone deserves to live in a safe and healthy home, regardless of of income, ethnic background, or neighborhood.

Tenants have a right to know a home’s health and safety history before they rent, and government should support tenants’ right to know by making data on housing inspections and violations easily accessible. Improved access to data on housing inspections can support tenant advocates and legal assistance agencies in their work to protect healthy living conditions for families. Greater transparency of property inspection and violation histories and public exposure of landlords with a history of violations can help motivate landlords to comply with basic habitability standards.

Housing Checkup is a web application that integrates regulatory and legal data from all public agencies regulating housing conditions, allowing people to access the complete “housing health history” for either a property or a landlord – like a CARFAX for homes. By designing an application that leverages data from multiple agencies and multiple cities, Housing Checkup will help advance a uniform open data standard for residential health and safety inspection data in the U.S.

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Health happens in a social context because humans are social beings.  This social context had a greater effect on health outcomes than our genetics and our access to the health care system.  We remain healthy because of our social context, we access the health care system typically when we have become ill.  Influencing our social nature is the next great opportunity for healthcare and it begins with each of us.

The Cards are a result of combining the concept of Creative Intelligences, the way in which people create an understanding of the world around them, with the Social Determinants of Health.

These cards are observation tools for a practice of Social Determinants of Health because they build on you, yourself as the most powerful instrument of monitoring, measuring and researching your environment and surroundings and circumstances.  These card instructions are meant to engage you in the joy of research.

You can download your own set here, OR if  you are interested in us catering it for your community, please let us know!

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One focus of Bitter Lab is on participatory mapping as a way to understand the relationship of bitterness, city and community. Bitter Lab is also developing a facilitative leadership workshop about bitterness that will help participants understand what constitutes bitterness, how bitterness influences community-building processes at work and at home, and ways that bitterness can be treated and managed.

So let us figure out!

Project examples:

Emograph:  This is an example for creating a unique and original survey to explore the concept of community, identity and belonging. You can also find out your bitterness level here!

A Salt Apology: Collaborating with local organizations, the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN) and the ENACT Youth Committee in San Francisco, CA, the project identified and mapped out a sense of bitterness that youth participants felt over places in their community.

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Sifting the Inner Belt was a year-long community development and public art project, consisted of a series of interventions and action-based research projects, which closely observed and created an understanding of Boston’s South End neighborhood. We successfully created emotional, conceptual and physical bridges between two well-respected neighborhood institutions that had previously been isolated from one another: the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) and the Berkeley Street Community Garden (BSCG).

This project invented new and authentic forms of audience participation, communication and political intention, and was constructed through a generative process involving dialogue and community engagement through specific efforts, including research and interactive performance art.

This project allowed us to develop multi-angled-and creative research methods in collaboration with individuals with a range of expertise.

“Inner Belt” refers to the ill-conceived and never completed highway project from 1948-1971 that would have created an inner beltway highway around downtown Boston and between the South End and Lower Roxbury.  In the process of the failed project, hundreds of homes were destroyed and many families displaced. Yet, because the project was stopped, over one hundred gardens have sprung up. The foundations of these homes, the spirit of these families, and the legacy of the impact remain today.

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