Buycott App
Buycott empowers you to effect global change by voting with your wallet.
As seen on CNN, NBC, FOX, ABC, and more!
● HOW IT WORKS ●
* Join campaigns to support causes you care about.
* Scan product barcodes to learn a product's history.
* Make a purchase decision on the product and communicate your decision to the company.
● FEATURES ●
+ Support causes by joining campaigns created by some of the world's best non-profit organizations.
+ Come across a product that doesn't match your values? No worries! Check out the suggested alternatives to find a product that's a better match.
+ Broadcast your purchase decision to create impact and get your friends and followers involved.
+ Improve your position on the leaderboard by taking action with Buycott.
+ Create your own campaign from buycott.com
● PERMISSIONS ●
Buycott takes your privacy very seriously. Below is an explanation of every permission that we ask for when you install the app, and a complete summary of what we use it for:
+ Location: They only use your location for determining nearby actions, trending campaigns, and trending products.
+ Contacts: If you try to invite a friend through the app, they access your contacts to provide you with a list of friends. Under no other circumstances do they access your contacts.
+ Camera: They only access your camera when you are scanning a barcode.
+ Cost: FREE
Go to the App Store
Fishbowl
The fishbowl is a special form of small group discussion. Several members representing differing points of view meet in an inner circle to discuss the issue while everyone else forms an outer circle and listens. At the end of a predetermined time, the whole group reconvenes and evaluates the fishbowl discussion. An interesting variation: first, put all the men in the fishbowl, then all the women, and they discuss the same topics.
Read moreCommunity Creation
"For me, living in community is a lot about living from my values and having my life be coherent — everything is moving toward the same goals, rather than being pulled in multiple different directions the way I see a lot of people being pulled. My work, my social scene, my spiritual life, my child rearing — all of these things were parts of an integrated life that I feel very good about. And I think that’s a rare thing these days."
Shared Housing
Additional Pages of Interest:
Sharing Ourselves
Work Parties
Fun & Celebration
Save Money on Transportation
- Walk or use a bicycle for short distances
- Use public transportation
- Use a rideshare service like:
-Lyft
Silence
If the pace is too fast, if energies and tensions are high, if people are speaking out of turn or interrupting one another, it is appropriate for anyone to suggest a moment of silence to calm and refocus energy.
Read moreCreate an Energy Decent Action Plan
Step 1. Establish a baseline. This involves collecting some basic data on the current practices of your community, whether in terms of energy consumption, food miles or amount of food consumed. You could spend years collecting this information, but you aren’t trying to build a detailed picture, just getting a few key indicators around how your place functions in terms of arable land, transport, health provision etc. Your working groups may have identified some of this information.
Step 2: Get hold of any community strategy plans that are produced by your local government. Their plans are likely to have time scales and elements that you need to take into account, and they will also be a useful source of information and data. You will need to decide how to integrate your EDAP with their existing plans.
Step 3: The overall vision. What would your community look like in 15 or 20 years if we were emitting drastically less CO2, using drastically less non-renewable energy, and it was well on the way to rebuilding resilience in all critical aspects of life? This process will use information gathered in your Open Space Days, from Transition Tales and a range of other visioning days, to create an overall sense of what the town could be like. Allow yourselves to dream.
Step 4: Detailed visioning. For each of the working groups on food, health, energy etc. (although this is trickier for Heart and Soul groups for example), what would their area look like in detail within the context of the vision set out above.
Step 5: Backcast in detail. The working groups then list out a timeline of the milestones, prerequisites, activities and processes that need to be in place if the vision is to be achieved. This is also the point to define the resilience indicators that will tell you if your community is moving in the right direction.
Step 6: Transition Tales. Alongside the process above, the Transition Tales group produces articles, stories, pictures and representations of the visioned community, giving a tangible sense through a variety of creative media, of what this powered down world might look like. These will be woven into the EDAP.
Step 7: Pull together the backcasts into an overall plan. Next the different groups’ time lines are combined together to ensure their coherence. This might be done on a big wall with post-it notes to ensure that, for example, the Food Group haven’t planned to turn into a market garden the same car park that the Health & Medicine Group want to turn into a health center.
Step 8: Create a first draft. Merge the overall plan and the Transition Tales into one cohesive whole, with each area of the plan beginning with a short summary of the state of play in 2009, followed by a year-by-year program for action as identified in the backcasting process. Once complete, pass the document out for review and consultation.
Step 9: Finalize the EDAP. Integrate the feedback into the EDAP. Realistically, this document won’t ever be “final” - it will be continually updated and augmented as conditions change and ideas emerge.
Step 10: Celebrate! Always a good thing to do
Sources: Transition Primer: A Guide to Becoming a Transition Town, US Version
Contributors: Transition US
Recommended Books: Transition Primer: A Guide to Becoming a Transition Town, US Version