Will Work for Camping

Can a barter system work for National and State Parks?
An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.
via Retirees Trade Work for Rent [...]

Ferris Wheel as Windmill

Reinventing the wheel for clean energy:
Last year Melbourne’s iconic Southern Star Observation Wheel found a sad turn when it had to be shut down due to cracks and buckling caused by the intense summer heat. The $100 million wheel has since been decommissioned, but that hasn’t stopped designers from thinking about what to do next [...]

Strategic Mergers

Mergers are not for everyone. But nonprofit boards with closely aligned missions should ask whether their missions are best served by standing alone.
…Longer term, say many nonprofits, the decline in donations to charities appears likely to continue. The sector’s difficulties are re-awakening a touchy debate among some leaders in the nonprofit world over whether the [...]

Disruptive Philanthropy

A new report from Lucy Bernholz with Ed Skloot and Barry Varela tracks new strategies and tactics for the social sector in the digital age.
…Technology … has become the lifeblood of new philanthropic networks, and has begun to unleash the power of aggregated individual donors and activists. Technologies are changing how philanthropists find and share [...]

Crowdsourcing Abundance

…We have excess of stuff, talent, ideas, information—in our homes , in our communities, and in our organizations. We are over-producing and under-utilizing resources all over the place.