#DearLaureen

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

#DearLaureen Harper,

​Citizens for Social Justice would like to thank you for taking the time to visit the City of Oshawa and recognizing the plight of homeless youth in our community. While you’re in town to attend a fundraiser for The Refuge, a homeless youth drop-in centre, we’d like to offer some practical policy proposals to combat poverty and homelessness.
​We’ve been told you are bringing a couple of neck-ties belonging to your husband and Minister Baird for auction at the fundraiser. With skyrocketing youth unemployment, good jobs leaving our community, and a lack of youth shelters and affordable housing, we think it’s going to take more than a couple of neck-ties to address the problems of youth poverty and homelessness.
​In return for the neck-ties, we’d like to offer you some practical poverty reduction strategies to bring back to Ottawa:
1) Create a comprehensive national housing strategy to bring good, affordable housing to our community;
2) Ensure all homeless youth have access to social services regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender;
3) Increase funding for addiction and mental health services;
4) Implement a job creation strategy to bring back good paying jobs to our community; and
5) Re-open the Youth Employment Centres that were recently cut in the federal budget.
Again, we’d like to thank you for recognizing the need to address youth homelessness in our community. Now, it’s time for this government to make poverty reduction and youth homelessness a priority through social policy at the federal level. We need less neck-ties and more action.

Sincerely,
Citizens for Social Justice:

For Labour and community groups:

We want to initiate a twitter/Facebook campaign to coincide with this press release. We would like to use the hashtag #DearLaureen and use it to offer poverty reduction solutions one tweet at a time. Please spread this widely to your network of social justice, labour, and poverty reduction activists and ask them to post a tweet with the hashtag “#DearLaureen”!
Here are some examples:
#DearLaureen, while neck-ties are nice a National Housing Strategy would be better.
#DearLaureen, neck-ties may raise some money but re-opening Youth Employment Centres reduces youth poverty.
#DearLaureen, neck-ties don’t put youth to work or create jobs.
#DearLaureen, tell Steve to keep the neck-tie – our community needs mental health and addiction counselling.
#DearLaureen, please ask your husband to create a REAL job creation strategy!

The Race Is On in Canada and the United States: A Tale of Two Political Cultures | ActiveHistory.ca

The Race Is On in Canada and the United States: A Tale of Two Political Cultures | ActiveHistory.ca.

Have you been paying Attention to these races?

Sharing history in the digital world

Today i came across this fantastic review of a website. Dedicated to the work of Sudbury History of workers in 1901-1939. Worth taking a look at http://activehistory.ca/2011/10/connecting-past-present-and-future-a-website-review-of-stacey-zembryckis-sharing-authority-with-baba

Can 50 Hackers change the world?

There’s an interesting initiative happening in a few weeks in California. An organization called Change.org is getting 50 computer programmers (it sounds more exciting to call them hackers) to spend 24 hours developing widgets and apps and all kinds of small software and other magical web things (examples below) for social good.

If you’ve ever thought: “If web browsers did ___, that would make organizing so much easier,” or “if there was a firefox extention that did ___, it would really help people think about zero waste,” you can suggest it to Hack For Change. There’s no guarantee that anyone will work on that project, but there are only 17 ideas so far (and not very many interesting ones). So if you come up with something good, someone might do it.

I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I know there are a lot of creative people on this list! Here are some of the ideas listed so far, as examples:
A Firefox extension that allows you to see the political donations of companies whose site you visit
An app that tells you the true effect/footprint of what you are about to buy (NOTE: someone’s already actually done this at www.goodguide.com)
A platform to connect grassroots activists to tangible, needed resources from members of the private sector who want to offer support, but dont know what to give, who to give it to, and how
Help people in developing nations to sell their products directly to the world
Make government data more accessible and actionable
The full list is here: https://hackforchange.uservoice.com/forums/113515-hack-for-change/filters/hot
If you have an idea, please add it here (feel free to email me if you want to talk about it).

Then please tell us so we can go vote for it! To vote you just have to sign up for a password, and then you have 10 votes to distribute to your favorite ideas.

=============================================
Article from http://mashable.com/2011/05/25/hack-for-change/
Can 50 Hackers Help Save the World in One Day?

Online activism platform Change.org is hosting a hackathon called Hack for Change, designed to get engineers coding quickly for social good.
Change.org will pick 50 engineers from a list of applicants and throw them into a programming blitz at its San Francisco headquarters. The goal is to get coders, designers and other creative types to start applying their talents to the non-profit and social good sector. While other hackathons have tried to get its talent to think like programmers, Hack for Change is trying to convince programmers to work for social good.

“The smartest people in the world are focused on problems that don’t really matter,” says Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org. “What we want to do is dedicate the time, effort and energy of those people to important issues.”

The event’s rules are simple, if a little vague: “You can create any feature or app that does good.” Participants can hack using any languages or available APIs and must post their code to GitHub. They can hack individually or in teams but teams still must apply — and be accepted — individually. That kind of openness will hopefully inspire off-the-wall ideas thanks to unexpected pairings (not to mention lack of sleep).

Spanning just one weekend, the programming starts June 18 at noon and ends 24 hours later. The finished products will then be presented to the attendees, invited media and judges.

There will be prizes, but that’s not really the point. Hack for Change is aimed at introducing a new community of talent to the non-profit world. Rattray and his team are trying to make the transition as easy as possible by giving social good greenhorns a slew of ideas to get their fingers moving. The conference will start with presentations by non-profits and conscientious companies offering their APIs. There is also a forum where anyone can suggest issues that need fixing.

Change.org is offering $10,000 of its own cash as seed money — $5,000 of which will go to the top project, with the rest to be divvied up amongst the top picks. The hackathon isn’t intended as a one-off; Rattray hopes to make it a regular event. “We want to create a very clear path by which engineers and designers can find full time work in the social change sector,” he says.

What do you think about a hackathon for change? Are designers, programmers and hackers the next wave of talent to revolutionize social good? Let us know in the comments.

Disclosure: Mashable is a media partner of Hack for Change.

Who votes for Conservatives anyway?

So who votes for the Conservative Party of Canada?

• not parents that had national daycare taken from them

• not aboriginals that saw two treaties rescinded and killed

• not scientists that had their work muzzled by the government

• not economists or social planners that were against tampering with the census

• not women’s groups that had their funding pulled for supporting a woman’s right to choose or abolishing the gun registry

• not anyone believing in freedom of information

• not environmentalists

• not anyone that protested at the G20 and watched the CONs squander a billion public dollars

• not anyone that thinks political parties shouldn’t use government funds to spread their propaganda – 45 million and counting

• not anyone that wanted fiscal responsibility and transparency

• not anyone that sees the CONs spending more to deliver less

• not anyone that wanted to see the CPP improved despite millions of Canadians calling for public pension improvements

• not anyone who lost money in the income trust funds

• not anyone who lost their job when the CONs cut funding to the arts, public sector or dismantling of manufacturing thriving communities

• not civil servants that saw anyone of their members who pointed out abuse vilified in the media

• not watchdogs that saw their power weakened until they could no longer do their job

• not those that shook their head at terms like “ethical oil,” “cancer is sexy” “build more jails to deter unreported crime” and “Hitler theory”

• not many nations when it came time to fill a UN Security Council seat

The international community has turned its back to Harper, Canada should too… a pair of glasses does not make the PM any wiser.

Stephen Harper plans to run on his “Tough on crime” “Family Values” and his “Business friendly agenda”

Go for it Steve. Your crime policies are a joke and are going to end up costing more money, and will not reduce crime or make society and safer. Your business friendly policies are an even bigger joke after the debacle with the UAE, and as for “Family Values” I can look after my own damn values and I don’t need you to do that for me.

Why don’t you run on your real agenda:

You will continue to run up accumulated debt which is more of a danger to the economy than anything else. You will continue your shameless self promotion, you will continue to waste tax payer dollars like water running through a sieve, and you will continue to embarrass Canada internationally, and you will continue to repeat the lie that you are an economist, and you will continue to be a fiscally reckless and incompetent leader.

Sounds like a plan, and at least it would be the truth. That would be a first for Stephen Harper.

Did you know Harper and Flaherty have a  dirty little secret.

The sub-prime mortgage fiasco they enable by de-regulating the Banks.

A Globe and Mail investigation in 2010 into more than 10,000 foreclosure proceedings has uncovered a burgeoning subprime mortgage problem that many, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have insisted does not exist in Canada.

The last five years under the Harper, Refrom regime has been a nightmare. They do not represent 68% of the electorate, but they keep ramming the ideologically driven Tea Party policies through government while ignoring parliamentary procedure.

Their boorish, arrogant, self-centred, big spending leader is an abomination to the majority of Canadians who did not vote for his condescending bills on law and order, corporate tax deductions, environment, and, in your face abuse of public funds to promote the Reform Party.

So if the Conservative party is testing the water and on-the road promoting their plans for Canada we may want to enact some real alternatives to what good government is all about.

Voting for the Cons or Libs reminds me of people who go into a bar looking for a meaningful relationships, get f–ked over, whine and complain about it, and yet, go back into the bar the very next night.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.