Happy New Year!!! Let’s hope things get better this year with everything. I could really use a break from all the bad news that seems to be floating around.
So if anyone knows me personally, they know I am a huge Blender head and proponent of free software, meaning free as in freedome of speech not free beer. I am especially fond of any software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License from the Free Software Foundation. So as part of the free software movement, BlenderNation is celebrating its third year as a free Blender software news and updates service. Congrats to the BlenderNation team and community. You can read more about it here. As part of their efforts to help with the development of community, they have started a donation team of the Kiva organization site.
Kiva(www.kiva.org) is a site where you can donate $25 or more. The money is then given as interest free loans to entrepreneurs in third world countries. Loans are usually repaid within a 3 to 12 month period. The best part is that once a loan has been repaid back to you, you as the lender have three options:
- Withdraw and take back the money you lent
- Reinvest the money to allow another person to borrow off of it
- Donate it to the Kiva organization to allow them to cover operational expenses
So in the end, you have control of how your money is handled. Check here to read more about it. What it means is that you are not donating or giving money away, you are providing someone with the means to support themselves. It’s like that saying about teaching a man to fish. One very important note, as with any loan or investment, there is a chance that the recipient of the loan may not be able to pay you back. This is something you should consider before donating. In anycase check out the site and see if it something you might be interested in.
And finally, if you are interested in growing your own food and live in a Phoenix Arizona, I would recommend checking out the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. This is basically a group of people getting together through the power of the internet and sharing their knowledge and self reliance and growing your own food. They have a several class where they teach a lot of the principles and techniques behind planting food. The next class will be on January 7th and it is a 4 part series on how to design a vegetable garden for your back yard. There is no required payments for classes but they do ask for a donation of $10. Anyway check them out and see if there is anything good they can do for you. To help ring in the new year I started my own small little compost heap of food scraps. Turns out my mom knows a lot about farming since she used to do it as a child growing up in Columbia. She thinks growing some simple herbs and vegetables is an excellent idea. I was very glad to hear that from her and I’m very excited to see where this new year will take us.
Well that’s all I got for now, C ya.