Our Partners For Change at Kiva.org recently shared an update from Jonathon Stalls, whose KivaWalk cross-country trek is a great example of an individual inspiring a community to create change. Along with his dog Kanoa, Jon has completed 173 days and over 2,100 miles of KivaWalk, a cross-country walk raising awareness of Kiva’s work and engaging people to build lending communities.
From the people he’s met on the road to the readers who follow his daily blog updates, Jonathon’s built a lending community of 334 people, who, through Kiva’s micro-loan program, have generated over a quarter million dollars in loans. (Seriously. $282,950! That’s amazing.) From Cambodia to Senegal to Peru, Jonathon’s walk is having an impact in the lives of people around the globe.
Want to lend a hand? Become member 335 of the KivaWalk Team and make a loan to one of Kiva’s many worthy entrepreneurs. You can also aid Jon in completing his walk: in a few weeks, he will be crossing into Eastern Nevada and looking for help with food and water drops; if you know anyone between Eureka and Fallon, NV, drop Jon a line at kivawalk@gmail.com. Also, all are encouraged to join him for the final miles walking into San Francisco on Saturday, November 13th. Denizens of the Bay Area, mark your calendars!
Our friends Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney—food and agriculture policy advocates, film-makers, and recipients of Nau’s 2010 Grant For Change—will be in Portland tomorrow to present the keynote address to this year’s Muddy Boot Festival. A weekend-long outdoor event, the MBF celebrates local organic foods and sustainable living, and this year focuses on the connections between City and Farm. We’re looking forward to catching up with Curt and Ian to hear them talk in person about their project Truck Farm, a 20-member CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) experiement, located (yes, really) in the back of an old Dodge pickup.
The Keynote will held at St. Philip Neri Church at 2408 SE 16th Avenue (near 18th & Division) in Portland, Oregon at 7pm. Admission to the outdoor festival is $5 per person per day (children under 12 are admitted free). Keynote address tickets must be purchased separately, and can be found online here.
Rachel Botsman has an interesting guest post over on design blog SwissMiss on the social movement toward co-ownership, social-network enabled swapping and collaborative lifestyles. From Zipcars to CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) to the exchange of books, DVDs and pretty much anything else on sites like Swaptree (now swap.com) and Freecycle, Botsman identifies a growing trend in consumption that’s less conspicuous and more collaborative.
Old market behaviors, including sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, are being reinvented through social technologies and peer communities. The social networks, GPS and real-time technologies, peer payment systems and so on have created the efficiency and trust glue for us to mimic exchanges that used to take place face-to-face on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. We have literally wired our world to share.
What do you think? Has the economy got you looking for ways to share ownership with others? Has peer-to-peer sharing expanded beyond your music collection to what you watch, what you wear? Does a bike share get you around? Hit up the comments, and let us know if you think sharing is making a dent in the cult of ownership.
Cool new feature on National Geographic’s site: navigate the archives of their MyShot database of beautiful National Park images by zooming in on a photo to reveal the photomosaic that makes up the image.
You can contribute by submitting your photos; each month two photos are selected from the submissions to be printed in National Geographic’s print magazine.
The Thought Kitchen is our effort at collective inquiry and its power to affect change. Have you ever noticed how the party is always in the kitchen? There are more walls to lean on and people are energized by the proximity to food and drink. Well, welcome to our kitchen, where we hope to tap into everything we love about that feeling—community, vivacious exchange, food for thought.
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Our friends Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney—food and agriculture policy advocates, film-makers, and recipients of Nau’s 2010 
