Imagine... quiet, greener streets and clean-powered vehicles! That healthier future is just around the corner to a curbside near you with BIG Green Island.

Starting in 2011, all the major car manufacturers are introducing electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, and Canadian communities are not ready to accommodate and encourage growth of green transportation.

BIG Green Island provides an innovative solution by making it easy for people switch to electric vehicles and take action on climate change and end our dirty addiction to BIG Oil and the Tar Sands. We build and manage innovative high-speed charging stations for electric vehicles and bikes/e-bikes for any site - rural, suburban or urban. We will create installations that are community and user-friendly, and will greatly reduce a community's carbon footprint, and increase livability. BIG Green Island stations can be mobile or permanent, depending on the need of the neighbourhood or community.

This pilot project will encourage growth in electric vehicle use and help the future arrive NOW. The charging stations will connect to larger, existing networks in North America, enabling drivers to go longer distances, and reducing range anxiety while greatly reducing our collective carbon footprint. These green transportation hubs will also accommodate ride-sharing and cooperative car sharing programs. Our renewable energy expertise allows for the hubs to run on solar, wind, micro-hydro power sources and use smart-grid innovations, feeding into the grid for a fully clean and renewable infrastructure.

The inexpensive use of used shipping containers allows for fast and efficient set-up in a broad range of space requirements. More permanent arrangements can also be arranged to suit residential, commercial or public requirements. Our electricians are fully qualified and certified to meet the federal, provincial, and local electrical guidelines for instillation and specialize in renewable energy instillations at home, for business and the community at large.

BIG Green Island thinks BIG and creates the BIG changes we want for our communities and the planet.

The Strathcona BIA wants to create community gardens throughout Strathcona to promote local food production, beautify the area, reduce crime, create green jobs for inner city youth and people facing multiple barriers to employment, and instill pride in the community.

We've applied for an Aviva Community Fund grant to create a Micro-Gardening program in Strathcona. The grants are given to the winners of an online voting contest, so if you are interested in the idea, please give us your vote!

Here's what the Micro-Gardening program is all about:

We propose to create 20 to 30 community micro-gardens throughout Strathcona. The gardens would be installed on private properties adjacent to public spaces in highly visible, underutilized areas.Depending on the nature and size of each location, the gardeners and the property owners would decide whether the plot should be a community garden, single-owner garden, or a living wall. Vegetation would consist of native perennials and edible plants.

The gardens would be installed by qualified landscapers of Mission Possible Enterprises, a local non-profit (and BIA member) that provides employment opportunities for individuals with job readiness barriers and assists in breaking the cycles of poverty, homelessness, and addiction. Local youth would also be employed as partners with the landscapers to learn valuable food production and community development skills.

Please help us make it happen by voting today: http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf5454

I am embracing social media as I slowly gain more experience with it. I am committed to applying my growing confidence in social media to my new online initiative www.greenthecityvancouver.com in order to give back, build community, and help shape our city's story as we move towards being the greenest city in the world by 2020.

Why Salmon Arm is doomed financially...

Created the Kyangwali Women's Microcredit Project. Trying to make the program successful.

The change I'd like to see is some kind of sharing of a dumpster-sized bin by apartment and townhouse dwellers on the same high-density block. The size of the mixed paper bin now provided to apartment buildings in Vancouver discourages recycling of paper boxes. Many are so big, they would take up an entire bin even if cut and folded.

Life as a Cooperative Banker

Our worker co-op (http://cantrusthosting.coop) seeks to create an affordable, full-service web-hosting platform tailored to the needs of co-operative, non-profit and charity organizations for whom access to such Canadian-based services is cost prohibitive. Our worker-owner members can greatly reduce future development and maintenance costs for our clients by collectively managing Drupal-based, template-driven websites.

Why do we want to do this? Our clients want Canadian-based website hosting they can trust and our co-op members want to pool their efforts to pass savings onto our collective clients. Together, we are creating solid web-hosting infrastructure in Canada and keeping jobs/money in our local community. It's win-win-win!

A global citizen-to-citizen communication platform that bypasses traditional media