SunlightNYC: Publicly Tracking Stimulus Money in New York

Want to see just how economic recovery money is being spent in your community?
From a February 26 press release:
Council member Bill de Blasio today announced he is drafting legislation to require transparency and accountability in the City’s spending of Stimulus funds. The proposed legislation would create a new government website, SunlightNYC, to help the [...]

Be a Top Chef in Your Community

Bright Knives. Big City. Tonight the Top Chef: New York finalists will duke it out for the grand prize, and if you’re feeling inspired to cook lots and cook local, you can apply to become a Just Food Community Chef.
We just learned about this community food education program via sustaiNYC:
Through Just Food’s Community Chef training [...]

Call for Applications: The Laundromat Project’s Public Artist Residency Program

Several months ago, I heard about 2004 Echoing Green Fellow Takema Robinson’s Laundromat Project:
Believing that tools of self-determination lie within creative practices, The Laundromat Project uses the space of local coin-ops to provide communities of color living on modest incomes with broad access to visual art as a tool of personal and social transformation.
Looks like [...]

Give a Valentine to New York: Donate Blood at CUNY on Wednesday

CUNY’s Graduate Center is hosting a “Pre-Valentine’s Day Blood Drive” this week. The drive will take place Wednesday, February 11 from 10:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m. in the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, Manhattan).
Details from the event website:
Call 212-817-8234 to make an appointment to donate blood at the Graduate Center or stop by [...]

Think Outside the Bottle

What’s the best thing to do with an empty plastic bottle? Make a lampshade? A pair of earrings that look like sea glass? An herb garden? If you’ve got a fresh answer, you could win a solar-powered backpack and the Keep the Bottle Contest crown.
Tap’dNY, a New York-based water bottling company that sources local tap [...]

‘Times’ Travel: Commuters Wake Up to Free Paper, Brighter Future

I was just transported to another universe, an alternate reality. Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I just traveled through time, thanks to the electronic version of a satirical New York Times edition distributed outside subway stations this morning.
Today’s “Times” looks like any other—that familiar layout, the reassuring masthead, the names of the usual columnists along [...]

One Volunteer’s Story: Event Planning with the American India Foundation

By Jesy Beeson
A year is not enough time to change the world. When the Young Professionals chapter of the American India Foundation (AIF) began to meet in 2007, we did not set out to feed all of the hungry people in India or build shelter for all of its homeless. We chose one cause, one [...]

Help for Young Changemakers

Just in time for a new school year, we’re launching Generation Idealist: a resource center for a new generation of community leaders and world changers. Bursting with tips and ideas for teens, college students, and budding nonprofit professionals, this collection will help you (or your younger friends) identify ways to build a better world; take [...]

Finding a Job: Is it Really All About Who You Know?

According to the Idealist Guide to Nonprofit Careers, a free resource for job seekers, the answer is yes! At our networking event at NYU in July, interns and young professionals talked about the importance of building relationships and community as you embark on a nonprofit career path. If you missed the fun, you can still [...]

Start Spreading the News…

Welcome to the Idealist in NYC blog!

Contributors will be posting all summer about the ways our city challenges us and inspires us to do wonderful, crazy things. Like make time stop in Grand Central Station. And go car-free for three Saturdays in August. And increase the number of foster parents in Bushwick.

We learned via a [...]