This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had a few meetings since my last update, both separately in our respective places and together. I’d like to share with you about a couple of them that I believe can illustrate the complexity of the larger scale situation and also why I’m convinced more than ever that holding space for communication is our best ‘strategy’ forward.

A couple of weeks ago we had our West Bank meeting scheduled. We were all very excited and nervous. For us Israelis crossing the check point into the West Bank is against the law, through there is a way to do it if we get stopped that’s pretty much safe and straight forward. We were however bracing for the unpleasant experience of witnessing ourselves the often humiliating and frustrating experience Palestinians endure daily in using the check points. We wanted to experience it ourselves to possibly understand what it’s like for the Palestinian women.  Also the Palestinian women who are Israeli citizens from the North of Israel were all excited as they don’t get to be in direct contact with Palestinians across the ‘green line.’

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This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had by now 2 monthly joint meetings, and I feel that the trust between us is building slowly but surely. Our facilitators are very experienced and our various activities have enabled us to discover and rediscover again that each of us, in spite of surrounding opposition and cynicism about the future of such gatherings, want to give this a real chance.

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image by smellyknee>

11 Questions is an ongoing feature where you, the reader, tell us all about a project you are working on to create a more functional, just, and beautiful future. Then we share your project on The Sunny Way. To tell us about your project, either fill out the survey, or copy the questions below and email your answers to us. We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

Your location
SF Bay Area, CA

Your project’s name
Read to Your Baby

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
I am a children’s librarian who works in a city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in America. In learning about the connection between parents engaging in literacy activities with infants and the reduced odds of those children becoming involved in violent crime later in life, I came to see what a vital service infant literacy could perform in our communities. Since I work for the public library, my goal is to create infant literacy programming for the branches I serve and generate interest in those programs. I hope to inspire my colleagues to do the same.

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image by Ana_Cotta

11 Questions is an ongoing feature where you, the reader, tell us all about a project you are working on to create a more functional, just, and beautiful future. Then we share your project on The Sunny Way. To tell us about your project, either fill out the survey, or copy the questions below and email your answers to us. We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

Your location
Tel Aviv, Israel

Your project’s name
Israeli & Palestenian women gathering beyond cultural divides

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
The main goal is to break the barriers between us, particularly now as the willingness for sane co-existence seems to be evaporating with the continuing rise of extremism, militancy and despair on both sides—Israeli and Palestinian. Currently, we’ve only met in seperate groups once, and next week we’ll meet for the first time all together. We will then explore what shared project we’d like to embark on together, besides the very imporatant and essential issue of building some trust and getting to simply know each other.

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an I Heart PV letterwriting party

11 Questions is an ongoing feature where you, the reader, tell us all about a project you are working on to create a more functional, just, and beautiful future. Then we share your project on The Sunny Way. To tell us about your project, either fill out the survey, or copy the questions below and email your answers to us. We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
I Heart PV aims to make New York the solar power (photovoltaics) capital of the East Coast. The way we’ll get there is by implementing long term, focused policies that create financial incentives for solar adoption until the technology can compete with fossil fuels on cost. The experiences of other places that have implemented aggressive solar incentive programs—such as Germany, Japan, California and New Jersey—has been a more rapid decline in costs as a result of local industrial evolution and increased competition. We need to move New York onto a similar track.

Solar advocacy has existed in New York State, but nothing that has effectively engaged a large number of voters in the action. I Heart PV will continue to act on this end of things: educating and mobilizing constituents to deliver feedback in support of pro-solar policies to relevant elected state officials.

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image by the San Jose Library

11 Questions is an ongoing feature where you, the reader, tell us all about a project you are working on to create a more functional, just, and beautiful future. Then we share your project on The Sunny Way. To tell us about your project, either fill out the survey, or copy the questions below and email your answers to us. We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

What are you creating with this project? What are your goals?
I want to create a network of people interested in reading to under-privileged children, especially from the ages of birth to 5 years for the project Stories for Brain Development, the goal being to create a more literate, integrated, and emotionally stable child.

Research shows vocabulary size not only aids in brain development in early childhood but creates a child more patient, more self-controlled, and more communicative. It also shows that the vocabulary of a child from a poor home is very often under half that of a child from a middle or upper income family.

How did you get started?
Babysitting the children of friends and reading to them, I noticed how excited they would get over particular sounding words, how they would repeat over and over new or favorite words and how attentive they would become. Often they would ask me to bring the same book back, again and again.

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image by r3v || cls

Happy Inauguration Day! I’m getting ready to head over to watch Obama be sworn in with my grandmother, who seems both stunned and thrilled by the change she has witnessed in her 85 years. Last summer, when she told me she was voting for Barack Obama, I was surprised—she was raised in West Virginia in the 1920s and 30s, and of course she has some attitudes leftover from that upbringing. But she told me that Obama struck her as a good and genuine man, something she hadn’t seen in presidential politics in a long time, and she was excited to see what he could do given the chance.

Of course, what inspires me most about an Obama presidency is his insistence that we all take responsibility for creating America’s future. The truth is that the future has yet to be written, and the choices we make today will determine what is possible tomorrow. That means there are no small potatoes—everything we do counts! If our problems are to be solved, we must be the ones to do it. I am the one, and so are you.

In line with the tone of service and teamwork that Obama is setting, today we are unveiling a new feature on the site: 11 Questions about what you are doing to change the world. Whether you’re working as part of an organization to restore waterways in your area, trying to connect with your politically-opposite family in a respectful way, or mentoring a kid from a rough neighbhorhood, we want to know all about it—what’s working, what’s not, how are you getting things done, and how can we support your efforts?

We also want to share your story with our readers. When you fill out the 11 Questions survey, we will publish your response. If you need help, we want to help you get it. And, over time, we expect to build up a big list of future-creating projects which visitors to the site can browse through for ideas and inspiration. So many people are doing so many great things—let’s connect and see how we can work together.

So please fill out the survey and let us know what you’re up to! And I hope you enjoy this wonderful, historic day.