Feel Good Fridays: a Great Opportunity for Comunity Activism

Hey Athenites!

If you're reading this blog post, it probably means that you're interested in all things feminist, environmentalist, social justice-y, inclusive, empowering, and community based.

So here is a super easy and fun way to engage in some community-based activism. Aviva is an insurance company, and, aside from all the reasons that I think insurance companies are malicious and vile (such as U.S. health care insurers seeing domestic violence as a "pre-existing condition" ), I still think this the Aviva Community Fund is a pretty cool idea.

Canadian communtiy activists can develop ideas on how to make their communities a better, more positive place, and then submit their ideas to the Community Fund site to be read and evaluated by others (such as yourself). You can then cast votes for the ideas which you think have the most merit. A variety of ideas will be awarded a total of $500,000. Projects range in size from small (under $10,000 ideas) to BIG($250,000). More information on how the competition works is available here.

Round 2 of judging, wherein the number of ideas is whittled down even more, is almost over, so get yourself down to the Aviva Community Fund website and start votin'!

I will now put in a plug for this idea: Snacks in Packs. Snacks in Packs is a concept generated by Alyse Schacter, a friend of a friend and all around awesome human being. She is actually an Athena contributor, and wrote an article for our first issue about living with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). The idea of Snack in Packs is to eliminate child hunger in Ottawa, ON. Although the Ottawa Food Bank is awesome (and I know this is true because I volunteered there for a year), it does not provide service on weekends and statutory holidays. And about 16,000 children use the services of the Ottawa Food Bank every month. So, Snacks in Pack would send school kids home every weekend and holiday with a backpack full of nutritious, kid-friendly foods, a list of other community resources, and other items they might need, such as mittens or toothbrushes.

So browse around the Aviva Community Fund website, check out some ideas, and, as Aviva's slogan says: "support what's important to you!"

Have fun! (And, if you have a minute to spare, write a nasty letter to those insurance companies.)

:) Steph