Tag Archives: Sustainability

Skillsharing: Community Through Sharing & Learning

Want to share your knowledge & creativity with others? Skillsharing is the answer, where you can proudly share your skills, talents and knowledge with others. Of course it’s not a one-way street…skillsharing means that you can pick up some great tips and skills in return. It’s a wonderful collaborative consumptive way to learn! Best of all, skillsharing means “community” because it is the foundation on which it is built. Think outside the box on ways you can learn and share in your community and check out what that might look like here in Western MA and where you can go to tap into these community-based learning resources. Read on…

Parenting Green: Climate Change Education & Action

This is an eye-opening piece by Hilltown Families Contributing Writer, Angie Gregory, in “Parenting Green” this month. Status quo capitalism provides regular obstacles to addressing the alarming change in the earth’s natural conditions. However, a culture of calling for positive change has had impact and families continue to have a voice that can be heard.

Angie invites our readers to an event in NYC in September called the People’s Climate March that has the potential to be the largest rally of its kind in history. This family friendly event will bring families into contact with like-minded advocates for change. If your family can’t make this event, you can support efforts at home. Angie reminds us that families have a voice, and that your kids can have a voice too!

Collaborative Consumption: Learning How to be Resilient Supports Community-Based Education

More and more, communities across western Massachusetts – and around the world! – are working together to create opportunities for pooling knowledge, sharing skills, and increasing each others’ access to useful resources. In creating systems and channels through which to access shared information and materials, communities are building resourceful, resilient foundations upon which to grow…The power of collaborative consumption not only supports sustainable efforts, but is a great source for community-based education too!

Parenting Green: Winter Curiosity & Outdoor Play

“I am always amazed at how the kids tend to be the ones to notice the pulse of our natural world through their curiosity,” writes Angie this month in ‘Parenting Green.’ What are some of the ways your family stays connected to nature when the winter wind and snow makes you feel like it’s not worth the fight to get bundled up?

Where you are is who you are

The physiocrats had it right when they said that “the earth is the sole source of all riches,” for from our ecology comes our economy. I”ve been thinking—as you have been, too, I”m sure—about the increasing political and natural chaos caused by our economy, which decimates the ecological systems that gave our ancestors their lives. […]

Debut of Parenting Green: Earth Friendly Ideas for Raising a Family!

No Seat Belts My nine year old rides the public transit bus to school, with no adult chaperone. Just with some classmates, typically some war vets, and sometimes a doughnut in hand, this is how she experiences the responsibility of being on time. As well as the reward of it: the once a week ‘doughnut […]

Spring Hunting

Cross-post from Hilltown Families: The Ripple: Hunting for Springs in Western MA Spring Hunting Spring has a leap of the leprechaun in it; who can deny that?—but spring’s called spring not because of its leapiness.  Spring’s called spring because of the upwelling waters that appear as the frozen earth thaws. Right now is the best time […]