SpaceShare Carpooling & Green Logistics September Newsletter
Deep Breath as Festival Season Fades
We're done with the busiest part of summer festival season. Starting to
think about plans for next year, including growing efforts to encourage
more green activities at festivals, beyond our current efforts
to coordinate sharing. Sherry is
wrapping up her internship, and an effort is underway to make green
event guides and standards aware of the effectiveness of carpooling.
Feedback From Recent Conferences
Jeff Smith working from Chiang Mai:
Hello from Thailand! One of my new roles at SpaceShare is collecting users' feedback. I am happy to share that we've had an overwhelmingly good response from ride-share and room-share users at the Food as Medicine & CancerGuides II and AHNA Conferences.
Many participants reported not only finding a good match, but also forming a new and lasting friendship. Here's just one of many
quotes I'm entering into SpaceShare's new website:
I signed up for the AHNA conference, and was connected with a nice person I didn't know ... someone else saw her name and called her to see about sharing. It turned out this other person was someone I'd met before and hadn't seen in years, and the three of us very happily shared a room - and that wouldn't have happened without SpaceShare. I'm glad AHNA uses you.
Marian Long RN MSN AHN-BC
Mercy Hospital Grayling
Big thanks to all the participants who make our systems work!
Jeff
Get
Involved!
Festivals: Worldfest and the Oregon Country Fair are past; we may need one or
two particularly responsible volunteers for EarthDance Sept 25-27, and have been offered
a back-stage pass for a San Francisco mega-festival. Want tickets?
Get involved and help us green the festivals! We're building carpool sites for,
but not applying to attend,
Power to the Peaceful & Woodstock 2009 in SF because there are too many
festivals -- but if you'd like to make it happen, contact us!
Online & Creative Volunteers:
 The Green Events Story: check out the rough draft and
help us develop an inspirational video for festivals to encourage greening.
Soon we'll be asking for your help to share it!
- Graphics & Video: Take the lead on generating images of people carpooling
& sharing appropriate for SpaceShare. We especially are looking for a
conference traveler to take photos or video of professionals
sharing: that's currently most of SpaceShare's work, but we don't attend,
so our images are almost all of festivals.
- Help redesign the SpaceShare homepage: work in progress here.
Two Stars: Improvements in the Hotel Rating Systems
Does luxury mean an organic mint on your pillow?
Ask for it!
Last month Sherry invited you to send emails to AAA, Mobil and other companies
that rate hotels with very detailed assessments, but never mention greening.
It certainly wouldn't be honest for us to take any credit, but AAA announced
some initial steps already. Sherry's internship has gotten particularly exciting,
with improvements happening as fast as we can keep up.
Learn more about greening hotels at the Green Event Guide's Campaign to Green the Hotel Stars System.
Share Medicine and Medical Equipment
The Recycle AIDS Medication Program (RAMP) recently caught our attention:
"If you have medications (sealed or opened) that are unexpired or up to one year
out of date, you may donate the medications to the Recycle AIDS Medication Program
(RAMP). This program is not limited to AIDS medications. For more information,
visit RAMP or call (415) 285-0606.
If you have other medical supplies, google for a local donation coordinator. There
are many good programs out there too small to advertise!
(SpaceShare has considered building a website to help match needs and
supplies -- from a software perspective it's a lot like carpool matching --
but that project is currently on a back-burner.)
Oregon Country Fair
The Oregon Country Fair deserves it's amazing reputation, celebrating forty years of "living artfully and authentically on Earth." We've now helped hundreds of people travel greener to the Fair, but this was my first chance to go. I found a ride on the SpaceShare site: traveled from Portland to the fair in the back of a van -- our driver found four passengers -- with a massage therapist & backrub circle in the back of the van. Get involved: we have extra
tickets to these events! -- Stephen
Replacing Cars with Community,
the SpaceShare team
SpaceShare.com
newsletter@spaceshare.com
6420 Colby St.
Oakland, CA 94618
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