Award winning Bangladeshi boat schools take books, technology & teachers to where they are needed.

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Avaaz is a global web movement to bring people powered politics to decision making worldwide. It is made of a transnational community.

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In my neighborhood, Bushwick, Brooklyn, the Puerto Rican Day Parade is more than a celebration of heritage, it's both a raucous expression of the hopes and dreams of a community and an indictment against the conditions under which the poor live.

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Finding a co-founder just got easier! Why is it that the first step is said to be the hardest? It is not! All one needs to get started is an idea one believes in, and a team to execute on it. Find both with Founder2be.com.

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Staro Riga is an annual festival of lights in Riga, the capital of Latvia. This year it coincided with the celebrations of the first independence. It brought a lot of vibrancy to Riga, in a country hit hard by the economic crisis.

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This is a concept video I created in graduate school. My idea is buying locally helps you connect with others invested in supporting local economies and communities, which is beneficial, rewarding and ultimately a lifestyle we should all adopt.

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Sulabh International Social Service Organization has set up more than 5,500 public toilet complexes throughout India and over 100 biogas plants which serve over 10 million people every day

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Helping my 6 year old daughter to realise her charity fundraising idea has taken me to my local Farmers Market each week – & I was struck by the positive energy and interactions taking place. It is so much more than a place to stock up on provisions

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The gaming idea is based on the Epic Win App that helps people to master their everyday duties while having fun. The idea is simple, you create a social media community that addresses various basics to eat and live healthy - appealing to kids and their sense of fun.

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Public private partnerships are growing in number through innovative business models, but more collaborative partnership is still needed, especially in the developing world.

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It wasn't so long ago that most schools had a classroom kitchen as part of a "Home Economics" or nutritional sciences program. Unfortunately, these were often used to bake cakes, cookies, and other foods with low nutritional value. Even worse, many of these kitchens were removed from our schools in the 80s and 90s in favor of computer labs and other programs. Let's bring school kitchens back!

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Find the 7 most creative examples of how we reclaim our environment with an online competition and campaign, provide guided tours for these 7 wonders and toolkits to encourage people around the world to create their own local 7 wonders.

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New Orleans is a beautiful example of a city taking action to rebuild in dire times. Through the arts, New Orleans created beauty and brought together a community by drawing upon its past, referencing the present and helping rebuild its future.

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Jane's Walks are named in honour of urbanist Jane Jacobs to get people out of their cars, homes and offices to explore their city and see it anew. It encourages community but also rediscovery of the city around us. They are held in 9 countries worldwide, 68 cities, and there were 424 walks as of 2009.

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Sometimes it's more important to appreciate what we already have.

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Aflatoun inspires children and youth aged 6–18 years to empower themselves by offering social & financial education in the context of their rights and responsibilities.

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To be an engaged volunteer, you need to feel that you get something back, e.g. a sense of belonging, feeling that you make a difference, new friends, etc. The community ENGAGE, gives the volunteers working to make a city vibrant, just that!

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Sack gardens are catching on in Kenyan slums via a primary school programme.

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The Big Lunch is a very simple idea from the Eden Project. The aim is to get as many people as possible across the whole of the UK to have lunch with their neighbours in a simple act of community, friendship and fun. www.thebiglunch.com

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New moms are just removed from the questions and experiences of pregnancy - full of sympathy and with the understanding that comes from being on the other side. Could we craft mentor relationships over SMS to complement existing family and community support structures?

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How can artists, business people, builders, programmers (etc. etc.) learn from (and have fun with) each other through barter systems?

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The SHEA initiative uses education, technology and mircofinance to improve the incomes and living conditions of women in Northern Ghana, who pick shea nuts and proces them into shea butter. How is technology helping these women? Women form village groups and have one group owned mobile phone. They are sent sms via a software tool which enables them to take orders from buyers who want to purchase shea butter. Women also receive information about the current market price of shea nuts/shea butter.

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Mental health is obviously such an important part of maternal health, so why not help mothers to connect with others going through the same experiences through simple video blogging via mobile phones?

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Art & culture are increasingly important components of urban redevelopment efforts everywhere. The Atlantic article takes a look at which metros have the largest concentration of artists relative to their population & some surprises are on the list.

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An easy way to make the city a little bit more vibrant as well as instill a sense of community is by introducing a "growing" art project in a centralized spot. These unconventional art projects can utilize highly common goods, trash, or even plants.

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Partnering with local museums and historical societies, average citizens can be empowered to become curators of their own neighborhoods, communities, and families. NEW UPDATE! SEE MY RESEARCH NOTES!

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I love this idea, not only is it mechanically simple but on a deeper psychological level it gives something that was lost back to the community... Described as "Like a giant strainer dropped into the river," this concept is adapted from part of a proposed project from the architectural firm FAMILY, to build a floating pool in the rivers of new york (http://www.pluspool.org/ scroll down to water + pool). River water flows through panels of different material, filtering out pollutants and bacteria cleaning the river water while providing a safe area to use. An adaptation of this basic idea could instantly produce segregated areas of usable water in places where rivers and streams are completely overwhelmed by waste. Though this does not address the concerns of waste production, as other long term projects reduce waste that ends up in water sources these filters are slowly cleaning the water source as a whole.

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Imagine if you could earn points and check in each time you purchased food that was locally produced. Compete with your friends and community to be the top purchaser of local food. Learn more about the provenance of the food around us and explore quick, easy, and healthy recipes that take advantage of the local food that is currently in season!

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This project by Candy Chang aims to voice the needs of the local residents in New Orleans.

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The HUB is about the power of innovation through collaboration. It's a global network of 25+ physical spaces that enclose some 4000+ social entrepreneurs and social innovators, working collaboratively to develop impacting ventures for a better world.

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Haiyan Zhang's inspiration sparked this idea. Why not have an OpenIDEO Storybook, where the stories of the challenges are told; the people involved, the triggers, the opportunities, the realisations...

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In some rural parts of India the birth of a girl in not as welcomed as the birth of a boy. To my knowledge the doctors are not allowed to disclose the gender of the baby until it is born. Often girls are killed as soon as they are born. In the community I see a lot of inspirations around eduction and training of the expecting moms: What do you think: Shall the doctors and community health workers continue the practice of non-disclosing the gender keeping in mind the strong traditions OR Try to educate the expecting moms and the families that all that matters is not the gender, but the health of the baby?

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The pocket parks project in Little Village is about creating beautiful and inspiring community spaces in a densely urban neighborhood in Chicago.

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Permablitz is helping communities get together and have fun learning about, designing and implementing suburban food systems – one backyard at a time.

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A story about how a group of passionate developers and start-ups is creating a movement that spurs innovation.

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India's celebrated Barefoot College helps teach skills to help rural communities, including children, become self-sufficient and sustainable. http://www.barefootcollege.org/

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A team from OpenIDEO travels around the world, hosting community meet-ups in each city.

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Market Square connects producers to consumers by creating an urban experience with social sculpture as focal points. The main event is the massive sun dial, which doubles as a staircase. The shadow that traces the sun's movement throughout the day is the basis of the paving pattern. With the ground as a calendar, imprints of fruit and vegetables are placed within the ideal growing and harvesting times.

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We throw away 8.3 mill tonnes of food a year which is very damaging to our environment and not a sustainable. Promoting recycling/reusing of waste food helps bring communities together by encouraging people to be more aware of what they are eating.

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A community of entrepreneurs (with or without a project). We get the momentum with : - Linking complementary people to build projects together. - Connecting Needs and demand inside the community

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So many products and services are not made here so buying locally helps you connect with others invested in supporting local economies. This is not only beneficial to communities, but is personally rewarding and a rapidly growing lifestyle choice.

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Creates self-contained models within the community itself.

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At the start of this month, Stonyfield Farm, the world's leading organic yogurt maker (also makes smoothies, ice cream, & milk), launched a campaign to build momentum for organic food. The focus is on encouraging people to share the reasons behind why they choose to eat organic through stories, videos, & photos.

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I had the best day ever at the Timaru Farmers Market today.

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Since parents are key influencers w.r.t. kids' eating habits, and many parents don't believe they have the time, money, or skill to prepare anything but microwave pizza, harness the power of the community and the Internet to show them how.

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Liz Coleman spoke at TED 2009 about reinventing liberal arts education with a focus on civic action. The world's events and issues become the framework for learning, providing students a laboratory in which to explore solutions and learn. Although geared at a university level, civic learning programs at lower levels have undertaken similar initiatives. For example, Kid Power, Inc., in Washington, DC, runs programs for inner city public school children using current issues to teach civic engagement.

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Building on the theme of parts making a whole, the logo is constructed of lots of little people, representing the communal nature (and one of the community principles) of openIDEO.

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I am always impressed by our community's optimism and positivity, especially when it comes to helping each other.

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In Wisconsin, a community works together to share resources on how to help people with disabilities get ready to vote come election day.

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When lemons are harvested the surplus is placed in the box for neighbors and passers by to take for their personal consumption and use. When there are no lemons, an insert displays "closed."

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Let's transform an abandoned place for bloggers to meet up that is built exactly according to their taste.

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Full-service schools address the multiple factors that heavily impact student achievement by incorporating services at the school site to provide the academic and non-academic supports students need to succeed. It’s integrated focus on academics, services, supports and opportunities, leads to improved student learning, stronger families and healthier communities. Schools become centers of the community and are open to everyone—all day, every day, evenings and weekends.

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Emily Pilloton brought impactful design to people via a "roadshow" experience, which allowed people to connect with design in new and accessible ways. How might this idea create awareness and encourage accessibility in the voting/election process?

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Why not have one or more winning concepts be turned into reality by the openIDEO community?

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One man goes above and beyond to bring a free farmer's market to a park in the Mission district of San Francisco, and it's blossomed into a true community event.

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Communities become resilient from within. Some of the best ideas for improving community life – health & well-being, social interaction, safety, etc can best conceptualised by the community itself. How can we support and encourage processes which provide voice, collaboration and creative thinking within local groups? That way resulting ideas are both relevant plus have local support and motivation.

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Cooking and eating together is an important social activity. With nuclear families the number of kitchens are increasing. There is a need to create space for common kitchens in urban areas, the community members could use this resource for cooking.

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Designing *with, not for,* communities.

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Using the process of prisoner rehabilitation to trigger urban and social rejuvenation and encourage re-habitation of a shrinking city in Latvia.

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Allow a community to support individual parts of a farm. A farm needs tools, seeds, labor, soil, ect.. You can buy/donate just the parts it needs. An amazing version of this idea can be seen here. http://www.the-girl-store.org/shop

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As there are personal trainers, personal coaches, personal shopper, … why couldn’t we have a personal farmer? Or better a group farmer?

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Inspirations Kitchen is a very creative and holistic solution to hunger, homelessness and poverty. They do reach out to the community to provide nutrition and job training and actively engages the surrounding communities.

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How do we leverage global resources to help 1000 communities innovate around their emerging problems, rather than trying to find the innovations that will help 1000 communities at once? And how do we get back data from those 1000 problems, to create intellectual leverage to solve the next 1000?

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OpenIDEO should use Project H's example of uniting community through courses, public projects, hands-on learning, and volunteer work to solve social problems, including education and poverty. Community is one of our greatest assets.

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Get Facebook (or other social media) on board and motivate people at risk to write status messages regularly and register with Amnesty International. If someone at risk is writing status messages each day, everyone knows he or she is fine. Once he or she stopped writing an alert is sent to Amnesty International by Facebook.

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Grow you own veggie this year using a highly efficient, productive and portable Sub-Irrigated Planter (SIP) you can make from two 5-gallon food-grade buckets

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Every person, community, and nation is faced with unique problems. OpenIDEO could use its ideology in a "Town Hall" context to serve as a forum for thinking of creative solutions to regional or national problems.

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The community brings together people who wish to buy locally produced ecological food which the ordinary supermarkeds do not provide. By becoming a community they can buy large amounts of food cheap directly from the producer.

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Hosted chats on Twitter where anyone can participate and a panel of experts offer advice. This opens up the community to anyone who might be interested and allows knowledge of be disseminated to a wide network quickly.

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This concept is inspired by the following article “Toilets are being converted to bedrooms in Kumasi “ (http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=165948), as its direct commentary on the toilet situation in Kumasi (the region this challenge is focused on) from Ghana’s most widely read newspaper (the Daily Graphic). This article highlights the trend of people “converting…bathrooms in their houses into bedrooms for renting”, which actually violates the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly’s by-laws that “every household in the metropolis is expected to have a toilet facility”, though unsurprising given the city’s ~16% unemployment rate. However, this article also contains the hints towards a possible solution: income generation.

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The purpose of MIOS concept is to connect abandoned spaces + unemployed workers + recyclable scrap under a label in order to transform these major problems as an opportunity.

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A rural newspaper empowers its creators and stimulates community awareness.

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Building on Sarah's mention of OpenIDEO Tweet-ups, another favorite memory of mine was the Grameen Social Business Challenge live webcast we did with the Grameen Creative Lab.

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Student social businesses: 1) help raise education funds, 2) promote learning by doing, building entrepreneurial skills, & 3) benefit the community, while raising student social awareness. Video below profiles some of these efforts in Africa.

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A lot of food is thrown away daily specially in the western world. Freegans therefore go through supermarked or restaurant dumpsters to find perfectly good food that has been thrown away because of expire date or broken packaging.

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In Mullumbimby I was struck by the deliciousness of their food. It was locally-grown and available to buy from markets and local businesses.

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Please view the included media that illustrate this concept and the need for it. By slightly modifying the pre-existing pay public toilet system and nudging users through signage placed inside and outside the toilet stall, this concept aims to build responsibility, accountability, and pride in maintaining and using clean community toilets with the users of the toilets themselves; thus, making their own experience of using these toilets more pleasant and hygienic. Furthermore, this lowers cleaning/maintenance costs so savings could be used fees, improve the facilities, or expand toilet access to new areas.

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This concepts seeks to harness a family's (including the father, in-laws, etc.) concern for producing a healthy baby to improve the wellbeing of the unborn child and mother. Through mobile-facilitated group funding, it aims to recruit both financial and social support for the mother’s healthcare needs. And by bundling the financing of important healthcare services with small regular payments for items that people can easily understand and value, it aims to decrease the price tag barrier and thus increase the use of the total package.

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Neighborhood watch systems create communities of observers and reporters.

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Grassroots comics are used to raise community awareness on local issues.

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Food already grows in cities. We just need to find it, share it, play with it and eat it. Building on the idea of a public kitchen, why not tap into the food already growing around Queensland? The kitchen could serve as a hub for sharing this food, information about where to find it and what to do with it.

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In the wake of a snowstorm that had many New Yorkers snowed in, the social collaboration platform Ushahidi was used to build a Snowmageddon Cleanup site.

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Residents along Tidy Street (Brighton, UK) in collaboration with a graffiti artist, produced street art each day indicating their electricity usage from the prior 24 hours, allowing them and passersby to reflect upon (and change!) their consumption.

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Imagine if a mom to be could simply call or text to choose from a list of qualified, experienced moms in her community for a meet up in a public place (like a market). The mom mentor would share her own personal story & advise on how to have a healthy pregnancy & birth. Future communication can be arranged. And the mom to be, after her own childbirth, could pay it forward by volunteering to be a mom mentor herself. Experienced moms can apply to be mom mentors, and then activated by pre-approved local partners (like medical providers, Oxfam?). Mentors would be trained on important practices (proper nutrition, sterile umbilical cord cutting, etc.), given referral contacts for health providers (midwives, local hospital, etc.), & perhaps even provided with basic handout kits (birthing/emergency, supplements). This would increase access by virally spreading vital maternal health info, tools, & emotional support through trusted community members, independent of ability to pay or proximity to traditional hospitals.

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In a few years you will be able to find a place close to home or work that brings you to the fresh environment of a farm with the modern amenities of the city. This place will have moving markets, community farming areas, community restaurants, and of course a menu that will allow you to taste typical food and new innovative dishes made of local food.

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What better way to revitalize your own community than by using your own true skills to do so? I love how Taproot makes business talent available to organizations that otherwise would have no money at all to do so.

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In terms of engaging the community, we can create programs like Improv Everywhere to get people more involved and create a more vibrant community!

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Working with the community to dream and create art projects in Brazil

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Social issues are complex, multi-faceted, & interconnected, so 1 actor, or a single-dimension intervention, is unlikely to easily solve a problem. Thus, coordinated efforts between different organizations are important to broaden & deepen impact.

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This is an annual event in San Francisco where an employee-owned company, Recology, gives away compost for free.

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Neighborhood Fruit (http://neighborhoodfruit.com/) helps people find & share fruit grown on public land & private yards through a website & mobile app. It already has >10K registered trees.

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A board game was proposed to educate children on basic information about food, water, health and sanitation during a recent collaboration between PSFK & UNICEF.

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When seeking investments for Social Businesses, it’s important to remember that the wealthy are not the only ones who can help. In fact, while a wealthy individual can donate a higher absolute amount, studies have shown that those with average means are often donating a higher % of their own incomes. And of course, there are many more people of average means vs. those with significant wealth. The power of raising funds through small contributions from many individuals has been demonstrated everywhere from politics (Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign setting numerous new record amounts raised by small donations, enabling him to be the 1st major-party presidential candidate to turn down general election public financing) to microfinance (Kiva has raised ~$225 million for almost 600K working poor individuals, though individual no-interest loans that are as small as $25 and average ~$240).

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Vibrant communities consist of vibrant people.

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Cities have already overtaken rural settings as the most inhabited places to live on the planet. One of the most lovely examples of bringing the rural back to the city is the example of city farms. London has a few, but my favourite is Hackney City Farm.

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How can we create interactions among people living in a city facing economic difficulties? Let's propose a very simple way of communication and encourage them to express their mood.

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Working in the non-profit sector, there are two questions we're always seeking to answer - how do we share resources and how can we build community. The lessons we're learning here applies to the challenge of building community around food.

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