Thoreau Center Brown Bag: Top Ten Fundraising Tips

Presenter: Darian Rodriguez Heyman, Editor of Nonprofit Management 101
Wednesday, August 17, 12:30 to 2:00
Pacific Room at Tides
RSVP to bruce@thoreau.org

You dream of a strong, vibrant community and have a sense of how to make it real. But how can you rally the funds you need to connect your vision to action? Join the former Craigslist Foundation E.D. and Editor of the newly released handbook, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, as he shares practical, tactical solutions from his new book that can and will help you get dollars in the door. Darian will provide concrete tips and tools for individual giving, foundation grants, corporate sponsorship, earned income, and online and peer-to-peer campaigns, plus point you in the right direction for more information.
After five years of service, Darian recently stepped down as Executive Director of Craigslist Foundation. While there, he helped launch Nonprofit Boot Camp, the Environmental Nonprofit Network, and the Next Generation Leadership Forum. His new book, Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals, includes practical tips and tools from 50 recognized experts across 35 topics, and he recently launched a nationwide Social Media for Nonprofits conference series and his Advancing Social Impact blog on Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge. Heyman previously served as a Commissioner for the Environment for the City and County of San Francisco and currently is a public speaker who provides strategy, messaging, and fundraising consulting for nonprofits and green economy organizations.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag: The End of Growth & the Birth of ???

Presenter: Author Richard Heinberg

Thursday, July 28, 12:30 to 1:30

Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability.

Join us for a discussion with Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality and Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. We all take economic growth for granted...until it falters, as it did in 2008. But what if the recent meltdown was not just an interruption in the story of continuous economic expansion, but the first intimation of the end of growth as we know it? Will a convergence of financial disruption, resource depletion, and environmental impacts create "Business as Unusual?" We know that traditional economic growth models do not reconcile the best measures of human health and welfare. So how can social change advocates and philanthropists prepare for -- and thrive in -- a future that is not based on assumptions of cheap energy, reckless consumption, and financial speculation? How can we decouple qualitative progress — in education, arts, health, well-being, freedom, happiness -- from ever-expanding consumption and growth?

Follow-up to Desmond D'Sa visit

Last Thursday's Thoreau Center Brown Bag speaker was Desmond D'Sa, the chairperson of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) in South Africa who was here to talk about the work of the alliance and its plans for the future. His visit to the San Francisco Bay Area was hosted by the International Development Exchange (IDEX), which promotes sustainable solutions to poverty by providing long-term grants and access to resources to locally run organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. D'Sa helped found the SDCEA in 1995 as an alliance of community organizations addressing the environmental and human rights issues caused by the largely unrestricted expansion in Durban of industry and oil refineries. Through vigilant pollution monitoring, information sharing, education, community empowerment, and government lobbying, the SDCEA has had numerous success over the years, although major problems remain, namely climate change and the need for grassroots mobilization to strengthen the movement for climate justice. For a full rundown of his visit to the area, see this report prepared by IDEX.

Thoreau Center Brown Bag - Rights-Based Approach to Environmental Justice

Presenter: Desmond D’Sa
Wednesday, June 22, 12:30P to 1:30P
Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) is organizing across the historic racial divisions of its communities to speak out for environmental justice at local, national, and international levels. Begun in 1995, SDCEA is a democratic coalition of members of communities who have come together to bring higher environmental standards to the industries and communities that cohabit South Durban.

SDCEA takes a rights-based approach to environmental justice and works to empower community members, especially women and youth, to engage in environmental issues and fight against man-made climate threats.

Desmond is currently the SDCEA Coordinator, and a coordinator of the Right2KNOW Campaign, a national campaign against the draft secrecy laws such as the Protection of Information Bill and the Media Appeals Tribunal. Desmond is a tireless campaigner and also serves as the Coordinator for the Durban Social Forum and sits on a number of activist boards and church organizations. As a key organizer and leader of the South African climate justice movement, Desmond is uniquely positioned as a spokesperson for grassroots organizing currently taking place in Durban to protest the upcoming UN summit on climate justice, in November/December 2011.

Brown Bag Events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

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Speaker Event - Afghanistan: A Returnee's Perspective

Afghanistan: A Returnee's Perspective

When: Thursday, May 20 12:30pm - 1:30pm
Where: Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center

Dawoud Nasraty, a recent Afghan-American returnee, recalls his experiences of day-to-day life in Kabul and offers perspective on the country's recent past, its current direction and future. Through film clips and discussion, Dawoud’s stories will open your eyes to the richness and complexity of the people that make up this war-torn country.

After a hiatus in Afghanistan of nearly three years, Dawoud has returned to Tides working as a financial analyst for the Tides Center.

Author Event - Philip J. Dreyfus

Whole Earth Library presents
Sustainably Speaking, author series
Presenter: Author Philip J. Dreyfus on
Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco
Thursday, April 29, 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Pacific Room at Tides


Join us for a conversation with Professor Philip J. Dreyfus of San Francisco State University as he tells us stories of the making of San Francisco. How did San Francisco become a world-class metropolis? How did San Franciscans labor to remake their landscape to fit their needs? Dr. Dreyfus will focus on the ideas about nature during the early 20th century that destroyed our wetlands and forests, yet created the Golden Gate and Yosemite parks, the Sierra Club, and the modern environmental movement.

Philip J. Dreyfus is Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University. He has received numerous awards for his classroom teaching, and his writings have appeared in various academic journals.

Sustainably Speaking: Energy in California

Sustainably Speaking: Energy in California, Challenges and Solutions, Locally and Globally

Presenter: Journalist Peter Asmus, author of Introduction to Energy in California, U.C. Press

Thursday, September 17, 12:30PM to 1:30PM

Pacific Room at Tides, in the Thoreau Center

Join us as Peter gives us an introduction to California’s energy resources, challenges and solutions, locally and globally.

Peter will sum up the history of California energy development, then outline key challenges, and then go into solutions, focusing on the potential of ocean energy (he recently authored a 100 page plus report on the topic) and the evolution of the "locavolt" movement taking root in his own backyard in Marin County.

Peter Asmus has been covering energy issues for over 20 years. Previous books include Reaping the Wind and Reinventing Electric Utilities, both published by Island Press. His articles on energy have been published in leading newspapers such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. He has served as a consultant to the California Energy Commission and California Air Resources Board.

Charity Vargas Presentation

Thursday, December 11
12:30 to 1:30p
Pacific Room at Tides

Whole Earth Library at Thoreau is pleased to kick off its first literary event with a presentation by Photographer Charity Vargas. Charity will present images from her new photography book The Presidio: Portraits of a Changing Landscape and discuss the evolving nature of the park throughout it's 200 plus year history. You can also take a look at the book online at its companion website: PresidoBook.com.

An excerpt from the introduction by Presidio Historian, Randolph Delehanty, Ph.D.

“Ms.Vargas came to live in the Presidio three years ago during this momentary pause in its long life. She started exploring the complex old post looking carefully and lovingly at its gentle sleep and slow but steady revival as a national park with a new civilian community living and working here. She has an eye for what it essential about the Presidio: the very American ordinariness of its military architecture and the strange “wildness” of its man-made forests. Many of her images put the two together in a new way, as a filigree of evocative shadows cast on the “screens” of plain white walls. They almost seem like photographs of photographs with the building walls the film on which the fugitive shadows are cast. Photography - literally writing with light - here becomes writing with shadows with the unseen light source behind us.”