Newsletter Archive: October 12, 2011

Newsletter Archive: October 12, 201110/12/2011 0 Comments   Hello everyone! In this Issue: Donation! Cross Country Sustainable Community Research Project Logo Creation Contest Launch  DreemKitchen Questionnaire *** I. Donation! Wonderful news good friends! We have received our first financial donation as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. True, we have had many contributions before and during the DreemKitchen, and we are so grateful for that. However, this donation is the first made officially to the organization – a check written to D.r.e.e.m. Reality and receiving official documentation in return. This exciting donation was given by Joni Wheat and her work place ITW Appliance of Des Plaines, Illinois.  Beautifully, Joni is the aunt of Amanda, the leading Dreemer of the Home Gardens project – sharing her experiences of her home garden in the blog “G is for Garden”. ITW Appliance, which matches employees donations 3-1, and Joni will join our Sponsoring Dreemers list on our website where we hope to honor many more donors soon. We are so very grateful for this contribution! Also on our “Donate” page, we have laid out our experimental gift breakdown, as well as our new PO Box address. We are looking forward to being straightforward with where donations are going and would like to offer people the opportunity to direct their donations’ focus. Take a look, and let us know what you think! (Coming soon - a "Donate Now" button on the website - OoooOooo Fancy!) II. Cross Country Sustainable Community Research Project (CCSC) The CCSC is our upcoming research project that will span several months as we travel to 5-10 sustainable communities (also called intentional communities or ecovillages). We may be starting this project as soon as January 2012. The goal of the research project will be to gain knowledge about the creation and maintenance of various successful communities that strive for environmental, social, and economic sustainability. (More info about CCSC) The project’s preparation is now well underway with literature review and potential community research. Presently, we are creating a power point containing notes of Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community by Diana Leafe Christian, Manager and Director of Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina. This book contains excellent information and we hope to begin contact with Ms. Christian and other experienced authors. To view the progress of the power point, please click here. We have begun creating a list of potential communities to visit, across the country. Each community is being thoroughly researched, creating a profile to begin answering questions for the CCSC study (view profiles and study progress here). If you have suggestions of possible sustainable communities to visit, please let us know! III. Logo Creation Contest Launch As D.r.e.e.m. Reality continues to evolve and grow we are looking forward to our symbolic appearance to as well. As you may have noticed, our website has undergone a make-over in color and “feel”. We are so pleased with the more natural colors as it feels more in line with our mission of sustainability. Now, it is time to evolve our logo. We’d like to introduce our new Logo Creation Contest open to the public to play! Offering a respected space in our historic timeline, consistent and open credit for their important contribution, and a free t-shirt with the new logo beaming proudly upon it. The winner of the contest will be greatly honored, as a logo is an effective method to share our mission as an organization. Please join the fun or recommend someone to! For more information about the Logo Contest, please visit the webpage for it. To participate, please sign up so we can be in communication if necessary! IV. DreemKitchen Questionnaire The memories of DreemKitchen 2011 are still lingering happily in our hearts and stories. An experience so great it will forever be celebrated and learned from. We are eager to continue the DreemKitchen report, which will contain information on the preparation, activation, and follow up. To view the report’s progress, click here. One element of the DreemKitchen report is to have the thoughts of those that partook in the experience. As we’ve mentioned, the success of the kitchen was due to the contributions of so many people - and we would be so happy to hear from them. We have created a new questionnaire that we hope anyone and everyone who participated in DreemKitchen would fill out. If you were part of DreemKitchen or visited it - Pretty pretty please fill in this questionnaire! Your answers will be used to evolve DreemKitchen 2012 as well as have a place in the official report. Plus, it's fun to talk about the experience, isn't it? We are open to hear your thoughts – both supportive and critically constructive. That concludes this newsletter folks, thanks for reading! Please feel free to contact us anytime - info@DreemReality.org Very Sincerely, Dani Phoenix Danielle@DreemReality.org Melinda@DreemReality.org