Maria Polletta's Page

Ashley Cecil calls herself a “painting activist.”

She is one of the most creative social advocates I have stumbled upon.

Her approach is simple.

1. Love art. Study art formally and work with it professionally.
2. Travel to different locations in pursuit of “events of cultural interest.”
3. Capture them, not with a camera, but with watercolors, oil paints, pastels..
4.… Continue

When I think of the familiar “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra, I think tin cans and water bottles…not bicycles.

Luckily, Allison Karow’s thinking isn’t as old-fashioned as mine.

Two and a half years ago, Karow started Bike Saviours out of a Tempe, AZ backyard. The non-profit serves as a(n):

* bicycle shop that provides low-priced used bicycles and bike parts, as well as affordable repairs
* “community recycling project” that turns donated bicycle part… Continue

I’ve always thought “trickle-down economics” was a nice idea, albeit an unlikely one.

Apparently Glen and Mildred Robbins Leet agreed with me.

The Leets were “frustrated that huge sums of money allocated to top levels of society never reached the world’s poorest,” according to the website for Trickle Up, the organization they founded in 1979. They decided to turn the tables on the… Continue

No one understands students like students.

That’s why I’m a big fan of Schools for Schools, a program run through Invisible Children, an organization that seeks to raise money and awareness to help end the longest-running war in Africa (in northern Uganda). The program partners schools in other parts of Uganda with a school in the war-torn North that badly needs… Continue

A nonprofit whose efforts I’ve followed for some time now is COAR (Community Outreach & Advocacy for Refugees), an organization that seeks to assist refugees resettling in the U.S. in becoming self-reliant and comfortable in their new lives and relies largely on volunteers to do so. COAR started out as a student organization and has ballooned to a dedicated nonprofit. They work for “awareness and advocacy” of the refugee situation, sponsoring tutoring fo… Continue