When most of us think of online shopping, Amazon, Ebay and other big name shopping sites immediately come to mind. With a wide audience and cheap prices, these websites are popular and sell just about everything — except for local, handmade and artisan products. For those items, you probably tend to head to local boutiques or farmers’ markets.
But now, thanks to the new site MadeClose, you can buy these types of items from the comfort of your own home.
Launched six months ago, this Brooklyn-based e-commerce site specializes in eco-conscious products. What makes the company stand out though is how it organizes its site. Focusing on location, all of its products are arranged according to where they’re manufactured. Customers can search for their desired product on a browseable map on the site.
Overall, the company’s goal is to connect small-scale American manufacturers with consumers all over the country, allowing the companies to grow and expand.
Vendors don’t have to pay to join MadeClose, but the site does receive a commission on all sales.
At the heart of the company’s values is transparency. All vendors are required to display what percentage of a product’s materials are made in the U.S., how many employees they have and the product’s key ingredients and materials. In addition, the merchants have the option to include information on where the materials they use are sourced and their values.
Through this policy, customers will know exactly what they’re buying and where it comes from — making them a more active participant in the manufacturing process.
Right now, MadeClose has 600 merchants on its site. And while most are concentrated in Brooklyn, there are sellers from Los Angeles to North Carolina and include a reclaimed wood skateboard manufacturer, a tomato and cheddar biscotti baker, a Massachusetts-based booze-infused jam maker and a leather goods manufacturer.
And even though it’s not that environmentally friendly to ship a product cross-country, that isn’t a deterrent for the site. Instead, it focuses on how these local businesses are usually more community-based since they use local materials and reinvest in the community.
One such company is Ampersand in Cincinnati, Ohio. Ninety-five percent of the materials used by this furniture and home goods product design company comes from the Cincinnati area. And since joining MadeClose about a month ago, the company has expanded beyond its borders with all of its sales being to places outside of its home state.
But with any new site, there’s always critics, which claim that local products are expensive, elitist and only for those with “precious tastes.”
However, according to co-founder and CEO Peter Smith, those stereotypes are exactly what MadeClose is trying to dispel.
“Part of the reason that we started the site was to kind of pull back the veil on a lot of noise out there,” Smith told Next City. “What about the fact that if you buy from a local shop, they circulate a lot more money in their own community than a big business chain? I can understand how someone might think that the price points of artisanal goods are exclusionary, but a lot of time, they are better made and longer-lasting.”
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Tag: New York City
Meet the Compassionate Stylist Cutting the Hair of NYC’s Homeless
Mark Bustos’s day job? Styling hair at a salon in New York City. While he’s just as chic and fabulous as many people in his line of work, this 30 year old is more generous than most.
On Sundays, instead of going to brunch or lolling around Central Park, Bustos is flexing his talents and providing haircuts at no-cost for an unlikely clientele: the homeless.
Standing between so many people without homes and employment is the inability to look presentable for job interviews. Mark’s Instagram page showcases the difference that a professional grooming can make to someone’s appearance.
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As Bustos tells the Huffington Post, one client emphasized this exact fact. “After offering him a haircut and whatever food he wanted to eat, he didn’t have much to say throughout the whole process, until after I showed him what he looked like when I was done … The first thing he said to me was, ‘Do you know anyone that’s hiring?'”
Mark’s mission started back in May 2012 after returning home from the Philippines. While visiting relatives there, he rented a local barbershop chair and gave haircuts to impoverished children. He took the idea back home with him and hasn’t stopped since. He doesn’t discriminate by locale, either. He’s given gratis cuts to people in Jamaica, Costa Rica and Los Angeles.
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Fully conscience of his work’s altruism, he deliberately performs his cuts in wide-open public spaces to show everyone how simple it is to #BeAwesomeToSomebody — his personal hashtag — which he uses on all his Instagram photos.
Hopefully, Mark’s story will prompt more people to greet strangers and the less fortunate with the introduction he uses before every haircut, “I want to do something nice for you today.”
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MORE: A Van That Tweets to Help the Homeless
This App Helps Reduce Food Waste
Americans waste up to 30 to 40 percent of food, an excess of up to $165 billion a year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Which is why a New York app developer is launching an app to help restaurants and grocery stores find customers who might pay for discounted food before it’s thrown away.
PareUp is an online platform that allows food vendors to list excess items at a reduced price, which is often food they’re unable to donate because of regulations or the items don’t meet the minimum bulk requirement for food banks or shelters.
“We want to change the cultural conversation around what it means to consume food and the life cycle of food,” co-founder Margaret Tung said. “Because we’re throwing out a lot more than needs to be.”
Tung, along with Jason Chen and Anuj Jhunjhunwala, created the app to both benefit retailers and consumers. Users can check in on available inventory each day and head to the store to purchase it. PareUp plans to take a small percentage of each transaction.
“A lot of people in food tech today are looking at production, consumption and distribution with all these delivery apps getting funding and attention like Grubhub,” Tung said. “We wanted to look at where people are not really spending that much energy … the next frontier to explore.”
Currently, the app is only available for food shoppers in New York City, but the startup is aiming to launch in Chicago, Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. as well. The company has also received inquiries from retailers in London, Sydney and Toronto, too.
But for now, the biggest hurdle facing PareUp is changing the way in which people think of leftover food, according to Tung. Food that otherwise is headed toward the dumpster is not exactly appetizing.
The company is also hoping to launch a version for food banks or shelters, bridging the gap between nonprofits and food retailers, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Though PareUp isn’t a silver bullet for food waste, it’s a step in the right direction to help retailers unload unused food and support nonprofit efforts.
“[We’re] just trying to pick up where they leave off,” said Tung said of food banks and shelters. “And even still the numbers are pretty huge. The market has enough room for everyone, at least right now.”
MORE: Food Cowboy: Teaching Truck Drivers ‘Nothing Goes to Waste’
When School’s Not in Session, NYC Food Trucks Are Serving Hungry Kids
In New York City, 75 percent of public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. For some of the city’s most impoverished students, school lunch might be the one the one nutritious meal he or she gets for the day.
But what happens during the summer when school is out? Do these kids just go unfed?
Well, for the last few years, New York City’s Department of Education has operated a summer meal program to make sure no kid goes hungry, Education News reports. And this summer, the Big Apple got a little creative with their delivery methods.
Since June, four brightly colored food trucks have been roaming the city’s five boroughs, feeding healthy breakfasts and lunches to kids under 18-years-old for free.
MORE: This State Is Making Sure No Child Is Ever Denied a School Lunch
These trucks stop at more than 1,000 locations such as pools, schools, libraries, parks, public housing sites, community-based organizations and soup kitchens. Serving healthy, low-fat fare such as blueberry granola, zucchini bread, omelets, bagels, tacos, salad, watermelon and grilled chicken, the trucks have handed out more than 4.4 million summer meals.
The program is sponsored by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Share Our Strength (SOS), an organization working to end childhood hunger in the United States.
“Ensuring the health of our children is our highest priority — and providing them with quality, nutritious meals is central to that,” said New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.
It’s important that no child goes hungry — how can he or she succeed on an empty stomach? As Billy Shore, founder and CEO of SOS said, “Making sure kids get the healthy food they need in the summer feeds more than just their bodies. It feeds their futures….If we want strong, healthy kids who can hit the ground running when school is back in session this fall, we need to make sure they’re getting the nutrition they need this summer. It’s that simple.”
The summer meal program ends in just a couple of weeks — on August 29 — right before the new school year begins. Those interested in finding the location of the nearest truck can text “nycmeals” to 877877.
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Once This Woman Realized the Vast Number of Homeless, She Started Making Sandwiches
To make a sandwich, all you need are a few simple ingredients: two pieces of bread, some peanut butter and a little jelly. For Erin Dinan, though, that isn’t enough, so she’s added a fourth ingredient — compassion — making her sandwiches, and those made by volunteers at One Sandwich at a Time, not just sources of food — but rather, instruments of change.
Originally from the South, Dinan moved to New York City to study art and photography. One day while running through Grand Central Station, she was struck by her interaction with a homeless man who asked her for help. While many would have kept moving, Dinan gave half of her sandwich to the man without a second thought.
“It’s amazing because the look of gratitude on his face,” Dinan told Starting Good. “He was surprised and grateful that someone was helping him to make it to his next meal.”
It was that moment and the look on his face that inspired her. Going forth, she started packing extra sandwiches in her bag and distributing them to the homeless people on the streets. Sometimes, she would stop and talk with them, while other times she simply dropped it into their laps and kept moving.
From there, the movement spread as her friends and family encouraged her to start the nonprofit that now feeds thousands.
So how does one woman feed New York’s hungry and homeless?
Dinan has turned her small actions into a large scale 501(c)(3) charity. One Sandwich at a Time operates with the help of donations from food suppliers, such as local bakeries and Whole Foods, and local kitchen areas.
The charity hosts sandwich-making events, which businesses donate kitchen space for. The night before, Dinan will drop off all of the supplies and the following evening, volunteers will pour into the kitchen and start making sandwiches at the various stations.The events last for about two hours in the evening, and volunteers, equipped with hairnets and gloves, can stay for as long as they like. The next day, the sandwiches are packed into vans and brought to local shelters and food kitchens to be distributed.
“That’s why it’s grown because people are busy in city, and if they want to pop in and make one sandwich then go home, they have made a difference,” Dinan told Starting Good. “If someone stays for two hours and makes a hundred sandwiches, then they’ve made a huge difference.”
At Dinan’s first sandwich-making event, about 400 sandwiches were made. However, that’s a modest number compared to the 800 to 2,000 sandwiches made at her affairs now.
While One Sandwich at a Time continues to grow in New York City, Dinan hopes to expand the group into other cities, and maybe create chapters across the world.
“There is a deeper level of homelessness that we won’t understand,” Dinan told Starting Good. “So we open our hearts and show compassion, and show them that someone cares and maybe they will realize that they can get out of this.”
Who knew that opening your lunch box and sharing half a sandwich could make such a difference?
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Meet the Man Who Believes Creativity Knows No Economic Boundaries
It’s the height of summer, and soon, back-to-school commercials will dominate our television screens.
Students won’t be the only ones hitting the books this coming semester, however, as New York University (NYU) just announced a new course load entitled “Initiative for Creativity and Innovation in Cities.” Created by Richard Florida, it aims to help city leaders make the creative field accessible for all economic classes.
That’s because in New York City, a city prized for its creative industry, 3 million residents don’t have home internet access. And in the Big Apple’s public schools, there is only one computer science teacher for every 11,000 students.
The goal? To teach city officials, nonprofit leaders and economic development professionals the tools to expand the wealth of the creative class to a greater and more diverse population. Included in this course is a class called “Tools and Techniques for Understanding Urban Economies,” which teaches how to correctly assess community assets.
Students will also have the opportunity to take “Principles of Economic Development,” which is anything but your normal economics class, as it focuses on how “technology, talent, tolerance and territorial assets” are the “strategy for competitiveness in the creative age.”
According to Florida’s interview with Next City, “I thought we could build an educational model that wasn’t so cloistered and was very much broader based” with a goal “to ‘preach the gospel of urbanism’ to a really broad group of people… This initiative is another mechanism for doing this.”
The boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn already experienced their boom, and Florida hopes this course will carry that growth to the people living in the area — from Staten Island to the Bronx. For many people in these communities and in the rest of the city, Florida cites low wages, not high rent as the main cause of economic immobility in NYC.
While the lucrative creative class remains an exclusive group, sending these city leaders back to school may break down those cliquey borders and promote inclusion in this broad city — or at the very least, set the wheels in motion.
MORE: Introducing the Newest Innovation in Higher Ed: The NanoDegree
If Another Superstorm Hits, This Dirt Barricade Will Protect NYC
Everyone — but especially New Yorkers — remember Superstorm Sandy’s seemingly endless destruction back in 2012. Costing the region billions of dollars, it was an example of what nature could do to our infrastructure and our society.
Preventing damage like what occurred is crucial — and a big part of what needs to be done to prepare for the future. That’s what the winning project of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design contest aims to do. And there’s no better way to do it than to also make some beautiful public space in the process.
The Bridging Berm is a new project on Manhattan’s lower east side. While there’s no timeline for completion, once it is finished, it will shelter 150,000 residents and a power sub-station from the effects of storms and rising sea levels.
The 2.19 miles along the East River that the Bridging Berm will occupy is currently a public park, though it has few entrances and is very isolated from the city. The Bridging Berm will change that — improving both access and the public space itself. Even more importantly, it will raise the riverbank to nine feet above its current level. Had this been around during Sandy, there still would have been four feet to spare.
Jeremy Barbour of Tacklebox Architecture tells Next City that “the strength of the proposal is in the way they have addressed both the vertical and the horizontal through a series of programmed berms and bridges that mediate the boundary between the waterfront and the edge of the city — defining a place for community gathering and a way to inhabit the in-between.”
And a defining place it will be, with bike paths along the water, boating and fishing areas, as well as athletic fields. Clearly, there will something for everybody.
This multipurpose space is just one of three components to the larger “BIG U” proposal in the Rebuild By Design contest; roll-down storm gates on the FDR bridge as well as a berm-and-educational facility in lower Manhattan are also part of the plan.
The Bridging Berm could have the largest impact, though. With such a dense population and the power station in the area, not to mention the improved public space, it is an exceptional urban planning vision.
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The 7 Smartest Uses of Technology in Government Today
Ahead of our July 30 lunch with Rachel Haot, we’re surveying the best applications of new technology in government across the country. Click here to write Rachel a question or idea, and we’ll pose it to her.
- ShotSpotter
This Milwaukee-based program relies on microphones in public places to instantly identify a gunshot by its sound signature. One thing this technology helps to prevent is false alarms: sometimes people confuse fireworks or tires going flat with gunfire. But more importantly, it notifies the authorities to actual gunshots, since in the vast majority of cases residents do not report them — even when they clearly identify the noise as such. In Milwaukee, one city that’s found success in ShotSpotter, only 14 percent of residents dialed 911 upon hearing gunshots. This is partly out of fear of retribution, but also a tragedy of the commons problem. ShotSpotter is now live in 75 American cities, including Washington, D.C. and most recently, New York City.
- NYC OpenData Portal
After Rachel Haot wrote the era-defining Digital Roadmap for NYC in Spring 2011, the city followed up on her instruction to make as much data open to the public as possible. Since then, New York City has published more than a thousand datasets on the usual topics like education, health, transportation and crime. This is an inherently transparent move: more of what the government knows about itself is now available to its citizens. Even better, it’s also proven to be a good first step in government-citizen collaboration. Some amazing visualizations have been derived from the data, including the Breathing City and the Collisions by Time of Day map:
- Grade.DC
Our nation’s capital is on the vanguard of discerning public opinion through digital interaction. Check out grade.DC.Gov: through it, any Washington, D.C. resident can grade any aspect of the city’s service. Every day, the mayor and his staff receive an analysis of the feedback, so they can focus their efforts on what citizens need most at that moment. They can also geo-target the responses, enabling them reallocate resources by district. In June they averaged an A-. Not bad.
- Predictive Policing (PredPol)
We know what you’re thinking: Minority Report. Yeah, kind of. This California program uses data to allocate policing resources to areas where criminal acts are more likely to occur. Its advantage lies in its bigger-picture comprehension of crime. Instead of issuing a blanket designation that certain areas are heavily problematic, PredPol analyzes each individual crime against a history of similar transgressions from the past, to calculate an array of probabilities. When the LAPD ran the program against its own internal data processing, PredPol was twice as good at predicting where wrongdoings would occur. Founded by a mathematician from Santa Clara University, the system incorporates some of the techniques that geologists use to predict earthquake aftershocks.
- Diplopedia
The State Department has this well-named internal wiki where diplomats and their staffers share vital but sensitive information about all kinds of things. The rules and principles are very similar to Wikipedia’s, including the requirement to adopt a neutral point of view, cite professional sources, and defer to others. It’s almost two years old and a model of intra-government collaboration and information sharing.
- FastFWD
This program is like Code for America, but for infrastructure. Run out of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, FastFWD pairs entrepreneurs with local governments to solve civic engineers’ and public officials’ infrastructure problems. Their goal is to push projects through the pipeline much faster, more affordably and with greater impact. Its first class of entrepreneurs graduated this summer.
- Smarter Sustainable Dubuque
Dubuque is a town of 58,000 on the eastern border of Iowa. In 2009, it partnered with IBM to install smart water meters — which flag overuse and monitor leaks — in 300 homes. During the program’s first year, participating residents used almost 7 percent less water.
Sources: Digital Transformation: Wiring the Responsive City; WhiteHouse.gov; StateTech Magazine
Rachel Haot Revolutionized City Government. Now She’s Working At The State Level, and Wants Your Input
Rachel Haot was first amazed by computers when she was eight. She logged onto IBM’s early Internet service, Prodigy, to play checkers. “It was the coolest thing,”she told The Verge.
Twenty years later, in January 2011, Haot became New York City’s first Chief Digital Officer (CDO). It was her job to write a Digital Roadmap in 90 days, but also to define the CDO role. She was the first person to hold that title in any major American city, and her work has changed our cities’ attitudes to 21st-century tools.
Like Bloomberg, Haot is a technology entrepreneur. In 2006, she founded GroundReport, one of the first citizen journalism outlets. Her insight was that anyone with a phone can be a primary source for breaking news. Which is why on the GroundReport platform, anyone can submit an article or media for publication. Advancements in personal technology meant to Haot that “the crowd” isn’t just a scattering of passive readers, but a mass intelligence eager to contribute to everything.
During Haot’s four years as CEO of GroundReport, she saw the power of this principle as more than 7,000 people around the world contributed text, images, and video to the site. When Mayor Bloomberg approached her to make NYC Internet-awesome, she left GroundReport and moved to City Hall. Her transition from one job to another should, in theory, be seamless. The idea behind GroundReport — that the collaboration of many ordinary people can supply extraordinary value — also makes sense as political science. Journalism and democracy both work better when they’re more open and inclusive.
But in practice, she faced an uphill battle. NYC is arguably the intellectual capital of the world, but ancient IT systems and clunky bureaucracy bogged down City Hall. And then there was the culture. Another Bloomberg staffer, Stephen Goldsmith, was Deputy Mayor when Haot arrived and worked regularly with her. He said that getting departments to embrace new technologies like social media and data analytics was “very difficult.”
“New York City is a huge platform of information,” Goldsmith says. “When Rachel arrived, it was underdeveloped, underutilized, not personalized — just waiting for social media to unlock it.”
In the spring of 2011, Haot’s office published the “Roadmap for the Digital City,” which recommended a series of steps to make NYC the best at “Internet access, open government, citizen engagement and digital industry growth.” Some ideas included: installing public WiFi hotspots in parks and subways, investing in digital education and Internet access for low-income families and redesigning nyc.gov.
The benefits of open source collaboration and the importance of a great user experience have been obvious to Haot since she was very young. But her other talent is spreading computer literacy. Haot also has a knack for showing the technologically hesitant how the Internet can make their jobs easier.
Which is the main thing that needs getting done at state and local governments, says Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institute and co-author of “The Metropolitan Revolution.” “Digital is not something one person does,” she says. “It’s an approach a government has internally and externally. Digital has to be infused into everything.” Haot told A Smarter Planet she begins her conversation with other department heads by asking what their goals are. Then, she “backs into talk about digital tools” in pursuit of those goals.
Last fall, NYC announced that 100 percent of the Roadmap’s projects had been completed. Then in December, Haot announced she’d be taking the position of Deputy Secretary for Technology for New York State. Goldsmith, reflecting on the cultural change wrought by Haot, says, “The staff matured a lot in the time that she was there. In the end, there was much more of an appetite for digital.”
Now, from her new perch in Albany, New York, she’s issued the following challenge to NationSwell readers:
“How can we in government improve our service delivery and performance by embracing digital tools? How can we support a vibrant tech ecosystem statewide? Broadly: How do we realize the State’s innovative potential?”
Help her out by taking action using the button on the left.
How New York City Is Advancing Worker Cooperatives
Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, Broadway and wealthy businesses are commonly what most of us probably associate with New York City. However, the city of skyscrapers and corporations is taking a step forward to promote another lesser-known industry: the worker cooperative.
New York City has now become the first city in the country to make worker co-ops a line item in its city budget, with $1.2 million set aside for the organizations.
While worker co-ops are a normal occurrence in Europe and Latin America, they are very rare here in the U.S. The business model varies greatly from your average corporation. For starters, everyone in a worker co-op is an employee-member and has an equal vote for who is elected to their board of directors. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is that generally all profits are distributed equally among the employee-members.
The U.S. is currently home to only about 350 co-ops, concentrated mainly in the New York metro region, the San Francisco Bay Area and New England.
However, with the $1.2 million, New York is hoping to increase that number. The expectation is that the funds will support and expand 20 current co-ops, plus start 28 new ones — creating 234 new jobs in the process.
Since 2011, the city had been supporting worker co-ops through the Center for Family Life with just $150,000 of funding annually, but the government’s new measure is the first of its kind and will provide much needed support.
Money isn’t the only way that the city is encouraging worker co-ops; the Department of Small Business Services recently began offering classes on how to start and maintain them.
While $1.2 million isn’t a huge amount when compared to New York City’s $75 billion budget, it represents a major step in the right direction. In a city where rents are high and wealthy live alongside the poor, funding worker co-ops will provide residents with the opportunity to work and earn a living.
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