Yoga • Community • Disaster Relief • Humanitarian Aid

A donation-based yoga class. Our proceeds go to the UUSC/UUA Joint Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund.
Our love goes to the people of Haiti. $20 minimum donation for class
Everyone welcome, from newcomers  to experienced yogis! Bring your mat or use one of ours

The Charity: UUSC’s disaster response in Haiti will focus on those survivors less likely to have access to aid, such as child domestic workers (restaviks), women-headed households that work in the informal sector, and people living with HIV/AIDS.

The Teachers: Sarah Jane Shangraw teaches slow flow yoga infused with meditative awareness. Margaret Suby is a teacher in training at The Yoga Studio in Brookline.

Speakers: Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon and Weimin Tchen

Health care, war, global warming and the economy: These are the greatest problems we’re facing today. The media and our elected officials like to portray them as isolated issues, focusing on blame rather than solutions that are in line with a vast majority of Americans.

The Majority Agenda Project, a new Boston-based initiative, views these issues as profoundly intertwined and, likewise, sees the solutions as interconnected collaborations across labor, peace and climate movements.

Organizers Suren Moodliar, Paul Shannon and Weimin Tchen will lead a discussion on the Majority Agenda Project and offer ways for local people to get involved. They’ll talk about a strategic agenda based on policies that will begin to solve these problems and already have a majority of support among the public.

Thank you to our Sponsors

Majority Agenda Project

What’s a time bank?

A time bank is an organization where members have a bank account of time, and exchange time-based services with other members.  It’s a pool of members, and operates like a circle, not a one-to-one swap or barter.  In  a time  bank, for example, Lara makes a cake for Aldo, Keren gives skiing lessons to David, Dianne gives Carol ride to the airport, Carol paints a painting for Louisa, Krystyna lends her vacation house to Alice, etc. You get time credit for the services you provide, and you can spend that time on services that other members offer.

After the economic crisis, more people are bartering with friends and neighbors and forming time banks to share goods and services locally. Come meet local members of the Time Trade Circle, a Boston-area organization with more than 500 members, to learn how you can start participating in this locally-grown and sustainable economy.

This orientation meeting will be followed by a potluck get-together at 5:00 PM, including JP folks who are already members of the Time Trade Circle. If you wish to stay for the potluck, please bring a dish to share.

To learn more about time banking, please visit www.timetradecircle.org

Thank you to our co-sponsors

Time Trade Cirle

It’s under our feet and under our fingernails, but what is it? And how did it get there? Inspired by William Bryant Logan’s acclaimed book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, find out how industrial farming, mining and urban development have led us toward cataclysmic droughts, starvation, floods and climate change. Dirt is a part of everything we eat, drink and breathe. Which is why we should stop treating it like, well…dirt.

Thanks to our co-sponsor

Raising polutry for eggs, meat and pets used to be a standard practice in America. As we have moved farther away from a local food system, many people are now reclaiming the right to raise chickens in their own backyards. But how can those of us urban dwellers do the same? In this birdkeeping 101 class, Joan Teebagy will share the basic how-tos of safely rearing chickens in urban and suburban environments. She will touch upon the legal side of poultry-rearing, and discuss local city codes and recent citizen-backed changes to ordinances.

About our Speaker

Joan Teebagy is a retired software engineer who lives on a small lot and raises laying chickens, meat chickens and bees as well as vegetables and flowers. She also tends two community garden plots and teaches at Codman Community Farms.  Joan has taught backyard laying chickens and meat chickens as well as a chick breeding, hatching and rearing class for children. She developed  and ran a program at Codman Community farm for community gardeners to raise meat chickens as a cooperative group.

Come taste some great organic fair trade chocolate from the Dominican Republic and hear the inspiring story of the struggle to form cacoa cooperatives to challenge the big growers.

Come meet a cacao farmer and a staff member of CONACADO cacao co-op in the Dominican Republic who will share their history.   In 1988, the cacao industry in the Dominican Republic was dominated by four major exporters. Most Dominican cacao production was low quality, unfermented beans shipped to the United States at low prices.  Seven hundred small-scale farmers came together to form CONACADO with the goal of producing a higher quality cacao, directly accessing new markets, and getting better prices.  Over 20 years later, this small-farmer organization now has 10,000 farmer members who produce approximately 25% of the cacao exported from the Dominican Republic.   The co-operative’s success in quality improvement and marketing means that the majority of their cacao has been sold as high quality fermented beans, primarily to niche markets: Organic, Biodynamic, and Fair Trade.

Ramón Matías Frías González is a cacao producer and Secretary of the Board at CONACADO. Basilio Almonte de los Santos is an agronomist and Technical Director at CONACADO’s office in Santo Domingo. They will be joined by members of Equal Exchange, a local Fair Trade organization and proud partner of CONACADO.

Chocolates and cocoas featuring organic and Fair Trade cacao from CONACADO’s farmers will be served.

Thank you to our co-sponsors

Speaker: Prof. Ruediger Volk

Come learn the inspiring local history of Robert Treat Paine and his work to build affordable housing in the Hyde Square neighborhood. Paine was a prominent business leader and great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence with the same name. Paine pushed to expand homeownership for working families, organizing alongside the Workingman’s Cooperative Bank.

Thanks to our co-sponsor

Speakers: Kim Denney, owner/operator of Chestnut Farm Meat CSA, cattle farmer Ridge Shinn, author and local food activist Jamey Lionette

All-natural. Organic. Free-range. Grass-fed. Are you a conscientious meat-eater trying to navigate this new terrain of labels and concerns? Are you wondering whether it’s safe and sustainable to eat meat at all? Bring your questions to a discussion with three experts in small-scale meat production — and learn about how you can eat meat responsibly.

About our Speakers:

As a child Kim Denney loved the Little House on the Prairie books and read them all repeatedly. She dreamed of living Laura’s life and credits the hours spent reading with driving her dream of farming. In addition, she grew up with a family that appreciated and valued open space. Her father would often tell her “they don’t make any more land”. As an adult she purchased an abandoned farm and embarked on the path of her dreams. She has enjoyed a decade of life without a furnace and raised three children on one bathroom. For eight years Kim worked as a middle school teacher and school administrator fully believing that nothing is more fun than a thirteen year old. Today, she loves farming full-time and notes many parallels between her former middle school students and current farm animals.

Cattleman Ridge Shinn is an expert in sustainable farm practices and hardy, high-functioning livestock breeds that allow him to eschew the industrial, feedlot model of raising cattle. He is now recognized as a pioneer in developing a system of producing tender, tasty, and healthful beef from animals raised on 100% grass and hay, with no grain. His company, Hardwick Beef, was featured in Time magazine in January. He lives in Hardwick, MA.

Jamey Lionette is a contributor to Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed and Boston’s most outspoken grocer. He ran Lionette’s Market in the South End until 2010, an independent shop devoted to sustainably raised local produce and meats.

Thanks to our co-sponsors

Speaker: Steven Greenhouse, New York Times business and economics correspondent

Since the recession’s peak, the U.S. unemployment rate has been hovering around 10 percent. But the challenges to the American worker go beyond the current economic crisis. Steven Greenhouse will talk about how American companies have squeezed millions of workers by clamping down on wages, cutting benefits and violating labor laws. He’ll also offer a practical set of solutions the government, business and labor leaders could implement to help working people.

Book Reviews

“In this shocking and important book, Steven Greenhouse explains and tells the stories of how U.S. workers are paying the price for the lower labor standards and wages that are the result of poorly-managed globalization.”-Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at Columbia University

“Steven Greenhouse’s brilliant and vividly reported expose shows how employers have been squeezing the life out of American workers through means both legal and illegal. My blood boiled when I read the Big Squeeze. Any presidential candidate-or voter-who overlooks this book will be clueless about what’s really going on in America.” – Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

For more on the book and Steven Greenhouse, please visit www.stevengreenhouse.com

Thank you to our co-sponsors

Welcome to Versailles, New Orleans-home to the densest ethnic Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. For over 30 years, its residents lived a quiet existence on the edge of New Orleans. But then came Hurricane Katrina, the immense garbage piles and the shocking discovery of a toxic landfill planned in their neighborhood. Watch as they fight back, turning a devastating disaster into a catalyst for change and a chance to build a better future.

Thanks to our co-sponsor