Heal Your Home

Co-op America, has created a great primer for making healthy environmental choices in your home. The section called "Heal Your Home" is broken down into Kitchen, Bedroom, Bathroom, Exterior, and Overall Health Homes and includes a glossary and additional related articles. You can browse the articles online HERE or download the entire thing as a PDF.

Creative for A Cause

Creative for A Cause is an incredible new online resource for socially minded design folks created by Heidi Cies. Made as part of her graduate thesis in advertising/design at Syracuse University, Heidi has put together two dozen detailed case studies of how socially conscious design is being taught in schools across the US. The site also has comprehensive lists of publications, websites, sources of funding, schools, and "role models" all pertaining to working in the fields of marketing, advertising, and design from an ethical stand point. The searchable site is a fantastic work in progress that should prove invaluable to anyone interested in working/teaching differently. Check it out HERE.

Groundswell

It's always great to discover another resource for socially minded artists online and the Groundswell Collective's Groundswell Blog is a welcome addition. With a wide range of articles on subjects that will be familiar to ALR reader you should definitely add them to your regular reading list. Check 'em out HERE.

Free Guide to Information Design

My friend John at Social Design Notes has created an excellent free resource: Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design. The downloadable PDF booklet contains tips and examples to help advocacy groups better communicate their messages with graphic design. Get the PDF HERE.

Why Bad Ads Happen To Good Causes

Why Bad Ads Happen To Good Causes, the classic work on how to best utilize print advertising for social causes (with plenty of examples of the good and the bad) is now a free downloadable PDF from communications consulting firm A Goodman. This is an invaluable resource for designers and clients alike!

Also available is Why Bad Presentations Happen To Good Causes.

Tap Water Quality Database

While we're on the subject of water...
Find out how clean your tap water actually is (in the U.S.) on the Environmental Working Group's National Tap Water Quality Database.

Planting Peace

Planting Peace is a handy new resource from the folks at the Organic Consumers Association. It collects news stories about the intersection of the anti-war, environmental, and organic activist communities in an attempt to forge a better alliance between the groups.

Eyes of a Stranger

“Upwards of 90% of the images of the majority world that are seen in the western media are produced by white photographers from the USA or Europe. This results in a one dimensional view often driven by a negative news agenda or the need to raise money.” -Dave Clark, Senior Lecturer in Photography, Bolton Institute, UK

With that in mind Kijiji Vision was formed to help indigenous photographers share their own vision of the world they live in. The organization, which offers its support services free of charge, also runs the commercial stock photography library MajorityWorld.com as a means of distribution.

via Boing Boing, thanks Meagan!

WiserEarth

WiserEarth is a new community-driven resource on non-profits & NGOs. It functions both as a directory of and forum for international organizations working on social and environmental issues. The site was created by the Natural Capital Institute, which is also working on a business oriented companion called WiserBusiness.

Make up or Die!?

Just because the FCC does not regulate the ingredients used in cosmetics doesn't mean you have to suffer for it.

Skin Deep: The Cosmetic Safety Database has information and online safety assessments for over 22,500 products. Created by the Environmental Working Group, this site is a great resource for discovering what harmful ingredients may be in your favorite cosmetics. Each product is given a score card with easy to undertand explanation of ingredients. You might be surprised to learn that many products with the words 'natural' or 'organic' in their name contain toxic chemicals.

You can also find out which cosmetic companies have joined the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of public health, educational, religious, labor, womens, environmental and consumer groups working to protect the health of consumers and workers by requiring the health and beauty industry to phase out the use of dangerous chemicals and replace them with safer alternatives.

With the help of The Cosmetic Safety Database, you can clean out your bathroom cabinets and find alternatives to products that contain killer chemicals like, DBP and DEHP which are found in anything from nail polish to deodorant and not included on packaging labels but are linked to birth defects.

(Thanks, Mim!)

Design Can Change!

Vancouver design studio SmashLAB has created a new resource for graphic designers concerned with global warming: Design Can Change. The site, which is still in it's early stages, is meant to be a comprehensive source of information and inspiration on sustainability for environmentally minded designers, and it is already chock full of data (though rather difficult to navigate). There's even a pledge you can sign and plans for a community directory. While I wish that it wasn't just about environmental issues, but rather the entire scope of socially conscious design, it's definitely a nice introduction for folks who are just becoming aware of graphic designers' power to affect positive change in the world.