Features

October’s top 10 green crowdfunding projects

Published

11 years ago

October 18, 2013

Blue & Green Tomorrow

Crowdfunding is a democratic form of financing that allows people to direct their money towards projects they consider important, innovative and socially useful.

Each month, we round up some of our favourite crowdfunding initiatives that focus on sustainability, the environment, education, society – all the good stuff – and this is the October edition.

1. Global Garden, Global Kitchen

Global Garden, Global Kitchen in Tottenham, London, will be a takeaway with a difference. The project aims to transform unused space in Tottenham centre to a sustainable community food hub, where tasty produce is grown, prepared and distributed to locals by bicycle.

2. Stop the drops!

According to the ‘Stop the drops’ campaign, 300m litres of fuel drips from nozzles at petrol stations worldwide every year. This waste contributes to the formation of hazardous ground level ozone and smog. Therefore, this campaign aims to raise funding for a no drip nozzle – “a small device with a big impact.”

3. Letters to a Beekeeper

Letters to a Beekeeper is a book, co-authored by Steve Benbow and Alys Fowler, not just about beekeeping as it first may appear, but about all forgotten insects, whether they are predator or prey, pollinator or pest and how they make our world run, and why we should care.

4. Break the ice for Arctic wildlife

This global campaign requires funding to help involve Inuit communities in efforts to address the impacts of hydroelectric projects on critical sea ice habitats. Inuits from Hudson Bay have been raising their concerns about impacts of hydroelectricity on sea ice for over 20 years without success, but this project aims to bring them to New York, the largest importer of Canadian hydroelectricity, to make them harder to ignore.

5. Project Nuevo Mundo’s Earth Odyssey

Project Nuevo Mundo’s ambitious aim is to set up a series sustainable eco-villages with self-sufficient homesteads across the world.

6. Create a bamboo forest

In 15 years one lonely bamboo seedling can make more than 15,000 new trees, with each of the ‘siblings’ connected through their roots. This campaign intends to plant 1,500 bamboo saplings, laying the foundations for a bamboo forest of as many as 25m bamboo trees in an organically-certified forest, to produce leaves for the extraction of green resources.

7. Tamandua Ecological Reserve

The charity Yana Cocha runs a 30-hectare reserve and a rescue centre in Pastaza, Ecuador, that receives Amazonian animals including sloths and capybaras that have been confiscated from illegal trafficking. They are currently seeking funds to help expand their protected reserve and to support rehabilitation programmes to release their furry inmates.

8. Environmental Education Portal

The Plant a Tree Today Foundation is seeking funds to develop an interactive, investigational web based tool that will educate “tomorrow’s leaders” on environmental issues.

9. Maple Field Milk

Maple field milk is a community owned micro dairy farm aiming to expand, to provide “healthy cows, healthy milk and a healthy planet”.

10. Empower women to charge-up Ghana

Social Venture Africa, together with the NGO Village Exchange Ghana and the charity Know Your Planet, need funding to initiate a project which will train young Ghanaian women to produce small, cheap and low-tech solar power devices for those in the country who cannot afford electricity.