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The Sustainable Village is proud to partner with the non-profit
organization, Greenstar. We help with Greenstar financing by offering
some of our products for sale on their web site, help sell their
CDs through our marketing channels and promote their work in our
catalogs. We hope to introduce some of our customers in developing
countries to the benefits of working with Greenstar as well as provide
engineering suggestions and tools for their portable community centers.
A small group of people including the head of the US Department
of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab and a member of the White
House Office of Media Affairs founded Greenstar in 1998. Goals were
to provide solar power, health, education and environmental programs
to small villages in the developing world as well as to connect
people in those villages to the global community. Today, Greenstar
includes twenty Ambassadors with world-class skills in finance,
telecommunications, public relations, media production, international
development, internet technology and marketing, medicine and education.
They work with people in traditional cultures to record the voice
of the community expressed in original music, artwork, photography,
video and other arts - voice connected with respect and dignity
to the land, to families, to language, tradition, to the past and
to a clear vision of the future. Revenues earned from this priceless
"digital culture" are used to fund an ongoing, community-driven
process of literacy, local business, education, training, public
health, and environmental programs.
Greenstar designed a portable community center that uses solar power
for water purification, a small clinic, a vaccine cooler, a classroom,
a digital studio and a satellite or wireless link to the Internet.
We work with the people in each village to develop an ecommerce
web site, employ local musicians, teachers and art professionals
to record the voice of the community. This formula provides new
jobs and skills, strengthens local culture and language, and affirms
people's independence. Villagers own the Greenstar Village Center
themselves, and become shareholders in Greenstar.
Completed pilot projects include installations in a remote Bedouin
settlement on the West Bank
in the Middle East, a small community in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica,
and a village in Parvatapur, India.
New plans include projects in Ghana, Tibet, Peru, and over 60 other
communities on all continents of the world - a network of people,
skills, ideas, tools and cultural voices.
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