Hello gentle readers. 

 Here is a letter from sweet Annie Leonard, the "Story of Stuff" senior advisor whom I helped with free publicity several years ago and who is now advising me of big changes to come in the future. 

Dear Joseph Raglione,

By now you have probably heard about the big changes under way at The Story of Stuff Project. We’re in for the biggest move yet in our six-and-a-half years of existence. My move to becoming a Story of Stuff Board Member and Senior Advisor, and new job leading Greenpeace USA, comes at a time of incredible excitement and action here, and affords us fantastic opportunities.

The greatest joy I have experienced through The Story of Stuff has been discovering just how many millions of people around the world connect with this message. I have been blown away by the passion of you, the Story of Stuff Community, and your desire to take action. We all need to do our part to tackle the big problems we’re facing, but while individual actions are a great place to start, they are a terrible place to stop.

And we are not stopping. In fact, we’re about to kick it up another gear. We are building new programs that will allow our Community to work together to reduce our collective footprint, build our citizen muscles, and make major changes in our communities and countries.

We know that the challenges we face are enormous, but recent technological innovations have given us power to connect, educate, and organize as never before. I’d like to take some time to let you in on the systems that we’re building out to help you, our Community, find each other, receive training, and work together to find Solutions. 

One of the things I hear repeatedly from members of our Community is “I am the only person around here who cares about these issues”.

We know how many of you are out there, and we are building out the capability of our site for members to connect with each other -- to find other Actors participating in The Story of Solutions -- and meet up to share your own stories, experiences, and tips for living well. In time, we’ll give you the tools to find and organize community events, such as pot-lucks, clothing-swaps, and community gardens. These tools will allow members to get to know neighbours that share their values, and work together to reduce consumption and live better lives.

What you can do is help us support our exciting new programs.

 Your reward will be cleaner air and water and less pollution!

Another refrain I often hear is from people overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues we’re facing -- “What can I do?”

In response, we’re working with partners across the key issues you have identified so we can leverage our power to speak out, together, and have the most impact. We’ll be able to flex our Citizen Muscles in unison to push corporations to remove harmful toxins from their products, to get local governments to go plastic bag free, and to fight the political corruption that stands in the way of real reform. I hope that you will join our community in taking action on these important issues.

For many of us, this may be enough, but I know that there are a ton of passionate people out there who want to learn what they can do as changemakers to become leaders in their local communities. To help out with this, we’re building up our Citizen Muscle Boot Camp -- the graduates of which will be leaders for our movement in their communities. The Boot Camp, which will begin its first phase of large-scale testing next month, will be a four-week course on how to identify the issues you most care about, and learn how to bring about change at the local level.

All of this will be offered for free, but costs us money to build out and support. Please become a Champion of our Story by chipping in $5 a month to help us become a fully Community-supported organization.

I would not be leaving the day-to-day activities of The Story of Stuff if I did not believe in these programs and the people behind them. There is an enormous positive energy here, and I am immensely excited both by the work that we will be unveiling over the coming months -- the reasons that Greenpeace was so eager to collaborate with us.

The energy around this Community has always been fantastic. I have been immensely impressed by  our hard working Story of Stuff Community. They have taken the message to heart in order to bring change to their lives. Now, we are building out tools that will make it even easier for you to multiply your effects and bring about positive changes to your community, and to our world.

I look forward to taking the next steps with you. 

Annie Leonard, on behalf of The Story of Stuff team.

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From Joseph Raglione" 

Dear Annie: Our enemies have Billions of Dollars and friends in government. Sometimes, like in Canada and Russia, they are the government. Individuals like you and I do have the ability to communicate on the world wide web but we are not heartless socio-paths who believe winning is everything! We tend to believe in sharing and caring and if we are forced against the wall, we can generate negative publicity to stop the worst company abuses around the world, unfortunately, money is the problem and not the solution. Everybody wants money and money creates industrial pollution! We have to place our money on clean air and water and on food creation systems. These along with clean recycling systems are vitally important!

We need to generate much more publicity to counter the Oil based commercial crap being generated by companies and people who care only for profit.

Thanks for reading Annie and I am passing your message along to my readers.

Joseph Raglione