The state’s largest newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, covered the project with a full page spread. Naturally, the focus was on Marie, our 96-year-old matriarch, who took active part in the construction of benches and gardens. From the Free Press:

Marie Hausman, 96, of Bradenton, Fla., found herself Tuesday wearing a face mask in the humid air in front of the O’Brien Community Center, sanding a board as part of her contribution toward a new bench for the Malletts Bay Avenue complex. She said she couldn’t imagine a better thing to do.

Enjoy the rest of the story at the Free Press website.

Today at the Personal Democracy Forum, my buddy Matt Ewing announced the launch of his new Democracy Alliance venture effort that’s looking to spend serious seed money on progressive technology start-ups. From their site:

Unknown candidates are raising millions overnight. Huge Internet fueled movements are rising up from nowhere. Long-standing powerhouses are struggling to adapt. Progressives have reaped huge rewards by successfully leveraging innovation. New Media Ventures was created to make sure we can stay ahead of the curve.

Anyone got a good idea out there waiting for some seed capital? This is your chance!

Folks following my life know that I’ve visited Haiti a few times to support an organization called the Haitian People’s Support Project. They operate an orphanage, worker collectives, educational institutions and do direct relief work for earthquake and hurricane victims. “They” is essentially one brilliant, fearless man — Pierre LeRoy — who splits his time between Haiti, the Dominican Republic and my hometown of Woodstock, NY.

I haven’t heard from Pierre this morning yet, but I’m sure he is already flooded with calls for help. Hundreds of Haitians depend on him, for life and death aid. If your heart is torn by this massive humanitarian disaster and you want to help, please donate to HPSP, at www.haitiansupportproject.org. It’s not a fancy, slick operation like the Red Cross or UNICEF. But unlike those bloated bureaucracies, every penny to HPSP goes directly to Haitians in need. It will save lives.

And pray to whatever God will listen for the people of Port-au-Prince.

Tim pulled off a ballsy, smart, inspiring act of environmental civil disobedience. He needs $45,000 to close the deal. He’s gotten $21,614 in donations in the past 4 days. I bet you’ll give your $25, too, once you hear his story. The facts:

On Election Day 2008, the Bureau of Land Management announced that it would auction off drilling rights to huge swaths of land in Utah, near Arches National Park. Beautiful country, up on the auction block to the highest oil company bidder. Not pretty, but pretty sneaky — they thought an Election Day announcement would fly under the radar screen, and the oil companies could snatch up the public land without anyone noticing.

Conservationists noticed. They (including my good friend Celia Alario) quickly started a campaign to keep the lands wild. They raised a ruckus, they challenged the BLM, they created Facebook pages. But the auction didn’t get derailed.

So a group of 200 protesters showed up at the auction itself. Tim was there. But instead of holding a sign and shouting, Tim checked himself into the auction … as a bidder. He got paddle number 70. When the auction started, his civil disobedience started. He didn’t shout. He didn’t lock himself to a table. He didn’t throw his size 10 shoes at the auctioneer and call him a dog. He just bid.

And won.

Tim ended up “winning” $1.7 million of leases, or about 22,500 acres. It took that long for the authorities to realize that the unaffiliated, 27-year-old newcomer was buying EVERY SINGLE PLOT. When they did, federal agents stopped the auction. They took Tim into custody. He may face federal charges.

But before that, he has the opportunity to actually buy the land. Or at least put down deposits on it. That is, if we help him.

Tim needs $45,000 for the first round of deposits, which he and his lawyers have agreed is the best way to keep the land drill-free. Why did I give him my $25? Mostly to reward his brilliant, ballsy creativity. And also because if folks like me think that wild lands should remain wild, there are times when we need to put our money on the line.

In fact, I could imagine a whole new wave of online eco-activism sprouting up around BLM auctions. One could use an application like PledgeBank to gather thousands of dollars in pledges for wild lands. Then an agent representing the pledgers would attend a BLM auction. If that agent won an auction, the pledgers would fulfill their obligation to buy the land. And voila, the land stays free.

Not a bad idea, right? I nominate Tim DeChristoper to be our agent!

Read more, and pony up your $25, at Bidder70.org.

The upshot: A small foundation near Boston, the Crossroads Community Foundation, lets high school students give its money away. Teams of students read grant proposals, make site visits, argue over priorities and then dole out grants of $3k-$5k to about a dozen groups.

The money here is almost irrelevant. The point is to train young philanthropists. Most of these young “donors” are from rich white suburbs, and someday will be in a position to give their own money away. If you train them young in the ways of charity, the theory goes, you’ll create lifelong giving habits.

A good idea. But what if you took it even further? What if, instead of letting rich white kids give away the money, you let poor kids of color give it away … in their own neighborhoods? What if the “donors” were part of the affected community? What would happen if you flipped the paternalism of charity on its head?

It makes me think back to when I was in college, and I was chosen to be a “Writing Fellow.” We were juniors and seniors who taught freshman and sophmores how to write. We actually had impact on other people’s grades (and their futures) so we took our jobs seriously. The training was brutally intensive. We de- and re-constructed the art of writing in a thousand different ways. We practiced, we critiqued, we studied, we theorized, all in order to teach writing better. All in order to teach our fellow students.

Well, guess who learned most from the Writing Fellows program? Not the underclassmen we so earnestly wanted to serve. It was us, the Fellows, who really learned how to write.

And at the end of the semester, our professor made a startling suggestion. Writing Fellows were supposed to be the best writers in the school, she told us, chosen because we already had exemplary writing skills. “But,” she said, “Wouldn’t it be clever of us to take some terrible writers, tell them they’re the best, give them intense training, and see if we could turn bad writers in great writers … and great teachers?”

High expectations, accountability to others and deep training. It works.

That’s what would happen, I suspect, if a foundation allowed people in disadvantaged communities to give away money. The “donors” would probably get more than they gave, in pride, in wisdom, in social conscience. You could go as far as letting dropouts, addicts, even prisoners — yes, convicted criminals — give away the money. In fact, that’s a pretty dope idea. Those on the lowest rungs of socio-political ladder would have the most to gain from investing in others.

Let prisoners make charitable decisions? I can hear the critics now. I bet the same folks would say that a group of kids can’t make real decisions about charitable donations. To which the Times answers:

Crossroads executive director Judy Salerno said her board had never overturned a student team’s recommendation. The lesson? “When you give them adult responsibility, they rise to the occasion,” she said.

Swap the words “citizens” for “students” and “community” for “adult” and you’ve got a whole new bottom-up vision of philanthropy.

The rafters were covered with it. Pigeon shit too. The belltower must have housed dozen of the winged beasts, and they found their way down into the roof, the gables and all along the upper windows. Every surface above the second floor sported a guano rug.

I guess that’s what happens in a 200-year-old church.

Every year, my extended Hausman family gathers somewhere in the western hemisphere to throw our backs into a community work project. This year, nine of us spent five days restoring a venerable church-turned-community-center in Newbury, VT. Originally a Methodist seminary with a proud anti-slavery past, the church was converted to a community center a few decades back. The “Vermont Hausmans” – Rick, Emi, Ethan and Nate – have been connected to it since Emi started teaching in the schoolhouse next door. They suggested to the family that we spend our week giving the building some much needed TLC.

Hence, our encounter with shit. We started with a deep cleaning of the upper floors and the belltower. After we could walk around without biohazard suits, we started repairs on the steeple shutters, the access ramp and the sagging porch. The skills we’ve developed from past work projects – in places as diverse as Haiti, Jamaica, California, Florida and New York – served us well.

By the time we had to leave, we’d certainly spruced the place up … but we’d also de-constructed as much as we’d constructed. The shutterless steeple was completely exposed to the elements. The porch roof sat on jacks, above a torn apart section of rot. The porch itself lay sanded but unpainted. I always hate leaving a job half-done, but our extremely competent hosts / project managers, Connie and Claude, assured us they could finish the work we’d started.

The photos tell more than the words; check out my Flickr stream. And if there are any other Hausmans reading this, please add more photos to that stream … and add your own comments about the project below!