In a previous post, Spirituality, Religion and Activism: What's the Connection?, I mentioned the work of the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation. The Fund supports organizations that are using "inner work" to inform their activism. 

I'm going to be honest with you. I'm a little burned out on do-goodness. August 19th is not only my 39th birthday, but also the 3rd birthday of when I started blogging about social change and nonprofit-y things, and I've hit a wall.  All I want to do is read cookbooks, do yoga, and spend time with my husband.

"No matter how many projects and campaigns and initiatives and alliances we set in motion, we won't find fundamental solutions to societal ills until we learn how to approach this work with greater awareness, compassion, and humility." - Seasons Fund for Social Transformation

About nine months after I had my first child, I went (with the kiddo in tow) to my first Mothers Acting Up meeting. It was my first foray, at least post-children, into an organized activist group. While the timing wasn't right for me to become a regular member, I gleaned a piece of knowledge from that meeting that I think will always stay with me. That is that mothers as a whole are a very, very large group, and if they use their power for good, they can become a force to be reckoned with.

Do you want to take the peacefulness you feel after taking a yoga class, and use it to make the world a better place?

iLoveMountains.org is a campaign to stop mountaintop removal for coal mining. What is mountaintop removal you ask? From the iLoveMountains.org web site:

A couple weeks ago I asked the readers of my personal blog, Have Fun * Do Good, and the Have Fun * Do Good Facebook group for suggestions for Changebloggers, people who are using their blog, podcast or vlog to raise awareness, build community, and/or

One of the world's challenges that disturbs me the most is genocide. Perhaps it is because my generation was raised reading The Diary of Anne Frank and watching dozens of movies about the Holocaust. Over and over we were told, someone should have said something. Someone should have done something. If it happens again, you need to do something.

Like nearly every holiday in the United States, Mother's Day seems to be as much about getting people to indulge in commercialism (Buy Mom this! Buy Mom that!) as it is about honoring your mother. While I am very happy to give my mom and mother-in-law cards telling them how awesome they are and give them a small token of my appreciation, I also like to celebrate all the mothers who have birthed social progress and given me the gift of more human rights. Make no mistake about it: many of the bravest, loudest, pushiest social reformers were moms. They thought about their lives and their children's futures, and they knew that to give their kids the best chances for success, barriers had to be broken.

Last year I met Julie Sulik, the development director for Friends Association for Children, a non-profit working to safeguard and nurture the dreams of underprivileged youth in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia.

"[Y]ou don't necessarily have to solve a problem. You just have to take the steps that are available to you. . . . I focus on the fact that I don't have to solve it. I just have to do what I can. " --Jerry Fowler, Executive Director of the Save Darfur Coalition, during an interview on the Voices on Genocide Prevention Podcast.