Briefs

A news site to be co-operatively owned by community members recently moved another step closer to reality. An organizing group met April 19 to discuss the nuts and bolts of advancing the pilot news site, which will serve the Haverhill, Massachusetts community. Tom Stites, a veteran journalist who’s worked at The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, came up with the idea of local news co-ops a few years ago and founded the Banyan Project to serve as an umbrella. The Banyan Project is aimed at serving what Tom calls “news deserts” — less-than-affluent communities that tend to be shunned by high-end advertisers and, thus, by the news organizations that rely on those advertisers. More

Chicago’s Department of Aviation announced last week that O’Hare International Airport is getting its own herd of goats to help manage vegetation. Although the airport does expect to realize some "bottom line benefits from goat-powered landscaping," one goal of the project is to raise public awareness about environmental stewardship, according to this article. The goats will be responsible for trimming down foliage and "naturally recycling nutrients as fertilizer" on about 120 acres of the 7,000-acre airport.

The Ontario Co‐operative Association has created a new resource and program to teach youth financial literacy. The program promotes budgeting and saving as well as credit unions. The association is partnering with credit unions to bring the program into elementary and high schools across the province. More

An attendee of the Connecting for Community gathering in Cincinnati grapples with some thorny issues that surfaced at the April 26-28 event. April Doner weighs in with a hefty, well-written blog exploring such questions as: How do we practitioners of community building, with all our ideals of equality, empowerment and co-creation, replicate and reinforce structures of imbalanced power within our own movement? How are people in traditionally marginalized groups (women, people of color, people with lower incomes, etc.) left out, overlooked, or under-celebrated — and what can we do to change this? Read the blog