The Best Solar Powered Flashlight: SunNight Solar Task

SNS SunLight Solar Task Flashlight is the best solar flashlight I have ever used! The charge lasts a very long time, it is ergonomically designed, and it comes with several levels of illumination.

Developed with the assistance of the Space Alliance Technology Outreach Program, supported by NASA, shaped by specific field work on our prototypes in Africa in the harshest conditions by scientists from the US Department of Energy and funded by research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation -- we offer you the next generation of portable, reliable and environmentally friendly lights for nightly use, for camping and outdoor activities, and a product which should be in every family's emergency preparedness kit.

When not in use, we leave our SNS SunLight Solar Task Flashlight in a sunny windowsill, and it always stays charged (even in low winter lighting).

Thousands of our SunLights have been donated to people who do not have access to electricity throughout the world. The BoGo Light program:

our Buy one/Give one - program has successfully provided lights to many, many thousands of people in the developing world, changing lives because of your purchase and participation. Education, gender equality, safety, security, economic improvement and overall quality of life have been transformed; all because of light. You buy and receive one light, we give a second light to one of our non-profit partners, delivering it to them in the developing world and then providing them $1 per light to offset importation and distribution costs.

FreeRice.com: Feed the Hungry and Improve Your Vocabulary

In honor of Thanksgiving week, here's a site that helps you take aim at world hunger and improve your vocabulary. FreeRice is a simple online vocab quiz. But for each word you get right, they'll donate ten grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger.

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com. As they explain on the site:

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.

What could be better?

At FreeRice.

Eating Local with a CSA Share from The Food Project

Hooray for June! Time for longer days, warm nights, and -- perhaps best of all -- the start of our CSA share from The Food Project.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You buy a "share" of a local farmer's crop at the beginning of the growing season, and all summer you receive "dividends" -- baskets and boxes of fresh summer produce.

Russ and I bought our CSA share from The Food Project, a local nonprofit that employs city and suburban youth working organic farms inside and outside of the city.

In addition to growing veggies for CSA members, The Food Project distributes their organic produce to local soup kitchens and sells it at inner-city farmers markets. Youth who participate in the program learn about the food system, organic and sustainable agriculture, and about access-to-food issues facing inner-city residents.

Last week, our share included enough greens to feed an army -- arugula, mizuma, spinach, lettuce, bok choy, baby field greens, and a handful of radishes and turnips. It provides a great lesson in eating locally (see Omnivore's Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral), and a great reminder of how good food tastes when it's fresh from the farm.

Learn more about Community Supported Agriculture and find a CSA near you.

Support The Food Project.

NYTimes on Socially Responsible Investing

Joe Nocera takes aim at socially responsible investing in an article in the Saturday business section of the NYTimes. The article's title - "Well-Meaning but Misguided Stock Screens" - sums up his opinion pretty well.

Continue reading: "NYTimes on Socially Responsible Investing"