Initiatives

Austin Florence Alliance

We have officially launched a sister city partnership between Austin, TX and Florence, Italy. There will be a lot more work needed to ramp this up and get the partnership formalized with both mayors, but this effort is now underway. The mission of Sister Cities International is “To promote peace through mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation—one individual, one community at a time”. We’re excited to work on the bonds between people in Austin and Florence. And hopefully we’ll also be able to enjoy some good pasta and wine throughout our time working on this.

Bob and Sue’s Healthy Eating Crew

Our plan here is to find an elementary school in Austin and setup a produce box system. This will be similar to typical food delivery services, but will target families within the school community, we will deliver at the school not to homes, and we will price the produce boxes at $1. The goal is to get healthy food into the homes of families with very easy access and a low cost. We’ll have enough funding to get it started and we’ll see if we can wrangle up further support from Whole Foods and other local corporations to expand.

Pollution Calculator

We have looked up various tools that are supposed to tell users how much pollution they produce, and we’ve found most of them to be pretty poor. So, we are going to build our own tool tailored to us. This will help us have a better understanding of the pollution footprint of some of our behaviors. With better awareness we’ll be in a better position to reduce our pollution output.