Billy Jonas is more fun and spiritual depth than you can hardly imagine. Sometimes described as doing neo-tribal hootenanny, industrial re-percussion, and soul-spelunking, he started as part of the Oberlin College Big Bang Theory performance art collective, was part of The Billys, sometimes shares as part of the Abraham Jam, and is at the core of the Billy Jonas Band.
Joe Luginbill is a prodigy and unstoppable dynamo. As Eau Claire's youngest ever elected official, he joined the school board at 20, powerfully influencing policies on transgender, homeless, sustainability issues, and much more. Strong, young, local, progressive officials are crucial in healing our nation, and Joe stands high among them. With a special leading to create a safety net or launching pad for young people with few or no other good options, he has established the Luginbill's Children Foundation, including a transitional home for youth called Smile House. Joe has also created a book, Chip the Cat Goes to Bat and has many other projects on the burner, promising to protect and enrich the most vulnerable youth of our society.
Kim Callinan is Chief Program Officer of Compassion & Choices, an organization that works for and attempts to empower personal choice in end-of-life decisions. After Oregon approved the Death With Dignity Act in 1997, other states have continued and advanced the ways in which medical consumers were put in control of their own life decisions. The latest initiative by Compassion & Choices is Truth In Treatment. Kim Callinan's degrees include government, public policy, & public health, and she clearly works in the field of her passion.
Listen to Nici Peper and you'll know why she won the title of Minneapolis's most authentic artist at the Wholly Guacamole contest. Whether performing solo, as part of Firefly, with The Big Smooch, or in other configurations, Nici radiates. Titles like indie, Americana, folk, etc, do not capture the reality of this love-based, Lutheran-raised, intense and deep woman who delights in performing in rowdy dive bars.
David HB Drake has deep Wisconsin roots, and deep knowledge of Wisconsin's music, wonderfully exhibited in his Wiscon-Sing history of the state's music. His decades of endeavors have included his years dancing with the Milwaukee Ballet & Betty Salamun's Dance Circus, and serving as shantyman on the tall ship, HMS Bounty. He leads music & worships with the Congregation of the Great Spirit.
Scott MacLeod is founder & president of World University and School (WUaS), an effort to make a high-quality, versatile, free education available to all who desire it, via the Internet. Drawing on wiki technology and with a tremendous supply creative commons-licensed open courseware from MIT & Yale, WUaS is launching its first 4-year class this fall. This project aims to make the education and learning available in a vast number of languages, eventually all languages from all countries - always free to the student. While the vision is breath-taking and the goals lofty, the plan draws on established and tried tools, and overlapping projects like Stanford Online High School and other ground-breaking implementations.
Featured Music:
It's time for a super-charged, profoundly-rooted, sustainable and transformative revolution, and Chris Moore-Backman has an inspired take on the needed way forward. He is the author The Gandhian Iceberg: A Nonviolence Manifesto for the Age of the Great Turning, loaded with thoughts, words, and images which will radically enrich the path of all who read it. Chris has a couple decades experience with nonviolent action and training, most recently with an emphasis on efforts to end the age of mass incarceration.
A vital part of improving the world is organizing people by getting the word out, which is the work of The Progressive Populist and its editor/founder, Jim Cullen. The populist movement and it's message prioritizing people over corporations has be transforming this country since the 1880's, and continues to do so today.
Email populist@usa.net or call 800-205-7067 for your free sample copy. The magazine is produced in Manchaca, Texas, and printed/distributed in Storm Lake, Iowa.