Green Thing is a not-for-profit initiative that makes green behaviour easier and more enjoyable. By suggesting one thing a month and suggesting it with exclusive pieces of world-class entertainment, Green Thing will encourage a community of green things across the world to act against global warming.
If you sign up to Green Thing, you will receive a video thing – a delightful short film shot by a top agency or director – which will tell you what this month’s Green Thing is (walk once to school or college or work, share a bath, lights out an 9, etc). At the end of the film you are taken to dothegreenthing.com where you are given content and context around that month’s Green Thing. You are told why that Green Thing is an environmentally good thing to do; you can find out what else you can do along the theme of that month’s Green Thing; you can upload your own Green Thing video or film onto a multimedia green YouTube; and you can find out what aggregated difference you and the rest of the Green Thing community made in the previous month.
One really important aspect of Green Thing is the extra on-site content. The video things will tell you what the monthly Green Thing is – but we will put extra pieces of creative content on the site will make that Thing even more tempting and enjoyable to do.
The first Green Thing will be about walking: ‘walk once to school or college or work or wherever.’ On the site, the extra pieces of creative content will be podcasts that you can download and walk to – a nice and simple idea.
Ideally we would like two podcasts – one music, one spoken word. The music one is in hand. And we are hoping that 26 can help us with spoken word.
We would love 26 members to write a number of short pieces – three to five minutes long – around the theme of walking. It could be about the things you see when you walk; it could be about the things you think when you walk; it could be about something that happens to someone who decides to walk one day; it could be about how people walk and how different people walk in different ways (elegant and silly). It could be fiction, fact, poetry, stream-of-consciousness.
We are hungry for as many stories as possible. We’d like to refresh the podcast with new stories over time to give people new reasons to download it and hopefully new encouragement to walk. To this end, we also intend to combine 26 submissions with submissions from other writers – so for example, Tracy Chevalier is writing a story for us.
How do we record the stories? One of two ways. Either the writer comes into a studio or an actor voices the story in a studio. Both ways are good.
Just a word about tone. Green Thing is about framing green behaviour in an entertaining and enjoyable way, something that the scientists and academics and activists have largely failed to do so far. The pieces of writing should ideally be entertaining and enjoyable – dare I use the word ‘fun’? – something a 14 year old and 54 year old would be tickled by in equal measure.
If you’d like to know more, you can contact Green Thing founder Naresh Ramchandani on naresh@dothegreenthing.com (the other founder is Andy Hobsbawm, a 26 member) and he can give you more information or even send you a presentation about Green Thing and how it’s going to work.
Green Thing launches August 31 so submissions should be in by Monday June 25th which leaves five weeks to record and edit for the first podcast.
Because Green Thing hasn’t launched yet, Naresh and Andy would really appreciate you keeping both Green Thing and the podcast idea under wraps for the time being.