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INTENT 365 daily tips to create wellbeing for people and the planet Read More
By : Juliana Essen January 2, 2021March 3, 2021

How to Live Well on a Small Planet: 365 Days of INTENT

They say you have to walk a mile in a person’s shoes to truly understand what her life is like. For me, it was six miles, barefoot, across irrigation ditches and rice fields in northeast Thailand. The people I hoped to understand were members of the Santi Asoke Buddhist Reform Movement—a fringe Buddhist group who

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By : Juliana Essen December 18, 2021December 18, 2021

How to Solve the Climate Crisis: 3 Takeaways From COP26

What does a “non-party stakeholder / NGO (non-governmental) observer” do at the United Nations Climate Change Conference?  I filled this role last month in Glasgow at COP26, and I’m still not sure. My nonprofit, Global Wellbeing Institute, was admitted along with about 1700 other NGO observer delegations to provide transparency and public participation in the UN-led

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By : Juliana Essen July 30, 2021October 12, 2021

Unpaid Care Work Adds Up Big Time for Wellbeing

Feminist economists like Nancy Folbre have written at length about the value of non-wage care work in domestic, subsistence, informal economy, and volunteer sectors. Sectors that are often dominated by women.  In 2018, McKinsey estimated that if women’s unpaid labor were accounted for, it would add $28 trillion or 26% to the global economy. Just think if

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By : Juliana Essen July 24, 2021October 12, 2021

How to Get the Best Bang for Your Donation Bucks

We have some inspiring role models for donation giving in the U.S. Bill and Melinda Gates decided in 1993 while on vacation in Africa that they would “give back” Microsoft’s profits to help others. They were drawn to inequities: 1) global disease epidemics affecting children that are easily treatable in the U.S. and 2) the

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By : Juliana Essen July 17, 2021October 11, 2021

12 Tips to Get the Most out of Volunteering

I’m a huge advocate for volunteering. There are so many opportunities – you just have to make the time! Volunteering obviously benefits your community and/or the organization you’re supporting. Bonus: when you volunteer, your personal wellbeing gets a huge boost, too! Check out these 12 tips to get the most out of your efforts. Tip

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By : Juliana Essen July 5, 2021October 11, 2021

5 Reasons Giving Is Good for Wellbeing

Today marks the start of the next wellbeing element in the INTENT framework: Being Engaged. We’re talking about civic engagement in particular – the kind that generates community wellbeing. For the next month we’ll be exploring one vital aspect of civic engagement: Giving. You might want to check out this post to see what I

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By : Juliana Essen June 30, 2021October 13, 2021

Waste Not Want Not: Sustainability and Social Good

For our final post on improving material wellbeing through sustainability, let’s turn our attention to social good. These 5 suggestions are just the beginning of the good you can do when you start making connections between helping others and waste. And while there are many local opportunities to act on, you might think globally as

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By : Juliana Essen June 25, 2021October 7, 2021

5 Simple Strategies to Make Society More Sustainable

Individual solutions alone won’t fix our waste problem. To make society more sustainable, we need more systemic strategies. By that I mean: wouldn’t it be nice not to have to worry about what to do with a plastic straw, for example, so that it doesn’t end up in a landfill? To really eliminate that worry,

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By : Juliana Essen June 20, 2021October 7, 2021

6 Creative Ways to Upcycle Trash into Treasure

If you’re not familiar with the term “upcycle,” it means to turn something used into something better. So not just reusing or recycling, but adding value. I love to upcycle because it gives me a creative outlet with a high cost-benefit ratio. I don’t have to invest much, except maybe time, so I don’t waste

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By : Juliana Essen June 13, 2021October 7, 2021

8 Wonderful Ways to Waste Less at Home

Of all the lessons I learned at Srisa Asoke (the intentional Buddhist community in Thailand), I’m most enthusiastic about how to waste less through the 3Rs (reuse, repair, recycle). Who doesn’t like to save money and, at the same time, save the planet? That’s a win-win. Still, try as we might, our landfills are overflowing.

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By : Juliana Essen June 6, 2021October 7, 2021

Waste & Wellbeing: How to Sustain a Good Life

The lessons I learned about material wellbeing at the intentional Buddhist community, Srisa Asoke, are pretty straightforward. Cut back on consumption to just what you need and ensure that your resources last as long as possible by reusing, repairing, and re/upcycling. This approach is not a likely path to early retirement, but it will help

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By : Juliana Essen May 30, 2021May 30, 2021

Poverty vs. Plenty: How to Help All Consume Enough

Although to this point we have been primarily concerned with reducing consumption for those of us who currently consume far more than we need, it’s vital to remember that there are vastly more people in the world who occupy the other end of the spectrum. I’m talking about people living in poverty. Underlying all this

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By : Juliana Essen May 25, 2021May 25, 2021

12 Tested Tips to Build Your Self-Sufficiency

It’s not always easy to figure out our consumption sweet spot. On the one hand, we have the subjectivity of sufficiency. As Asoke Buddhists reasonably observed, individuals must determine for themselves what is enough. On the other hand, we have the objectivity of ecological constraints. There are real, concrete limits to what we can consume

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By : Juliana Essen May 14, 2021May 14, 2021

7 Consumption Movements Lead the Way to Wellbeing

The Santi Asoke Buddhist Reform Movement of Thailand, the group I studied, were serious about reducing their consumption. They only had two suits of clothing (and no shoes), furnished their houses sparsely, had no cars, ate communally, and otherwise gave everything they owned to the collective. This is austere, to be sure, but there are

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© Juliana Essen 2021

Juliana EssenFollow

Public anthropologist on a mission to empower change agents to create #wellbeing so we can all live well on this small planet. #climate #SDGs

Juliana Essen
JulianaEssenJuliana Essen@JulianaEssen·
13 Oct

Catching up on INTENT 365 weekly round-ups of #wellbeing tips (Week 30): "Unpaid Care Work Adds Up Big Time for Wellbeing"

http://ow.ly/ehvL50GqNdH

Unpaid care work is vital for wellbeing yet sorely undervalued, especially by those who do it. 6 tips appreciate how much we give.

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JulianaEssenJuliana Essen@JulianaEssen·
13 Oct

Catching up on INTENT 365 weekly round-ups of #wellbeing tips (Week 29): "How to Get the Best Bang for Your Donation Bucks"

http://ow.ly/iXb950GqN5B

Want to give more? Here are 7 ways to simplify your charitable donation while increasing your impact on wellbeing for all.

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JulianaEssenJuliana Essen@JulianaEssen·
13 Oct

Catching up on INTENT 365 weekly round-ups of #wellbeing tips (Week 28): "12 Tips to Get the Most out of Volunteering"

http://ow.ly/Yubg50GqMSB

Volunteering benefits the the organization you're supporting and your community. Bonus: your own wellbeing gets a huge boost, too!

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JulianaEssenJuliana Essen@JulianaEssen·
13 Oct

Catching up on INTENT 365 weekly round-ups of #wellbeing tips (Week 27): "5 Reasons Giving Is Good for Wellbeing"

http://ow.ly/HERS50GqMGv

Giving is vital for community wellbeing - the kind built through civic engagement - and it turns out to be good for the giver as well!

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