Nadine Riopel, who has written for us here at Unlimited, is an amazing writer, thinker and consultant in the non-profit space. During an event at which she was speaking there was a Q&A after her presentation where she brought up a phrase that’s popular in the international NGO space. “Whites in Shining Armour,” is an idea that needs to explored more than ever in the aftermath of the Stop Kony viral video affair.

If you’re not familiar with the Stop Kony project by the NGO Invisible Children here’s a useful recap.

Essentially an NGO called Invisible Children created a super viral videocalled Kony 2012 that went on to detail the horrendous story of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army and what you can do to help. The LRA is a brutal revolutionary group that started in Uganda but has since operated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. They’re most famous for kidnapping children and forcing them to become soldiers. It’s a brutal, nasty story and if anyone deserves to have a spotlight shone on them it’s Joseph Kony. The video asks for people to donate money to their Kony 2012 campaign and purchase t-shirts and bracelets.

Everything sounds great right? Oprah, P. Diddy and even President Obama throw their support the campaign.

Then a critical reaction bubbles up. At first it was your usual cast of misfits like Vice and the Exile which raised doubts but as the video became more and more popular and more people looked into the organization and the claims made in the vide0 serious and legitimate criticism was unearthed. Now, let’s be clear I don’t doubt that the people behind the Stop Kony campaign have good intentions nor do I refute the fact that Joseph Kony is terrible, dangerous human human being, regardless, legitimate concerns have been raised.

This fact-check by NPR is a useful place to begin. Also, Michael Deibert makes the argument that the campaign will hurt the issue more than help it. Visible Children offers up a pretty devastating critique as well. Do you think that Oprah and bracelets are enough to motivate the international community to slog through the forests of Africa to track down a man who has evaded capture for two decades?

But the real niggling issue in all of this is the authenticity problem. Are white, upper middle class Brooklynites really the best people to raise this issue? Are they just post-colonial whites in shining armour? It’s a question they tried to answer, at least indirectly, in their response to criticism in the Washington Post. Have a read and tell me if you think they answered it satisfactorily

In our article this month on a design contest looking for interesting adaptations of suburban strip malls we explored the idea of adaptive re-use.This is both a great challenge and a massive opportunity for our urban spaces. A flexible city is a successful city. Well, the city of Calgary recently rolled out a new idea which fits this perfectly.

The city of Calgary is refurbishing an old sandstone school, King Edward School, and turning it into a hub for non-profits, arts groups and social entrepreneurs.

I have a bit of a history with King Edward School. I wrote about it as a journalism school student in March of 2006 and my article was preserved for posterity on the Calgary Heritage Initiative Society forums.

It’s a beautiful example of the sandstone architecture that used to be so common in Calgary but is now all too rare. It was boarded up when I wrote about it eight years ago, lying fallow with an uncertain future while costing the school board at least $50,000 a year in maintenance. It lies in the community of Richmond in southwest Calgary, relatively central and close to 17th Avenue.

While it was unlikely to ever become a school again (the demographics just weren’t there), neighbours didn’t want to see it torn down and turned into condos. Well, after many years of wrangling (which, if you’re curious, you can follow here), there’s a new story for this old school.

Calgary Arts Development and the Calgary Foundation purchased the school from the Calgary Board of Education as the first of a future portfolio of spaces for what are being called cSPACE Projects. It’s an ambitious plan that aims to have non-profit real estate enterprises dedicated to developing a network of multi-disciplinary creative workspaces across the city.

Taken from the press release:

“The vision for the King Edward School site is a sustainable, mixed-use hub that provides a dynamic and collaborative environment focused on the incubation and advancement of professional arts practice, social enterprise and community development in Calgary. The King Edward School project is intended to connect and enable nonprofit cultural organizations, the next generation of artists, social entrepreneurs and the neighborhood of South Calgary.”

The website http://transformkingedward.ca/ has all of the info you could possibly want on the plans for this space.

Not only is it important to re-use buildings and for non-profits and arts groups to have space but there is a maxim in the sustainable buildings and green preservation movement that comes from Carl Elefante, “The Greenest Building is the one already standing.”

While this was generally accepted wisdom, the release of a new study, The Greenest building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, uses life cycle analysis to compare the relative impacts of building reuse and renovation versus new construction. This article renders it in plainer language and draws out the important bits.

This example of creative re-use ensures that a beautiful building remains standing and it also means less environmental impact in the long term. Nothing like a win-win situation to cheer you up.

Housing is a hot topic, especially when, as members of Gen Y, we’re surrounded by the belief that we’re not responsible adults until we own a home (that’s “distorted and stigmatized the cheaper and safer alternative: renting,” states a Canadian Business article on the topic).

Renting is one alternative, and so too are the innovative approaches to housing I wrote about in this month’s Unlimited – although if renting is stigmatized, I’m sure telling others “I’m heading back to my teeny tiny house” comes with its own raised eyebrows.

Still, it was fun to explore what else is out there, and to learn about many people who think that less is more when it comes to the size of a house. While researching cohousing, laneway housing and tiny housing, I came across a few other alternative living arrangements, like this hobbit house built by a photographer in Wales who was “tired of mortgage payments and had a passion for nature.” Home, sweet home, anyone?