Came across this awesome site - the title got me straight away - "ideas that matter"!

Sappi (who seem to be some kind of premium paper manufacturer?) has created...

the industry’s only grant program aimed at helping designers contribute their talents to the charitable activities that they care about most. Sappi believes that the creative ideas of designers can have an impact beyond the aesthetic and that those ideas can be a powerful force for social good. To date, Ideas that Matter has awarded $9 million worldwide in grants supporting causes that range from youth centers and health care awareness to wildlife protection.

Entry criteria:
Grant awards, ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 per project, may be used for implementation and out-of-pocket costs, including photography, illustration, paper, printing, mailing and related expenses. It cannot be applied toward the designer’s time.

Who may apply:
Ideas that Matter is open to individual designers, design firms, agencies, in-house corporate design departments, design instructors, and individual design students and design student groups.

Looks cool eh? : ) And it looks like it's open to anyone worldwide... nice!

The Mental Health Foundation idea submissions are closing this Sunday! Whoa time flies!

Unfortunately, we've also just discovered that the website form for submitting the entries has not been working at it's best (boo!). So we've been getting incomplete info and you've probably been getting a page of garbled code everytime you click Submit.

Getting developers to look into it...but in the meantime, please send us all ideas via email.

Please copy and paste the submission form into an email. Send it to us with your image files attached to design (at) thehinitiative.com and we'll email you a confirmation that everything's been received. Thanks for the patience & sorry for the inconvenience!

P.s. All entries since 9 April 2009 have not been received in full. If you have already submitted something, please email a copy to us as well. Sorry!!

Quick decision of the day: we'll be wrapping tee orders in paper before putting into the courier / postal bag. Since the courier / postal bags are (recycled) plastic already, it just seemed a waste to put the tee into it's own plastic packaging as well. Just another plastic bag!
So, a shift to paper tissue wrap it is so at least it can be recycled in your city council recycling. If you know of places that sell wrap made of recycled paper, let us know 'cause we're looking and looking for some!
Oh and...you may ask: why even package the tee? We're worried it might get dirty/stained along the way, so the wrapping is just some extra protection : )

I heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) last week and it's doing good in quite an interesting tech-saavy way. This organisation aims to have one laptop per child:

To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

People can help out by paying for a laptop, being a translator, providing tech support to kids/adults, or even helping to develop software (games, tools, programs)! Very cool : )
It also seems that people can help by testing the laptops to make sure they run ok before they're given away (someone had mentioned it to us). There's workshops in Wellington doing this, so it must be quite widespread round the world?

Get this week's New Idea magazine to check out the exclusive spread about the Plunket t-shirts and the celebs who've kindly helped out with this campaign! Hurray! : )

...and you can buy the magnet too : )

Last week was a little crazy as we semi-moved to a temporary new location – which we will be moving out of in a month’s time (here’s hoping!). So it feels like the business is working out of boxes at the moment and I am running about like more of a headless chook than usual (and the usual is probably bad enough!) : )
The Plunket t-shirt collection will be launched in exactly TWO weeks and we/Plunket are pretty excited about it. So many people have put in so much work into this new t-shirt campaign! Seeing boxes of the tees is quite rewarding in itself – the real product always looks/feels better than just seeing a concept onscreen.
There will be an exclusive retailer in each of the major New Zealand cities for the childrens range: Baby Divine in Dunedin, Milk in Christchurch, Kirkcaldie & Stains in Wellington, Cutie in Hamilton, and Sugarfree in Auckland. Check out their details on our stockists page. Hooray for the retailers and their support!! Support them too by sending your friends to them to buy the range from 30 March onwards. Haha, we would love to hear that every single retailer has sold out : )
Ok…well counting down now…