BOSTON/Jamaica Plain - One of Boston's dozen or so distinct neighborhoods, Jamaica Plain (or JP for short) has one of the most outspoken and activist populations in the city. Hundreds of those residents interested in the past, present, and future of their community took part in a special meeting on Tuesday, February 15th at English High School and sponsored by the Jamaica Plain Forum and the JP Neighborhood Development Corporation.

UMass Boston now has a new program that explores the social, economic, and political dimensions of science and technology in our ever-changing world. So often we end up as the consumers of science and rarely are we encourage to question where do new drugs, technologies, or scientific knowledge come from. Offering both a masters and graduate certificate, the Science in a Changing World program seeks to connect those with scientific knowledge to communities of practice and change agents.

Quincy, Mass. - The Prison Book Program is a non-profit, all volunteer organization based in Quincy that distributes paper back books to people in prisons in Massachusetts and throughout the United States.

The most sought after types of books by prisoners include dictionaries and history texts. On Saturday, November 6, 2010, at the Non-Profit Center near South Station in Boston, the group is holding its fourth annual “Great American Book Drive” to collect donated books for the program.

BOSTON/Downtown Crossing - This Thursday, September 30th, Ford Hall Forum - in cooperation with Suffolk University and the Old South Meeting House - is sponsoring a public conversation on "AIDS, Social Justice, and the Politics of Transformation."

Given that the war, economy, and upcoming elections have bumped HIV and AIDS off the cultural radar, this is a good time to assess where society and science stand on eradicating (or at least slowing) this disease.

In the Bourne neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, Andrée Zaleska and Ken Ward, with their 3 boys, Simon 8, Eli 9, and Kuba 11, are rehabbing a 100 year old, abandoned, former corner store to serve as their new home, a demonstration of sustainable living & passivhaus design, community center and climate campaigning "hub" for Bill McKibben's 350.org. As the project nears completion of the first phase, Ken does a video walk-through with Simon Hare and Declan Keefe, of the design/build firm Placetailor, pointing out unique materials, design and passivhaus construction techniques that will reduce energy use by >90%.

BOSTON/Jamaica Plain - On the third floor of Building L at the Brewery Complex in Jamaica Plain, staffers with the Institute for Policy Studies, the Forum Organizing Project, and the Jamaica Plain Forum, are laboring over a critical question for our times: how to pull people out of the quicksand that is the U.S. economy.

Andree Zaleska, Director of the Forum Organizing Project and Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies Senior Scholar, and their partners with the Grassroots Policy Project and On The Commons, think they have a pretty good answer: "common security clubs."