Parvatapur, India

photo by Charles Gay ©2000, Greenstar India http://www.e-greenstar.com

You can hear the results by downloading sample MP3 music from India, Jamaica and Palestine by clicking on: http://www.e-greenstar.com/Music-Sample/

The Sustainable Village is proud to partner with the non-profit organization, Greenstar. We help with Greenstar financing by offering some of our products for sale on their web site, help sell their CDs through our marketing channels and promote their work in our catalogs. We hope to introduce some of our customers in developing countries to the benefits of working with Greenstar as well as provide engineering suggestions and tools for their portable community centers.

A small group of people including the head of the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab and a member of the White House Office of Media Affairs founded Greenstar in 1998. Goals were to provide solar power, health, education and environmental programs to small villages in the developing world as well as to connect people in those villages to the global community. Today, Greenstar includes twenty Ambassadors with world-class skills in finance, telecommunications, public relations, media production, international development, internet technology and marketing, medicine and education.

They work with people in traditional cultures to record the voice of the community expressed in original music, artwork, photography, video and other arts - voice connected with respect and dignity to the land, to families, to language, tradition, to the past and to a clear vision of the future. Revenues earned from this priceless "digital culture" are used to fund an ongoing, community-driven process of literacy, local business, education, training, public health, and environmental programs.

Greenstar designed a portable community center that uses solar power for water purification, a small clinic, a vaccine cooler, a classroom, a digital studio and a satellite or wireless link to the Internet. We work with the people in each village to develop an ecommerce web site, employ local musicians, teachers and art professionals to record the voice of the community. This formula provides new jobs and skills, strengthens local culture and language, and affirms people's independence. Villagers own the Greenstar Village Center themselves, and become shareholders in Greenstar.

Completed pilot projects include installations in a remote Bedouin settlement on the West Bank in the Middle East, a small community in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, and a village in Parvatapur, India. New plans include projects in Ghana, Tibet, Peru, and over 60 other communities on all continents of the world - a network of people, skills, ideas, tools and cultural voices.