100% of Rob’s speaking honorariums for 2020 are being donated to indigenous and women led grassroots environmental organizations. He is grateful to be able to support these powerful human beings who are contributing to a better world for all.
Here are some of the amazing organizations, with more to come. We encourage you to learn about these organizations and support the ones that you feel called to.
It was my absolute honor to spend the weekend with Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm and to now be able to call Joel a friend.
The Green Riders are back at it for the third tour.
I am so elated to see the good deeds continuing on. I won’t personally be on this tour, but I will be there in spirit and supporting from home. The following is an announcement of the 2020 tour and all the details one would need to get involved, written by the Green Riders team.
-Rob Greenfield
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Announcing the Green Riders Summer 2020 tour, starting in the Pacific Northwest, cascading through the redwoods and hugging the Pacific Ocean the entire way!
Green Riders is a voluntarily organized cross-country cycling tour intended to promote a conscious, eco-friendly lifestyle and to leave every place better than we found it. We will be volunteering weekly at community gardens, permaculture operations, organic farms, homesteads and any other community projects. This provides a learning exchange between the riders and locals and we will use our social media platforms to promote the work they are doing. Along the route we will be picking up trash, donating fruit trees, planting regionally appropriate seeds and foraging. Many will also frequently dumpster dive for food to bring awareness to food waste.
This is a guest blog written by Lexi Beshara of the Green Riders Europe Tour.
To learn about the Green Riders mission and more details on this trip click here.
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On July 31st, 2019 the Green Riders completed their 2,500 mile (4,400 km) journey that began on the Atlantic coast of France in Saint Brevin Les Pins and ended at the Black Sea in Constanta, Romania. Twenty of us started together, and while traversing through nine countries, over a dozen more who would call themselves Green Riders joined us. Our riders represented the far stretches of the globe, from the USA to Australia, France, Denmark, Italy and Serbia, just to name a few of the dozen countries.
Jason Burke from Pennsylvania was inspired by the Gardens for Single Moms program to create gardens in his own community, too! As high school teacher, he even got his students involved to raise money and build the gardens. What an amazing way to bring the community together! Read his story about how he became inspired to take action.
This is a guest blog by Nicole Abrams from the Green Riders. She wrote this during the seventh week of the Green Riders tour as the Green Riders approached the end of their journey on July 31st, 2019.
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The countdown to the end begins today, 10 days to the Black Sea. Ironically, I sit down to write this entry in a cafe named “Coffee Nicole” in Vidin, Bulgaria and unexpectedly learn how to write my name in the Cyrillic alphabet, “Никол”. The foreignness of this exquisite script feels less novel after riding these past weeks out of the Schengen region of Europe and into the Balkans. The pace of pedalling allows me the time to slowly sound out the words on the signage and compare the letters to my native alphabet. Now having crossed into Bulgaria, I realize I actually have some of these letters committed to memory, a testament to full immersion in a new culture and the plasticity of the human brain.
This is a guest blog by Suzie Roberts from the Green Riders.
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I was recently contemplating why being apart of the Green Riders Europe tour was so important to me.
In the summer of 2016 I was on my first cycling tour solo. I met a friend named Marc living in Arcata, California. He invited me to volunteer at Food Not Bombs, an anarchist group who feeds anyone who is hungry for free. At the time Marc was living at a community called The Spoon House. Twice a week they hosted the cooking for Food Not Bombs in their kitchen. We hooked up bike trailers to our bikes and went around to grocery stores to collect the food that otherwise would have gone to the landfill. These grocery stores were expecting the food pick ups as they had this arrangement for a long time. The grocery stores loaded us up with rescued food. We brought the food back to the community and cooked a big meal that fed around 70 people in the Arcata Plaza.
Churches own millions of acres of land around the world. Much of that land is used wastefully, just to grow grass. If that land was used to grow food, churches could be a the center of a food sovereignty movement. They could create local, sustainable food, feed their neighbors and improve their communities. My friend Pastor Sarah Robinson at Audubon Park Covenant Church in the Audubon Park neighborhood of Orlando, Florida is a great example of this vision.
Imagine if every church followed this example? We could greatly reduce hunger, provide healthy food to people in need and decrease our dependence on heavily fossil fuel based foods.
