Yestermorrow Instructor Bert Yankielun's Book Hits the Streets

Yestermorrow is excited to announce that instructor Bert Yankielun's book, How to Build an Igloo, and Other Snow Shelters is hot off the presses. Bert has been teaching the Igloo Design/Build course at Yestermorrow since 2004. He's been featured in a recent issue of Architecture Week with an excerpt from the book, and in 2005 his Yestermorrow class was featured in the NY Times Travel section. In his regular day job, Bert is an electrical engineer designing and using ground-penetrating radar with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, NH, or participating in scientific expeditions to Arctic Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica. Yestermorrow will offer its annual 1-day Igloo Design/Build workshop on Saturday, March 1, 2008. The course is open to students of all ages and the tuition is only $50 per family.

Friend of Yestermorrow offers Internship in Ghana

This from Anthony Broese, a Yestermorrow grad from Australia who is doing some great community development work in Africa.

"I'm writing to inform you of the project commencing in January 2008 in Ghana. Basically the project is about peace building through food security. This means that it has many faces. Landscape design and restoration will be addressed through permaculture. There is also an aspect of peace building and conflict resolution and using art as a form of expression. I wanted to offer the opportunity to people interested in these issues to intern/ volunteer on the project.Within the scope of permaculture we will also address water and sanitation, and hopefully, if the right skilled people present themselves, building. We are in the midst of registering this as an NGO but in the mean time the project is also being run by the two other NGOs I am working with whom are registered. They are, Aliamos an Australian based NGO and Self Help Initiative for Sustainable Development (SHIFSD) a local Liberian NGO (we are working with the Ghanaian branch). "

For more information, contact Anthony directly at abroese@gmail.com.

3rd Annual Exhibition and Sale

We are busy this week getting ready for the 3rd Annual Yestermorrow Exhibition and Sale: Art from the Yestermorrow Community. Once again we will feature an amazing lineup of artists from Yestermorrow's talented crew of instructors, interns, staff and board. Our Main Studio will be magically transformed next Saturday into an art gallery and we will celebrate with a public reception and opening with wine and cheese from 6-9 p.m. on Saturday, December 15th. The show will stay up for one week and is free and open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through the 22nd.

This year's show includes furniture from wood and metal, functional ceramics, photography, jewelry, watercolors, prints, wood carvings, stained glass, collage, light fixtures, mixed media, and oils. Featured artists will include Michael Sullivan, Benjamin Cheney, B'fer Roth, Yumiko Virant, Art Schaller, Monica DiGiovanni, Carl Bates, Dave Sellers, Robin Foster, Randy Taplin, John Anderson, Ted Montgomery, Carrie Burr, Dick Montague, Diana Nicholas, William Schnute, Larry Jacquette, Nadia Khan, Chris Gabriel, Anya Domlesky and Dan Wheeler.

This featured piece is stained glass by Nadia Khan, a former Yestermorrow intern from 2005. In addition to creating custom stained-glass pieces in her spare time, she is also a carpenter and treehouse builder.

John Abrams Returns to Yestermorrow in 2008

After last year's "Thinking Like a Cathedral Builder" workshop with John Abrams from the South Mountain Company attracted nearly 30 students, we were thrilled to have him back on the schedule for 2008 to present another weekend workshop, this year entitled "Redefining Small Business". In John's words, this course is "a radical business primer full of stories, activities, and information about making everyday business a thrilling adventure" which covers everything from designing and building a business to issues of philosophy and practice, and will tackle employee ownership, growth issues, personnel issues, benefits, community service, multiple bottom line thinking, and long term business planning and succession.

You can view an 8 minute clip from a 2006 lecture by John Abrams' lecture here at Yestermorrow on Chelsea Green's website- check it out!