By -Theo Kitchener contact@thesharehood.orgwww.thesharehood.org The Sharehood started about one year ago, in Northcote, Melbourne, when I distributed a letter inviting my neighbours to help create a local community that would enable us to share household goods, skillshare with each other, and get to know one another. Thirteen households responded initially and six of these came to our first meeting where we discussed how we'd like things to work. I went away and setup a basic version of the website. Out of 240 initial letters, around 25-30 households are now involved to varying degrees. We have had several different social events - picnics, afternoons at the local pub, really really free markets, a big community garage sale in our local guerrilla community garden and a BBQ. There has been a greywater working bee, and several lovely people share their kitchen waste with our house compost bin. Some of the sharing happening in our hood includes people borrowing vacuum cleaners, ladders, lawn mowers, tools, babysitting for...

Aboriginal languages in the Northern Territory are presently under threat from the NT government's dismantling of the bilingual education program. Australia has suffered the largest and most rapid loss of languages ever known as a consequence of the ongoing violence, dislocation and dispossession inflicted upon Aboriginal people and communities. It is estimated that of the 500+ languages that were spoken in Australia prior to European invasion only 145 remain today, and 110 of those are “critically endangered”.[1] This has provided strong incentive for communities to have their languages taught to children in school. Accordingly, bilingual education programs were created in Aboriginal communities in the 1970s in order to encourage language protection and revival.[2] Bilingual education programs involve the teaching of academic content in students' first language as well as in English. There are currently nine such schools in the NT, operating in remote communities where the local Aboriginal language is spoken fluently. However, the ban on bilingual teaching implemented in 2009  attempts to force...

Safer Spaces Policies Every activist camp, conference, organising space, road trip and now even parties will have one of these. These are basically an attempt to jargonise our desire for people to feel safe in a space. If you're new to the scene and have never heard of Safer Spaces...well, sucks to be you because no one, not even the people who run the Safer Spaces workshops, will ever tell you what it means. We like autonomy, you see, so to give people any more of an idea would be far too prescriptive. The truth is, we just have this vague idea of what is “shit behaviour” and everyone is encouraged to avoid it. Good luck! Hating on Socialists, AYCC and NUS Our out of control radical self-image of horizontalism would be threatened if we felt any kind of resonance with hierarchical organisations. Anyway, I heard that those groups are full of factions. We don't have factionalism in ASEN. We don't allow it! We have...