Yesterday, I was at Makom Hadash for the first time. Makom Hadash is a shared office in New York City, operated by Jewish environmental organization Hazon. It also currently houses GLBTetc organization Nehirim, Jewish learning conference of awesomeness Limmud NY and probably some other groups.
The office is not finished yet, but here are the plans, which I perused while I was poking around:

Notice the bike next to it. One of Hazon’s big programs is a series of annual bike rides. So it was nice to see a couple bikes laying around the office, not to mention a clear attention to sustainability in the office kitchen area.
But it gets better. In the final plan, there will be an office bike rack!

It’s gonna be a pretty cool office when they finish it. And the point is that it’s great to see an organization’s values reflected in its offices. I was thinking about this while I was at home in Austin over break, when I discovered that the synagogue where I grew up currently has no recycling. Which is even more troubling than it would be on its own, given that the congregation makes a lot of noise about environmentalism.
But for now, it looks like this:

In other news, the reason I was there was to help move the Limmud NY office out for our trip up to the Hudson Valley Resort where Limmud NY 2011 begins in Friday. We also brought this Hazon bike torso thing with us so that it will be here for them when they set up their table at our organizational shuk on Sunday.