“Bikes have always been a point of access, transformation, and empowerment for people,” says David Boone, owner of The Towne Cycles, a boutique bike shop in Oakland. With cycling often seen as a hobby or sport for the white and affluent, Boone stresses that it’s a necessary means of transport for many others. “It’s very important to me that if you need a bike to live your life, that it aids in your functionality to get to your job or pick up your kids or get home safely every night rather than having to walk.” This is not the place where shiny, mass-produced toys get pulled out of some distant manufacturer’s box. The Towne Cycles transforms used bike frames and parts into custom work tailored to each rider’s needs.

When you really want to put your money where your mouth is, La Cocina Municipal Marketplace makes it easy. Eat to support a worthy cause? You don’t have to ask twice. As the nation’s first women-run food hall powered by minority and immigrant entrepreneurs, San Francisco’s new 7,000 square-foot culinary spot in the heart of the Tenderloin exudes a lot of heart. And its international flavors have been getting a lot of notice since it opened last spring.

Nick Pourfard says he’s never had a real job, ever. While it’s true his role as the founder of a thriving company certainly isn’t traditional, he’s managed to be profitable doing what he’s passionate about: The 26-year-old wakes up every day, walks downstairs to his garage workshop in San Francisco’s Sunset district, and converts used skateboard decks into guitars.

Local vet Pat Farley sheds light on the untold story of surfers during the Vietnam War in the film "Between the Lines." Raw and unorthodox, the documentary confronts the war’s influence on the specific demographic of surfers at the time by looking back on two surfers’ opposite reactions to the draft. Indeed, it is striking, but it still begs the question: Why surfers?

Oakland floral designer Ariana Marbley used literal flower power in the face of hopelessness. During this spring’s social unrest in response to the police killings of Black citizens in America, the owner of Esscents of Flowers turned to what she does best: She gathered and distributed flowers to uplift her local community in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The result of her spontaneous "Yellow Rose Campaign" has had positive long-term effects she never anticipated.

“If it’s not a robust holiday season for your local bookstore, it might not be your bookstore for much longer,” warned Robert Martin, executive director of the national Independent Booksellers Consortium. These days, many independent bookstores are experiencing a real-life page-turner as they nervously wait to see how 2020 ends. Will the mystery turn out to be a horror story or a redemptive fairytale? Twenty Minnesota bookstores are joining forces.

When the pandemic first started, takeout containers and single-use plastics came back with a vengeance because sanitization was on our minds. Now, more and more people are trying to make up for it as plastic pollution weighs heavy on our conscience. So at the start of the new year, when the pandemic entered its third year, Re-Up Refill Shop had its best day ever. It was January 5, and the Oakland retailer that serves as a refill shop and zero-waste pantry wasn’t struggling to make ends meet like many businesses; it was struggling to meet demand.

“I’ve felt invisible in the water,” says Chelsea Woody, when asked how being an African American woman has influenced her experience as a surfer. “I’ve definitely had folks tell me that I don’t look like a surfer and that they don’t think I can surf based solely on how I look. I’ve had the experience of people disregarding me in the lineup, or paddling around me, even as they treat my white girlfriends of the same level whom I paddle out with differently.” The co-founder of Textured Waves—a campaign to spotlight women of color, and especially Black surfers—talks about how America's history of segregation reveals itself in modern surfing and water spaces.

What if descendants of coal miners were the ones installing solar panels? With its history in the coal industry, Appalachia isn’t exactly synonymous with clean energy—but that unlikely pairing is exactly how West Virginia’s innovative Solar Holler is finding success and impact. “There was no one doing solar here when we started, so we’ve been building this market over the last seven years,” says Solar Holler Founder and CEO Dan Conant. Meet the solar company dedicated to "mining the sun."

When Chris Lopez was an infantryman stationed in Iraq in 2003, his father would go out surfing and sit on his board to send him prayers across the ocean. Today the 27-year-old, who retired from the service and returned to Santa Cruz with an injured lower back and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), assists fellow veterans through his work at the local Veterans Affairs office. Taking a cue from his father, he also picked up surfing as a source of relief from the memories of war.

We’ve seen in the news that the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was off to a rocky start upon launch last week. For small businesses struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic, streamlining the emergency loan application process and avoiding snags is critical. One lender gives the inside scoop on how to remain at the front of the line.

Despite being a seasoned performer and the enigmatic voice behind the dreamy ’90s folk-pop band Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval is notoriously pained by the thought of performing. With wistful atmospherics in dimly lit venues drawing audiences into an intimate haze of seductive, reverb-drenched lyrics, Sandoval’s signature mystery—and fragility—perhaps stems from the fact that she just may be the ultimate shoegazer.

Henry Rollins returns—and he has a lot on his mind. With a brawny build, a shaven head sprouting gray, and darting eyes that stare down like a bull about to pounce on a cape-waving Spaniard, Rollins can pierce through the lens of a camera looking like a mean mofo. But, as he’ll tell you himself, he really just aims to be one polite dude. Pleasant and matter-of-fact, a one-on-one chat with the guy proves to be more of a relaxing, earnest exchange of ideas.

Before the internet—and clean energy—had gone fully mainstream, Geoff Greenfield used to flip through the pages of Home Power magazine reading how-to tips. It was there that he learned to build a very DIY solar system for his off-the-grid family home in Athens County, Ohio, back in 1997. He couldn’t have known then, that 20 years later, he and his wife would still be building a solar project together. Only this time, that project is a successful company celebrating two decades of business. Meet Third Sun Solar.

The government saving taxpayers money? It can happen. Contract management isn’t just for business profits: One city’s legal department went from antiquated paper processing to digital contracts, and the change is serving the people. Located a few miles outside of New Orleans, the City of Kenner is Louisiana’s sixth-largest city and home to about 70,000 people—learn how it leveraged an all-in-one contract lifecycle management solution.

Helplessness. It’s a feeling that Planned Parenthood (PP) works tirelessly to protect the public from—because your wallet shouldn’t determine your worth. With all the blood pressure rising over healthcare reform in the last couple of years, it pays to take a closer look at Santa Cruz County’s locations of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte (PPMM), the largest PP group in the country with sites spanning the coast of California to Northern Nevada.

His infamous photo of a seahorse carrying a Q-tip went viral in 2017 and made him a finalist in the Natural History Museum's prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. Justin Hofman talks about how he balances exposing places in photographs with trying to protect them (much like the way surfers stay hush about a firing break), what keeps the continent-hopper curious, and why he now has regret for capturing that wildly popular seahorse image.

Noam Chomsky is down with electronica. OK, so you might not see the revered scholar waving a glow stick at a Sound Tribe Sector 9 show anytime soon, but you will see him collaborating with the band in an upcoming documentary. That’s because STS9 walks the walk. Virtually all sound and no talk, the Santa Cruz 5-piece-gone-big, infamous for elaborate orchestrations of instrumental jam band rock with tech-savvy electronica, is all about getting the word out.

More and more business leaders are looking up to the sky for help—to The Cloud, where technology is taking unnecessary work and risk out of daily operations. In “The Business Impact of The Cloud” report, technology market researcher Vanson Bourne found that cloud computing led to an average 19.63% increase in company growth. The ability to store, manage, and process data via the internet’s secure remote servers, anywhere and at any time, gives businesses necessary agility in the ever-changing market. The forecast is clear: according to a recent study by LogicMonitor, 83% of enterprise workloads will be moved to The Cloud by 2020.

For some people, it’s hard to be the new kid on the block. For others, it’s what they seek. Speaking from his home in New York City, Justin Townes Earle’s Southern twang makes its way through the phone line—the Nashville native tells me he was chasing the ghost of Woody Guthrie when he made the move to the Big Apple a year ago. He wouldn’t be the first; there was one Robert Zimmerman who did the same. However, Earle—the son of Steve Earle with a name from Townes Van Zandt—is an anomaly in plenty of other ways.