We appreciate a company with an ethos. Makin’ It Great is not an ethos. Neither is Built Ford Tough. Help Remedies has a simple one: Help people. Make ethical and environmentally sounds products. Give some money back, oh yeah…have a laugh about it. Right now they can help you by providing toilet kit essentials like space-age bandages and organic aspirin, all packaged in nondescript recycled paper mold. They also have company motto inspired t-shirt, where you can fill in this sentence “Help I…” with a personalized cry for assistance. We find their way of doing things so refreshing that we hope they offer a little more in terms of product selection next time. Come on guys, it’s our turn to help.

Throwing away jeans is kind of like throwing away a kidney–it’s a part of your body, you use it every day, but lets be honest…you have two. If you have to toss a pair, the most karmically responsible thing you can do is turn it into insulation for a home in a needy community. National Jean Company and Earnest Sewn are sponsoring a denim drive benefiting Cotton. From Blue to Green. The goal is to get 1000 pairs (insulation for two homes) and after a charity fashion show last week, they’re half way there. Just show up at any Nation Jean Company location in NYC or Long Island for collection. They’ll understand if you need a moment to say goodbye.

Art Directors Pier Madonia (UK) and Stuart Macmillan (Montreal) teamed up with photographer Roger Stayte and created a rather captivating print campaign for the International Red Cross. Prescribing the values of “awareness,” “compassion,” and “tolerance” was achieved through some pretty literal imagery. And, if you want more edge, check out what Pier and Stuart did for Blavod Black Vodka.

Each week, JoshSpear.com explores the latest projects by top creative professionals in the Behance Network and highlights a few that are pushing the edge of creative industry. Josh Spear also serves as an Advisor and Guest Curator for the Behance Network.

Are you constantly afraid that a tree is going to come crashing through your bedroom window on a windy night and ruin everything you own and possibly crush sweet sleeping you. No? Well I am. However, since I visited Let Your Worries Go, I’ve learned to let my anxieties dissolve into the ether. The site, run by the charitable folks at Northwestern Mutual asks users to cast their individual concerns into the sea, sky, or space via a pretty sweet animation. Each click on certain icons denoting specific societal worries allows the financial network to donate to charitable organizations dealing with the specific social woes, such as Habitat for Humanity, America’s Second Harvest, and The YMCA. While my specific tree trials aren’t exactly covered such pressing issues as health & fitness, natural disaster, illness, hunger, and education are covered, amongst others. So go ahead, tell Northwestern Mutual your worries and they’ll and they’ll do their part to make them a thing of the past.

With Polaroid film set to go the way of the dodo sometime in 2009, it's only a matter of time before the many shutterbugs who champion the photo format run out of their remaining film stock. Luckily, for fans of the non-digital instant image some of the best scene snappers have pooled some of their favorite images together so that the art form of Polaroid photography might live on forever. For The Love of Light: A Tribute To The Art of Polaroid gathers the work of twenty-five photographers from ten countries, on five continents in one breathtaking volume of photos produced with the their precious Polaroids. The book will be available in July, and hopefully will be such a roaring success that it will lead a world wide Polaroid revival and force the parent company to reconsider its stance on phasing out their film. C’mon photo fans…band together to save an endangered species before it's too late.

While Brad Pitt and President Clinton are putting up pink houses (sorry if that sounded sarcastic, it’s sincerely good works), Sean Cummings, co-founder of Startup New Orleans has been setting up shop. In an effort to drive creative-minded people to the economically rebounding city, Cummings has created a site where entrepeneurs can see what a vital center New Orleans can be for their business. From technology (like computer graphics skunkworks Turbo Squid) to ad agencies (like Inc. 5000 firm Trumpet), the project promotes the idea that the new Nola can be to entrepreneurship what Silicon Valley is to tech. Plus, we hear they have this thing called ‘Mardi Gras.’ It’s supposed to be pretty awesome.

Via All-Day Buffet

To mark the launch of its super-duper exclusive Be True collection of only seven sleek kicks models each saluting a different metropolis including Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, London, NYC and L.A., Nike’s thought of doing something really fun to mark the Brazilian release. In Operation Be True SP, they’re sending motivated sneakerheads on a treasure hunt with a pair of Be True shoes as the booty at the end of the rainbow. On March 29, registered pairs will first be briefed at Maze Skate Shop and then off they’ll go, scampering through the city to capture their finds via cell phone and sending them into Nike central as proof of the finished tasks. The hunt ends at Doc Dog Sneakers, where the five winning duos with the fastest completion times will be announced (and yeah, it’s no coincidence that they and Maze will be the only ones carrying this shoe). Losers should keep their chins up, though, because even if they don’t come in 5th place, they can still stand a chance to win in other categories, like Best Dressed Duo and Most Creative Photo. Sure beats an Easter egg hunt. Find more info — including registration — on the site. Good luck!

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are certainly essential components of a child's education, but too often the importance of the arts to a child's development gets lost in the shuffle of all of those other subjects. Recognizing the need for kids to be immersed in all kinds of aesthetic endeavors, the inspiring minds at Boston's Thomas Edison Middle School thought it would be a good idea to have an Art Day. The after school center, one of thirty seven Citizen School programs that focus on hands-on learning as a means to foster academic leadership and strong study habits for kids in underserved communities, will host the program from 3pm to 5pm on March 27th with the express purpose of increasing students' enthusiasm for a wide variety of the arts. The previous year's event had everything from puppet making to balloon design and this year, who knows? If you have any artistic talent (note: armpit farts are not artistic talent) that you'd like to share with the kids at Thomas Edison Middle in Boston, the event is looking for a few good volunteers, who are willing to make their enthusiasm for the arts contagious. Get involved.

American Apparel may claim to wear its conscience on its ribbed thermal sleeve, but Apolis Activism lives up to its claim of socially responsible fashion. Raan, Shea, and Sten Parton started their designer couture rooted firmly in charitable work. They’ve partnered with organizations like Invisible Children, which helps displaced children of Uganda, and Yuva Lok, a Bangalore, India based charity that uses education to break the poverty cycle. The brothers have also gone on missions down to Uganda, which actually used have a thriving cotton business before the rebel fighting broke out. You say, ‘Fantastic! I love helping people and wearing organic cotton! But, what about the clothes?’ Apolis’ garments are what you’d expect from a high-minded company: cool hoodies, t-shirts, jackets and pants that have an anachronistic charm. So, suck on that Dov Charney.

More kids today know more about Knicks guard Stephon Marbury than are familiar with the landmark decision in the 1803 case of Marbury vs. Madison. While both of them have something to do with a court, I'd venture to say that the latter is more important as it helped outline the concept of judicial review as it applies to our court system. Unfortunately, to plenty of children watching a game of basketball is more enjoyable than reading about history of the United States, but what if we pretended that history was a game of basketball and printed important facts on the back of jerseys? Maybe we could teach kids a thing or two while they were learning to play a zone defense. That seems to be the idea behind the Supreme Court line at Peek Aren't You Curious. The sporty collection features the name of a landmark case on the front, with the decision count and the principle outlined in the case on the opposite side. Here ye, here ye. Class is in session.

Several days ago at the TED conference we told you about Kluster's mission to create a product in seventy-two hours with the assistance of one thousand of the brightest people in the world. Well, the results are in, the votes have been tallied and we have your product. The result of the massive meeting of the minds is over there. No, don't look behind you, that's the name of the product. Over There is an ingenious (it better be if it had that many minds working on it) board game that both tests and fosters global awareness. It’s also the first of what we hope to be many productions developed start to finish through the Kluster team — and we couldn’t be more excited to watch what happens.

There are a lot of things we take for granted in an industrialized nation: a roof over every head, a chicken in every pot, and a macchiato in every post-consumer recycled paper cup. According to UNICEF, there are 1.1 billion people in this world without access to the most basic necessity: water. From March 16th through 22nd, restaurants participating in the Tap Project 2008 will ask their patrons to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they normal get gratis. Your buck will buy 40 children a day of clean drinking water. So, don’t bother with bottled water next month, save your Starbucks bucks, and go out for a generous cup of agua fria.

The world we live in sure is a strange place. Through all of the discovery, triumph, struggle, strife, greed, glitz, glamour and gore there is plenty for Earth's inhabitants to digest; the one consistent thing that seems to come out of the craziness of it all it seems to be a wealth of compelling stories and images recording all of the ups and downs that both man and mother nature made. Sometimes if we don't have the stories, the images are left to tell the tale themselves. The winners of the World Press Photo of The Year Contest for 2007 seem to speak more than those proverbial thousands words and serve to effective transplant us to a time and place whether we wish they were there or are glad we were not.

Image credits: left, Tim Hetherington, UK, (Vanity Fair); right, Bold Hungwe, Zimbabwe (Independent)

While love may make the world go round, denim keeps the majority of the world's inhabitants from being pantsless. It's a rare phenomenon where one material has become the textile of choice the world over, but have you ever stopped to wonder why? Maybe you will, thanks to UCL's Global Denim Project. The project was borne out of a collaborative effort between anthropology students Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, and takes aim at creating a hub for people interested engaging in academic research on what your blue jeans are made out of. People from Turkey to Texas have been inspired by their trousers and the project's website also trumpets the product of that inspiration, displaying a laundry list of ventures related to what my mother still refers to as dungarees. Perhaps it's time for you to explore what it means to be in your jeans.

While the NEW YORK GIANTS SUPER BOWL VICTORY may have changed a few fans’ outlook on the world for one shining moment, the fact of the matter remains that most of the world doesn't really care. They like the other kind of football, or as we here in the U.S. call it, Soccer. And while the mass appeal of Soccer is something everyone on the earth can relate to, so too is the plight of the homeless, evidenced by the fact that there are over one billion homeless people in the world today. Maybe that's why the Homeless World Cup makes so much sense. This past summer in Copenhagen at the 5th Homeless World Cup, 500 homeless athletes from 48 countries competed in the name of national pride, but the more significant impact was how the competition changed their lives. Since the inception of the tournament in 2003, Seventy-three percent of the players have since changed their lives for the better, coming off drugs and alcohol, getting jobs, homes and reuniting with their families. Some have even gone on to play or coach in pro or semi-pro leagues. Now that's certainly a change for the better.