Growing Indie Passion Projects: Robyn Jasko

In this ever more commercialized world, we're always impressed by any tool or resource that helps consumers quickly and easily find and support local, independently owned businesses — especially when traveling, where dining at chain restaurants always seems tragically par for the course.

Not any more, thanks to the recently re-launched Dine Indie and Travel Indie websites, a couple of passion projects from Robyn Jasko — a rural Pennsylvania-based marketing professional with a love affair for all things local, who launched Go Indie Media with her husband in 2005. Like a marriage between your Local First chapter and UrbanSpoon or Yelp, each of Go Indie's websites helps consumers find independently owned and operated cafes, coffeeshops, food trucks, grocery stores, and other sustainable sustenance providers, easily locating quirky and cool new places to try on the fly.

Being DIY obsessed as we are, we also love their side projects and blogs: Grow Indie, a journal of self-sufficiency and directory of Grow Guides for starting your own organic garden (plus recipes!); and Side Dish, the weekly magazine from Go Indie, all written by Robyn and a hand-selected roster of indie-minded guest bloggers.

To celebrate the redesign and re-launch of these three websites, Go Indie is giving away a Soyabella machine — an amazing contraption that allows you to make your own homemade soy milk or nut milk, which Robyn swears is better than anything she's ever bought in the store — to one lucky reader. (We're excited to try out some homemade almond milk: can you say liquid marzipan? YUM.) Sign up now through August 29th at GoIndie.com.

Plus, check back in October for our full interview with these two eco-friendly and economically minded entrepreneurs in Shoestring's Fall Food & Wine issue!

Story: Copyright 2010, Shoestring LLC. Image: Courtesy of GoIndie.com