LETS GO Chicago – Round 2!

Posted on February 24, 2012 by letsgochicago

After a successful first year, the Chicago Summer of Solutions team is back and ready for more. In fact, we have been plotting it ever since we put our gardens to bed last October!

What we learned in 2011 will help us build up 2012 into an experience you won’t want to miss. In 2012, we will engage in projects such as:

Expanding our urban yard share to include 3-5 additional vegetable gardens for use by low-income families
Growing our children’s garden program and bringing the food into the kitchen for our first ever summer cooking classes
Launching a worker-owned green infrastructure business to install rain gardens and other storm-water management features on public and private properties

With such big hopes ahead, we knew we had to build our team to have the right group for the job. At the beginning of January, we welcomed 3 new Program Leaders: Nell Seggerson, Gabriel Solis, and Benson Tucker to the team. All three bring new skills and vision to the group that we know will push the program beyond our wildest expectations. We are excited to be working alongside these new solutionaries and cannot wait to report on all we can accomplish!

To follow our work more closely, you can:

About our team

Molly Costello is a second year Program Leader for LETS GO Chicago. As an artist, organizer, and a lover of the outdoors, she usually has her hand dirty in one project or another.

Peter Hoy has spent the last three years honing his skills as an environmental educator in the Chicago area. When he’s not in a garden, he is usually counting down the days until the last frost so he can resume outdoor activities.

Nell Seggerson is a first year program leader with Summer of Solutions. She is in her third year at Loyola University, where she is studying to be a high school history teacher. She is also involved in Rogers Park Food Not Bombs and Loyola Anti-War Network. Nell is originally from Columbus, OH.

Ben Tucker grew up in Indianapolis, where he was involved with Keep Indianapolis Beautiful and Improving Kids’ Environment. He’s interested in music, comics, and urban history.

Gabriel Solis is a 21 yr. old History major, currently wrapping up his final semester at Loyola University Chicago. Gabriel grew up in El Paso, Texas–a city on the US-Mexico border, which due to its desert ecology, is continually affilicted by drought and water issues. These issues led him to become more interested in systemic-water conservation; a subject he hopes to explore through the “solutionary” method. Gabriel is also a member of Food Not Bombs, a firm socialist and a silly human being.

Look Who’s In The House!

Posted on January 22, 2012 by s0luti0naries

We, at The Art Affect, know that many of the solutions to the environmental and social challenges we face are already out there. Our 2012 Summer of Solutions program participants will train in journalism & communications, community organizing, and radical leadership, then set out across Seattle to engage in and document the top local solutions that are currently being implemented. At the end of the program we will harvest each of the projects and together create a step-by-step DIY guide to share with the world.

Potential Projects Include:

1. Urban Gardening and Food Sovereignty
2. Storytelling, Art and Alternative Media
3. Community Organizing and Leadership Development
4. Our DIY Guide to Grass-roots Community Action
5. Energy Efficiency and Retrofitting
6. Water and Habitat Restoration

Our Purpose:

Like so many others, we dream of a world that is equitable, thriving, and sustainable; where people shine with true happiness from the inside out. We are committed to ‘walking our talk’ by manifesting this dream in our own lives and engaging our peers, community and world in local solutions to our global problems. We are committed to providing tools, space and inspiration for people to come into alignment with their own gifts and purpose in the world and transform that inspiration into measurable actions in their communities.

About the Program Leaders:

Barbara and Dan are community leaders, activists and facilitators who are currently co-coordinating The Art Affect, a non-profit that creates powerful artistic spaces for young people to explore their purpose, develop their identity, and take part in building a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and personally fulfilling world. We enjoy making music, laughing at ourselves, creating new words that should never have existed, and sipping tea in perpetuiTEA. We put the “silly” back into Authentisilly. Just sayin.

Contact Us:

Barbara Jefferson barbara@theartaffect.org
Dan Mahle dan@theartaffect.org

Greetings from Portland!

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Leo

Greetings from Portland, OR!

We here at the Portland Enrichment Program are incredibly excited to be firing up for our next Summer of Solutions!

In Portland, we work primarily with an organization called the Foster Green Eco-District. They are main stakeholders in a fairly large area of Portland with the same name. The neighborhoods that the Eco-District encompass are all incredibly diverse and working class. Many of the residents are new immigrants or work irregular and abnormal hours. This, if course, is not the image that most people have of Portland, and we intend to fulfill several goals of social justice through our projects, among others.

Last year, we conducted a listening project with over one thousand people in the Eco-District designed to gauge the interests that residents had in regards to sustainability and neighborhood livability. We have streamlined the process from last year, and this summer we will work towards our goal of visiting every resident of the Eco-District over the next three years. This is no small feat, as the Eco-District contains over twenty-five thousand unique addresses. We are aided in this goal by our many community, city, state, and regional level partners.

When we visit residents of the Eco-District, we conduct a survey of their interests, but we also engage them in producing a sustainable future for themselves. The Foster Green Community Challenge is a way for residents to sign up and take personal steps to live sustainably. Many of the actions are low or no cost.

Another initiative that we are undertaking (and this writer is spearheading) is what we call the Challenge in a Box. The model that we have created and are testing in the Foster Green Eco-District is one that we would love to see expanded not only to other regions of Portland, but also to other cities all across the United States. The Challenge in a Box contains the materials, directions, and models that we have used to greatly expedite the startup process in other places. The faster the Challenge is set up and ready to go, the faster that strong Community Engagement data and effects may be generated.

We hope you’re excited at the prospects of our newly rejuvenated program! We can’t wait to get started!

Leo Qin, Program Leader

www.neighborhoodenrichment.org

Iowa City making noise

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Kerri Sorrell

It’s been an exciting week in Iowa City. One of our program leaders – Zach Wahls, maybe you’ve heard of him – has been fighting hard for marriage equality across the nation the past few months. He gave a speech a while back to the Iowa legislature, and it’s been blowing up the Internet (again). It recently hit 12 million views – woah.

It’s pretty easy to be proud of our friend. It’s also been pretty easy to get excited for this upcoming summer. We continue to work on projects from this past summer and have been planning away for new ones.

Update on 2011

IC is on the verge of something great. Our Solar Schools project – an initiative to install solar panels on two local schools in the Iowa City Community School District – has grown tremendously. After working with the school district, the project now includes at least 10 schools, and our team has been working tirelessly to get this passed. If the project is approved, it will be the largest solar project network hosted by a public school system in the nation.

Looking forward – 2012 projects

Our Power: Born in the Twin Cities, the Our Power program is a home weatherization initiative for low-income households in the Iowa City area. The program combines strong outreach and educational components focused on energy/environmental benefits of winterizing homes, the effect on residents’ energy bills and local resources for homeowners and renters. We recently received an $8k grant from Re-Amp, an alliance of foundations focused on clean energy issues, to get the project off the ground.

Iowa City Roots: Jumping on the local food bandwagon is easy to do in Iowa City, where our community’s educators, farmers, expert gardeners, parents and students all have a common goal: feed our kids with fresh, local and HEALTHY foods! We’re in the planning stages of this bloomin’ awesome project, which aims to construct and maintain 6 community gardens in public parks and schoolyards throughout the growing season of 2012. Partnering with the Parks and Recreation department of the City of Iowa City, the ICCSD, the Johnson County Local Food Alliance and dozens of community members, we have received a bounty of support thus far; the planning will continue through the dormant winter months as we secure land and funding–be on the lookout for things to start sprouting up come March!

Internship program: We working with the University of Iowa Career Center to create internship opportunities for U of I students interested in gardening, green economy work, clean energy issues and other community-based projects. Our team incorporates leadership development and youth empowerment in all aspects of our organization, making us aptly suited to be a Community Based Learning partner with the University. We are also working with professionals in local green businesses to match interested interns with sustainable companies in need of help and innovation.

White Roof and Neighborhood Compost Pilot projects: still in preliminary stages, these two projects aim to involve community members in simple intiatives that make a big impact. White roofs are perhaps the easiest way to engage businesses in sustainability, and with a lively downtown business community, we hope to provide white roofing services while partnering with local hardware and home improvement stores. The Neighborhood Compost Pilot is a branch of Iowa City roots, and hopes to bring composting intiatives to the community garden centers we’ll be working with.

Who we are

Our team is led by Zach Gruenhagen, Hadley Rapp, Zach Wahls, Tom Frakes, Eleanor Marshall and Kerri Sorrell. All of us are Iowa City natives or students at the University of Iowa. We’re committed to building a model of sustainability in Iowa City, one that can hopefully be replicated in other parts of our state. Iowa may be small, but we’ve got a lot of potential to do big things in this unique community.

Interested in keeping up with Iowa City Summer of Solutions? Check us out on Facebook, Twitter and at iowacitysos.org. We can’t wait for what promises to be an exciting, exhausting and exhilarating summer.

p.s. – Did you know Grand Aspirations is in the running to win $25K in the Pepsi Refresh Project? We’re working with the Progressive Slate to fund-raise towards our amazing programs and leaders. You can vote every day in December, so mark your calendars! Share this link: http://bit.ly/sWzLvl with your friends online and help us spread the word! Go team!

Pioneer Valley Summer of Solutions: Take 2!

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Martha Pskowski

Just weeks after our program ended last summer, the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts was hit by Hurricane Irene. Bad.

I was in North Carolina for the Grand Aspirations National Gathering as the storm worked its way up the East Coast. The GA crew was fine, albeit delayed in our travel plans. But when I got back to Franklin County, the home of program, I could see Irene had done serious damage. Turners Falls and Greenfield, the hubs of activity for Summer of Solutions, were spared the worst of it, but near-by neighbors in Shelburne Falls, Conway and many other small towns lost roads, homes, electricity, farm crops, animals and more. Seeing news footage of the main bridge being wiped out in Shelburne Falls was devastating. We had helped partner Co-op Power to weatherize several homes in this beautiful and tight-knit community.

A big lesson of 2011 for me has been that unprecedented weather in our rural river valley and the surrounding mountain towns is incredibly devastating. This lesson came in waves: first the tornado which struck Springfield and other towns south of us in June, causing massive damage, then the hurricane in August, and most recently with the surprise Halloween snowstorm, which dumped a foot of snow overnight and knocked out power for almost a week in many parts of the region. Narrow mountain roads aren’t built to withhold major flooding; aging bridges across the Connecticut and Deerfield Rivers can’t handle 100 Year Floods every year. In an area which depends on agriculture, many small farmers had their worst season in years and lost thousands of dollars in crops.

While it has been a sobering year to the realities of climate change, I feel hopeful for what we are building in the Pioneer Valley. I also feel a new commitment to learning how to sustain ourselves and our communities in a changing climate. We will be at it again in 2012.

Pioneer Valley Summer of Solutions is based in Greenfield and Turners Falls, MA, two towns in western Massachusetts along the Connecticut River. These towns were rooted in manufacturing industries and are traditional crossing points for the surrounding communities, as far back as when the Pocumtuc tribe lived on the land.

SoS in 2012 will continue our farming and community education projects from 2011 and expand in new directions. In 2011 we helped start the Summer Workshop Series, hosted at the Brick House Community Resource Center in Turners, which was made up of dozens of free classes on topics from wood-working to self-defense to herbal medicine. We will continue this partnership with the Brick House, including the Snack Garden, which we planted and tended with Spanish-speaking neighbors kids in the Kids Gardening Class.

We also are continuing a fruitful partnership with Harvest Moon Farm, across the river in Greenfield. We started a “work-share” in 2011, helping with the Gwen and Eric’s crops in exchange for a quarter acre plot of our own. We’ll be expanding to grow more vegetables to sell, and expand options for Greenfield residents to eat healthy, affordable and local food and be a part of its production. We also will be using the Greenfield Community Kitchen to develop our own prepared food product.

As a program in a small, rural community (combined Greenfield and Turners are under 25,000 people) we face challenges and advantages. Living in the heart of amazing natural resources reminds me how we depend on them for everyday existence, and even in rural communities, access is lacking. Learning how to create prosperity in a community which has been abandoned by many commercial industries is more than a summer experience, but we’re lucky to work with a lot of other dedicated residents.

Myself (Martha Pskowski) and Erika Linenfelser are returning as second year program leaders, and we’re hiring new local leaders. Erika and I are both students at Hampshire College in near-by Amherst. I am excited to deepen my connections in this community and explore ways to make more self-sustaining options for youth in Franklin County, who often relocate to find opportunities. SoS is an exciting way to connect youth to older residents of the area to create a shared vision for the community. I also can’t wait for more harrowing bike rides on our narrow roads, and refreshing swims in the Connecticut River after work days. If you make it out to the Pioneer Valley, you’re sure to be charmed by our beautiful surroundings, and taken aback by the vitality of our local community.

Solutionaries

Category Archives: 2012 SOS Program Introduction Blog Series