Category Archives: Summer of Solutions

The View from Four Years Out

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When I helped close the 2011 Twin Cities Summer of Solutions three weeks ago, I knew something amazing was happening, but in the flurry of it all I wasn’t really able to identify it. I started to get a sense of it when I first sat down at the Grand Aspirations August Gathering two weeks ago, when forty people from all over the country streamed in with wondrous stories of their work creating the green economy. By the end of the Gathering, last week, the full depth of the change was starting to dawn on me and was brought to the front of my attention when Ethan Buckner, a friend and Oakland Summer of Solutions Program Leader, said smiling at the end of a big group hug, ‘you know, we’ve created something really remarkable in the past few years’. Now, after a week of catching up and taking the next steps forward back in Minnesota, I’m finally seeing the view from four years out.

Four years ago was about 6 months after the events that got Cooperative Energy Futures and the Alliance to Reindustrialize for a Sustainable Economy off the ground – the seeds of my green economy work in the Twin Cities. It was about 6 months before the vision for the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations emerged. Four years ago, there had been no national gatherings of thousands of youth activists, candidate Barack Obama was barely a competitor, and the economy had not yet tanked. The dream of a green economy was barely starting to be voiced, and the idea that we could sustain ourselves, our communities, and the future of our world by creating new ways to feed, house, power, and transport our society was an exciting but utopian ideal.

So what has changed?
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Late greetings from Portland: The Foster Community Action Day

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On Saturday, we had our Foster Community Action Day. It was the culmination of weeks of hard work and organizing. At times, the pace became frantic as we made last minute adjustment and preparations. Nonetheless, everything got done, and spectacularly so.

The day started separately for all of us. We split up into two groups. Naomi, Anastasia, and I (Leo) went to New Seasons Marketplace to buy refreshments and snacks for the volunteers. New Seasons was nice enough to donate a $50 giftcard to help fund our food purchases. Earlier that day, Naomi also picked up several cakes from Baker and Spice Bakery, again donated.

 

The others, including Shabina, Nathan, Huntley, Barbara, Kari, and Allison were busy at our secret headquarters (aka the Shrub House) assembling clipboards and other materials for the volunteers. They soon received word that more volunteers than they anticipated would be arriving: several people from the Corvallis Summer of Solutions program would be joining us!

The food group reconvened at the Shrub House to quickly prepare some food for the volunteers. We purchased chips, dips, and a variety of fruits and vegetables for the volunteers to eat in between canvass areas and rest stops.

Once the volunteers from Corvallis arrived and introductions were had all around, we packed all our materials and food and moved to the park next to Kelly Elementary, where our training would be held. Shortly thereafter, about 25 volunteers from Second Stories, as well as their older interns arrived at the park.

Nathan and Allison did a thorough canvassing training for them. Many had never canvassed before and were quite nervous about the experience. We explained to them the basics of what we were doing, as well some logistics, such as our coding system and how to read the turf maps. Finally, we split into groups to practice the canvassing script and giving surveys and challenges.

Heading out with volunteers in tow, we each were assigned a block or two of houses in the Kelly Elementary area. Some volunteers were nervous, others were eager, and the whole experience went very quickly.

We ended up covering nearly all the turf that we had set out to cover, basically finishing all the turf in the Kelly School area. Many of the groups had multiple challenges and surveys. The numbers aren’t quite in yet, but we’ll keep readers updated as they roll in!

https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Worried about Defecits and Unemployment?: Community Powered Energy

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As the federal government eyes a shutdown and Minnesota cautiously creeps towards the end of its state-level closure, the underlying questions remain unanswered:

  • How do we balance budgets and live within our means by raising income and cutting waste without sacrificing the essentials, whether at the government level or for people already living on the edge?
  • How do we create lasting jobs and economic opportunity when the costs of living keep rising and people have less money to spend?
  • How do we bridge traditional divides (partisan, ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural) to work together creatively for public health, geopolitical stability, climate and energy solutions, community resiliency, and social justice?

For the neighborhoods around Midtown in South Minneapolis, where the recession has left unemployment edging towards 40%, foreclosure running rampant, violent crime rising, and neighborhoods and community organizations struggling with funding cuts, these questions are at the fore. Things have always been challenging here; absentee landlords control much of the housing, and a large portion of people’s income leaves the community to pay for goods and services elsewhere. Many local residents (the area is primarily low-income, people of color, and has many recent immigrants and non-English speakers) feel they have little agency in corporate and governmental decisions affecting the neighborhood.

In times of crisis, communities can turn against each other in a desperate attempt to protect what remains, or towards each other to work together to create new opportunities and long term solutions. In the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions, we’re helping the community use the opportunities that clean energy and energy efficiency provides to make the latter choice. Scaled up, we hope this work may serve as an example for a world facing challenging times.

The seven neighborhoods (over 13,000 households and over 500 businesses) we’re focusing on together spend over $63 million each year paying for electricity, heating, and gasoline – that number will only go up as prices rise. That money is creating few local jobs – the majority of it pays for coal mining, oil drilling, natural gas extraction, power plants, natural gas pipelines, and more. I don’t need to recite the list of problems these things create for both the local community already plagued with asthma and other respiratory illnesses and for our broader nation and planet. 30-80% of this $63 million/year  can be avoided through behavioral changes and available technologies that pay for themselves, reducing the negative impacts created. Collectively implementing these practices cuts the cost of implementing them (opening access to people and making it easier to finance) and dramatically increases demand for local green business and green jobs, putting people back to work (or into it for the first time). Eliminating those costs helps individuals and businesses balance their own budgets and create new jobs and income. This in turn reduces reliance on public subsidies and increases public income, making economic recovery and fiscal responsibility connected instead of opposed. In doing so, we help create a win-win-win scenario for residents and businesses and across cultural and socioeconomic groups; building community and helping people unite across difference for a common goal.

We believe energy efficiency and clean energy can be a driver for stronger communities and a renewed economy. And more than our belief; we’re making it happen.

So here’s the low down on what’s happening around energy in the Twin Cities …

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My 40 New Best Friends

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Five days ago I remember sitting nervously around a bowl of cherries at a fellow program leader’s kitchen table. Our conversation kept switching with the tense energy of those with much to say but too many thoughts to clearly express any of them. Have we figured out housing for everyone? How much money do we still need to fundraise? What time are we going to start tomorrow? Have you emailed the group the address yet?

Now I look around at a sea of young faces, all different races, different backgrounds and with different reasons why we decided to spend our summer working to create ingenuitive grassroots solutions to Oakland’s most challenging environmental and social problems. Despite our differences, I can confindently say that there is not a single person in the room who I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to and confiding in. Moreover, there are many people in the room whom I’ve told more personal things about myself than I have to friends I’ve known for years.

This story of immediate friendship might be written off as “cute” just as Summer of Solutions is often written off as just another “summer camp.” But in many ways, I believe that the community we are creating is a model for how the rest of the world should function. Imagine if diverse groups of people, from all different income levels and racial backgrounds, came together to really think about the problems that their community was facing and then worked together to solve those problems? Sound idealistic? Maybe, but if you truly believe as I do that at some point all of these smiling faces sitting around me are going to take the knowledge that they’ve learned this summer to become even better leaders in their communities and country then perhaps a solutionary world isn’t that far off in the future.

Creating Our Own Jobs

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Next weekend I’m heading down south to celebrate my sister’s graduation from college. Although the festivities are sure to be merry, they are slightly tempered by the fact that she will be joining my class, the ”class of the great recession,”  and enter the labor force at a time when more than half of recent graduates have not be able to get a full-time, salaried job with benefits; nearly half of us find ourselves in jobs that do not even require a college diploma, and nearly one in 10 of us are unemployed. The worst recession in decades and the slow economic recovery has clearly punished those full of big ideas but short on work experience or skills.

And yet, as Rahm Emanuel famously said at the start of the Obama administration amidst the financial collapse,  ”You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

The dearth of employment in the formal work force has provided an opportunity for recent graduates to travel, volunteer or even take the risk of trying to create their own jobs. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal showed that a growing number of us are–at least temporarily–opting out of the labor force entirely, as measured by the drop in labor force participation rate among college graduates under 25. This summer, I’m joining that demographic as a volunteer program leader for the Summer of Solutions in Oakland, subsisting off of a meager stipend and the generosity of my parents.

While sometimes I wish I had the stability and salary of a formal job like some of my friends, most days I am incredibly exited not to have to sit in an office and instead have the opportunity to work at the grassroots level on the issues I truly care about  in my own backyard of Oakland. Summer of Solutions is a is a 2-month program that trains participants how to develop the green economy by creating hands-on, community-based solutions to environmental and social injustices. Throughout the summer, participants learn not just valuable leadership skills that will be useful no matter what they choose to do after the summer ends, but also how to make grassroots community change that integrates climate and energy solutions, economic security, and social justice.

For too long, I have been part of the youth climate movement that has been busy telling politicians what we don’t want–coal plants, factory farms, gas subsidies etc.–without showing them examples of practical solutions. Now, I am part of a new movement of over 250 young people around the country who are working in their local communities to create change under the umbrella of 15  Summer of Solutions programs. Although the program doesn’t officially start for another couple of weeks, I’ve already been impressed by the qualifications, enthusiasm and dedication of the other leaders and participants. While we don’t yet have specifics on all of the projects we’ll be working on since many of these depend on the group desires and community needs, we’ve already formed valuable partnerships with local organizations within our focus areas of food justice, clean energy, transformational media and thriving communities.

Of course, in order to successfully implement all of these solutions, we’re fundraising like crazy. We’re hoping to raise $8,000 in the next two weeks in order to provide stipends to low-income youth participants, subsidize food and housing for all program participants and purchase materials for our projects. If you or anyone you know wants to make a tax-deductible donation to support our program, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/SoS-Oakland. Every penny really does count, particularly since there isn’t any administrative cost (remember, we’re all volunteers)!

Solutionaries Worldwide!

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This fall, solutionaries around the world are getting interested in Summer of Solutions. As we grow together across the country and make more and more connections nationally and internationally, new opportunities are emerging.

Like this one: e-GLO

e-GLO (Global Learning Opportunity) is a project inspired by the Earth Charter, an international document written to encourage “respect and care for the community of life,” “ecological integrity,” “social & economic justice,” and “democracy, non-violence & peace.” People all around the world are developing Earth Charter projects to make their communities more sustainable.

Summer of Solutions – Fayetteville, through OMNI Center’s youth program, Teen Leadership Corps, won a $300 scholarship to represent the United States in e-GLO.  I also want to see solutionary representation from other cities, not just Fayetteville, so that everyone can benefit from the materials and network. It’s truly inspirational!

In e-GLO, 30 youth from around the world get together online via a type of Skype platform.  We share our projects and inspirations, answer polls like the one above, listen to guest speakers, view video and powerpoint presentations, discuss important questions like “How do we spur the capacity for innovation among youth leaders?” There is also a very human component to the course: each time we connect, we can chat with each other, wave across oceans, and share a little about what’s going on locally. Want to participate? e-GLO #3 lasts until December 7th, 2010. Follow the course material on the e-GLO schedule. You can access the training materials, too! Or join the Facebook group and find out what people are doing around the world, via project templates, videos, and photo slideshows.

Watch e-GLO’s video here. (It’s not possible to embed the video from this website)

The course has already begun to affect the way we do Summer of Solutions here in Fayetteville.  Someone can’t attend a meeting or lacks transportation? No problem, let’s Skype them in. We don’t have access to a business trainer? Ask Hadijah, a  professional who teaches business skills in Uganda and is interested in Summer of Solutions for Ugandan youth.  Not sure about which materials to use for social entrepreneur trainings? We can now use the professionally designed powerpoints and PDFs from e-GLO to help each other learn and achieve more for the community and the planet. The biggest learning curve for me has been the access to new technology.  e-GLO really stresses the importance of social media tools, and their tutorials are engaging and encouraging.  I’m beginning to notice that technology is becoming more exciting, and a bit less threatening.

But the best part about e-GLO is the people! Our facilitators in Canada and Costa Rica, and our tech specialists around the world, are funny, helpful, and inspiring people.  The youth who participate in the program stand out as innovators guided by their passion for a more sustainable world.  Meet the e-GLO solutionaries!

This is a pic from one of our recent e-GLO sessions! Each square is a different participant from around the world.

First day of the national gathering!

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I just got here to Fayetteville last night for the Grand Aspirations national gathering. So far, I have been extremely impressed with the level of real engagement with the community that I have seen here. I have been on the working group planning the event along with Amanda, Ryan, and Sarah here in Fayetteville and Matt from the Twin Cities. Our Fayetteville working group members kept telling us about all the donations that were coming in from the community, that people who they’d never met were calling them asking to bring produce from their farms. I’m really impressed with the way that the Fayetteville program is made up of people who are a part of this community and have been for years and working in a very integrated way with community partners. Continue reading →

Reclaiming prosperity

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“…it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer…”

James E. McWilliams “Food that Travels Well” The New York Times August 6, 2007

Say what?  I thought better of you, NYT.  While McWilliams does raise some valid points, this mentality falls short in two major ways.  His assumptions mirror outlooks about sustainability I have often encountered which also apply to clothing, building practices, transportation and more.  Good thing there are Solutionaries on the case.

1)      This view doesn’t look far enough back.  Transportation of food over long distances is a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.  There was a time when everyone ate food that was more or less local.  Then refrigerated transportation happened, and the industrial revolution and agri-business squeezing out small farmers and before you know it, local is a novelty.  This all happened in the course of a century or two.  Is inertia so strong we can’t get back to this way of living? Judging from past moments in history, such as WWII when many Americans started Victory gardens, I beg to differ.

2)      It doesn’t look far enough ahead.  Oil is what fuels our transportation system and alternatives like corn ethanol aren’t looking so hot.  Oil is running out, and fast.  Since 1968, the world has been using more oil than it has discovered.  Just this month after a cabinet meeting, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah answered a Zawya Dow Jones Newswires reporter’s question: “I told them [the cabinet] that I have ordered a halt to all oil explorations so part of this wealth is left for our sons and successors, God willing.”[1]

One projection of peak oil from energyinsights.net

McWilliams doesn’t think about all the subsidies that have made oranges and coffee beans in New York City cheaper than swiss chard from a Hudson Valley farmer. The subsidies and the artificially suppressed cost of gas for transportation all create a false sense of economy in far-flung production.  When the U.S. starts paying an arm and a leg for the last dregs of oil fields, local won’t look so much like a “choice”.

A big part of being solutionary to me is a type of long-term thinking that McWilliams sorely lacks.  I’m not just in this for my generation.  If I were I might focus on R & D of energy resource extraction.  And I’m not just in it for my kid’s generation.  I’m in it to figure out a way that humans can co-exist on this earth alongside all the other species we haven’t wiped out yet, indefinitely.  This takes looking way back in the past before looking too far into the future.  Humans have lived without fossil fuels for all of our history except the tiny blip of the last two centuries.  I’m not saying we have to go back to the Stone Age, just that the Earth can support a human population that doesn’t suck it dry.

One of my neighbors kept apples and potatoes all through last winter in her basement, no fossil fuels required.  Local apples in a Minnesota February; it can be done, no science degree required.  I’ve spun and knitted wool from Maryland sheep into hats and mittens that never left their state of origin in production or use.  I joined St Paul high school youth, the Lily Springs Farm crew and other Solutionaries working on a natural fence in Wisconsin this past weekend.  Just pine trees, brush and some hard labor will keep rabbits out of the crops.   Summer of Solutions is helping Sibley Bike Depot get bikes to people so they can get around without fossil fuels.

Natural building at Lily Springs Farm

And what’s so beautiful to me is these changes feel like anything but sacrifices.  It’s taking our future out of the hands of corporations, institutions and bureaucrats and into our own hands.  To me, being Solutionary means transforming the world so my life is more prosperous than it ever could be in our current, broken and unjust system.

[1] http://community.nasdaq.com/news/2010-07/has-peak-oil-arrived.aspx?storyid=29215

More Using Less

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I came to environmental issues initially from what seems to me to be a very middle class standpoint. My family had always been frugal, adverse to waste, etc., but these were choices that we made from some sense of social responsibility and personal financial responsibility, not absolute necessity. Moving my things out of my dorm room after my first year of college, I realized how much arbitrary stuff I’d kept throughout the year because of my socialized (and possibly genetic?) aversion to throwing things away. But this also meant that I had accumulated plenty of stuff, which made me think about the fact that despite the fact my family and I may have opted to not live excessively, we never went without, and certainly have always had small luxuries.

Therefore, as I gradually came to engagement in environmental issues growing up, I faced what I feel is, at least in my experience, a somewhat common paradigm that “doing stuff that’s good for the environment” means sacrifice. However, I always had this idea – that always felt vaguely idealistic due to current well-entrenched systems – that it shouldn’t mean sacrifice, that there were common sense ways, for example that more localized food production should be able to be environmentally sustainable and build local economies. However, I never felt particularly empowered to be able to make this happen.

My thoughts in the last few months about Cooperative Energy Futures (CEF) have been gradually informing this idea, and tonight Timothy told his story of growing up (which I don’t really want to delve into here because I feel it’s still his story to tell) and I felt like the way in which I perceived his observations and experiences in a way complemented mine. To describe what I took from his story tonight, I’m going to go with something else I’ve heard Timothy say, over a month ago: “Let’s see lack as an asset.” I see this as a way that can (maybe in different ways depending on background, but maybe not, I don’t know) engage people from many class backgrounds (both the “haves” and “have-nots”, let’s say) in ventures that are both environmentally and economically sustainable.

The model being tested by CEF understandably seems unusual: capitalizing energy efficiency can also be described as creating something out of less, which runs opposite to most modern notions about wealth creation. While this is not an entirely new concept (see the ’70s cookbook, More With Less), carrying it out on any scale and with distinct entrepreneurial intent is definitely not a widely-thought-about idea, but it has lots of opportunity as we’re getting to the point at which continued excess is seeming unfeasible. However, less excess doesn’t mean the end of “business.”

Tonight I was told that CEF has been described as “a different kind of more,” which I see as very well capturing what the future will look like in a myriad of sectors. This is a different type of business plan, and it allocates value differently in some ways, but it’s still a business plan. Such a business can still create value and support people.

[Note: Our community conversation I reference was under the understanding of confidentiality, and I got Timothy's permission to reference him and his comments.]

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Note: This post cross-posted from Discovering Solutions by Christina Getaz.

Corvallis SoS Launch Week

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The NICE Summer of Solutions launch week imploded my brain and lassoed my soul, forcing me to reflect on my life in ways I never have, but have always wanted to. The deep and penetrating introspection divulged thoughts I’d never thought, connections I’d never seen, and worldviews I’d never considered. These views exploded outward from within making me feel and see the world in entirely and fundamentally different ways. These trainings lassoed my soul, asking not only what do I want to do, but what I need to do it, and how I am going to. The most powerful realization for me was that I can dream big, big, big, but I never seem to plan how to reach those dreams. This was a pretty amazing realization for me because I’ve always known this, but haven’t felt so determined to overcome it before. But more than introspection, this week was about imagining ourselves in our highest vision and visioning a world beyond the horizon. Loosening the lasso, my soul soared. It’s not so much that I haven’t had visioning sessions before, but that I realized by thinking and stating out loud the world we wished to see, by living it in our thoughts, words, and actions, we created it right where we were. Our training week was spectacular.

You know, clicking on the Summer of Solutions tab on the Grand Aspirations site, I saw our lonesome green balloon in Oregon, signifying our program in Corvallis. Despite being the only SoS program west of the Mississippi, I couldn’t be prouder and happier to be here.