All the way from Mountain Standard Time – Denver, CO

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Denver Solutionaries

Chris Morgan here! I’m very happy to introduce everyone to Denver’s Summer of Solutions! First, let me say that I wish I could write this introduction using the “we” pronoun, but I’m still looking for team leaders! Feel free to send any connections my way! Feel like coming to Denver? Email me!

The Idea

So here’s the idea. Let’s find some people who really care about growing, eating, and cooking food in the city, and we’ll live and learn together! What if we produce not only food to eat, but solutionaries to lead in this new, green economy? I’m confident that the handful of people who will come out for the summer of 2012 in Denver will finish as competent gardeners, if not entrepreneurs and advocates for urban agriculture and food justice in Denver. One of the best parts about this is that there are so many options in Denver to accomplish it! I have been lucky enough to connect with a number of great organizations to work in partnership with! I would love to tell you about a few of them! All of them influence me in some way when envisioning this summer! [I'm going to try to let them use their own words as much as I can.]

Greenleaf engages youth in urban agriculture, farming on available lots in neighborhoods that don’t have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. At GreenLeaf young people ages 14 – 18 earn a fair wage while they grow food for their communities and explore issues of health, nutrition, and social justice. The diverse crew of youth interns drives GreenLeaf’s innovative and project-based curriculum of intensive leadership development and asset-based community building. The young people also grow, challenging themselves and each other in an environment that creates lasting, just, and sustainable social change.

Slow Food Denver’s Seed To Table School Food Program creates meaningful relationships between young people and food in order to transform the school food system. By placing an emphasis on hands-on experiences, community interaction, and the pleasures of the table, SFD-STT projects help to strengthen the food communities of tomorrow by engaging youth today.

The GrowHaus is a non-profit urban farm and market in northeast Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood. Their mission is to grow healthy community through food access,production and education.

Cooking Matters empowers families with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to prepare healthy and affordable meals.

All of these programs and more inspire me to help contribute to solutions in our community. I have made several contacts with people to work in gardens, provide grocery store tours, and learn the skills around urban farming. I look forward to solidifying a program [or two] with the coming team leaders who will jump on board!

Chris Morgan

I grew up in Denver, went to college in Minnesota, and am currently part of the Colorado Vincentian Volunteers. I started traveling in 2005, and since then, I have been to El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, U.A.E, and (Oh!) Canada. My degree is in peace studies, and I see food as a building block for all kinds of justice near and far! I love to cook anything you put in my fridge or pantry. I have had the best conversations while weeding in the garden. I’m trying to be a disciple of Jesus, which has a lot to do with where I’m trying to go with life. In May 2011, I gave a report to my Peace Studies department from the year 2041 about how I contributed to world peace by helping each yard in the United States to produce food. I want to talk with you. One of my favorite things is listening.

Please, let me know what you think! My email works great! christopher.p.morgan@gmail.com

I see some other programs I want to connect with across the country, and I’m looking forward to talking with those people very soon! Stay tuned for more exciting action from Denver, Colorado! [the only SoS in Mountain Standard Time! "the new frontier"]

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!

Growing Food and Sustainability-Middleton, WI

Posted on November 30, 2011 by growingfoodandsustainability

The team in Middleton, WI is so excited to be a part of this inspiring network of youth leaders!

Our Program

We are designing and running a sustainability and environmental education program primarily for middle and high school youth that focuses on gardening and food production but also incorporates art, people-powered transportation, and multi-age relationship building through teaching and mentorships. The program’s home base will be the garden and greenhouse, located on public school land in central Middleton, where we will hold the majority of the workshops and host open garden work hours. However, we will also expand our work into the greater Middleton community. Some of our ideas include running a kids activity table and possibly selling some of our produce at the Downtown Middleton Farmers’ Market, taking group bike trips to the nearby Bock Community Garden, and delivering (by bike trailer) a percentage of the produce we grow to the Middleton Outreach Ministry’s food pantry.

Workshops will incorporate a variety of sustainability topics and will often use the garden as a hands-on classroom. Students will learn basic gardening skills such as bed construction, seed starting in the greenhouse, composting, transplanting, caring for plants, maintaining the garden, harvesting, washing, and distributing produce. We will also discuss and put into practice topics such as nutrition, the nutrient cycle, alternative transportation, water conservation, energy efficiency, and we will host several cooking classes at the nearby Willy Street Co-op. All of this will help connect the garden to the larger issues of sustainability, health, and justice. Personal expression through art and writing will be a part of every workshop as well. We will incorporate garden-fresh snacks as often as possible, and participating students will have the opportunity to bring fresh produce home to their families on a regular basis.

During open garden work hours, students will be able to spend additional time at the garden based on their level of interest. The garden will be a safe, supervised space, where parents can feel comfortable leaving their kids and where kids will know they can interact with a supportive adult.

Gabrielle Hinahara

Gabrielle has extensive farming and gardening experience and has also worked with youth. In college, she was involved with F.H. King Students for Sustainable Agriculture, where she helped to lead educational workshops for the student body in addition to volunteering in the garden. In the summer of 2010, she worked as the head counselor at the Frost Valley YMCA Farm Camp in New York, where she helped run garden-based outdoor education classes, counseled middle school-aged youth, and advised and evaluated the counseling staff. In the fall of 2010, she worked as an intern at Growing Power, an urban farm in Milwaukee, WI, where she learned about intensive growing systems such as vermiculture and aquaponics. She recently completed a full-season apprentice at Simple Gifts Farm in Amherst, MA, which runs a 300-member CSA and also sells at the local farmers market. This is where she gained most of her agricultural knowledge, including learning how to plan greenhouse and field planting schedules and how to grow and harvest almost every type of produce, from strawberries to squash to lettuce.

Natalie Hinahara

Natalie has significant experience organizing groups of peers and also in effectively communicating and partnering with adults. She was the student representative on the City of Middleton Sustainability Committee both her junior and senior year of high school and was president of the high school Ecology Club during her senior year. She also has experience working with youth in a garden setting, since she volunteered in Middleton’s Bock Children’s Garden in the summer of 2010. In college, she is currently a member of the UW-Madison chapter of Slow Food and is an intern in WISPIRG’s anti-big ag campaign, where she is learning community organizing skills. She is also majoring in art, so her talent in this area will contribute to the arts portion of our program.

Right now, we are working on securing land for garden space at both Middleton High School and Kromrey Middle School. We are excited to know how much land we will have so that we can design the gardens!

If you are interested in keeping updated on our progress, please join our facebook group!

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.

Introducing the 2012 Summer of Solutions Programs

Posted on November 14, 2011 by rubylevine

View Larger Map

That incredibly exciting map represents our 2012 Summer of Solutions programs. Returning programs are blue; new programs are green. Read more about these programs after the jump and get ready to watch this space for posts from all these amazing program planning teams. Continue reading →

Social Media!

Posted on November 14, 2011 by s0luti0naries

Social Media
Grand Aspirations has a variety of social media accounts that comprise our online presence and help us relate to other non-profits and similarly driven individuals. We highly recommend you visit and subscribe to these pages!

LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/company/2384483?trk=tyah

Google+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/100670483184187069676/

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Grand-Aspirations/346189577410

We also have a Twitter page that is forthcoming. Join our movement by liking our page!

Creation is Our Essence

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Casey

Our economy is crumbling. One in seven Americans live in poverty. The only thing our partisan politic-deadlock government can agree on is a free trade agreement with South Korea that isn’t likely to produce anything different from every other free trade agreement we’ve created.

More for the rich, less for the poor.

So why the squirrel?

It brings me back. Back to the single greatest period of growth and leadership development I’ve experienced in my life: Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities. It was the summer of 2010, and it was when my potential to lead, to challenge, to create, was unlocked.

I learned how to organize, how to facilitate, how to create a proposal for successful implementation of energy efficiency measures in homes and then how to present it to the administration of an electric utility, the imam of a local mosque, the head of a children’s summer program. I learned about oppression and privilege. I learned how to use Google Docs.

Together, we door-knocked, created an urban farm in a day, fixed and rode bikes, hosted community listening sessions, developed plans to convert an old car factory into a green manufacturing and living zone, planted and harvested food across Minneapolis, wrote business plans, toured renewable energy facilities, organized fundraising events, and ate a lot of delicious vegan food.

That summer changed me, because it empowered me. It gave me the tools I needed to help create the vision I and others have for our world. A world where communities overcome divisions and rise up together to take head on the economic, social and environmental challenges we face.

There’s a reason the dandelion is the focal point of the Summer of Solutions logo. A versatile, highly nutritious plant that can take root almost anywhere, grow, and disperse for miles around the parent plant, the dandelion defines the methodology of the program to gather in low-income communities, build up local infrastructure while training the next generation of green social entrepreneurs, and spread.

I was fortunate enough to go through this great experience, and now it’s time for me to return the favor. So I’m creating.

In 2012, application pending, there will be a Summer of Solutions program in Los Angeles. Building largely off the great work of a local organization, La Causa, we will be working with various different organizations and leaders, and our focuses are likely to include food access, green business, urban agriculture, complete streets and bike advocacy, green manufacturing, renewable energy projects, and community organizing.

I can’t wait to see what creations emerge.

The application to build your own Summer of Solutions program is open until next Saturday, October 29th. I encourage others who are ready to take this step: to join an incredibly talented and growing network of young leaders who aren’t waiting for help from above–they are working now to create the change they wish to see in the world.

Apply to Start a Summer of Solutions Program in Your Community!

Posted on October 6, 2011 by s0luti0naries

The Summer of Solutions is a program for young people who want to build just, sustainable economies in their communities.

We want to invite YOU to be one of those young people building those solutions. Apply here by October 22 to start a program in your community or to join an existing program leader team.

Running a program gives you the opportunity to create and support green economy projects that build power for people who currently don’t have as much access AND to empower young people from your community and beyond with the skills and strategies they need to do the same thing wherever they go next.

Past Summer of Solutions programs have:

Built community gardens and farms on vacant lots
Taught neighbors how to use bikes as an effective form of transit
Run summer camps for children to help them learn about healthy eating and growing their own food
Founded and partnered with energy businesses to create a community-based clean energy system
Created community spaces, from mini-golf courses in the coal fields of West Virginia to a playground in Detroit, MI
Designed and organized for green manufacturing at a closing car factory in Saint Paul, MN Continue reading →

The View from Four Years Out

Posted on September 5, 2011 by timothydenherderthomas

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?
Continue reading →

Update on 2011

Looking forward – 2012 projects

Who we are

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