Grand Aspirations is extremely pleased to announce that we received $60,000 in funding this week!
Here’s how:
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Grand Aspirations wins $60,000 this week!
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“Green Stuff”
Each day of the online voting campaign for the Health Justice CT Challenge, Summer of Solutions Hartford is posting new videos to show voters what our work is all about and why we should win $10,000.
You can vote for “Health Justice in the Garden” every day until March 16th: http://www.healthjusticect.org/challenge-voting
Today’s video is a series of clips from Kids’ Week- a free summer camp that our team ran last August. We had 18 campers ages 3-13, which is quite a task! We had a ton of fun doing arts and crafts, playing on the playground, cooking, and learning in the garden. My favorite part was a series of activities we did with plant botany. First, Joe taught the kids about plant structure and function. Then, each kid did a drawing of a plant and showed how it ate, drank, and soaked up sun. That afternoon, we got out the chalk and decorated the driveway of the community center with an imaginary garden. The next day, Claudine taught our campers about nutrition and healthy eating. Then she lead them through the garden on a nutrition scavenger hunt to find all the ingredients for a healthy meal. On the last day, we painted a big mural with room for each kid to paint their own plant.
Photos from Kids’ Week:
http://soshartford.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/kids-week-photos/
I’ll let some of our campers tell you the rest.
You can vote for “Health Justice in the Garden” every day until March 16th: http://www.healthjusticect.org/challenge-voting
Health Justice CT Challenge Update
Click Here to Vote Now. Click the “Click here to vote” link and Vote for “Health Justice in the Garden.”
Click Here to Sign up to Vote Daily. Click continue to agree, fill in your email and get started!
Voting Results: At the end of the fourth day of voting, Summer of Solutions Hartford remains in close second place. Voting results have shown that our supporters have been the most consistent in voting daily, but we have not yet achieved the number of voters reached by other organizations. Reflecting this trend, we won the most votes on days 2 and 4 of voting, while the organization in first place won the most votes on days 1 and 3.
What does this mean? : We will continue to rely on our core of daily voters to support us by voting every day. We are confident that by continuing our daily voting campaign, we can continue to pull in a steady number of votes. We also plan to make a special effort this weekend, when we believe we will be able to reach more voters than a larger organization.
At the same time, we need to reach out to a larger audience. We will continue our efforts to reach as many voters as possible, and we ask for your help. If you are reading this and have not yet signed up to vote daily, there is still one week of voting left. We also depend on your support to reach new voters. While you can make a big impact for our campaign by enlisting others to sign up, you can also have a large effect by sending the voting link – healthjusticect.org/challenge-voting – to as many people as possible and encouraging them to vote for “Health Justice in the Garden.”
What we could do with $10,000:
1) Provide stipends to Program Leaders and Participants working Full-Time to bring community gardens and community programs to the Frog Hollow and surrounding neighborhoods.
2) Cover the construction costs of over over 60 raised wooden beds and over 2,000 Square Feet of Growing Space.
Grand Aspirations Launches Webinars
Grand Aspirations has just officially launched a webinar series for this May. This will be an opportunity for people interested in building a just, sustainable, community-based economy and doing it effectively to share and gain skills and insights they’ve gained through their experience. The Webinars Team is currently seeking proposals for this initial series of webinars. If you have an idea, please send in your proposal using this form by March 23. Webinar facilitators will receive up to 60% of the revenue from these webinars, so it’s a great strategy for personal resource generation as well as a way to get your ideas out there.
We are looking for people within the Grand Aspirations network and for people who have never heard of Grand Aspirations, and everyone in between, to offer webinars. If you know someone who might be interested, please pass on the opportunity! We are looking for people to present on the topics that interest them, but we have heard some particular interest in trainings on being an effective ally (particularly along race and class lines), tactics for de-escalating conflict, and fundraising. Is there anything you’d like to attend a webinar on? Let us know in the comments!
The Health Justice CT Challenge
We are happy to announce that Summer of Solutions Hartford is a finalist in The Health Justice CT Challenge. The winner will be decided through an online vote and will receive a $10,000 grant from the CT Health Foundation to work towards establishing “equal opportunities for health to all Connecticut residents.”
You can watch our grant application video here.
Here’s how you can get involved:
1) Sign up for our voting campaign to receive reminders and links to the voting website by email
2) Follow our campaign efforts on our twitter feed
3) Tell your friends, organizations and networks about our organization and about our voting campaign by sending them links to our website and the short-cut link to the vote sign-up: bit.ly/A2R7hK
4) Follow the daily video updates on our youtube channel.
“What I Really Do”
It’s springtime in Connecticut, though the calendar insists it’s February. Summer of Solutions Hartford is planning our second summer of food justice work in Frog Hollow, Hartford. We have an excellent summer behind us and a million plans in the works for the next, but in the meantime I’ve been spending a lot of time at my kitchen table on this computer.
This image has been floating around Facebook for the past few weeks. I had to laugh when I saw it, because I had been sitting for 6 hours with a laptop, my phone, and a notepad- “organizing.” This particular day I was scheduling meetings with partners, emailing our participant application to community members, and fixing up our website- soshartford.wordpress.com. On days like this, it appears my “community organizing” is lacking some community.
When I’ve been working at my kitchen table so long that I don’t realize the sun has set- only that my papers have been getting harder to see- it is memories of that community and enthusiasm for our future work together that inspire me.
Memories like:
-Meeting our team of 2011 program participants for the first time at La Paloma Sabanera coffee shop in Hartford.
- Getting to the register to buy a cart full of seedlings and hearing “oh, you’re starting the garden in Hartford? We’re giving you all of this for free”
- The first time Nino, a five year old boy who lives next to el Jardín de Zion Street, came out to the garden to work with us and ran around with a wheelbarrow, which he called his “truck,” helping us fill raised beds.
- When Climate Summer visited and we ate home-cooked picnics on the front yard.
- Planting squash in a tire with Ramón who lived down the street, “it will be beautiful.”
- Wes teaching me how to maximize all the space in a 4×8 bed, and that your tomatoes won’t grow if you don’t talk to them enough.
- Playing Power Rangers with the kids during the summer camp we ran, and not knowing how to properly represent the yellow one.
- Holding a meeting of organizers and activists in our basement on a particularly hot day.
- A Hartford Courant photographer showing up at the garden during the heat wave “looking for people crazy enough to be outside.”
- During “Graffiti Day” of Art Week, when Javier showed Nino how to paint the Puerto Rican flag on their raised bed.
- Witnessing the secret musical talent of our garden neighbors at our open-mic potluck picnic.
- Drawing a “magical chalk garden” at the playground- featuring a bean stalk, jack, the giant, heart flowers, purple strawberries, and “car plants” during summer camp
- Playing Seedling Scavenger Hunt with neighborhood kids (celery is deceiving!)
- Talking to strangers on the sidewalk about our kale harvest and signing them up for plots on the spot.
- The last night of our summer, when everyone came out to eat dinner together in the garden at Alice-in-Wonderland-esque tables and our neighbor called the garden “a wonderland.”
So thanks, clever graphic, but I think what we do has a lot more community in it than you think. Sure, I have my fair share of desk hours, but it’s all to make those moments possible. As I plan for next summer, meet with potential partners, and talk up the program to applicants, I am encouraged by the potential of Summer of Solutions Hartford to bring people together, makeover vacant lots into flourishing gardens, and turn the tides of food justice in Hartford.
If you’re wondering, “say, what might the magical moments of SoS Hartford 2012 entail?” You should check out What’s New 2012: http://soshartford.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/whats-new-2012/ and apply to join us at http://grandaspirations.org/summer-of-solutions/apply2012/
LETS GO Chicago – Round 2!
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.
