Tag Archives: community

Fayetteville Summer of Solutions Grows Community Power!

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As Communications Facilitator for Summer of Solutions, I’m featuring every program to paint a broad picture of the depth and variety of solutions young people are building across the nation.

This post is drawn from a conversation I had with Amanda Bancroft, an AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer at the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology. The main organizers of Fayetteville SoS are: Andrea Love, Maggie Strain, Karina Hunt, Banah Ghadbian, Jeanie Lopez-Hall, Chelsea Mouber, and Brian Kupillas. The post is co-authored by me and the Fayetteville team.

Leaders in the program have a strong interest in gardening and permaculture. There are already over 50 gardening projects, organizations, and networks in Fayetteville, and so Amanda sees the role of Summer of Solutions as one that will connect these already dynamic organizations together. The Fayetteville team has already partnered with the OMNI Center’s garden, the World Peace Wetlands Prairie, and the community garden at Unity church. In addition, the group has been given several acres of land and a greenhouse, which the team is hoping to develop for gardening.

Through building collective growing power in Fayetteville, Summer of Solutions participants will be facilitating a beautiful expansion of the amazing work already happening around the city.
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Building strong initiatives means building strong communities

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After today, our first week of Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities will be over.

Wow.

It’s been tumultuous, fascinating, inspiring, and overwhelming all at once. I’ve had a lot of thinking to do, and not much time to sit down and meditate.

We’ve had a lot of good thought happening this week. I’ve met some really amazing people that I would really like to get to know. However, my own role in the Summer of Solutions seems to be a precarious one.

I don’t have nearly as much experience as most of the people I’m working with. And while that’s completely fine – I attended the SSC’s training program last summer, I have been working on my campus as best I can, but really, I haven’t accomplished nearly as much as these amazing people, and feel self-conscious about it. I know I don’t have as much experience to bring to the table, and am frustrated with myself for having wasted so much time not organizing.

I don’t want to come up with excuses for my lack of experience. It’s simply where I’m at right now in my activist journey. And I know that this summer, I will learn so much from these people.

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