Our next project is aimed to help rebuild and reconstruct this park. We are currently looking for volunteers to help with this initiative. We will began restoring the Doria park in northeast Detroit in June. Contact hopeforgreen.wordpress.com/contact for more information.
Greetings fellow Solutionaries and loyal readers,
Bad news first. The house we worked on throughout January, which we were planning to convert into a residence and community resource for sustainable home upgrades, is slated for demolition. There is much commotion with the city right now, other folks are trying to take ownership of the project and move it forward. It isn’t in the ground yet, but its future is definitively uncertain.
All’s going well with Soulardarity. We’re in the midst of a planning stage. After the first light went in, we’ve been revisiting our long-term planning and business model. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time driving around Highland Park, meeting neighbors, and planning community meetings to facilitate active involvement in the planning and implementation of this project. We’ll be developing our master plan, partnerships with the city and neighborhood association, and a design for the streetlights we hope to build right in Highland Park. I don’t want to give away too much detail right now, but the plan right now is to launch a Capital Campaign in the next few months with the goal of raising $1.5 million to install 200 solar streetlights all in one fell swoop.
I’ve also been working with Detroit SOUP to get the Highland Park neighborhood SOUP underway. Detroit SOUP is a crowd-funding event that’s been running for three years. Every month, they hold a community dinner. It costs $5 at the door, which gets you soup, salad, bread, and a vote. Four people propose creative projects that benefit the Detroit community, give short presentations and take questions. Afterwards, everyone eats and talks and votes and, by 8:30, someone walks away with the door money (currently between $1000 and $1500). With support from one of their grants, we’ve held two Highlanf Park SOUP’s at St. Benedict Hall, and are excited for the first SOUP to occur at Nandi’s Knowledge Café, which is a little easier to find. Continue reading
Hello friends, and happy (almost) spring!
I’m Sara, a first-year intern at Growing Food and Sustainability. I wanted to tell you all a little bit about one of the great things I have been able to do with our team so far this year. Beginning last fall, I began working with our GFS team at Clark Street Community School; over the past few months, I have been fortunate enough to co-lead their weekly Ecology Club meetings. In our 90 minutes together on Friday mornings we have had some amazing discussions already, and I imagine they will get even better as times goes on and we move from inside the classroom to outside in the garden.
A lot of what we have been talking about over the winter season has related to general questions of sustainable living. Currently, they are working away at a bottle-recycling program with other organizations in their school, and we have started some plants under light tables–just to get our hands a little dirty this winter! We have also done some great asset-mapping exercises to help them realize how effective they can really be as agents for change, and how their talents and networks really matter when it comes to making a difference.
We have about about 10-14 youth at each meeting, which is so exciting to see–it’s a great combination of returning students and new faces! These kids are from a wide variety of households and labor backgrounds, and in the first days of each quarter one of the most interesting things for me is learning what makes them tick and where their realm of experience is rooted. We have had some wonderful “get-to-know-you” sessions, where we talk about everything from where we like to go in our free time to what our ideal superpower would be (who knew there were so many people who would swim to the bottom of the ocean?). After these sessions, I feel like we are all on the same level, all ready to tackle some really important and difficult issues.
The various backgrounds in our group have made for some diverse discussions; we have a dairy farmer who wants to make it a career, a boy who loves all things motors, a girl who loves drawing, horses, and “being outside away from the city,” a boy with a wry sense of humor and a starkly realistic view on political and global military relations, and of course, plenty of budding environmentalists–who also love their iPhones and video games. The things that these students know surpass a lot of what I was thinking about (or at least actively discussing) in high school–it’s incredible. One boy talked about methane digesters during our first discussion about current alternative technologies that are being explored; another explained that in order for ideas like composting, consuming less, or consuming differently to become popular, people simply need to start “walking the walk,” and per societal norms, the rest will follow. They have amazing insight, which is so refreshing for me, especially since I haven’t been in a high school environment for nearly a decade–and let me tell you, as much as I wish I could say so, I was not concerned about the future success of methane digesters ten years ago.
Clark Street students helping us clean up the youth farm last fall Continue reading
In the mist of some of the biggest civil rights movements of our Generation in Motown, the diverse group of international leaders in HOPE4GREEN Detroit plans to gather young people to push for more involvement in the urban planning process by educating and empowering our communities through grass-root organizing and energy and environment networking. The planning process is in effect! We are preparing to start door knocking, attending community forums, and getting the word about our initiatives for the city of Detroit. HOPE4GREEN Detroit has some pretty BIG goals for our community. But we’re ready, willing, and fired up! Stay tuned to hear more about the change we’re making in our Detroit by cleaning and maintaining one of 50 public parks Mayor Dave Bing has shut down in Detroit, volunteering in a community garden, and potentially working on Street Lights on the Northeastern District. It’s time to be the change we wish to see for our future. The world needs us!
Think Global, and ACT Local!
In the weeks since the January gathering the Twin Cities team has been getting used to Skype, lots of Skype. We are currently all in different cities: Patricia is in Minneapolis; Aly is in Northfield, MN; Elizabeth is in Ashland, WI; and Maddie is in Canada. So we have been faced with the challenge of 4 different schedules, 3 states, 2 time zones, and 2 countries. Needless to say I think all of us are pretty excited for when we can all be I the same place.
Patricia and Maddie talking about the Twin Cities program at the Chicago January Gathering
Despite all this we have been having fun and getting a lot done! Only two of us were able to make it to Chicago for January Gathering, so we had fun sharing everything we learned with our fellow program leaders. We planned lessons in Chicago which we then shared with the rest of our team in the weeks following. There was and Anti Oppression session, a Media and outreach session, ahow to work google docs session. We used the time to practice facilitating, and we are planning on having a facilitation recap when we are all back in the Twin Cities.
Hi everyone!
As February comes to close, we are getting close to planting season. Also, at the same time, our to-do list is longer than before. We are busy planning how to secure plots of land for our gardening projects, reaching out to schools and potential partners, as well as getting the nitty-gritty of our budget organized.
Amidst all this bustle, one of the key things which we picked up from our program leader, the incredible Peter Hoy, is that we have to be able to express our vision for our organization to everyone we reach out to. Now, that to us seems like a huge task! Not only do we have to be precise on point when we are doing this (Let’s face the truth: Potential partners are not always our friends from high school who would happily stay up hours listening to our ramblings), we also have to be able to reach out to community members at different age groups—kids from middle school to high school, their teachers, personnel from our partner organizations, members in our Church community, and so on. In other words, our message should be packed tight and snug in slightly different but equally attractive bottles. Continue reading
Cross-posted from LetsGoChicago.org, homepage of the Chicago solutionaries! Written by Marissa Neuman, Chicago 2013 Program Leader.
Compartmentalized is a word that I often use to describe the separated realms that make up my day to day life, and I think that for many young activists this is a similar sentiment. Many of us have other jobs, school, children, relationships, other activist work, or passions that occupy our time and energy. The majority of my time is spent between the ceramic studio, Let’s Go Chicago, and feminist organizing. With so many of these sectors functioning simultaneously and often not in union with one another it is easy for me to feel spread ultra thin.
On those weeks when days feel like hours and work looks like steep mountains for me to conquer, it is important for me to know why I spend my time the way I spend it. Sometimes these reasons are more clear on certain days than others and it is often more challenging for me to find real clarity when the pressure keeps building on top of me.
This past week started off as one of these ‘bottom of the mountain’ kind of weeks. Several projects were due at school, a fundraiser I had been planning for months was taking place, and an important grant was in the works for Let’s Go. By the end of the week all of these tasks were successfully accomplished and all of those seemingly daunting mountains felt like foothills in retrospect. Admittedly, I think it is relatively symptomatic to make little of the pain of a challenging week when time has nursed the wounds. However, the transformation of my ‘mountains into foothills’ was not a temporal consequence, but the result of breaking down that precipice and conquering it with a team of fellow solutionaries. Continue reading
FCF campers Tyra and Davis and Aniah Bland, and FCF Program Leader, Toni Craige, have been selected as one of 6 projects to receive a $1,000 Fellowship though SustainUS, a youth environmentalist organization. They are working on a project to increase awareness of sustainable, reusable menstrual products. The Fellowships were awarded to 6 small-scale sustainable development projects all over the United States. For the year 2013, Tyra, Aniah, and Toni will receive mentoring and support for their project, and get to know the other fellows though conference calls and in-person meetings.
The average woman in America will spent over $2,000 over a life time on single-use, disposable menstrual products. Reusable products like menstrual cups (cost $35 and last for 10 years!), and cloth pads (you can make them yourself), are great for the environment, and for women’s wallets. They will be working to get the word out about sustainable menstrual products, and are also developing a line of reusable cloth menstrual pads to sell as a microventure to support FCF. This is an exciting and empowering opportunity – we can’t wait to see what they do with it!
Here’s some more information about the project. Sustainable Cycles is a great resource to learn more about reusable menstrual products. Please let us know if you want to know more, or be involved!
Tyra sewing reusable cloth menstrual pads at the FCF Raleigh office.
Project Description: Continue reading
Mosquitos and sweaty brows characterized Little Rock Summer of Solution’s first large group meeting on a recent and unseasonably warm 75-degree January day. Despite the discomfort, our team showed their dedication and energy through active participation, which bodes well for our ability to make great things happen in what promises to be a hot and challenging summer ahead.
Our gears quicken their pace every week. After our January meeting, we organized working groups for outreach and fundraising. We have begun prepping our garden and starting seeds in the greenhouse at a nearby urban farm. Donations of all kinds have started rolling in– a printer, a bucket of heirloom seed packets, $$$$, time/labor from volunteers, and a zine rack all in the past few weeks.
Greetings to you all out there in blogging land! I hope that all is going well for you this February. In Middleton, things have been going extremely well!
January 17th through February 8th has been a glorious rush of ideas and planning for us. This all began when we arrived at the United Church of Rogers Park in Chicago. This was the location of one of Grand Aspiration’s January Gatherings this year, where all the leaders of programs throughout the Midwest (and this year from Hartford, CT, too) gathered to learn, teach, and enjoy each other’s company. Though I have been involved in Growing Food and Sustainability for over a year, this was my first January Gathering and it was quite an experience. The week contained trainings on everything from the abstract early in the week (the green economy, and the larger systems organizing our world) to the concrete towards the end of the week (such as the best way to message and frame the work that we are doing). I also helped to facilitate a community organizing training, which was a relatively new and informative experience for me, as I had never facilitated a training for such a large group of people before. Towards the end of the week, we had some time to get together as a team and begin to create plans and share our ideas for our summer, and everything that goes into making it possible. It was a process that was slightly overwhelming, but in the end yielded many great ideas and much excitement for the semester ahead.
Facilitating the Community Organizing Training Continue reading
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