Grand Aspirations is launching a new series of webinars designed to help you build your skills as an organizer. From fundraising to social movement strategy, join in to learn about the diversity of skills you can use to organize your community more effectively. You can read full descriptions of the webinars and register at www.grandaspirations.org/webinars.
Joshua Kahn Russell will help you learn how to build powerful movements that are bigger than the sum of their parts. Timothy DenHerder-Thomas will walk you through the steps to building a successful sustainable business that also serves your community. Zach Wahls will give a crash course in public speaking 101 and then share some ways to avoid common rhetorical traps that environmentalists fall into. (If you want to check out his public speaking chops, look up his David Letterman appearance earlier this week.) Rachel Aitkens will walk you through the basics of effective fundraising from individuals and help you get volunteers fired up about fundraising. Zo Tobi will help you bring ease, clarity, grace, and focus to your work and your life as a whole.
Each webinar costs $25, with $5 discounts for Grand Aspirations members and for students, seniors, and under- and unemployed people. Please sign up and tell your friends! Webinars are an exciting new way for Grand Aspirations to connect you with powerful skills and generate valuable resources for the organization’s work.
Focus often eludes high school students with seven different classes covering seven different subjects and too much homework to jam in their backpacks at the end of the day – but on Thursday, April 5, EcoCentric and Envirocity, environmental clubs at two Iowa City high schools, teamed up with Iowa City Summer of Solutions to concentrate class discussions on one issue: the environment.
The daylong event, Focus the Classroom, encouraged teachers to relate the subjects they teach to current environmental issues. Last summer, Zach Gruenhagen, Bailey McClellan and Noelle Waldschmidt from the Iowa City solutionary team worked to complete a website with sustainability-focused lesson plans for every subject area, to help teachers more easily integrate the environment into their classes. In addition, presentations ran all day from environmental leaders in the Iowa City community, including Tim Dwight – a Iowa City High graduate and former professional football player.
Dwight, a popular speaker at both high schools, co-founded a renewable energy company called Integrated Power Corporation after retiring from the San Diego Chargers. At the Focus the Classroom event, he gave presentations extolling the virtues of solar energy.
“This shift [to renewable energy] that I’m going to talk about is your generational shift, and it’s going to be massive. Producing energy with wind and solar will change the world because those resources are available anywhere, and you’re going to see it,” he told students at West High school.
Dwight was joined by others including New Pioneer Co-op Outreach and Education coordinator Scott Koepke, Iowa City recycling coordinator Jen Jordan and University of Iowa Director of Sustainability Liz Christiansen. The speakers brought everything from live red wriggler worms to a battery-powered experiment that converted salt water into bleach. In a presentation at City High, teacher Mike Loots turned the students loose and after ten minutes, students from miscellaneous classes, with varying investment in sustainability, were almost all raising their hands to share an idea – from a trash clean up by the mall, to more vegan options at lunch, to guerilla gardening.
“A lot of times, as much as teachers try to bring in outside applications of what we’re studying, it’s really nice that we can see how to take what we’re learning and apply it to the world around us. You can actually go out and change things … and Focus the Classroom really reminds us of that,” said West High senior Javier Miranda-Bartlett, a member of EcoCentric and participant in the day’s activities.
According to Miranda-Bartlett, the message definitely reached the students in attendance.
“[My favorite part was seeing] the enthusiasm my classmates had for the whole concept and just how they actually got pumped, which surprised me. Also, [I loved] discovering that we have this wealth of resources of really knowledgeable people that are willing to help and work with us, and it was really empowering,” Miranda-Bartlett said.
Check out this video for a little background on past & current ICSOS work. Thanks to Nathan Meyer for his awesome video skills!
Applications for ICSOS are still open! Apply at grandaspirations.org – we’re looking for help with our local garden and energy efficiency campaigns!
Start your seeds in the MHS greenhouse this spring!
This spring, Growing Food and Sustainability (SoS Middleton) has programmed and cleaned-out the greenhouse at the high school so that after years of disuse, it is now up and running and growing beautiful seedlings! Our program only needs to use a fraction of the greenhouse space, so we would like to invite all community members to start garden seeds in the greenhouse this spring!
Every weekend this spring we will host weekly Community Greenhouse Hours when the greenhouse will be open and a Program Leader will be present. This is time when anyone using the greenhouse can check on their plants, plant more seedlings, remove their seedlings, etc. Community Greenhouse Hours will be posted on our website homepage. For guidelines and more details, please click here. We look forward to seeing the greenhouse teeming with life and activity!
Watch Growing Food and Sustainability’s Video Debut!
Join these lovely ladies and the rest of the Middleton team for an incredible summer! We still have openings for full-time participant positions and stipends available (allocated based on financial need). To apply, please click here. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis until May 15th. We hope you’ll join us!
This is Leo, your friendly Portland Summer of Solutions Program Leader! I’m just writing to inform you about some of the exciting things that have been happening around Portland.
Two weeks ago, we signed our first Memorandum of Understanding with a local community partner, Million Monarchs! Million Monarchs focuses on individual and community solar power projects, specifically seeking to connect residents of low income communities to the resources they need to finance solar power installations. This is not only good for the environment, but actually saves money in the long run!
This summer, Portland Summer of Solutions will work with Million Monarchs to raise community awareness of their solar installation efforts through their inclusion as an item on our survey-challenge model of community engagement! Furthermore, Summer of Solutions participants will work directly with Million Monarchs to create and implement strategies to raise awareness of individual and community solar projects in the deep Southeast neighborhoods of Portland!
The sun has begun to shine and cherry blossoms are in full bloom all across Seattle, serving as an apt metaphor for the exploding momentum of our summer program! Last week marked the launch of our participant outreach campaign, including a new Facebook page and website (www.sosseattle.org) which are now up and running. Just two weeks ago we secured our first major donation: $10,000! These initial funds, from a family foundation, have provided a great jumping off point for our larger fundraising efforts. Local non-profit, Sustainable Seattle, is serving as our fiscal sponsor this summer, providing shared use of their 501c3 status, accounting support, and many great connections throughout the community.
Seattle Center
As we launch the first ever Summer of Solutions program in Seattle, we could not be happier about our home base: we will be operating from the heart of Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle and Monorail. We’re partnering with The Next Fifty (www.thenextfifty.org), a six-month, citywide celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1962 world’s fair, which brought those iconic structures to Seattle. This partnership gives our program unprecedented access to some of the most innovative and exciting workshops, performances, and exhibits ever to grace the Emerald City. Our presence at The Next Fifty offers us a unique opportunity to amplify and extend the stories of our local program onto the global stage, where we will harness the power of new media to interact with others doing similar projects worldwide.
One of the most exciting elements of our program is our DIY guidebook. Throughout the program, participants will document their experiences via journalism, photography, videography, and mixed media to create and share powerful stories of their work online with the world. We will combine these multimedia stories with step-by-step instructions for replicating the projects we’ve engaged in to create a digital DIY Guide to Solutionary Living, which will be made available to the public at a closing celebration event in early August. This guidebook will serve as a powerful, accessible, and incredibly practical tool for community engagement and action.
Summer of Solutions | Seattle is now accepting applications for program leaders, participants, and volunteers to join us for a deeply creative, connected, and energizing summer experience! Apply Now: www.sosseattle.org. We look forward to seeing you in Seattle!
The Pioneer Valley Summer of Solutions in Northern Massachusetts is growing into our second summer! Check out this awesome video of program leader Martha Pskowski breaking down what the program is all about:
Now that you’re all fired up about community education and farming in Turners Falls and Greenfield, MA, apply to join our program before April 12.
If you aren’t interested in joining our program, but you want to get involved, look up our ‘Field to ‘Field bike ride fundraiser from Springfield to Greenfield! You can sponsor a rider or join us for the ride. We’d love to see you there!
What got me interested in bicycles was 1) their connection to the idea of being self-sustaining, and 2) how bicycles can be utilized as a tool to organize people while promoting the idea of alternative forms of transportation. I wanted to help unlock the potential for individuals in communities to create a better infrastructure and safer environments for people to transport themselves. Noticing the lack of education that served the individuals who use bicycles as a form of transportation really pushed me to get involved. Therefore, I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this program…
I’d like to introduce you to Let’s Ride, a community-learning program that is taking place at LA CAUSA in collaboration with the City of Lights program (LA CAUSA is the LA-based organization that has teamed up with Grand Aspirations to bring the first Los Angeles Summer of Solutions program to life).
Let's Ride LA
Let’s Ride’s mission is to develop new ways for young people to learn the ins and outs of bicycling. We plan to accomplish this mission through providing and focusing on topics regarding bicycle mechanics, bicycle safety, group-ride organizing, community outreach, media, and advocacy. Not only will this program result in more safe and confident student riders, but it’s another big step in promoting the idea of alternative sustainable forms of transportation.
LA CAUSA students are already involved with Let’s Ride. Currently, they are working on the Bike Ride Organizing section and planning a ride with and for their peers. Through their work, they have the opportunity to develop (and flex) their leadership skills while highlighting and supporting the idea of community organizing around self-sustaining practices.
It feels great to finally have our hands in the dirt! We have had a busy month in Middleton beginning work in the high school greenhouse and garden site. On the 19th and 20th, we kicked it off with our first greenhouse workdays which included program leaders, community members, college-age participants, students from the high school Ecology Club, and a very enthusiastic group of middle school students. Mark Voss, a local farmer and teacher, led a soil mixing workshop, followed by seeding trays and trays of tomatoes, onions, kale, broccoli, peppers, cabbage, and other veggies.
Trays seeded by middle and high school students
We held another big workday on Saturday the 24th with our college age participant team, this time out in the garden. Being the food lovers that we are, we of course kicked it off with a potluck at noon, and then worked until four, repairing the raised beds, cleaning up the old composting area, pruning the espaliered pear and apple trees, raking leaves, and clearing out the old plant debris from previous years (there was two-year-old kale still in the beds!). We also built new compost bins from reused shipping pallets, which is just in time because we have begun our compost pick-up service for Bloom Bakery. We diverted 20 pounds of waste from local landfills this first week! As you can see we had a lot on our plate, but we got it done and the garden is looking great! We have our amazing volunteers to thank for that 🙂
Garden Workday
On top of the beautiful seedlings that are now sprouting up in the greenhouse, our work is really paying off! Community members and students that live nearby have been eagerly stopping by to check out the progress. A very curious eight-year-old stopped by our workday and asked for a complete run-down of all of the produce we will be planting this spring, and other neighbors have offered to pitch in a helping hand and even serve as nighttime security for the garden. Its great to feel the surrounding community really embracing the garden and excited for the summer program that is fast approaching!
Our next big step is the somewhat intimidating job of rototilling over 4,000 square feet of bed space at our new garden site at the Middleton Alternative Senior High. Wish us luck and endurance!
Candles welcomed guests from Figueroa Street up to Tony’s home, where they were welcomed with local food and drinks, live music and good company. A seed bomb-production lab gave everyone a chance to try their hand at guerrilla-beautification. A resource wall that Jasmin made displayed the many assets our Summer of Solutions program is proud to have, and allowed guests to contribute their own resources, knowledge, skills and connections to the effort.
Everyone came wanting to know more about this new program and how they could learn more and get involved.
This was LA CAUSA Summer of Solutions’ premiere event. Our hello to the world. It was Friday, March 16th, 2012. Over the course of the night, upwards of two hundred people layered long sleeves and jackets to spend their evening celebrating and networking on a small patio overlooking downtown Los Angeles.
As one of the five organizers who comprise the LA SOS leadership team, I couldn’t be happier about the event. While an oncoming flu tempered my outward excitement, on the inside I was glowing as I watched new faces interacting with familiar ones. Partying with a conscience. Here were powerful connections being made; friendships that could mean the start of new ventures and collaboration on existing ones.
So I venture: why can’t we do this every weekend? If we’re going to drop a few bucks on a given weekend on some drinks and food, why not have it directly support a program that will give young people the skills and connections that will support them making change in their communities? Or any cause for that matter. I’ll take the warmth and curiosity of the people surrounding me last Friday over a glammed-out club–where I can’t hear anyone anyway–any day. Moreover, I had the honor to entertain with my band, Dylan Trees, and our partners in music for the night, The Withers.
Sharing music, raising some dough for a good cause, meeting new and interesting people–can a Friday night get much better? Not really. I’m excited for the next party. It’s not official, but yeah, we want this to happen again. And next time, it won’t be five people organizing, it will be a larger group of people all working together to organize, promote, set up, cover, take down, and move on to the next steps. All in an effort to bring a new program to Los Angeles that will continue to grow and help shape the future of this region.
Photos by Alex Kinnan.
We made a lot of seed bombs on Friday. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be tossed into vacant lots and fields around Los Angeles and start sprouting into beautiful fields of wild flowers. What I didn’t realize is that our event itself was a seed bomb. We threw in all the right ingredients, packed it into a condensed space, and now we grow. Glad to have you on board.
Solutionaries 