There are a lot of exciting things growing in East Tennessee! The program leaders of Build It Up eTN are very busy making connections in our community–Johnson City, TN–in order to jam pack our Summer of Solutions program with food justice solutions. We are very hopeful that we have found an established community garden at a local university that spends its summers largely unused. It is a large garden and its current director is having trouble maintaining it. BIU hopes to revitalize the space and get it growing to suit our many needs for the summer.

Access to this garden will allow us to accomplish four important goals for the summer:

1. Increase self-sufficiency for participants
2. Teach and learn urban gardening skills
3. Provide a majority of the produce we need to conduct our workshops
4. Improve access to local food at area soup kitchens

This summer, we hope that our participants and volunteers will learn skills for becoming more food secure.  Our goal for growing is to produce at least 30 percent of our food needs for the summer, if not more!  The garden at East Tennessee State University (ETSU) will provide a teaching and learning space for our participants, students and faculty families, and interested community members on sustainable, organic urban agriculture methods.  Lexy is very interested in growing for small spaces, increasing self sufficiency, and implementing Permaculture techniques and she hopes to share her skills and learn new ones this summer.  The garden will be incorporated into our skills building workshops, through timely sessions on planting, caring, harvesting and preserving.  Any extra produce will be donated to local soup kitchens, food banks or community centers. We are making plans to coordinate food pick ups with other community gardens and hope our efforts can improve access to local, nutritious food in our area.

The garden at ETSU will serve as our home base for the summer but will not be our only project! Lexy is currently working on getting a few smaller projects set up for participants. Tentatively, so far, these will include:

The garden at ETSU will serve as our home base for the summer but will not be our only project! Lexy is currently working on getting a few smaller projects set up for participants. Tentatively, so far, these will include:

1. Partnering with the Shady Oaks Garden Club to build a new “pizza garden” at the Girls Inc. In a previous year, Shady Oaks constructed a self-watering herb garden at Girls Inc, but they are looking to expand the space in order to provide even more learning and play opportunities to the kids.
2. Partnering with Shakti in the Mountains, a women’s resource center, to expand their small existing garden to provide more space for enrichment activities.
3. Partnering with the Carver Center and the Carver Peace Garden to plan fun food related activities for the many kids who access this community center in a low-income neighborhood. They will be running a summer camp around the same time as our SoS program, so the possibilities are great!
4. Starting a collection service for extra produce from existing community gardens to provide local, nutritious food to area soup kitchens. Lexy hoping we can tie this in with activities to promote the benefits of this kind     of food to both the people who provide the cooked food and the people who access it. This is the most tentative project yet, and Lexy is working to make connections with local soup kitchens in the coming weeks.

In addition, Veronica is currently working on setting up workshops that address issues of food justice in the area. These will be taught by local farmers, students, gardeners, food service workers, local businesses, and food service recipients. Workshops will work to address intersections of food justice and gender, food justice and race, food justice and the environment, and food justice and Appalachian cultural history. They will also cover practical, everyday-use topics too, such as canning, wildcrafting, building a local food economy, and skills training for farming and gardening.

Finally, the third project that we are working on for this summer is putting together a cross-region food justice tour! This tour will take folks from Johnson City, Unicoi, and Elizabethon to Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Greene County. At each destination volunteers and community members will work with other regional food justice organizations in order to build connections between rural and urban issues, network cross-regionally, and learn about the different kinds of food justice work in East TN.

In the meantime, we’re busy holding fundraisers, talking to community members, and getting together with our local food partners to get everything ready for this summer!

We (Natalie and Gabrielle) just returned from a 5-day regional training in Chicago organized by Grand Aspirations and man, was it awesome!  We met and became friends with fellow Summer of Solutions program leaders from the Twin Cities, Detroit, Iowa City, Chicago, West Virginia, Hartford CT, and the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.  Our Middleton, WI program, Growing Food and Sustainability, was the only brand new program that was part of this Midwest gathering, so we had the incredible experience of receiving advice and support from many seasoned program leaders.  Thank you for sharing your stories of success, failure, and personal insight with us!

Every single training was engaging and eye-opening, so it’s almost impossible to share only a few thoughts, but here are some ideas that really stuck with me.

• EVERYONE cares deeply about at least one of the four values that Grand Aspirations embodies: sustainability, prosperity, justice, and community.  By integrating all of these, Summer of Solutions programs like ours can involve people traditionally left out of the “environmental movement”.

• Our current social, political, and economic system is not working for a vast number of American (and global) citizens, and their failures hit already marginalized groups the hardest.  We can choose to create new systems that strengthen communities, sustain individuals, and value our environment.

• The transition is already happening. Cities like Detroit led the way for the expansion of American manufacturing, and they were also the first to be abandoned by our economic system.  Now, out of necessity, they are leading the way again, this time in revolutionary green economy ventures.

• Creating the future that we want to see means making it sustainable, both environmentally and financially.  By thinking about ways to grow businesses out of
  

  Raised bed vegetable garden installation...this could be your yard!

  our projects, we can provide needed products, services, jobs, and job training to our communities.  In Middleton, we plan to start a raised bed vegetable garden installation business and a bike-powered composting business.  Both will train high school students and post-high school youth in green entrepreneurship, nonprofit administration, and hands-on job skills.

• Personal (and community) transformation is dependent upon personal sustainability.  We should strive to create jobs and experiences that people will be happy and satisfied dedicating their lives to.  In other words, we have to take care of each other and ourselves.

Whew!  I know that was kind of heavy, but I do believe in taking a step back every now and then to realize that our little project here in Middleton, WI is part of something much bigger.

We arrived home with a great sense of empowerment, inspiration, and responsibility.  We have so much to do to get our program ready but there is so much possibility!

We are starting our collaboration with the Middleton High School Ecology Club and AP Environmental Science class next week.  We are also starting to bring together a team of students and community members who plan to help launch Growing Food and Sustainability in a number of ways.  If you are interested in taking a more active role in the creation and running of this program, please contact us!  We are dedicating a lot to this project and we would love to expand our team!  In addition to “adult” community members, our goal is to have 5 full-time youth (under 30) participants and 5 high school interns signed-on by June.  Please see the “Get Involved > Participate” page of our website for more details.

** If you are interested in becoming a full or part-time participant in our program this summer, please fill out this online application.  If you are interested in becoming a high school intern, we will be posting an application soon! **

Let’s rock it, Middleton!
Gabrielle

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

For those of you watching the development of this blog as a space for solutionaries growing the green economy, check out this report on the growth of our blog in 2011:

Click here to see the complete report.

Last week was the second of three regional Summer of Solutions gatherings hosted by Grand Aspirations.

For those who aren’t clear, Summer of Solutions (SOS) is a program of Grand Aspirations (GA), a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit.

As with the Eastern Gathering in West Virginia and the Central Gathering in Chicago, the West Coast Gathering brought together a circle of incredibly talented organizers and bore the fruit of their collective brainpower and energy.

The idea that such groups of people are working together to create local solutions on the national scale leaves me very inspired. The potential of such a powerful cast of Solutionaries collaborating together is truly explosive (in the reciprocal sense, of course).

With such invigorating conferences taking place across the country this month, I can only imagine what the energy level will be come August, when Solutionaries from every program gather in one city for our national gathering.

As we continue to share our stories, lessons and successful practices, we will continue to grow and spread change to local communities. We hope you will join us.

Sorry about the audio problems last night.  We were in an internet free area, and had to try and do the best we could with what we had.  New streams are up (with real audio) and can be viewed in the channel’s archive.  More updates about live streams will be forthcoming.  Streaming live now

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sos-sessions

Session: GA History, Vision and Case Studies

Tonight at 7:30-9:30 p.m. CST we will be live streaming from our session at this site:

http://www.ustream.tv/user/SOSMidwestGathering/shows

Click on the channel that SOS Sessions.  There will be advertising, but after a brief commercial you will be able to view and hear the session.  If you are unable to view it live, there will be an opportunity later to view the archived footage from the live session.  

It is becoming more and more apparent that our world is resting on a system that is failing people. The most unfortunate victims of this system are young people. The aim of Full Circles Foundation is to nurture strong girls, a fair economy, and a healthy world in hopes that these young women are able to reach their full potential. Full Circles Foundation was established last year as a Summer of Solutions program in Raleigh, NC. I became one of the program leaders for Full Circles Foundation in Raleigh. After the summer ended, I returned to my home in Lexington, KY, and, with program leaders Austyn Gaffney and Lindsey Jagoe, decided to replicate the program.
In our program, we will be working with girls ages 11 to 15. These are middle school ages, specifically chosen because of the rapid transitions girls experience during this time. We provide a safe space for active learning to facilitate and enrich connections between the human and natural environment. Our program looks to reconcile differences in class, community, age, education, ethnicity, race, religion, and gender in our community. As we look to the future, we want to continue reevaluating these objectives in order to ensure the sustainability of the program.
Our program leaders have had several inspiring meetings with our future partners. So far, we will be utilizing space at Transylvania University and Tuska Art gallery. Thanks to local artists and writers, we have already confirmed fashion design and writing workshops for our campers. We look forward to combining those projects into a showcase of the young girls’ work. Not yet confirmed, but other plans we have for the summer with our campers include gardening, hiking, cooking, feminine studies, all kinds of art and literature expression, and music.
We look forward to this new venture and collaboration with other Summer of Solutions programs in Grand Aspirations!

http://fullcirclesfoundation.org/

Our Program Leaders
Austyn Gaffney aegaffney12@gmail.com
Lauralee Crain lrcrain10@gmail.com
Lindsey Jagoe lindseyjagoe@gmail.com

Greetings from South Charleston, West Virginia! We’ve just wrapped up the first day of our first January Gathering to train program leaders in the skills they need to run their Summer of Solutions programs and to build community across programs. Today got off to a hectic and snowy start, but we closed with a fantastic session on the story of our organization and practice on how we can each tell our own stories.

Looking around the Rock Lake Community Center, I feel that this is a perfect space for us. It’s spacious — enough room for the Full Circles Foundation programs from Raleigh and Lexington to brainstorm together, for Duncan and Evan from Pioneer Valley to play music downstairs, for Jen and Joe from Hartford to make tea in the kitchen, and for four different teams and individuals to prepare trainings and logistics tomorrow. The space is in construction to make room for more, better, and more locally relevant programing — sound familiar? Moreover, it’s being shared with generosity, love, and a dedication towards a better world. Jenny, Dana, and Steve shared their stories and enthusiasm with us to welcome us here.

I am so excited to learn and grow with my fellow solutionaries over the next week!