Our car pulled up across the street from the church and we parked, grabbing only essentials on our way out. We were let in the church and bounded up two flights of stairs to a beautiful, spacious auditorium. About twenty people were seated in a circle and I beamed, taking in each face. We tried to make a quiet entrance, but everyone burst out in greeting and a round of hugs broke the concentration of the circle.

Joe and I had started in Northern Virginia at noon the previous day and wound south to Charlottesville to pick up Mary, then through West Virginia to our sleeping spot near Lexington, KY, at Marcie’s home. A stop for tofu tacos in Charleston, WV (I kid you not, the Tricky Fish, check it out) broke the twisting, rising and falling drive. Bluegrass music and socio-environmental-historic commentary on the area from Joe filled the dark January night. Occasional plumes of exhaust and waste poured from power plants alongside the highway, casting billowing white clouds into the all-consuming night sky. Their networks of lights, yellow and glaring, pierced the scenery like Christmas lights with a grudge.

We caught some winks outside Lexington, KY, and woke before the sun had risen. I drove us west in morning light that turned the hills and valleys blue and rosy. With barely a pause we headed on to Chicago, discussing youth at the Cancun climate talks, direct action against mountain top removal, favorite bands and good reads.

If you had stopped by the Roger’s Park United Methodist Church of Chicago in the past week you would have found about twenty young folks working and playing twelve hours a day and upward. The January Gathering of Grand Aspirations brought together national leaders and leaders of ten Summer of Solutions programs across the country. Represented at this Gathering (a second followed in Portland) were:

• St Louis
• Raleigh
• West Virginia
• Pioneer Valley
• Twin Cities
• Detroit
• Chicago
• Oakland
• Fayetteville
• Hartford

The Gathering focused on building national community and purpose, and embarking on the different aspects of program planning.

It was exciting to put faces to names of people I had talked to on the phone or emailed countless times and reconnect with people I had not seen since an intensive two months in the Twin Cities. I’m the national support person for the Fayetteville team, and though we had talked numerous times, this was my first time meeting Andrea, Amanda, Ryan and Sylvia. I also had never formally met Ashley, who I talk to at least an hour every week. The binds we had already started to develop by telephone lines and emails really blossomed during the week.

I can only offer an anecdotal account of the week. Each day started at eight for breakfast and didn’t wrap up until nine p.m. or later. After the last session of the night I was often preparing trainings for the next day. In my dual roles as trainer and representative of the Pioneer Valley team I often felt overwhelmed and ill-prepared. That precarity opened me up for deep learning and reflection.

To speak from the I as we would say, I took away from the Gathering a renewed commitment to the work Grand Aspirations is doing, its necessity, and the power of solidarity across the country. Even at an intentionally progressive and individualized college like Hampshire, I find during the semester my thoughts and intentions can stray and become caught up in work that does not fulfill me. We discussed in a Personal Transformation session the Buddhist concept of “Monkey Mind”- that voice that tells you you can’t achieve you’re dreams and it’s not worth it to try. Monkey Mind can get pretty strong at school, and this Gathering was exacting what I needed to remember that voice is normal and within my power to ignore.

Summer of Solutions is very local, each program shaped by the place it’s in and specific needs and assets of the community. However coming together as a national group is an amazing experience of support and inspiration. The admiration I feel for fellow organizers in places such as West Virginia cannot be fully articulated. The connections between these geographically separated locales cannot be forgotten- Massachusetts power plants still burn West Virginia coal and natural gas.

I can also say coming out of the Gathering that young folks in our country right now really have what we need to redefine what our future holds. Planning a Summer of Solutions is a huge undertaking, but its potential impacts and ripple effects are innumerable. I admire everyone I was working with this past week so much for taking on that challenge with open hearts. We’re building the road as we walk it. That can either be terrifying or create a deep sense of agency. Surrounded by people who are committed to this same undertaking reminds me why I’m doing it in the first place and the power of the collective. Our programs will each be different but collectively they will show that local solutions to environmental and economic problems exist and can work in beautiful synergy.

I believe in Energy Democracy.

Energy is 10% of the entire economy, powers and makes possible everything we do in the other 90%, and is the most centralized and tightly controlled of all economic sectors – just a handful of giant oil companies and electrical and natural gas utilities control the vast majority of the wealth. Every year, the average American household puts 5% of their income into the hands of these energy companies, and reaps a return in asthma, traffic congestion, war, destruction of communities in places where energy is extracted, reduced economic security in the face of volatile energy prices, and dramatic and unpredictable changes in our climate as well as the ability to heat, light, and power their homes, schools, and workplaces, and drive between them. For families below the poverty line, this portion of their income is more like 15%, and these proportions get still higher if you count the energy costs embodied in the prices of our food and other products. Every day, our communities are pouring these dollars outside, to massive, centralized energy producers. Every day, we’re pouring these dollars towards the problems that are fracturing our communities, attacking our health, threatening or security, and devastating our climate and ultimately our economy.

What if we reversed this flow? What if we poured this vast channel of wealth – over $1 trillion across the United States alone  – back into our communities and towards energy solutions that reconnect us with ecology, create bonds between neighbors, and revitalize our economy my cutting our costs and creating jobs building and servicing smart energy systems in our communities. What would this change do for our society? First, it would send a huge pulse of resources and capital back into our communities to improve the efficiency of our homes, upgrade our infrastructure to local smart grids, and help capitalize a massive wave of localized community-owned energy. Second, it would put these resources into local job creation serving local needs, and require people getting together with their friends and neighbors to learn how to make the transition and work together to do it. Finally, it would eviscerate the dirty energy industry by removing its greatest cash flow (which, let’s remember, is not investors or the government, but us, energy users).  We could do all this if only we (collectively, individual consumer choice makes little difference)  redirected the money we spend on dirty energy and invested in a better energy.

In 2007, I began a journey to figure out how to turn this big concept into a reality. Read on to learn the what, the how, and the why.

Continue reading →

It feels entirely fitting that I’m blogging for Grand Aspirations around Thanksgiving.  Since my involvement with Grand Aspirations and Summer of Solutions began in May, I’ve experienced an amazing transformation in how I think about the world and the opportunities around me that I’m extremely thankful for.  Nope, I haven’t tuned out the facts that we’re already experiencing the effects of climate change, mountains are still being blown up in Appalachia and we’re in the throes of the worst depression since the 1930s.  It’s all in how I’ve started to look at those facts and the systems that create them.

I recently read in an article by two excellent researchers, Julie Graham and Stephen Healy, that captured how I used to think:

“[the economy is] understood as a force outside community and environment that effectively determines their fates.”

“If the practice of conventional economic development is about accommodating the demands of the (global) economy, environmentalism in its various incarnations is about resisting, or compromising with this same external force… …We can either say ‘no’ to economic development entirely or we can accept an unsatisfying compromise between development and environment. “

Building Community Economies: A Post Capitalist Project of Sustainable Development pages 4 and 8

This is a pretty intractable situation.  Economists portray environmentalists as anti-development and elitist, while environmentalists portray economists as, well, the source of all evil.  Enter Martha Pskowski, an environmentalist intent on studying economics.

The past year has taught me that people all around the world are forging ahead regardless of globalization, economic crisis and political stalemate.  And these groups aren’t just addressing the climate and ecological crises we’re facing, they’re redefining their community economies.  Young farmers starting CSAs and subsidizing low-income shares, community bike shops making bike commuting an affordable reality, cooperative housing keeping rent low and foreclosure at bay.  The list goes on.

Students at Hampshire College run an all-volunteer natural food co-op and keep prices cheap!

This is really what Graham and Healy wrote their article to ask:

“What if we could produce a different representation of economy that no longer functions as a force outside community that issues demands?  If a different understanding of economy were to free us from obsessively trying to satisfy (or resist) an external master, what new conceptions of ‘sustainable development’ might emerge?” Page 10-11

These are the same questions Grand Aspirations inspires participants to ask.  The options I see for myself in the economy expand and multiply every day.  And the ways our ecology can be nurtured and celebrated seem more and more accessible.  Not to say I could quit school and walk into my new job tomorrow.  But that’s the point.  We’re building the jobs of the future.   And I couldn’t be more thankful.

Students build cold frames to extend the growing season in a community garden.

Cross posted with revisions from Minnesota 2020’s Hindsight Blog

I spent my time in the Twin Cities this summer with Summer of Solutions. Since that summer, I’ve been thinking about intersections between the abstract concepts of “the economy” and “the environment” and the communities where these ideas become realities. During my fall semester at Macalester, I’ve been spending time at an internship for Minnesota 2020, a progressive non-partisan public policy think-tank in the Twin Cities, and I have the opportunity to write about moving Minnesota’s economic policy forward.

of  ago, Will Allen from Growing Power Inc (Milwaukee, WI) spoke at Macalester’s campus at a fundraiser dinner for the Women’s Environmental Institute. It was awesome. In the audience I recognized the faces of Cities organizers, activists and entrepreneurs that I had met through Summer of Solutions. Allen’s speech and got me thinking about how permaculture could go statewide and mainstream, so I got to write about it for MN2020:

The turn toward blustery and freezing weather this week signals the end of harvest season here in Minnesota and the beginning of even more Californian, Mexican and South American imports. Meaning that multi-national agriculture corporation owners will benefit from more of our food dollars.

The world’s warmer regions certainly have an advantage when it comes to year-round food production. Large-scale agricultural methods could not support any crop through a Minnesotan winter.  But thanks to innovative and sustainable growing techniques, fresh salad greens grown in Milwaukee and fresh tomatoes grown in southern Minnesota are becoming an affordable option for consumers.

At most grocery stores in Mankato, Rochester and the Twin Cities you can find Bushel Boy tomatoes, grown in Owatonna, Minnesota, on the shelves all winter long. Bushel Boy grows its tomatoes in greenhouses without pesticides or herbicides. Bees pollinate the tomatoes and predator insects eat any pests that appear. Because Bushel Boy’s produce doesn’t travel thousands of miles to get to a grocery store, these local, vine-ripened vegetables have better nutritional value than their artificially ripened counter-parts.

Over in Milwaukee, Growing Power Inc, a non-profit urban farming organization, takes sustainable, job-creating food production a few steps further. Growing Power’s intensive urban farm design combines raising fish, livestock, poultry, and fresh produce with solar panels, compost, and an anerobic digestor that generate enough heat and electricity to power green houses through the winter. At their Milwaukee location, a two acre urban farm employs 35 full-time staff; generates revenue by selling compost, meat and produce; and offers classes and workshops for folks in the neighborhood. Growing Power unites sustainable food production, economic development and social justice.

Bushel Boy and Growing Power set examples of what year-round farming in Minnesota could look like. Both use efficient, common-sense methods that support the local economy and produce healthy and more cost-competitive food year round. There is still a long way to go before we can make these  systems a widespread reality. The first step is to recognize that economic development takes many forms, including through local, innovative and sustainable agriculture.”

I will continue to think about ways to communicate what I learned and experienced during SOS this semester…Check out MN2020’s blog or website!

Last summer I had the privilege of participating in an amazing Twin Cities Summer of Solutions Program. While I knew this was really a special experience it wasn’t until recently that I’v realized just how well SoS has prepared me to work as a solutionary.

Last weekend I had a chance to give a presentation about one of our Summer of Solutions (SoS) projects at the Northland Bioneers Conference along with several other SoS participants. This conference takes place all over the country and includes thousands of participants. Revolutionary thinkers from around the country talked about pioneering ideas to make our earth more sustainable.

My presentation was about Cooperative Energy Futures, an energy efficiency co-op that works to create community powered energyefficiency as a first step on a pathway towards a Green economy. Throughout the summer I realized that we were doing groundbreaking work, but it really wasn’t until the Bioneers conference that I realized that this work is truly on par with what some of the greatest leaders of our day and age. We are not a just a group of youth, innovators who are contributing to the cutting edge of the global systems thinking we need to pull us out of crisis.

While I have always been confident in my ability to do good work I have considered myself inferior to the “grown up” world.  SoS taught me that I don’t need to wait to make an impact until I’m done with school and that my input and work is just as significant and needed as anyone else’s. I am no longer afraid to take on commitments because I don’t think I can do it, instead I try my best and ask for help when I need it, and in doing so I’ve surpassed what I thought I was capable of.

I am starting to realize while this personal growth is great what will be more important is passing on this confidence to my peers.  By helping others start doing work to improve our world in a way they feel passionate about I hope I can become part of a global solution, one that grows and blossoms over the years to come. In a world facing massive economic, social and environmental challenges we need strong leadership from the youth that will inhabit this plant after our current leaders have passed – SoS is one incredible program that is helping create that leadership.