Cross-posted from It’sGettingHotinHere.org

This is a call.

On the basic level, it’s very simple; it’s a call for youth leaders all across the country who are ready to dig down into the grassroots and work with people in their communities to create solutions. We’re looking for leaders who want to plan a summer program next summer that will start, grow, and expand green ventures at the community level that meet the needs of our neighbors (food, housing, transit, energy, jobs), show the world what is possible, and start to out-compete the dirty energy systems that run our world.

You’re in? Just find a friend who agrees and APPLY HERE. Priority deadline midnight 10/24 – just give us a heads up if it will take a bit longer.

Need more background? Check out this video by my co-worker Matt Kazinka, read the background info in the application, or check us out at www.summerofsolutions.org

But really, this is about a lot more than running a cool program next summer. This is a call about changing the game for our economy, our communities, and our climate.

Continue reading →

This summer, I realized what empowerment means: wanting something you deserve but can’t have, and to be shown how to get it for yourself.
This could be civil rights.
This could be education.
Or it could be a green job.
 
Do we want green jobs, really? Have we fully, deeply, and comprehensively come to understand the deprivation we experience daily: our immediate need for money, being forced to acquire money in unsustainable ways, use it to buy food that’s almost poisonous, take jobs with no concern for us, other people or the planet…it goes on and on.
My swirl of confusion in SoS Fayetteville may be caused by one simple oversight on my part: we don’t really want green jobs, because we don’t realize how much we need them.
We have television sets and cookies, how could American youth ever be deprived? For one thing, when presented with the tools of empowerment, they ignore them.

authored by GELTer Ayoola White

Over the course of our time in Highland Park, we GELT-ers have had a variety of learning experiences: permaculture lessons, visits to nearby farms, a lecture about the danger of nuclear power, and tutorials on home weatherizations. In addition to those classes, we’ve been taking a seminar entitled “the Freedom Movement”. In this seminar, we have discussed the history of slavery, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Poor People’s campaign.

To the untrained eye, this seminar would stick out like a sore thumb when compared with everything else. After all, our overarching goal is to create a model green economy in Highland Park. What do the civil rights battles of the past have to do with the environmental struggles of today?

In actuality, social and environmental concerns have salient intersections. After all, the most disadvantaged people in the world—women, people of color, citizens of the Global South, and disabled people—will be affected first and most severely by climate change, pollution, rising ocean levels, and the like. These groups have struggled and continue to endeavor to gain political efficacy, just as blacks, women, Chicanos, and indigenous peoples did in the ‘50s and ‘60s in the United States. Attempts to solve environmental problems must take into account human communities in order to succeed. Sadly, not everyone realizes this necessity. As one workshop facilitator at the United States Social Forum noted, news regarding environmentalism covers two topics almost exclusively: politics and polar bears. People? Not so much. How can the human population as a whole deal with environmental crises if a substantial portion is so encumbered by pernicious, institutionalized forms of negligence and discrimination? The lessons from the Freedom Movement offer tools to ameliorate the situation.

In our Freedom Movement class, we’ve sharpened the valuable skill of defending our ideas. One exercise we’ve practiced is to create a short thesis—25 words or fewer. Then, we must defend that thesis for ten minutes against probing and difficult questions from our peers. With this exercise, we have to keep cool and think on our feet, much like the countless civil rights activists who made arguments for equality to people who vehemently—and sometimes violently—resisted the encroachment on their unearned privileges. Certainly, the stakes aren’t the same, but I personally appreciated this opportunity, since persuading irreconcilables to recognize the reality and urgency of climate crisis is such a burdensome yet necessary task.

Nonviolence is another key concept we’ve explored. Although environmental activism is not typically considered to be as aggressive as other forms of activism (hey, we’re treehuggers, not tree mercenaries, right?) it is vital to remember that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, “Hate multiplies
 hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.” We, as environmentalists, must be proactive, not reactive. Moreover, we must make connections to other movements, not simply notice parallels between them.

This weekend Summer of Solutions enmeshed i in the festivities of Corvallis’s da Vinci Days, self-proclaimed “Oregon’s premier art and science festival.”  Under the umbrella of the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition, we snagged two slots—on Friday and Sunday—to table about our project this summer.  The Coalition’s table was the intersection of many very involved people around town; it was cool to see everyone in their element out tabling.  Although foot traffic was slow during our sessions, everyone had good conversations with people about our project.  Aside from tabling, da Vinci days is just pretty cool.  It seems like most of Corvallis comes at some point to see the bizarre contraptions, listen to the various musicians, or to delight in the playful atmosphere of kids and adults reveling at the countless inventions humans have made, and are making.  What ideas at the table today will become the next light bulb?  With the rapid and exponential pace of new technologies, can there be a singular invention as revolutionary as something like a bulb of glass and a wire filament?  Photovoltaic solar panels, wave powered generators?  The problems we face today seem far more complex, the world incomprehensibly more interconnected; it seems no invention will be the revolutionary one, only a whole swath of them.  What’s more, projects like ours—engaging communities, asking what they need, and teaching them how to organize—seem much more promising than any new technology that can come out ever.  People are and will be the greatest invention ever, and the changes we ardently desire can only come from us.

In the past week or so, Cooperative Energy Futures (CEF, the energy efficiency co-op I’m heavily involved in) has started to get off the ground and had several meetings with ‘adults’ or older, wiser, experts in the field, to talk about what we are trying to do. Generally these meetings were incredibly helpful, people were willing to donate their time and expertise to listen to our plan, give us advice and help us move forward. These people were excited to hear about what we’re doing, thought we are smart and engaged, however almost all of these meetings included a discouraging section in which we were told we had a lot of obstacles to overcome and it was unlikely we would succeed.

Part of the reason that I enjoy working with CEF is that it is incredibly visionary; we are trying to implement a model that has never really been done before. We have done our homework, researched efforts going on around the country, know the materials, and have spent a lot of time developing effective training and teaching methods, but our process is very experimental, constantly changing and generally somewhat uncertain. We also have a lot of challenges to face, but I have never thought of these as things that cannot be overcome, merely something we have to figure out.

Yet these adults came up with question after question of how this was all going to work, a lot of which I didn’t have answers to. They pointed out flaws and potentially insurmountable difficulties, and I started to become discouraged. These people were all incredibly supportive of us, they liked our ideas, our enthusiasm, but also wanted to make sure that we understand what we are up against and ground us in the fact that what we are trying to do probably won’t work. It was somewhat of a stark awakening.

Part of me wants to believe the logic that these people presented; they have a lot more experience than we do and understand more thoroughly how difficult it is to start a new venture. But, I also realize that if we don’t try and make these fundamental changes to society no one will. A larger part of me believes in our vision, in our ability do something bigger than we thought was possible. If everyone listened to the strong voice of the status quo and refused to take risks or try something that has never been done before because it seems too difficult our society would still be stuck in the Stone Age. Already CEF has tested and stretched what I thought I was capable of. While we don’t have the answers yet, and we do understand that there is a lot for us to overcome, I still believe that it is worth wile to try. I am learning to enjoy being the naive college student that can listen to the discouraging words of older generations and then say I’m going to do this anyways. Summer of Solutions has given me the chance to enact a vision of the future I didn’t used to think was possible, and even if our work doesn’t come to fruition I have learned so much in this process there are no doubts in my mind that it won’t be worth it- and if we can make it happen we will have done something incredible.