Creating the Space for Solutions

Posted on September 9, 2009 by aafrench

-from Summer of Solutions Omaha organizer and Midwesterner extraordinaire: Lance Brisbois-

Creating the Space…

This summer, I had the opportunity to participate in the Omaha Summer of Solutions program. The Summer of Solutions began in the summer of 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota by an ambitious group of student environmental activists. Being from the greater Omaha area, I decided that I would love to get involved with something like that in Omaha for summer 2009. Planning began many months in advance and became a very inclusive process with anyone who wanted to help out…either from a distance or on the ground. Dozens of people expressed interest in the program. The possibilities seemed endless—we could work on energy efficiency, clean energy, transportation, local food, building community, and myriad other sustainability-based initiatives.

Continue reading →

…the Only Thing That Could Have Happened

Posted on August 19, 2009 by aafrench

Almost 3 months to the day since I arrived back home in Omaha, NE from school out East and started working on the Summer of Solutions Omaha with my great friends Lance, Tyler and Matt. I was a wide eyed visionary, believing I would change the face of my fair city with my bold and organized climate activism. I believed I would engage hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens and neighbors, empower them to create real climate solutions and establish a kick ass organization that would have me leaving the summer wiping my hands on my jeans, brushing my shoulders off and whistling dixie at having solved climate issues in Omaha. I expected to hop on a plane to head back east at the end of the summer and see solar panels on every roof, smile at the wind turbine production factory in low income North Omaha and notice waves of native prairie grass being grown for sustainable bio-fuel production. In short, I expected to make the sort of drastic changes that usually take years if not decades.

Needless to say this didn’t happen. But a lot of things did happen. Continue reading →

On Overcoming Monsters.

Posted on August 7, 2009 by abbie

Today is the last day for the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions program.

I began this program feeling like it was an exercise in “seeing what is to come.” Back in January, I decided that I wanted to work more intensely on issues of environmental justice than what I was working on at the time, as it felt more sustainable and more exciting. Since then, it’s been a practice in working Zen: be here, now.

That is all I can do. While the planet weeps, and the coal industry battles with clean industries, and people everywhere cry out against injustice, I am here. In the presence of such sweeping injustice, I am here.

Change that signifier, this ain’t no “I,” it’s a we! We are here, in this moment. We take it in, see what needs to be done, and do it. Our actions may not be quiet, but they are powerful. Continue reading →

Bringing our aspirations within reach

Posted on August 6, 2009 by mkazinka

Its the end of the summer, and I have a lot of reflecting to do. The Summer of Solutions (SoS) has been a wild learning experience for me from the moment I joined on in spring 2008. However, rather than share some of my reflections in this post, I’m gonna clue y’all in on how to build on your reflections

This program is at a huge turning point. Last summer, the first SoS gave us some insights on how to do local solutionary organizing (and how not to do it). This past summer gave us some ideas about how to do it on a national scale (and, well, how not to do it). As we begin to prepare for our third year, we can take all those lessons and figure out how to make solutions the next big thing – and we want you to be a part of it.

Apply to join a Grand Aspirations working group here by Monday, August 17.

Many folks involved in the Summer of Solutions have had national conversations about how to move forward into the fall while increasing our capabilities. The strategy we identified will be to create working groups of leaders to handle everything from organizational development to building SoS programs for next summer. This will be the temporary structure that will move us towards more formality, better communication, better funding, and better programs.

The work we are doing with Grand Aspirations is solutionary – at once revolutionary and, at the same time, just common sense. We’re building community development solutions that are sustainable, long-term and replicable. We are not shooting for one-time fixes – we are building the conditions for accelerating and ever-expanding change to occur. We can’t get the future we want without implementing local solutions that everyone, everywhere, can plug into. In order to get those built, we will need to rapidly coordinate in places across the country.

Our success in this stage will rely on the innovation and energy of volunteers who are willing to seriously build this – and we need that to include you. You can be a part of it all by joining a working group by August 17th

It has been an incredible experience this summer to work with young folks all over the country who strove to make their summer solutionary. I’m constantly blown away by all your capabilities and I am really hoping to work with many of you through the year. Keep blogging your successes and thoughts as the year continues!

The End is a Beginning, is a End is a …

Posted on August 5, 2009 by tylermag

Sitting outside of our (soon to be evicted) community house in Omaha, Nebraska I reflect on the Omaha Summer of Solutions.

By some accounts our program could be perceived as a failure. We didn’t mobilize a million, a thousand, or even a hundred to demand clean energy investments in Nebraska and we didn’t shut down a coal plant (yet). We lost volunteers and participants every month and by July we didn’t have anything substantial to put on paper and say we accomplished. But on closer examination we achieved much more than other campaigns that I have been apart of can claim.

Continue reading →

Watching Gardens Grow!

Posted on July 30, 2009 by melindav

It is hard to write just one blog post about my experience with Summer of Solutions. Condensing 2 months of SoS into one post is pretty difficult but here I go:

My summer has been filled with learning, gardening, potlucking, discussing social justice, and meeting amazing people.

The best way to describe my SoS journey is with the gardens I have been tending all summer. First we had seedlings, a hope for what the summer would be but (at least on my part) very few ideas about how to turn seedlings into edible food and no plots to put them in. But quickly we found people to help us with our projects and community members willing to let us build gardens in their backyards. It takes faith to let college students dig up your grass and replace it with dirt, seeds, and the promise of a future garden. It also takes faith to listen to students explain how we want to change the Twin Cities and the world with improved energy efficiency and green jobs. But people have listened and gotten excited and the gardens have grown.

But with any new garden there was a lot to learn to make it successful. As a group we had identify what plants were weeds and what we had planted and wanted to protect. Then we had to get on our hands and knees and weed. After all the watering, weeding, and researching how to take care of our gardens it has been so exciting to watch the plants grow. And so many people have gotten their hands and knees dirty taking care of the gardens. The same is true for all of the Twin Cities projects, so many people have given their time, expertise, and optimism to helping our projects and work come to fruition.

We’ve already started harvesting the plants that were seedlings only a few months ago. Some of the food will go to a youth shelter where one of the gardens is, other vegetables will be donated to food shelves in the cities and the rest will go to the people who have given their land or time to help these gardens grow. We have already harvested chives and basil and soon there will be carrots, green beans, and tomatoes. With any luck by the fall there will be beets, parsley, peppers, spinach, more tomatoes, more carrots, and maybe even a watermelon or two. Summer of Solutions has already produced so much and there is so much more to come.

So all summer I have been watching gardens grow, figuratively and literally. And I could not have spent my time any better this summer.

Eugene NICE Hits the Streets

Posted on July 21, 2009 by thenicejesse

Eugene NICE Update #3

Welcome back to the Eugene NICE update! After doing out reach and having a wonderful time at the Oregon Country Fair, it’s been a fun week for everyone at the NICE and many wonderful volunteers. The pieces of the Energy Equity Project are coming together as we began crafting the energy audit together in the Think Tank and we reached out to the Whiteaker community during our successful Do Tank. It has been wonderful meeting members of the Whiteaker community and also having more participants at our Think and Do Tanks. Through our eclectic backgrounds and knowledge base, we can work together to advance sustainability in Eugene

This week’s Think Tank was centered around our NICE Energy Check-Up and what it will entail for the homes we will visit. We were fortunate to have EWEB staff Ann Porterfield attend the Think Tank and she helped us understand what EWEB puts into their energy audits. Focusing mostly on infrastructural improvements, we will incorporate some of the EWEB audit into our Check-Up. We also had input on the audit from Climate Master’s Lorraine Boose, and her audit focused more on habitual energy practices. Both of these aspects of energy conservation are very important, and we will have both in the NICE Energy Check-Up.

A treat for the NICE crew this week was having Monica Dutcher at our Think Tank because Monica has volunteered to translate our materials into Spanish for the only-Spanish speaking residents of the Whiteaker. The NICE passionately seeks to serve diverse communities and this translation support will help us reach out to communities we may otherwise miss. If you would like to receive any of our materials in Spanish, please contact jesse@thenice.org

Continue reading →

Wake Up and Smell July!

Posted on July 1, 2009 by aafrench

“July, July, July, never seemed so strange!”

Sitting here in our Omaha office in the bottom of St. John’s Church, Lance Brisbois, one of our organizers put the above song on. At first I thought it was just another song by The Decemberists, but then I noticed the deliberate look Lance was giving me.

“Aaron”, he said, “It’s freaking July!!!”. I couldn’t argue with his infallible logic, my computer calendar confirmed that truth. It was indeed, July. A month since our program started. Whoa. Now, I’m not entirely sure about how other programs are being run, but I think Omaha is a little bit different. See we’ve been semi-intentionally & semi-unintentionally creating a space where we as organizers can truly run wild with our ideas for a sustainable Gifford Park (the neighborhood we’re working in) and a sustainable Omaha. Another way to frame that is, we have sort of abandoned any structured process right now with out program and adopted a very loose style of working together and working on our projects. There are definitely positives and negatives to this, and seeing as it’s now JULY, and our program is somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 over, I’d like to take a second to reflect on the style we’ve been using so far, and examine how it can be applied to both the Summer of Solutions and organizing as a whole. This is far too much information for one post, so I think this will be done over a few posts in the next few days and maybe weeks!

For this first post, I’ll give my view of how things in Omaha have been going down so far.

Continue reading →

Greetings from Omaha!

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Lance

From May 26-28, solutionaries from St. Paul, St. Louis and Omaha gathered in Omaha to discuss the Midwestern Summer of Solutions programs just weeks before they started. At the gathering, we brainstormed safe space ideas as well as goals for SOS. We then discussed ways of defining what it means to be a solutionary and ways of orienting new solutionaries to our programs.

Timothy, Tyler, Lance, Melissa, Connor and Aaron at the Omaha gathering

Much of the rest of the time was spent planning how to ensure successful communication occurs within our teams, between teams, and with the broader climate movement, as well as how we can make Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations grow ever-larger while maintaining sustainable sources of funding. We also had time to relax and get to know one another better, including a hike in the nearby Loess Hills of Western Iowa.

Summer of Solutions had a bit of a slow start here in Omaha, partly because some of us were not in Omaha before summer began. We also had challenges with communications and research because we do not have internet in our house. This changed a few weeks ago, however, when we got a new office space near our house. In recent weeks we have begun to get involved with a few large projects.

Continue reading →

Courageous climate-saving superheros?

Posted on June 28, 2009 by ashtrull

Last Wednesday night, a group of about 15 Worcester Solutionaries sat around a community fire hosted by our local librarian, advisor, and spiritual teacher Rachael Shea, checking-in for the week after one of our delicious, abundant potlucks. Rachael and her fellow friend, shaman, and healer Dan Sprinkles, who was a special guest visiting us, posed the questions, “What motivates you to do this work for Summer of Solutions?” “What brings you together as a community in ways that seem so natural to you but yet take time and practice from so many others?” and “What gives you the courage to do what you’re doing?”, not necessarily expecting an answer, but just hoping to understand how and why we’re doing what we’re doing this summer. The last question struck me as particularly interesting and maybe misdirected because I did not consider what we were doing “courageous” per se; to me that sounded too gratifying or pedestal-deserving than what we were actually doing. After talking to Dan about it more and asking what he meant by that question, he told me that “courage” actually comes from root definitions meaning “action from the heart”. All of a sudden it made more sense to me, and I do see our work this summer as full of courage; not in a medal-deserving way, but in a way that we maybe don’t know exactly why we’re doing what we’re doing, but it feels right, important, and coming from a natural pull from our hearts to action.

Continue reading →