This Summer Filled with Solutions in Corvallis, OR

Posted on March 11, 2010 by abbie

As communications director for Summer of Solutions, I’m featuring every program to paint a picture of the diversity of solutions young people are building across the country. This post features the powerful work happening in Corvallis, OR, as related to me by Nathan Jones.

Oregon’s Summer of Solutions program is three years in the making. In the summer of 2008, Nathan and others led a summer program called the Northwest Institute for Community Enrichment. Throughout the summer, the NICE kept in touch with Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities, and at the end of the summer they decided to team up for summer 2009 to run their programs simultaneously on a national scale.

Since then, the NICE has turned into an organization that runs year-round, and the programs have been growing and expanding.

The Projects: This summer, the Summer of Solutions – Corvallis team will be continuing a listening project that has already started. While the team currently working on the listening project finishes it up, new program participants will begin a replica of the listening project in another neighborhood.

Teams of solutionaries will enter specific neighborhoods in Corvallis and conduct a listening project surrounding how solutions for energy efficiency. After the listening has been conducted, the people working on the listening project will provide specific follow-up and support to this neighborhood, at the same time that a new listening project is begun in a different neighborhood in Corvallis.

After this initial follow-up stage is completed, solutionaries will bring interested community leaders together in a forum. Nathan said he’s not quite sure what will come out of these forums, but that’s part of the point. Community members will form groups around their interests that will create community-based solutions for Corvallis.

NICE Projects: The NICE is positioned to run Grand Aspirations programs year-round. Programs that he and his fellow Oregon-ites are moving forward with are designed to be year-long programs that Summer of Solutions participants can plug into.

One really exciting project in particular is the development of a permanent site for the Northwest regional Summer of Solutions. The idea is to get an old abandoned house, school, church, any sort of building, and then fix it up. The building would serve as a model for sustainable living, as well as a space to host people for conferences and gatherings.

The physical space for the NICE building will more likely be in Portland than in Corvallis, but participants who are interested in this particular project would be able to plug in in various ways.

To apply:

As a Coordinator: Go here

As a Participant: Go here

For more information, contact Nathan Jones at nathan [@]thenice[.]org

Twin Cities Summer of Solutions hits the ground running!

Posted on March 3, 2010 by abbie

This is the first post in our National Blog Series, and we’ll be featuring … The Twin Cities program!

After two summers of amazing work and programs in the Twin Cities, the TC Summer of Solutions Planning Team is back in business and ready to amplify their already very strong programs!

Programs in the Twin Cities: The TC Summer of Solutions is the first program run, and two of the projects from that very first summer are still maintained.

CEF Logo Cooperative Energy Futures (CEF) is a business that connects home- and business-owners in St. Paul with the resources to weatherize homes and implement very practical energy efficiency strategies to save energy and money. The broad vision of CEF is to reframe the debate about energy and climate change by demonstrating how the average household can play a role in building solutions through community collaboration. First envisioned in early 2008, and is running strong today.

The Alliance to Re-Industrialize for a Sustainable Economy is a coalition of groups working together to transform the St. Paul Ford Plant, which is slotted to close, into a mixed-use site that would act as an example of how green manufacturing can very positively act as an ecosystem-like community. The manufacturing spaces already existing on the site would be converted to manufacturing solar panels or wind equipment. Within the blueprints for the site are high-density, mixed-use housing, green space, business establishments, and transit systems. The site would be a whole community. Last summer, SoS participants took an integral part in developing a fiscal impact statement, and the project was taken to the St. Paul City Planners in the fall.

These are two programs that have been running for a while, but Twin Cities leaders have told me they have much more up their sleeves for this summer!

Much of the program expansion this summer is in the exciting move out of the Macalester Neighborhood. Program leaders the past two summers benefited greatly from the local community around Macalester College, but the projects of the Summer of Solutions – Twin Cities are meant to be scalable into many different neighborhoods, and have reached a point of stability where that is possible.

However, there are a couple of really new, exciting opportunities that set this summer apart from other summers. A local bike co-op is hoping to implement a bike loan program this summer for those coming from low-income backgrounds to save costs on transportation. There are also several exciting opportunities to collaborate with local urban agriculture/community gardening groups, and the program leaders are excited to expand their focus on Community Gardens this summer.

About the Cities: St. Paul and Minneapolis, MN have grown together since the mid-late 1800s into a center point for urban life in the Midwest. Matt explained that the Twin Cities are the most metropolitan area within 300 miles, and are extremely neighborhood focused.

Jason highlighted the cities as a focal point for immigration to the Midwest – until about the 1970s, that immigration had been largely white, but has become very diverse. Three immigrant populations in particular are highly present in the Twin Cities metro area: East African, Hmong, and Mexican populations thrive within the two cities. The Twin Cities are very bikable, have a (decent?) transportation system, and, in true Minnesota fashion, are a very friendly place to live.

The Planners: Full-time planners for this summer are Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, Matt Kazinka, William Raedy, Jason Rodney, and Ruby Levine. For more detailed information about these wonderful people, check out their bios on our website.

We hope to see you here in June! Apply here to participate in the Twin Cities Summer of Solutions!

If you have any further questions, please email Matt at matt.kazinka@grandaspirations.org

Summer of Solutions 2010 National Blog Series!

Posted on March 1, 2010 by abbie

Hello, beautiful solutionaries!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but fear not, lots of cool new developments have been going down in my absence from the blogosphere.

I have returned triumphantly to announce the 2010 Summer of Solutions National Blog Series!

Each week, the Solutionaries blog will feature a different local program. Blog posts will include interviews with local program leaders, pictures of the towns where the programs will be taking place, and information about the city and projects that you would be working on if you participated in one of our Summer of Solutions programs.

Here’s a list of the programs you’ll be learning about:

Asheville, NC

Austin, TX

Burlington, VT

Cleveland, OH

Corvallis, OR

Dallas, TX

Detroit, MI

Fayetteville, AR

Harrisburg, PA

Iowa City, IA

Santa Fe, NM

Twin Cities, MN

Worcester, MA

To jump start the series, this week we’ll be featuring SoS Twin Cities and Asheville!

The St. Paul Summer of Solutions program is what started it all back in 2008, and the program is looking really strong this year. Yesterday, I sat down and had a very dynamic talk with Timothy, Matt and Jason – all program planners, and all very excited to get their story out there.

Asheville is in North Carolina, at the bottom of the Appalachian range. The program is new this summer, and leaders JC and Tiffany have some really great ideas for development work in their community.

The post on the Twin Cities should be up sometime tomorrow, and the post on Asheville will be up Thursday or Friday. Keep checkin’ Back!

In other blogging/web news, you’ll notice that over this week, the face of our site will be changing gradually. Pantelis Korovilas, an amazing graphic designer, has created a logo for us, and we’ll be updating Solutionaries and our website with the fresh new look. This is a project of five months in the making, and I’m really, really excited about seeing it come to fruition!

That’s all for now – I’ll be back tomorrow with a post featuring the Twin Cities!

Reflecting on a Grand Aspirations Leadership Gathering

Posted on January 9, 2010 by abbie

x-posted to It’s Getting Hot In Here

Over the past ten days, 19 youth activists involved in the Summer of Solutions converged in chilly St. Paul, MN to build a strategy for reshaping our economy from the ground up. We learned how to run an effective summer program dedicated to finding tangible, local solutions to the problems of climate change, the economic downturn, and environmental injustice.

The program began in the summer of 2008 with one program of 20 participants, and over the course of last year grew into 9 programs across the United States. Collectively, there were 150 youth activists involved around the nation.

That was this last summer. Now, we’re looking forward to next summer and the growth it has in store for us.

I have had the amazing experience of working with folks from around the nation over the past 10 days at the Grand Aspirations Winter Leadership Gathering. Grand Aspirations is the organization that facilitates Summer of Solutions programs around the nation. The purpose of the gathering was to bring local Summer of Solutions program planners together to strategize at the national level on how to make our programs effective, how to connect with the communities we live in and train participants.

Participants in Grand Aspirations’ Summer of Solutions program have created businesses around cooperative energy, held community forums called “barn raisings” to raise awareness about energy issues, and have enhanced the power of their own organizations, such as the Northwest Institute for Community Energy. Last summer also saw a huge growth in community gardening and local food projects, listening projects to bring communities together around development issues, and general education and awareness raising.

Continue reading →

Apply for the Summer of Solutions

Posted on November 30, 2009 by timothydenherderthomas

Please join the Summer of Solutions! The youth-led grassroots program is already growing rapidly – we had 1 program in St. Paul, Minnesota – last year it blossomed to nine nationwide. Dozens of grassroots activists have jumped on board the process of “making it happen“, and are generating climate and energy solutions that also build economic opportunity and social justice all across the country. As one of our grassroots leaders wrote last spring as the 2009 wave of solutions was ramping up – this is just the beginning. Its a grassroots movement led by young people who are creating solutions with their communities while building careers growing the green economy. We know you have the solutions, so please join in! If you need even more convincing, you can check out our video by Matt Kazinka on our Get Involved Page.

APPLY HERE to design and lead a Summer of Solutions program in a community you know and love!

Priority deadline is Wednesday, November 11th, so please act fast.

Seeking solutions? We’ll meet you there. Let’s make it happen.

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.

Weatherizing homes and the potential of skill

Posted on June 27, 2009 by rubylevine

Here in the Twin Cities, one of our projects is Cooperative Energy Futures, a cooperative harnessing the power of efficiency to build community as well as energy solutions. We sell a lot of materials for home weatherization, but many of us had never tried these materials out. To educate ourselves more about how home weatherization is done, we enlisted the help of Jim Walsh, one of the founders of Project Warm in Kentucky. Last Saturday, about seven solutionaries did a walk-through of a house owned by Macalester College. Jim told us about different kinds of heat loss in a home and explained how to combat them. We mostly focused on convective heat loss (the kind that happens through the loss of warm air) rather than conductive heat loss (the kind that happens as heat moves through solid surfaces like walls). Armed with new knowledge, we walked through the house and he showed us where to look for inefficiencies.

Unfortunately for us (although fortunately for the residents), the house was already very well weatherized and there wasn’t very much for us to do. There was one window that needed weatherstripping, a door sweep to replace on the front door, some caulking to do in the basement, and a whole bunch of window pulleys to make more airtight. All of these are methods to plug up small holes in outer walls that let either cold air come in or warm air escape. We went back today to install them. They’re all fairly cheap methods — where the cost in weatherization lies, Jim told us, is in the labor.

That’s one thing that has really stuck with me, the idea that there’s so much value to add to weatherizing materials by knowing how to use them. I’ve been thinking today about the possibilities for CEF if we were really good at weatherizing. We’re already working on a workshop to teach people how to use caulk and weather stripping. As I understand it, one of the major flaws in energy auditing as it is done now is that the auditing work is separate from the installation of the needed materials. What if folks from CEF came around, did audits, and installed needed materials? I know this idea isn’t new or unique, but it really hit home for me today while I was actually installing pulley covers and caulking windows. I am really excited to figure out how we can simplify the process of making people’s homes more efficient and use it to do the parts of CEF that ARE new and unique: building communities that are empowered to create their own energy solutions.

Looking into the Future: A Fireside Chat with Timothy and Matt

Posted on June 27, 2009 by timothydenherderthomas

Over the past two weeks, I’ve gotten particularly excited about looking ahead to where we’re going. My eyes are always both here in now and endlessly on horizons. The past few weeks for me have been about thinking bigger about where we’re going, and about exploring how to share this moment of possibility with everyone …

Fellow national coordinator Matt Kazinka and I pulled together this firesdie chat on Thursday night with the help of camera-woman Abbie Plouff and editor Ruby Levine. Its basically an explanation of some of the things going on in the bigger national picture and an invitation to start the process of dreaming with us as we go forward.

Part 1: Welcome, what’s up, and why we’re talking:

Part 2: The big things happening, and next steps on collaboration:

We’ll be checking in, first with Summer of Solutions program planners, and then with partners, participants, and other supporters over the coming weeks.

Keep up the solutions!