It feels great to finally have our hands in the dirt!  We have had a busy month in Middleton beginning work in the high school greenhouse and garden site.  On the 19^th and 20^th, we kicked it off with our first greenhouse workdays which included program leaders, community members, college-age participants, students from the high school Ecology Club, and a very enthusiastic group of middle school students.  Mark Voss, a local farmer and teacher, led a soil mixing workshop, followed by seeding trays and trays of tomatoes, onions, kale, broccoli, peppers, cabbage, and other veggies.

We held another big workday on Saturday the 24^th with our college age participant team, this time out in the garden.  Being the food lovers that we are, we of course kicked it off with a potluck at noon, and then worked until four, repairing the raised beds, cleaning up the old composting area, pruning the espaliered pear and apple trees, raking leaves, and clearing out the old plant debris from previous years (there was two-year-old kale still in the beds!).  We also built new compost bins from reused shipping pallets, which is just in time because we have begun our compost pick-up service for Bloom Bakery.  We diverted 20 pounds of waste from local landfills this first week!  As you can see we had a lot on our plate, but we got it done and the garden is looking great!  We have our amazing volunteers to thank for that 🙂

On top of the beautiful seedlings that are now sprouting up in the greenhouse, our work is really paying off!  Community members and students that live nearby have been eagerly stopping by to check out the progress.  A very curious eight-year-old stopped by our workday and asked for a complete run-down of all of the produce we will be planting this spring, and other neighbors have offered to pitch in a helping hand and even serve as nighttime security for the garden.  Its great to feel the surrounding community really embracing the garden and excited for the summer program that is fast approaching!

Our next big step is the somewhat intimidating job of rototilling over 4,000 square feet of bed space at our new garden site at the Middleton Alternative Senior High.  Wish us luck and endurance!

Candles welcomed guests from Figueroa Street up to Tony’s home, where they were welcomed with local food and drinks, live music and good company. A seed bomb-production lab gave everyone a chance to try their hand at guerrilla-beautification. A resource wall that Jasmin made displayed the many assets our Summer of Solutions program is proud to have, and allowed guests to contribute their own resources, knowledge, skills and connections to the effort.

Everyone came wanting to know more about this new program and how they could learn more and get involved.

This was LA CAUSA Summer of Solutions’ premiere event. Our hello to the world. It was Friday, March 16th, 2012. Over the course of the night, upwards of two hundred people layered long sleeves and jackets to spend their evening celebrating and networking on a small patio overlooking downtown Los Angeles.

As one of the five organizers who comprise the LA SOS leadership team, I couldn’t be happier about the event. While an oncoming flu tempered my outward excitement, on the inside I was glowing as I watched new faces interacting with familiar ones. Partying with a conscience. Here were powerful connections being made; friendships that could mean the start of new ventures and collaboration on existing ones.

So I venture: why can’t we do this every weekend? If we’re going to drop a few bucks on a given weekend on some drinks and food, why not have it directly support a program that will give young people the skills and connections that will support them making change in their communities? Or any cause for that matter. I’ll take the warmth and curiosity of the people surrounding me last Friday over a glammed-out club–where I can’t hear anyone anyway–any day. Moreover, I had the honor to entertain with my band, Dylan Trees, and our partners in music for the night, The Withers.

Sharing music, raising some dough for a good cause, meeting new and interesting people–can a Friday night get much better? Not really. I’m excited for the next party. It’s not official, but yeah, we want this to happen again. And next time, it won’t be five people organizing, it will be a larger group of people all working together to organize, promote, set up, cover, take down, and move on to the next steps. All in an effort to bring a new program to Los Angeles that will continue to grow and help shape the future of this region.

Photos by Alex Kinnan.

We made a lot of seed bombs on Friday. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be tossed into vacant lots and fields around Los Angeles and start sprouting into beautiful fields of wild flowers. What I didn’t realize is that our event itself was a seed bomb. We threw in all the right ingredients, packed it into a condensed space, and now we grow. Glad to have you on board.

– Casey Wojtalewicz

Grand Aspirations is extremely pleased to announce that we received $60,000 in funding this week!

Here’s how:
Continue reading →

Click Here to Vote Now.  Click the “Click here to vote” link and Vote for “Health Justice in the Garden.”

Click Here to Sign up to Vote Daily.  Click continue to agree, fill in your email and get started!

Voting Results: At the end of the fourth day of voting, Summer of Solutions Hartford remains in close second place.  Voting results have shown that our supporters have been the most consistent in voting daily, but we have not yet achieved the number of voters reached by other organizations.  Reflecting this trend, we won the most votes on days 2 and 4 of voting, while the organization in first place won the most votes on days 1 and 3.

What does this mean? : We will continue to rely on our core of daily voters to support us by voting every day.    We are confident that by continuing our daily voting campaign, we can continue to pull in a steady number of votes.  We also plan to make a special effort this weekend, when we believe we will be able to reach more voters than a larger organization.

At the same time, we need to reach out to a larger audience.  We will continue our efforts to reach as many voters as possible, and we ask for your help.  If you are reading this and have not yet signed up to vote daily, there is still one week of voting left.  We also depend on your support to reach new voters.  While you can make a big impact for our campaign by enlisting others to sign up, you can also have a large effect by sending the voting link — healthjusticect.org/challenge-voting — to as many people as possible and encouraging them to vote for “Health Justice in the Garden.”

What we could do with $10,000:

1) Provide stipends to Program Leaders and Participants working Full-Time to bring community gardens and community programs to the Frog Hollow and surrounding neighborhoods.

2) Cover the construction costs of over over 60 raised wooden beds and over 2,000 Square Feet of Growing Space.

Grand Aspirations has just officially launched a webinar series for this May. This will be an opportunity for people interested in building a just, sustainable, community-based economy and doing it effectively to share and gain skills and insights they’ve gained through their experience. The Webinars Team is currently seeking proposals for this initial series of webinars. If you have an idea, please send in your proposal using this form by March 23. Webinar facilitators will receive up to 60% of the revenue from these webinars, so it’s a great strategy for personal resource generation as well as a way to get your ideas out there.

We are looking for people within the Grand Aspirations network and for people who have never heard of Grand Aspirations, and everyone in between, to offer webinars. If you know someone who might be interested, please pass on the opportunity! We are looking for people to present on the topics that interest them, but we have heard some particular interest in trainings on being an effective ally (particularly along race and class lines), tactics for de-escalating conflict, and fundraising. Is there anything you’d like to attend a webinar on? Let us know in the comments!

We are happy to announce that Summer of Solutions Hartford is a finalist in The  Health Justice CT Challenge.  The winner will be decided through an online vote and will receive a $10,000 grant from the CT Health Foundation to work towards establishing “equal opportunities for health to all Connecticut residents.”

It’s springtime in Connecticut, though the calendar insists it’s February. Summer of Solutions Hartford is planning our second summer of food justice work in Frog Hollow, Hartford. We have an excellent summer behind us and a million plans in the works for the next, but in the meantime I’ve been spending a lot of time at my kitchen table on this computer.

This image has been floating around Facebook for the past few weeks. I had to laugh when I saw it, because I had been sitting for 6 hours with a laptop, my phone, and a notepad- “organizing.” This particular day I was scheduling meetings with partners, emailing our participant application to community members, and fixing up our website- soshartford.wordpress.com. On days like this, it appears my “community organizing” is lacking some community.

When I’ve been working at my kitchen table so long that I don’t realize the sun has set- only that my papers have been getting harder to see- it is memories of that community and enthusiasm for our future work together that inspire me.

Memories like:

-Meeting our team of 2011 program participants for the first time at La Paloma Sabanera coffee shop in Hartford.

– Getting to the register to buy a cart full of seedlings and hearing “oh, you’re starting the garden in Hartford? We’re giving you all of this for free”

– The first time Nino, a five year old boy who lives next to el Jardín de Zion Street, came out to the garden to work with us and ran around with a wheelbarrow, which he called his “truck,” helping us fill raised beds.

– When Climate Summer visited and we ate home-cooked picnics on the front yard.

– Planting squash in a tire with Ramón who lived down the street, “it will be beautiful.”

– Wes teaching me how to maximize all the space in a 4×8 bed, and that your tomatoes won’t grow if you don’t talk to them enough.

– Playing Power Rangers with the kids during the summer camp we ran, and not knowing how to properly represent the yellow one.

– Holding a meeting of organizers and activists in our basement on a particularly hot day.

– A Hartford Courant photographer showing up at the garden during the heat wave “looking for people crazy enough to be outside.”

– During “Graffiti Day” of Art Week, when Javier showed Nino how to paint the Puerto Rican flag on their raised bed.

– Witnessing the secret musical talent of our garden neighbors at our open-mic potluck picnic.

– Drawing a “magical chalk garden” at the playground- featuring a bean stalk, jack, the giant, heart flowers, purple strawberries, and “car plants” during summer camp

– Playing Seedling Scavenger Hunt with neighborhood kids (celery is deceiving!)

– Talking to strangers on the sidewalk about our kale harvest and signing them up for plots on the spot.

– The last night of our summer, when everyone came out to eat dinner together in the garden at Alice-in-Wonderland-esque tables and our neighbor called the garden “a wonderland.”

So thanks, clever graphic, but I think what we do has a lot more community in it than you think. Sure, I have my fair share of desk hours, but it’s all to make those moments possible. As I plan for next summer, meet with potential partners, and talk up the program to applicants, I am encouraged by the potential of Summer of Solutions Hartford to bring people together, makeover vacant lots into flourishing gardens, and turn the tides of food justice in Hartford.

If you’re wondering, “say, what might the magical moments of SoS Hartford 2012 entail?” You should check out What’s New 2012: http://soshartford.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/whats-new-2012/ and apply to join us at http://grandaspirations.org/summer-of-solutions/apply2012/