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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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!