Posts Tagged ‘community’
Community-Grounded Optimism Live from the Oil Spill
Posted in Movements, Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on August 9th, 2010
Source: Green Cross Australia
Green Cross CEO Mara Bun interviewed Beth Galante, Director of Global Green, to discuss the prospects for a sustainable recovery in America’s climate change impact hot spot – find out more about why community-grounded optimism persists through the nightmare of mega environmental disasters.
MB – How does the oil spill feel on the ground?
It’s been a punch in the gut – earth shattering at the community and personal level. Not a single person was untouched by Katrina. But after a few months, it was clear where the damage was done and people started to move back. Recovery began, first in discrete areas. There has been no shortage of setbacks over the past five years. But the community was truly inspired to put this magical place back together. And it’s come together so much better! With heart, with passion. There is so much to celebrate. But then came the spill.
MB – Let’s get back to the oil spill – but first can you share your reasons for celebrating the recovery?
Sure – some great things come to mind. New Orleans is becoming a model coastal city – resilient, designed to adjust to climate change. The community has embraced sustainability at every level. All levels of government encourage energy efficiency and renewable energy. Awareness about the need to withstand wind and water stresses is massive. We are building to prepare for future hurricanes, so sustainability goes hand in hand with resilience at the neighbourhood and policy level.
The next real accomplishment has been in the public education system. New Orleans had a very poorly performing education system when compared to other parts of the US or other developed nations. Our schools were rock bottom before Katrina. The storm destroyed the school system overnight. The rebirth has been awesome. We now have a decentralized, entrepreneurial school system with all kinds of new models emerging (some private, some traditional public, some supported by Universities). Student test scores have improved every year after Katrina.
Sustainability has been a big factor in this equation. Global Green has led a green school infrastructure project – funded by the Bush Clinton Katrina Fund – that has delivered six new LEED accredited schools [LEED accreditation is similar to Australia's Green Star Ratings]. One of these is Louisiana’s first LEED Gold school. We are really proud of that – and now green schools are embedded in the system. By legislation, all new schools and school renovations in New Orleans must reach at least “LEED Silver” standard. That’s a nation-leading accomplishment. And it’s no surprise that test scores have improved because worldwide studies show that students have better results if they study in places with better light, better air, and lower toxic and other environmental impacts.
The other cause for optimism is governance. Before Katrina, New Orleans and the State as a whole experienced a never-ending stream of corruption enquiries. Our new Mayor has an overwhelming mandate – from black, white, rich and poor residents. We are in a new era of transparent, good local government that has not been seen for generations. Much of this has been citizen-driven. New Orleans has some of the best local community groups in America, and now finally the government is following the community’s lead. For example, a task force including community and local business groups has out forward thirty recommendations for sustainability, and many of these wonderful citizen projects are being supported. But the best cause for optimism – for sure – was when the Saints won the Superbowl!
MB – So bearing all of that good news in mind – lets go back to the oil spill. How is the community responding?
Sustainable South Bronx: Community-Scale Action
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 12th, 2010
Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx) is a community organisation dedicated to Environmental Justice solutions through innovative, economically sustainable projects that are informed by community needs. In 2001, SSBx was created to address policy and planning issues like land use, energy, transportation, water, waste, education, and, most recently, design and manufacturing.
The Hunts Point neighbourhood in the South Bronx is one of New York City’s last remaining industrial areas. On the one hand, the neighborhood has numerous assets, including a waterfront location on the Bronx and East Rivers, proximity to Manhattan, the economic engine of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center (the second largest in the world), new City-led development projects, waterfront parks, and a strong local organisational infrastructure. Simultaneously, it exhibits one of the highest poverty and unemployment levels in the City, with poor community health, noxious uses and commercial traffic, substance abuse, and prostitution issues.
Caught in the middle of these pressures are approximately 11,000 residents who have been neglected, under-served by the neighbourhood local economy. The one-square mile area of Hunts Point is bound by the Bruckner Expressway to the north and west, and the Bronx and East Rivers to the south and east.
Sustainable South Bronx has a diverse range of ongoing projects which deliver multiple benefits. The South Bronx Greenway, for example, will create bike & pedestrian paths to connect key areas, but will also provide spaces for physical recreation, improve local travel options and create more employment, as well as improving air quality and reducing the heat island effect.
Visit their website for a better insight into the range of programs this 9-year old organisation delivers.
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Sharing Knowledge: Farmer-to-farmer videos
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 5th, 2010
Source: Nourishing the Planet: Worldwatch Institute
From “Innovation of the Week: Messages From One Rice Farmer to Another” by Alex Tung:
Some 80 percent of the world’s rice production is grown by smallholder farmers in developing countries, according to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). From Bangladesh to Benin, these farmers continue to develop different solutions to improve the process of rice production. These methods include using flotation to sort seeds, and parboiling, which removes impurities and reduces grain breakage. The Africa Rice Centre (AfricaRice) has developed a simple solution to help farmers share this knowledge: Farmer to farmer videos
Working with researchers, rice farmers and processors, they have developed a series of videos to instruct farmers, including, manual seed sorting manually and by flotation, seed drying and preservation in Bangladesh; rice quality and parboiling in Benin; land preparation for planting rice in Burkina Faso; and seedbed preparation, transplanting, weeding and soil fertility management in Mali.
Farmers in Guinea watched videos of Bangladeshi women creating solutions to improve the quality of farm-saved rice-seed. “The farmers pay a lot of attention to the quality of their seed that they store for the next season,” said Louis Béavogui, researcher at the Institut de recherche agronomique de Guinée (IRAG). “Watching the videos on seed has stimulated them to start looking for local solutions to common problems that farmers face. It is by drawing on local knowledge that sustainable solutions can often be found at almost no cost.”
To pique farmers’ interest in the project, AfricaRice researchers approach them with videos on topics relevant to that particular region. And farmers are involved in the production of the videos from the very beginning, helping researchers decide which methods should be highlighted. Edith Dah Tossounon, chairperson from a rice processing group in Southern Benin, was one of the many women who demonstrated how to parboil rice in a video.
The strong presence of women in the videos also helps local NGOs and extension offices—which tend to be made up mostly of male agents—engage women’s groups. A survey of 160 women in Central Benin comparing the use of video with conventional training workshops showed that videos reached 74 percent of women compared with 27 percent in conventional training. Women who watched the videos worked with NGOs to formulate requests for training in building improved stoves and to seek financial assistance to buy inputs such as paddy rice and improved parboilers that allow rice to stay above the water during steaming, so more nutritional value is preserved. More than 95 percent of those who watched the video adopted drying their rice on tarpaulins and removed their shoes before stirring the rice to preserve cleanliness and avoid contamination, compared to about 50 percent of those who only received traditional training. In addition, illiterate woman could easily learn from the simple language and clear visuals of the examples shown in the videos.
Read the full article by Alex Tung, and for more about innovative ways to share knowledge among rural populations, see Acting it Out For Advocacy.
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Urban Manufacturing: Small, Sustainable Business
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 30th, 2010
Source: MetropolisMag
From “Made in Brooklyn” by Karrie Jacobs:
The United States has lost over 42,000 factories since 2001, and some 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since the turn of the millennium. Officially, this is a death spiral. At the same time, a powerful desire to make things—tangible things, products even—has sprung to life in the border zones where high tech meets the green movement. And Brooklyn now sits squarely in this fertile territory. The borough is home to the wildly successful Web site Etsy, a marketplace of handiwork, which can be read as a Web 2.0 rebuke to the clean-out-your-storage-locker ethos of creaky old eBay. Local food production is booming; it seems as if every 28-year-old guy in the borough has a line of artisanal pickles.
And then there’s the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre site on the East River, established by the U.S. Navy in 1801. Since 1966, when the Navy pulled out, it’s been a city-owned industrial zone. Sitting on what is now prime real estate, just across the river from Manhattan, the Navy Yard contains a fascinating mix of about 240 businesses, only a couple of which have anything to do with ships. There’s Crye American, a young company that managed to snag a defense contract to make Kevlar body armor; Steiner Studios, the largest soundstage on the East Coast; and Cumberland Packing, the company that invented Sweet & Low. There are also artisans—metal- and woodworkers, set builders, display makers—who straddle the boundary between art and industry. The Navy Yard, according to Andrew Kimball, its president, is energetically rebranding itself as a “sustainable industrial park,” home to America’s first “multistory, green industrial facility,” the newly completed, 89,000-square-foot, LEED-certified Perry Building.
Down in Building 275, one of the ramshackle old warehouses typical of the Navy Yard, I run into Jeff Kahn, a partner at Ferra Designs, a 10,000-square-foot metal shop specializing in architectural fabrication and miscellaneous small, intricate metal objects. Many of his 15 employees studied industrial design at nearby Pratt Institute. “This is a Pratt shop,” Kahn boasts, explaining that graduates are drawn to Ferra and other Navy Yard companies because they’re no longer content to just design things. “Most of them are under thirty,” he says. “They’re into craftsmanship; they want to know how to build things. It’s a renaissance.” The 40-year-old Kahn, who originally planned to be an artist and never made it to college, is the face of New York City’s industrial revival, representing an approach that is pre–industrial revolution in scale and post-industrial in strategy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Finding the Plot: Event Report
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on June 17th, 2010
Source: SustainWeb
Image: © RISC
In October 2009, Local Action on Food (LAF) and Women’s Environmental Network organized an event (Finding the Plot) aimed at community groups wanting to set up food growing projects in urban areas. The day looked at the challenges that groups face and provided an opportunity to share experience and skills. The final report outlines the presentations made by the speakers, and includes links to available on-line copies. The report is a valuable resource as it contains references to a wide range of case studies and projects in the UK, and discusses common issues encountered by community food groups at various stages of development.
Download Finding the Plot: access to land for food growing groups in urban areas – final report
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Double Value Coupons: Promoting fresh local food
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 15th, 2010
Source: Sustainable Cities Collective
Image: Wholesome Wave © David Keh
From “Chef to the rich, advocate for the poor” by Marc Gunther:
Can you think of a simple idea that would fight obesity, support local farmers and help the poor, all at once?
Michel Nischan and Gus Schumacher did. Nischan is an award-winning chef, cookbook author and restaurant owner. Schumacher is a longtime government official who worked for the state of Massachusetts, the World Bank and as Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the Clinton years.
Their idea? Subsidize poor people who get food stamps or benefits under the federal WIC (Women, Infants, Children) program so that their grocery dollars go twice as far at farmers’ market. Several years ago, to make it happen, they started the Wholesome Wave Foundation with the help of some well-connected friends. Wholesome Wave began working with about a dozen farm markets in Connecticut, Massachusetts and California in 2008. This year, Nischan says, the program, called Nourishing Neighborhoods, expects to operate at 160 markets in 18 states and Washington, D.C.
Among other things, Wholesome Wave is disproving the notion that poor people either don’t care or don’t know enough to buy healthy food. “The fear that some people had was that we would go into these communities, and it wouldn’t work,” Nischan said. “There was a wide assumption that people in poor communities didn’t know what to do with fresh food.” Instead, he said: “Everywhere we go, people flood the farmers’ markets and buy fresh fruits and vegetables. They actually buy with a vengeance.”
Libraries as Virtual Supermarkets: Food Security Innovation
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 11th, 2010
Source: Sustainable Cities Collective
From “Libraries as food desert oases” by DNaim:
NPR reports on a clever strategy being rolled out in Baltimore to provide fresh food to underserved neighborhoods. It’s being dubbed the Virtual Supermarket. Two library branches have been selected in urban locations where the nearest grocery store is basically inaccessible to anyone without a vehicle. The city public health department helps residents place food orders online using the library computers, and the bag of groceries is delivered [to the library for pick-up] the next day from a local grocer.
This program is up and running with the help of a $60,000 federal stimulus grant. According to the NPR story, there are currently a couple of dozen subscribers. This number may grow as people wade into the technology.
There’s so much to appreciate about this innovative approach to food access. Delivery costs are held down, because the the orders are aggregated for each day and condensed into a single drop-off point. Libraries get to broaden their horizons a bit, a trend Wendy Waters discussed a little while ago. Some more assistance with computers can only help knock the digital divide down a notch. And, of course, more people get to enjoy the nutritional food at fair prices most of us take for granted.
The department plans to expand Virtual Supermarket to other sites with additional programming, such as cooking demonstrations. Apparently, other cities are watching all of this very closely. Philadelphia has long been known for being on the forefront of food access solutions, but it looks like Baltimore is finding it’s own niche.
Read this article by DNaim on Sustainable Cities Collective, or the original article on NPR.
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FoodLoop: Design-Led Social Enterprise
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 10th, 2010
Source: Worldchanging
From “Food Loop: A Design-Led Social Enterprise for Localized Composting” by John Thackara:
Cities such as London face three environmental and social challenges. First, biodegradable waste in landfill causes methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Second, although about 50 percent of some inner city London boroughs are comprised of flats, many councils struggle to carry out waste separation in any dwelling that is not a single house. And third, about 20,000 people live in temporary accommodation for homeless people – but their social needs are so acute that of the 79 percent who want to return to work, only seven percent of them manage to do so.
FoodLoop is a design-led social enterprise for the localized composting of biodegradable waste on housing estates. It greens housing estates, and transforms unused and often wasted spaces of inner city council housing into rich and flourishing social and agricultural spaces.
The service, which is designed to be staffed by disadvantaged people, creates compost from waste using a specially designed community composting machine, the The Rocket Composter, and provides a door-to-door service from inner-city flats. As well as dealing with waste collection and management, FoodLoop workers will learn gardening and landscaping skills, using the compost to cultivate fruit and vegetable plants on communal areas of the estate.
The first FoodLoop project is up and running on a housing estate in Camden Town in London where the service is currently being run by the East London Community Recycling Partnership. The composter was installed in September, and the team has started food planting.
FoodLoop is available to other local authorities as a blueprinted system for the localized composting of biodegradable waste on housing estates. There are also plans to launch FoodLoop, with its accumulating expertise concerning the development of services for organic waste management, in the Middle East and South East Asia.
Read the article by John Thackara via Worldchanging’s Attention Philanthropy 2010
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Growing Communities: Start-Up Programme
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 7th, 2010
Source: SustainWeb
Growing Communities 2010 Start-Up Programme
Growing Communities (GC) is a social enterprise run by local people in Hackney, East London. It has been running a community-led box scheme since 1993 and now packs over 900 bags of fruit and vegetables a week, most of which come direct from local, sustainable farms and some of which is grown in their urban agriculture sites dotted around Hackney.
GC wants to help more communities round the UK to set up their own community-led box schemes, as a practical way to change the food system and increase the economic sustainability of food growing projects. There is now a Start-Up Programme with materials, training and web-tools to help groups set up community-led box scheme using the Growing Communties Model.
If you are interested in joining the programme or if you want to register to receive email updates, visit the website.
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Allotment Gardens: Social-ecological Resilience
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on June 3rd, 2010
Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre
Image: beachcomber1954 via flickr CC
From “Urban gardens key in times of crisis“:
Allotment gardens have often been sources of local resilience during periods of crisis. During World War I the number of allotment gardens surged from 600,000 to 1,500,000 in Britain, supplying city people with food and other ecosystem services. The gardens were planted in parks and sports fields, and even Buckingham Palace turned up the earth to grow vegetables. After declining abruptly in the 1920s and 1930s, World War II saw a new explosion in the numbers of allotment gardens in cities of Britain and other parts of Europe.
The story above is told in a new seminal article (Social–ecological memory in urban gardens—Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services) by centre researchers Stephan Barthel, Carl Folke and Johan Colding.
The article, which is in press in Global Environmental Change, investigates where and how ecological practices, knowledge and experience are retained and transmitted in allotment gardens in the urban area of Stockholm. It is the first study ever to really analyse in-depth the concept of “social-ecological memory” as the carrier of ecological knowledge and practices that enable sustainable stewardship of nature. Linking back to the story of allotment gardens during the World Wars, the specific aim of the new study has been to explore how management practices, which are linked to ecosystem services, are retained and stored among people, and modified and transmitted through time.