Draft IGHIH blog post: Please comment
Timothy DenHerder-Thomas
Hi all,
I am drafting an outreach post to IGHIH. I wanted to give people an opportunity to comment, but don't have much time - I need to get it out this afternoon. See below. Please comment by 3:30 Central time if you want to comment. I still need to add a couple links.
SoS rising!
Timothy DHT
This past summer, about 25 students spent June and July in St. Paul Minnesota working on community-based solutions to the climate and energy crisis, social justice issues, and our falling economy through the Summer of Solutions. We posted a couple of times about the beginning of this program, but as we went along kept finding it difficult to communicate what was going on. As the movement moves into PowerVote, and starts to think about what happens during and after the first 100 days, we want to share the experience and invite participation in the future process.
The Summer of Solutions hosted a variety of initiatives and campaigns, and helped us build a community energy efficiency coop, a green industrial design coalition, movement networking and messaging plans, and much more. Moreover, we built a community that is continuing its solutions work in a number of communities across the country. One of our participants created this video about our efforts:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1RNh__eDxk&eurl=http://www.grandaspirations.org/]
Summer of Solutions dramatically accelerated our efforts here in the Twin Cities while helping friends from outside the area build skills and models for building innovative strategies for a post-carbon society in their own communities. Along with dozens of groups across the country working to create a green economy and pioneering people-powered sustainable community development, we see these efforts as starting to open up a new phase of organizing. As a movement, we're moving forward on creating demand through the political process and getting a new energy society to be taken seriously, but we need to start figuring out how our nation (and the world) overhauls how it works because no one has really figured that out yet. We're moving from the debate to the design challenge, and as we know a lot of the solutions we're ultimately going to need (various renewable energy technologies, urban redesign, sustainable agriculture, better transit systems and the like) the biggest innovations we need are social: how to make the community organizing, economics, culture, and policy work to roll out these solutions on a massive scale on a record-breaking timeline.
Right now we need mass mobilization around elections work and accountability efforts in the first 100 days, but we also need to start planning for this societal design challenge. We need to start building a base of solutionaries - young social innovators ready, willing, and able to invent, implement, and share solutions that work for our communities here and now. That's why we're looking for your help taking this national next summer.
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In the past month since Summer of Solutions, we have found more and more student leaders excited about the model and interested in setting up a summer program in local communities around the country next year. It has started to snowball, more sites, more organizers, more help with the extensive central fundraising and planning that we'll need. We see this growing at a very crucial time as our Calendar moves through the fall election cycle, spring accountability work, and then ... a summer of youth leadership to build the new energy future.
Right now, we've partnered with some youth leaders in Portland who led the Northwest Institute for Community Energy (NICE) last summer, and are looking to identify local leaders who want to help set up programs in local communities to make this work, so we can get a small planning group together to define central messaging and start the process of building partnerships and funding resources. We want to ramp up on-the ground work after the elections since we know folks are very busy with PowerVote, but need to get some sense of who wants to be involved since we need to work on the central planning before then.
You can find
out more about the project on our Summer of Solutions 2009 page. if
you're interested in setting up a local planning team for next summer,
please submit the application that can be found at the following form.
We'll start the planning process with current participants after an
initial deadline the night of Sunday the 7th, but if you need more
time, just submit it within the next couple weeks. It will be harder to
include local groups in fundraising plans if we don't know by the final
week of September, and you'll miss out on some of the planning the
later you submit, so please respond ASAP if interested.
If you want to participate next summer, but necessarily plan, hang on! We'll start the outreach process for more participants in a few months!
Happy solutionizing!
Ruby Levine
Otherwise excellent.
Ruby