It’s Getting Hot In Here

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 was a participant-created program where we spent the summer together creating a variety of initiatives and campaigns and a really remarkable community that integrated organizing, life, and planning. The summer helped us build a community energy efficiency coop, a green industrial design coalition, movement networking and messaging plans, and much more. One of our participants created this video to help share the experience:

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 we need to start figuring out how our nation (and the world) overhauls its structure and function since that’s still a big question mark. We’re moving from the debate to the design challenge, and the biggest innovations we need are social: how to make the community organizing, economics, culture, and policy work to roll out the technical and structural solutions we already have on a massive scale and 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 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 help to take this national next summer.

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.

SoS Local Planning Teams form

If you want to participate next summer, but don’t want to get involved in planning a local program yourself; hang on! We’ll start the outreach process for more participants in a few months!

Happy solutionizing!