It’s Getting Hot In Here

First, there was the Campus Climate Challenge, building a base of action on campuses nationwide. Then, there was PowerVote, mobilizing youth across the country to vote for a clean energy future and shift America’s political landscape. Recently PowerShift 2009 escalated the call for bold climate policy with 12,000 young people convening in Washington DC. And now…

As the youth climate movement reaches for major policy goals, we start to catch a glimpse of the long-term struggle still ahead — the one in which we must innovate and implement climate and energy solutions that also revitalize the economy and empower communities. In this struggle, we must wrest control of the economy from the fossil fuel industry that has run our society and put that control in the hands of millions of local innovators around the world who are harnessing the power of the wind, sun, and land to sustain their lives and their local economies. We must figure out how to make our buildings efficient, our urban planning smart, our agriculture sustainable, our grid system renewable, and our industries green. This is the epic economic, political, and social project of our generation and those that will follow – it will take decades and be global in scope. It must be participatory and people-supporting not only to be fair, but also to succeed.

Let’s be frank: we have a pretty good idea of why this needs to happen, and a somewhat more vague idea of what needs to happen, but relatively little sense of how to achieve it.  More news: our political leaders, scientists, and economists don’t know either. We are embarking on a societal process of figuring out how to create this new future, and unfortunately, much of the current planning is being done by supporters of unsustainable and unwise options (such as “clean coal”, nuclear, tar sands, suburban sprawl, agribusiness, central station transmission, etc.) who prefer “solutions” that will recreate the same failing system we have today.

If you want to spend your summer building your capacity and career as a creative leader helping develop the solutions we need – figuring out the how -  please join us for the Summer of Solutions. In 2008, we piloted a program in St. Paul Minnesota with 25 participants, while a sister program started in Portland Oregon. Now we’re going nationwide.

The Summer of Solutions is a grassroots program led by pioneering youth innovators in 12 locations nationwide (Austin TX, Burlington VT, Corvalis OR, Eugene OR, Michigan, Omaha NE, Portland OR, San Francisco CA, Seattle WA, St. Louis MO, the Twin Cities MN, and Worcester MA). Each program will bring together a team of youth leaders from a wide range of backgrounds and skill-sets for approximately 2 months (length and dates vary) to accelerate and launch new initiatives around energy efficiency, community-based energy, sustainable food production, sustainable urban design, and green industry by creating innovative partnerships with existing local groups and building initiatives that can sustain themselves over time. Program planners at each local area are forming projects, but participants are also invited to help create new ones through a collaborative process. The program fosters community-based innovation, peer-to-peer learning, and participatory leadership, and empowers participants to build and practice skills in community organizing, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable development. The Summer of Solutions teams will form creative communities that help participants:

1. Develop model projects that are “solutionary” — integrating climate and energy solutions, economic revitalization, and community building; create the resources needed for their own emergence; and can be replicated broadly.
2. Build a growing “community of practice” with the skills and mind-set that prepares participants to launch and build solutionary initiatives in their own communities while supporting others in the process.
3. Foster their careers by honing their skills and ability to support themselves.

As a follow up from PowerShift, we want to plug youth activists – newcomers and old-timers – into grassroots programs that will help create green jobs, foster local sustainability initiatives, and create solutions campaigns that will model how to actually solve the climate and energy crisis while revitalizing the economy and fostering social justice.

If you are looking to build your skills as a collaborative grassroots innovator of the green economy, please join us:

APPLY HERE

Regardless of whether you are personally available, please spread the word!

The true power of the Summer of Solutions lies both in the method embedded in the program itself, and in the lived experiences of the participants.  Part of it is the incredible can-do attitude that drives our work and increasingly builds our legitimacy with local governments, business partners, and labor leaders. We are a national initiative started and run by grassroots volunteers, often setting up programs amid classes and jobs, and training each other in the process. This essence is best captured by the blog post that Callista Perry wrote at the beginning of last summer’s program – she has since gone on to help start up the 2009 program in Worcester Massachusetts.

The method or approach to social change we are using is far more about personal and collaborative creativity towards ways that work, than it is about advocacy fights between grassroots power and corporate money. The solutionary approach contests power systems systematically and transformatively — but it does so quietly.  By creating solutions that benefit the participants and invite other actors (whether community partners, labor, small business, faith groups, farmers, governments, or corporations) to join us in doing things differently, our approach subtly transforms existing power systems through a mobilization of people power.  Tyler Magnuson put it beautifully in his recent blog post on the emerging Solutionary blog: we’re about a sustainable activism that gives us life, creates tangible resources (financial, social, emotional) for ourselves and others, and builds itself through the collaborative process of creation. I sometimes think of it as similar to jujitsu: we use the strength of the system to change it.

In the Summer of Solutions, we learn by doing and teach each other: together we figure it out. That process starts from day one of involvement, when you begin considering your own involvement in the program. One of the most regular questions I get about Summer of Solutions is whether the program costs money, is volunteer, or is paying. It’s understandable to have such questions when trying to decide how to spend your summer, especially when you are considering a program in which you will be both working for two months and getting intensive, practice-based training to build your career as a green economy leader.

We start by asking what you need to participate this summer, and how can we work together to fill those needs? Applicants and program planners work together to raise the funds to cover costs of living and provide a summer stipend for their participation (or link with related jobs/ internships.) We collaborate to create our own summer jobs. Based on what you need as an incoming participant, we’ll help you identify ways you can help raise those funds through the grassroots to complement whatever sources of support our planning teams can secure in this tight funding environment. Figuring out how to support ourselves in pursuit of our dreams is a valuable skill in a falling economy, and one we need to build if we want to sustain our commitment to our vision for the world. Would you rather put some effort into fundraising this spring and do something amazing this summer that will empower your ability to support yourself in this movement in the long-run, or spend two months working a job you don’t care about?

I think we’re used to having the way forward be clear-cut and simple - things are pretty much set up for us. That clear way forward was supported by an economy founded on familiar and reliable, if ultimately disastrous, power sources. As we take charge of our own future, and help lead a green economy founded on power and economic activity that is currently uncertain and not-yet created, we have to innovate. We have to rethink how we make social change happen while sustaining each other, other people, and whole communities in the process, since this movement is about how we support our society. We have to make the unlikely alliances real, communicate and implement a vision that reaches across issue lines to focus on systemic solutions, and reimagine how we work, think, and live in the process. We have to recognize our personal, collective, and societal assets as well as the complex problems in which we are enmeshed at all scales, and use the collective awareness and creativity of teams and partnerships to figure out the how.

This is just the beginning! Let’s pursue some solutions. Join us this summer to help make it happen.