I spent the weekend at Midwest Powershift in Cleveland. Among the rallies, trainings, and speeches, I was able to catch some downtime with fellow Summer of Solutions program leaders and participants from around the Midwest. Especially valuable was a conversation I had with members of other Midwestern programs on Saturday night.

500 young people applaud Joshua Kahn Russell's keynote poem at Midwest Powershift in Cleveland. Photo credit Ben Hejkal.

This conversation helped me articulate two things: one, the “good environmentalists vs. the evil polluters” framing I saw a lot of other places during the conference makes me deeply uncomfortable, and two, if the green economy is going to work it needs to be the whole economy, not a side industry.

First: I heard a lot of people, excellent organizers and activists who I strongly respect, talking about how we need to stop them, the polluters and the fossil fuel barons. I fully believe that we urgently need to stop, for example, the Keystone XL pipeline. To me, the fundamental issue is that we don’t need to make them stop the pipeline, but we that need to stop us from building it. Our society is dependent on these fuels, and a “we” that includes every attendee of Midwest Powershift and President Obama and the CEO of TransCanada and every person that uses fossil fuels needs to do something different. Stopping them is, to me, deeply disempowering because I am not involved in the final decision. Finding something different for all of us to do is something I can be a part of.

Second: At that conversation, we talked about the realities of our own lives and financial situations. Many of us need to make money to cover needs we can’t meet in other ways. We talked about student debt traps and worries about health insurance. We talked about needing to work other jobs to meet our needs. I left the conversation with a strong need to find ways to support not only myself but my friends and people I have never met to live lives that sustain them and the planet and its people. To me, this means building businesses that generate their own revenue by providing needed services like energy, food, and transit. This may not sound new to my fellow solutionaries, but it felt realer to me leaving that conversation than it has in a while.

Third: (Surprise, there’s a third!) I could not have had this conversation without the three years and four programs I have spent with the Summer of Solutions. I have learned a sense of urgency and a deep-rooted narrative of my own power through my involvement in Summer of Solutions and from my fellow solutionaries in Grand Aspirations. I believe that I can move past the disempowering get-someone-else-to-do-it attitude I described in my first point. I believe that I have agency in moving us towards an economy where we don’t need to wait tables to support our farms or solar businesses — we work on our businesses to support our businesses.

If you want to join me and hundreds of other young people in this endeavor, consider starting a Summer of Solutions program in your community. You can also use that link to let us know if you want to be contacted when the application for participating goes up in the spring (just click the link to apply for a new program and it’s one of the options).

The Summer of Solutions is a program for young people who want to build just, sustainable economies in their communities.

We want to invite YOU to be one of those young people building those solutions. Apply here by October 22 to start a program in your community or to join an existing program leader team.

Running a program gives you the opportunity to create and support green economy projects that build power for people who currently don’t have as much access AND to empower young people from your community and beyond with the skills and strategies they need to do the same thing wherever they go next.

Past Summer of Solutions programs have:

• Built community gardens and farms on vacant lots
• Taught neighbors how to use bikes as an effective form of transit
• Run summer camps for children to help them learn about healthy eating and growing their own food
• Founded and partnered with energy businesses to create a community-based clean energy system
• Created community spaces, from mini-golf courses in the coal fields of West Virginia to a playground in Detroit, MI
• Designed and organized for green manufacturing at a closing car factory in Saint Paul, MN

You can read more about these and other stories at the Summer of Solutions blog. To learn more about the values, principles, and strategies of the program, check out the statement on our website.

Leading a program is a challenging, broadening experience that will help you grow your skills in organizing communities, innovating new solutions, planning with flexibility, telling your story, and raising the resources to support it all. Past program leaders have said about the experience:

• “Our program was a transformative and sometimes overwhelming experience that made several leaders and participants challenge their own destiny. The gratitude expressed by the groups we were working with, the fun we had together, and the bonds we formed will last a lifetime.” – Summer of Solutions/Build It Up West Virginia program leader team
• “This work fits my beliefs and passions so perfectly. I have learned so much from trying and failing and retrying to grow into this role and this movement. The people I’ve befriended through Grand Aspirations and activism are an incredible source of strength. Hey, we’re family.”– Jen Roach, Hartford Summer of Solutions
• “Leading a Summer of Solutions program was one of the most challenging and yet exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I would highly recommend the experience to anyone who has ever wanted to start their own organization to create positive change—this summer certainly had as much excitement as any start-up I’ve ever worked with.” — Lisa Curtis, Oakland Summer of Solutions
• “Participating in and then leading a Summer of Solutions program has been the literally the most transformational experience of my life. It has helped me to grow into becoming the person I want to be. This summer I felt like I was learning so quickly that I felt confident doing things that just the week before would have been totally beyond my skill-set.” — Elana Bulman, Twin Cities Summer of Solutions

If you want to start a new program, you can start something totally from scratch or partner with an existing organization (or something in between). Programs can be hosted either within Grand Aspirations, which runs Summer of Solutions nationally, or as part of a local organization. You can use the summer to start new projects or expand existing ones. You can bring together young people in your community and from outside your community to work together towards common goals. To see all the things program leaders accomplish, please check out the 2012 Program Guidelines.

If you want to join an existing program in Hartford, CT; the Twin Cities, MN; Oakland, CA; or Portland, OR, you can check out what those teams are looking for in new program leaders on their pages. These teams have more experience and direction already but are open to new ideas and innovation as well.

The deadline to apply is October 22.

However you choose to engage as a program leader, Grand Aspirations will support you! Each planning team has a Program Supporter who is an experienced program leader. Your Program Supporter will talk through challenges and connect you with the resources from the rest of the organization like the Media Team, the Resources Team, and the Leadership Development Team. You will have opportunities to connect and brainstorm with your peers at other programs through confluence calls and regional training events during the winter.

If you have any questions about what being a program leader entails, please get in touch with Ruby Levine (802-272-4140, ruby.levine@gmail.com) or Timothy DenHerder-Thomas (646-670-1682, timothydht@gmail.com) to talk through what being a program leader could look like for you!

When I helped close the 2011 Twin Cities Summer of Solutions three weeks ago, I knew something amazing was happening, but in the flurry of it all I wasn’t really able to identify it. I started to get a sense of it when I first sat down at the Grand Aspirations August Gathering two weeks ago, when forty people from all over the country streamed in with wondrous stories of their work creating the green economy. By the end of the Gathering, last week, the full depth of the change was starting to dawn on me and was brought to the front of my attention when Ethan Buckner, a friend and Oakland Summer of Solutions Program Leader, said smiling at the end of a big group hug, ‘you know, we’ve created something really remarkable in the past few years’. Now, after a week of catching up and taking the next steps forward back in Minnesota, I’m finally seeing the view from four years out.

Four years ago was about 6 months after the events that got Cooperative Energy Futures and the Alliance to Reindustrialize for a Sustainable Economy off the ground – the seeds of my green economy work in the Twin Cities. It was about 6 months before the vision for the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations emerged. Four years ago, there had been no national gatherings of thousands of youth activists, candidate Barack Obama was barely a competitor, and the economy had not yet tanked. The dream of a green economy was barely starting to be voiced, and the idea that we could sustain ourselves, our communities, and the future of our world by creating new ways to feed, house, power, and transport our society was an exciting but utopian ideal.

So what has changed?

It wasn’t until I took the view from four years out that I really absorbed how much has changed. Here in the Twin Cities, and in so many of the other places where the leaders I’ve worked with are based, the idea of a green economy has rapidly become concrete and hundreds and thousands of people are all trying to figure out how to do it. It’s still an epic struggle with truly gargantuan economic competition, political obstacles, and cultural inertia, but suddenly, thousands – maybe millions nationally and tens of millions globally – of people are chugging away at the solutions. That indicates that a critical mass believe that it is a realistic possibility and they’re going for it. This wasn’t true four years ago.

The power structures that have managed our world for living memory are coming apart at the seams. The past fours years have seen a cascading collapse of many of the largest financial institutions on the planet, taking trust in the American economy and the jobs and homes of millions of people with them. Though we as a society may not have made the full connection between energy costs and their resulting effect on housing, food, and transportation and the connections of all those things with the housing and financial markets and the current recession, it is by now increasingly clear to the general public that the American Dream is not what it used to be. In the midst of this, the politics we have relied upon is failing. The promised wave of hope and change elected a president who has not been able to deliver in a national climate of hampered public participation and partisan deadlock. As climate organizers by the thousands, including many of my friends, go to protests at the White House and leave in handcuffs over the tar sands pipeline and repeated attacks on pollution controls, the inability of our political system to serve the needs of people in the face of economic chaos is becoming brilliantly clear.

The fallout from this chaos is tragic, but from a systems change perspective, it is a deeply promising sign. Public faith in the institutions that have propped up an unsustainable and unjust economy for living memory is breaking. As faith that the polluting economy that advances injustice and weakened communities erodes, it creates space for people to believe in emergent ways of supporting our communities that will actually sustain and uplift us. It is time to let go of the lie that was the old prosperity, recognize that it was founded on the abuse and destruction of people and places cross the planet as well as our own future, and move on. As long as this economy and politics continues to fail us, there is the opportunity for something better to win us.

En masse, distrust of the political process and disfunction in politics coupled with stark clarity of the challenges we face is driving people to innovate new ways to influence the world around them. Some of this is taking the not-very constructive form of building personal safety nets (buying gold, fighting taxation, etc.). Some of it is taking the positive form of collective support (finding community-based ways to provide the health, food, energy, finance etc. services that are evaporating in the current economy. And some of it is truly transformational – developing new models that outcompete business as usual, drawing money, people and resources out of the unsustainable economy and into the new one. We can work on doing more of the latter, but the point is, people are shifting from assuming that someone will take care of their problems for them to taking action (often because they are forced to by economic threats or other situational issues). Four years ago, efforts of this nature often had the feel of hobby projects or radical experiments. More and more, they are taking on the quality of emergent institutions.

Here in the Twin Cities, I’ve seen the transition from promising ideas to new realities happen before my eyes so smoothly that I almost didn’t notice it:

• Four years ago, our vision for green manufacturing at the 140 acre Ford Plant site was an intriguing research project. Now it has the City of St. Paul as a partner and Perkins and Will, a prominent green design firm, pulling together a development team for this multi-billion dollar project.
• Four years ago, our urban agriculture work was developing backyard gardens and learning how to grow things. Now there are new businesses employing people and feeding communities through urban farming.
• Four years ago, our energy efficiency models were cute ideas on paper and a lot of knowledge – now neighborhood associations are contracting for our services, a coalition of over a dozen organizations is working together to save energy and create green jobs in South Minneapolis, and I’ve created a job for myself while also supporting local youth helping the community save energy.

In the past four years, these nascent seeds of solutions have grown into the saplings of the new economy not just here in the Twin Cities, and not just in the 15+ places where Grand Aspirations has operated. They are growing in countless communities across the globe powered by communities and local businesses and forward-thinking public officials. These communities are starting to look towards each other and recognize in the solidarity and collaboration that will turns many small local things into transformation.

The view from four years out continues to remind me of this article by Sara Robinson that urges activists to remember history and act with patience and grounding. It describes the long and troubled process from business as usual to transformation that our society is now acting out on the grandest of scales.

The view from four years out makes this process visible – it even makes it look fast. It shows me how quickly the dreams that started the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations are becoming realities. It shows me how quickly the people I met at the August Gathering – over half of whom I did not even know 12 months ago, let alone 4 years ago – have become my fellow world-makers. And it whispers thrillingly all the things that this implies for the endless fountain of ideas that are only now emerging and the millions of people preparing to join in.

Which REALLY makes me look forward to the next four years … and the next … and the next.

‘We need to start training young people, not just FOR green jobs, but TO CREATE green jobs. We should start in the Twin Cities this summer.’

Fast-forward three years, and over 250 young people have been trained over three years in Summer of Solutions programs around the country to create innovative and self-sustaining solutions around energy efficiency, green industry, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and smart transportation and design that advance job creation, social justice, and community empowerment. A network of over 70 youth leaders has coalesced to launch a national organization from nothing and develop 2011 Summer of Solutions programs that will support hundreds of youth in creating the clean energy economy in 15 cities nationwide. These programs have expanded rapidly in number, quality, and sustainability over the years without grant support, and with a major influx of funding and leadership in late 2010, we’re just hitting our stride.

As you read on, I’d encourage you to think of any young people (individuals or groups) who might be interested in a summer program based on community-based innovation in the clean energy economy. If so, please invite them to apply to any of our 15 programs nationwide by April 24th at www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos

In the Twin Cities, where I have been working, the Summer of Solutions has helped launch several initiatives that have been sustained throughout the year:

• Launching Cooperative Energy Futures, a community-based energy cooperative focused on helping neighborhoods create economies of scale in hard-to-reach markets (residential and small business) through community organizing, bulk buying, and cooperative ownership of energy. After a series of pilots around group contracting, bulk buying, neighborhood training, and community mapping starting in 2008, we started focusing on broad-based adoption in the Phillips community of Minneapolis during the summer 2010 while helping provide technical assistance to help the neighborhood understand efficiency and clean energy alternatives to a proposed high-voltage transmission line. With Cooperative Energy Futures now an independent though collaborative entity, this process led us to convene local business, neighborhood, and efficiency groups to form Our Power, a community-based campaign. This campaign focuses first on mobilizing a broad base of young people in the low-income and multi-cultural communities in Midtown Minneapolis to take charge of saving money by saving energy and engaging residents and businesses in doing the same. Starting in January 2011, Our Power has secured a marketing partnership with the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Minnesota’s oldest minority-owner business and a local weekly paper, and hired youth interns from the local school systems. We have also helped facilitate a series of biweekly meetings pulling together multiple constituencies to create a community energy plan for the neighborhood.
• Building the Alliance to Re-Industrialize for a Sustainable Economy with local labor leaders from the UAW 879, affordable housing and transit advocates, and St. Paul City developers to create a mixed-use development plan for the St. Paul Ford Manufacturing site that will close later this year. Since 2007, we have worked to create and research a net-energy positive, transit-oriented, affordable living and working community that would create more jobs from green industry than the site currently hosts including fiscal impact modelling, analysis of job multipliers, on-site clean energy assessment, housing and transit assessment, and carbon inventories. During a hiatus where the future of the plant was uncertain, we turned this plan into the first draft of a template for how it could be replicated at other old industrial sites in the Twin Cities and in other Rust Belt cities. Now that the fate of the plant is more certain, we’re moving forward on a community engagement campaign to build “Yes In My Back-Yard” (YIMBY) support for the vision while working with the city and recruiting developers, designers, and investors.
• Growing our networks within the entrepreneurial urban farming movement in an effort to create jobs and turn hobby-style community gardens into viable urban farms. We started exploring the field in 2009, but expanded substantially in 2010 by working with the Harrison Neighborhood Association to bring residents in North Minneapolis, a major food desert, together around urban farming. We also started learning urban farm business development basics from Collie Graddick, a leader of the Co-op Project, and experimented in permaculture with other local groups in the Phillips Neighborhood and North Minneapolis. In 2011, we’ll be supporting the launch of Concrete Beet Farmers, a new Phillips urban farm while helping expand urban farming ventures with several other organizations (and maybe exploring urban anaerobic digester options).
• Working to expand access to bike transit in partnership with Sibley Bike Depot. We helped Sibley, a community Bike Shop based on University Avenue in Frogtown. This new program in 2010 helped Sibley develop a listening project among local residents, improve their volunteer training program, increase adoption of their low-income bike loan program, and start a bikeshop session for women and trans-gender people.

And that’s really just the beginning at just one of fifteen amazing programs across the nation. From organizers helping communities create new economies in the coal-fields of West Virginia to the emergence of local food economies in Arkansas to community revitalization in Detroit to neighbor-to-neighbor asset-based carbon reduction campaigns in Oregon, we’re getting to work. You can learn more about each of the Summer of Solutions programs at www.grandaspirations.org/programs

If you or a young person you know wants to join in this summer, please apply by April 24th at www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos

So what is the Summer of Solutions trying to achieve?

First, Summer of Solutions is about winning the hearts and minds of our communities for whom climate and energy concerns are frequently lost amidst an overwhelming tide of economic uncertainty, job losses, political conflict regionally (like the labor/ state government conflicts in Wisconsin and elsewhere), and global unrest (in the Middle East and Japan) that further threatens to destabilize our economy. Through tangible, on-the-ground solutions that help people see how the green economy allows them to redirect the energy, food, and transportation dollars that they already spend away from the problems and towards the solutions. It allows people to see how being smarter, more efficient, and more collective in our approaches to meeting these basic needs can create more jobs, improve the quality of life, and reduce the cost of living, even as it helps confront big picture problems like climate change, energy depleting, economic dependency, and military conflict. It allows people to see, feel, and trust that a clean energy economy is more than just talk – it’s productive, realistic, and fun.

Second, Summer of Solutions is about building a new generation of leaders who bring people together across differences and both organize and innovate real, deep, and lasting solutions. At a moment when the climate movement needs to be bigger, more networked, and more inclusive than ever, focus has largely remained on a reluctant political system and the backlash that has ensued rather than on building a movement that is big enough, broad enough, deep enough, and solutions-oriented enough to win. We need leaders who can do the dirty work on the streets and face to face, but who can also think strategically on the big picture of how this work transforms development, progress, politics and culture to work towards a change as systemic as the Industrial Revolution. We need organizers with business models who are in it for the long haul and are innovative and resilient enough to sustain themselves and each other regardless of grant funding. And we need tens of thousands of them working in coordinated, distributed action. Green jobs visionary Van Jones said it beautifully:

“Because to win over a wounded and frightened nation, our cause itself must become irresistibly beautiful, vital, healing, and sustainable. Success will come when our networks are practical enough to “organize” hundreds of thousands — and soulful enough to “magnetize” tens of millions. So let us dare to imagine … a movement that celebrates more than it condemns … inspires more than it critiques … and solution-izes more than it problem-atizes. Imagine a movement for justice with its arms wide open.”

The Summer of Solutions is about building a massive swarm of leadership that will create the tipping point that we must see. It’s not about
creating more foot soldiers or organizing mass rallies, it’s about creating a self-sustaining and exponentially expanding network that
sends the seeds of the clean energy economy into every community where it creates visible benefits for all. One of our central theories is what
we can the Dandelion Strategy; that by the end of a Summer of Solutions program, every participant will be ready, willing, and able to:

1. Support themselves (materially, emotionally, etc.) through a sustainable livelihood that they create.
2. Create cascades of sustainable livelihood benefits (income, jobs, lower cost of living, better quality of life, ownership, social capital, skills, etc.) for the broader community through the work that they do.
3. Inspire, teach and prepare others to do the same.

What This Says About Youth Organizing

The power of the millenial generation is not that we have Facebook or that we know how to use it. It’s that growing up in a networked world is allowing us to imagine and equipping us to implement people-oriented coordination of real-world action at a massive scale. At the center of this story is that all of us – regardless of age – are creators, that we have the tools, the ability, and the skill to create beautiful outcomes that had seemed impossible through our coordination. We’re seeing the results start to emerge in the Arab Spring protests led by young people, which built off of the lessons from Serbia’s Otpur movement several years ago. Let’s not kid ourselves, overthrowing an oppressive regime that the vast majority already dislikes is far less complicated than reinventing the foundations of a fossil energy economy, but it’s certainly an impressive start.

Vast, decentralized networks of creative agents are effectively coordinating to achieve simple common goals in the form of either/or choices about how their societies will work. Vast decentralized networks of creative agents have also demonstrated their effectiveness at compiling and synthesizing and vast and complex volumes of knowledge and opinion at record speeds. What we have yet to create are vast and decentralized networks of creative agents effectively coordinating to achieve complex, multi-faceted, and interdependent society-changing goals that require both intense creativity and intense selective pressures for feasibility, scalability, replicability, and sustainability. These systems are emerging, and I believe that they will be necessary to solve problems at the magnitude of the climate and energy crisis.

The Summer of Solutions seeks to create the conditions for that system – thousands of super-empowered grassroots innovator-organizers who know how to create solutions and are able to communicate, coordinate, and synergize their work. In the spirit of the network, we trust that there are many others seeking to achieve the same end. We’re looking to work together – with you.

We welcome all participants ages 14-30 regardless of race, culture, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Positions as volunteer participants (up to 20 hours a week) and full-time participants (40+ hours a week) are open. The program is free, and full-time participants are eligible to receive need-based financial support, the application for which is here. We are currently working to generate funding to support participants with all levels of need.

To learn more about Summer of Solutions and find a program, visit Grand Aspirations, the host organization of Summer of Solutions, at http://www.grandaspirations.org/programs. The page for applications can be found at http://www.grandaspirations.org/apply2sos. The priority deadline for full-time applicants is Sunday, March 13th at midnight PST, and the final deadline for full-time applicants is Sunday April 24th at midnight PST. Volunteer applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

We look forward to receiving your application, and working together, hands-on, to create stronger, self-sustaining communities across the country.

APPLY NOW

Energy is 10% of the entire economy, powers and makes possible everything we do in the other 90%, and is the most centralized and tightly controlled of all economic sectors – just a handful of giant oil companies and electrical and natural gas utilities control the vast majority of the wealth. Every year, the average American household puts 5% of their income into the hands of these energy companies, and reaps a return in asthma, traffic congestion, war, destruction of communities in places where energy is extracted, reduced economic security in the face of volatile energy prices, and dramatic and unpredictable changes in our climate as well as the ability to heat, light, and power their homes, schools, and workplaces, and drive between them. For families below the poverty line, this portion of their income is more like 15%, and these proportions get still higher if you count the energy costs embodied in the prices of our food and other products. Every day, our communities are pouring these dollars outside, to massive, centralized energy producers. Every day, we’re pouring these dollars towards the problems that are fracturing our communities, attacking our health, threatening or security, and devastating our climate and ultimately our economy.

What if we reversed this flow? What if we poured this vast channel of wealth – over $1 trillion across the United States alone – back into our communities and towards energy solutions that reconnect us with ecology, create bonds between neighbors, and revitalize our economy my cutting our costs and creating jobs building and servicing smart energy systems in our communities. What would this change do for our society? First, it would send a huge pulse of resources and capital back into our communities to improve the efficiency of our homes, upgrade our infrastructure to local smart grids, and help capitalize a massive wave of localized community-owned energy. Second, it would put these resources into local job creation serving local needs, and require people getting together with their friends and neighbors to learn how to make the transition and work together to do it. Finally, it would eviscerate the dirty energy industry by removing its greatest cash flow (which, let’s remember, is not investors or the government, but us, energy users). We could do all this if only we (collectively, individual consumer choice makes little difference) redirected the money we spend on dirty energy and invested in a better energy.

In 2007, I began a journey to figure out how to turn this big concept into a reality. Read on to learn the what, the how, and the why.

In 2007, I started networking with community groups across Minnesota focused on community energy. Minnesota is the national leader in clean energy generation that is owned by cooperatives and other partnerships of local residents, as opposed to big companies. It was also the pioneer in energy auditing and weatherization back in the 1970s, and more recently has passed at the time nation-leading clean energy standards 25% by 2020 plus major energy efficiency goals (1.5% energy savings from a baseline every year for the next 15 years). It was fruitful terrain to work on. I interned with the Neighborhood Energy Connection, which provides energy audits, home energy loans, and other services for improving energy efficiency, trying to figure out if getting residents to work together in a group to insulate their homes would help insulation contractors provide discounts. I worked with other students to get trained as energy auditors by a leader in the field statewide. I started thinking about how to reverse the low rates of adoption that accompany energy efficiency programs – some of the most successful energy audit programs nationwide get 10% implementation of recommendations from the people who receive audits.

In early 2008, I convened a group of energy enthusiasts to start planning Cooperative Energy Futures (CEF), a cooperative that would help communities transition to a clean energy future while creating community ownership and local jobs. We faced many major set-backs – core leaders dropped out at some of the worst times, undermining our legitimacy, many of our outreach efforts ended in lackluster responses, and we kept losing focus among the vast web of efforts (financing, incorporation, team training, community engagement) that we had too coordinate. But slowly, we moved forward. We piloted a group insulation project where seven neighbors got their walls and attics insulated together at a discount from a contractor (Summer of Solutions 2008 helped out). We tested out community mapping tools to map energy use at the community level. We waded through months of legal research and financing options to incorporate CEF as a co-op in early 2009, and pulled together the initial Board that would get us going. In Spring 2009, we secured a seed grant of $5,900 and an angel loan of $5,000, which we have since repaid at 6% interest. Despite slow progress and difficulty building a sustainable team, we slowly built capacity for a budding organization with long-term roots. You should check us out: www.cooperativeenergyfutures.com.

In late 2009, the next main phase of our work began – we started building networks across South Minneapolis, particularly in the Phillips community. Over time, we focused in on this neighborhood as a place to build a stable base. As opposed to mostly white upper-income neighborhoods where we have often been encouraged to start (and did), this area is highly culturally diverse, and low-income. While this means less financial resources are immediately available, it also means that community members are both more individually concerned about high energy costs and in general have stronger communities ties and concerns about economic stability and job access of the neighborhood as a whole. While many existing efficiency organizations have approached efficiency as a non-profit program providing heavily subsidized services, our approach focuses on using efficiency to build community and create economic opportunity. This means that we focus on identifying and building community leadership to champion the approach, ask participants to pay a fair cost for improvements that pay for themselves in under a year, and build communities where people learn skills and help each other, as opposed to having experts come in and install measures on a one-time basis. These subtle changes shift the dynamic from outsiders to insider and from receiving services to proactive behavior change.

Organizing takes time. It took almost a year of networking across the Latino, Somali, African American, Native American, and European American parts of the community before we really started identifying the people and networks who would help champion this idea. We had at least one difficult organizational relationship characterized by misunderstandings and disagreement that lasted over six months. Ideas kept evolving – we went from selling kits to selling products individually, from selling products to offering training with products as the next step, from making sales to broad-based community engagement.

Suddenly, since mid November, things have started clicking. After months of trying, we suddenly started to get people who wanted to join our community engagement and sales team and get compensated on a commission basis off of the sales achieved. We have started to get teams of neighbors eager to sign up for our Power of 10 community energy planning – you bring together 10 neighbors and we work with you to build a team and develop an energy planning process for the neighborhood. We have Somali leaders who want us to run workshops to teach their community how to be energy efficient, Latino businesses seeking energy assessments, and energy auditors newly trained by stimulus funds who can’t find work and want to help the community become efficient. With a new infusion of seed capital, we bought long-term inventory stocks and are on a roll. Our volunteer team grew to 10 dedicated volunteers and 5 interns, and just expanded again with five community leaders ready to build out our community engagement team.

Enter the Hiawatha Transmission Line struggle. Xcel Energy, the electrical utility in the Twin Cities and the 5th largest energy company in the United States, wants to build a 115kV transmission line through the Phillips neighborhood. Since late 2009, community groups and local political leaders have been fighting this line, which was originally proposed to go overhead along the Greenway, a major bike-only corridor that has helped Minneapolis rise to its current title of the most bike friendly city in the county (it beat out Portland in 2010). The struggle has polarized the community, as local businesses have traditionally supported the line because it is supposed to add electrical reliability in an area where grid capacity is stretched thin, while many residents groups have opposed its negative impacts on health, community aesthetics and local economic revitalization.

In 2010, working with State Representative Karen Clark, youth connected with Grand Aspirations worked with community partners to pass legislation requiring a Certificate of Need (a regulatory permit demonstrating that the energy facility is needed) in addition to the Routing Permit process currently in effect for the site. The line had originally not needed a Certificate of Need, because high-voltage transmission lines under 10 miles long are not required to get one. This provision may make sense in rural Minnesota where that 10 mile stretch might effect 30-60 households, but is poor logic in a neighborhood like Phillips with population densities over 8,000 per square mile. The legislation passed, along with funding for an independent study to assess the need for the lines, but funding was stripped from the process by the Governor (Tim Pawlenty, Republican).

During the Summer of 2010, Summer of Solutions participants worked on a two-pronged strategy – build a strong base of relationships in the community and engage leaders to launch Cooperative Energy Futures, and work with the emerging coalition to do some of the now unfunded process of studying alternatives to the transmission line. We were never in a position to be the formal legal interveners, so we focused on the technical and community based end of things to get as much information as possible to support community energy engagement and the process of assessing need in South Minneapolis. This meant learning as much as possible about how urban electrical grids, energy efficiency strategies, clean energy sources, and demand management (shifting energy use from high-use to low-use times of day) could meet the energy needs of South Minneapolis. In the fall, I supported a team of University of Minnesota students in continuing this research, while another team member (Brianna, who also blogs here) developed the GIS skills to start mapping energy demand in the community.

This Fall led to breakthroughs. The Administrative Law Judge reviewing the routing permit recommended that the transmission line be moved from overhead along the Greenway to underground along nearby 28th Street, a change that would dramatically reduce the local health, aesthetic, and economic development impacts. It wouldn’t however, change where South Minneapolis investing its energy dollars – it would still be pumping in high-volume coal and nuclear electricity as opposed to generating energy benefits locally. A further exciting development emerged as the Lake Street Business Council connected with this coalition – while still supportive of the transmission line, this association of hundreds of area businesses has shown strong interest in working cooperatively towards a better energy future that integrates energy efficiency and clean energy as drivers of job creation, community building, and local economic development.

One night in late September, I woke up at 3AM with an idea racing through my head. For an hour and a half, I pondered and jotted down campaign strategies, organizing partners, messaging, and a set of unifying values for what has become Our Power, an emerging community-based campaign focused on residents and businesses uniting for a better energy future across South Minneapolis. The campaign integrates social diffusion and peer-to-peer outreach models influenced by behavioral psychology, Marshall Ganz organizing theories, and the cultural knowledge embedded in the different groups in the area with a direct linkage between outreach and information and action. By connecting the efforts of an emerging coalition to develop a community energy plan with a range of non-profit and for-profit programs (including the growing community organizing and sales team in CEF) that helps people make the switch around where they invest their energy dollars, Our Power seeks to unify the community around what we can agree on – reliable, affordable, clean energy that builds local economic opportunity and community resilience. It can tell the big story of our transition while helping people walk through specific steps.

Our Power bubbled around for a little while, evolved into a campaign plan with discussion with community partners, and has slowly gained traction. Just a few weeks ago, Grand Aspirations secured a local grant ($15,000) to kick-start this campaign by funding youth leader organizing residents and businesses. The coalition of residential and business groups is building deeper trust and shared goals for the long journey ahead. Even Xcel is voicing some support for the general concept.

In January, I’ll be helping launch this campaign in concert with a rapidly growing number of community partners. I’m getting contacted by school teachers, youth organizers, and state representatives out of the blue as the idea starts to spread. Its picking up its own momentum, and that’s the telltale signature of something that is going to work.

The impossible will take a little while. But that’s okay, because an energy democracy is worth the time and effort, and as it grows, it will change the world.

On the basic level, it’s very simple; it’s a call for youth leaders all across the country who are ready to dig down into the grassroots and work with people in their communities to create solutions. We’re looking for leaders who want to plan a summer program next summer that will start, grow, and expand green ventures at the community level that meet the needs of our neighbors (food, housing, transit, energy, jobs), show the world what is possible, and start to out-compete the dirty energy systems that run our world.

You’re in? Just find a friend who agrees and APPLY HERE. Priority deadline midnight 10/24 – just give us a heads up if it will take a bit longer.

Need more background? Check out this video by my co-worker Matt Kazinka, read the background info in the application, or check us out at www.summerofsolutions.org

But really, this is about a lot more than running a cool program next summer. This is  a call about changing the game for our economy, our communities, and our climate.

As solutionaries, we’re calling for our peers, a rising generation that is the largest and most diverse in United States history, to step up to the challenge ahead of us:

Our generation is the hardest hit by the ongoing recession – we are most likely to be unemployed, especially those of us from minority and low-income communities.

Our generation faces the global peak in fossil energy, a dangerous and uncertain climate future, a polarized yet globalized society, and the hard economic times that such moments bring.

Our generation is working in partnership with others to reignite and redefine the traditions of collaboration and innovation that have sustained humanity for thousands of years. We are more likely to see across traditional divides, more interconnected, and more socially-conscious. Through how we choose to create new opportunities and work together across differences, we hold the future in our hands.

For the past few years, the climate movement has followed a predictable narrative about how change will be made. This story got lead out of gasoline and sulfur out of (some) smokestacks, so it does have a track record. Here’s how the story goes: A lot of people get really pissed (in a righteous kind of way) about these big problems. They tell the people in charge that something needs to be done. They get loud enough, and serious enough, and sooner or later the people in charge get the feeling that they’d better solve the problem or they’re going to be in much bigger trouble. So they solve the problem. This is a pretty simple story, but it has been funded to the tune of over a billion dollars over the past few years in the form of electoral and policy advocacy campaigns to get the country to pass bold and comprehensive legislation controlling climate change.

This story if very addictive, since according to it, if you are failing, it just means that the public pressure has not gotten loud enough, serious enough, or threatening enough and we need to try harder. Failure implies that the same approach should be repeated with even more force.

With all due respect to the great people who  have worked so hard to fulfill this story, I think this story is a lie and is leading us astray. In my view the fact that progressive legislators are now on the political defensive and that bold climate action now seems either further away backs up my point. Frames are notoriously addictive, but – my dear climate movement -PLEASE LET THIS STORY GO!

I see at least two key conditions critical to this story making any sense that are demonstrably not the case:

1. There is an effective, known solution to the problem
2. It is clear to the vast majority of people that the problem is important and solving it is in their best interest

On point 1, a lot of people will say they know how to solve the problem – for example specific policies like increasing CAFE standards or passing Renewable Electricity Standards. It’s pretty clear to me that the vast majority of existing approaches are tinkering at the margins and/or bolstering and strengthening underlying infrastructures that support dirty energy. An example is that Renewable Energy Standards of ~30% will prevent the growth of additional fossil energy infrastructure, but on the current energy grid with monopolized utility control, it pretty much ensures that their development will increase reliance on existing dirty energy back-up filling the other 70% or so. In other words, they entrench a system that prevents us from getting to a majority-clean energy grid. I gave this and a number of other examples in my post earlier this year. There are a number of good strategies for transforming all of these systems, but it’s not really clear how they all fit together. I suspect that will take a while.

On point 2, while we may celebrate that now a modest majority of people understand that climate change is real and a bad thing, we have to face the cold hard facts that the vast majority:

• don’t really understand the problem or the solutions,
• see the issue as separate from, much less important than, and in many cases in conflict with more pressing issues such as the economy, and/or
• generally think that doing something about the problem is going to cost them.

Together, these two features of reality stop the conventional story in its tracks. Paralyzing debate over how to solve the problem sets in, muddied by those who don’t want to see it solved at all, and the issue gets swept to the side in the face of more pressing concerns. Whenever it is seen as in conflict with top priorities like economic recovery (opponents of action love to hype up this frame), supporters of climate action get backlash from the voters. In the movement, I’ve been chilled to see the impact this dead-lock has had on our movement – more and more young activists getting burnt out, disillusioned, and moving on to more “realistic” life goals.

Except that the conventional options for our generation are declining.

Here’s another story.

People face adversity because the current ways of meeting our needs (food, energy, housing, transit, jobs, health, etc.) are breaking down, resources seem to be getting scarcer, and even greater future challenges threaten.  People start working together to create new ways (or re-creating old ones) of meeting their needs that out-compete the old strategies (further weakening them) and create opportunity and resources for those that adopt them. These ideas spread, aided by the collaboration and networking of the innovators and collaborators who catalyze them. The solutions get clearer as successful models emerge, and people begin to understand how to address the root causes of the multi-faceted threats facing them. More and more people (and broader cultural, institutional and economic entities) perceive the solution as both vitally important and immediately in their self-interest (helps meet their needs and protects them from the threats of the old model), and start directing their resources and power towards them. As a new political consensus emerges, old markets collapse, new ones emerge, and the political infrastructure to institutionalize the new systems is implemented.

What I have just described is the game plan of the inter-organizational program, the Summer of Solutions and Grand Aspirations, the new, youth-led organization that supports it. We support local leaders build and run programs that help each participant become ready, willing, and able to:

1. Sustain themselves materially, emotionally, etc. through a green career that they shape.
2. Create a ripple effect in sustainable livelihood benefits (income streams, reduced cost of living, improved quality of life, and attractive careers) in their communities.
3. Teach and mentor others to do the same

That’s why you should join in by launching a program in your community (APPLY HERE). From whatever location and with whatever background, affiliations, and experience you bring, we’re excited to work together. Because it’s by innovating together that we make it happen.

People came together in communities across the world to make neighborhoods more efficient, grow food, install renewable energy, plant trees, create bike transit teams, and so much more. In the face of political inaction, a global economy that seems hesitant to go green or to recover, and a climate clock whose ticking is ever more audible in Pakistan’s floods and Russian fires, these people from all across the planet are getting to work and telling the world to do the same.

It’s a start.

Building a green economy is the work of a lifetime. We will not reinvent the electrical grid, rebuild our cities and their transit infrastructure, or renew our food system overnight. Rather than removing urgency, this long time horizon should heighten it while making our movement more thoughtful and strategic. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Now is the absolute latest that we can get started, but it will be a long haul.

How will our generation survive this marathon race to a society that can sustain itself? The job market is slowly slipping, and our generation is the most unemployed, particularly for young people from low-income and minority backgrounds. The economic foundations on which young people have long relied to pay the bills, or drifted back to after the bright-eyed aspirations of youth fade from us are themselves fading. As a generation, we are increasingly finding ourselves with our backs to a wall in an uncertain world.

Its time to get to work.

We need to start growing the green economy so that it can sustain us and others around us. We need to demonstrate through our work that this whole big dream of sustainable communities and green jobs is more than a bunch of talk. We need to rally our communities around a vision that they can see and feel and touch – that is visibly a win-win-win for the planet and the economy and the person down the street or across the world. It’s time to start competing with the dirty energy companies and the highway networks and the food giants to provide better alternatives to meet the basic needs of people from all backgrounds while rebuilding community, revitalizing local economies, and creating a future for ourselves. It’s time to forge new alliances that dream a better future AND create it, transforming the balance of power politically, economically, culturally, and technologically. With that, I have an invitation to one great way to get to work doing those world-changing in conjunction with other cool people doing the same:

Over the past few years, I’ve had the honor of being a part of building an emerging community of leaders who are getting to work by growing the green economy. Since 2008, Grand Aspirations has grown rapidly, supporting youth leaders and partner organizations in running Summer of Solutions programs across the country and sustaining and replicating the innovative strategies they develop throughout the year. These young people are helping communities employ people to farm in urban food deserts, launched community-energy projects, started green industry centers, helped whole neighborhoods work together to find positive ways to cut carbon emissions, and opened access to green jobs and sustainable transit. Several of us met in August to share lessons learned figure out next steps. We know that there is a lot more great work going on out there – we keep hearing about new solutionary ventures across the country and around the world. We’d love to get to work together, because it will take all of us.

So now, we’re inviting youth leaders (14-30) from all walks of life, backgrounds, and organizational affiliations to create and lead a Summer of Solutions program in 2011. These programs focus on making transformative change in close partnership with local communities while creating the sustainable community development models that create jobs and a future for youth leaders and their communities.

Telling us that you want to be a part of it is simple. Find at least one partner-in-solutions and fill out the application! Priority deadline is October 24th at midnight.

APPLY HERE

To get a better understanding of what the Summer of Solutions means and what great work we are trying to achieve together, you can check out the guidelines for a program here. While we’ll provide plenty of support, outside these guidelines the shape and format is pretty much up to you! We’re bottom-up, and while we have some cool insights and resources to help you create the green economy solutions most relevant for your context, we need the genius, passion, and dedication from all the solutionaries out there to create the green economy.

However you decide to do it: get to work.

“…it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer…”

James E. McWilliams “Food that Travels Well” The New York Times August 6, 2007

Say what? I thought better of you, NYT. While McWilliams does raise some valid points, this mentality falls short in two major ways. His assumptions mirror outlooks about sustainability I have often encountered which also apply to clothing, building practices, transportation and more. Good thing there are Solutionaries on the case.

One projection of peak oil from energyinsights.net

1) This view doesn’t look far enough back. Transportation of food over long distances is a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things. There was a time when everyone ate food that was more or less local. Then refrigerated transportation happened, and the industrial revolution and agri-business squeezing out small farmers and before you know it, local is a novelty. This all happened in the course of a century or two. Is inertia so strong we can’t get back to this way of living? Judging from past moments in history, such as WWII when many Americans started Victory gardens, I beg to differ.

2) It doesn’t look far enough ahead. Oil is what fuels our transportation system and alternatives like corn ethanol aren’t looking so hot. Oil is running out, and fast. Since 1968, the world has been using more oil than it has discovered. Just this month after a cabinet meeting, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah answered a Zawya Dow Jones Newswires reporter’s question: “I told them [the cabinet] that I have ordered a halt to all oil explorations so part of this wealth is left for our sons and successors, God willing.”[1]

McWilliams doesn’t think about all the subsidies that have made oranges and coffee beans in New York City cheaper than swiss chard from a Hudson Valley farmer. The subsidies and the artificially suppressed cost of gas for transportation all create a false sense of economy in far-flung production. When the U.S. starts paying an arm and a leg for the last dregs of oil fields, local won’t look so much like a “choice”.

A big part of being solutionary to me is a type of long-term thinking that McWilliams sorely lacks. I’m not just in this for my generation. If I were, I might focus on R & D of energy resource extraction. And I’m not just in it for my kid’s generation. I’m in it to figure out a way that humans can co-exist on this earth alongside all the other species we haven’t wiped out yet, indefinitely. This takes looking way back in the past before looking too far into the future. Humans have lived without fossil fuels for all of our history except the tiny blip of the last two centuries. I’m not saying we have to go back to the Stone Age, just that the Earth can support a human population that doesn’t suck it dry.

One of my neighbors kept apples and potatoes all through last winter in her basement, no fossil fuels required. Local apples in a Minnesota February; it can be done, no science degree required. I’ve spun and knitted wool from Maryland sheep into hats and mittens that never left their state of origin in production or use. I joined St Paul high school youth, the Lily Springs Farm crew and other Solutionaries working on a natural fence in Wisconsin this past weekend. Just pine trees, brush and some hard labor will keep rabbits out of the crops. Summer of Solutions is helping Sibley Bike Depot get bikes to people so they can get around without fossil fuels.

Natural building at Lily Springs Farm

And what’s so beautiful to me is these changes feel like anything but sacrifices. It’s taking our future out of the hands of corporations, institutions and bureaucrats and into our own hands. To me, being Solutionary means transforming the world so my life is more prosperous than it ever could be in our current, broken and unjust system.