It Takes a Gang to Raise a Community
Grist recently featured Democracy Collaborative co-founder Ted Howard as part of The Change Gang series that presents profiles of people who are leading the way to a more sustainable society and planet through practical solutions. The Evergreen Cooperatives is highlighted as it provides an opportunity for the low-income communities of Cleveland, Ohio to take part in the environmental movement, but more importantly by taking ownership of their workplace. Howard thinks of Evergreen “not as a job creation or a cooperative strategy, but as really an exercise in community building and strengthening democratic life at the ground level where people live. It’s also an attempt to stabilize a community that has been radically disinvested over the last 20 or 30 years by globalization and capital mobility and jobs offshoring and so forth.”
Included in this series are several other great leaders of sustainable change.
Navina Khanna organized the Food and Freedom Ride to advocate a Slow Food grassroots movement where “food justice” aims to produce food in an ecologically-responsible method, such as urban agriculture, and simultaneously revitalize the communities of the farm workers. Similar to Ford Motor Company’s policy of paying its workers a wage high enough to afford the cars they were assembling, “if the 20 million people in the food chain all were paid well, that would probably revitalize our economy ... and people would actually be able to afford good food.”
Consulting Director of Preservation Green Lab, Liz Dunn mentions that it is better to retrofit old “crappy-looking” buildings instead of tearing them down because “you don’t just tear down an old neighborhood to build a new one. That’s just insane.” It is insane because, according to the Preservation Green Lab, over 40% of carbon emissions are caused by the construction and operation of buildings. More importantly, these old and historic buildings and neighborhoods are retrofitted to “simultaneously promote economic development and social equity while remaining environmentally sustainable” and adding even more to the community by creating green collar jobs.
Rue Mapp founded Outdoor Afro, a community organization based in Oakland, California that “reconnects African-Americans with natural spaces and one another through recreational activities.” While “living in an urban setting means that any serious engagement with the outdoors has to be ‘very intentional,’” Outdoor Afro helps African-Americans in low-income urban neighborhoods engage in affordable and local outdoor activities such as camping, hiking, biking, birding, fishing, gardening, and skiing. One recent event included about a dozen Outdoor Afro members kayaking in an hour-long adventure on Lake Merritt, a local lake in Oakland, as a post-Thanksgiving workout.
These are only three of a growing list of Grist’s Change Gang series leading the way to a more sustainable planet using various approaches. An overarching theme in this series points to the importance of building and fostering a community that can be productive and responsible.
Posted by benzamin on 12/11/2011 at 11:58 AM
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