(Cross-posted from Its 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, there was PowerShift 2009, with 12,000 young people convening in Washington DC and continuing the effort in their local states to call for bold climate policy. And now …
As the youth climate movement forges ahead to deliver on its major short-term 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 of communities. In this struggle, we must slowly wresting control of the economy from the fossil fuels that have run our society and putting it in the hands of millions of local innovators around the world who are harnessing the power of the wind, sun, and landscape to sustain their lives and their local economies. We must figure out how to make our buildings more efficient, our urban planning smarter, our agriculture sustainable, our grid system renewable, and our industries green. This is the epic economic, political, and social project, at least of our generation and probably of more to come – it will take decades, is global in scope, and must be participatory and people-supporting both if it is to be fair but also if it is to succeed.
Let’s be frank: as a movement, 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 it will be done. More news: our political leaders, scientists, and economists don’t really know what to do either. We are embarking on a societal process of figuring out how to create this new future, and as a warning, much of the planning is being done by those (supporters of “clean coal”, nuclear, tar sands suburban sprawl, agri-business, central station transmission, etc.) who prefer solutions that will lead us to dead ends.
If you want to spend your summer building your capacity and career as a creative leader helping develop the solutions we need to see, please join us for the Summer of Solutions. In 2008, we piloted a program in St. Paul Minnesota with 25 participants, and 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 structures for action that can sustain themselves over time. Program planners at each local area are forming existing projects, but participants are also invited to help create new ones through the 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:
- Develop model projects that are “solutionary” – they integrate climate and energy solutions, economic revitalization, and community building, create the resources needed for their own emergence, and can be replicated broadly.
- Build a growing “community of practice” with the skills and mind-set that prepare themselves to launch and build solutionary initiatives in their own communities while supporting others in the process.
- Foster their careers by honing their interests, 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 model 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 experiment and build your skills as a grassroots innovator of the green economy leader, please apply to join us:
Regardless of whether you are personally available, please spread the word!
The true power of the Summer of Solutions is in its atmosphere and method. Part of it is just the incredible can-do attitude that drives our work, and increasingly builds legitimacy among local governments, business partners, and labor leaders. We are a national initaitive 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 big bruising advocacy fights between grassroots power and big money. The solutionary approach does contest big power systems – in fact more systematically than a purely advocacy approach – but it does so quietly, through creating solutions that benefit the participants and invite other actors (whether community partners, labor, small business, faith groups, farmers, governments, or corporations to join in in doing things differently). My friend Tyler Magnuson (an activist from Omaha Nebraska going to school in Evergreen Washington) 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 fighting fire with water (instead of with more fire), or maybe like 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 1 of involvement, when you start considering how you could be involved in the program. One of the most regular questions I get about the program is whether the program costs money, is volunteer, or they get paid for it. It’s an understandable question in a program where you are both working for two months and getting intensive, practice-based training to build your career as a green economy leader.
We start with a different question: what do 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) – its sort of like collaborating with other youth leaders to create your own summer job. Those of us on the national and local teams are working intensively to secure funding for stipends, but particularly in today’s tight funding climate, we won’t be able to cover everyone alone. 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 we do manage to secure.
I think we’re used to having the way forward be clear cut and simple, with the way forward clearly laid out 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. Figuring out how to piece together financial support for your dreams is a valuable skill, particularly in the tight job market of a falling economy – it’s just the start of the solutionary process. The programs themselves explore how we can make sweeping change in an entrepreneurial manner, sustaining ourselves through the process.
If we can’t support ourselves through our activism, our vision for the world isn’t very sustainable. Let’s create some solutions.
