Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The savings groups they nurture are encouraged to federate, enabling them to have more influence over city and national governments in ways that are grounded in real experience. Members survey, map and profile their neighbourhoods, turning invisible challenges into concrete evidence and locally-proposed solutions.
[Jamies’] paper suggested that growing up in poverty can result in decrements in attentional processes, working memory, and a measurably smaller hippocampus. In an exploration as to the reasons why, as a culture, we might be less able to constructively imagine the future, Jamie felt like an important person to talk to.
“The reason I started off with that little prelude,” he told the Neighborhood Funders Group Conference attendees, “is that I wanted to say that what has not changed is the vision of that new society, that new way of thinking. That new way of engineering and governing a society, where everyone would be treated with dignity. Where there would be no class, no gender, or color discrimination. Even though it didn’t happen in that little community which we called El Malik, now it’s about to happen in Jackson, Mississippi. And would you believe it?”
This three-story, six-apartment residence is one of three buildings in Chicago that provides affordable, intergenerational housing to 90 elders and the young people and families who live with them. Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly – H.O.M.E. – has been rooted in the city for 35 years, and as their executive director Bruce Otto told the Chicago Tribune, “We haven’t been able to find anybody that does exactly what we’re doing.”
Incipient anti-fascist coalitions hold the potential to call a new politics into existence in the United States. Socialist municipalism could be a means for both resisting the far right as well as articulating a libertarian socialist alternative. While there is much to critique in Bookchin — even from a municipalist angle — the basic guiding principles hold.
Graham takes heart that experts are “starting to piece together data showing that regenerative agriculture is the solution,” pointing to research out of Iowa State University in particular. But Graham and his friends are well-aware that convincing studies and inspiring success stories like Del’s aren’t enough—not with Big Ag’s stranglehold on the market, and the death of local infrastructure (independent grocery stores, small butcher shops, community institutions) that once allowed small farmers to thrive. We need to revolutionize food production and distribution from the ground up.
This short-term thinking is what the child in each of us wants. This unevolved part of us just wants our reward, would rather not share any of the rewards, would really rather not be responsible, and would rather not make the effort to responsibly deal with other people (or other beings like animals). Although we don’t like to admit it, there really is a child within each of us.
Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA), a nonprofit, multi-issue, grassroots organization has earned international acclaim for giving parents leadership roles in schools since 1995. Their Parent Mentors start out assisting in the classroom, and go on to design full-service community schools, offering adult education, childcare, and afterschool classes, reviving a simple principle that we too often forget: schools belong to families.
The state started to get serious about cleaning up nitrates a decade ago. It is now working with growers to stop new pollution and is considering how it might clean up old contamination. But it’s costly to clean an entire aquifer, and even extraordinary efforts would take several decades to pay off. So the state is also focused on funding interim local solutions to supply people with safe drinking water.
The first-ever report card on walking and walkable communities was announced at the Summit, underscoring the importance of the emerging walking movement. The United States as a whole gets a failing grade in the following subjects: 1) pedestrian safety; 2) pedestrian infrastructure; 3) walking opportunities for children; 4) business and non-profit sector policies; and 5) public transportation, which is a key factor in walkable communities. We earned a D for public policies promoting walking, and a C in walking opportunities for adults.
What can be done to protect this forest and improve the life of this community that is so marginalized by public power? With this question in mind, the ecologist Hélio Vanderlei founded the socio-environmental NGO Onda Verde (“Green Wave”) in 1994. “When I started the NGO, I thought: I have to go to Tinguá to protect the rainforest. There are 25,000 hectares there that produce 170 million liters of water per day,” he says.
Humans haven’t always been ignorant of how our world and our civilization worked. I was intrigued by this image of a church in Houston Texas recently flooded during Hurricane Harvey. The picture above is of the old First Baptist Church of Orange, Texas completed and dedicated on September 14, 1915. What I found striking about this picture was the main floor was well above the flooding from Hurricane Harvey because it was built well above flood levels.
