Photo: Stock Exchange/Potato Peels

Composting is an obvious and inexpensive technique that would improve our soil and food quality while keeping rotting food out of landfills. Constructing vegetable bins on parking lots or vacant lots and using the rich compost as organic soil would be a win for everyone.

Putting a compost bin on every corner and educating people about what goes go in, and what must be kept out (meat, dairy and oil), would dramatically reduce the volume, and improve the quality, of our landfills. Wouldn’t keeping landfills free of rotting food be a huge improvement?

Landlords could get a tax break for allowing vegetable beds to be placed on empty lots. Take what you need and leave some for others. If a crop is at its end, take it all as a tacit agreement would be important for this to work well. This is merely a shift, maybe a radical one, but not rocket science. If the owner has an opportunity to sell the property, vegetable beds cannot stand in the way. In the meantime, with twenty-one percent of households with children—yes, twenty-one percent!—hungry and malnourished, what is the logic in lots sitting vacant?

For more info: New Community Vision is working to spawn a movement to think about our social and housing paradigms in a new context. Community gatherings to address our universal challenges are the fertile soil in which durable solutions take root. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.

Urban Scene

Traffic moves, buses run. Buildings, except for the abandoned businesses, look pretty much the same. Grocery stores are loaded with food that is colorfully packaged but synthetic and devoid of nutrients. On my route anyway, if you visited from outer space five years ago and again this week, things look pretty much the same. Scratch the surface however and you find a country bleeding from internal injuries.

Meeting in Davos, Switzerland last week the worlds’ financial titans acknowledged that “trust in governments, corporations and above all banks” [has evaporated] … Over the first four days of mostly closed-door meetings at the World Economic Forum, bankers, central bankers and politicians reached no consensus on the best way forward to regulate markets or banks… Commenting on whether private equity companies would support an Obama administration proposal on bank regulation, David M. Rubenstein, managing director of the buyout firm Carlyle Group, quipped, “Our position is unsure because we’re afraid if we come out in favor, it won’t pass.”

The wizards orchestrating the world’s economies have no idea what it will take to restore confidence, but that’s OK. Lots of other people do. The fresh ideas are coming from the grass roots. Mindful Metropolis reports that in the historically troubled Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, Alderman Helen Shiller wants to convert the Salvation Army building at Sunnyside and Broadway into an urban farm growing organic produce and tilapia modeled upon Growing Power, Will Allen’s Milwaukee-based enterprise. Growing Power

transforms communities by supporting people from diverse backgrounds and the environments in which they live through the development of Community Food Systems.  These systems provide high-quality, safe, healthy, affordable food for all residents in the community. Growing Power develops Community Food Centers, as a key component of Community Food Systems, through training, active demonstration, outreach, and technical assistance.

Will Allen, our Chief Executive Officer believes, “If people can grow safe, healthy, affordable food, if they have access to land and clean water, this is transformative on every level in a community.  I believe we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system.”

As unbelievable as it seems, the economy could get even scarier than this. The only sane way through this is together. We are awash in idle capacity-talented people of every possible skill and vocation, vacant store fronts and buildings, abandoned property. Grass roots movements, working to correct the imbalances with innovative ideas and energy, are leading the way out of this wreck.

For more info: New Community Vision is working to inform and educate the public about housing alternatives that are affordable, sustainable and engender a community experience that includes healthy inter-dependence and support. Housing models that meet these criteria include cooperatives, cohousing and shared housing. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.

photo credit: urban scene

American classic - the diner

The entire country seems to be having a deer in headlights moment: stunned with fear. With our social fabric rent to shreds, if there ever was a time for a new model, this is it. Cooperative community diners pose an elegant solution that may solve myriad problems on many levels. The diners of my youth and the movies are places where the customers and the employees know each other with easy familiarity. That would replace the uneasy mistrust that is so prevalent now.

Cooperatives are businesses that are owned, managed and governed by its members.  Earlier this year, the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives completed the first phase of research on the economic impact of cooperatives that revealed stunning statistics:

Nearly 30,000 U.S. cooperatives operate at 73,000 places of business throughout the U.S. These cooperatives own >$3T in assets, and generate >$500B in revenue and >$25B in wages. Extrapolating from the sample to the entire population, the study estimates that cooperatives account for nearly $654B in revenue, >2M jobs, $75B in wages and benefits paid, and a total of $133.5B in value-added income.

Americans hold 350M memberships in cooperatives which generate nearly $79B in total impact from patronage refunds and dividends. Nearly 340M of these memberships are in consumer cooperatives.

Our culture is so unbalanced, it is surprising that we don’t tip over. Cooperatives have tremendous potential, is an ideal model for this historic moment, and is finally getting the respect it deserves.  For one thing, it requires a dedicated group of people putting forth a concerted effort toward a big and worthy goal. That’s good exercise, right? It would also distribute the tasks so that, hopefully, no one gets burned out. It would fill genuine, unmet needs while creating jobs.

These are just some of the skills required to create and launch a cooperative diner: marketing mavens, grant and marketing writers, web and graphic designers,PR pros, computer experts, accountants, managers, real estate pros, lawyers, building trades men and women, architects and space designers. The skills required to keep a healthy diner running are: food service workers, marketing people, HR professionals, managers, bookkeepers, accountants, food purveyors, and more.

A community diner would be the place to go for a nourishing meal at an affordable price. Designed to benefit the community, it could have a quiet area for children to do homework after school and be tutored by teenagers, seniors or anyone in between. When parents come to pick their children up up after work, they could sit down to an affordable meal and go home with dinner, dishes and homework out of the way. With many people contributing to a child’s education, report card day could be a special celebration.

How do we pay for this you say? As the saying goes, you can pay me now or you can pay me later. We are paying a very high price for our deteriorating social fabric. The root causes of dysfunction – stretched families, poor nutrition, children with too little parental and community involvement spend too much time alone and too much time unsupervised. And then we end up with gang affiliation, teen pregnancy, obesity, abysmal school performance, which deteriorates further into violence . The effect is a circular spiral downward.

If we start with the simple concept of neighborhood diners that serve simple, nourishing food (even if it’s primarily beans and rice), at a price that is as affordable as possible, we can nourish our community both with food and with friendliness – neighbors caring for and about each other.

So pay me now or pay me later. We are paying the price one way or another. The money exists. Figuring out how to get the resources to fund projects such as these can help tremendously. Since every neighborhood in the country could benefit from a diner, the impact could be significant. Brainstorming ideas has several cooperative food service concepts that could nourish us in many ways and on many levels.

For more info: New Community Vision is committed to the notion that cooperative community diners, friendly, safe and affordable places to to meet, eat and mingle with your neighbors, have the potential to anchor a neighborhood and provide the the social lubricant of camaraderie. They could also create jobs and provide nourishing food.  Please contact us to cook up some diner action in your neighborhood. Comments are welcome.

The smart money may be buying shares in junk food companies, knowing that this recession will be with us for a good long time. The smart people, however, are driving the movement for organic and locally grown food.

Michael Pollan’s Open Letter to President-elect Obama brilliantly lays out the connection between health care, energy policy and climate change.

… The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken..

In the midst of the grim news, there are many signs of hope including the urban gardening movement.