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Earth Day, from sea to sea

Tomorrow is Earth Day, and we have examples of communities working to save the environment from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, hundreds of people turned out Saturday for the city's first Sustainability Fair, an idea that grew out of the Portsmouth Listens program, which for years has used study circles (large-scale, action-oriented dialogues) to address important local issues. The fair featured hands-on activities like pond cleanups, a sustainability scavenger hunt, and vendors selling everything from organic food to worms for composting. From the Portsmouth Herald:

Bert Cohen, a UNH professor on sustainability and co-founder of Piscataqua Sustainability Initiative, started the fair with opening remarks on the importance of a "systems approach" to sustainability, where it is infused in everything that the community does.

The phrase "change happens one person at time" might be true, he said, but to address an imminent threat such as global warming will require more than one person at a time.

"That's probably not the way it's going to happen," he said. "It's going to be a network of people who bring everyone together to create change. That's what we're doing this morning."

Read more about the Portsmouth fair here, and see a profile of Bert Cohen here.

Meanwhile, in Port Townsend, Washington, study circles on climate change led to a climate action lab where participants decided to focus on cutting greenhouse gases from motor vehicles, since every gallon of gas adds more than a pound of air pollution to our skies. From the Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader:

The question asked at the first action lab meeting was, "How do we get people out of their vehicles?" recalled Anne Bishop, one of the participants.

"We were bouncing ideas off of each other," she said. "It was a fun evening." They discussed creating street theater, encouraging people to ride the bus, proposing stories to the paper, and even changing parking requirements in the city and county building codes.

Anne's husband, Dan, said that increasing ridership on the buses is "probably the easiest important thing that can be done in the short term."

Read more here, and check out the Seattle-based group 2People.org, which helped Port Townsend organize its dialogues. (Seattle also is home to one of the best transit blogs anywhere, the Seattle Bus Chick. For a transit blog near you, click here.) Watch for more Earth Day news tomorrow, and have a look at Everyday Democracy's resources for holding action-oriented community conversations about growth and sprawl.

Making headway on health care

The economy is on everyone's minds these days. The faltering housing market has the spotlight, but the soaring cost of health care is another burden that American families and small businesses can barely shoulder. Members of the Cedars Unitarian Universalist Church on Bainbridge Island (near Seattle) met earlier this month to launch a round of study circles on “The Moral Imperative of Health Care."

Organizer Barbara Clarke, who formerly worked in managed care, told the Bainbridge Island Review that the debate has started moving beyond whether health care is a right or a privilege. “When you see that women with breast cancer and no insurance have a 40 percent less chance of surviving, that’s moral," she said. "When you see a mother who can’t take her children to the doctor, that’s moral.”

Meanwhile, syndicated columnist David Sirota writes about how the state legislatures in Washington and Wisconsin are considering legislation to extend health care to every citizen in those states. "The plan is simple," he says. "Employers and employees pay a modest payroll tax in exchange for full medical benefits, with no premiums. Patients never lose coverage and pick the doctors they prefer. And for the spendthrifts, here's the best part: According to an analysis of the Wisconsin proposal by the nonpartisan Lewin Group, the plan would save middle-class families an annual average of $750 on their existing health care bills. In all, the state would save almost $14 billion over the next decade." Read the whole column here.

Friday digest-open thread 1/11/08

So it looks like we may finally get the real national conversation on race that many Americans have been seeking for decades. In the wake of Barack Obama's rise as the first African-American presidential candidate to win the Iowa Caucus, news reports, blogs, and coffee shops are abuzz with his success and what it might mean for broader racial - and perhaps generational - politics in our nation. But in an essay in the current issue of Newsweek, Ellis Cose writes:

All the celebrating notwithstanding, Obama is still a long way from wrapping up the nomination, much less the election. For all his allusions to harmony and change, he has not yet demonstrated that we have ceased to be "a collection of Red States and Blue States," as he put it, but are one, united America. Indeed, in the end, the messages of change and unity may find themselves in conflict. For as beautiful as the dream of one America may be, the reality is of a country where income disparities are growing, not narrowing, and where the very privileged have less and less in common with those who are constantly struggling. Two generations after the major rights were fought and won, we are still a nation whose inner cities and barrios are full of people with no real sense of a better tomorrow. In an era when incarceration is seen, in certain neighborhoods, as the nearly inevitable fate of young men, talk of one, united, bighearted America can seem like something of a joke. Their problems will not be solved, nor their outlook notably changed, simply because America elects a new president—even one who is young, attractive, black and runs on a platform of national unity.

Against this backdrop of hope mixed with realism, the Study Circles Resource Center - soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy - is pleased to announce a new  Communities Creating Racial Equity initiative. As seen on the SCRC website, eight communities will embark with us on a process "aimed at helping communities create and sustain public engagement and community change on issues around racial equity." The communities include Stratford, Connecticut; Syracuse, New York; Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland; Lynchburg, Virginia; Burlington, Vermont; Jacksonville, Florida; Sacramento, California; and New Haven, Connecticut. Read more here.

Meanwhile, back on the campaign beat, Rich Harwood of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation has advice for all the presidential candidates:

Now, the presidential candidates have discovered that "hope" is the coin of realm and that "change" is required. Campaigns have a way of dressing up ideas, proposals, and new directions in language and packaging that can appear to be citizen-centered and community-driven, but in reality remain very much about Washington and politicians and policies that touch the edges of change. But such words, and even the deeds that may follow, will only transform America if we're called upon to step forward to bring about new conditions in our communities, to tackle tough issues such as entitlements, or to pursue policy initiatives that inevitably will require serious trade-offs and sacrifices.

Read more here, and also consider downloading a print or audio copy of Rich's new essay, Make Hope Real.

In other news:

The community of Cortlandt, New York, is forming a diversity task force and plans community dialogues and outreach programs following a cross-burning at the home of a black family last November. Organizer the Rev. Adolphus Lacey of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in nearby Peekskill told the local media that the cross-burning "revealed an underbelly of underlying intolerance we want to deal with."

Climate dialogues have been launched in Port Townsend, Washington, and in other Puget Sound-area communities. Phil Mitchell, director of the Greater Seattle Climate Dialogues, describes the dialogues as "a grassroots, science-based process that aims to bring the whole community into this crucial conversation."

UU Allies for Racial Equity, building an anti-racism movement among Unitarian Universalists, will hold their annual conference February 1-3 in Memphis, Tennessee. The multigenerational gathering is for whites who share a goal of learning to work to end racism and being allies to people of color. Click here for more info and registration details.

Please add your comments on these stories below. And if you have a news tip or see a timely piece of commentary for the weekly digest, email it to us with the relevant links.

Blogging to end poverty

At least five communities involved in the Horizons program - a partnership between the Northwest Area Foundation, the Study Circles Resource Center, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, and university extension programs and tribal colleges across the Upper Midwest and Northwest - have launched blogs to spread the news about citizens' grassroots leadership efforts to spur economic development and reduce poverty. The communities include Colville, Skamokawa, Mossyrock Area, Springdale, Washington state, and Eveleth, Minnesota. Through words, photos, and even music, the bloggers offer local residents and visitors glimpses of what makes each community unique - from Shorty (above), guardian of the Skamokawa Post Office, to the Mad Hatters of Springdale.

Horizons aims to provide leadership skills to people in communities of fewer than 5,000 people. Study circles were held in 163 communities, including 52 on or near sovereign Indian Nations. Ten thousand people took part - 6,000 over projections - and nearly 2,000 were trained to lead community dialogues on poverty. In addition to the blogs, action items taken by communities include establishing local open-air markets, youth activity centers, community clean-ups, promoting affordable housing, and many more.

Would you like to start a blog for your own study circles program? You can have one up and running - for free -  in mere minutes. Contact SCRC online organizer Julie Fanselow to learn how.