Project Team Community Gardening

Welcome to the Community Gardening Team. Your first task is to get to know community gardening, and a few community gardens in Ithaca. You can get to know community gardening by listening/watching/reading the below backgrounders. You can get to know Ithaca Community Gardens by visiting their website. The second garden information is as follows :

People's Garden Project - (First Baptized Church of Christ, 412 1st st., Northside)

Jhakeem Haltom haltomj at gjr dot tstboces dot org 342-5323

Pastor Ronald Benson

Your Community Gardening Backgrounders are found at the following websites:

Machetes and Marigolds

American Community Garden Association
(scroll down to videos section)

Your resources for "ground-truthing" on Thurs the 6th will be found at the following websites:

Garden Mosaics Neighborhood Exploration

Garden Mosaics Garden Inventory

Read the instructions, download the forms, get photos, etc in advance of Thurs!! Remember, you are responsible for taking initiative-take the ball and run with it!

Success, is it possible?- Chapter 11

During class on Tuesday I was thinking about how to gauge if any sustainable practices actually work. It sounds like an easy question, but how do you really know if you and your community were successful in attempting to create a sustainable community? I sought answers in chapter 11 only to discover that gauging success is incredibly difficult.

Hallsmith begins the chapter explaining that humans are great at problem solving through specially designed programs. She then says the pitfall of this is that people tend to end up caring more about if the program goes as according to plan than if the program actually achieves its purpose. The sight of the big picture is often lost. This is one of three problems that Hallsmith acknowledges in evaluating success. She describes it as the lack of a holistic approach. In an example, Hallsmith discusses this problem as a “vicious cycle” of “grow grow grow”. It is very difficult to know when to step back and analyze the progress based on the original objective.

Another difficulty in gauging success is the tendency to judge the progress of a program based on activities rather than results. Most sustainable programs do not have the resources to get the information that will tell them the impact they had on their surrounding environment. Hallsmith calls this “the activity trap” when progress is gauged based on secondary measures such as amount of people trained in sustainable living or the number of energy efficient materials that were installed in the lifetime of the program. Although this may be a decent subjective indicator of the success of a program, there is no guarantee that these activities actually had any affect on the planet’s natural systems. In an account about a California based group called Common Ground the success was measured based on the semi-celebrities that attended an event… no way to gauge actual environmental impact.

One of the most risky aspects of beginning a sustainability program is the repercussions it may have on externalities. Some programs may be deemed successful as they had “solved” the problem at hand, but in the process of solving this problem new ones were created. Can an instance such as this really be considered a “success”?

This is why “indicators” are the best gauge as to the success of a program. These indicators are based on natural phenomena; for example, how an ecosystem is doing based on the number of salmon swimming upstream. In a concluding statement, Hallsmith writes that “Ultimately, the success of efforts to improve sustainability in communities will be evaluated based on whether or not all the human needs are satisfied…” In other words, it is virtually impossible to claim a sustainability program is entirely successful.

Modest Systems Reading Assignment: Chapter 1

Chapter Summary: In Chapter 1 of The Key to Sustainable Cities, Gwendolyn Hallsmith argues that all government is local. Individual people at the local, grassroots level initiate the political and social changes that occur in national government. Thus, the larger government institutions are simply byproducts of the efforts made by involved and engaged citizens. These individual community members act out of a necessity to fulfill their basic human needs. When the local systems, fail to meet their needs they in turn seek to change the system. As a result, their needs have become the impetus for the creation of more complex and, in most cases, less sustainable systems. In this chapter, Hallsmith introduces and describes the difference between sustainable local systems and unsustainable local systems by contrasting two cities: Randolph, Vermont and Naryn, Kyrgyzstan. In her contrast, Hallsmith explains that Randolph, the sustainable city, has a bustling city center, developed western cultural identity, growing economy, local citizen participation, and a democratic political system. As a result, this local urban system is effectively meeting the needs of its citizens. On the other hand, Naryn, which lacks all of the above stated characteristics of a sustainable system, is not meeting the needs of its citizens.

New Learning: In this chapter, Hallsmith gives readers a very vague idea of what a sustainable city looks like. In her vision, which Randolph seems to exemplify, citizens’ active, informed and engaged participation in local government is essential to creating sustainable cities. This link between citizen participation and sustainable cities is quite interesting considering that at the beginning of the chapter she suggests that it is citizens’ actions in response to their growing needs that propels the development of these unsustainable systems. Nevertheless, it seems that she also suggests that cities like Randolph are using citizen participation as a strategy for establishing sustainable systems. Unlike the citizens of Naryn, the citizens of Randolph had a voice in local government that was not only listened to, but also taken very seriously. Hallsmith’s ideas about citizen participation are extremely relevant and can be incorporated into our work as students and professionals.
Quite remarkably, Hallsmith brings light to the circular nature of society, communities, and systems. It is individual need that sparks development of more complex and often unsustainable systems. Once these more complex systems begin to negatively affect individuals, they will again act out of necessity; the need to create more sustainable systems. By giving citizens the space to act out their natural roles in these systems governments can do their part in working toward sustainability.

Challenges of change

Key Points:
- Change is not static, it is an ongoing metamorphoses.
- In order for change to be effective those effected by the change must be involved in developing it.
- There are different players in change: Innovators, change agents/ opinion leaders, trendsetters, conservatives/mainstreamers, reactionaries, and curmudgeons. Each plays a different role in the change process, whether it be by enabling or inhibiting it.
- Conflict is an inevitable part of the process to create change, a facilitator needs to anticipate this instead of fear and deny conflict.

The idea that was most important to me during this chapter was the idea of involving community members in the process of change. This fits in to the question of how do we get people to grasp an idea or complete change in thinking. Hallsmith settles this problem by explaining that change is gradual. Ideally one should not have to get people to except an idea but come up with it themselves. In this way people will no longer see it as an outsider coming in to create change but as actions coming from within the community. This can be done through a group process, although this can decrease our ultimate vision more will be accomplished.


Despite Hallsmith’s urges to include the community some of her methods seem to include the community members in a false manner. She describes reactionaries and curmudgeons as those against change, portraying them in a negative light. Viewing them as such would seem to lead to more conflict as these members of the community will feel they are not listened to. Additionally Hallsmith portrays conflict as a completely negative experience, ignoring the fact that often creativity and understanding can come out of the “storming” phase.

Hallsmith - "short" blog: Ch. 5 Celebrating Assets and Creating a Vision

Summary:
In Chapter 5: Celebrating Assets and Creating a Vision, Hallsmith outlines the initial steps in the process of creating sustainable systems in a community. The three main strategies she suggests are (1) community participatory planning, (2) taking a community asset inventory, and (3) determining a shared vision.

A community participatory approach often involves including stakeholder groups in planning meetings. The idea is that people are more likely to embrace change when they take place in choosing the changes that need to happen.

The community asset inventory approach is expressed as an alternative to a problem-centered approach. Hallsmith encourages an identification and celebration of the best experiences that already exist. She recommends mapping the assets in reference to the corresponding needs that are being met. A mapping should then reveal the areas that need improvement and gaps that exist.

Creating a shared vision is the final step in this preliminary planning process. Collective goals are expressed and combined to create a consensus on where the community wants to go. Hallsmith mentions The Earth Charter – a Vision statement for the world.

Application – Case example:
Over the summer I worked on a project proposal to create an inventory of obesity prevention programs across the nation. This was an asset-based approach; to see what services were provided by each program and examine what impact the programs could have if they formed partnerships in their communities.

Criticism/questions:
Hallsmith talks about mapping the system of assets to provide a visual representation of what needs aren’t being met adequately or at all. This sounds like it could be very effective, but I have a hard time picturing what it would look like, especially with more than one factor (i.e.; water AND transportation on the same map?) An illustration would have been extremely helpful here.

Hallsmith recommends that each part of the community be represented. She asks “Why do citizens get involved with local decision making? Why do they not?” but she doesn’t really answer this – There is an underlying assumption that there will be volunteers from each part of the community to participate in the planning process. The people who are less inclined to participate may be hesitant based on something related to a lacking asset – and so are ironically the very people who should be there – and the question should be “is it possible to involve the quieter, less assertive voices of the community?”.

Sustainible Cities -Assignment 1

Hi everyone! I just recently joined the class, so here is my first assignment.

-Greg

(a) It seems that Hallsmith has the concept of community as one overlying theme which is comprised of social, economic and political factors. Each plays a role as a key concept in the reading. These factors interact in a web-like fashion all affecting one another in a particular hierarchy: the social goals drive economic goals which in turn drive political goals. The sustainable community is discussed in terms of how each facet of communal living is connected with each other in convoluted ways. It is the relationships between these concepts that drive the possibility of sustainable living. In certain ways, the very definition of a community makes one sustainable. Communities are systems or organizations that are built in order to nurture success and positive growth. Examples Hallsmith gives of community social needs include “peace, health care, lifelong learning, meaningful relationships, a sense of belonging, self-expression, self-esteem, beauty and spiritual life”. To achieve many of these goals there requires an economic need – money. Hallsmith says economic security can be achieved when people pursue their “creativity and natural productivity” which can be sustained by the natural world. It is the political responsibility to foster this sustainable atmosphere. Together these all make up the community.

(b) This reading was very relevant to our course in an interesting way. Our course is essentially the political aspect of a community that was such a key concept to Hallsmith. The political part was what essentially helps drive the community. The class was built to embrace the social needs of the students by encouraging self-expression and meaningful relationships. “Economic security” is achievable as we have the ability to be creative and naturally productive in class and the class itself is the organizational factor that helps to solidify the community. Our course is essentially defined by the key concepts of Hallsmark’s writing.

Typically, I personally do not think of communities in such a logical perspective. The depiction of the sustainable community in this step by step, logical way allows me to think more strategically of the community of which I am a part. Each of us contribute to our communities in one way or another and this scientific approach to dissecting it helps me to begin seeing my own role.

(c) What I would really like to know is where the environmental aspect fits into the big picture from my perspective. What is the environment? Is it a social, economic or political factor? I think that it may deserve to be a subsection of the community as a whole, not a subsection of its individual parts. I understood what was mentioned regarding the environment, but I felt that it did not fit in properly. As a critique, I found the reading to be repetitive. I think the concepts were explained fairly well in general, but the reading seemed rather unorganized as it jumped from one key concept to the other only later to refer back to the first one. The charts were not of great help to me and if Hallsmark was a little more succinct there would have been no great need for them.

CHAPTER 5

After Tuesday’s discussion, the biggest questions in my mind were: how do community leaders get citizens involved in sustainable development? What are some basic strategies that community leaders can use to facilitate change? I chose to read Chapter 5 “Celebrating Assets and Creating a Vision,” (p 86-98) because I felt this chapter reveals a couple of basic approaches toward creating a sustainable community.
Chapter 5 Main Points
• The first step toward gaining support for a sustainable community movement is to start celebrating the community’s assets. This action creates more awareness to all that is special and positive in a community and begins to create a positive environment for change. People want to be proud of their community and as more attention is focused on the positive things in a community, more value is placed on these assets and more desire to save and preserve them. Hallsmith calls for leaders to administer a survey to determine the community’s assets. The survey will show the community what they value and how they are effectively meeting their needs. When there are common values and goals in the community it becomes easier to preserve the assets and sustain them for the future
.• After the surveys are compiled, it is important to make an assessment of how all the assets are meeting the community needs. An inventory should be conducted to note how sustainable or unsustainable the current practices are. This community “sustainable health report” will give the community a whole view of where the community needs to fill in the gaps to become more sustainable and is the basis for a comprehensive plan.
• Finally the community should adopt a community vision based on the surveys and sustainable practices assessment. The community vision should entail all the goals for the city including social, economic, sustainable, ect. The vision should articulate how the community would like to be in the future. The vision should be relatable to all the citizens and invoke excitement and passion.
Hallsmith states that these steps aren’t easy and most attempts will fail. However, this chapter provides basic action steps for a community to start the progression towards a sustainable community. Absolutely there will be citizens that are unable or unwilling to be a part of a sustainable movement. However, Hallsmith’s tries to provide steps to apply to begin to gain support.