Written by Jim Cummings.
Two new programs aim to get subject-matter experts linked up with local and regional governments to take on their most pressing resiliency challenges. Andy Revkin offers up his typically link-infused overview of these efforts, centered on Thriving Earth Exchange, which is networking to bring in experts to help cities with specific issues such as flood risks to food distribution systems, adapting to extreme heat, responding to drought, and many others. Meanwhile, the Obama White House rolled out a similar program dubbed The Resilience Dialogues, an “online consultative service will help communities find, use, and understand information, tools, and programs to support their climate-resilience needs.”
Both of these programs are actively soliciting requests from cities for expert guidance, and subject-matter experts willing to share their insights. If you’re active in your local community’s transition, resiliency, or climate response programs, check them out! Start with Revkin’s introduction, then dig in.
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, evolutionary strategy, future, resilience, tangible assets
Written by Jim Cummings.
Not long ago, I stumbled across The Daily Yonder, an excellent website that focuses on rural economic and social issues (try their Weekly Yonder email to get a taste). This week, they featured an inspiring interview with Maury Forman, Senior Manager for Rural Strategies and Entrepreneurship for the Washington State Department of Commerce, who urges small towns and cities to cultivate an entrepreneurial culture that can entice young and middle-aged kids who left town to return to start small businesses. In contrast to the concern about “brain drain” in small towns, he says, “Let kids get out and explore. People keep saying we want to keep our kids after high school. I think we should let them go out and explore new ideas, new things, and then come back educated and experienced, so that they can start a business, and create new jobs, and live in healthier communities.”
Forman enthuses:
I actually think it’s easier to do economic development in rural areas than it is in big cities. …. When you have small successes in rural, they’re big successes; the thrill is so much bigger there than it is if Seattle hires 10 employees. It’s going to make the newspaper in a rural community. I find rural communities to be easier to work with, more fun to work with, they take life a little less seriously.
Forman has also collaborated with a colleague to put together one of the best concise primers on raising capital that we’ve seen, and they’re giving it away free online. Startup Wisdom: 27 Strategies for Raising Business Capital offers succinct 2 or 3 page overviews of everything from crowdfunding to local investing clubs to grants (while also making nods to the lottery and even lemonade stands!). It won’t get you all the way to being funded, but it’s a perfect first read to help you narrow down the avenues you want to investigate further. They put this booklet together after finding that many potential rural entrepreneurs were struggling with Step 1, since “banks were not loaning to people in order to get businesses started. They didn’t like the idea. It was a risk. The whole bank idea of making bank loans just wasn’t in the banks’ interest, especially in micro-loans. That’s really what many small communities are looking for, probably under $50,000.”
Forman is offering just the kind of practical, localized guidance that can invigorate the regional vitality that is essential to the flourishing resilient economies and social networks that we envision in The Resilient Investor. Here’s to both local communities and early- to mid-career rural expatriates taking this advice to heart!
Tags: close to home strategy, community groups, crowdfunding, local investments
Written by Jim Cummings.
We’ve been hearing about the rapid expansion of solar power, and most of us have probably noticed more rooftop panels and small community solar projects in fields. But it turns out that solar’s spread is not simply due to climate concerns or enticing economics: there’s a strong “contagion” factor, as new solar owners encourage their friends and neighbors to get on board. Check out this animation, from northern Colorado:
According to SolarCity, the largest solar installer and leasing outfit in the US:
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, community groups, energy, renewable energy, tangible assets, your home
Written by Jim Cummings.
It’s an all-too-familiar scenario: a prized corner of your local landscape is suddenly up for sale, slated for houses or a hotel. Maybe it’s a place where generations of locals have had informal access, or perhaps it’s always been kept tantalizingly private. Either way, the new plan is a step too far. . . . and it sure would be great if it were saved by a conservation group, or for a state park, or maybe just by a public-minded conservationist.
But nowadays, we don’t have to wish for a savior: a community effort in New Zealand recently made history by crowdfunding over $2 million to purchase an 18-acre beach and open this pristine beauty to the public! The effort caught wider public attention, thanks both to the novelty of the initiative and its location near a popular National Park, and attracted donations from 40,000 people—along with a modest commitment from the New Zealand government—to outbid nearly a hundred other prospective buyers.
That’s what we call some inspired Zone 4/9 investing, coming together to protect an important tangible asset for the people, using the latest evolutionary finance models! Chalk one up for the power of creative thinking by two locals who organized the crowdfunding effort after a holiday conversation. “At 10:57 last night we delivered a pristine piece of beach and bush into the hands of all New Zealanders to look after and to cherish and to treasure and enjoy forever,” announced Duane Major, one of the two, after the successful fulfillment of their ambitious dream.
Tags: close to home strategy, community groups, evolutionary strategy, financial assets, tangible assets
Written by Jim Cummings.
Scandinavians have grappled with social challenges more diligently than most of the rest of the world, and it’s no different in the realm of resilience. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has long been the global leader in researching and teaching about the nuts and bolts of what resilience is and what it can offer to communities, planners, and the world. They’ve just compiled their most-requested new papers of 2015, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better syllabus for getting up to speed with the most current municipal experiments and global thinking in resilience. Topics range far and wide, with a special emphasis on recent practical attempts to implement resilience, along with the important question of how we can or should assess or measure resilience. If you’re active in local or regional resilience planning or Transition Town programs, you really do need to jump on over to the SRC website and peruse this collection.
Here’s a taste of the topics covered; their site includes a full-page summary of each one, some with video and most with a sidebar of related papers and links:
- Learning to apply resilience: First in-depth analysis of a resilience assessment put into practice
- Don’t fence me in: Managing ecosystems for predictable outcomes may backfire, new study warns
- Beyond measure?: Reducing resilience to a few measurements can block deeper understanding
- Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet
- Five factors for successful management of natural capital: Strategies for successful governance, for both people and ecosystems
Kudos to the Centre both for funding this important work, and for offering such complete summaries of each paper to help guide visitors to the ones that are most relevant for them. Great work!
Tags: close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, learning, regenerative, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
There seems to be no shortage of “practical visionaries” with big ideas about how we’re reshaping our global and local economies to be more just, ecological, and responsible. A joint initiative of EcoTrust and e3 (economists for equity and the environment) called Future Economy is producing reports that seek to answer the key question about such initiatives: are they mostly hype and hope, or are they something really new that’s emerging and can make a large-scale difference?
The first minute or so of this video gets at the purpose here:
Tags: close to home strategy, community groups, evolutionary strategy, financial assets, local, regenerative
Written by Jim Cummings.
At a conference this summer, Building Climate Resilience for Equitable Communities, Shaun Donovan, Director of the Office of Management and the Budget, announced a slew of new White House climate resilience initiatives that are targeted to helping communities at risk and reduce the inequity that has become a major source of social instability. He asked:
“Why are some children less likely to go to college, find good-paying jobs, and stay out of the criminal justice system? Why do those who have the least stand to lose the most when the storm comes through?”
Donovan went on to outline several programs that address these questions, through the lens of federal efforts to increase resilience in the face of climate challenges, including
Tags: close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, justice, personal assets, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
In recent weeks, we’ve featured the work of several networks of cities and of mayors that are working together to tackle climate challenges locally. But if you live in a smaller city (or aren’t a mayor), you may be interested in a couple of other organizations we just came across. Resilient Communities for America includes over 200 city and county councilmembers (and mayors) and offers free resources to help your community track emissions, plan for solar and resiliency, and more. The larger ICLEI (launched in 1991 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives; now rebranded as Local Governments for Sustainability) has hundreds of members in 42 states, and over a thousand from around the world; dues for cities under 50,000 are just $600/year. Either or both of these networks could really help you jump-start local initiatives or take the next steps.
Tags: close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, personal assets, resilience, tangible assets
Written by Jim Cummings.
This summer, the Obama administration launched a new AmeriCorps program that dovetails perfectly with the local resiliency efforts that we’ve highlighted as part of the Close to Home resilient investing strategy. Resilience AmeriCorps was formed “to assist vulnerable communities that lack the capacity to address climate-resilience planning and implementation. The AmeriCorps VISTA members will increase civic engagement and community resilience in low-income areas, and help those communities develop plans for becoming more resilient to any number of shocks and stresses, including better preparations for extreme weather events.” Or, as funding partner The Rockefeller Foundation put it: to “support the development of resilience strategies to help communities better manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” Now that’s a punchy definition of resilience!
The focus on vulnerable lower income communities is especially encouraging, since many current grassroots efforts tend to involve generally better-off and already socially-engaged activists. A White House overview of Resilience AmeriCorps stressed the importance of its social-justice priorities:
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, community groups, future, justice, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
The UK newspaper The Guardian has been a leading voice on climate change for some time now. As part of its Keep it in the Ground campaign, they ran a series of excerpts from Naomi Klein’s most recent book, This Changes Everything. This one popped up again recently in one of our social feeds, and it’s a solid reminder of the stakes, and the potential, that stand before us. Here’s the rallying cry:
Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.
Klein goes on:
Tags: activism, climate, collaboration, community groups, evolutionary strategy, personal assets
Written by Jim Cummings.
Everywhere I turn lately, there’s another reminder that cities are central to our hopes for a more sustainable, resilient future. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group—a decade-old collaboration among 75 of the world’s largest cities that are home to over a half-billion people and a quarter of the global economy—is on the forefront of these efforts, as is the Compact of Mayors, involving 84 cities, many of them smaller or mid-sized. Both groups are gearing up to have a major presence at the upcoming Paris climate talks. The C40 has just released a new report, Powering Climate Action: Cities as Global Changemakers, which highlights the collaborative potential of cities working together: “The evidence shows that cities are taking action even where they have limited power, by collaborating with other cities and non-state actors and catalysing wider climate action in the private sector and civil society.”
NRDC’s OnEarth magazine recently produced an issue devoted to city-based climate action that is full of inspiring stories, including
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, personal assets, sustainable global economy strategy
Written by Jim Cummings.
Much of what we share here is coverage of projects, research, and news that’s relatively encouraging—ideas and actions that might spur your own constructive engagement in these challenging times. Recently, we’ve shared evolutionary/breakthrough techno-optimist visions, close-to-home/tangible in-the-dirt initiatives, and muddling-up/market-based optimism about carbon. But hovering there in the background, as it has been with increasing intensity for at least a couple of decades, is the specter of questions that many of us can’t quite bear to face: Did we wait too long for any of this to make a real difference? Is catastrophic climate change now baked into the system? Have economic elites stubbornly steered the ship onto insurmountable shoals of social inequity and ecological overshoot? What if it really is too late?
Addressing this possibility has been among the hardest parts of putting together our book and this ongoing chronicle of resilient investing resources. But we, too, have grappled with the darker questions, and have to some degree prepared ourselves, at least internally, for the possibility that we are indeed in the early stages of a significant societal and/or ecological decline. None of the four of us who put the book together are ready to abandon ship,
Tags: close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, future, personal growth
