So if we are to address the problems of our time—the problems of climate change, inequality, and social insecurity, among others—our first challenge is to expand our very definition of what “the economy” is. Is the market the only serious vehicle for wealth-creation and value, as investors and economists claim? Or are there other forms of value that need to be systematically and rigorously recognized?  

I argue that this is precisely the problem: economics cannot recognize other forms of value and state power has largely adopted neoliberal economic priorities. No wonder our sense of possibility are so constricted! 

As an antidote, I believe that we need to learn how the commons can help us re-imagine our mind-map of the economy. The point is not merely to add a few neglected values into the standard economic framework. It is to challenge some core premises of “the economy” as conventionally understood, by naming the many forms of nonmarket value that are essential to life.  

That’s what the commons does. It is a robust sector of nonmarket stewardship that honors different types of value – ecological, social, ethical, spiritual. More: it is a way to nourish and protect important forms of meaning and cultural identity, as seen in the collective stewardship of forests, fisheries, farmland, and water in many permutations around the world. The commons is at work in agroecology, permaculture, community land trusts, community supported agriculture, and relocalized food systems. The commons is seen in countless open source software projects, platform cooperatives, mutual aid networks, arts and culture projects, and alternative currencies.

The problem is that many actual commons are not seen as commons and therefore as wealth-creating. They exist outside of the market worldview, and so they aren’t considered so valuable or consequential. Mainstream economics, politics, law, and culture mostly ignores them, or worse, considers them a failed management regime, the “tragedy of the commons.”

The great challenge, then, is to learn how to see, name, and reclaim the commons as significant forces in life – a powerful social phenomenon that is not just at play in the Global South, but everywhere. Some of the most significant systems of commons-based value include:

• the care work performed by families, especially women;
• the eco-stewardship of Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, community land trusts, and CSA farms;
• socially committed cooperatives; 
• artistic and academic gift economies;
• alternative local and regional currencies; and
• online communities that revolves around shared software, wikis, scholarly research, scientific knowledge, datasets, and much else. 

What most distinguishes these general classes of commons from capitalist businesses and markets, is the social mutualism that animates them and the sharing of their wealth. Commons are living, relational systems for meeting personal needs and collective well-being that mostly function outside of markets and state power. The interpersonal, social dynamics of these commons are the forces that generate value: the care work within families, the affective commitments of forest-stewards, the sharing ethic of digital commoners, the social commitment of water protectors.

Standard economics tends to ignore these genres of wealth-creation because the value generated is not easily monetized or traded in markets. The value is created without money necessarily changing hands. The value is socially embedded and localized. It arises through the pooling of commitments.

As I describe in my book Think Like a Commoner, just released in a significantly revised Second Edition, commons arise as ordinary people decide for themselves how to identify and meet shared needs. It’s a way to manage common wealth in fair and inclusive ways. This is the process of commoning — the process by which people negotiate, devise, and enact situation-specific systems of provisioning and peer governance. Commoning is not just an economic process; it’s a process that summons forth our deeper, larger humanity, our intersubjective selves in an unfolding field of cooperation.

It helps to see commons as complex life-forms—living processes.  They aren’t like impersonal markets driven by money, rationality and material desire. They are social systems through which people come together to create effective ways of meeting needs and peer-governing themselves. If the neoclassical, capitalist mindset declares that provisioning (“the economy”) must be separate from governance (the state), commons blend these two. The social practices of provisioning, governance, rules-enforcement, and culture are all integrated into one system. 

The general aim of any commons is to mutualize the benefits of shared wealth. People often decide to become commoners because they realize that conventional business requires extractivist strategies: the exploitation workers and consumers, ecological destruction, unfair practices, social disruptions. Commoners realize that the notional Invisible Hand of the market won’t serve the common good. Nor will nation-states, thanks to their deep political alliances with investors and corporations. 

That’s where the commons steps in. Commoners are pioneering new social logics for provisioning and governance at the cellular level of society. They’re meeting their own needs while enhancing the social bonds and shared purpose that the common good requires.

A key virtue of this process is that we can choose and make themselves ourselves, right now. We don’t need to rely on legislatures or courts. The state may offer support to commons, and businesses may engage in limited forms of exchange with them. But outsider control or interference is resisted because commoners prize their social and political autonomy. They want the individual freedom to enter into community agreements, to assume responsibilities, and to reap the benefit of their hard work and cooperation.  

At a time when the market/state system claims dominion over so much of the earth and everyday, imposing its own ideas of social order and value, the commons offers a refreshing alternative. They offer a space in which people can assert significant autonomy and self-determination. They need not rely on formal, legalistic terms dictated by bureaucracies or large corporations. People can innovate by their own lights, to meet their needs in their particular circumstances. They need not submit to the conventional capitalist modes of “development” and “progress,” which so often prove to be unfair, unsustainable, and anti-democratic.

A British money designer and commoner, Dil Green, once made an astute observation about the special role that commons play. He said: “Commons are ‘meso-scope’ social institutions. Not micro/individual or macro/collective, but meso. Right libertarians prioritize agency at the micro level. Statist lefties at the macro. But it’s in the middle where life takes place, where we all live. The missing middle is key. Build commons!”

This insight helps explain both why commons are so vital. They can build a new type of economy through new types of meso institutions. They help us get beyond the private / public binary (corporate/state order) that otherwise controls our sense of the possible. Commons open up new zones for action and creativity.

So let’s modify our mental maps about “the economy”!  We need to shed many of the roles ordained by capitalist economics – consumer, worker, business owner, investor – by creating spaces that let people develop their own solutions based on their own situated needs, knowledge, and wisdom. That’s what the commons does. It steps outside market/state orthodoxy to declare new terms of aspiration. It offers fresh, forward-looking archetypes for meeting people’s needs. It lets us develop new type of social practices for meeting needs, new forms of more democratic governance, and effective strategies for protecting shared wealth.

We can begin by making existing commons more culturally legible and known, and then work to consolidate and expand these commons. Going forward, we must develop new infrastructures to make commoning easier and more normal, and types of finance, legal hacks, and partnerships with the state. While this may seem an ambitious agenda, a robust Commonsverse already exists, poised to liberate us from a market/state system that otherwise limits the scope of possible change.

David Bollier is Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. He is the author of more than a dozen books on various aspects of the commons, including the just-published Second Edition of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. He blogs at www.Bollier.org and hosts the monthly podcast Frontiers of Commoning. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The post The Liberating Power of the Commonsverse appeared first on Shareable.

Canada was founded on enslavement and dispossession, most exemplified by its assimilationist ideologies and policies, the displacement, subjugation and oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures, and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The colonial theft of land and the accumulation of capital have been foundational to Canada’s wealth. In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron uses settler colonial theory to examine environmental racism in Canada to highlight the symbolic and material ways in which the geographies of Indigenous and Black peoples have been characterized by erasure, domination, dehumanization, destruction, dispossession, exploitation, and genocide. She offers a historical overview of cases of environmental racism in Canada and outlines how she has been addressing environmental racism over the last 10 years in partnership with Indigenous and Black communities, and their allies.

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About the speaker

Dr. Ingrid Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID-19 in Black and South Asian communities. Ingrid is the author of the book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, and Ian Daniel. She is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project) and helped develop the federal private members bill a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice (Bill C-226). Bill C-226 was approved at Senate on June 13, 2024, and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities, was published on November 25, 2024. It traces experiences of racial trauma in Black communities in Canada, the US and the UK from the colonial era to the present.

Video of A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron

Transcript of A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website shareable.net just click the link in the show notes. And now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we’re delighted to host Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Ingrid is professor and Hope Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Health Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID 19 in Black and South Asian communities.

0:01:42.7 Julian Agyeman: Ingrid is the author of the book, “There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities” which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page and Ian Daniel. She’s the founder and director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project, the ENRICH Project and helped develop the Federal Private Members Bill, a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice and that’s Bill C226.

0:02:20.4 Julian Agyeman: This bill was approved by Senate, the Canadian Senate, on June 13, 2024 and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first ever environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled, From Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter, the Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities was published in November last year. The book traces experiences of racial trauma in Black Canadian and US communities and in communities in the UK from the colonial to the present period. Ingrid’s talk today is a history of violence, the legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada. Ingrid A Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:03:07.1 Ingrid Waldron: Thank you very much and good afternoon to everyone. Can you all hear me? Okay.

0:03:14.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yep, just fine.

0:03:16.1 Ingrid Waldron: Okay. Great. I’m going to begin with a Quote from a resident of Lincolnville, one of the communities that I met with back in 2013 when I started my project. I wanted to meet the indigenous communities and the African Nova Scotian communities to hear what their concerns were about at that time. So I’m going to start. If you look at the health of the community prior to 1974, before the landfill site was located, and our community seemed to be healthier from 1974 on until the present day, we noticed our people’s health seems to be going downhill. Our people seem to be passing on at a younger age. They are contracting different types of cancers that we never heard of prior to 1974. Our stomach cancer seems to be on the rise. Diabetes is on the rise. Our people end up with tumors in their body and we’re at a loss of what’s causing it. The municipality says that there’s no way that the landfill site is affecting us. But if the landfill site located in other areas is having an impact on people’s health, then shouldn’t the landfill site located next to our community be having an impact on our health too? And that community, as I said, is Lincolnville.

0:04:38.8 Ingrid Waldron: And this is James Desmond. He is, or was, I should say. Unfortunately, he passed away two years ago, but he was a staunch environmental activist in his home in Lincolnville. And during that same meeting, we were filming a documentary called, “In Whose Backyard”, which is available on my website. And we asked James to define environmental racism because at that time a lot of people, particularly in Nova Scotia, where I had begun this work, were very confused by that term, environmental racism. So we asked him to define it, and I find that his definition is one that I use often because it’s extremely simple and concise, but very layered at the same time and aligns well with the more academic definition of environmental racism by Dr. Robert Bullard, who I’ll show his definition just after this one. So James Desmond says here, the practice, which is environmental racism, has been locating industrial waste sites next to African, Nova Scotian native and poor white, communities that don’t have a base to fight back. You ask if that’s environmental racism, it’s environmental racism to its core. And here’s the more academic definition of Environmental Racism by Dr. Robert Bullard.

0:06:00.5 Ingrid Waldron: Dr. Robert Bullard is an African American who teaches at a university in Texas, and he is considered to be the father of environmental justice. He’s obviously my hero, and I had the opportunity to host him at a symposium that I held in 2017 on environmental racism when I was in Nova Scotia. So this is coming from his early work. His very first book was called I believe, Dumping in Dixie, from 1990. But this is how he defines environmental racism. He says, environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate location and greater exposure of indigenous and racialized communities to contamination and pollution from environmentally hazardous activities. It is also about the lack of political power these communities have for resisting the placement of industrial polluters in their communities.

0:07:00.2 Ingrid Waldron: The third definition or component of that definition is, the implementation of policies that sanction the harmful and in many cases, life threatening poisons or presence of poisons in these communities. Fourth, environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate negative impacts of environmental policies that result in differential rates of cleanup in these communities. And finally, environmental racism is about the history of excluding the very communities that are most impacted by environmental racism. Indigenous communities, black communities and racialized communities. We often use that phrase, having a seat at the table. These are the communities that typically don’t have a seat at the table. Even though they’re more vulnerable than other communities to environmental racism.

0:07:52.3 Ingrid Waldron: So they’re often not invited to the table to help develop policy and decisions around environmental racism. As I’ve done in my book, what I want to do now, very briefly is talk about geography in a way and space. Because I think it’s really helpful when you situate environmental racism within a spatial analysis. And I do that a lot in my book. I look at spatial processes and spatial inequality in a way to broaden the discussion on environmental racism, which helps us to address the siloing, I think, sometimes of environmental and climate issues. We have to understand that environmental racism is connected to so many other issues in our places and spaces. So that’s what I will do here. So environmental racism that is a manifestation of white supremacist use of space that has come to characterize the harmful impacts of spatial violence in black, indigenous and other racialized communities. And when we say spatial violence, for me that means policy.

0:08:56.1 Ingrid Waldron: That means what is happening on the ground in terms of the various inequalities and oppressions that marginalized racialized communities are experiencing on the ground due to the various policies that can be harmful in purposeful ways, but also policies just by the absence of or the erasure of the issues that these communities are facing. That’s harmful as well. If the policies are excluding the experiences of, or there’s an absence of the experiences of indigenous and black and other racialized people in policymaking, that’s also harmful in subtle ways and perhaps in very indirect ways.

0:09:35.4 Ingrid Waldron: Teelucksingh and Masouda are both Canadians who are working in the space of environmental racism and spatial inequality. And they observe that space is more than a geographical area. It is also a socially constructed and highly contested product that has significant political, cultural and economic implications. So what they’re saying here is we often tend to look at, or in the past we did, geography as this fixed issue. And now we’re seeing with human geography, health geography, all these really exciting disciplines popping up. We know that it’s not simply about a fixed space. It’s about how inequalities are imbued within spaces. And it also talks about how these spaces are socially constructed.

0:10:23.8 Ingrid Waldron: They’re socially constructed because individuals, communities have relationships with each other and they have relationships with organizations. And there’s the social construction. They’re always manifesting these issues, these inequalities over time. So we have to look at space as always under construction, as fluid, as never fixed, and as ever changing. So this is what Teelucksingh and Masuda argue. Lipsitz, who is another professor I admire who is American, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At that same event where I hosted Dr. Bullard, I also hosted at the same event, Dr. Lipsitz. They were both my keynote speaker. And I love doctor Lipsitz’ work on the racialization of space and the spatialization of race. It really helped me to open up my view on environmental racism. I had a very, in the beginning, a very constricted view of environmental racism. And after reading his article on the racialization of space, which I think comes from a publication from 2007, it opened up my eyes about the various connections and how we can talk about environmental racism in a more critical way. So he talks about that and he talks about the inequalities, racial inequalities that are imbued and manifest in all our spaces.

0:11:49.4 Ingrid Waldron: And this concept is useful in helping to think through the implications of race, class, gender and other social factors with respect to spatial processes that have the most deleterious impacts in racialized communities. And these include government and industry expropriation of indigenous lands, the formation of neighborhoods segregated by income, class and race, neighborhood revitalization projects that gentrify low income and often marginalized areas by bringing in businesses and housing that ultimately push out long term residents, and also environmental racism.

0:12:31.8 Ingrid Waldron: What these spatial processes have in common is a quest for profit by business owners and industry leaders. And these processes tend to shed light on how spaces of profit are often premised on possession, dispossession and displacement. It’s for these reasons that it’s important to challenge notions of space, as I said earlier, as fixed, neutral, ahistorical and physical.

0:13:02.7 Ingrid Waldron: So rather, space is an embodiment of power relations that are fluid and ever changing. And I also point to Doreen Massey, the late Doreen Massey. Her work on space also resonated with me, specifically her work from this article from 1992. She put it really succinctly when she argued that space is never apolitical, but imbued with a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.

0:13:39.7 Ingrid Waldron: There have been, in Canada, several cases of environmental racism in Indigenous and African Nova Scotian communities. I would say over the last 70 years. I’m going to begin with my work in Nova Scotia. That’s where I began my work on environmental racism in 2012. And what’s on the screen is a community called Shubenacadie First Nation. This is an Indigenous community. And starting in 2014, Alton Gas, which is a company in Alberta, Canada, was planning to build a brine discharge pipeline near the Shubenacadie river near to this community. There are tons of studies in the United States indicating that brine discharge pipelines can be dangerous, although Alton Gas argued that it was not dangerous, it was safe and the community had nothing to be concerned about. But starting in 2014, when this project was announced, the community began resisting.

0:14:39.3 Ingrid Waldron: And in 2021, I’m happy to say that the project was closed. We often don’t find success when we’re talking about environmental racism. There’s often not success. But they spent seven years resisting this pipeline project. They were concerned about the impact of the pipeline on fish, on their health and on climate change. And they used social media and on site, in person practices and approaches to stop this pipeline project from coming into their community. And in the end, they won in 2021 when Alton Gas decided to pack up and leave.

0:15:21.5 Ingrid Waldron: We have another Indigenous community in Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s called Pictou Landing First Nation. And this is an aerial shot given to me by a journalist when he was flying over Pictou Landing First Nation. And this is called Boat Harbour. And Pictou Landing was a pristine hunting and fishing ground for the Indigenous community before a mill started dumping effluent into boat harbor in 1967. And over that time, particularly in the 1980s, the government made many broken promises to the Indigenous community, saying that they were going to close the mill. That never happened.

0:16:07.1 Ingrid Waldron: This is another success story, but it took 50 years, unfortunately. In the end of 2019, the Nova Scotia government said that the mill did not come up with an appropriate or robust plan for their waste water treatment, and that he was going to close the mill. And he did. And that happened at the end of January 2020. But you can imagine, 50 years this mill was operating, dumping effluent into Boat Harbour. It became a toxic cocktail of different pollutants.

0:16:42.9 Ingrid Waldron: And the community would say that high rates of cancer, high rates of respiratory illness and skin rashes and other illnesses is due to Boat Harbour. What can I say about Boat Harbour? Yeah, I think that’s really the pertinent issue. There were some rumblings that the mill would open again, which of course concerned the community, but that hasn’t happened. So they’re involved right now in the long process of cleanup.

0:17:09.9 Ingrid Waldron: We have Aamjiwnaang First Nation, another indigenous community near Sarnia, Ontario, and it’s often referred to as Chemical Valley, which tells you all that you need to know. This is a stunning case of environmental racism. I would say the worst case of environmental racism in Canada. Why? Because the community is surrounded by over 60 petrochemical facilities. And it sounds incredible, but I also remember reading, I think it was a New York Times article way back about an African American community in Louisiana that was also surrounded by a lot of toxic facilities or petrochemical facilities. And that community was referred to as Cancer Alley. And they had, of course, high rates of cancer. And they were, just like Aamjiwnaang, surrounded by petrochemical facilities.

0:18:05.3 Ingrid Waldron: So this community, like the other communities I’ve discussed, have extremely high rates of cancer. They have… When I talk about environmental racism, I often say it’s also a gendered issue because many indigenous women have reproductive cancers. They have gestational issues, birth anomalies. So the birth rate ratio is abnormal compared to the Canadian average. I believe there are more female births than male, and it’s extremely out of whack. And of course, all these communities will have mental health issues, the psychosocial stressors of living near to these contaminated sites. Redress is on the way. The Canadian government, the Department of Environment and climate change, is currently working with the community, with the chief, to address this issue.

0:19:04.1 Ingrid Waldron: We also have Grassy Narrows First Nation, another indigenous community near Kenora, Ontario. So in the 1960s and 1970s, mercury was dumped into the Wabigoon English River near to this community. So you can imagine mercury is serious and will have health effects. There was cleanup in 2015. The government put millions of dollars towards cleanup and it was cleaned up. However, in 2022, April, there was a CBC article that came out with residents talking about the enduring health impacts from the mercury being dumped into the Wabigoon English River in the 1960s and 1970s, which just shows you that even though you might have cleanup, the health effects can remain. So they talked about less serious health issues, skin rashes, to more serious health issues such as, cognitive delays, neurological problems such as numbness in the fingers, et cetera.

0:20:06.8 Ingrid Waldron: This is another indigenous community in Canada, this time in British Columbia, specifically in northern British Columbia. So there is a plan, there has been for a while to develop a multi billion dollar pipeline project near to this community which is called Wet’suwe’ten First Nation. And over the past several years, there have been mass demonstrations, sit ins and blockades that have gripped parts of Canada over the movement to support the leaders of Wet’suwe’ten First Nation, who are opposed, of course, to this multi billion dollar pipeline project near to their community in Northern BC. This is an ongoing issue.

0:21:01.3 Ingrid Waldron: In the United States, it’s not strange to talk about African Americans experiencing environmental racism. But I think in Canada, when people hear environmental racism, they assume that only indigenous people are impacted. That’s not the case, and it’s certainly not the case in Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada. And that’s where I began this work and I spent 13 years there. And what I witnessed during my 13 years there is that quite a few African Nova Scotian communities are impacted by environmental racism. And it’s been… I haven’t seen that in other parts of Canada, but for whatever reason I see it in Nova Scotia, the province of Nova Scotia.

0:21:40.6 Ingrid Waldron: What you’re seeing on the screen is Africville. This is a historical African Nova Scotian community. The unique thing about African Nova Scotians is that they’re in many ways unique. They’re dissimilar from the Caribbean community and the community that comes from the continent of Africa. African Nova Scotians have been in Canada for over 400 years, so they’re not considered to be an immigrant community, although everybody’s an immigrant really, because I could talk about their heritage.

0:22:11.1 Ingrid Waldron: So African Nova Scotians are descendants of black loyalists from the United States who came to Nova Scotia after the War of 1812 that took place in the US. They’re also descendants of Jamaican Maroons and they’re descendants of people from Sierra Leone. So they’ve got all that in their heritage. However, they’re the longest residing black community in Canada with, I would say, unique and very specific challenges related to racism. They fare worse on every social indicator, whether you’re talking about employment and education. They fare worse compared to other black Canadians in other provinces.

0:22:54.3 Ingrid Waldron: So this is Africville. And Africville is one of those historic African Nova Scotian communities. There’s a total of about 45 African Nova Scotian communities. And what makes them unique as well is the fact that they’re located mostly in rural areas. Typically when black people immigrate to Canada, they’re going to Toronto or Montreal or the more urban spaces to find work. The unique thing about African Nova Scotians is that they typically reside. There’s only one community that was urban, and that’s the one that you see on the screen, Africville. But all the other communities are rural. Africville was certainly not wealthy. There are no wealthy black communities in Canada. But they were thriving in terms of they were well connected. And we know that social connectedness is an important determinant of health. Some of them had their own businesses, right? 

0:23:47.1 Ingrid Waldron: So in many ways, they were well connected and a healthy community. And then in around the mid-1960s, Halifax, the city of Halifax, decided to gentrify their community and start building or started engaging in industrial development. So they needed this community to get out and so they pushed out this community, which is gentrification, or what we call urban revitalization.

0:24:13.8 Ingrid Waldron: So I would say that Africville is an example of both gentrification and environmental racism. Why is it an example? We know why it’s an example of gentrification because the government was trying to push them out to engage in industrial development. But it was also considered to be a case of environmental racism because a lot of social and environmental hazards were left in the community due to industrial development. And these social and environmental hazards, making this a case of environmental racism, included a fertilizer plant, a slaughterhouse, a tar factory, a stone and coal crushing plant, a cotton factory, a prison, three systems of railway tracks, and an open dump.

0:25:00.4 Ingrid Waldron: Here’s another African Nova Scotian community. So you saw a photo of James Desmond earlier. I said he was from Lincolnville. This is Lincolnville’s dump. Starting in 1974, the municipality placed a first generation, let’s say, landfill, because a dump is different from a landfill. So this is a landfill. They placed a first generation Landfill in 1974 near to the African Nova Scotian community. And just when the community thought that perhaps they were making some headway in getting redress and having the government relocate this landfill, they received a bit of a slap in the face.

0:25:39.5 Ingrid Waldron: In 2006, the municipality put a second generation landfill over the first one. What a slap in the face, of course? So of course, the dirty water is seeping into the second landfill. And the community would say that we’ve seen, as I… That was the quote I presented to you when I first came on the screen. The quote from somebody from Lincolnville who said over the years, since 1974, our health is worsening. Higher rates of cancer, higher rates of respiratory illness. So this is what the community argues, that it’s because of these two landfills that we are seeing poor health outcomes in our community.

0:26:15.8 Ingrid Waldron: If you were able to watch my documentary at all, it ended up on Netflix in 2020 and it was co-produced by myself and actor Elliot Page. You would have seen activist Louise Delisle from Shelburne. Now, the African Nova Scotian community lives primarily in the south end of Shelburne, but the white community lives in the north end of Shelburne. They’ve had a dump. So I’d call this a dump, not a landfill, because there’s no liner. They’ve had a dump in their community since the early 1940s. I would say probably in Canada, this is probably the first case of environmental racism, because all the way back in the 1940s, this dump was placed there. And the community would say everything and anything went into this dump. Syringes from the hospital, items from the military base, dead animals, et cetera, et cetera.

0:27:10.8 Ingrid Waldron: And over the years, they would also say that we’ve seen increasing rates of cancer, and particularly like multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer. When I first met with Louise in my office, she said to me, Ingrid, 95% of the people in my community have cancer. Of course I didn’t believe her, but I remembered that New York Times article about that African American community in Louisiana where most people had cancer because they were surrounded by petrochemical facilities. And I said, is this happening in Canada? I really couldn’t believe it when she said 98% of the people in my community have cancer. But she was telling the truth, because if you see the film, she’s driving down a street, many streets in Shelburne, pointing out different houses with people who had cancer. And it’s a stunning part of the documentary.

0:28:00.9 Ingrid Waldron: So it is the case that there are extremely high rates of cancer in Shelburne. Lots of things are happening right now. I don’t have the time to talk about it. Louise is a strong leader and she’s led so many things in that community and so many great things are happening right now, such as a Nova Scotia human rights case. The first part of it, which has found, actually, which is probably the first time in Canada that what’s happening in Shelburne is a case of racism because it’s environmental racism. That’s never happened in Canada where environmental racism by any human rights board or commission has found it to be an example of racism.

0:28:38.6 Ingrid Waldron: So they’re making a lot of headway, and I would say primarily due to Louise’s activism. Here is Toronto. The Greater Toronto and Hamilton area is known for high levels of air pollution, particularly Hamilton. So I teach at McMaster University in Hamilton. And Hamilton is considered to be Canada’s industrial town and increasing rates of immigrant people, racialized immigrant people who are being exposed to poor air quality. And that’s the same in Toronto, particularly in areas such as Scarborough and Etobicoke north in Toronto, where there are high rates of or poor air pollution.

0:29:23.6 Ingrid Waldron: So what have I been doing over the years to address these issues? I founded, in 2012, an organization called the ENRICH Project, the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Projects, which would be advocating around environmental racism for indigenous people and African Nova Scotian people. First off, in Nova Scotia, now it’s gone broader than that because I’m back in Ontario, so it’s all across Canada now. And I didn’t know what ENRICH would be at that time. I was new to environmental racism. I had no experience. But it has turned out to be incredibly interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, multi approach, multimedia, and very intersectional in its approach, in its viewpoints, in many ways, in terms of how I articulate what I’m finding.

0:30:17.5 Ingrid Waldron: I thought that the first important thing for me to do when I founded ENRICH was to raise awareness because there were a lot of people who were skeptical about what I was doing. They were environmental racism. Are you sure about that? And they thought the term was funny. And I let people know, I said, this isn’t a term that I came up with. This is a term that originated in the United States by Reverend Benjamin Chavez back in the early 1980s. So I didn’t create this term. So don’t get angry at me. They thought I created it and I was playing the race card. And everything that people say about people like me who are staunchly anti-racist and whose work I consider myself to be a race scholar before I would consider myself to be an environmental scholar or health scholar, I focus on race.

0:31:08.5 Ingrid Waldron: So I got a lot of pushback in the beginning. So I thought, well, in order to address the pushback, maybe I need to raise awareness to talk about the structural underpinnings of environmental racism. Because when you look at the term environmental racism, it sounds crazy. Someone would say, anyone could say, yeah, how can the environment be racist? People are racist. How can the environment be racist? So I said to myself, I needed to explain to people the structural policy implications of environmental racism in order for them to understand this as a systemic issue. Just like when we talk about racism in labor, racism in health, racism in employment, this is racism in the environment, and it means that environmental policies are the root of it.

0:31:57.6 Ingrid Waldron: So because I needed to raise awareness, I held so many events in Nova Scotia, in other parts of Canada, and even in the United States. I was asked to talk at various events in the United States as well. And this is one of the events that I held where I brought together communities and activists and government people. And this continues to be what’s on the screen, my favorite event. It was inspiring. It was educational and entertaining. We had drum groups.

0:32:27.2 Ingrid Waldron: And so I try to do different things every time I have events. And I think over time, particularly in the province of Nova Scotia, people began to get it, right? Because I was constantly, every year putting on these events, trying to explain what environmental racism was. And I would say, in Nova Scotia, people get it. And what happens when people get it is that they want to help. And often after my events, people will say, oh, I get it now. I didn’t know this was happening in Nova Scotia. How horrible can you let me know how I can help? And that’s magic to my ears, of course. So I think creating awareness sounds benign, but it has been extremely important for me and for my project, because eventually people want to help out, and it’s really good if I don’t have a grant, it’s really good to have volunteers who really want to help and who are really passionate.

0:33:21.0 Ingrid Waldron: As I said, multimedia has been part of what I’ve done. Multimedia is a way of sharing information, just like an event. So I’ve done a lot of it. And I like to be creative. I recognize, particularly as a professor, I’ve got students in my class, and students want to learn differently, they want to be assessed differently. Some students are good at writing essays. Some students are good at multiple choice, right? So for me, this is about targeting my audience in a way. Who needs to hear about environmental racism? Who needs to do something about it? Is it the policymaker? Is it the educator? Is it the ENGO? 

0:33:58.4 Ingrid Waldron: So I have to think about who I’m targeting and then what multimedia, creative multimedia resources can I create or use? One of those was a map using GIS analysis, a map of Nova Scotia that actually shows the location of toxic facilities, different types in African Nova Scotian and Indigenous communities. What is on the screen is a flat map, but if you go onto my website, you will see one layer for indigenous communities and another layer for the black communities. So basically, this is not saying that white communities are not close to these sites, but it shows undeniably that black and indigenous communities are disproportionately near these different sites.

0:34:42.1 Ingrid Waldron: And here is actor Elliot Page. This is a kind of a long story, so I can’t get into it, but we connected through Twitter in 2018, just a few months after my book came out. Elliot had apparently read my book and loved it and wanted to express that on Twitter. So I noticed that my Twitter page was extremely active and I saw somebody following me called Elliot Page. I didn’t connect it to the actor. I didn’t realize it was the actor. And I had seen Elliot’s movies like inception with Leonardo DiCaprio and Juno and other movies. And I said to myself, is this the actor? Like, why would he be trying to connect to me? And it was. So I DM’d him. And I said, I want to thank you for promoting my book and for supporting my Enrich project and supporting the women on the front lines. And he said to me, I’m trying to find a way to use my celebrity to help. And Elliot’s from Nova Scotia, interestingly, and his family is near to Shelburne, which I just talked about.

0:35:57.9 Ingrid Waldron: So he had a kind of very personal connection to this. We ended up talking at the end of 2018, the week of Christmas, on the phone with his friend who actually connected us. Because when the friend found out Elliot had connected with me on Twitter, the friend said to me, oh, I’ve known Elliot for 15 years, Ingrid, do you want me to connect you guys? And I said, yes. So we did it on the phone and we didn’t really come up with anything. Then we met again in January of 2019 and we decided we would do some maybe posts and videos, short videos, 10 minute videos to post on Twitter. And then we changed again.

0:36:37.1 Ingrid Waldron: I had an opportunity to see the full film. Elliot had come down to Nova Scotia where I was living and filmed me in my home, and then went out to the community to film the indigenous people and also Louise Delil, the African Nova Scotian woman in Shelburne. And Elliot invited me to his mother’s home in Halifax to see the film. And I noticed when I was looking at the film, I said, people are crying. This seems really emotional. I don’t think slapping it onto Twitter is going to do this topic of environmental racism justice. I said to them, Elliot and the co-director, Ian Daniel, I said, we want awareness, don’t we? We want to make an impact. What better way than to create a documentary? And Ian said to me, are you talking about like a 70 minute documentary? I said, yes, and we could submit it to the Toronto International Film Festival and Robert Redford’s Film Festival.

0:37:38.7 Ingrid Waldron: And the Berlin Flag just kept going. And they agreed and we submitted it very late. I would say it was after the deadline, to be honest. And we got into the Toronto International Film Festival and it premiered in September of 2019. And Elliot’s publicist also arranged for us to speak to all these high profile media outlets. So we spoke to the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, which is an Entertainment Magazine, and other media outlets, Television, Entertainment Tonight Canada, et cetera, et cetera. It was an extremely exciting day to have this film based on my book. It was actually based on my book. My very first book premiere at a film festival at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is widely considered to be the best film festival in the world. I’m a bit biased.

0:38:38.0 Ingrid Waldron: And then to have all these media outlets that we connected with to get this issue out into the public, this is what we call, as academics, knowledge mobilization, but for me, prime knowledge mobilization. And for this to happen to me and to my first book, I’m still very shocked by it after all these years. So this was 2019, I’m still shocked. And then we heard rumblings that it was going to go to Netflix. And I was like, okay, I can’t believe this. And that came from Elliot. We were walking with Ian Daniel to a Japanese restaurant in Halifax and I think Elliot said, I think it’s going to Netflix. And at that time, Elliot had started that show called the Umbrella Academy, which was on Netflix. And I thought, oh, maybe this is kind of going to happen because Elliot’s already on Netflix. And it did happen. We found out in October of 2018 it was going to Netflix. And it started streaming on Netflix March 29, 2020, just a few weeks after COVID hit.

0:39:38.3 S4: And then I also heard then it also went to Apple TV. I think it’s still on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and also Microsoft Xbox. So I’ve done a lot of media stuff, I’ve done a lot of creative stuff because I think it’s important to share information about studies in creative ways. This is Nocturne, Halifax’s annual nighttime art festival. This was during the height of COVID We did this on Zoom. It was really interesting. We had the community activists, indigenous and black, in five minutes, talk about environmental racism in their community.

0:40:19.4 Ingrid Waldron: And then they were paired with an artist. So whether it be a musician, a spoken word artist, or poet, a dancer, a multimedia artist, the goal of this project that I developed was to pair one activist with an artist on Zoom. And it was very well received. People loved it. And the fact that we were able to do it on Zoom, something like this was just an achievement, really. So it’s just another example of how I like to be creative, to share knowledge.

0:40:50.0 Ingrid Waldron: So media is really important to me, and I continue to give interviews to television and radio and podcasts and magazines and newspapers for all my research projects. Of course, I have to do research. I’m a professor. I’ve done a lot of research. But the one that’s wrapping up right now is Focus on Shelburne. I mentioned to you that Shelburne, they’ve had a dump since the 1940s. I mentioned multiple myeloma and cancer and high rates of cancer. So we’re trying to figure out with this study, why are there such high rates of cancer in Shelburne? And we’re looking at four issues as causal factors potentially. Is it the dump? Is it racism and other structural determinants of health? Is it lifestyle factors such as smoking, nutrition, diet, exercise? Or is it African ancestry and genetics? So we have a black cancer biologist on the team, and she looks at race and cancer, cancer in black people, particularly black women.

0:41:54.2 Ingrid Waldron: So we’ve done the focus groups and interviews. We’re just waiting for the DNA sampling to come in. So we took blood at a town hall two years ago when we went to Shelburne, and the DNA sampling stuff takes a while to come in. That’s going to come in soon, and we’ll write a report on that. But we’ve already written a report on the focus groups and the interviews, and we’ve shared that on social media. Of course, I have to publish, and this is my very first book on environmental racism. I look at environmental racism in Canada, but of course, Nova Scotia is a bit of a case study.

0:42:29.2 Ingrid Waldron: I also talk about the United States and the leaders there, such as Dr. Bullard and others. And this was the book that the Netflix documentary was based on. I like to build capacity in communities. I don’t want to be a professor, a researcher who goes into communities and just takes from them and never returns. So I like to build capacity. And one of the many ways that I’ve done that is by water testing. Many of these communities, specifically Lincolnville and Shelburne, have always wanted to test their water, but they didn’t want the government to do it because they didn’t trust the government because the government would probably say everything’s fine, right? 

0:43:10.7 Ingrid Waldron: So I got together a team comprised of a hydrogeologist, an environmental science professor and environmental science students. We formed a working group in 2016 to test the water of Lincolnville. And we tested the water at no cost. That’s the whole point of this. These are low income black communities in Nova Scotia. They don’t have the money for this. So we did this in the environmental science professor’s lab at no cost. We tested the water, we wrote a report on the findings, we went back to the community, we shared our findings and we educated them on how to keep your drinking water healthy, how to manage your drinking water.

0:43:53.8 Ingrid Waldron: And we continue with various projects like Healthy Wells Day. Many rural communities in Nova Scotia are on wells. They’re not on municipal water. Well water can be contaminated. So we have done this kind of multimedia social media on site project, awareness project for Nova Scotians to say, you’ve gotta find ways to keep your well water healthy. And we post infographics on social media. We did Facebook live and we also chose four communities to test their water on site. We collected the water from them and it’s a whole day, one day, typically it’s October, where we just educate the Nova Scotian public about keeping your well water healthy.

0:44:44.3 Ingrid Waldron: I’ve recently got into climate change, I would say maybe since 2021. I would say most of my projects now are on climate change. And I didn’t think I would be interested in this topic, but I realized that it operates very similarly to environmental racism. Who are the communities that are most vulnerable and exposed to climate change? It’s black communities once again, it’s indigenous communities. Why? Well, it’s because these communities tend to be low income. If they’re low income or poor, they’re living in neighborhoods that are low income and poor.

0:45:16.3 Ingrid Waldron: Low income and poor neighborhoods are less prepared for climate change. Their public infrastructure might be fragile, their housing might be poor. So when people often say to me, Ingrid, everybody’s impacted by climate change, not just black people and indigenous people, I say to them, yes, climate change doesn’t choose black people to impact, but they’re more vulnerable to it because they tend to be. In Canada, black people and indigenous people are our poorest, lowest income groups. And that means it’s like a Domino effect. That means they’re going to be living in neighborhoods that are low income and poor. And that means that their public infrastructure will be fragile, including their housing.

0:45:57.9 Ingrid Waldron: And that means that they will be less prepared for the onslaught of climate change. And it also means that they are the communities that are less… They’re not given attention by policymakers, climate policymakers. So these are the reasons why black and indigenous communities and racialized communities and low income white communities will be more vulnerable to climate change. I’ve looked at legal remedies for environmental racism, particularly with Ecojustice.

0:46:25.9 Ingrid Waldron: This is a law charity, environmental law charity in different cities in Canada. So I’ve worked with them so that they can develop a case for some of the communities I talked about. This confidential information, so I don’t have much information unless I get permission from community members, which I have in the past, just to say that it was really convenient that we had water testing results because we were able to hand over those water testing results to Ecojustice to help them make their case for many of the communities that I have worked with.

0:47:00.0 Ingrid Waldron: Then we get into politics. I wanted to have an environmental justice law for Canada for a long time and that started just provincially. I wanted an environmental justice law for Nova Scotia and that never happened. And I co-developed the very first environmental justice private members bill with former politician Lenore Zann. And she put that private members bill forward in Nova Scotia several times. It never went anywhere.

0:47:30.1 Ingrid Waldron: So in 2020, she moved over to the federal department as an MP Liberal for Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister. And she said, Ingrid, remember that bill we developed back in 2015? And I said, yes. She said, well, it’s now 2020 and I think we should take that bill and turn it into a federal bill for all of Canada, not just Nova Scotia. I said, fantastic idea. I said, because we can deal with all the pipelines in indigenous communities across Canada.

0:47:58.7 Ingrid Waldron: So we took that 2015 Nova Scotia private members bill and we turned it into a federal Canadian bill, hoping that it will become environmental justice law in Canada. We didn’t know at the time that it would. And that private member’s bill was called Bill C226. And it eventually, shockingly went to Senate, third reading at Senate in June 13th of 2024. And I thought to myself, this rarely has a chance of becoming the very first Canadian environmental justice law. And I don’t even know if the United States has this a law. I know everything is being dismantled by that president that you have, but I think this is maybe really groundbreaking, I thought.

0:48:45.6 Ingrid Waldron: And then on June 20, 2024, it passed. It was given Royal Assent, which means it became Canada’s first, very first, environmental justice law. And I’m, of course, happy that I was part of it, that I helped to develop it with Lenore Zann. Part of this law, there is a policy, it’s called the National Environmental Justice Policy, which requires the government to do consultations across Canada with impacted communities and to allow them to give them an opportunity to be part of the policy making. If you remember earlier, I talked about having a seat at the table, and I said, one aspect of environmental racism is that [inaudible] table. With this new legislation, this new law, and with the national environmental justice strategy, which is essentially a policy, the communities now have, I think, a seat at the table because in addition to sharing their concerns about environmental racism in their communities, they get an opportunity to say, this is what I think should be in this policy. So they’re, in a way, co-creating this national environmental justice strategy with government.

0:50:02.2 Ingrid Waldron: So I’m happy really to say that this law, this environmental law and the strategy specifically, has to wrap up. With the law, its going to be there forever, but the strategy has to wrap up next year. So right now, the government is engaged in consultations with indigenous and African and other communities across Canada, but their deadline is next year. And that’s it. I thought I would leave you on a high note. So we have a law in Canada, environmental justice law. Yay. Thank you very much.

0:50:37.9 Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you so much, Ingrid. What a tour de force presentation on all of the issues in Canada. Unfortunately, we’re out of time for questions at the moment. I just… One little thing that I was thinking, but you’ve addressed it at the end. Environmental racism is the kind of negative. Environmental justice is the goal. And I notice in your bill, it’s a bill for environmental justice. Can you just say in one minute a word or two about your use of the two terms environmental racism and environmental justice? 

0:51:11.3 Ingrid Waldron: There was a bit of a debate about that. We wanted it to be called environmental racism, and the government wouldn’t let it go. They said, we’re not going to agree to that unless you put in the title environmental justice. But that’s fair, because that’s what we want. So for me, people obscure. People use those terms interchangeably. Environmental racism, environmental justice. What we want is environmental justice. So for me, what environmental justice is, it’s the tools, the actions, the resources that we put in place to advance environmental justice by addressing environmental racism.

0:51:50.1 Ingrid Waldron: So for me, the bill is one of those tools. You can use various tools. You can use activism, you can use advocacy, you can use a private member’s bill, you can use the legislation that we developed. That’s a tool to advance environmental justice, which means that you are addressing environmental racism. Environmental racism is the sickness, it’s the condition, it’s the illness that we have to deal with. Environmental justice is the antidote, it’s the medication. That’s the way that I describe it.

0:52:22.2 Julian Agyeman: On that note, can we thank Ingrid with a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause. Thank you. Thank you, Ingrid.

0:52:30.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Anka Dregnan. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

[music]

The post A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron appeared first on Shareable.

Julian will start with a 25-minute presentation about power dynamics and how to work with others before addressing questions submitted by the live audience. 

Resources:

• New Economy Coalition
• Sources of Power
• Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freedman)
• Mutual Aid 101 Learning Series
• Mutual Aid 101 Community Canvas
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Video)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Transcript)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Slides)
• Mutual Aid 101 Session 2 w/ Stephanie Rearick and Julian Rose (Links from Stephanie, Julian + chat)
• Donate to The Response

Episode credits:

• Hosted and executive produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Produced and edited by Paige Kelly
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The post Group decision making, conflict management, and power dynamics with Julian Rose appeared first on Shareable.

This talk explores how and why city governments can step up to lead on climate action and how resident organizing is critical in making this happen. This talk also explores how to build and sustain the political coalition to ensure climate justice policies can be passed and implemented.

About the speaker

Hessann Farooqi is the Executive Director of the Boston Climate Action Network. He is the youngest person and the first person of color appointed to lead BCAN. Hessann studied economics at Boston University, worked in the United States Senate under Sen. Ed Markey, and served on various federal, state, and local political campaigns. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also appointed him to oversee the implementation of Boston’s key climate law on the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) Review Board. Hessann is Co-Coordinator of the Boston Green New Deal Coalition and serves as an Environmental Justice Advisor to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council on developing their Greater Boston Climate Action Plan. Hessann previously served as an advisor to The White House and Department of Energy’s Opportunity Project.

Watch the video of Local Leadership for Climate Justice with Hessann Farooqi

The post Local Leadership for Climate Justice with Hessann Farooqi appeared first on Shareable.

In addition, 97% of food waste ends up in landfills, and the methane gas released from rotting food – the same thing that’s released in your refrigerator drawers, causing perishables to expire faster – is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So, reducing food waste has an environmental impact as well, playing an important role in curbing climate change.

Addressing food waste through prevention, redistribution, and composting is an emerging focus for city leaders. Inspired, in part, by the report Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill, by Dana Gunders, staff scientist at the NRDC, food waste is a hot topic.

Despite the magnitude of the problem, solutions exist to prevent food waste—many of them are fairly easy and inexpensive to implement. In fact, a great deal of food waste prevention can be accomplished simply by changing people’s habits.

Everyone can help reduce food waste, and some steps elected officials, city managers, and other leaders can take to make food waste prevention a widespread practice. Countless resources, tools, and initiatives to prevent waste and draw attention to the issue have already been created:

• France became the first country to ban supermarkets from disposing of unsold food. Supermarkets in France now donate unsold food to charities and food banks.
• The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit provides families and communities both strategies and tools resulting in a nearly 50% reduction in preventable food waste.
• Just Eat It, a documentary film about food waste, is screened around the world.
• National Geographic features the ugly foods movement in its cover story, How ‘Ugly’ Fruits and Vegetables Can Help Solve World Hunger.
• ReFED – a collaboration of more than thirty business, nonprofit, foundation and government leaders committed to reducing United States food waste – creates numerous resources, including a Solutions to Food Waste interactive chart and the Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent.
• WRAP, a UK organization that works in “the space between governments, businesses, communities, thinkers and individuals,” creates the Love Food Hate Waste program to educate and instruct people about food waste prevention strategies.
• SHARECITY is crowdsourcing information about food sharing activities enabled by Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). They’re creating a searchable database of 100 cities around the world.
• Save Food, a joint initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Messe Düsseldorf, and interpack, forms to fight world food waste and loss through a global alliance of all stakeholders.
• Italy offers tax breaks to supermarkets that donate their waste food to charity.
• FoodCloud announces a ground-breaking partnership with Tesco Ireland to redistribute surplus food from 147 grocery stores to charities and community groups.
• The Real Junk Food Project creates cafés in the UK that serve restaurant-quality food from produce headed to the landfill.
• The Think.Eat.Save campaign of the Save Food Initiative is created to “galvanize widespread global, regional and national actions, and catalyze more sectors of society to be aware and to act.”
• LA Kitchen recovers healthy, local food from the waste stream to feed the hungry and provide culinary training to unemployed adults, particularly adults exiting prison as well as foster kids aging out of the system.
• A growing number of apps are created to reduce food waste, including Waste No Food, Copia, Zero Percent, Pare Up, Spoiler Alert, FoodKeeper, Food Cowboy and many more.
• Imperfect Produce launches to deliver ugly fruits and vegetables in the Bay Area.
• End Food Waste’s Ugly Foods movement grows into a global community connected by social media platforms.

For city officials, reducing food waste remains a matter of educating residents, providing the necessary infrastructure and creating a consistent messaging strategy that addresses both sides of the issue: preventing food waste and recycling organic matter once there is waste.

Shareable connected with three food waste reduction experts to get their recommendations for city leaders in the effort to help reduce food waste on a municipal level. We spoke with Cassie Bartholomew and Jeff Becerra from Stop Waste in Alameda County, California, which has one of the largest food scrap recycling programs in the country, and Veronica Fincher, Waste Prevention Program Manager at Seattle Public Utilities in Seattle, Washington, where it’s now illegal to throw food and food waste into the trash.

Their responses include great tips to prevent food waste, strategic partnerships for food redistribution and recycling options for food waste once it is generated. Here are their top 27 recommendations.

1. Look to Prevention First

Just as the materials recycling hierarchy places reduction as the best option, ahead of reusing and recycling, food waste has a similar hierarchy. Preventing food waste is a far more desirable option than dealing with it once it’s been created.

Composting is certainly better than letting food waste rot in the landfill. But it’s also important to remember that when food is wasted, all of the resources used to produce the food, including water, are also wasted.

As Fincher explains, at the municipal level they’re trying to reduce the tonnage of materials going to the landfill through both composting and prevention.

“It saves everybody money if we don’t have stuff going into the waste stream period,” she says. “It’s a matter of trying to use resources wisely, conserve, keep rates as low as possible, and help our customers reduce the amount of food waste they throw out.”

The food recovery hierarchy places reduction as the most preferred means of reducing food waste. 

2. Raise Awareness of Food Waste Reduction Strategies

One of the biggest challenges of reducing food waste is breaking people’s habits and automatic behaviors. If someone has thrown away food scraps and uneaten food for decades, composting requires a complete behavioral shift.

The best way to accomplish this shift in thinking is to create awareness regarding the massive amounts of organic waste. The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit is designed to help families both track and reduce their individual food waste. It includes instructions and messaging and marketing materials as well as research conducted on reducing household waste. Numerous cities are already utilizing this toolkit for broader campaigns and food waste challenges, and it can be customized to work with any community or family.

Communities can also include food waste prevention with their municipal messaging, supplying tips and resources to help citizens implement food waste prevention strategies in their own daily lives.

Download our free ebook: “Beyond Waste: Community Solutions to Managing Our Resources”

3. Bring the Problem Home

Food waste prevention requires everyone to do their part. Programs that people can easily implement at home and that involve the entire family bring food waste awareness to people of all ages. Therefore, it’s essential to find and create ways to work with families to minimize food waste.

An estimated one-third of food produced in the world for human consumption is being lost or wasted. 

4. Reduce the Ick Factor

Some people already understand the benefits of composting, while others push back with concerns about cleanliness and rodents. As Becerra points out, compost consists of the same waste that people are already generating, they’re just sending it to a different location.

“When you have a new waste stream like this, people don’t necessarily get it,” he says. “There’s sort of this ick factor that people need to get over.”

Becerra suggests creating simple behavioral changes, such as designating a small pail in the kitchen to collect vegetable trimmings and disposing of food-soiled paper in an outdoor organic bin.

5. Support the Growing Community Composting Movement

Community composting programs use previously wasted resources as local assets and reinvest them back into the same community. Many of these food waste prevention programs are powered by bicycles. City officials can support community composting programs and partner with them to further engage the community.

6. Educate Composters about Prevention

One of the challenges that Stop Waste faces is getting people who are already composting to make a deeper commitment to food waste prevention. Composting is the fifth tier of the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, so it’s important to educate seasoned composters about the importance of reducing food waste in the first place.

“People may feel like they’re already doing their green duty,” says Bartholomew. “They feel good about [food] recycling. It’s easy to do. It doesn’t take as much thinking and analysis as prevention.”

Through composting, organic waste becomes fresh soil. Photo: USDA (CC-BY)

7. Look at the Big Picture

Because food waste is a complex issue, it’s important to look at the big picture as well as the steps toward ideal solutions. Stop Waste did some strategic planning to assess the whole waste management cycle—how materials are produced, consumed, and ultimately discarded in their area—to create a closed-loop cycle.

“That’s where the prevention and reduction piece came in,” says Bartholomew, “from looking at the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy and trying to develop resources and best practices around reducing waste through prevention, reduction, and donation, then composting the rest.”

8. Work on a Community Level

Raising awareness of food waste prevention and recycling should be part of a top-down messaging effort, including mailers, posters and websites. But the message should also be community based, reaching community members in familiar places. Where are people in the community gathering? What messaging will they respond to? What kind of hands-on education can you provide? These are key questions to ask.

9. Develop Culturally Appropriate Materials

Developing culturally appropriate materials for community members works hand in hand with community outreach efforts.

Determine your target market, then work with community organizations to find the best ways to spread food waste messaging and disseminate resources. Be culturally sensitive. Work closely with neighborhood organizations to determine the most effective strategies for their specific community, then support them in doing the work. A marketing message has far greater impact when it comes from someone within a community.

“We work with community organizations and nonprofits so they can help educate their communities,” says Becerra. “They work in conjunction with us, but in a way that resonates with them. We’ve been visiting nonprofit groups over the last couple of years and have worked closely with them to find the best ways to reach their constituents.”

The resulting projects include a community mural about composting and a door-to-door canvassing campaign.

“It’s a little more of a grassroots community effort,” says Becerra.

Reducing food waste can be a grassroots community effort. Photo: Family O’Abé (CC-BY)

10. Create Food Waste Reduction Requirements for the Garbage Franchise

Cities typically control the garbage franchise, so they can require garbage haulers to pick up the organic stream. That organic stream can be set up to allow for food waste, including food scraps from preparation, uneaten food, and food-soiled paper, such as paper coffee cups and takeout containers.

“If the city is able to site a commercial composting facility, that helps a tremendous amount as well,” Becerra says, “because you’re generating this new waste stream, so you need to have a place fairly close by to process it. The city can assist by making sure the permitting process is not too cumbersome for setting up a commercial composting facility relatively close to the city.”

Becerra stresses that waste haulers need to be on board and invested in the fact that recycling organic matter is worthwhile and not simply meeting the requirements of their agreement.

11. Find the Right Location for Industrial Composting

Neighbors will likely push back against proposed locations for commercial composting facilities because they don’t want it in their neighborhood. Finding an agreeable location will be different for every city, but Becerra advises finding an area that is close to the city, but not necessarily in an urban setting. Many of the Alameda County composting facilities are in fairly remote areas.

The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit is full of resources and strategies to reduce household food waste.

12. Create Diverse Strategies and Messaging

In your communications about reducing food waste, offer a variety of options. Not every food waste prevention technique will work for every family or individual. In a small pilot study in Seattle, residents received a list of possibilities to reduce waste and tested three options over the course of a month.

“We were hoping it would settle on a few key, top strategies,” says Fincher.

However, they discovered a mix of 15 different strategies that worked for different people.

“It’s so individual,” Fincher explains. “We recognized that we need to allow for a lot of flexibility in our messaging so people can pick what’s going to work for them.”

13. Leverage Waste Management Funding to Raise Prevention Awareness

Cities may have robust budgets and resources available for food scrap recycling, but fewer resources available for food waste prevention. Bartholomew advises leveraging the recycling budget to raise awareness about food waste prevention.

“When rolling out a new recycling program, for example,” she says, “see if you can pair the messaging to use this as an opportunity to teach people how to reduce the amount of food waste they’re generating in the first place, then compost the rest.” She adds, “It’s a complex message, and you’re teaching multiple behaviors. Clearly there’s an opportunity to leverage that funding that already exists for outreach by adding in the prevention messaging.”

14. Create Food Waste Challenges

Building on the resources from the Food Too Good to Waste toolkit, you can create food waste challenges in households, neighborhoods, and cities to bring awareness to the issue of food waste. Rally community members around the cause and introduce a competition where people can challenge themselves and each other.

15. Utilize the UK’s Love Food Hate Waste Resources

Love Food Hate Waste is a project of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). Their website offers a number of resources to reduce food waste, including an app to help people waste less and save money, a perfect portion tool, a two-week meal planner, and hints and tips about date labels, freezing food, storing food, and more.

To help reduce food waste, set goals for yourself and your household. Photo: Madhan Karthikeyan (CC-BY)

16. Create Partnerships

Partnerships play an important role in solving food waste at a grassroots level.

“If communities are going to be successful,” says Becerra, “multiple parties need to be on board. Working together is critical to making it happen, whether it’s food waste prevention or food scrap recycling.”

Potential partners include industrial kitchens, restaurants, school cafeterias, supermarkets, local community organizations and nonprofits. To facilitate these partnerships, there’s a growing need for companies to create software and increase efficiency.

Food recovery—taking surplus food from one business and delivering it to organizations working to curb hunger—also requires key partnerships.

In Orange County, California, they found that restaurants didn’t understand the Good Samaritan Act, which protects businesses from criminal and civil liability when they donate food to nonprofit organizations. Concerns about liability had been preventing restaurants from donating food.

To educate restaurant owners, local health inspectors, who regularly visit the restaurants, were trained to discuss how to safely donate excess food.

The county then partnered with Yellow Cab and local 7-11 stores: Yellow Cab picks up the food during off-hours and takes it to the convenience stores to refrigerate overnight until pick up.

“These are innovations that are specific to that community,” says Bartholomew, “and they took a handful of partners to really think through and come up with.”

Food rotting in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO². Photo by Taz (CC-BY)

17. Sell or Donate the Compost

Compost can be sold, donated to local schools and organizations, or used for public projects like parks and gardens.

“One thing you can do,” says Becerra, “is have free compost giveaways. It’s a way to show residents, who are essentially the customers, that their work is creating a useful product, and not just disappearing.”

One school district in Alameda County has language built into the city’s franchise agreement to donate a percentage of the finished compost to the school district for school gardens. One of the haulers also has a donation program where they donate directly to community groups and school groups that can promote the use of local compost.

18. Do a Local Study

Gathering sample data can help determine next steps toward sustainable consumption in cities. Officials in Seattle conducted a small food waste study of 119 households. They asked each household to weigh their organic waste to help determine how much of their total waste stream was organic matter.

“That gave us some data that we didn’t have from any other source,” says Fincher. “It showed that a third of our food waste is edible food waste and that reducing it is actually something that is worthwhile.”

Food waste occurs at every stage of the food cycle, from producers down to consumers. Photo: s pants (CC-BY)

19. Create and Support Food Recovery Programs

Food waste recovery is an important, socially responsible aspect of reducing food waste. Businesses may be inclined to adopt food waste recovery practices, since production is unaffected.  Encourage local stores and restaurants to join existing food recovery programs or to create a new program.

20. Create and Support Food Redistribution Tech Tools

Preventing food waste requires smart systems. Develop and use local tech platforms, such as online portals or mapping platforms, to connect those with surplus food to those who need food. In Seattle, for example, 200 different agencies pick up and redistribute food, but, as Fincher explains, “There are a lot of other generators and people who need the food.”

21. Celebrate Wins and Showcase Businesses Taking a Leadership Role

One of the best ways to get businesses and organizations on board with food waste reduction is to spotlight the ones that are already doing it well. This inspires and encourages other enterprises to find ways to participate.

“We’re always trying to share success stories and best practices,” says Bartholomew, “by highlighting businesses that are doing the right thing or highlighting how they overcame some barriers.”

22. Set Food Waste Reduction Goals

In keeping with the nationwide goal to reduce 50 percent of food waste by 2030, city officials can create local goals to keep leaders and residents on track.

“By setting some sort of goal, tracking how much pre-consumer food waste is being generated, then categorizing why it’s being generated and whether that food gets composted or goes to the landfill,” says Bartholomew, “we can see where that food waste is generated and where it goes.”

Stop Waste will be gathering data for the next few years to yield better insight into the county’s larger waste generators. Once they’ve pinpointed the largest problems, they can work to reduce food waste in those areas.

23. Include Food Scrap Pickup in Mandatory Recycling Programs

Alameda County has a mandatory recycling program for businesses that includes organics collection. Recycling Rules Alameda County states the rules and gives information on both the expectations and best practices.

97 percent of food waste ends up in landfills. Photo: Alan Levine (CC-BY)

24. Support Food Waste Reduction Legislation

There’s an increasing amount of legislation addressing food waste reduction—particularly regarding date labeling. Advocates aim to create a standard labeling system to help reduce food waste. The NRDC report The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America is a “first-of-its-kind legal analysis of federal and state laws related to date labels across all 50 states.” The report presents recommendations for a new labeling system.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree from Maine recently introduced the Food Recovery Act. The bill is aimed at reducing the amount of food wasted each year in the United States and includes nearly two dozen provisions to reduce food waste.

Supporting legislation around food waste issues is critical for city leaders working to prevent food waste.

25. Provide Food Waste Awareness Outreach in Schools

As Bartholomew explains, it’s easier to instill positive waste reduction behaviors in children than to change existing behaviors in adults. To facilitate this behavior change, city leaders can create and support programs designed specifically for local schools and youth organizations.

Organizers should work with an existing recycling coordinator or find the resources to integrate food waste education into existing programs. To create consistency, Bartholomew recommends setting up a consistent infrastructure, so kids have the same recycling bins at school that they have at home.

Stop Waste’s Student Action Project visits 5th grade and middle school classrooms to train teachers about recycling and food waste. Their team also helps families with the Food Too Good to Waste program, which works with them for four to six weeks. Bartholomew finds the citizen-science aspect to be particularly effective because students are bringing the same message home to their families.

26. Get Other Officials On Board

The best way to get other officials on board with a food waste reduction program is to show them projects that are successful in other cities.

“City officials have to deal with many of the same issues,” says Becerra. “It’s helpful for elected officials to know that it is possible to do these things.” He adds, “Sometimes it takes a while for people to understand that this can be done fairly easily and that it is important.”

27. Connect with Successful Food Waste Reduction Programs

Are you ready to get started on a food waste reduction strategy? The Stop Waste team is available to advise and share its best practices. Services and programs are well established in Alameda County, and the Stop Waste team stresses that they can help connect the dots for other leaders, too.

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This article was originally published on April 11, 2016

Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

The post How to prevent food waste: 27 tips for community leaders appeared first on Shareable.

What is Participatory Budgeting?

In 1989, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre developed a new model of democratic participation, which has become known internationally as participatory budgeting (PB). Through this process, community members directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget. In other words, the people who pay taxes (all of us) decide how they get spent.

This sounds simple, but it is not. Budgets are complex creatures, and it takes a lot of time and support for ordinary people to make wise spending decisions. For this reason, PB generally involves a year-long cycle of public meetings. Community members discuss local needs and develop project proposals to meet these needs, then invite the public to vote on which projects get funded.

This innovative model has become popular across Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and has been deemed a best practice of democratic governance by the United Nations. Cities, counties, states, schools, and housing authorities have used it to give local people control over public spending.

In 2009, The Participatory Budgeting Project (The PBP) helped launch the first process in the U.S., with a $1.3 million budget in Chicago’s 49th Ward. Then, in October 2010, The PBP successfully launched a $6 million initiative in four New York City districts. 

Things to consider ahead of time

Could PB work in my community?

First, check that the right conditions are in place. At the most basic level, you need political will from above and community support from below. You need someone with control over budget money (an elected official, agency head, department director, etc.) to agree to let the public decide how to spend part of the budget. And you need community organizations — in particular those working with marginalized communities — to engage people and push the process forward.

How do we put PB on the agenda?

To start gathering support, organize a public event about PB to explain how it works, where it has worked, and what benefits it could bring to your community. The PBP can help provide speakers and materials. Ask organizations and universities to co-sponsor the event, to build up more support and resources. Invite government officials and community leaders to respond to the presentations, to say whether and how they think PB could work locally.

You can also try proposing PB at other community meetings, writing editorials or blog posts, and asking elected officials or candidates to take a stance. Bit by bit, this public outreach can add up and spark local interest.

Who should be at the table for initial discussions?

When you begin to introduce the idea of PB to your community, talk with as many interested organizations and parties as possible. This includes government representatives and elected officials, local nonprofits, block clubs, religious institutions, political groups, foundations, universities, schools, and activists. The knowledge and relationships of these groups will determine how far your efforts will go.

How do we pitch PB to attract interest?

We’ve found that different people get excited about PB for different reasons, but these six angles attract the most interest:

Democracy: Ordinary people have a real say — and they get to make real political decisions. Politicians build closer relationships with their constituents, and community members develop greater trust in government.

Transparency: Budgets are policy without rhetoric without the rhetoric; what a government actually does. When community members decide spending through a public vote, there are fewer opportunities for corruption, waste, or backlash.

Education: Participants become more active and informed citizens. Community members, staff, and officials learn democracy by doing it. They gain a deeper understanding of complex political issues and community needs.

Efficiency: Budget decisions are better when they draw on residents’ local knowledge and oversight. Once they are invested in the process, people make sure that money is spent wisely.

Social Justice: Everyone gets equal access to decision making, which levels the playing field. Traditionally underrepresented groups often participate more than usual in PB, which helps direct resources to communities with the greatest needs.

Community: Through regular meetings and assemblies, people get to know their neighbors and feel more connected to their city. Local organizations spend less time lobbying, and more time deciding policies. Budget assemblies connect community groups and help them recruit members.

How do we deal with resistance?

When government officials and other decision-makers first hear about PB, they often raise the following doubts:

“That’s the elected officials’ job”: Voters elect government officials to make the tough decisions, so shouldn’t budgeting be their responsibility?

Sure, they should be responsible, but if they share this responsibility with community members, they can better represent local needs and desires. PB helps officials do their job better, by putting them in closer touch with their constituents, and by injecting local knowledge and volunteer energy into the budget process.

“There’s no money”: Budgets are being cut across the board, so how could there be money to launch PB?

Fortunately, PB does not require a new pot of money, just a change to how existing budget funds are decided. You will need some resources to carry out the PB process, but this investment saves money down the road, as participants discover new ways to make limited budget dollars go farther.

“The process will Be co-opted”: If budget decisions are opened up to the public, won’t the ‘usual suspects’ and powerful community groups dominate?

This is a valid concern for any kind of public participation, and PB is not immune. But if you involve all segments of the community in planning the process, and reduce the barriers to participation for marginalized people, you can prevent any one sector from taking control. Regardless, when people are given real responsibility to make budget decisions, they tend to rise to the occasion, and think about the broader community.

What pot of money will the community allocate?

PB usually starts with “discretionary funds”—money that is not set aside for fixed or essential expenses but allocated at the discretion of decision-makers. While this is typically a small part of the overall budget, it is a big part of the funds that are available and up for debate each year.

There are many sources of discretionary money. It could come from the capital budget (for physical infrastructure) or operating budget (for programs and services) of your city, county, or state. City councilors or other officials could set aside their individual discretionary funds, as in Chicago and New York. These officials may also have control over special allocations like Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) or Tax Increment Financing (TIF) money. Housing authorities, schools, universities, community centers, and other public institutions could open up their budgets.

The funds could even come from non-governmental sources like foundations, community organizations, or grassroots fundraising if this money is oriented towards public or community projects. Some PB processes mix funds from different sources, to build up a bigger budget pot.

How much money is enough to do PB?

Almost no pot of money is too small to start. PB has worked with a few thousand dollars and with many millions of dollars. Most processes involve 1-15% of the overall budget. PB usually starts as a pilot project with a small budget. If the process is successful, it can build political will to increase the pot of money.

How much money you need depends on what it will be used for. If students are allocating the money to school activities, a couple thousand dollars will go a long way. If residents are deciding on significant physical improvements for public parks, streets, and buildings, you’ll probably want at least a million dollars. These capital projects typically require more money than programs and services, since they are built to last multiple years.

Regardless, you’ll want funds that are renewable from year to year, so that PB isn’t just a one-year fling. And in the long run, the more money, the more you can do!

Steps to help your community take charge of how money is spent. 

1. Planning

• Educate decision-makers 
• Engage community partners 
• Identify a pot of money to allocate 
• Secure funding and staffing for implementation 
• Announce approval of PB process

2. Design the Process

A steering committee that represents the community creates the rules and engagement plan in partnership with government officials.

• Form a Steering Committee.
• Develop a PB Rulebook.
• Schedule idea-collection events.
• Recruit and train facilitators and outreach workers.

3. Brainstorm Ideas

Via in-person meetings, and online tools, participants share and discuss ideas for projects.

• At public meetings, residents and other community stakeholders learn about PB, discuss community needs, and brainstorm project ideas.
• Residents also submit ideas online or via other digital tools.
• Residents volunteer to serve as budget delegates to turn the ideas into full project proposals for the PB ballot.

4. Develop Proposals

Volunteer “budget delegates” develop the ideas into feasible proposals, which are then vetted by professionals.

• Budget delegates go through an orientation, then meet in committees to transform the community’s initial project ideas into full proposals, with support from agency staff and technical experts.

5. Vote

Residents vote to allocate the available budget on the proposals that most serve the community’s needs.

• Delegates present final projects at science-fair style expos
• Residents vote on which projects to fund, at sites throughout the community over a week or two. 

6. Fund

The government or institution funds and implements winning projects, and participants help monitor and troubleshoot problems as they arise.

7. Evaluate

Participants and researchers evaluate the process and identify improvements to make the following year

Starting PB in your city is a lot of hard work, but if you do it right, the payoff is tremendous. You can make government more transparent, budgeting more efficient, and public spending more fair. You can educate thousands of people on how government works, develop hundreds of grassroots leaders, and build stronger community networks. And in the end, you might even fend off those waves of budget cuts, and replace them with a people’s budget.

For more information about starting PB in your community, please visit www.participatorybudgeting.org or email The PBP at info@participatorybudgeting.org.

Other Resources:

PBP Scoping Toolkit

Best Practices for Inclusive Participatory Budgeting

People Powered: Participatory Budgeting

Making Participatory Budgeting Work: Experiences on the Front Lines

More Shareable articles about Participatory Budgeting can be found in this archive.

This article was originally published on December 3, 2011 and was significantly updated by Jennifer Foley on June, 27, 2024.

The post How to start Participatory Budgeting in your city appeared first on Shareable.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this guide should be misconstrued as legal advice. For guidance on your particular circumstances, please consult a lawyer.

Taxpayers in the United States paid an average federal income tax rate of 14.9 percent—nearly $2.2 trillion altogether—in 2021, the latest year for which information is available from the Internal Revenue Service, according to the Tax Foundation. That tax levy arrived amid real wages stagnating since the 1970s, per the World Economic Forum, and military spending reaching record heights—more than $916 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. 

It should therefore come as no surprise that some taxpayers, spurred by economics, politics or both, choose to avoid paying taxes altogether. Here’s how they attempt it—both legally and illegally.

Legally: By lowering your taxable income

The only technically legal way to avoid taxes is to intentionally lower your income below the taxable threshold, which varies by age and filing status—that is, whether you are single, married or the head of the household, meaning you have dependents such as children or relatives other than your spouse whom you support financially.

If you are unmarried, younger than 65 years of age and have no dependents, the threshold at which you must file an annual tax return is $12,950, according to the IRS. In other words, if you earn less than $12,950 a year, you don’t have to file a return and therefore pay further income tax. That threshold increases to $14,700 if you’re older than 65, or $19,400 if you’re the head of the household, or $25,900 if you’re married and filing your return jointly with your spouse.

You can also increase the threshold for income taxes by contributing to tax-exempt accounts for specific benefits, like retirement and health care. According to the IRS, up to $6,500—$7,500 if you’re over the age of 50—can be contributed to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA) without incurring federal income taxes. Similarly, up to $3,850—$7,750 for families—can be contributed to Health Savings Accounts (HSA), per the agency. If you’re unmarried, under the age of 50, have no dependents and make the maximum contributions to IRA and HSA accounts, that means your income tax threshold is $23,300.

But annual tax returns are only one method of taxation. If you’re a full- or part-time employee, rather than a business owner or freelancer, federal and state governments also deduct taxes from each of your paychecks. Per the IRS, you can minimize these “payroll taxes” by updating your filing status, increasing the number of dependents and/or making other adjustments to your Form W-4, which helps your employer calculate the amount of tax dollars that should be withheld from your paychecks.

Illegally: By refusing to pay—or lying

Avoiding taxes due to political considerations is often described as “tax resistance” and framed as a form of civil disobedience. Typically, tax resistance involves the open and deliberate withholding of all or a portion of your taxes due. For example: You may complete your annual tax return and submit it to the IRS with a letter explaining your refusal to pay. In such cases, tax resisters may also donate the withheld taxes to causes more in line with their beliefs, such as the Church Peace Tax Fund from the Mennonite Church USA, or reserve the money to pay potential fines for non-payment of taxes from the IRS. Such fines, including penalties and interest, may accrue on overdue tax debt for up to 10 years, when the statute of limitations expires. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee maintains a War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund to help tax resisters meet such burdens. According to the NWTRCC, it is extremely rare for tax resisters to be imprisoned.

The other illegal method of tax avoidance is simply lying. This can be as sophisticated as reporting complex losses of income on your annual tax return or as straightforward as adding nonexistent dependents to your W-4. Either way, be aware that knowingly attempting to mislead the IRS may be considered fraud and result in jail time.

Life After Taxes

In 2003, David M. Gross decided to legally avoid paying taxes by intentionally lowering his income. As a form of tax resistance in response to the US invasion of Iraq, he requested a 75 percent pay cut and, nine years later, reported having a richer life for it.

After becoming self-employed, Gross had to get creative to meet his new budget. Maximizing his contributions to tax-exempt benefits, his income tax threshold was about $36,000 a year, but $14,000 needed to be invested in retirement and health care accounts. The prospect of surviving on the remaining $20,000 in the notoriously expensive San Francisco Bay Area initially seemed daunting, yet Gross found that wasn’t the case at all. Aside from fixed expenses like rent, he minimized his variable expenses like food and transportation through a do-it-yourself ethic with cooking and biking. By taking advantage of other free or low-cost resources like libraries, public transit and Craigslists’ “free stuff” section, he even managed to save enough for backpacking trips in Mexico.

That said, Gross admitted that his choices would not serve everyone as well. He had professional skills that translated well to a self-employed, work-from-home job, which helped to minimize his expenses, and had no children, who typically cost more than the deductions they afford. Still, Gross’ fundamental concern applies to every taxpayer: Wouldn’t you rather be living more, even if it meant earning less?

Read more about Gross’ rationale for, and experience with, intentionally lowering his taxable income below.

Note that this account was first published by Shareable on April 17, 2012, and is reproduced below without update.

How to Not Pay Taxes

by David M. Gross

Nine years ago, I started living a more bountiful life by working less, earning less, and spending less.

I started by going to my employer’s human resources department to ask if I might take a significant pay cut. “How significant?” they asked. I said, “I’m not sure yet; maybe 75 percent?”

As you can imagine, this was not the sort of request they were used to, but they gave it their best shot. How did I come to make such a strange request? A little over nine years ago, the war on Iraq began. Along with many other people, I was horrified at the magnitude of the suffering the U.S. would inflict with its “shock and awe” campaign, and also at the increasingly blind, ignorant, and bloodthirsty war fever that dominated our country. But I also knew that as a taxpayer I was a small but vital part of the monster we were unleashing, and that no matter how much I protested, as long as I continued to pay taxes, I was — in a practical, bottom-line sense — a war supporter. I had a hard time getting to sleep at night and looking myself in the mirror in the morning. I knew I had to stop supporting the war, if only for my own peace of mind.

But how? My major financial contribution to the war was from the federal income tax which was automatically withheld from each paycheck before I even saw it. If I were to stop this withholding by filing a new W-4 form with more allowances, this would just delay the inevitable. Come April, the IRS would realize they’d been underfed and would come after me or my employer to seize the rest. I decided instead to get “under the tax line,” reasoning that the best way not to pay income tax is not to owe any to begin with. So that’s why I visited my H.R. department. But they said they couldn’t help me — such a radical pay cut might look suspicious to auditors and cause problems of some sort for the company.

So I quit my job where I’d been earning roughly $100k, and now I’m self-employed doing contract work and writing books. When I started, I didn’t know where the “tax line” was. I assumed it was somewhere in the vicinity of the “poverty line” (which didn’t sound encouraging). I found some stories about war tax resisters who use the “under the tax line” method (one among many methods of war tax resistance) and these seemed to suggest that the “tax line” was somewhere around $3,000 to $8,000 a year.

So I started thinking “hmmm… I could buy bulk rice and pick dandelions for vitamins” . . . “you can do a lot with top ramen!” . . . “maybe I could work as a fire-spotter to avoid paying rent” . . . that sort of thing. I started to resign myself to a path of deprivation, sacrifice, and renunciation in the service of my values.

There are things to be said for sacrifice in the service of values, but my path took another turn entirely.

I researched tax regulations to find out more precisely where the “tax line” is and just how much of a budget I had to work with. What I found was a great relief. Today in the United States, about 40 percent of households that file tax returns are already under the federal income tax line — that is to say, two in five of these American households pay no federal income tax. So I didn’t have to live in a cave and eat grubs and berries, all I had to do was join the income-tax-free 40 percent.

There really is no single “tax line.” The threshold is different for everyone. It’s based on things like your family structure, your age, how you make your income, and what you do with your money. For me, the tax line is about $36,000 this year. By using deductions for tax-deferred retirement accounts, and for health savings accounts and health insurance — entirely legally and by-the-book — I’m able to owe no federal income tax.

To do this, I have to put about $14,000 into these retirement and health savings accounts (almost 40 percent of my income). Subtracting Social Security taxes, that leaves me about $20,000 to live on during the year. That seems like very little to many people, especially in the expensive San Francisco Bay Area where I live, but it’s more than enough for me.

For one thing, it’s a real $20,000, not a $20k salary that then gets whittled down by income tax. My yearly expenses — rent, food, transportation, health insurance, and the like — come to less than $18,000. What’s left over is a rainy-day, emergency, or vacation fund. I often use it for a south-of-the-border backpack-and-hostels style adventure. And note that I’m also saving a healthy $14,000 a year for retirement and for health expenses.

Here are some of the techniques I’ve adopted to lower my expenses:

• I cook my meals from scratch rather than eating out or eating expensive packaged food.
• I brew my own beer, because I like the good stuff (and because I want to avoid the federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages).
• I’ve traded English tutoring for Spanish tutoring, and web programming for training in DIY skills like meat curing and urban foraging, rather than paying for classes.
• I use the public library for research and recreational reading rather than buying books.
• I don’t own a car, but instead use public transit, bicycling, Greyhound, Amtrak, and such.
• I try to find used stuff on freecycle or craigslist rather than buying new — for instance: a pot rack, a Foreman grill, a vacuum cleaner, a back door that I could cut a cat door in without risking our security deposit, a bread machine, speakers, a living room couch, some lectures on video, a food processor and blender, and a carboy I use for brewing.
• I gravitate toward social events that highlight generosity and participation rather than commerce and spectatorship.

How has my life changed now that I’ve gone from a $100k urban playboy lifestyle to living on $20k?

When Money Magazine profiled me a few years ago for an article they put out on how to avoid taxes, they wrote that their readers wouldn’t enjoy the “ascetic lifestyle” that comes along with my technique. Well, if this is “asceticism,”asceticism is very underrated. The life I’m leading now is fuller and more enjoyable than ever. I have less anxiety and feel more integrity, and I’m genuinely living a bountiful life. By being willing to take in less income, I can work fewer hours. Those now-free hours are much more valuable to me than the money I’d been trading them for.

It seems that many things people give up to pursue their careers are more valuable than the money they gain in the trade. And many are not for sale at any price: health, youth, and the time we need to pursue our dreams, learn new skills, volunteer for good causes, strengthen relationships with our family and friends and communities, or just to read those books we’ve been meaning to get around to.

Money is at best a means to various ends. It is these ends, and not the money itself, that define abundance. While money is a useful means to some ends, it is hopeless for others and inefficient for many.

For example: I love good food. When I was making the big bucks I used to go out to eat all the time since there are so many great restaurants in the Bay Area. But for the cost of one restaurant meal I could eat fantastic food all week — if only I had the time to look up the recipes, shop for the ingredients, prepare the food, and clean up the kitchen afterwards. Now I have that time, and so I eat great food just about every day for a fraction of what I used to spend. And along the way I’ve learned a thing or two about the art of cooking, which helps me share good food with others.

One measure of abundance is this: What percentage of your time and energy can you devote to your passions, and what percentage are you forced to spend on priorities that contradict and oppose them? By “your passions” I don’t just mean “your selfish whims” but your values, the things you think are worthwhile and important.

If a percentage of your paycheck is being sucked up by Uncle Sam, you’re spending that percent of every working day — spending your energy and time, your life — to promote the Pentagon’s priorities and political pork projects, war and empire, bank bailouts and mass imprisonment. You can serve your values and your community much better by redirecting that time and energy in more positive directions.

What worked for me won’t work for everyone: Some people, for good reasons, have higher expenses than I do (for instance children, though they are good tax deductions, can be an expensive hobby – I don’t have kids). Not everyone has job skills that translate well to a part-time, freelance, work-from-home style job. Many people have to work full-time jobs, year-round to earn as much as I earn. Many still earn less. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy, but there are some lessons I learned along the way that many of us can use to make our lives more bountiful, whatever our situation.

Take stock of your own vision of a rewarding, generous life, and look closely at which components of it are best served by earning money and which components are best served in more direct ways. Look also for ways in which your career may interfere with such a life. And look at how the government, by means of the tax system, is forcing you to expend your time and energy on priorities that contradict your values. Consider the possibility that the most bountiful and generous life you could be living may be one in which you are earning and spending less but living and sharing more.

If you like this article, read Comprehensive Disobedience: Occupying the Sharing Economy in Spain, also by David Gross.

The post How to not pay taxes appeared first on Shareable.

In this, our inaugural episode, our series host Neal Gorenflo interviews Zoe Schlag and Derek Razo from Common Trust—the industry leader in business succession and exit transitions to Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs). Common Trust co-produced this project, and the resulting book, alongside Purpose US. Derek and Zoe discuss the origins of the project and how the needs of the alternative ownership sector shaped the focus of the book and the research behind it.

They discuss the rise of shared and steward ownership as solutions to economic challenges, highlighting the importance of shared infrastructure to scale these models. They share compelling case studies, such as Clegg Auto in Utah, where an employee ownership trust led to record profits and higher customer satisfaction. The conversation emphasizes the widespread potential and historical success of these models in creating resilient, community-focused economies.

Relevant Links:

Grab a free copy of the book here: assetsincommon.org

Learn about Common Trust here: common-trust.com

Guests:

Zoe Schlag is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Common Trust with a long standing track record leading and investing in mission-driven businesses. From being an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Eric Schmidt’s family office and a Managing Director at Techstars, Zoe has been a major catalyst for shared ownership and impact investing worldwide. Zoe began her career in international development, working with ex-guerrilla fighters in Guatemala and microfinance in Argentina before transitioning to impact investing in India. Zoe is an Rutgers Executive Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, Aspen Ideas Scholar, JUST and MDaaS board member, and graduate of Tufts University.

Derek Razo is a Co-founder and Managing Partner at Common Trust, where he leads business and product development. Derek has led shared ownership and steward ownership transitions since 2017, and is recognized as one of the nation’s foremost authorities in this field. He co-founded Purpose International in 2016 and then later Purpose US, which have led the movement for steward ownership and popularized the use of Perpetual Purpose Trusts for mission protection. Derek has served as an investor, advisor, and delivery partner for businesses shifting to stakeholder and purpose ownership. Derek’s extensive experience also includes collaborating on community-led projects such as affordable housing and real estate, and indigenous-led funds. Derek studied computer science and business at UC Berkeley, and has been a serial founder of cooperative and open source businesses throughout his early career.

About the Book:

“Assets in Common” reveals a strategy for transforming the U.S. economy through shared ownership and stewardship. Based on extensive research, the authors present in-depth case studies and approaches, such as cooperation between companies, shared balance sheets, holding companies, and shared services. They offer compelling evidence that connecting assets can create economic resilience. “Assets in Common” identifies what’s working at scale, and what’s needed next. This book is a must-read for business and community leaders who want to be part of the solution. Filled with practical insights, “Assets in Common” offers actionable steps for building infrastructure.

The post Kicking off the “Assets in Common” series: Next steps for the alternative ownership movement – Podcast #1 appeared first on Shareable.

In cities across the world grassroots initiatives organize alternative forms of provisioning, e.g. food sharing networks, energy cooperatives and repair cafés. Some of these are recognized by local governments as engines in sustainability transitions. In this talk, I will discuss different ways that local governments interact with, and use, such grassroots initiatives, drawing from case studies in Berlin and Gothenburg. An argument will be made for that we need to reconsider what municipal infrastructure should entail, i.e. not only the traditional infrastructure for transport and waste but also new infrastructure for repairing and sharing.

About the speaker

Karin Bradley is Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research concerns planning and policy for sustainability transitions, the role of civil society, alternative economies and justice aspects of transitions. She has been the co-director of the eight-year research programme Mistra Sustainable Consumption – from niche to mainstream that engages researchers from different disciplines as well as municipalities, civil society organizations, companies and national authorities in Sweden. She has had several assignments for the Swedish government, including leading a public inquiry on the sharing economy.

Her publications include “Community repair in the circular economy: Fixing more than stuff” (2022, with Ola Persson), “In search of sufficiency politics: The case of Sweden” (2021, with Åsa Callmer) and “Planning for sharing: Providing Infrastructure for citizens to be makers and sharers” (2017, with Anna Hult).

About the series

Shareable is partnering with Tufts University on this special series hosted by Professor Julian Agyeman (Co-chair of Shareable’s Board) and Cities@Tufts. Initially designed for Tufts students, faculty, and alumni, the colloquium has been opened up to the public with the support of Shareable and Barr Foundation.

Listen to the Cities@Tufts Podcast (or on the app of your choice):

Watch the lecture

Transcription

[music]

0:00:07.9 Karin Bradley: What we today see, the activities in terms of these repair spaces, reuse, food sharing, different ways of minimizing material consumption and increasing sort of circularity, that is something that municipalities are starting to pick up and perhaps in the future seeing as part of their role.

0:00:33.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:01:08.1 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts virtual colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry, and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, we’re delighted to host Professor Karin Bradley, Professor of Urban and Regional Studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

0:01:51.4 Julian Agyeman: Her research concerns planning and policy for sustainability transitions, the role of civil society, alternative economies and the justice aspects of transitions. She’s been the co-director of the eight-year research program, MISTRA Sustainable Consumption from niche to mainstream, that engages researchers from different disciplines, as well as municipalities, civil society organizations, companies and national authorities in Sweden. She’s had several assignments for the Swedish government, including leading a public inquiry on the sharing economy.

0:02:27.0 Julian Agyeman: Publications that she’s responsible for include Community Repair in the Circular Economy, Fixing More than Stuff, In Search of Sufficiency Politics, The Case of Sweden, and Planning for Sharing, Providing Infrastructure for Citizens to be Makers and Sharers. Karin’s talk today is how local government can use Grassroots Initiatives for sustainability transitions. Karin, a Zoom-tastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.

0:03:00.0 Karin Bradley: Thank you so much for that introduction, and I’m very happy to be here. I’m working at KTH in the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, and the research that I’m going to talk about today is very much in the context of Sweden, and more specifically drawing on cases in Gothenburg, but also in Berlin. And I understand that you are all from very different contexts than many are in the US, so the conditions might differ slightly, but hopefully you can relate to some of this, and that’s also something we can discuss at the end.

0:03:35.5 Karin Bradley: So this is the title, and the work is part of a larger project called Grassroots Initiatives for Energy Transition that I’m working on together with colleagues from University of Uppsala and Linnaeus University and another colleague at KTH and one at Gothenburg, and we’re doing several sort of papers and done years of field work, but I will present one little piece of this, and it’s, as I said, it’s ongoing work, so I’m very open to comments and questions and suggestions for sort of the analysis. And our focus here is on Grassroots Initiatives in the areas of energy transport, food repair, and reuse. And I should say that it’s Grassroots Initiatives that somehow are active in doing sort of practices in terms of then themselves expanding infrastructure for cycling, for instance, through play streets, or in terms of food sharing, etcetera.

0:04:38.8 Karin Bradley: So it’s not sort of campaign organizations necessarily, more like traditional environmental organizations. And a little bit of background to what we’re doing is the need for, when we talk about sustainability transitions and circular economy, etcetera there is more and more awareness that even if we do circle and reuse and recycle material, there’s still so long way to go. Currently, there’s a quite recent study on the circularity in the context of Sweden, that pointed out that only 3.4% of the economy is actually what you could call circular.

0:05:22.4 Karin Bradley: So it’s really still based very much on virgin material. And a similar sort of study on the EU level said around 9%. So with that said, there is also a need to reduce sort of levels of material consumption. Therefore, this kind of interest also in sharing and reusing. And I think this is taken from the story of Tufts, this sort of building on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where really the emphasis should be on using what you have or borrowing rather than buying new when we talk about sustainable consumption.

0:06:02.0 Karin Bradley: And I think this kind of perspective has really come to influence and be quite a core part of transport policy, at least in the context of Scandinavia, but also more and more in the EU with this, some of you might be familiar with this, but this avoid, shift, improve kind of logic and hierarchy, where the first step is really try to avoid the need for traveling and then shifting to more sustainable forms of transport.

0:06:29.8 Karin Bradley: And then if not possible, then improve. So electrification, for instance. So I think that is really has come into the sort of, yeah, planning procedures and the way we think in terms of urban planning. Whereas if you relate that to material consumption, it’s much more politically sensitive, and it’s…

0:06:52.7 Karin Bradley: Yeah, considered as more somehow political to plan for or try to encourage less material use of resources. Whereas we can see many Grassroots engaged in different ways of sharing, swapping and making use of the existing. So that’s the background of, so what can be learned from Grassroots Initiatives and how can also local governments work with the learn from or use the work of Grassroots Initiatives. So that’s the kind of the main question, but also more of a maybe analytical question, how may this be conceptualized? And I’ll come to a one way that we are currently thinking about this in terms of different kind of modes.

0:07:39.2 Karin Bradley: You can say modes of governing, in a sense, Grassroots Initiatives. And here the focus then is, as I said, on the Grassroots Initiatives working on practices. And here the focus is on cycling, food, repair and reuse. We don’t have in this work, we left out the energy because there are slightly different conditions there. Yes. And it’s based on interviews with the Grassroots Initiatives in these two cities and also with interviews with public officials and also different intermediary organizations.

0:08:14.0 Karin Bradley: Yes. And I should also say that we are of course not the first ones in history that have been thinking about different ways that local governments relate to Grassroots Initiatives or civil society organizations. Just pointing on at some work that we are building on and relating to is the work of Yuri Konkrite-Paligan and colleagues that have explored different ways of municipal governance of sharing economy organizations. But they relate not only our focuses on Grassroots Initiatives and they have a wider frame in terms of sharing economy, also including commercial sharing economy actors.

0:08:56.2 Karin Bradley: Another one that we have also built or been inspired by is La Forge et al. And they’ve looked at Grassroots Initiatives in the field of food and how local authorities in different ways relate in terms of they use the concept co-opting, collaborating, containing and contesting in turn and how this may affect the scaling of Grassroots Initiatives. Yes. And then to what we see as modes, what we have seen from our material is basically these six different modes. And I should say this is really from the lenses of the local governments.

0:09:41.5 Karin Bradley: So this is not so much the lens from the Grassroots Initiatives, but rather how the local governments see what they can do or not do in terms of working with or building on the work of Grassroots Initiatives. And these six modes, I’ll go into each one of them and give a few examples. We see that there is also a from overlooking or mainly ignoring the Grassroots Initiatives to the what you can call it like municipal replication, basically where the municipality steps in and takes over the kind of activities of that Grassroots Initiatives have been organizing.

0:10:21.2 Karin Bradley: There is also a sort of this can be analyzed in terms of autonomy because there’s larger kind of autonomy where the Grassroots are being overlooked, but at the same time, they don’t have as much maybe potential for scaling. Okay, so what do we mean then by these different modes? So overlooking could be examples of the food sharing, for instance, primarily I would say the food sharing organizations that we have looked at or we have studied in Gothenburg could be examples of the municipality kind of ignoring and what they’re doing, letting them be basically letting have their activities and not going there and controlling and saying that this is not complying with the this and this whatever food safety laws, etcetera.

0:11:14.7 Karin Bradley: But let them basically do whatever they do, whereas in the food sharing sort of seen in Berlin, it’s been a little bit different, where it was maybe a bit more overlooked in its early phase, but there has been quite a lot of sort of crackdowns on food sharing. And also, meaning that that those engaged in food sharing are actually then responsible for cases of food poisoning, etcetera, which has meant that it’s become more difficult and less attractive to be engaged, particularly to host these fridges, etcetera.

0:11:58.8 Karin Bradley: And I suppose some of you or many of you might be or familiar with this, but the food sharing organizations will look that basically have they gather food leftover food or food from grocery stores, from restaurants, from hotels, etcetera. And sometimes they have this, they store the food in fridges or freezers that are somehow different collection points in the city, and then people can come and basically receive the leftover food for free.

0:12:29.5 Karin Bradley: And this is really, I would say it gathers people with very different sort of socioeconomic backgrounds and very different kind of rationales also where some are very into environmental issues or to gift economy, ideological reasons, whereas others are really there for getting a meal. Yes, and the second mode then a governance sort of mode is what we call sanctioning, and this can be in the case, there’s one quite well-known, a community garden in Berlin, Prinzessinnengarten, that was firstly initiated very bottom up, more or less as a guerilla garden. And where the first phase would maybe then be overlooking, but later on they were provided with another space. And also now they exist in two different locations, but they have been now sanctioned. So basically giving permits that, okay, you can continue with your operations. And this is a quote illustrating that. So that could be then a second mode. A third that we looked into and think we have identified is how local governments are adjusting their bureaucracies in relation to Grassroots Initiatives.

0:13:53.1 Karin Bradley: And this can be, for instance, in Berlin, the cases of play streets, where these were firstly initiated from local residents that saw a need for having more car free spaces where kids and others could use the streets for playing and cycling and just hanging out. So it started as basically a kind of takeover of streets in several different places and temporary sort of events. And then the local sort of government saw that, okay, this really, yeah, this fills a need and decided to somehow support this, but in the sense of making it easy for neighborhoods to file for. So basically organizing a sort of a bureaucracy, a template of how this is how make, transform a car street to a play street and informing about this possibility, etcetera.

0:14:47.9 Karin Bradley: And in the map, you can see how basically from zero now 100 play streets in Berlin. And I think this is not unique for Berlin. You can see that in many other places in the world as well. But what we mean is specifically then the way of doing administration and bureaucracy simpler for these kinds of initiatives. The fourth mode then is what we call, we haven’t really decided actually we’re gonna call it coordinating or making visible or something like that. But it’s basically when local governments support, you can say Grassroots Initiatives in the sense of making them visible for larger population, more or less. And this can be illustrated through the example of Smarta Kartan, which translates to the Smart Map.

0:15:49.6 Karin Bradley: And this was a collaboration between a collaborative economy organization, a sort of, you can say Grassroots Initiative in the city of Gothenburg that together decided, or this NGO contacted the city of Gothenburg and asked if they could do this together somehow. So now they have basically mapped different places in the city where you can share, borrow, swap, etcetera. Rather than buying new. And I know that this also very much relates to the work of shareable and map jamming work and really highlighting what’s out there since an identified problem for many sort of Grassroots sharing organizations is that there is a tendency of these sort of activities and practices being primarily maybe visible and known for the people engaged somehow that in sort of certain circles or so, but how do you make them visible for people that are newcomers to the city that are not into environmental stuff or sharing or living on in post-capitalist ways or so.

0:17:01.9 Karin Bradley: So in that sense, this is making them more accessible. And the interesting thing I think also with the Smart Map is that it was built on kind of an open source platform. So it has been multiplied now and used by several other cities around in Sweden. And then it’s been a collaboration so that the city has its kind of logo and this is an official kind of local government information as well. So somehow also, yeah, using this in their work to promote more, whatever, sustainable living, etcetera. And this is something we also saw in Berlin that the local government there has done a both an electronic, but also physical maps highlighting where and then showing where these kind of Grassroots Initiatives have their operations and opening hours or whatever.

0:17:53.3 Karin Bradley: Okay. And then the fifth mode is what we call partnering. And this is then a form where the Grassroots kind of initiative is being used by the local government in the sense that it could be in terms of public procurement, for instance. We see cases where local governments, for instance, buy services, for instance, food to their events from community gardens, etcetera. And this is a case from Berlin where the local, this AEFC is a local cycling organization where they started to gather cargo bikes and electric cargo bikes that could be used by several people.

0:18:37.4 Karin Bradley: And then the local government picked up on this. So they’ve organized these kind of fleets, open fleets of cargo bikes that people can use. So in that way, it’s a form of, yeah, partnership between this cycling organization and the local government. Yes. And then the sixth mode we call municipal replication. And this is instances then where local governments have somehow observed or seen activities that grassroots organizations are doing that they see that there is a need for, or that they think that they could do as well. It’s not necessarily taking over sort of grassroots activities, but it could be basically copying. So in one of the cases we’ve looked at is the so-called Fixoteken, which are like DIY repair spaces.

0:19:37.3 Karin Bradley: So basically the existence of like repair cafes, for instance, or these repair, open repair workshops, that are often run by grassroots groups in different areas, some of them might be more stable, others can be like pop up, etcetera. So basically, the local government and the city had observed this kind of trend, you can say, and basically decided we should do that. We should set up a number of DIY repair spaces where you also have the Fixoteken is not only repair, but there are also spaces where you can swap things. So they have a swap corner where you can leave things you don’t need and you can take things. And they also organize workshops and have lots of different types of sort of activities. But it was, it started like a pilot project where they set up in five different locations around in Gothenburg where the municipality was then the owner, the operator, and they had paid staff, municipal staff on these sites. And with fixed opening hours, etcetera. And it turned out to be very successful, you can say, very much used in these different areas. But the idea was that somehow, should the municipality continue to run these operations or should they do it together with some other entity, etcetera.

0:21:03.2 Karin Bradley: What happened was that one, after the pilot project, one was turned into being run by sort of a nonprofit, whereas the others were taken over by the municipal, one of the largest municipal housing companies in Gothenburg. So now they’re currently, that’s where the development is taking place. So that’s in a sense also the local government and they are opened to anyone, not only the residents in the houses, that the municipal housing company owns, but open to everyone. So in the container, that’s one of the sort of outdoor spaces of the Fixoteken an area called Hammarkullen. And they’ve also become very much appreciated in terms of social spaces and places that can be used nighttime for other types of activities like studying circles, etcetera. And a similar thing we could also see in Berlin was the, you can say reuse mall, called NochMall. So Noch means like enough in German. So it’s playing with words that is run by the municipal waste company. So it’s really a, it’s a huge place where they have basically it’s like secondhand stores, there are lots of reuse stuff, but they also have repair workshops, maker activities, lots of different workshops related to reuse, remake, etcetera. That’s also now first run as a kind of pilot project, but the idea is that it should be sustained more or less by itself, but again run by the municipality.

0:22:55.7 Karin Bradley: Yes, and the quote you have there is basically from, it’s from the city of Gothenburg, how they are illustrating how they’re thinking about what could be their role. Maybe it’s operating these spaces, maybe it’s more like paying the rent and having them and working together with others that would come and do activities, but somehow they are experimenting with the mandate and what can be the future role of the municipality. Yes, another example of this municipal replication that is quite striking is this, it’s called Fritidsbanken, it’s basically like a sports library where you can come and use sports equipment for a number of weeks. And this is run, it was set up, it was started in a small place in the countryside actually in Sweden a few years ago, or no not a few, but 2013 actually. But now it’s multiplied to 100 of these sports libraries and it started out as a Grassroots Initiative and in collaboration with a sort of local church, and now 90% of them are run by municipalities. So I think that’s also a clear example of the municipality kind of observing this and stepping in and taking over.

0:24:19.5 Karin Bradley: Yes. Okay, so coming to conclusions and sort of analysis of this, we can see that in our cases, the cities in city administrations in Gothenburg and Berlin, overall, I would say, see grassroots initiatives as assets for spearheading sustainable practices and see that they can somehow use or work with them. But we can also see that there is a kind of a balance, as I said initially, between supporting or what you might call it, grassroots initiatives in scaling and also restricting their autonomy. And this is how, in a way, how you can think about this in terms of these six different modes that I mentioned, where you have in this grassroots initiatives operating here, you often don’t reach beyond the critical niche.

0:25:20.9 Karin Bradley: It’s people really engaged in say community gardening or so on that would find the place and be active. Whereas here we have the coordinating or making visible is about making it more accessible to more people, etcetera. To the staff where you, the municipality steps in, multiplies, sets up similar kind of operations in different districts, etcetera. And make it very accessible. But at the same time, you maybe you lose some of the, I can say the engagement and maybe lose some of the criticality and the yeah, maybe the little bit of the soul of the Grassroots Initiative. So in that sense, there is a kind of attention in terms of autonomy here where you can perhaps think that maybe it’s somewhere in terms of coordinating or partnering where you really have a good possibility for grassroots to be able to do their operations being in one way supported but not entirely reliant on, the municipality because being very reliant on the municipality means also a certain sort of, perhaps vulnerability.

0:26:35.8 Karin Bradley: Yes. And, but what we have seen so far is that if these Grassroots Initiative and their practices are to read a broader population, some degree of municipal involvement is probably needed. And I think this also is a question too that we could perhaps come back to, because I know there is the context in different sort of cities, in the world, can be very different. Where to what extent you can trust the local government or not, and to what extent you also expect their support. Where I think particularly in the context of Sweden, Scandinavia, there is, quite long tradition of some form of government support to different NGOs and grassroots initiatives. Whereas we could see in the context of Berlin, maybe a stronger tradition of being, wanting to be autonomous and not even if they would be given funding, some wouldn’t take it.

0:27:37.8 Karin Bradley: Yes. And some final reflections on this also relating it to history, that that what is currently seen as the responsibility of the municipality hasn’t been that forever. So I think it’s interesting to point out that, say the infrastructure for cycling, say bike paths, etcetera, that that was something that grassroots initiatives of different forms pushed for and enacted them themselves some decades ago. And also what we now see as municipalities and cities all over the world are providing some form of bike sharing system, for instance, often in collaboration with commercial companies. But that was also something being pushed from grassroot initiatives early on. And this is an example already in the ’60s from Amsterdam, where it was supposedly first bike sharing system that was run by grassroots groups where you had, there were some white painted bikes, but this now has become the mandate and the role of the municipality.

0:28:47.3 Karin Bradley: And, so how can this then inform or what can be learned from this in terms of policy for local governments, local authorities today? I think our argument here is that what we today see the activities in terms of this repair space, this reuse food sharing different forms of ways of minimizing material consumption and increasing circularity, that that is something that municipalities are starting to pick up and perhaps in the future seeing as part of their role. And this in a similar way, like if you think about libraries, I know also this is different in different contexts, but is in the context of Scandinavia, it’s the municipality providing libraries. That’s a basic service for people. And this is something they also must do. And that wasn’t the case a number of decades ago.

0:29:50.9 Karin Bradley: And now you could think of a similar way, like two libraries or spaces where you can fix things if that’s going to be more and more important in the future. Maybe that’s also an infrastructure that’s somehow the municipality needs to, yeah, provide the citizens with, and this, it comes from the, one of the reports of this Fixoteken spaces where they point out that these are current locations, but also in some of their, the interview material, they’re pointing to, yeah, maybe it should be in, not every but in districts all over basically, the city. And something we’ve seen now is that many municipalities all over in Sweden are experimenting with this repair spaces or reuse centers, reuse malls, etcetera. That was basically what I had planned to say and I’m very eager to hear your comments and thoughts.

0:30:54.3 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Karin. What a fascinating talk. I love the typology really clear and I think makes a lot of sense. We got a lot of questions. I could ask you questions, but I’m gonna save mine till the end. But first one, grassroots initiatives are very important to quickly test new social ideas. Have you also looked at how cities can inspire more grassroots initiatives to happen? I’ve seen great examples in Montreal in the past, and as somebody who spent a year on sabbatical in Montreal. Yeah, Montreal is probably the premier example in North America. But Karin, what do you think? 

0:31:31.9 Karin Bradley: Yeah, that’s a good point. And probably there is a lot of that going on as well. But we haven’t really, in our sort of material, we haven’t seen the local governments saying that themselves, that we are somehow providing whatever seed funding or doing events for new ones, because that’s what I got from the comment. But rather that they are arranging lots of matchmaking events and inviting the ones that do exist. But yeah, I think that’s a relevant comment that you could maybe find also actively looking and encouraging nuances to develop. Yeah.

0:32:16.4 Julian Agyeman: I see Samian… Have you got anything to add there? Samian…

0:32:21.4 Samian: Yeah… Do you hear me well? 

0:32:22.2 Julian Agyeman: We got you. Yeah.

0:32:23.0 Samian: Yeah. Perfect. I was in Montreal for a study trip about grassroots initiatives and there you could see a lot of collaboration between the city that would fund a lot of local associations to inspire more grassroots initiatives to come together. And there was one thing that I really enjoyed. It was called in French Le feux de poésie. Which is basically a festival about potential projects where they would actually create an event and a space where people could just come together and create like a local stand, right? Where you could then present your ideas and then people could come sign up to join the project, for example. And then the association and the city would find ways to finance that or to help them to test it. So that was, for example, one of the things that I found very inspiring. I put the link in there in the chats, but yeah, you don’t see that much, right? Cities being very proactive on creating the right supporting programs and so on to inspire more of those. So that’s why I was quite curious in that sense. Thanks for the presentation. It was very interesting.

0:33:19.2 Julian Agyeman: Great, thanks. Question from Mike Boyle. Did you look into how the electioneering cycle does not impede the GI initiatives, e.g., New power in party, funding for GI dries up? 

0:33:34.1 Karin Bradley: Oh, the political cycles? 

0:33:37.5 Julian Agyeman: Yeah.

0:33:38.0 Karin Bradley: Yes. Okay, that’s a very good also comment. We did Gothenburg, we saw just a little bit of that and particularly a kind of a fear of that. And maybe didn’t have so much to do with the sort of shift in politics, but rather shift in guidelines from one of the big supporting organizations that in turn get their funding from the state that had changed their requirements. So suddenly operations like the bike, kitchen, etcetera, that had received a lot of funding and support, couldn’t get any because they didn’t fit the requirements anymore. So in that sense, they felt that, okay, it would have been better if we weren’t even relying on that support. So, yes, whereas in Berlin, we didn’t encounter that, but I think it’s definitely something that is relevant. And particularly, I think maybe in cities where there is a tendency to, that go back and forth politically. Maybe in previous sort of research, I’ve looked at the city of Malmö that has had a very stable sort of political structure for years and years.

0:34:47.7 Karin Bradley: And they pointed to that fact as really one of their success factors, that they know that they can, also the public servants know that they can trust that, okay, this way we’re working, we’ll could be able to continue, that it won’t change every, in our case, every sort of fourth year. Yeah.

0:35:08.4 Julian Agyeman: Great. There’s a question from Alex and Alex is saying, what implications… Oh, there’s so many questions coming in, my chat is just jumping. What implications does your research have for those of us operating GIs? 

0:35:23.7 Karin Bradley: Yes, yes, that’s a good question. That’s actually, we’re working on another paper, part of this project as well, where we look at more from the grassroots perspective. So what kind of strategies are relevant to use, depending on what kind of goals you have also? To what extent do you wanna spread your practice by numbers? Or to what extent do you wanna spread it by, say, ideology or by thought and trying to pinpoint at what could then be relevant strategies? Yeah. But trying yet to say something simple, what we could see, I think, was that the grassroots initiatives that somehow managed to balance maybe a critical or maybe tone in their practice, but still being open and visible and welcoming and not, okay, let me say like this. There were certain grassroots initiatives that were in a little bit like locations that were difficult to find that really people felt, okay, I really need to be of this kind of political orientation, ideological this way, dressed like that, in order to dare to even go in here.

0:36:40.6 Karin Bradley: That was often a bit of a problem if you wanted some kind of more being on that government map or being or, receiving some kind of funding. It doesn’t mean that you have to be entirely like mainstream, but somehow trying to actively open up for broader groups than the ones already engaged. I think that was something we saw those had easier to somehow, yeah, get more stable operations, yeah.

0:37:10.0 Julian Agyeman: Right. Inger Treichler, perhaps she’s from Berlin. She asks, can you remind us in what time period you were conducting your research in Berlin? 

0:37:21.0 Karin Bradley: Yes, we were there during, actually during, actually during the pandemic, to some extent, and also just after that. So 2020, or was it 2021? Yeah.

0:37:33.4 Julian Agyeman: Karin O’Donohue asks, what quality and amount of data do GI’s need to collect as evidence to share with local stakeholders for additional and sustainable resources that will enable the activity to scale? Do you want to ask Karin your question? 

0:37:55.5 S5: Thank you, Julian. Hello, Karin, and everybody.

0:38:00.1 Karin Bradley: Hello.

0:38:00.2 S5: Hi. So I work with an organisation called ChangeX, whereby we bring proven innovations from all over the world to local communities, and then give them the option to self-identify which one they want to replicate and we provide the funding and the resources for them to do it. And one of the things that our platform allows both the grassroots initiative, as well as the innovator behind it, be it the repair cafe originator, plus the scaled repair cafes, is to collect data in terms of how many beneficiaries, what the impact was, changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviours, all the user generated content, etcetera.

0:38:45.1 S5: And so both groups have found that very helpful, either for their own funding proposals or to make the argument to a local municipality or whatnot to say, this isn’t just something that should be bolted on, it’s something that should be built in to the area’s planning. But not everybody, not every community activist or community leader or community group is skilled in the area of data collection or data reporting or whatnot. So I’m just wondering, we work with communities all over the world, South America, Europe, North America, soon to be Australia, Japan, all over. So they’re quite different. But broadly speaking, what quality of data do you feel the stakeholders require in order to listen to what the GIs need to say? 

0:39:36.1 Karin Bradley: Yeah, okay, I see your point. Yes, I would say in the case of Sweden, there are a lot of these government programmes that are very much focused on reduction of CO2. So you’d have to, in that case, be able to somehow quantify the effects from your operation in terms of CO2 reductions, which for some of these organisations was very difficult. And even not…

0:40:03.0 Karin Bradley: That’s not necessarily their main focus. And particularly, I remember, some of the bike kitchen in Gothenburg feeling that’s our, what we’re doing, it’s so much more about, yeah, reuse and building empowerment and learning how to, yeah, be more autonomous in terms of not relying on cars, etcetera, which of course relates to CO2. But anyhow, that’s what they had to do sometimes. So yeah, I think that’s, but we did not see any, that’s super interesting with your organization that somehow aiding with this, because we did not encounter that. What we did encounter though was intermediary organizations that were in different ways helping with funding, but also making booklets or guides and popularizing.

0:40:53.5 Karin Bradley: So if you want to set up a, say, bike kitchen or a toy library or whatever it is, this is what you should think of. And that’s something, because often the actual GIs themselves didn’t necessarily have the interest in doing this, spreading their work. They sometimes just wanted to do their own little, the thing rather than the spreading. So it was more about that type of not so much maybe data, but rather, yeah, I would say handbooks, guidebooks. Yeah.

0:41:24.7 Julian Agyeman: Question from Mike Boyle, very important question. Did you look into the difficulties caused by government silos and no department being responsible for the GI initiative? And he says, again, he’s got loads of examples on this, but I think this really gets to the core, doesn’t it? These GI initiatives are not siloed, governments are. How did that work? 

0:41:46.3 Karin Bradley: Yes. Yeah. That’s something we very much encountered, particularly in the context of Gothenburg, where several of the GIs and also the municipal officials pointed out that there is often the situation that that sharing organizations will look that they didn’t fit into the exactly to the silos because the whole administrative system was built on, you’d have the administration for sports and culture, you would have environmental and you would have waste or maybe transport, infrastructure, etcetera. And many of these cut across. And that meant that if they applied for permits or funding or whatever it was, it often ended up in nobody’s responsibility.

0:42:29.5 Karin Bradley: But that was something that they also very consciously have worked with in the city in Gothenburg to change and change the guidelines. And they even did attempts, I think it’s fascinating, they realized that this was a problem. So they made, they cooperated with a GI, asked them, so now you apply for funding and we’ll see how this goes in order to learn how, where that application went up. So they tested in a way their own system and then tried to change it.

0:43:00.7 Julian Agyeman: I’m gonna throw in a couple of questions here, Karin. First, having worked in local government, albeit in the ’80s and early ’90s and in the UK and working in an environmental health department, these were people who, environmental health officers, very protective over their professional status. They’d only in the last 20 years got in the late ’80s, like professional status. How is it working with those… It’s a silo question. These people who can’t get out of their box, did you have any experience of those people? It seems the quotes that you gave us from the civil servant in Gothenburg, that person got it, that person understood. But I could see a lot of people who might be supportive, but feel this is totally outside of my skill set.

0:43:49.8 Karin Bradley: Yeah. Yes. I would say that’s maybe to some extent specific for the local authorities we’ve studied. Gothenburg really has a quite strong tradition of civil society organization and the grassroots movements. And almost, I think all of the public officials we interviewed were very interested in trying to develop how they could support these kinds of initiatives in different ways. And also many of them have some kind of, there’s maybe sustainability strategist or something like that, which is, I think not so maybe, yeah, a role that entails that you can do quite a lot of different things and they are creating their own roles quite a lot. And also I should say that it’s also, it should be noted that previously, some years ago, there was the head of the environmental administration in the city of Gothenburg consciously had as a strategy to employ activists and make so, which you can discuss in different ways, but actually get people that are active in the grassroots to work for the local government.

0:45:05.7 Karin Bradley: So many of these actually knew each other or had worked, some of the municipal officials had worked in grassroots organizations before or knew several people there. So it was really intertwined. Yeah. In Berlin, it wasn’t really the same way what we could see, but not what you’re describing, this is my role and I don’t get what this is. We didn’t really see that, but I guess for sure that exists, but maybe not the ones we encountered. Yeah.

0:45:32.5 Julian Agyeman: You mentioned a word way back in the beginning of your presentation. That word is trust. You enjoy in Sweden and in Germany and quite a lot of other nations in Europe, a reasonably high level of trust in government. We don’t enjoy that in the United States. I think I read somewhere that levels of trust in government in the US are some of the lowest in the industrialized world. Do you have any suggestions? How do we work on these generative projects in a state of mistrust or distrust? 

0:46:08.5 Karin Bradley: Oh, yeah. Yes, that’s a challenging, I think, question, because I think what you pointed, that I think our whole analysis is basically in the context of there is quite a lot of trust between GIs and local governments. Yes. So how do you do that? 

0:46:29.6 Julian Agyeman: It’s a really… I don’t expect an answer, but it is a real problem and I’m sure many people in this room and others that will see the video will be asking that question.

0:46:41.3 Karin Bradley: Yes. But what we could see, those that did not so much, maybe not trust or did not, their ideas did not align maybe with local governments, they would try to pursue strategies where they were not dependent on any type of funding from the local government or any premises or anything like that, or not even handling any money. That was something, a strategy we could observe. They would prefer having very small scale activities and be autonomous, but maybe then not having so much impact, but still being more in a way small scale, but resilient.

0:47:22.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much for a fantastic presentation. Can we give a great round of applause for Karin, please.

0:47:34.9 Karin Bradley: Thank you so much and great to be here and thank you for all very good questions and comments.

0:47:42.5 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graph recording or to register for free tickets to our upcoming lectures. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Bar Foundation, shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants, Deandra Boyle and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song. The graphic recording was created by Anke Dregnatx Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding and outreach support provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others so this knowledge can reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show. Here’s a final thought.

0:48:43.6 Karin Bradley: Really, the emphasis should be on using what you have or borrowing rather than buying new when we talk about sustainable consumption.

[music]

The post How Local Governments Can Work with Grassroots Initiatives for Sustainability Transitions with Karin Bradley appeared first on Shareable.

The journey of rural electrification is a testament to community resilience and innovation. With the inception of Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs) in the early 20th century, spurred by the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, rural America quite literally, lit up.

These cooperatives, owned and operated by the very communities they serve, are providing more than 42 million member-owners across nearly every state with not just electricity, but a model of democratic, member-driven governance.

Bri Knisely from Appalachian Voices, a member organization of RPC, articulates a vision of an energy system that is not only transparent and democratic but also reliable, renewable, and inclusive. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, with its historic $11 billion investment in rural clean energy programs, represents a beacon of hope and is seen as a pivotal moment to reimagine and rebuild the energy infrastructure in these areas. It’s about ensuring that the benefits of clean energy and technological advancements like broadband are equitably distributed, enabling rural communities to thrive.

Narrated by Rev. Michael Malcom, executive director of The People’s Justice Council – a coalition member – and produced in collaboration with The Story of Stuff Project, Shareable, and Ruben DeLuna Creative, with support from the 11th Hour Project, this film does more than recount the history of rural electrification; it serves as an inspiration, showcasing the transformative power of collective action and the potential for rural communities to lead the charge in the clean energy transition.

Philip Fracica of Renew Missouri emphasizes the film’s objective to inspire active engagement among REC member-owners. According to a leaked study conducted by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) and Touchstone Energy in 2015, roughly 56% of energy coop member-owners don’t even know they have governance rights over their utilities and have the right to vote and run for their coop boards.

The transition to clean energy presents a unique opportunity to ensure that rural America is not left behind but is instead at the forefront of the sustainable energy movement.

As the RPC members gather at PowerXchange to network with leaders in the cooperative electric utility sector, their dedication to facilitating a smooth transition for cooperatives into clean energy is palpable. By leveraging the strength of community and cooperative principles, they aim to ensure that the fruits of these programs are fully realized by the rural communities they are intended to benefit.

This initiative by RPC and its partners embodies the spirit of Shareable, championing solutions that bring about social justice, environmental sustainability, and a future where every community has the power to shape its destiny.

Shareable has been a working partner in the Rural Power Coalition, leading all communications projects for the coalition since its founding in 2020.

The post “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives” appeared first on Shareable.