Networking at Green Drinks

2nd Friday of the month at Crescent Moon cafe, Downtown Hickory from 5 - 7pm.  We attended for the first time this month and enjoyed a stimulating and entertaining chat with some regulars.  It was wonderful to discover artists, a cob building expert and the Chair of the Green Building Council.  Cob or cobb or clom (in Wales) is a building material consisting of clay, sand, straw, water and earth, similar to adobe.  Cob is fireproof, resistant to seismic activity and inexpensive. It can be used to create artistic, sculptural forms and has been revived in recent years by the natural building and sustainability movements.  Hickory has a wealth of clay, so what a fabulous resource we have locally!

Come next month for a chat and to make some connections.  The food is good and inexpensive if  you fancy a bite to eat.

Update 2012: Green Drinks is no longer meeting. Thanks for the good times and good connections!

IABC Presents the Envision Charlotte Project

By  Robyn Cornwell, Behavioral Change Agent

Recently the Charlotte chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators held a forum of three participants in the Envision Charlotte Project who described their contributions in “Communication’s Role in Driving Behavioral Change”.

The three participants were;

Vincent Davis, Director of Smart Energy Now, Duke Energy

Tom Shircliff, Co-founder of Intelligent Buildings, LLC

and Darlene Heater, V.P. Neighborhood Development and Special Projects.

“Sustainable development” is the 2020 vision, added to the current “livable, memorable, viable” theme for Charlotte. To make an immediate point, a familiar shot of the city lit up at night was projected on the screen along with the message “Envision Charlotte: Changing this Picture”. One assumes that the goal is to turn off a great number of those lights. The results of their two-years of work are now being seen in kiosk installations in major buildings throughout the city.

Tapping into the latest in high technology and the cloud, the kiosks feature a real-time running display of the wattage used in all the city’s commercial buildings, purposely not singling out any one building. The point: to jump-start the Prius Effect: Making one aware of the impact of one’s actions (through feedback) leads to a positive change in those actions.

Included in the kiosk are people featured with their stories of what they are doing to contribute to reduced energy use. These “energy champions” are rewarded with an iPad, one being given out each month. 

The power of feedback is now possible for facilities managers where they can see what the energy use of a building is in real-time instead of seeing it a month later when the bill arrives. This gives them the opportunity to detect the source of an energy spike and address it immediately to make corrections or adjustments. Another inducement to behavior change is in writing lease contracts to have the tenant pay their own bill.

The project worked with $1.5 million from Duke Energy and $1 million from Verizon, using part of this to tap into the behavioral change expertise at MIT. The kiosk was designed knowing that the typical person will spend just 30 seconds viewing it, and one cannot assume that they will care. For this reason, it must be as engaging as possible while offering many different ideas on how to save energy.

Transtion in Action: Homeschooling and Community

by Melissa Alderman

If you wish to educate the student by science [or in any subject], love your science and know it, and the students will love both you and the science, and you will educate them.  -Leo Tolstoy

We get this question a lot, "Why do you homeschool your kids?" The answer is not in theories of public and non-public education, nor is it in religious protection or in pursuit of educating a super-brain such that the world has never known.  Our answer is that our kids have us, their parents, and a wealth of friends and neighbors that are highly qualified to teach what they are passionate about.  And as Tolstoy says, that passion is contagious, and they can't help but be influenced and taught.

Three years ago we started a homeschool co-op.   A few families from the neighborhood and our church decided to meet once a week to hold classes.  Some parents would teach and others would help watch kids that were not old enough to be in class.  We started with History, Art, and Science.  Our friend around the corner, a school teacher turned stay at home mom, taught our history lessons just because she loves teaching and jumped at the opportunity, even though she didn't have a kid old enough to be in the class.  I taught art because I couldn't imagine teaching anything else at the time, and my neighbor taught science, an obvious choice since she holds a degree in physics.   That year we met every week for twenty four weeks with breaks in between.  In the history class, each kid made a mummy entombed in its own sarcophagus.  Our oldest daughter went so far as to bury hers in the back yard.  The students entered their Jackson Pollock lesson pieces in the kids’ art exhibition at the Caldwell County Arts Council.  In the biology class, they studied metamorphosis by observing and recording caterpillars transforming into butterflies.

Since then we have kept up the co-op, sometimes formal, sometimes not, sometimes the same teachers and subjects and sometimes different ones.  But we see a lot of value in continuing to do it no matter what the format because we love it, the kids love it and they learn a great deal.  We have found that a large part of our homeschool experience is with others.  

We teach others, and they teach us.  We teach what we are passionate about, and we learn from others what they are passionate about.  So far, it has worked.

It has been incredible to see what this group of people can accomplish together. Classes, book clubs and field trips aside, we've seen the kids come up with ways to raise money to buy books for kids that don't have books.  That was last year's project and they raised around $200. That's not a huge amount of money, but it is impressive when 5-10 year olds are doing most of the work. This year, however, we saw the largest culmination of our efforts.  We held a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ in our backyard.  This play started as a homeschool project, but by the time it was done we had student actors and stagehands from both public and private school as well.  Most of the kids in the play were from our neighborhood and all of the assisting adults live within walking distance of each other.  

Our co-op of passionate and intelligent friends is not the only reason why we homeschool, but it is an important factor in our decision to continue.  What we do collectively is more than we can accomplish as individuals or individual families.

Transition Training for Jacqui

Jacqui has now completed her Transition Training. We went to Sautee GA, outside Helen, for an inspiring weekend of training and camaraderie. The trainers, Karen Lanphear from Sandpoint ID and Don Hall from Sarasota FL were excellent with many years of experience creating transition in their own communities as well as around the country as trainers. If you are contemplating doing the training we both highly recommend these two. As there is interest in starting initiatives in Lenoir and Newton, perhaps we should think about hosting a training in the area.

If you want to keep track of Transition nationally, you can subscribe to their newsletter at their website: www.transitionus.org.  If you are interested in the British site, please visit: www.transitionnetwork.org.

Awareness raising presentation a rousing success!

There are lots more folks on the mailing list after our wonderfully attended awareness raising presentation last Sunday at the UU church.  After the publicity on the front page of the Hickory Daily Record, we hoped for a good turn out, and we were so happy with the result. Our thanks go out to the fifty folks who came to learn more about Transition and those who had seen it before; we are always updating our research and finding more entertaining ways to present difficult but inspiring material. The energy in the room was palpable and we really appreciate your support.  Lots of telling questions at the end allowed us to hear that you are well informed and love the idea of building resilience into our communities.  The groundswell in Hickory is rising.

As for the long emergency issues, Connie rightly pointed out that for some more conservative audiences, looking at Peak Oil and Climate Change would either turn them off or cause an unproductive argument, and we are in the process of creating a different way to present the Transition ideas to that type of audience.  Economic instability will be the initial way in, as everyone is feeling rocked by the debt ridden, depressed economy and volatile stock market.  Of course the ideals of Transition (communities rich in connectedness and resilient in many aspects of life) stand up for themselves.

After the talk, six folks followed us back to The Sustainable Living Project on 11th St NW and took a tour.  Spirited talk of strategy, sustainability and resilience resounded over blueberry cheesecake and cups of tea until 6pm!

As a result of the meeting on Sunday, we have two more presentations in the works.  We are also arranging two Neighborhood Association presentations.  If you know of other arenas where we might offer our talk, please let us know.  Our aim is to spend the winter raising awareness and laying the foundations by connecting with groups, clubs, businesses and other parties who are already working towards the goals of Transition.

Another goal for the winter is to hold some Open Space meetings to start generating ideas for working groups. We need a venue with lots of tables and chairs for this. If you have any suggestions please let us know.

Transition Training

By Jacqui Riordan

Next weekend I will do Transition training in Sautee, GA.  In order to be an official Transition Initiative, we must have two people who have attended the training.  Robb completed his training a couple of years ago in Totnes, England (the first Transition Town and home of the Transition Movement).  Anyone can take the training, details of which can be found at transitionus.org.  We were so pleased to find a course that is relatively local (we don’t have to fly to get there!) and they also found us host housing (even our dog Annie can come!).  The weekend will cover the following:

•              Explore how the Transition process increases community resilience

•              Receive tools for community outreach, education and engagement

•              Learn how to summarize the Triple Challenge of Peak Oil, Climate, and Economic Instability in ways that move people to positive action

•              Understand and know how to work with obstacles that have prevented our communities from recognizing and positively responding to the challenge of energy transition

•              Experience ways that local social and economic community can be created and strengthened

•              Learn ways of creating a positive, shared vision for your community’s future

•              Receive support for becoming a Transition catalyst in your community

•              Connect with others who are helping your region transition to greater stability and security

•              Become a part of a rapidly growing positive, inspirational, global movement!

Upon hearing of Robb’s experiences setting up Transition Bermuda and having attended Transition training in Totnes, they invited him to participate on the course as an advisor.

There are several issues we are hoping to receive guidance on at this training. One is how to build a multi-pronged initiative. We are still seeing a level of interest and a fertile community spirit for an initiative in Newton. So should we form Transition Catawba and foster several local groups from that? If so, how is that different from just doing a single initiative? Another, how and when should we consider fundraising?

How I became a farm girl

By Melissa Napier

A couple of years ago my friend Amy moved to Hickory with her husband and children and set out to find or create a group of friends to get together to make things, share their crafty skills and learn from one another about our adventures in living simply. She and a friend, Cindy, decided to found a chapter of Mary Jane’s Farm Girls. Here’s the main website: http://www.maryjanesfarm.org/farmgirl-connection/ 

We meet once a month with a new topic led by different people from within the group. Topics range from canning jam and making butter from milk fresh from the cow, to home grown herbal remedies and sewing a repurposed feed sack purse.  

I was a bit overwhelmed at my first meeting, when the conversation over coffee turned to, “How to choose the best horse at your next purchase,” and, “What to do to encourage your chickens to lay through the winter.” Wow! These are ‘real’ farm girls! By the end of the meeting, though, they were all begging me to lead the next meeting because they all wanted to learn to crochet. Well, I couldn’t believe I had something to offer these ladies after all! Each time I come home enriched by the time spent with such diverse people, some who actually live on functioning farms or some who are just hoping to plant tomatoes on the patio next summer. 

I think the best thing about this group is that it doesn’t require anyone to own a cow or chickens, wear an apron or cowboy hat, or grow all your own food, but instead you just have to have a desire to learn more about how others are living, learning and growing, and be willing to offer your own knowledge and experience to the group in exchange. They say “being a farm girl is a condition of the heart,” and I must admit, that motto has helped me to embrace more changes to my suburban life.