20 mm 020215

Monday Mailing

Year 21 • Issue 20 02 February 2015 1. Top Ten Tips for Inclusive Engagement 2. Why Build A Hospital In A Tsunami Zone?

3. Don't Delay & Register Today for Oregon Small Farms Conference Fee Increases on 2/3 4. Toolkits Available for Community Projects 5. When Yogurt Affects the Brain 6. Join Us for a Free Effective Utility Management Workshop on March 2 in Sunriver 7. Building Leadership for the Long Haul – Free Webinar Heart & Soul Talks: Use Community Network Analysis to Improve Participation and Results – Free Webinar 8. See What Your City Will Be Like in 15 Years 9. Free Federal and State Tax Returns for AmeriCorps Members 10. Movement to Take Down Thousands of Dams Goes Mainstream 11. MIT Open Courseware on Urban Studies and Planning 1. Top Ten Tips for Inclusive Engagement So, why is inclusive engagement so important to our Heart & Soul Community process?

Quote of the Week: Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. ~Vince Lombardi Oregon Fast Fact: Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the United States.

It was formed more than 6,500 years ago. Its crystalblue waters are world renowned.

Broad—and deep—engagement with community members is a fundament building block of a successful Heart & Soul Community Planning project. We’ve worked hard to advance authentic engagement because it makes all the difference to building stronger communities; it is a means to an end in our work, and it is also an end in itself for the trust it builds, the ideas it sparks, and the new connections it creates.

Here’s why it’s important.

Local wisdom: Local people know their town best. When you get their insights it can transform a project. Local knowledge deepens and gives context to your quantitative data, from wildlife to walkability.

Community ownership: Residents need to own the final recommendations of a planning process so that they can be upheld.

They need to share in the decisions leading up to the results.

Many minds, better results: Research shows that many minds working on a project lead to better results. The greater the diversity of people contributing to solving a problem, the more creative and effective the solutions.

New leadership: The next generation of community leaders are cultivated through civic processes. Involve the people who the decisions will effect, and look for leadership in new places. In long range planning, involve the young people who will inherit your decisions.

To access the full story, click here.

Page 1 of 5

2. Why Build A Hospital In A Tsunami Zone?

Gold Beach City Administrator Jodi Fritts was angry — or, as she put it in an email to state officials: “Incredible Hulk ANGRY.” She was one of several Gold Beach officials who had been working for months to finalize plans for re-building the local Curry General Hospital. They convinced local voters to support a bond measure to pay for it.

Then, in the spring of 2014, state officials from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) started asking questions about the location that local officials had chosen for Curry General.

That’s because the new hospital is to be built inside the state’s proposed new tsunami zone.

“If there were ever a place for the state to step in and help, this is it,” DOGAMI’s Ian Madin wrote to other state officials. Madin is the agency’s chief scientist.

To access the full story, click here.

3. Don't Delay & Register Today for Oregon Small Farms Conference - Fee Increases on 2/3 Oregon State University at the LaSells Stewart Center and CH2M Hill Alumni Center Saturday, February 28, 2015 We're looking forward to seeing you on February 28th, 2015! Registration is now open. Don't delay as the $45 per person registration fee will increase on February 2nd!

This daylong event is geared toward farmers, agriculture professionals, food policy advocates, students and managers of farmers markets.

Twenty-four sessions will be offered on a variety of topics relevant to the Oregon small farmers.

This year there will be a session track in Spanish.

Speakers will include farmers, OSU Extension faculty, agribusiness, and more.

For more information and registration, click here.

4. Toolkits Available for Community Projects Have an idea for a service project – like getting a group together to volunteer each week at a homeless shelter, or reading to kids at your local library? Learn how to turn your volunteer idea into a successful service project using our do-it-yourself toolkits. Includes projects such as community gardens, Audit Your Home, How to Support Military Families, etc.

To access the toolkits, click here.

5. When Yogurt Affects the Brain English is rich with idioms that connect our bellies with our behavior. We get “butterflies in our stomachs” or just have a “gut feeling” about things. But increasingly, there’s scientific evidence that the bacteria in our guts might influence emotion and behavior.

Page 2 of 5

Our gastrointestinal tracts teem with tens of thousands of species of bacteria. These germs are already known to help regulate the digestive process and to play a role in weight and food cravings.

Some scientists are finding, though, that these same microbes can also alter our brain chemistry. Just how this happens is still being figured out, but one pathway might be the vagus nerve, which runs from the brain to the stomach. The bacteria stimulate the vagus nerve, and that, in turn, stimulates the production of various neurotransmitters—the brain chemicals that partly determine what we think and how we feel.

To access the full story, click here.

To access a stellar RadioLab episode covering the same topic, click here.

6. Join Us for a Free Effective Utility Management Workshop on March 2 in Sunriver Sustainable water and wastewater services are critical to providing Oregonians with clean and safe water and helping the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of the communities these utilities serve. Utilities across Oregon face tremendous challenges, such as aging infrastructure, climate change, population shifts, and competing priorities within the community. More and more, utilities assume leadership roles related to community sustainability, resource recovery and conservation, sustainable economic development, and climate change. As they do, they must concurrently focus on long-term sustainability and bringing about meaningful change in their organizations and their communities. This workshop is a timely opportunity for public works directors, city council members, and city board members to move toward building a stronger community through effective utility management.

WHAT: Effective Utility Management Workshop WHEN: Monday, March 2, 2015 WHERE: Sunriver Resort, 17600 Center Drive, Sunriver, Oregon HOW: Click here to register COST: Workshop registration is free. If you wish to attend the full Oregon Association of Water Utilities Conference, a registration fee will be charged.

7. Heart & Soul Talks: Use Community Network Analysis to Improve Participation and Results – Free Webinar Achieving community-wide participation is an admirable but often lofty goal. Identifying the multiple layers of community can be the difference between success or failure of a project. Orton’s Community Network Analysis (CNA) brings fresh new voices and solutions to the table and is a powerful way to understand who lives, works, and plays in your town and how best to reach them.

Alece Montez-Greigo, Orton’s director of programs, explains the tool. Community Heart & Soul project coordinators Alexis Halbert of Paonia, Colorado, and Liz Subin of Essex, Vermont, join her to share their on-the-ground experience with CNA. 4-5 p.m. Eastern, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015.

Free!

Can't wait to get started? Download a copy of the Community Network Analysis Tool now!

To register for this webinar, click here.

Page 3 of 5

8. See What Your City Will Be Like in 15 Years Minority populations will surpass the aging, white majority by 2042. New births, immigration, and internal migration will reconfigure the populations of our cities, towns and suburbs. The tectonic plates of America's demographics are shifting, and now there's an easy way to follow along.

A new interactive tool developed by the Urban Institute predicts how these changes will play out locally by 2030. Using historical trends and census data, it allows users to adjust for rates of birth, death, and migration to forecast a range of scenarios—so urban planners, local leadership, and anyone else can track the effects of demographic trends in their region.

"Sometimes people's idea of what their community is like gets fixed at a fairly early age," says urban planner William Fulton, who formerly served as San Diego's planning director. "If you have statistical information ... it becomes more possible to have a conversation about how things are changing and what you’re going to do about it."

To access the full story, click here.

9. Free Federal and State Tax Returns for AmeriCorps Members Each year, AmeriCorps Alums partners with MyFreeTaxes.com to offer free federal and state tax return filings to alums and current members. Year after year, this free service provides AmeriCorps alums with millions of dollars in tax refunds. This service has proved to be valuable to thousands of alumni who are looking to put a few extra dollars in their pocket around tax time or a free guide to filing taxes on your own online.

Instructions are noted below. It's fast! It's free! It's effective! So start today and get your tax return back at no cost to you.   

STEP 1: Visit www.MyFreeTaxes.com to get started!

STEP 2: Learn if you’re eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and other credits.

STEP 3: If you made under $60,000 in 2014, you can file your federal and state income taxes securely online with our exclusive link to tax preparation.

10. Movement to Take Down Thousands of Dams Goes Mainstream This spring, for the first time in more than two centuries, American shad, striped bass, and river herring may spawn in White Clay Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River in northern Delaware.

Early one morning last month, a five-person crew waded into the frigid creek and pulled down most of a timber-and-stone dam that had blocked the river's flow since the early years of the Revolutionary War. The White Clay Creek dam was the first ever removed in the state of Delaware, but it was far from the only one removed in the United States last year. On Tuesday, the conservation group American Rivers announced that 72 dams were torn down or blown up in 2014, restoring some 730 miles of waterways from California to Pennsylvania.

Twenty years ago, dam removal was a fringe notion, and early demolition efforts gained support only because the dams in question were no longer in use and, in some cases, were dangerous to people living nearby.

Now, the U.S. dam removal movement has wide acceptance as well as bigger ambitions; on Tuesday, producers of a recent documentary called DamNation met with members of Congress and White

Page 4 of 5

House officials to press their case for the removal of four large federal dams from the lower Snake River in eastern Washington.

To access the full story, click here.

11. MIT Open Courseware on Urban Studies and Planning The Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) is a department within the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. It is comprised of four specialization areas (also referred to as Program Groups): City Design and Development; Environmental Policy and Planning; Housing, Community and Economic Development; and the International Development Group. There are also three cross-cutting areas of study: Transportation Planning and Policy, Urban Information Systems (UIS) and Regional Planning.

Since its inception in 1933, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning has consistently remained one of the top planning schools in the country. Now totaling close to 60 teaching faculty members (more than half of whom are full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty), it has the largest planning faculty in the United States.

The Department is organized around the following core questions of engagement and progressive change: "Can we make a difference in the world? Can we design better cities? Can we help places grow more sustainably? Can we help communities thrive? Can we help advance equitable world development?" Our mission statement is as follows: We are committed to positive social change. Our moral vision is translated into professional education in distinct ways:    

We believe in the abilities of urban and regional institutions to steadily improve the quality of life of citizens.

We emphasize democratic decision-making involving both public and private actors, and acknowledge the necessity of government leadership to ensure greater social and economic equality.

We foster a positive approach to technological innovation as a major force of social change.

We trust that the built environment can meet the needs of diverse populations and serve as a source of meaning in their daily lives.

For more information, click here.

Page 5 of 5