Monday Mailing
Year 19 • Issue 25 18 March 2013 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Quote of the Week: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ~Anais Nin
Placemaking: Shared Focus on Place Builds Vibrant Destinations The 10 Happiest States in the U.S. San Francisco's New Favorite Bridge Hut Sweet Hut Not In Our Town NIFTI Webinar 6 - Transitioning Farmers Off the Incubator Site Charlotte Martin Foundation Oregon's Energy Dept. Issues Rural-Aimed Grants Coos Bay Coal Port Investors Drop Out of Project Who’s Minding the Movement? Fundraising in Rural Communities (Webinar or Peer Learning Session)
1. Placemaking: Shared Focus on Place Builds Vibrant Destinations Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved and build shared wealth in their communities. “Placemaking, applied correctly, can show us new ways to help cultures emerge where openness is not so scary,” notes Dr. Katherine Loflin, the lead project consultant for the Knight Foundation’s groundbreaking Soul of the Community study, which showed a significant correlation between community attachment and economic growth. “We could find with consistency over time that it was the softer side of place—social offerings, openness, and aesthetics—that really seem to drive peoples’ attachment to their place. It wasn’t necessarily basic services: how well potholes got paved over. It wasn’t even necessarily for peoples’ personal economic circumstances.” The study’s other key finding was that there is an empirical relationship between higher levels of attachment and cities’ GDP growth. This is important because, in Loflin’s words, “We have not recognized, as a society, the importance of [place]. Studies like Soul of the Community are helping to give us all permission to spend some time working on this stuff—and not in a kumbaya way, but an economic way.”
Oregon Fast Fact #30: Tillamook is home to Oregon's largest cheese factory.
To access the full story, click here. 2.
The 10 Happiest States in the U.S. Live in Hawaii, Colorado, or Minnesota? Chances are, you’re happier than your brethren in Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia. That’s according to the 2012 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The yearly report surveys 1,000 people each day for 350 days out of the year, asking them questions about work environment, physical health, emotional health, lifestyle behaviors like exercise and smoking, access to things like health care and food, and overall life satisfaction. To access the full story, click here.
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3. San Francisco's New Favorite Bridge Although the Bay Bridge opened six months before the Golden Gate Bridge, it is widely considered the lesser of the two. The Golden Gate's Art Deco design in striking international orange has made it a global icon, while its silver counterpart is a heavily used expressway connecting San Francisco with its industrial neighbor, Oakland. After 75 years of living in the shadows, yesterday the Bay Bridge came into the spotlight. At 9 p.m., the 1.8-mile western span of the bridge became the world's largest Light-Emitting Diode (LED) sculpture, covered top to bottom in "25,000 undulating white lights." Artist Leo Villareal's "The Bay Lights" installation is being lauded for its contribution to public art, its potential to increase tourism revenue and the competition it now poses to the Bay's more famous bridge. To access the full story, click here. 4. Hut Sweet Hut Next time you complain about your house being too small, think about Mark Hubbell, Diane Sciacca or Phill Bregg. They are among the people in Eugene who reside in 6-foot-by-10-foot living spaces, in an experimental type of housing for the homeless called Conestoga huts. Some of the huts could become the first shelters at Opportunity Village Eugene, a proposed homeless community on city property on Garfield Street. Hubbell lives in a Conestoga hut at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection on Hilyard Street, near East 40th Avenue. He said the value of having a home again — even a temporary, extremely small one — is “immeasurable.” “You really can’t put a price on it,” he said. “When you become homeless, your day-to-day life is about survival.” “It’s home,” Hubbell said of the hut. “It gives you security.” To access the full story, click here. 5. Not In Our Town If you could take action to prevent prejudice and bigotry and promote a more inclusive society, would you do it? Have you stood up to intolerance, and now have ideas and lessons learned to share? NIOT.org is a new resource that CONNECTS you with people everywhere confronting bigotry and intolerance, and EMPOWERS you to take action in your own community or school. NIOT.org's interactive map highlights stories and videos from everyday people who are finding new ways to stand up to hate. The map's red dots show hate crime hot spots: places where an act of hate or intolerance has taken place. But every time a person organizes a positive event to respond to or prevent hate violence and bigotry, a green dot gets added. You have the power to transform your community!
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On NIOT.org, you can stand up and make your fight against hate visible: · Find a Group near you, or start a new one; · Watch a video about how another town responded; · Download materials from the Action Kit; The need for a community-based movement to promote inclusion has never been more urgent. Recent statistics show that 210,000 people in the U.S. annually are the victims of hate crimes – 86% of which are violent crimes. For 15 years, the Not In Our Town Initiative has used film, grassroots events, educational outreach and new media to provide over 100 communities with real tools to fight bigotry and create inclusive communities and schools. With the launch of NIOT.org, the Not In Our Town resources are available to people everywhere – whenever they need them – and your stories of success and innovation help educate and inspire others to stand up. For more information, click here. 6. NIFTI Webinar 6 - Transitioning Farmers Off the Incubator Site Tuesday, March 26, 2013 from 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM EDT Join the National Incubator Farm Training Initiative (NIFTI) for a webinar on strategies for transitioning farmers successfully onto their own farm operations. Partners from the Intervale Center, the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) and the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project (New Entry) will discuss farmland matching programs, helping farmers access capital, and the structure and challenges of continued support for graduates. This webinar is designed for those interested in or already operating land-based beginning farmer training programs. We will include ample time at the end for participant questions. Please note, a recording of this webinar will be available online afterwards at: https://nifti.wikispaces.com/Webinars. Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now at: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/774907831 7. Charlotte Martin Foundation The Charlotte Martin Foundation supports nonprofit organizations that provide services in urban, rural, and tribal communities throughout Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. The Foundation is dedicated to funding projects that enrich the lives of youth in the areas of athletics, culture, and education. Grants are also provided for the preservation and protection of wildlife and habitat. Applications, which must be submitted online, are reviewed throughout the year. Visit the Foundation’s website to review the goals and priorities for each of the Foundation’s program areas. There will be two funding cycles for 2013. Cycle 1: Applications will be accepted beginning March 1, 2013. Deadline for submissions: April 30, 2013. Grants awarded by June 15, 2013. Cycle 2: Applications will be accepted beginning August 1, 2013. Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2013. Grants awarded by November 15, 2013. Page 3 of 6
For more information, click here. 8. Oregon's Energy Dept. Issues Rural-Aimed Grants Oregon's energy department and the U.S. Forest Service have kicked six grants over to small wood energy project operators. Each of the six projects, which will share the Oregon Department of Energy's $168,000 in grants, are east of the Cascades. The grants are part of the Wood Energy Cluster Pilot Project that the state launched last year. The funded efforts are: $50,000 to the Oregon Military Department for a biomass district heating feasibility study for the Umatilla Training Center. $47,700 to Harney Community Energy for a feasibility and facilities study for a possible thermal energy service company in Burns. $30,000 to the Mt. Bachelor Resort for a central biomass heating system technical and economic analysis. $16,000 to the Grant County Wood Energy Cluster for energy improvement studies at two elementary schools and the county's jail. $15,000 to the Sisters Airport to study the feasibility of installing a biomass boiler. $9,300 to Wallowa Resources Community Solutions for a biomass district energy study. The projects aim "to help develop Oregon’s renewable bioenergy industry and complement forest restoration activities." 9. Coos Bay Coal Port Investors Drop Out of Project A California marine terminal management company has until the end of the month to decide if it still wants to try to develop the Port of Coos Bay to ship coal mined in Montana and Wyoming to Asia, now that two of its partners have dropped out. A document (http://bit.ly/ZBerdO) posted on the International Port of Coos Bay website Monday says Mitsui & Co., the U.S. subsidiary of a Japanese trading company, and Korean Electric Power Corp., the potential buyer of the coal, are no longer part of the project. The development was first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Metropolitan Stevedore Company of Wilmington, Calif., known as Metro Ports, on March 5 signed a renewal of its exclusive negotiating agreement with the port, which is good through March 31. The company did not return a call for comment. Coos Bay is one of five Northwest ports interested in exporting coal mined in Montana and Wyoming to markets in Asia. To access the full story, click here. 10. Who’s Minding the Movement? The past year or so has brought some dramatic changes to key organizations in the community food arena. Organizations like the Community Food Security Coalition, Food Alliance, Organic Farming Research Foundation, and Slow Food have gone through either challenging leadership transitions, substantially downsized, and/or closed down. The leadership vacuum left in part by these unfortunate occurrences is compounded by the breakneck growth of the field, as new food-oriented organizations emerge and existing groups discover how food systems work can help them meet their goals.
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The result is a dramatically transformed landscape and a lack of clarity as to who will provide the unifying vision and direction to help these organizations become more powerful than the sum of their collective parts. As non-profits tend to fixate on the “four walls of their organization,” otherwise known as their mission, these changes to the flagship organizations lead me to wonder: Who’s minding the movement? The struggles of these larger groups could be just random entropy. Organizations come and go. Yet, these struggles also point to several broad issues regarding the sustainability of the non-profit model and the foundations that support it. For example, there exists enormous redundancy and wasted effort among the thousands of nonprofits, which as legal entities, must comply with federal, state and local regulations. Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, suggests that the best thing non-profits can do to fight hunger is to merge groups and build their collective capacity. Any Executive Director will tell you how much work it is to create and just maintain a 501(c)(3) entity, even before any of the real substantive work gets done. These are energies that could be better spent changing the food system. To access the full story, click here. 11. Fundraising in Rural Communities (Webinar or Peer Learning Session) Want to raise funds for operating expenses, programs, and projects? Drawing on the wisdom of fundraising gurus such as Andy Robinson and Kim Klein, as well as our own work with clients in rural communities, we’ll walk through the elements of annual fundraising and highlight some key steps that often get overlooked. In particular, you will learn how thoughtful planning and community engagement can set the stage for greater fundraising success. Finally, we’ll discuss how everyone in your group can (and must!) contribute to fundraising success, even if not everyone feels comfortable asking for money! Discussion topics will include: Defining the need for support Understanding your organization’s “positioning” and how to improve it Making your fundraising plan Organizing your annual fund campaign The donor cultivation system The role of events A word about grants Strategic collaboration This webinar is for small nonprofits and all-volunteer nonprofits that want to raise funds for operating expenses, programs, and projects. Two Ways to Attend Hosted Webinars and Peer Learning Discussions. Facilitators will host group webinar viewings and lead focused discussions immediately after the webinar in the below communities. This is an opportunity to learn from the experts and also learn from your peers, renew community connections, and build new relationships. Discussions will include opportunities for the group to identify ways to address participants’ issues and concerns. BANDON—Bandon Conference and Community Center, 1200 11th Street SW, Bandon, OR 97411 Page 5 of 6
THE DALLES—Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Museum, 5000 Discovery Drive, The Dalles, Oregon 97058 ROSEBURG—YMCA of Douglas County, 1551 Stewart Parkway, Roseburg, Oregon 97471 Non-hosted Webinars. Not close to one of the hosted sites listed above? Join us via traditional webinar format—all you need is a computer and internet connection. For more information, click here.
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