WfW, not WWF silly!

I took my first class here at Yestermorrow this past week, and wouldn't ya know it was called Woodworking for Women (WfW)! A topic near and dear to my heart...women in "nontraditional work."

...hang on, who decides what is non-traditional anyways?? sheesh!

The instructor for the class was Lizabeth, a woman carpenter whose father was also a pediatrician! Funny coincidence! I spent the whole week making a shaker-style end table, learning about routers, mortisers, dado cuts, different kinds of finishes...it was a really good introduction to the woodshop, and now I feel totally at home creating furniture and other wood products.

Arrival at Yestermorrow

I was home for a brief week and now I'm off again. To Vermont this time! The next 6 months of posting will be the documentation of the second half of my current journey: the yester(half)year.

Vermont is rural as rural can be. There is NO cell phone service, so I leave my phone in my bedroom, which caused me to spend the first 3 days searching for my cell to check the time. Even my phone's alarm clock fails to work out here. By the fifth day I have come to terms with it; I no longer have any sense of hours in the day and only judge times by my nose...I can smell meal times from the smells of the kitchen.

The Yesterfamily is an odd bunch. Only time will tell, but in the end I will most likely continue to conclude that I hope to never start a non-profit if I can avoid doing so. There are many inefficiencies that would simply not exist if this school were run as a for-profit business that remained socially responsible.

This posting will most likely become weekly at this point. By the time the day of chores and work is over, I'm too wiped to write a daily post. Coming up: what I'm learning and working on here at the Yesterplex.

Heidelberg Project

I did not interview anyone from the Heidelberg Project, but I remembered speaking with the project's founder 2 years ago at the Great Lakes Building ReUse Conference in Buffalo and thought I should check it out. What a crazy/interesting place!

In the years of its existence, it has been a rather controversial project. Why? To some, Tyree Guyton's work is just prolonging the demise of the abandoned and unsafe buildings in their neighborhood. To others, it is a tragically beautiful depiction of the abandonment of Detroit. And to others still, it is an amazingly creative space and a spot of light in an otherwise destitute area. I myself am not certain how I feel about it.

The decorated buildings and sculptures made of old building materials at first look seem to suggest a different vision of the future--of what could be. Instead, I believe it is more an artist's depiction of the creative energy of people. Not an exact vision but more of a suggestion that even in the most forgotten and abandoned of places creative energy and hope still exists. I think that it is this powerful message that I connected most with while looking at the installations on Heidelberg Street. More than the artist's canvas and the political commentary behind the wild air vents snaking out of a ruined roof and the stuffed animals tacked on the side of a house, this message hits at the core of the current rebirth of Detroit. It is just one part of the message being sent through the Detroit: City of Hope (DCOH) campaign, but it is a strong one at that...yes Detroit has problems, yes many buildings are falling apart, but we can take back our neighborhoods, we can use our creative energy (which the Heidelberg Project has been instrumental in highlighting) and come up with realistic solutions that benefit US as a community.

Speaking of, DCOH is another entity on the list that I thought I should check in on. I contacted longtime organizer (and former autoworker)Rich Feldman to speak a little about this idea of a loose organization whose main goal is to connect businesses, nonprofits, people, etc. in order to create a network of caring Detroiters, excited to work with each other to achieve a better future for Detroit. DCOH and my visit with a pretty amazing lady will be in my next post.

For now my questions are: Why are artist communities seen to be an indicator of progress? Are they actually? Can you have artists move into an area without gentrifying it in the process? How do you get neighborhood artists invested in the area and community building rather than turning an area into a space that largely functions as an artists canvas with little to no community involvement? When is that ok and when do you need to integrate creation of art pieces and community?

Soup and Support

I was supposed to be meeting my couchsurfing host Leeann at an event called Soup. If you're not familiar with couchsurfing...you should be. Anyway, I was invited to this event via facebook, and when I checked the event page I saw a link to another event during the day...Spruce up Spaulding. ...What is Spaulding?

This is Spaulding.









Glass bottles are broken in the planters, trash is sticking to overgrown weeds, and the building has been abused, set aflame, and subsequently forgotten. To many, Spaulding Court is an abandoned piece of junk. To the people working at Spruce Up Spaulding, the building is a treasure! You may not be able to see in the picture, but given the potential for future community interactions within this specially designed space, I tend to agree with the latter group. The building is essentially designed to smush people together, a design that I think can often be helpful in engaging people within a community since it forces increased levels of communication and tolerance for others. As I volunteered in cleaning up the planters and work on some plumbing, I pictured a future with food growing in the planters, implementation of smart retrofit techniques, etc. That's the beauty of Detroit nowadays...anything is possible. Learned how to use aquatherm, a material that surpasses pex in performance! Hoping it becomes more readily available in plumbing supply stores in the US...expands and therefore does not burst if/when water freezes in pipes, has straight runs like copper which are easier to install than the curved, bendable pex, melts together to form a tighter seal than pex, etc.

I went to Soup after volunteering at Spaulding Court, and loved the idea. Every Thursday this group gets together, makes soup, and charges $5 for dinner. The awesome part about it is that the money paid to get soup goes toward funding a community project. There are 2 people in attendance who have 3 minutes to pitch their idea and why they need start-up funding. The others in attendance vote on which group deserves to receive funding, and then the money is given to the winner! Sure, it's only a couple hundred dollars, but think of all the free publicity as well! Even if you don't win you still get the undivided attention of all the people in the room for 3 whole minutes, to speak about and sell your project.

Same Circle Syndrome

I left Minneapolis early early morning (sorry I missed saying goodbye Andrew, you were a wonderful host!) in order to catch the ferry from Manitowoc to Ludington. It cost a pretty penny, but on the last leg of my journey…anything to keep from driving more, no? So I hopped aboard the S.S.Badger, cruising ever closer to the last stop on my 3-month road trip…DETROIT.

Detroit is everything I imagined only on an infinitely larger scale. In a way, the abandoned buildings served as a reminder of home—forgotten streets and forgotten neighborhoods fading into history—but there was a pervasive shift in the wind which was in no way similar to the some wind patterns in Buffalo these days. I’m speaking of the winds of change, of course. Perhaps that is an overly negative judgment of my hometown; there are plenty of amazing people and organizations within Buffalo, but there is less of a cohesive energy...? Less of view that the entire city is behind this shift in the wind?

The first people I visited with in Detroit were from two different training and conservation corps. Instead of speaking directly about their organizations, I want to mention something that came up in the conversation which has really gotten me to reexamine my own experiences in Buffalo and the role I want to play in the future. What we discussed was something I like to call "same circles syndrome." It's awfully easy and comfortable to find yourself surrounded by the same people who are working within the community building realm. We're all on similar committees, we hold events which we all attend in support of each other, and we see each other in both professional and informal settings. If we never wanted to, we could successfully avoid interacting with our actual communities at all! ...But how does that reflect the wants and needs of the community? How can we call a neighborhood or our work successful if we base success on numbers in attendance versus on who attends or how people are becoming engaged in the org and taking ownership of their own communities?

I noticed in Detroit this divide of sorts; one which I do not care to repeat. There is a major divide between one side--the "creative minds," the "community builders," the out-of-towners coming to try their ideas on a fresh canvas--and the other side--people who have been around forever, "the community." At many events I attended it was often a group of the former, the same circle people, mostly not reflective of the demographic in Detroit. And here I find it can be very much the same...is it unavoidable? I sure hope not. I have much more to say on this topic, especially concerning Detroit...how some people seem to get it and successfully avoid the same circle syndrome, while others are consumed by it...but I think this is enough to reflect on and think about now...

Grand Aspirations

I spoke with Timothy, a leader of Grand Aspirations and Summer of Solutions, when I was in Minneapolis this past week. Grand Aspirations and Summer of Solutions seeks to capitalize on the energy of youth in order to develop and create green solutions for our uncertain future. I was interested in several things regarding this organization and the programs it runs/supports:

Big Ideas:
1. National versus local programming. Though my heart always shifts toward more localized solutions, I can see why there are national organizations. I was curious to see Timothy's opinion on this and the decision behind turning Grand Aspirations into a national org versus a Minneapolis-based organization. Timothy agreed that localization is always important, but that each local program need not create an entirely new curriculum or orientation/training for its leadership. Rather than each location around the country spending countless hours re-creating the wheel, the programs can focus more on their localized version of curriculum and local issues. It makes sense to have a larger org overseeing in this case, especially since different local chapters can network...though I still think a lot of attention has to be paid toward ensuring that the local chapter is in fact addressing local issues...

2. Educated, well-off participants versus at-risk, disadvantaged youth. This is something I personally struggle with. Being the former of the two I find myself torn. Sometimes creating programs for people who are well off are well intentioned...the idea that creative, educated minds can be a catalyst for change within a system rings loudly, but oftentimes exclusively. With programs only working with the first group it can become a very top-down approach which assumes that the disadvantaged have nothing to contribute to the conversation. On the other hand, working with only with the latter category may close off opportunities for new ideas to enter the space. By incorporating both I think there is more of a chance of diversity in knowledge, experience, etc. which could be more effective in producing realistic (rather than solely idealistic) solutions...

3. Training for job opportunities that don't exist (in the green jobs movement). This org focuses more on youth creating solutions rather than training them in any specific green job skills, which I think is an important aspect of this org. First we need to rethink how we approach problems and empower people to seek solutions. There needs to be a go-getter attitude, an entrepreneurial spirit which eventually, fingers crossed, creates the jobs through initiatives that are begun through programs like these...

Other things:
1. They have a cooperative model for investing in energy efficient upgrades. Called Cooperative Energy Futures, it started out of the Summer of Solutions, but it is essentially a revolving fund...all the returns from energy efficient upgrades goes to financing more upgrades within a community, making it affordable for a neighborhood to install otherwise expensive upgrades

2. Youth power! This can go two ways, actually. Yes, I think that supporting youth and giving them power in creating solutions is AMAZING. But are youth the only ones with the answers? Seems to me that other generations have answers as well. I'm not saying this organization should be intergenerational, because some orgs can simply support one age group, but I think this idea of intergenerational interactions is something that is very important to me in thinking about healing/creating/strengthening communities...and empowering members to be able to propose and realize solutions to issues that neighborhoods face...(be it crime, blight, climate change, whatever)

There is probably much more to say about this organization, but I need to continue on and type up other posts before I forget many of the conversations I had while in Detroit this past weekend (my stop after Minneapolis).

Throwback to Seattle

I didn't have the picture to post at the time, but while I was in Seattle I met up with my longtime friend and teacher, Ken! Of course we can never rest and just hang out when we get together, so within minutes of my arrival...I was moving boxes and furniture onto a huge semi. Ha, typical!