Published in Green Fire Times, November, 2010.
When people my age were growing up, progressives had this mindset that everything important had to happen in the margins, not the mainstream. Whether you were thinking about artistic pursuits, politics, or what sorts of professions were offered – people just made that assumption, because so much of the industrial system was still in place. We need to get over that mindset, because so much of it is not marginal anymore. We are the workforce now, and there are plenty of chances to earn a living while doing the things you believe in. A local living economy organizes all of that. It’s a thoughtful people-centered economy that is rapidly becoming our mainstream economy. And there’s no other alternative out there once you realize that we can’t keep shoring up the industrial model.
Localization is not a crusade; it’s a significant evolution of our culture. It’s happening because people are working hard at it. I really think the Santa Fe Alliance is part of a movement that, looking back, won’t be seen as a movement. It will be seen as some huge inevitable turn in the course of our economy. The economy that’s out there isn’t something that inherently can be fair, it’s just not the economy we want, and it’s already falling apart. It’s just never going to make a stable economy for our region. I think the local living economy movement is one place where social justice concerns and environmentalism can come together. The local economy movement is bringing social considerations back into economic decisions.
Social Enterprise
The deal that we perfected in the 19th century was that you could make money on railroads or coal mines or any number of things that have hidden external costs, and then give back to society later by building a library or a museum. With the social enterprise model, we are slowing that process down to say ‘okay, let’s take some of the profits from every sale, every month, every year, and put it back into hidden environmental and social costs.’ A social enterprise benefits society in the course of doing business, and in the way that it does business.
Of course, there are a lot of obstacles in changing this paradigm, and that’s why there’s an advocacy side of Santa Fe Alliance. The Alliance has pushed for a lot of ‘level-the-playing-field’ types of things, like closing tax loopholes for out of state companies. Conventional business models are full of hidden costs, and there is a competitive advantage to keeping them hidden. When we make those costs visible, and make sure everyone has to pay to clean up after themselves, it opens the field to locally owned businesses, social enterprises, and green businesses. It can also lead to significant innovations -- if you can find a way not to make the mess in the first place, the cost savings become a competitive advantage.
It takes a mix of regulation and consumer demand to make these changes happen. When people said that they didn’t want hormone disruptors in their plastic water bottles the whole industry transformed in less than twelve months. Consumer demand lead the issue, starting with baby bottles. We don’t have a naïve public anymore. When people hear about these things, it spreads in so many different ways, because of social media. The push for supply chain transparency is a great example of the combination of consumer and regulatory pressure. People want to know where the product is from, and who made it, and certification standards are sprouting up to address this demand. Sometimes though, you get sad results when you ask people to vote with their dollars. They buy the cheapest thing that still makes them feel good about the issues on the table.
Localization versus Protectionism
It is easy it is to confuse localization with protectionism. Protectionism is part of an economy of scarcity. There’s a working assumption in most peoples’ model of capitalism that there’s not enough ‘stuff,’ and that supply and demand is a natural mechanism that satisfies unlimited desires with limited resources. You can read that in most economics textbooks. The funny thing is that when you look at the actual mechanics of supply and demand, it turns out everybody always has to manipulate supply and demand because it doesn’t work organically. There’s been a lot written about manufacturing desire and the manipulation of desire. The scarcity model is based on the assumption that we have these insatiable desires. Manufacturing those desires is actually a huge industry that’s failing to keep up right now.
In Mexico, the birthplace of corn, importing U.S. GMO (genetically modified) corn is really pretty outrageous. I’m not even talking about the importing of corn seed, which is another dimension of that fight; just literally bushels of corn grown on industrial farms in Kansas being made into tamales way deep down into Mexico. It makes no sense. Protectionism is a stop-gap response to these situations, but it leaves the underlying economic model intact.
The thing that makes the same product from somewhere else cheaper is, in most cases, a hidden environmental or social impact. We can keep making money in this 19th century way where we don’t consider any of the impacts, or we can gradually expose the hidden costs and build them into the business model. The competitive environment adjusts and everyone can still make money. That’s the local living economies model.
Our current economic paradigm is that people have desires, someone makes a product that satisfy that desire, and we do a cash transaction. I pay for my costs and take a profit. And there is nothing wrong with that model, necessarily. It’s just that it’s not how human beings really work, it doesn’t match an anthropologist’s view of what economic exchanges are really about.
What social enterprise takes into account is that all these economic decisions also actually mean something to people. There is a cultural and social dimension to it. The localization movement is a deeper look into ‘what does all this mean for me?’
Community Livelihood
Livelihood is actually the central concept for me in all of this. It’s being able to supply whatever needs your family has while at the same time having actual satisfaction in your work. Livelihood is everything that makes a more meaningful work experience for everyone in your community. One of the things the local living economy is pushing back against is the commodification of everything – the fact that everything is measured in dollars. If you switch away from the scarcity model and from the assumption that endless desires drive purchases, and from the assumption that you have to measure it in dollars for it to be part of our economy, then you rediscover a whole set of activities that people have always done for and with each other that have economic value. When you look at this from a community economic perspective, you can actually measure and visualize the benefits to the community’s collective livelihood. Measuring things helps up to be more strategic, and there are ways to measure our economy and our economic health in units other than dollars.
The local economy movement has made itself comfortable with the idea that some of these things are actually better to do outside of the dollar economy; that you get all kinds of positive network effects from letting things happen in a family circle, in a friends circle, in a local cooperative circle, rather than pushing things into the dollar economy. Offering a product or service with a dollar price tag on it is going to still be the majority of how people make their living. But there are big categories (childcare, entertainment, etc.) that are arguably better left to an informal economy. There should be a protective layer of informal economy around any given set of formal (dollar) activities. So in healthcare, for example, we need a layer of commonsense mutual care that kicks in before you have to go to the hospital. The irony is that the cost savings in U.S. dollars of even a modest social intervention in community health is tremendous.
Let’s look at local investing. People want to be able to measure risk, and it is harder for banks to assess the risks of local investments. As we move from an image of investing as a form of gambling to an image of investing as a form of community building, we discover new measures for risk. Community resilience is one of the strongest of these measures -- does the investment increase stability and prosperity in the community? We’ve learned a lot from micro-finance about the impact of social factors on the success of investments. Its time to bring those lessons home to our own economies.
New Motivations
There are gross inequalities and injustices built into our current system, and people are inspired to correct them. How can we build a culture around the satisfaction that people get from being intimately involved - from having positions of responsibility in supplying basic community needs?
We are building an economy that is more efficient and more resilient, a system that considers long-term impacts, but that’s still a very functionalist way of looking at the world. If you want to live in a more magical and deeply personal world, then the exercise becomes how to bring meaning to each little part of our collective livelihood. And that in itself becomes a reason to change the system --- and it’s actually a deeper motivation. There’s nothing wrong with the motivation of, ‘hey, let’s do this better.’ But let’s also do it in a more meaningful way. Let’s do this in a way that can bring acknowledgment and social satisfaction to more of the people involved.
Every job does something to benefit the people around you. But most jobs aren’t set up to acknowledge the meaning of the work, especially basic jobs. If you drive a truck or maintain a power plant, you should be acknowledged as the person who brings food and energy to the community. We have to allow it to mean something socially. When the bakers get to come out of the back room and actually meet the people eating the bread, that’s what makes the job meaningful. We have to cultivate a layer of social-cultural “informal economy” activities around the core of livelihood activities. That’s where the satisfaction is, and that’s what creates the economic value.
Roy Wroth is the Board President of Santa Fe Alliance. He has worked in urbanism and community development in Santa Fe for 14 years, and is currently the Executive Director of Santa Fe Complex, an economic development organization that supports independent workers in science, technology and the arts.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Santa Fe Alliance President’s Message 2010: The Human Currency
Dear Friends
The last decade has been a sobering one for traditional investing, with the stock market barely keeping pace with inflation. While it has been catastrophic for many individuals, the economic crisis presents us, as a community, with the opportunity to reshape how we think about money in a fundamental way.
What is investing? What is money for, actually? What does prosperity consist of? Our old paradigm is coming up short of answers to these questions. A new paradigm is forming around localization, socially responsible investing, fair trade, and sustainability. At the Alliance, we call it the local living economies movement, and we are proud to be a part of it.
The entry point to the new paradigm is to see our community’s economy for what it really is -- a network of people caring for, and providing for, each other. We need to see through the dollars that our economy is denominated in, to our everyday personal acts of responsibility, acts measured in the true human currency, the currency of caring.
The human currency is what makes work meaningful, what makes us value costly things, what motivates us beyond satisfying basic needs. When the Alliance works to localize food, or energy, or hiring, or investing, what really happens is that we personalize each of those parts of our economy, reconnecting them to our deeper values.
Recentering our economy in this way is the antidote for the hedonic economy of the previous century, but it can also avert the deflationary cycle many economists are predicting. It is a matter of transforming and managing our appetites, not just denying them.
In the local living economies paradigm, entrepreneurship becomes social enterprise -- strengthening people while making a profit --, construction becomes green building, and investing becomes responsible investing -- building a future based on mutual prosperity. When you see the economy in this light, you’ll realize how much there is to do, and how many opportunities we have to make a difference in our everyday purchases, our investments, and our business decisions.
We are very proud of our members, the businesses and organizations listed in this directory. I hope you’ll visit with them, join your commitment with theirs, and help us build a better economy for our community. It’s time to put your human currency to work!
Roy Wroth
President, Board of Directors
The last decade has been a sobering one for traditional investing, with the stock market barely keeping pace with inflation. While it has been catastrophic for many individuals, the economic crisis presents us, as a community, with the opportunity to reshape how we think about money in a fundamental way.
What is investing? What is money for, actually? What does prosperity consist of? Our old paradigm is coming up short of answers to these questions. A new paradigm is forming around localization, socially responsible investing, fair trade, and sustainability. At the Alliance, we call it the local living economies movement, and we are proud to be a part of it.
The entry point to the new paradigm is to see our community’s economy for what it really is -- a network of people caring for, and providing for, each other. We need to see through the dollars that our economy is denominated in, to our everyday personal acts of responsibility, acts measured in the true human currency, the currency of caring.
The human currency is what makes work meaningful, what makes us value costly things, what motivates us beyond satisfying basic needs. When the Alliance works to localize food, or energy, or hiring, or investing, what really happens is that we personalize each of those parts of our economy, reconnecting them to our deeper values.
Recentering our economy in this way is the antidote for the hedonic economy of the previous century, but it can also avert the deflationary cycle many economists are predicting. It is a matter of transforming and managing our appetites, not just denying them.
In the local living economies paradigm, entrepreneurship becomes social enterprise -- strengthening people while making a profit --, construction becomes green building, and investing becomes responsible investing -- building a future based on mutual prosperity. When you see the economy in this light, you’ll realize how much there is to do, and how many opportunities we have to make a difference in our everyday purchases, our investments, and our business decisions.
We are very proud of our members, the businesses and organizations listed in this directory. I hope you’ll visit with them, join your commitment with theirs, and help us build a better economy for our community. It’s time to put your human currency to work!
Roy Wroth
President, Board of Directors
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Is Santa Fe Complex a Social Enterprise? If Yes, Please Explain.
Yes! A social enterprise, or social entrepreneurship, is an organization whose activities result in both revenues to the organization and benefits to society. A social enterprise can benefit society through direct services to the community, or by reallocating some of its profits to public purposes. The fullest measure of a social enterprise, beyond services and philanthropy, is an organization that benefits society through the manner of its operations, for example a business that employs the handicapped, or makes an otherwise polluting waste stream into a useful product.
Social enterprises range from very mainstream businesses with exemplary employee and environmental policies, to activist organizations with an explicit world-changing mandate. A for-profit company can become a social enterprise by making commitments to social equity and environmental sustainability in its corporate charter. Currently, the B Corporation process is the most carefully structured and widely accepted certification for social enterprises, or “triple-bottom-line” businesses, but there are many other ways to make your commitments public.
A not-for-profit organization, like Santa Fe Complex, has a commitment to certain public benefits built into its corporate structure, and its activities must be “mission-driven” -- they must further the mission of the organization. A ‘non-profit’ can, and should, earn revenues; the limitation in the name is only that any profits must be cycled back into the work of the organization. The public purpose the Complex serves is “scientific and educational” and includes “creating economic opportunities”.
You would think that with all that public purpose built in, non-profits would have a big head start in becoming social enterprises. My view is that the majority of non-profits, while effectively delivering social benefits, are relatively static elements in our economy. They draw on government and philanthropic funding sources, and they employ a fairly small and homogeneous group of professionals. They just aren’t engaged in a great number of people’s livelihoods the way a social enterprise could be. They deliver public benefits as outcomes of their activities, but not through the manner of their operation.
Santa Fe Complex is positioned to fulfil the whole package of social enterprise -- we provide direct services to the community, like our educational programs, but we also create a million dollars a year (and growing) of high-wage employment in theSanta Fe
Santa Fe Complex is expanding the areas of expertise of our members. We’re expanding the types of project we can take on, and we are expanding our community partnerships. We’re expanding our impact on theSanta Fe
Now you know some of the values and motivations that inspire the Complex founders and our supporters in the community. If you share these or similar beliefs and enthusiasms, I hope you’ll come in and become a member, a donor, a partner, or a client. We need your participation -- we need you to be part of the ‘we’.
Roy Wroth, Executive Director.
Social enterprises range from very mainstream businesses with exemplary employee and environmental policies, to activist organizations with an explicit world-changing mandate. A for-profit company can become a social enterprise by making commitments to social equity and environmental sustainability in its corporate charter. Currently, the B Corporation process is the most carefully structured and widely accepted certification for social enterprises, or “triple-bottom-line” businesses, but there are many other ways to make your commitments public.
A not-for-profit organization, like Santa Fe Complex, has a commitment to certain public benefits built into its corporate structure, and its activities must be “mission-driven” -- they must further the mission of the organization. A ‘non-profit’ can, and should, earn revenues; the limitation in the name is only that any profits must be cycled back into the work of the organization. The public purpose the Complex serves is “scientific and educational” and includes “creating economic opportunities”.
You would think that with all that public purpose built in, non-profits would have a big head start in becoming social enterprises. My view is that the majority of non-profits, while effectively delivering social benefits, are relatively static elements in our economy. They draw on government and philanthropic funding sources, and they employ a fairly small and homogeneous group of professionals. They just aren’t engaged in a great number of people’s livelihoods the way a social enterprise could be. They deliver public benefits as outcomes of their activities, but not through the manner of their operation.
Santa Fe Complex is positioned to fulfil the whole package of social enterprise -- we provide direct services to the community, like our educational programs, but we also create a million dollars a year (and growing) of high-wage employment in the
Santa Fe Complex is expanding the areas of expertise of our members. We’re expanding the types of project we can take on, and we are expanding our community partnerships. We’re expanding our impact on the
Now you know some of the values and motivations that inspire the Complex founders and our supporters in the community. If you share these or similar beliefs and enthusiasms, I hope you’ll come in and become a member, a donor, a partner, or a client. We need your participation -- we need you to be part of the ‘we’.
Roy Wroth, Executive Director.
Friday, July 2, 2010
President's Message, Summer 2009
Dear Friends:
If we could redesign our local economy, what would it look like? How can business support our community in the pursuit of happiness, security and justice? And what systematic changes are needed to help local businesses play this vital role?
Santa Fe Alliance is an advocacy organization founded in 2003 to address these issues, and to pursue real solutions for our community. We envision an economy based on principles of self determination, social justice and inclusion, entrepreneurial opportunity, and long-term stability. A sustainable community economy balances the productive strength of financial capital with human and natural capital, making full use of all our community assets. As the voice of the local economy, Santa Fe Alliance helps to ensure that the needs of citizens, small business owners and future generations are all considered.
The Alliance's activities have evolved as we have grown. We promote buying local goods and services, advocate for the local economy at the local and state level, and help our members grow stronger businesses. But to me it seems that all our efforts have a similar pattern: convene groups of people to address a common challenge, model a solution, often in the form of a new program, and then build partnerships to implement the solution. The issues we take on form the context for the community's economic life. In Judy Herzl's words --our newest board member -- we take care of the pond, not just the fish. In seven years, we have taken on a range of issues which -- looking back -- seem to describe that pond from all angles: green jobs, affordable housing, healthcare reform, food security, the living wage and the living river.
The Alliance pursues a rotating portfolio of projects, and we expect our programs to outgrow us and take on a life of their own, freeing our resources for new challenges. This year, we have seen many of our initiatives come to maturity. Last Fall, the Green Jobs Initiative launched, with YouthWorks taking the implementation baton. In October, the Locals Care loyalty program, a longtime Alliance partnership, gained full independence. In the Spring, the Buy Local movement went mainstream with the launch of the City's "Santa Fe -- Buy Into It" campaign. And our Farm to Restaurant program gave birth to the Food and Fuels Program, building capacity in the communities that supply New Mexico's food and renewable energy.
For next year we have a few new ideas brewing, including starting a 10% Shift campaign, creating a localization checklist, building a mutual credit system, and strengthening Santa Fe's commercial districts and the neighborhoods they support. We're excited to pursue these ideas while maintaining our commitments to our members, the Buy Local campaign, our other projects, and the community at large.
How do we do it all? The Alliance has an incredible staff, active members, a strong board, and great support from our parent organizations, BALLE and AMIBA, and our sister networks throughout the country. But the most important factor is our support in the community. This year in particular, we have really learned how to give important work to volunteers, and to trust partnerships more deeply. It makes me proud of our community to see the significant resources, in time and money, that residents and business owners have entrusted to our organization, to see Santa Feans participating in conversations with openness and caring, and to see the increasing clarity of vision in our partners, including City and County and many non-profits.
This year is a big adjustment for us all. I hope you are each finding your way to a stable and satisfying livelihood, with closer connections to your values and the people around you. And I hope that you will find ways to work with the Alliance, helping us fulfill our mission in the community by becoming a member, volunteering for our many programs, joining our summer fundraising campaign, or just starting a conversation with your neighbors.
Sincerely
Roy Wroth
President, Board of Directors
If we could redesign our local economy, what would it look like? How can business support our community in the pursuit of happiness, security and justice? And what systematic changes are needed to help local businesses play this vital role?
Santa Fe Alliance is an advocacy organization founded in 2003 to address these issues, and to pursue real solutions for our community. We envision an economy based on principles of self determination, social justice and inclusion, entrepreneurial opportunity, and long-term stability. A sustainable community economy balances the productive strength of financial capital with human and natural capital, making full use of all our community assets. As the voice of the local economy, Santa Fe Alliance helps to ensure that the needs of citizens, small business owners and future generations are all considered.
The Alliance's activities have evolved as we have grown. We promote buying local goods and services, advocate for the local economy at the local and state level, and help our members grow stronger businesses. But to me it seems that all our efforts have a similar pattern: convene groups of people to address a common challenge, model a solution, often in the form of a new program, and then build partnerships to implement the solution. The issues we take on form the context for the community's economic life. In Judy Herzl's words --our newest board member -- we take care of the pond, not just the fish. In seven years, we have taken on a range of issues which -- looking back -- seem to describe that pond from all angles: green jobs, affordable housing, healthcare reform, food security, the living wage and the living river.
The Alliance pursues a rotating portfolio of projects, and we expect our programs to outgrow us and take on a life of their own, freeing our resources for new challenges. This year, we have seen many of our initiatives come to maturity. Last Fall, the Green Jobs Initiative launched, with YouthWorks taking the implementation baton. In October, the Locals Care loyalty program, a longtime Alliance partnership, gained full independence. In the Spring, the Buy Local movement went mainstream with the launch of the City's "Santa Fe -- Buy Into It" campaign. And our Farm to Restaurant program gave birth to the Food and Fuels Program, building capacity in the communities that supply New Mexico's food and renewable energy.
For next year we have a few new ideas brewing, including starting a 10% Shift campaign, creating a localization checklist, building a mutual credit system, and strengthening Santa Fe's commercial districts and the neighborhoods they support. We're excited to pursue these ideas while maintaining our commitments to our members, the Buy Local campaign, our other projects, and the community at large.
How do we do it all? The Alliance has an incredible staff, active members, a strong board, and great support from our parent organizations, BALLE and AMIBA, and our sister networks throughout the country. But the most important factor is our support in the community. This year in particular, we have really learned how to give important work to volunteers, and to trust partnerships more deeply. It makes me proud of our community to see the significant resources, in time and money, that residents and business owners have entrusted to our organization, to see Santa Feans participating in conversations with openness and caring, and to see the increasing clarity of vision in our partners, including City and County and many non-profits.
This year is a big adjustment for us all. I hope you are each finding your way to a stable and satisfying livelihood, with closer connections to your values and the people around you. And I hope that you will find ways to work with the Alliance, helping us fulfill our mission in the community by becoming a member, volunteering for our many programs, joining our summer fundraising campaign, or just starting a conversation with your neighbors.
Sincerely
Roy Wroth
President, Board of Directors
Friday, February 5, 2010
Green Jobs Redux
Alex Steffen has a provocative piece on the fate of green jobs over at Worldchanging.org. I'll let you read it yourself, but it led me to review where the green jobs concept has gone in New Mexico.
I would be reluctant to lose the name or concept of 'green jobs' even though the vagueness of the phrase played significantly in the collapse of momentum his post chronicles.
In Santa Fe, we managed to create a few youth training programs while the concept was hot, and they've mostly survived. Green jobs are actually not all that glamorous when the dust settles -- most are old-fashioned skilled manual labor jobs like your grandfather had and they can't really support the kind of sustained publicity that was demanded of them in building a national movement.
'Green Jobs' carried a double meaning, and the idea broke down here on both counts: When "green" meant sustainability, the conversation bottomed out in debate locally as to what is or is not a green job -- would an accountant for a solar company be green? And the jobs themselves just simply slowed with the fate of the construction industry. When "green" meant, in a highly coded fashion, that under-privileged youth, or populations generally, i.e. minorities, would be the focus of the programs, the conversation broke down in more complex ways.
In our area, there is very little of the working class vs. welfare dynamic Steffen describes. Our version is that the native, Hispanic, traditional, and largely Democratic political network assumes a 'taking care of our own' posture without adequate resources or high enough aspirations, while the supposedly more progressive, largely transplant Anglo network talks about better models, but fails to deliver the political commitment to really fund programs. And here there is an echo of the culture war Steffen laments in other parts of the country: that government shouldn't subsidize workers in certain industries if it can't quantify the economic gains.
As I read it, Steffen thinks the social justice agenda was too explicit in the Van Jones version of green jobs. I don't believe that social justice as a core value should be camouflaged, but rather that it should stay in the background while we work out the mechanics of programs to ensure that they are solidly funded and framed to be taken up by the intended participants. Green jobs programs consistently underestimate the degree of mentorship needed, the necessity of funding the mentorship outside of the break-even business model of the program, and the importance of culturally appropriate mentors.
I would suggest the following remedies for green jobs programs in New Mexico:
1. Swing the door wide open on what constitutes a "green" career. Anything with a triple bottom line, even a modest one, should qualify. I know this weakens the actual polar-bear-saving appeal of the concept, but I don't think liberals are the ones in need of convincing.
2. Focus public spending on job-training (rather than appearing to subsidize specific industries, like solar) and make the connection to economic development entirely transparent.
3. Like Teach for America or other programs that forgive school loans, we should build in incentives or commitments to stay in the state after going through training. This helps local officials see where their dollars go, and it also ends up benefiting the local Hispanic students, who statistically are the ones likely to make a commitment to stay near their families.
I would be reluctant to lose the name or concept of 'green jobs' even though the vagueness of the phrase played significantly in the collapse of momentum his post chronicles.
In Santa Fe, we managed to create a few youth training programs while the concept was hot, and they've mostly survived. Green jobs are actually not all that glamorous when the dust settles -- most are old-fashioned skilled manual labor jobs like your grandfather had and they can't really support the kind of sustained publicity that was demanded of them in building a national movement.
'Green Jobs' carried a double meaning, and the idea broke down here on both counts: When "green" meant sustainability, the conversation bottomed out in debate locally as to what is or is not a green job -- would an accountant for a solar company be green? And the jobs themselves just simply slowed with the fate of the construction industry. When "green" meant, in a highly coded fashion, that under-privileged youth, or populations generally, i.e. minorities, would be the focus of the programs, the conversation broke down in more complex ways.
In our area, there is very little of the working class vs. welfare dynamic Steffen describes. Our version is that the native, Hispanic, traditional, and largely Democratic political network assumes a 'taking care of our own' posture without adequate resources or high enough aspirations, while the supposedly more progressive, largely transplant Anglo network talks about better models, but fails to deliver the political commitment to really fund programs. And here there is an echo of the culture war Steffen laments in other parts of the country: that government shouldn't subsidize workers in certain industries if it can't quantify the economic gains.
As I read it, Steffen thinks the social justice agenda was too explicit in the Van Jones version of green jobs. I don't believe that social justice as a core value should be camouflaged, but rather that it should stay in the background while we work out the mechanics of programs to ensure that they are solidly funded and framed to be taken up by the intended participants. Green jobs programs consistently underestimate the degree of mentorship needed, the necessity of funding the mentorship outside of the break-even business model of the program, and the importance of culturally appropriate mentors.
I would suggest the following remedies for green jobs programs in New Mexico:
1. Swing the door wide open on what constitutes a "green" career. Anything with a triple bottom line, even a modest one, should qualify. I know this weakens the actual polar-bear-saving appeal of the concept, but I don't think liberals are the ones in need of convincing.
2. Focus public spending on job-training (rather than appearing to subsidize specific industries, like solar) and make the connection to economic development entirely transparent.
3. Like Teach for America or other programs that forgive school loans, we should build in incentives or commitments to stay in the state after going through training. This helps local officials see where their dollars go, and it also ends up benefiting the local Hispanic students, who statistically are the ones likely to make a commitment to stay near their families.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
What is Urbanism?
Here is a presentation I did last year. I'll go through sometime and make it a bit more self-explanatory.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
St. Michaels Boulevard Designs up on City Website
This Spring, RWu+p participated in a sketch design process with the City of Santa Fe to Transform St. Michaels Drive. You can see our boards along with the other participants at the City's website.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Looking Ahead to the Electric Car City
The electric car will make personal mobility cool again, and that's not always a good thing. With renewable power sources, the electric car promises to reduce much of the immediate impact of our automobile culture. But there is more to automobiles than emissions, and it is likely that most of the impacts of sprawl will still be with us in the Jetsonian near future. Personal mobility feeds social and economic segregation, consumption of land, isolated land uses, and excessive road construction.
But there is at least one aspect of the electric car that is good for the growth of sustainable cities, and that is the demise of the filling station. It appears that charging stations will be much simpler and more distributed than gas stations, and certainly the majority of charging will occur at home. It's entirely reasonable to project that the majority of gas stations currently occupying prime crossroads real estate will be out of business in a decade or two. This is an incredible opportunity to reshape environments that today are written off as "automobile dominated".
Every local government should be looking ahead to this eventuality, and devising transition plans for these prominent sites. As cities redevelop corridors, with complete street streetscapes, mixed use development, and transit, they should cast a proprietarial eye at all of those gas stations. They will soon be the lowest hanging fruit in the process of reforming our suburbs.
But there is at least one aspect of the electric car that is good for the growth of sustainable cities, and that is the demise of the filling station. It appears that charging stations will be much simpler and more distributed than gas stations, and certainly the majority of charging will occur at home. It's entirely reasonable to project that the majority of gas stations currently occupying prime crossroads real estate will be out of business in a decade or two. This is an incredible opportunity to reshape environments that today are written off as "automobile dominated".
Every local government should be looking ahead to this eventuality, and devising transition plans for these prominent sites. As cities redevelop corridors, with complete street streetscapes, mixed use development, and transit, they should cast a proprietarial eye at all of those gas stations. They will soon be the lowest hanging fruit in the process of reforming our suburbs.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Ideas from the Mayors Innovation Project
Mayors Innovation Project, Summer 2008 Meeting in Madison, WI
1. Put Pedestrians First
-- put the pedestrian at the center of the city
-- cities exist to maximize exchange
-- provide access rather than mobility
2. Write a Complete Streets Policy for Santa Fe
3. Focus on non-work trips -- 82% of trips
4. Community/ City Hall communication
-- increase transparency to accelerate uptake of new ideas
-- do a website to publicize issues and solutions locally
-- start a city policy wiki
5. Street and Development ideas
-- Road diets
-- Car Share
-- decouple parking unit from housing unit
-- bike boulevards
-- cyclovia/ sunday parkways
-- bike racks
-- bike boxes
6. one card gets you onto buses, trains, carshare, bike share, and locals care
7. Mapping neighborhoods
-- map existing use trails
-- create a citywide Greenways Plan
-- draw 20-minute walkshed neighborhoods around parks and schools
-- map access to food in neighborhood mapping process
8. Plan for bikes
-- "make biking an integral part of daily life in Santa Fe"
-- convene a broad group of stakeholders,not just bike advocates, and include public health and minority communities
-- use Vehicle Miles Travelled as primary measure -- Boulder is holding steady since 1994.
9. Promote community development, not just development of separate systems
-- bike routes and green ways strengthen social capital
-- Door-to-door transportation advising to residents
-- Driving less puts cash and time back into communities
-- community building happens in community gardens
10. Equitable Development--allows residents to shape and benefit from gentrification
-- revitalize neighborhood
-- protect housing stock
-- mitigate displacement
-- build resident incomes and wealth
-- include social dimension--quality of life issues, jobs
11. match gentrification strategies to the market changes you are addressing
-- land banking is an early strategy, inclusionary zoning is a late strategy
12. Support Green Jobs programs -- the "Green New Deal"
13. Build on existing cultural and historic values and assets (Angelou report captures this well)
14. City needs to support businesses, not just build physical infrastructure
-- for new entrepreneurs, capital is not the primary issue--deal with other capacity issues first
-- benefits packages, IDA's, law clinic,technology partnerships, criminal record cleanups and other programss for entrpreneurs and employees
15. Build academics into all alternative programs for kids -- garden programs, etc.
16. Community gardens
-- Reduce public safety issues by using vacant lands
-- Market gardens help support immigrants with agricultural skills
1. Put Pedestrians First
-- put the pedestrian at the center of the city
-- cities exist to maximize exchange
-- provide access rather than mobility
2. Write a Complete Streets Policy for Santa Fe
3. Focus on non-work trips -- 82% of trips
4. Community/ City Hall communication
-- increase transparency to accelerate uptake of new ideas
-- do a website to publicize issues and solutions locally
-- start a city policy wiki
5. Street and Development ideas
-- Road diets
-- Car Share
-- decouple parking unit from housing unit
-- bike boulevards
-- cyclovia/ sunday parkways
-- bike racks
-- bike boxes
6. one card gets you onto buses, trains, carshare, bike share, and locals care
7. Mapping neighborhoods
-- map existing use trails
-- create a citywide Greenways Plan
-- draw 20-minute walkshed neighborhoods around parks and schools
-- map access to food in neighborhood mapping process
8. Plan for bikes
-- "make biking an integral part of daily life in Santa Fe"
-- convene a broad group of stakeholders,not just bike advocates, and include public health and minority communities
-- use Vehicle Miles Travelled as primary measure -- Boulder is holding steady since 1994.
9. Promote community development, not just development of separate systems
-- bike routes and green ways strengthen social capital
-- Door-to-door transportation advising to residents
-- Driving less puts cash and time back into communities
-- community building happens in community gardens
10. Equitable Development--allows residents to shape and benefit from gentrification
-- revitalize neighborhood
-- protect housing stock
-- mitigate displacement
-- build resident incomes and wealth
-- include social dimension--quality of life issues, jobs
11. match gentrification strategies to the market changes you are addressing
-- land banking is an early strategy, inclusionary zoning is a late strategy
12. Support Green Jobs programs -- the "Green New Deal"
13. Build on existing cultural and historic values and assets (Angelou report captures this well)
14. City needs to support businesses, not just build physical infrastructure
-- for new entrepreneurs, capital is not the primary issue--deal with other capacity issues first
-- benefits packages, IDA's, law clinic,technology partnerships, criminal record cleanups and other programss for entrpreneurs and employees
15. Build academics into all alternative programs for kids -- garden programs, etc.
16. Community gardens
-- Reduce public safety issues by using vacant lands
-- Market gardens help support immigrants with agricultural skills
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
BALLE 2008 from A to Z
Business Alliance for a Local, Livable Economy, 2008 Conference, Boston MA
New Ideas
1. Glocal: act locally, but also do business with local- and green-focused businesses in other places when a service or product isn’t available here. Go to the global supply chain as a last resort.
2. B-Corportation: a new form of corporation that defines social and environmental objectives, and protects those values as the company grows.
3. Aggregated Demand: organize smaller buyers into a purchasing block that can specify your product and buy it in quantity. Also, write purchasing specifications to help larger buyers move to a local product.
4. Working landscape certificates: certifications for small farms to distinguish their products and show their community-benefit mission.
5. Shorten the work week: working fewer hours improves productivity and efficiency, and reduces our carbon footprint by leaving time for workers to satisfy needs directly, instead of through buying processed products.
6. Triple-bottom-line is going mainstream: business, environmental, and social issues are coming together in a common vision of sustainable community.
Business strategies
7. Mission-based balance sheet: If your business is mission-based, build a balance sheet that lets you measure you success in social, environmental and economic terms.
8. Branding -- make sure your brand strategy is scaled to your local context. Most mainstream branding strategies are too big and are all about endless expansion.
9. Collective purchase agreements: Form a buying group to get better prices on common staples.
10. Succession Plan: business owners should start planning now for a smooth succession to your company’s future owners.
Manufacturing Strategies
11. Create a regionally integrated manufacturing plan to replace a global supply chain product with a local product.
12. Develop a deep relationship with one supplier for each product.
13. Create a forum to identify waste streams from business to business
14. Collocate smaller enterprises that use a common waste stream, or that use each other’s waste streams
Employees
15. Help each employee create their own economic dashboard - a strategic plan for their economic goals.
16. Employee Ownership -- is often a good fit with local, triple-bottom-line businesses.
Alliance Strategies
17. Recruitment of new and struggling businesses -- B to B mentoring and direct revenue enhancing services are the most important to stressed business owners.
18. Create a products directory, including products available locally, and a pipeline of products that are coming soon, or should be developed.
19. Loyalty card programs -- create a toolbar to guide internet searches to local suppliers. Link the card to bus passes.
20. Green Business Assistance: create a program that helps businesses go greener. The process should include assessment, recommendations, an action plan, and follow-up support.
21. Austin Orientation: create a program to introduce new residents to local resources. Don’t leave it to the big-boxes to welcome newcomers.
22. Food cycle leakage study: the Puget Sound has completed a careful study of economic leakage in the food cycle.
23. Create a eco-industrial park, or an eco-industrial partnership
Government
24. Create a 'social prosperity framework' that defines triple-bottom-line objectives for the city (or state)
25. Create a local standard for 'sustainable competitiveness' -- raise the bar on social and environmental issues, and make it apply fairly to all businesses
26. The Green New Deal: leaders in struggling communities are calling for a sustained investment in green jobs.
New Ideas
1. Glocal: act locally, but also do business with local- and green-focused businesses in other places when a service or product isn’t available here. Go to the global supply chain as a last resort.
2. B-Corportation: a new form of corporation that defines social and environmental objectives, and protects those values as the company grows.
3. Aggregated Demand: organize smaller buyers into a purchasing block that can specify your product and buy it in quantity. Also, write purchasing specifications to help larger buyers move to a local product.
4. Working landscape certificates: certifications for small farms to distinguish their products and show their community-benefit mission.
5. Shorten the work week: working fewer hours improves productivity and efficiency, and reduces our carbon footprint by leaving time for workers to satisfy needs directly, instead of through buying processed products.
6. Triple-bottom-line is going mainstream: business, environmental, and social issues are coming together in a common vision of sustainable community.
Business strategies
7. Mission-based balance sheet: If your business is mission-based, build a balance sheet that lets you measure you success in social, environmental and economic terms.
8. Branding -- make sure your brand strategy is scaled to your local context. Most mainstream branding strategies are too big and are all about endless expansion.
9. Collective purchase agreements: Form a buying group to get better prices on common staples.
10. Succession Plan: business owners should start planning now for a smooth succession to your company’s future owners.
Manufacturing Strategies
11. Create a regionally integrated manufacturing plan to replace a global supply chain product with a local product.
12. Develop a deep relationship with one supplier for each product.
13. Create a forum to identify waste streams from business to business
14. Collocate smaller enterprises that use a common waste stream, or that use each other’s waste streams
Employees
15. Help each employee create their own economic dashboard - a strategic plan for their economic goals.
16. Employee Ownership -- is often a good fit with local, triple-bottom-line businesses.
Alliance Strategies
17. Recruitment of new and struggling businesses -- B to B mentoring and direct revenue enhancing services are the most important to stressed business owners.
18. Create a products directory, including products available locally, and a pipeline of products that are coming soon, or should be developed.
19. Loyalty card programs -- create a toolbar to guide internet searches to local suppliers. Link the card to bus passes.
20. Green Business Assistance: create a program that helps businesses go greener. The process should include assessment, recommendations, an action plan, and follow-up support.
21. Austin Orientation: create a program to introduce new residents to local resources. Don’t leave it to the big-boxes to welcome newcomers.
22. Food cycle leakage study: the Puget Sound has completed a careful study of economic leakage in the food cycle.
23. Create a eco-industrial park, or an eco-industrial partnership
Government
24. Create a 'social prosperity framework' that defines triple-bottom-line objectives for the city (or state)
25. Create a local standard for 'sustainable competitiveness' -- raise the bar on social and environmental issues, and make it apply fairly to all businesses
26. The Green New Deal: leaders in struggling communities are calling for a sustained investment in green jobs.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Paul Hawken, from Blessed Unrest
" You can try to determine the future, or you can try to create conditions for a healthy future. To do the former, you must presume to know what the future should be. To do the latter, you learn to have faith in social outcomes in which citizens feel secure, valued and honored."
Friday, December 21, 2007
Digital History Project
“The best map of a territory is the territory itself.”
The Digital History Project is an on-line space where Santa Feans can help make personal and family histories into community history. It serves as a comprehensive index to Santa Fe’s cultural and historic resources. Visitors and collaborators access and contribute to the index by navigating a 3-D model of our city. Community members, including students, can become collaborators in the project with minimal training
The backbone of the project is an immersive, photorealistic 3-dimensional digital model of Santa Fe. Visitors can navigate along streets and into buildings, and can move through different time periods as they go. Historic photographs, and films, appear as small markers at the original camera location. Selecting a marker pivots the visitors point of view to the view of the original camera, and the visitor can toggle between different decades to make comparisons. Historic records for buildings are referenced to their locations.
The interiors of buildings include immersive panoramas and furnishings from each historical period in the building’s life. A wall of portraits link to biographical records for past residents and significant events that occurred in this location. As in the streetscapes, visitors can move a slider to see the room pass through the decades of its life. Physical artifacts are represented, and link to relevant museum collection records. Historical journal entries are shown for each location, and linked sequentially to form a tour.
The virtual environment would also serve as a geographic index to Santa Fe genealogies, allowing visitors to trace family trees and see where each generation lived. Oral histories, biographies, photo archives, artifacts and artworks, and bibliographies, would all be linked. Visitors would be able to contribute their own historical materials (appropriately marked as to provenance).
Certain locations would also host special exhibits related to occupants or traditional uses of that location. A furniture-makers’ studio might have for instance a special feature on the New Mexico chair, with more in-depth resources and a chair that can morph through the stylistic periods. An artist’s home could have a slide show of their work, with links to museum collections.
Current occupants of each building would have the opportunity to link to their own websites, and to sponsor the content for that area. And contemporary artists could make ‘interventions’ in the city that were only visible in the virtual world.
Based on a specific topic of interest, visitors can plan a guided walk, and access much of the location information from a mobile device. Alternately, visitors with mobile devices can record their path through Santa Fe, and review their walk later with the full resources of the Digital History system. Local guides can give remote or disabled viewers tours via internet.
The Technology
→ virtual worlds
→ digital museums
→ photosynth and photosketch
→ geotagging, geocaching, geography games
→ google earth
→ mechanical turk, google image tagging
→ ancestry.com, wikis
→ metadata and xml databases
→ current local digital media, arts calendar, forums
“The best map of a territory is the territory itself.”
-- with apologies to Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard, Alfred Korzybski and Lewis Carroll
The Digital History Project is an on-line space where Santa Feans can help make personal and family histories into community history. It serves as a comprehensive index to Santa Fe’s cultural and historic resources. Visitors and collaborators access and contribute to the index by navigating a 3-D model of our city. Community members, including students, can become collaborators in the project with minimal training
The backbone of the project is an immersive, photorealistic 3-dimensional digital model of Santa Fe. Visitors can navigate along streets and into buildings, and can move through different time periods as they go. Historic photographs, and films, appear as small markers at the original camera location. Selecting a marker pivots the visitors point of view to the view of the original camera, and the visitor can toggle between different decades to make comparisons. Historic records for buildings are referenced to their locations.
The interiors of buildings include immersive panoramas and furnishings from each historical period in the building’s life. A wall of portraits link to biographical records for past residents and significant events that occurred in this location. As in the streetscapes, visitors can move a slider to see the room pass through the decades of its life. Physical artifacts are represented, and link to relevant museum collection records. Historical journal entries are shown for each location, and linked sequentially to form a tour.
The virtual environment would also serve as a geographic index to Santa Fe genealogies, allowing visitors to trace family trees and see where each generation lived. Oral histories, biographies, photo archives, artifacts and artworks, and bibliographies, would all be linked. Visitors would be able to contribute their own historical materials (appropriately marked as to provenance).
Certain locations would also host special exhibits related to occupants or traditional uses of that location. A furniture-makers’ studio might have for instance a special feature on the New Mexico chair, with more in-depth resources and a chair that can morph through the stylistic periods. An artist’s home could have a slide show of their work, with links to museum collections.
Current occupants of each building would have the opportunity to link to their own websites, and to sponsor the content for that area. And contemporary artists could make ‘interventions’ in the city that were only visible in the virtual world.
Based on a specific topic of interest, visitors can plan a guided walk, and access much of the location information from a mobile device. Alternately, visitors with mobile devices can record their path through Santa Fe, and review their walk later with the full resources of the Digital History system. Local guides can give remote or disabled viewers tours via internet.
The Technology
→ virtual worlds
→ digital museums
→ photosynth and photosketch
→ geotagging, geocaching, geography games
→ google earth
→ mechanical turk, google image tagging
→ ancestry.com, wikis
→ metadata and xml databases
→ current local digital media, arts calendar, forums
“The best map of a territory is the territory itself.”
-- with apologies to Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard, Alfred Korzybski and Lewis Carroll
Thursday, December 20, 2007
A Culture of Difference
Friends:
I hope this finds you in good health and good cheer. I've been thinking about my work, and the work we all do, and want to share some thoughts with you. It seems that now is a good time for us to come together a bit, to focus our work and lives -- our efforts -- on our common enterprise, furthering the art of living well together.
Don't worry, this isn't a pitch for anything. I'm talking about building a common culture, and I am convinced that we are all already working on it, each in our own way. I'm really writing today to affirm that effort and to offer you a bit of time to contemplate how it all fits together.
As people of good will, we are doing our work in ways that sustain the people around us, within the constraints and opportunities life presents us with. I want to lift up and encourage that work, to pause and see it as a common effort, and also to counterbalance feelings of divisiveness and strain. We, people of good will, are the vast majority, and our work, though often hidden or seemingly fragmented, is the basis of the relative prosperity and happiness our communities enjoy.
One of the things that can dishearten us is the false conception that a common culture and cultural diversity are incompatible ideas. Certainly, communities must be based on shared similarities, but I think we all feel that communities also thrive on diversity, difference, and maybe a bit of controversy. Political correctness and diversity are paradigms that suffer from both the low expectations of their creators and from quiet subversion by their detractors. We are all told not to presume that our own culture is dominant, and most of us respectfully acquiesce, but often at the expense of conviviality. I believe we can work around this stalemate and make a common culture -- even as our identifications with sub-cultures deepen and multiply.
I find that my reservations about the current paradigm of 'diversity' mirror those about the older one of 'tolerance'. Compared to the rigor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, say, or the poetry of many mestizo movements, much of the language of diversity sounds like a grade school show-and-tell. The language of tolerance, on the other hand, draws integrity from a relatively intact local culture that feels sure enough of its own value to leave room for other cultures. In a few cases I am able to appreciate the naive or innocent arrogation that this culture is 'central' and the others are 'marginal'; but most of the time the old-fashioned virtues of 'tolerance' are quite eclipsed by its vices -- willful provincialism and triumphalism, dissimulated racism, or the false conscience that is the heritage of colonizers. With these reservations in mind, I believe we must tolerate 'tolerance' even with its hidden constrictions, and we must defend 'diversity' even when it seems terribly saccharine.
But neither speaks clearly about the nature of our differences. They're both framed by ideas of similarity while perpetuating divisions.
The phrase "a culture of difference" is a way of getting around some philosophical dead ends (whose history I'm not going to make you read through here). The awkwardness of the wording, I'm hoping, will help you ease into a new sense of the word difference -- freeing it, if you will, from the pairing "similarities and differences", a pairing that is always dominated and defined by similarity.
Let me expand on what I mean when I talk about difference in this way. I find that consciousness is always consciousness of something outside itself, something other. When we get beyond the various questions of identity we engaged with as adolescents, I think we find ourselves in ever-deepening relationships with the 'other' -- our partners, our work, our communities, passers-by, the exotic stranger, our imagined fears and enemies. All of these relationships deepen because we engage in an open back-and-forth that lets us revise our sense of self in the light of our differences.
When difference and similarity are rebalanced, we can see ourselves midstream in transformation, and release some of the humorless tension of maintaining self identity. And I think it is only in a climate of difference that the deeper shared experience of being human is really visible.
The culture of difference I'm enlisting your help with is a messy thing that seems to involve leaving a lot of doors open, but also involves embracing other people's projects as your own. It means being bolder about your own values and yet simultaneously defending, not just respecting, other people's values. It will certainly involve getting much closer to the people around you, but also taking much braver and lonelier positions. I don't want to over-sell or over-describe the culture of difference, because I'm not in a position to set terms. I'm relying on you to recognize this state in yourself, in the pause as you shift your grip on life's certainties. I'm sure you've seen it recently in relationships and workpaths that went from awkward to comfortable in no time at all (or the reverse!). I hope you're able to recognize this feeling from my odd description, and I hope you'll take the plunge with me into a self-fulfilling prophesy: that we can each renew the feeling in our own way and find ourselves in a common effort.
Now I'll end with a numbered list -- with your indulgence -- four memos for a culture of difference:
1. Avoid reductive thinking. Whether it's applied to your value system or another's, reductive logic will always deaden things. I believe that the mystery of consciousness and the dignity of our lives can't be reduced to materialism or any other 'ism'. In a culture of difference, other people don't simply belong to equivalent, parallel value systems; they are likely to frame and hold their values in entirely different ways.
2. Step aside from the paradigm of scarcity. It's pervasive in our economy and our pop psychology, and it's a dangerous fiction. We all produce a surplus, and it's your right and duty to identify, manage and share yours. In a culture of difference, we don't need to hold identical ration cards.
3. Localize your activities. Localization is a movement away from the idea of a presumptive power, away from the excuse that our choices are controlled or predetermined by external forces. A culture of difference fractures power relationships and lets us more clearly see our oddfellow neighbors and our own capacities.
4. Cultivate humility. I know talking about humility is a contradiction. But I can't find another way to describe the habit of putting other people's concerns first, while risking but sustaining your own needs and momentum. In a culture of difference, the mystery of other people's subjective realities is an endless source of renewal and transformation.
So won't you join me, then, in continuing our work, in celebrating the efforts of others -- even from seemingly opposed value systems -- and in stewarding a messy, vital, local, sustaining and inclusive culture?
Thanks for entertaining these thoughts, and I hope to hear from you if you have the time. Also, please help me pass this on to others who you think would read it.
Roy Wroth
December 2007
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