The Summer of Solutions

Vital Stats

Matt K

Saint Paul, MN

  • people helped390
  • People Doing It 70

The Problem

In the face of a falling economy, an energy crisis, fragmented and inequitable communities, and the growing threat of global warming, youth are coming together to create and implement solutions that address all of these challenges together. These are solutionaries - youth leaders who work as innovative organizers across issue lines to build the green economy as an engine for local opportunity, climate and energy solutions, and social justice. Our generation sits at a crossroads. We face a bleak job market and declining opportunity, but we hold the insight and innovation needed to create holistic solutions to our world’s problems that create economic opportunity for ourselves and our communities in an equitable manner that sustains our planet. The choice seems clear, but with few resources, limited support, and no precedent for the solutions we know we need, our generation will struggle to make the leap. The need for innovative and inspiring leaders is dire as we confront these seemingly overwhelming problems. Young people are particularly vulnerable in this situation. We are coming of age in a world that has been ravaged by poverty and environmental catastrophe. Climate change will affect us and next generations more than any other before us. Unemployment among young people is at the highest since 1948, reported as 51.3% in a July 2009 Bureau of Labor Statistics report. I am excited by the social consciousness I have seen in my generation, but without an economy to support our good work as we enter the job market, we face stark challenges. Young leaders all around the country need the skills to build their own careers to help their community transition to a just, prosperous, and sustainable future. Through the Summer of Solutions, I am providing such youth leaders the training and space for experimentation needed to build those skills while piloting approaches for a new green economy.

Plan of Action

In Spring 2008, I helped lead a group of seven youth leaders establish the first Summer of Solutions program in St. Paul. We started a host organization called Grand Aspirations, and secured fiscal agency through Global Exchange. We raised money through grassroots donations to pay small stipends to summer participants, and linked students with existing internships and research projects around sustainable agriculture and wind energy to extend our support beyond the funding we could raise on our own. We did outreach through national movement venues and brought together a total of 20 young people, three of whom had never been to Minnesota before, for the 2-month program, during which we worked as a team. We established a base of partnerships with local organizations and advanced a number of existing projects in the Twin Cities while engaging participants in defining and innovating new ones. We helped the 20 program participants become active and engaged leaders and helped build a green industry coalition and a community energy cooperative that are still operating and expanding. After the first summer, we started discussing our work with friends and allies throughout the youth climate movement, and found many groups interested in replicating our model. I took on the task of coordinating the 9 projects that emerged through the process of building local leadership teams, planning the process of fundraising, defining community partnerships and projects, and preparing the outreach and application process. I and a small national team designed training templates, led conference calls, created the online presence and application tools for the programs and conducted national fundraising. Local planning teams helped develop innovative local projects all across the country, customizing our approach. During the summer of 2009, we hosted 120 youth leaders across our 9 locations and implemented a wide range of energy efficiency, community energy, urban farming, green industry, and smart development initiatives. After the 2009 programs, I helped set up a system of national working groups drawn from the leaders developed through our work to prepare for a national gathering in January 2010, launch the 2010 programs, and coordinate funding, media, and organization building. This structure has provide highly successful, allowing us to host a 10-day intensive leadership training at the beginning of 2010 and recruiting 14 local program leadership teams. We have since started intensive local and national recruitment for participants and started forming community partnerships to develop initiatives for this coming summer. We will start the Summer of Solutions 2010 with trainings that will help full-time fellows and volunteers learn the community organizing, social entrepreneurship, and transformative leadership skills that they will use throughout the program. Throughout the summer, our local program leaders will guide participants through the innovation process by building solutions on the ground. In August, participants from across the country will meet in a national gathering that will kick-off our year-round efforts and identify leaders for our 2011 programs. Starting in the fall, we will establish permanent regional hubs that will focus both on turning their communities into role-models of sustainable community development and supporting volunteers across their region in launching and replicating such solutions in their own communities.
Go
Education
Environment
Homelessness and Poverty

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