Working in the tradition of Ella Baker, the community organizer seeking an innovative breakthrough in education will use the principle of “cast down your bucket where you are.” The organizer becomes part of the community, learning from it, becoming aware of its strengths, resources, concerns, and ways of doing business. The organizer does not have a complete answer in advance – the researcher’s detailed comprehensive plans for remedying a perceived problem. The organizer wants to construct a solution with the community. He or she understands that the community’s everyday concerns can be transformed into broader questions of general import. The form of these questions and actions that follow from them are not always known in advance. I did not know that my concern for [his daughter] Maisha’s math education would lead to the Algebra Project’s raising questions about ability grouping, effective teaching for the children of color, experiential learning, and community participation in educational decision-making. I pulled these issues up flycast at my bucket. Finally, unlike the researcher, the organizer helps community members air their opinions, question one another, and then build consensus, a process that usually takes a great amount of time to complete.

This is a long journey and not a linear progression. It is a journey with zigs and zags, a process of push and pull, if you are successful in some classrooms, that gives you an opening to approach the community. In order to get into all the classrooms, however – to all the students – we need the community’s political commitment and clout. You have to work both sides of the street at the same time. You have to learn how to move effectively in all arenas. I have thought of the Algebra Project as a young child who is trying to stand up and teetering and falling down a little, then getting back up, falling down a little, and getting back up again.… It doesn’t really matter how many times young children fall down, they keep getting up, attempting to walk. Probably part of the reason that happens is that they have a lot of people around them who are walking. (pp. 112-3)

I’m not sure how this ties back to my framework. Clearly it’s got something to do with how you think about power and shaping the economy from a Movement Perspective, but beyond that I can’t put the connection in the words. But it feels like there’s something important in what he’s saying that goes beyond community organizing, that ties back in a deep and powerful way to how we should think about the economy. So for now, I’ll just let it simmer on the back burner.

SGEP sees its work centered in working with the communities most affected by the economic crisis—women, African Americans, immigrants, youth and poor whites. We are working on not just getting a piece of the pie but developing cooperative business and making our own pies.

The folks who attended the Southern Grassroots Economy Project were from cooperatives or cooperative networks all across the South. And as you would expect from a founding conference held in the Appalachians at the Highlander Research and Education Center, they’re trying to do so in a way that is also focused on movement building.

Given the South’s rich history of cooperatives and fighting for social justice, it’ll be interesting to see what they’re able to pull off. Stay tuned for more info in the spring, when they’re getting together again in Epes, Alabama, at the Rural Training Center of The Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

the projection says that we’ll have a cumulative output gap of $5.1 trillion, with $2.8 trillion of that having already happened.

Surely it would have been worth making an extraordinary effort to avoid this outcome. In particular, an $800 billion stimulus, a significant fraction of which was stuff that would have happened anyway (like extending the patch on the alternative minimum tax) looks ludicrously underpowered. Yet policy has been timid and conventional….

The CBO also projects unemployment staying above 8 percent until late 2014 — again, with no clear explanation of why it should fall sharply in 2015. This translates into a human catastrophe for the long-term unemployed.

Our side has got to get our ass in gear.

Britain has used standard policy tools to reduce its child-poverty rate by more than half since 1994 and has effectively defended this progress against the pressures of the Great Recession. By contrast, the child poverty rate has trended upward in the United States since 2000, and children have proved economically vulnerable to increased unemployment….

The ordinary policies in Britain that led to what many Americans would consider extraordinary results were these: an increase in the national minimum wage (currently about $9.70 an hour, compared with our $7.25), tax incentives to encourage single parents to move into paid employment, increased public benefits for parents, provision of universal preschool and regulations making it easier for parents of young children to request flexible work schedules.

Many similar, though less generous policies are already in effect in the United States, at the federal or state level.

And this isn’t unique to the UK.

Most other rich countries rate higher on indicators of child well-being than either Britain or the United States. But we have more in common with Britain than most other countries, and rightfully pay closer attention to it.

Maybe it’s time for a little more of that audacity of hope I remember someone campaigning on.

Peggy Schulz was fed up. In March, after being unemployed for nearly two years, she performed an experiment: She went to a job-search website, limited the search to the Milwaukee area and typed in a simple term: “bus line.”

The results displayed what had long been plaguing her. Job posting after job posting featured similar caveats: “this is not on a bus line,” “need reliable transportation not on bus line,” “positions are NOT on a bus line,” “our client that is not located on a bus line is interested in having you work …”

“Here it was in black and white,” she later recalled with a bitter laugh. “It’s been very frustrating to look through the want ads, look online, think about places I could work and realize, ‘Nope, can’t get there on the bus.’”…

In Milwaukee, bus service cuts have rendered more than 40,500 jobs inaccessible to people dependent on the bus, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, released in 2009.

Not only does it hurt folks at or near the bottom of the job ladder, it hurts the economy overall:

Milwaukee has reached a point at which cuts, necessitated by a weak economy, make the local economy even weaker.

“We’re going to start bleeding red ink,” county executive Marvin Pratt said while sitting at a heavy wooden table in his stately office on the third floor of the county courthouse. “If you’re talking about getting people to jobs and creating jobs, we have to maintain that transit system. We have to make it better.”

We have some great news to announce: The coal-burning power plant proposed by the East Kentucky Power Cooperative (EKPC) has been canceled by the utility.

EKPC has entered into an agreement with Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Kentucky Environmental Foundation, the Sierra Club, three individual co-op members, the Kentucky attorney general, and Gallatin Steel (EKPC’s biggest industrial customer). Under the agreement, EKPC will halt its plans for the proposed [nearly $1 billion] coal-burning power plant in Clark County by abandoning the permits it needed to proceed with construction. The cooperative also committed $125,000 toward a collaborative effort in which the public interest groups, EKPC and its member co-ops, and other parties will work together to evaluate and recommend new energy efficiency programs and renewable energy options.

To pull this off in coal country is pretty damn impressive – especially since they got the power company to agree to take a serious look at investing in renewable energy.

KFC won not only because they ran a great campaign against the plant but also because they have a vision of where they think Appalachian Kentucky could go. Their plan called Renew East Kentucky, is very sharp. It takes advantage of existing infrastructure:

EKPC and the local co-ops already have the infrastructure in place to ramp up EE/RE solutions to scale throughout the region—trucks, workers, power lines, contracts, customers, and brand. Most of the co-ops have more than 70 years of experience each, and with their proven capacity for billing and servicing more than half a million members, the electric co-ops are in the perfect position to provide an immediate shot in the arm that would kick off a wider Appalachian transition.

Because it’s being run through co-ops, more of the money is likely to stay within the community. And what they learn from their experience could be scaled up:

The co-ops here are similar to the more than 400 other rural electric co-ops across the nation… this plan can become a model, or template, that can be picked up and implemented by—and can become a vision for—hundreds of other co-ops and for the more than 40 million members those co-ops

More excerpts from Renew East Kentucky:

“We are running the country on a dinosaur,” says John Craft, who mined eastern Kentucky coal for nearly 20 years. John not only knows how to run the heavy machinery required to extract coal, he is also familiar with the coal industry’s political and economic machinations. He has lived through the cycles of boom and bust and understands their causes: “The stockpiles of the power plants go up and the bottom falls out of the [coal] market.”

The extraction of coal by miners like John, and the thousands before him, has fueled the modernization and prosperity of the United States during the last century. It has made distant stockholders and owners of coal companies rich, but has left the area from which the coal has been extracted in poverty. As a result, Appalachian Kentucky suffers from an underdeveloped economy and a dearth of jobs. The jobless rate in the central Appalachian region is much higher than it is in the rest of the country. While the national unemployment rate for February 2010 was considered high at 9.7 percent, some eastern Kentucky counties, including the coal-producing counties, had unemployment rates of more than 23 percent.…

like thousands of other folks in eastern Kentucky, John also has a vision of a very different future, one of a “sustainable economy built on renewable energies like wind, solar, and small hydro plants.” In this future, energy workers have safe and healthy jobs, and hundreds—or thousands—of people like himself can be re-trained to fit into a twenty-first-century workforce. Renewal in eastern Kentucky is not only possible, but necessary.…

We propose that the East Kentucky Power Cooperative and their 16 distribution cooperatives launch an aggressive, well-funded, five-year energy efficiency and renewable energy initiative—called “Renew East Kentucky”—in the EKPC service area.

This initiative, anchored by the distribution cooperatives, would re-tool and expand the local workforce, build up local initiatives already in place, and much more aggressively implement energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE) solutions to address the region’s significant infrastructure and economic challenges. The initiative would offset the need for a risky new coal plant that EKPC is proposing to build and in its stead would yield thousands of new jobs during the initiative’s initial five-year lifespan. It would reduce energy consumption while diversifying energy generation, facilitate new job training, upgrade residential housing, build new renewable energy facilities and capacity, and develop a new economic sector that can grow well beyond the borders of our initial plan.

Grants and loans from USDA would fund a large part of this initiative. A creative new on-bill financing mechanism being designed today by the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) and the distribution cooperatives would ensure loan payback, allowing co-op members to upgrade their homes and pay for the improvements with their utility savings.

Such a plan not only has tangible energy, economic, and job creation benefits, but can also begin to shift public perception toward transition, offer a proactive plan that all but the most fearful or coal-captive politicians can promote, and launch a new, growing sector of the national economy right here in eastern Kentucky…

EKPC and the local co-ops already have the infrastructure in place to ramp up EE/RE solutions to scale throughout the region—trucks, workers, power lines, contracts, customers, and brand. Most of the co-ops have more than 70 years of experience each, and with their proven capacity for billing and servicing more than half a million members, the electric co-ops are in the perfect position to provide an immediate shot in the arm that would kick off a wider Appalachian transition.

Second, the co-ops are locally owned and, according to their publications and messages, democratically controlled by their membership. Though much work is still needed to bring the co-ops into complete adherence to this democratic structure, the members, as owners of the co-ops, collectively will own the solution itself. Unlike other for-profit, investor-owned utilities that operate in the state—utilities headquartered in Ohio, or North Carolina, or even Europe—the benefits generated in the local co-ops will not increase the shares of distant stockholders, but will stay local. “Profits” made on any of the programs will return to the cooperative members in the form of capital credits and re-enter the local economy when these credits are spent.

There’s yet another reason why working within the rural electric co-ops in Kentucky is important: The co-ops here are similar to the more than 400 other rural electric co-ops across the nation. These other co-ops are governed largely in the same way that EKPC’s distribution co-ops are, they operate similarly, and they serve similar demographics—the rural and relatively poor regions of the country. This plan can become a model, or template, that can be picked up and implemented by—and can become a vision for—hundreds of other co-ops and for the more than 40 million members those co-ops serve.

On a more philosophical note, this plan reflects the original mission of all electric cooperatives, including all those in EKPC’s service area. Two of the seven Cooperative Principles that guide the co-ops are “Education, Training, and Information” and “Concern for Community.”6 During the early years of rural electrification, the co-ops hired staff to travel throughout their service areas and educate their members about how to use the electricity they were now able to receive. They held traveling demonstrations on how to operate new electric appliances like clothes washers. This plan presents an opportunity for the co-ops to return to those early guiding principles and behaviors. By going back to that hands-on approach, traveling door-to-door to perform energy audits and implement the efficiency and weatherization programs, the co-ops will once again build strong relationships with their members and truly serve their communities.…

We know of no other concrete, specific plan that can be implemented right now in central Appalachia and provide such a vast range and scale of benefits.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

If you’re in that top 1%, life is grand….

They back up this statement with 15 charts with titles like

The last two decades were great… except for American workers

Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years

Poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class

Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap

None of this is new, but it’s still pretty entertaining to see a business magazine laying it out in stark, nicely designed graphs. Maybe something to e-mail to your cranky Republican uncle?

The really inconvenient truth: We’re toast. Fried. Steamed. Poached. More so than even many hand-wringing carbonistas admit. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, C02 that’s already in the air or in the pipeline will stoke “irreversible” warming for the next 1,000 years. Any scheme cobbled together in Copenhagen for slowing—forget reversing—the growth of greenhouse gases will be way too little, way too late. In the apt jargon of industry, a hotter planet is already “baked in.”

But fear not — technology will save us!

Coastal communities, for example, will survive not because the world will somehow unite to stop sea levels from rising (it won’t). They’ll survive because they’ll learn to adapt—much as the Dutch have done since the Middle Ages.

I’ve got one word for you, Spencer: Katrina.

I don’t know how anyone could see how our country abandoned our poor brothers and sisters during & after Katrina and think technology will save us. Maybe it’s the “us” where Spencer is having trouble opening his imagination; guys like him don’t worry that our government would abandon them.

But it wasn’t just poor folks of color our country abandoned. Here’s how well we’ve “adapted” to Katrina’s lessons:

Three days before the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (August 29), a coalition of 17 advocacy groups today urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to honor President Obama’s priority in his budget and campaign “to restore nature’s barriers – the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.”…

The severity of Katrina’s damage in Louisiana was caused, in part, by the fact that the state has lost 1/3 of its original wetlands – about 2,000 square miles — an area larger than Delaware.

“Scientists agree that these lost wetlands could have helped reduce Katrina’s storm surge,” said Charles Allen, assistant director of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities and co-director of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development. “Wetlands are ‘horizontal levees’ that in many cases are more economical and effective at damage prevention than man-made vertical levees because they absorb storm energy, slow incoming waves, wind, and surge waters. It is widely recognized that we urgently need to restore these wetlands and coastal forests to prevent similar or worse storm damage in the future.”

Despite these facts, four years after Katrina, Congress has been unable to fund major coastal restoration projects it authorized in the 2007 Water Resources Development Act because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not completed the projects’ design and engineering.

In the face of these facts, how can Spencer write:

Ditto the other supposed horsemen of the climate apocalypse. Drought? Check out Perth, on the edge of the Great Australian Desert, where more than a million people keep hydrated with seawater that’s been desalinated by wind power.

Who does he think is going to pay for building a system like this for Africa?

Spencer isn’t completely clueless. At one point he hints at the bigger issue:

But won’t the transition to a warmer world be painful? The honest answer is that we don’t know. It depends on the resources we can bring to bear, technological and otherwise.

But that’s about it.

Look, I love Wired as much as the next geek. But it’s stunning that after decades of political deadlock over stopping global warming, Wired assumes politics will disappear when we try to cope with global warming’s aftermath.

Spencer’s article appeared in the same issue as Wired’s holiday gift guide; here’s my recommendation for Spencer.

For starters, it’s hard to help folks in low income communities of color get access to green jobs when there aren’t many green jobs.

While these efforts are promising, by and large, most cities report that “green jobs” remain a concept — a target more than a reality. Some initial programs stalled, after cities discovered they were training workers for jobs that don’t yet exist. In Memphis, Tenn., officials were about to start adding solar installation training to a successful prisoner reentry program, which offers job training to low-level offenders. In the course of researching the program, however, they discovered that almost no one was actually purchasing solar systems in the city, leading them to focus instead on attracting solar companies before they start the job training program.

Ironically, Obama’s stimulus plan gives out a ton of cash for creating green jobs — a lot more than enviros had fought for the past. But, like the stimulus plan more generally, it’s nowhere near the amount of money we need to spend.

Even where green jobs exist, cities will have to change their strategy for economic development to fit these new green opportunities.

To attract jobs, traditionally, cities have focused on traditional business incentive packages, which favor largescale corporations, luring them to come or stay with promises of lower taxes, reduced utilities and developed infrastructure. That model may work for a large wind turbine manufacturer, but the green jobs sector in any given city is much more likely to rely upon dozens of smaller companies, such as contractors who do rehab work in homes or who install solar panels. The challenge for cities will be to adapt their existing strategies to the smallscale, dynamic green jobs sector.

The shift towards green jobs will also demand that cities rework traditional workforce development. This is a system that is typically uncoordinated and disconnected from local employers. Understanding the demand side will entail tremendous effort as these new green skills are just now being deciphered. Green jobs, like many other parts of the economy, demand different types of workers, from skilled carpenters and electricians to landscapers and mechanics, each with their own existing experience, and unique needs for new skills. And the potential employer will not just be a hospital chain or a school system but dozens or even hundreds of small shops and firms.

Another issue that makes Green For All tricky to pull off is that success, particularly smart growth-friendly “transit-oriented development” can ” propel gentrification, leading to skyrocketing rents in newly hip neighborhoods.” Cities are trying several strategies to avoid this problem.

In the Twin Cities, advocates, policymakers and funders are developing plans to ensure that neighborhoods along the corridor stay affordable for current residents. One idea they’re exploring is creating a land trust to preemptively buy up land around the corridor so it is secured for future affordable housing development. Similar efforts are underway in various neighborhoods in the Bay Area…. Advocates and funders elsewhere are exploring less costly strategies, including zoning rules, community benefit agreements, tax increment financing and other means to ensure that transit-oriented development achieves its full potential to boost neighborhoods while not ignoring the fates of its poorer residents.

So yes, it isn’t easy. But that’s no excuse for not trying. It’s not like stopping global warming is easy either.

And if cities — and enviros — don’t work hard to ensure that everybody benefits it’ll make stopping global warming all that much harder. The single biggest argument against seriously stepping it up to stopping global warming is that too many folks will lose their jobs or will be financially crippled by the cost of stopping global warming. If you want to counter this argument, the best way is to show that you’re serious about making life better for everybody.

four out of five cities report that sustainability is among their top five priorities as articulated by the mayor. Over 75 percent of cities have, or will soon have, detailed plans on how they will reduce greenhouse gasses; nearly all are calling for an emissions cut of between 10 and 20 percent in the next five to 10 years

But there’s a big gap in most plans: the needs of low income communities of color.

relatively few cities’ programs are incorporating working families and poor people into their sustainability plans. For example, new transit programs like new rail lines or bike paths tend to move residents of higher-income neighborhoods to the urban core, rather than offering service to neglected neighborhoods. And few city officials we surveyed on green jobs talked about ensuring that links are made between new green-collar job opportunities and the under- and unemployed.

As a result, cities are going to miss a once in a generation opportunity to actually do something about inner-city poverty — and to do it in a way that helps save the planet.

it is precisely in low-income areas that sustainability plans can have the most dramatic impacts: The housing stock is the least energy efficient, and the job seekers have the skills and motivation to plug into the expected growth in construction and retrofit jobs.

What’s particularly galling about the redlining by most city green plans is that, as the report points out, there are lots of ways cities can go green that help everybody. If you build better mass transit, middle-class folk can drive less and inner-city poor folk who don’t have cars now have a shot at jobs that they otherwise couldn’t take.

It would be a particularly awful irony if America threw away its best chance chance to rebuild low-income communities of color right after it elected its first black president.