GLUE

It would be fair to say that I didn’t expect the last few days.

After all, I spent them at a conference for an organization I learned about on Monday, and am now helping with digital community development. That organization is GLUE - the Great Lakes Urban Exchange (and one of the best acronyms I’ve run into in a while). This is a group of (generally younger) people interested in sharing ideas to ‘take the rust out of rustbelt’. And by that, I mean that everyone from graduate students in policy (or engineering)  to members from community development organizations (CDCs, to add that confusing acronym to your vocab), to all the local non-profits - and even some businesses. It was a widespread and awesome group.

Rational thought probably would have said that I shouldn’t have gone - I should have taken the time to write/rewrite more of my Proposal, or draft part of a manuscript on the Marcellus, or edited a class proposal. But I’m pretty sure, in the long run, that it’s going to be the people I meet at conferences as much as the advertisements from email chains that will help me be a productive member of society. And I’m so glad I went. I missed some of it - mainly two of the panels (on Green Jobs and Community Redevelopment), and one of the discussion sessions, but I caught a lot - the tour of the city that I already live in, which still taught me a lot, the keynotes by incredibly emotionally powerful Black community leaders, the discussion sessions I *did* get to, which were hour long sessions of ‘what are all the ideas of cool/necessary/powerful things we can do’, the youth panel of middle and high schoolers discussing with incredible frankness the current state of neighborhoods and Pgh’s school system, and the final session of exactly what projects to work on going forwards and how to do them. It was an incredible time, and hopefully some great things will directly germinate from it.

Why am I so excited at this unexpected set of days?

Because this is was a conference not only of telling people what you’ve done, and of meeting people - both of which are awesome - but also of creating new things to work on together that can help with everyone’s goals.
Because this set of ideas and projects and sharing has a geographic basis - a large one, to be sure, but the guys from St. Louis were absolutely right when they said that all of these post industrial cities share some architectural heritage and feel as well as our climate (lots of water) and some of the same social problems. The solutions people talk about in Cleveland or Milwaukee can work here too.

And because what we’re working on for the next step (my group in the last session up above) is furthering a model of local action and Cool Stuff that I totally support - a central organization providing connections, support, and publicity for a wide variety of local efforts. It’s the model that ESW uses, and the model for TEDx - both of which have produced awesome things. It’s a model that works really well for sustainability - improving our cities is not as much about inventing new solutions as it is replicating the same solutions over and over again in each neighborhood in every city. We need {municipal, state, national} policies, but we need to create resilient cities for the world the policies we advocate for would create - when we advocate using less oil or capping carbon emissions, we need to make sure that the local food systems and stores and strong communities are there to make things work.

So we’re working on having local events in these cities, and using the (currently nascent) communications facilities of GLUE’s website, to supplement the annual conference and keep momentum going. To connect people in new cities who don’t have a group yet - and help them create one when they find out they have local friends. Look for more on this initiative soon - either here or at PittEnvironmental. And mark down November 3rd - that’s the date we’ve set for the first meetups, and the Pgh one might well be at Ava/Shadow Lounge. Join this - come with goals, come with ideas, come with what you have to offer. There are a lot of local organizations, and this is a way to connect them.

This is, yet again, a random opportunity taken on a whim that has so many possibilities.