Conference engages Mpls activists

by Abdel Shakur
Several hundred activists, civic leaders and community members gathered on Saturday to share and discuss strategies toward sustainable community development. The four-hour conference was divided into a number of workshops that tackled environmental strategies such as alternative transportation, community gardening and solid waste reduction.
“It was really exciting,” said Barb Thoman, program director of Transit for Livable Communities. “It was packed with a lot of people interested in making real changes.”
Thoman’s workshop was designed to help neighborhood volunteers implement projects that increase transportation options in their respective communities. All of the workshops at the conference used previous case studies to develop more effective strategies toward neighborhood sustainability. Thoman said the importance of coordination and communication between neighborhood groups, volunteers and elected officials was one of the major themes of the conference.
“We need to be more organized when it comes to communicating with our elected officials,” she said. Thoman also said she was encouraged by the participation of the elected officials who attended the conference.
Mayor R.T. Rybak called the conference an incredibly energizing experience and named it a highlight of his first month in office.
“The neighborhood sustainability movement is clearly a dominant force in the city,” he said. “I'm committed to making sure that it isn't just a passing fancy. I'm committed to reform of the city's community development agency and its planning functions.”
Anna Wasescha, Director of Farm in the City, said that the conference gave her a “sense of solidarity” with other environmental activists. “It lets you understand how many of us there are out there,” she said. “There was a lot of diversity in the programs at the conference, but you could see that everyone was headed in the same direction.”
Wasescha described the experience as “incredible” and said an important part of the conference was the opportunity to network and learn about resources available to community organizations and individuals.
“We had a lot of people concerned about what they could do in their own neighborhood,” said Event Coordinator Sean Gosiewski. “People wanted to know how to organize their resources so they could take action.” Gosiewski said the conference allowed people the opportunity to learn about lifestyle decisions, such as ecologically safe cleaning products, that could improve the health of their communities and homes.
Gosiewski also said the goals of the conference will be more fully realized when notes from the workshops and meetings are made available on the Internet.
“We want to make sure that people who didn’t attend can have access to this information and be inspired to do some of this work themselves,” he said.
Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin spoke and participated in the solid waste disposal workshop and said the conference has given a lot of momentum to sustainability advocacy, which he called “the wave of the future.”
“Historically, the county has been considered ‘Big Foot’ in a lot of these issues,” he said. “But we’ve turned policy around to a more modest scale.”
McLaughlin said government efforts are more productive and efficient as a support mechanism for nonprofit organizations and individuals who are willing and able to do the work. “That approach allows us to harness the energy and expertise that we already have in the community,” he said.
McLaughlin cited both the county’s involvement in plans for an energy co-op in the Phillips neighborhood and the county’s sale of compost bins to residents as examples of positive government support.
Notes from the conference are available at
www.center4neighborhoods.org and www.moea.state.mn.us .