2011 Third Phase Blossoming Possibilities Grant Partners
ITP has expanded into a new third grant phase. It is limited to Grant Partners from the first three years of the program, who are taking their innovative collaborations to deeper levels of engagement.
Collaborative Funding Grants
CityLab 7 and Taco Diplomacy
An exciting collaboration has been formed this year between these 2 Grant Partners to examine local food systems from the urban Northwest and Southwestern Arizonan local perspectives. While Sabores Sin Fronteras and its Taco Diplomacy Food Wagon will continue to use grass-fed beef, heritage wheat and chiles as a lens through which to look at urban food movement, City Lab7 will recapture coffee grounds otherwise meant for a landfill as a growing medium for oyster mushrooms. The results of their process oriented approach to local food systems will be communicated through a broad range of media and cultural events to a stimulate urban dwellers to take a fresh look at the food flows they are part of, and to be engaged as co-designers of climate-intelligent food systems.
CityLab7 Fertile Grounds Project - In Phase 3 of Invoking the Pause, Blossoming Possibilities, CityLab7 will create a pop-up Fertile Grounds coffee operation as proof of concept. This inspirational business model will provide premium locally roasted coffee and repurpose waste (coffee grounds) in order to improve the health of local ecosystems and economy, positively impact climate change, and deliver a return on relationships—all by addressing lifestyle choices related to food. (Click here to see the full scope of their project.)
Taco Diplomacy Food Wagon – Sabores Sin Fronteras Farming and Foodways Alliance is creating a novel mobile exhibit — a “heritage food wagon” or “taco diplomacy truck” to stimulate public discourse and community discussion at Arizona festivals and other events with regard to the sustainability and “foodprint” of traditional foods historically and currently eaten and produced in Arizona. As part of these public events, it will provide a forum in which dynamic content related to food value chains and carbon footprints, environmental and culinary history, food justice and multi-cultural heritage foods are presented as more than just calories, but elements of cultural identity and management of agrarian environments.
(Click here to see the full scope of their project.)
Council of Pronghorn and Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
The Cathedral is particularly pleased to collaborate with Terry Tempest Williams, Felicia Resor and Ben Roth to bring A Council of Pronghorn: Bearing Witness, to the Cathedral grounds. The Council of Pronghorn will migrate east, traveling from Jackson, WY to New York City to take part in the Cathedral’s exhibition The Value of Water: Sustaining a Green Planet, running from September 2011-March 2012. The Council of Pronghorn strongly represents the responsibility we all bear to wilderness, to water and to all living creatures. Terry Tempest Williams also will be part of a keynote speakers’ program and will be working with the Public Education division of the Cathedral on associated workshops. The pronghorns bear witness with their lives and deaths; the artists have done so with this work. The Cathedral wishes to join, support and extend this important act of bearing witness.
Individual Funding Grants
Catalogue of Extinct Experience
A Catalogue of Extinct Experience is a multimedia art installation offering people sense experiences that are extinct or endangered – drinking water from a stream or seeing the night sky blanketed with stars; senses – tasting honey from an endangered flower, smelling a fragrance made of rare and endangered plants – hearing recordings of extinct and endangered landscapes and the people who once lived there.
The hope is that the multimedia, multi sensory experiences that comprise A Catalogue of Extinct Experience will offer participants a moment of resonance with what is and that such resonance might develop into an increased sensitivity to the visible (and invisible) world. This subtler noticing releases our sense of separateness – offers a visceral understanding of the interconnected whole of which we are a part. And the hope is that in some way people might be changed; that this new awareness of what is might be refracted, prism-like , through them into something made sensible to others – given material manifestation whether through painting, music, scientific endeavor, activism, teaching or just being with a different perspective – so that they too, might see themselves and the world in a different way.
The purpose most emphatically, is not to reify extinction – to mourn the very real and often tragic losses that are occurring everyday, but rather to point out that the consequences of such losses imperil not only the physical survival of our own species, but the evolution of human consciousness as well. As the richness of the natural world – the source of so much human creativity; the basis for so much human insight, is reduced, the range of human experience, and all that arises from it, is ever more impoverished.
Cittaslow Sonoma Valley
With an organizational facilitation grant in 2011, Cittaslow Sonoma Valley will undertake further definition of its partnership with Cittaslow USA. It will continue to define its environmental projects; and, it will broaden its efforts to engage the whole community and its many diverse constituencies in efforts to remediate the implications of climate change. Two of its citizen science and participation projects include the following:
“Cittaslow Pollinator Stewards Collaborative,” or “Pollinator Pals”. This project is focused on civic participation and educational efforts, to save bees and other pollinators; encourage pollinator attracting plants to be grown in gardens throughout Sonoma Valley; facilitate local food security; and, reduce carbon by focusing on local food production. Cittaslow Sonoma Valley’s Pollinator Pals project will serve as a model for replication in other Cittaslow municipalities throughout its USA network.
“The Big Game”. This project is a community-wide citizen participation and education model born our of the 2010 collaboration of Cittaslow Sonoma Valley team members who took a pause and convened as a result of ITP funding. The Big Game is also designed to be a broad collaboration of local constituencies that will positively affect the impacts of climate change by individual residents and by the community at large.
The Village Green(er) with the SuperPower Magic Motion Machine
The SuperPower Magic Motion Machine (SPM3) is a pedal-powered mobile art installation to raise awareness about energy consumption and human innovation: a custom-made bicycle with a trailer attachment that will carry the components to convert human power into electricity, initiating a public discourse about energy generation, consumption, and community empowerment.
Its launch will be a temporary art and performance piece in Lancaster, PA highlighting the integral relationship between human creativity and generating sustainable energy. In order for the machine and performance to function, participants much collectively produce both the power (by riding the bicycle) and the ideas (collected during the performance) that will run the installation. The launch will (1) serve to introduce SPM3 and it’s possibilities to the public, (2) generate conversations on energy use and new technologies, (3) identify key partners and collaborators for future SPM3 applications, (4) stimulate the construction of local, creative solutions to climate change issues.
2010 Grant Partners
Cittaslow Sonoma Valley
Cittaslow (literally slow city in Italian) is an international organization that expands on the principles of the Slow Food movement. Cittaslow towns are comprised of fewer than 50,000 people and must meet specific requirements in the areas of environmental conservation, sustainable development and community wellbeing.
The Cittaslow Sonoma Valley chapter is the first in the U.S., and a prototype for other communities across the nation. Founded and directed by Virginia Hubbell, it is comprised of a diverse group of community members who seek to foster local identity and grassroots efforts for addressing climate change. Cittaslow Sonoma Valley is poised to inspire similar groups throughout the world.
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
Environmental leaders have come together to discuss our connections with each other and the earth in the sanctuary of New York City’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, often referred to as the “Green Cathedral.” This grant provides the opportunity to continue this century-long tradition to address the immediacy of climate change. A diverse group of thinkers will meet to build broader collaborations to effect change, bringing the wisdom of many disciplines to bear. Far-reaching initiatives that make use of the prominence, commitment, space, and human capital of this great institution will be developed.
The Village Green(er)
An ecologist (Nicole Heller), artist (Libby Modern) and poet (Marci Nelligan) come together to re-imagine the village green as a public commons where local concerns embrace global realities. Historically a place where American democracy, social engagement and community building take place, the village green becomes the Village Green(er)–a theater where community engagement and empowerment can affect climate change.
The voices, geography and climate of Lancaster, Pennsylvania become the muse for an evolving public art installation that marries scientific research with the daily lives, imaginations and memories of the community.
Window Farms
Windowfarms is a research and design-it-yourself venture combining social media, urban farming and open-source product development to grow food and reduce our collective carbon footprint.
Windowfarms themselves are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using inexpensive, low-impact or recycled local materials. But the Windowfarms project empowers individuals beyond the use of a product. Based in New York City, Windowfarms promotes environmental, financial and social sustainability. It provides urban dwellers with a model for growing their own food and encourages people to design for their own microenvironments, share ideas, rediscover their own capacity to innovate and play an active role in the green revolution.
2009 Grant Partners
Catalogue of Extinct Experience
Chris Desser facilitated a gathering of 22 people from various disciplines to create an artistic vision for a multimedia collaborative installation. The aim of the installation is to inspire awareness and wonder for this remarkable world while awakening our senses to the environmental losses it has sustained. With a Phase Two Seeding Possibilities grant, a scale model for the installation was built, which incorporates the ideas, images and artifacts of the team as well as the multimedia works of others.
CityLab 7
This group of architects, landscapers, planners, artists and communicators is developing a variety of personalized, interactive systems to inform and incentivize carbon-smart lifestyle choices and promote stronger urban communities. CityLab7 found that using the word “carbon” doesn’t effectively convey the impacts of personal choice on climate change, and instead learned how to use compelling examples to motivate change.
With the aid of a Phase Two grant, they developed the Lettuce Utility concept to put under-used urban space to work, create healthy jobs, increase food security and build strong communities.
“Taco Diplomacy” and Border Foodways Alliance
Gary Nabhan joined Sabores Sin Fronteras (Flavors Without Border) Border Foodways Alliance to inaugurate the launch of “Taco Diplomacy.” Together they work to create a smaller, more sustainable “foodprint” (carbon footprint of food production and delivery) for food production systems, including livestock, chile and wheat in the bi-national foodshed shared by the Southwestern U.S. and Mexican border states.
A Phase Two grant enabled Gary and his team to engage the citizenry in artistically imagining and implementing a local food culture that is just and sustainable.
Smartmeme
In anticipation of the U.N. Conference on Climate Change held December 2009 in Copenhagen, a diverse group of young activists joined to define a meme, or unit of cultural information, for framing the climate change discussions. That meme came out of smartMeme’s mission to build movements and amplify the impact of grassroots organizing through the power of narrative.
*Smartmeme is not a part of new 3rd phase of funding
2008 Grant Partners
Council of Pronghorn
Wyoming, if it were a nation, would be the world’s third largest in coal production. In 2008, Felicia Resor, Ben Roth and Terry Tempest Williams set out on a road trip to view the effects of coal mining, coalbed methane extraction and oil and gas development on the Cowboy State.
What they saw and learned is articulated through Council of Pronghorn: an art installation to initiate provocative conversations about what they discovered. Present throughout the trio’s journey, pronghorn bear silent witness to the environmental stresses of human activity on the land. The Council gives them a voice. Twenty-three pronghorn skulls are placed in a circle representative of Wyoming’s 23 counties. Through prose poems, each pronghorn speaks to a perspective heard, a story told or a fact conveyed.
Houston “Low Carbon Diet”
A citywide grassroots educational program created by community activists, government officials and energy experts to educate residents about energy efficiency. Trained facilitators lead workshops in Houston’s neighborhoods that focus on improving home energy efficiency.
*Low Carbon Diet is not a part of new 3rd phase of funding
National Teach-in on Global Warming Solutions
In February 2009, Eban Goodstein and Chungin Chung mounted this national educational initiative that engaged college students in conversations exploring global warming solutions. Faculty, staff and student leaders on college campuses around the nation participated, with the aid of SightSpeed technology, in a groundbreaking direct video dialogue on this issue with members of Congress. More than 800 colleges, universities, civic organizations and businesses from all 50 states actively contributed.
2007 Pilot Program:
At the Water’s Edge
Lisa Micheli and Healy Hamilton, two leading mid-career female scientist-entrepreneurs from the California Academy of Sciences, took a pause to develop a model that shows the potential impacts of climate change on biodiversity and sea-level rise in Northern California.
Their project seeks to make climate change impacts tangible, educate local communities about the link between human behavior and climate change, empower individuals, and motivate action to decrease greenhouse gas emissions locally.
After At the Water’s Edge received a Phase Two grant, Micheli and Hamilton continue to expand their effective grassroots work.
Special Project:
In 2010, the founder of Invoking the Pause supported an organization that shares the spirit and scope of ITP grant partners. As a non-profit venture seeking to become for-profit, XSProject did not receive an ITP grant, but is mentioned here to illustrate the type of project that is in keeping with ITP’s intent.
XS Project
XSProject uses design and education to protect the environment and reduce poverty by creating fun, functional products from non-recyclable consumer waste. XS is responding to two problems: the tons and tons of non-recyclable waste that are thrown away every day and the extreme poverty of the people who make their livings collecting, sorting through and reselling garbage.
There are an estimated 350,000 to 450,000 trash pickers in Jakarta alone. XS buys non-recyclable, plastic consumer waste from Indonesia’s trash pickers before it reaches the landfill. It trains and employs low-skilled workers, who make all XS products by hand. Proceeds from sales are used to provide scholarships to trash picker children. In marketing its products, XS educates the international consumer about the ongoing problems of environmental degradation through our consumer discards.