Higher Needs

On Art - a post by Laura Musikanski

When I was a child I thought that art was the highest form of civilization. A community that valued artistic expression, I reasoned, had the mechanizes in place to meet all the “lower” needs. Similarly, as person who created art had met all lower needs. This was before I heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or even knew the word “sustainability.”

Today, I think we all have deep within us an idea of sustainability, and the knowledge that to reach a fully just and healthy place, all people must have their needs filled, not just the basic needs of eating, sleeping and shelter. It’s just that we are a long way from there. So, while doing the work to get there, its important to take the time to meet some of those “higher needs.” 

Last night I went to the opening of a small pop art gallery, LTD. I went because I wanted to see Sean Conroe, the guy who started Alleycat Acres.

Gazing at the pieces making gentle fun of the American way, I felt a relaxing of all those cares of the world our kind carries, and a rekindling of the desire to pick back of the paint brush. When your in the sustainability field, the work can be overwhelming. Sometimes you have to step out and take care of your own “higher needs.”

An Update from the Sustainable Rain Gardens Project

Sustainable Seattle completed installing and planting five rain gardens as part of our Sustainable Rain project. This important milestone means we have demonstration gardens at businesses and organizations in the Central District, White Center, West Seattle, and two different locations in Beacon Hill. We are now planning community workshops in each of the neighborhoods to spread the word about this neighborhood project and how residents can install their own rain garden. We will also be announcing a rain garden scholarship project to help fund more rain gardens in the Seattle area.

Rain gardens are attractive landscape features that remove pollutants from storm water runoff before it reaches Puget Sound. These shallow depressions are designed to absorb and treat rainwater from paved surfaces such as roofs, parking areas, and sidewalks. A rain garden has rich soil and usually native plants adapted to changing water levels. The soil and plants remove pollutants from storm water and reduce flooding and overflow in the sewer system.

We have designed our rain gardens to be more than this, however. They will be a demonstration, an inspiration for businesses and community members to take the next step towards sustainability. All of our neighborhoods were selected because rain gardens were not present yet and so that neighbors could have access to them and learn from them. Rain gardens are one of the tangible things that property owners can do to reduce storm water pollution. Participating business owners are getting some other sustainable business ideas on topics as diverse as reducing solid waste to encouraging community engagement for employees.

We would again like to thank our great partners that have been working with us on this: Home Grown Organics, Rain Dog Designs, Stewardship Partners, Alleycat Acres, and Creatives4Community. Youth from Creatives4Community reached out to businesses in the neighborhoods to find participants. A big thank you to all the volunteers who came out to excavate and plant the rain gardens! Our rain gardens will be a part of the 12,000 Rain Gardens in Puget Sound map. We are producing signs for each of the sites, showing how a rain garden works and what they do. They will match signs at other sites installed by Stewardship Partners as part of the 12,000 Rain Gardens.

We also want to thank our participating organizations, most of whom came to us and asked to participate and worked patiently with us on this new project. Our participants include Big Al Brewery in White Center, whose rain garden required jack-hammering asphalt and now sits next to their outside beer garden area. In Beacon Hill, we installed rain gardens at El Centro de la Raza, Latino cultural center, and Helen B. Ratcliff, a woman's transitional prison facility. Green Plate Special, a educational garden and cooking project in a vacant lot in the Central District, now has a rain garden to treat the run-off from their kitchen facilities thanks to Sustainable Rain. And in West Seattle, Alexandria Melchior warmly embraced her rain garden for her newly renovated yard at her residence and business property.

Sustainable Rain garden workshops where you can learn about how to install a rain garden and about rain garden scholarships:

November 14, 6:30 -8:30 at 2100 Building in the Central District
November 16, 6:30-8:30 at Big Al Brewery in White Center

More workshop announcements coming.

Check out our Facebook page for updates and news on when and where these workshops will be occurring!

Help with the digging of the first Sustainable Rain Garden in West Seattle!

We are constructing our first rain garden on July 30th in West Seattle at 5902 SW California Ave. and we invite interested volunteers to come and learn about rain gardens, while you help build one! We will be hand-digging our first rain garden at this private residence and business site from 10 until about 2. Come when you can, no previous experience necessary. Bring your own shovel and gloves if you have them. Bring children if you can closely supervise them. And bring water! Come help build sustainable neighborhoods, protect Puget Sound, and bring what you learn home!

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

(Photo by Stewardship Partners; Rain garden in Puyallup.)

Read the article below written by Amy Waterman, the project lead for our Sustainable Rain Project. You can learn more about not only our projects, but also about rain gardens themselves. Do you know what they are for? How they help the environment and the surrounding communities? Saturday is a great day to learn the answers to these questions and many others. You can help protect Puget Sound and sustainable businesses. Questions? Contact info@sustainability.org or amy@sustainability.org.

Sustainable Rain: We’re Not All Wet Behind the Ears Anymore
By Amy Waterman, Project Lead

This is an update from the field on Sustainable Rain, Sustainable Seattle’s project to create rain garden demonstration projects at small businesses and organizations in Seattle funded by the Russell Family Foundation. The goal of this project is to energize the business/organization leaders and their communities around creating positive change for their own property that also benefits the community. Rain gardens are one tangible piece of a “sustainable neighborhood.”

Rain gardens, in case you haven’t heard, are basically very attractive stormwater treatment areas that can be used in relatively small spaces to treat the runoff from roofs, driveways, and sidewalks through a carefully designed basin with extra rich soil and plants adapted to different water levels. We will be working in some of our denser neighborhoods to install rain gardens, do education and outreach on their benefits, and also teach business/organization leaders about sustainable practices that go beyond “green.”

We have five forward-thinking leaders who have agreed to work with us to learn more about sustainable practices and allow us to install a rain garden on their property. Our leaders are the Laura Dewell from Green Plate Special organization in the Central District, Doug Jans from the Pioneer Human Services’ Helen B. Ratcliff House in Beacon Hill, Alexandria Melchior, property owner in West Seattle, Estela Ortega, director of El Centro de la Raza, and Noelle Brown from Big Al Brewery in White Center. We are pleased and proud to be working with these organizations and individuals.

We are proud to be working with our partners on this project: Creatives for Community, Homegrown Organics, Alleycat Acres, and Stewardship Partners. Sustainable West Seattle is also an important ally on this project.

Stewardship Partners have been very helpful in getting us started, due to their experience with many community rain garden projects. We have been getting the word out in the neighborhoods and talking to potential participants with the help of Creatives for Community youth (C4C) as well as lots of ideas that came from Sustainable West Seattle. One of our potential sites (which unfortunately did not have enough space for a rain garden) was The Station Café in Beacon Hill and they came to us directly from the canvassing work of C4C. I have been working closely with Homegrown Organics, a local landscaping company that was involved with Sustainable Seattle’s first rain garden last year, to evaluate sites and do technical review to determine if a rain garden will work on an interested parties’ property. Rain gardens are one of many innovative ways to clean up stormwater and they do NOT work everywhere, as has been demonstrated in Seattle already.

This project is ambitious with a short time frame, with all five rain gardens, sustainability training, and community education happening this calendar year. Although El Centro de la Raza and Big Al Brewery are still undergoing some feasibility review, we are moving forward in July with design work and sustainability interviews, beginning at the other three sites. Over the rest of the summer, we will begin construction and develop agreements with landowners on maintenance of the rain gardens. Some sites will be excavated in July and planted in September, in time for the fall rains and some may be completed in July. We are going to be volunteers soon help build the rain gardens and welcome questions, and feedback on the projects, as they take shape. As the rain gardens are completed, we will be holding community meetings to share the project’s lessons and results and provide some training for those interested in pursuing a rain garden on their property.

There will another upcoming volunteer opportunity in mid-August to plant in all five of the rain gardens around the city. Look out for announcement of this on our website and facebook page.

Bike events today and tomorrow

A couple more announcements worth sharing:

TONIGHT from the Belltown Pull-Apart, a bike shop specialising in reusing old parts:

Come and join us for festivities and merriment as we roll through Belltown in style. We’ll kick of this year’s Seattle Founder’s Day festival with a bang. Dress to impress and have some fun. The ride starts at 7:30 from Belltown’s bike headquarters, Belltown Pull-Apart and winds its way past some notable features before ending at Pintxo Bar, 2207 2nd Ave. Bring you helmets, horns, and freak flags. Don’t have a bike? No worries. Belltown Pull-Apart rents ‘em out. Plan on a 1-hour ride. We’ll start things off early with the musical stylings of the Desert Rats. Come one, come all!

TOMORROW from Alleycat Acres, an urban farming collective and fiscal sponsoree of Sustainable Seattle:

This Saturday, the Bikestravaganza: Off the Chainring Tour, a self-described "DIY bike summit roadshow" is coming to Seattle. It will be happening on Saturday 8/14 from 7-9pm at Ada's Technical Books at 713 Broadway East. Alleycat Acres and Ada's Technical Books are sponsoring the local event to ensure it is free and accessible to you. But what do urban farming and books have to do with bicycle advocacy you may ask? Everything!

While Alleycat Acres focuses on urban farming, we share common goals with the bicycle advocacy movement of building community by encouraging people to get out and spending time with their neighbors. We believe that if we can help build out bicycle infrastructure and show people what is possible to accomplish by bicycle, we can induce and inspire more people to ride. As more citizens in urban areas return to an active and local lifestyle, we will see substantial quality of life improvements for everyone.

A key part of making this happen is knowledge and each of us has to attain this knowledge ourselves. We can, however, build organizations together to create opportunities for this to happen. Giving citizens an opportunity to learn together is a big part of why Alleycat Acres exists! Similarly, we're thrilled that Ada's Technical Books stepped forward to offer the use of their venue. Local book stores are cornerstones of a community where people can come together under the common goal of learning. Consequently, we are quite proud of them and their involvement in this event and their neighborhood.

So please come out on Saturday with your ideas and excitement to put them into action creating change in our city. For more information, you can check out the Bikestravaganza tour website and thefacebook event.

July Events from Sustainable Seattle and Updates

So what is next for Sustainable Seattle? We the month of July is filled with various events and trainings that are still barely available for attendance. We do have limited space so make sure to sign up today!

July 1,2010 Climate Solutions from Buddha



July 15, 16, 2010 Triple Bottom Line Reporting





July 28, 2010 Life Cycle Analysis











Whew, the last few months have been busy here at Sustainable Seattle. We've been working towards a holistic vision of sustainability with all engines firing with different events, trainings and collaborations that have widened the spectrum of sustainability and broadened our minds.

First, we had a fantastic event at Hidmo located in the Central District. It was a cultural exploration of East African people's through dance, song and food. Our partnership with Walking with Africans was to bring the vision of micro lending into the wider audience of the Central District. The event was a tremendous success and the performances were entertaining and educational.

Our Dream a Sound Future project is fired up and bringing in ideas and plans from numerous sources both professional and dreamers from all ages. Some of the ideas that have emerged include an energy source from the motion of falling rain to solar powered street lights.

We have also just completed the first step in our Rain Garden project.
The project was a joint collaboration with Alleycat Acres and Creatives 4 Community and it included an extensive training project that teaches homeowners and individuals about the importance of the Puget Sound Watershed and the steps they can take to lower their impact on this important resource.

The Rain Garden Project was funded in part from a grant from the Puget Sound Partnership via EcoNet.

Alleycat Acres Fund Raiser

TUNES BY DJ COLBY B and BETT LAW! DRINKS! NEW FRIENDS! RAFFLES! AND TONS OF FUN! ALL FUNDS RAISED WILL SUPPORT ALLEYCAT ACRES, AN URBAN FARMING COLLECTIVE WHOSE MISSION IS TO CREATE URBAN FARMS ON UNDERUTILIZED SPACES.
$5 - $20 suggested donation @ door

Garden Planning Potluck

22nd & Union
Garden Planning Potluck & BBQ hosted by
Alleycat Acres
Grow Forth

SUnDAy MAy 16Th
2-4PM
@ 22nD & Union in The CenTRAl DiSTRiCT

Central District Residents and Community Members &
Alleycat Acres

Garden Planning Potluck and BBQ to discuss future
plans for 22nd and Union Site

The goal of Alleycat Acres is to convert empty spaces
in Seattle into sustainable urban farms. We need your
input for what to grow and how to distribute the crops
in the Central District.

Local Food and Urban Agriculture: An introduction

Alleycat Acres is a sustainable Urban Farming Collective and has been blazing a new trail into affordable, urban food growing. The organization is leading a trend to grow food in smaller areas, areas normally reduced to parking lots or vacant weeds and rubble.

The entire concept of urban agriculture is a relatively new idea that focuses on making affordable fresh fruits and vegetables in areas where many people would not reasonably be able to expect produce. Many areas in dense urban cities do not have a market or grocery store that has fresh fruits and vegetables. Many are stores that buy the lowest bid plants that are on the verge of spoiling or rot in order to save money. Some stores replace fresh fruits with sugary drinks and canned veggies that lose all their nutrients the minute one opens the can.

With urban agriculture plots of land or even smaller pieces such as flower beds or sides of drainage areas are converted into growing centers. Often times the food that is grown goes to local food banks, charities or the growers themselves in an effort to minimize transportation and maximize the payout of the project.

There are numerous groups who are recognizing the positive lessons taught by working the land and many of them are focused on urban youth. One such organization is Seattle Youth Garden Works which unfortunately has been running into financial difficulty due to the recession. They are still in existence, but need assistance.

Food that is locally grown not only is fresher, but it also accomplishes supporting the local economy, your friends and neighbors, and it is also environmentally better than shipping or flying food from the average 1500 mile distance.

For more ideas on how you can get involved visit:
Alleycat Acres