Regional Sustainability Organizing Project Draft Proposal
The Regional Sustainability Organizing Project
A proposal by Jeff Goddin – November 10th, 2007
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation. – Bertrand Russell
The Regional Sustainability Organizing Project (RSOP) will be a membership organization whose purpose is to start and support programs which replace global scale institutions with more natural and sustainable human scale institutions through intensive and layered community organizing.
First Programs to implement:
• Community Inventory and Map – Businesses, apartments, houses, flat rooftops, productive landscaping plants, potential gardening spaces, interesting people, parks, and potential backyard social spaces are all examples of what to inventory and map, starting with a single territory of about 200 urban acres in Oakland bounded by Alcatraz Ave, 52nd St, MLK Jr Ave, and Telegraph Ave.
• A network of urban CSA’s called Backyard Organics – Grow 15% of the food for 300 people on about an acre distributed around a small neighborhood with the help of neighbors and five part time gardeners, then multiply the concept into many more neighborhoods. Complementing urban produce with regional produce will help to fill out our diets with 50% or more of our diet coming from regional sources, and it will help us to achieve a maximum efficiency as we learn what works well here and what works better elsewhere nearby, while maintaining the positive social effect of working together while gardening. Also, add herbs, flowers, and other useful or appropriate landscaping plants.
• Mealsharing network – Learn about tastes, cooking abilities, and schedules and then connect people together to share the responsibility and joy of cooking, so that each person may cook twice a week but have fresh healthy food they enjoy for every meal. Coordinate delivery and storage.
• Personal Meal Planning – Designed as a food management application accessible though your phone, PDA, or computer, which refers to a common database of food information which include recipes which program participants use. Connect grocery receipts to household inventories by networking our database with Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, etc. Allow participants to develop cultural frequency preferences (I’d like to have that pumpkin pie once a year in November, and that breakfast of waffles, fresh fruit and yogurt once a week) and taste preferences that enable the application to suggest meal plans which match nutritional needs, household inventory, seasonal availability, and preferences. The same algorithm can plan shared meals in the Mealsharing network. Then generate grocery lists according to the plan and according to local prices, which the program participant can then either take to the store with them or which they can submit to a grocery shopping network to have their groceries delivered. The grocery shopping network can be another extension of the Urban CSA, and meal planning and preferences can be used to plan garden production to align with tastes.
• Transportation share – Map ridesharing potentials and introduce community members to each other, then work to reduce the cars per person statistic among program participants by taking advantage of City Car Share or creating a similar internal programmatic capacity. Increase use of public transportation, bikes, and walking , reducing transportation costs and increasing secondary productive use of time in transit (conversation, reading, or relaxing.)
• Activity Groups – Connect neighbors according to activity interests, prioritizing those activities with fringe benefits, such as community health and cultural maintenance though sports and storytelling, and craft groups which help knit the fabric of community while being productive. This can also include project teams to work for some community improvement or benefit, supported though community grants provided by the RSOP, where neighbors get to apply their talents to common problems.
• Personal Daily Neighborhood Newspaper – Two-four pages print or email for easy consumption and proportional distribution of pertinent information can allow many stories to be told without overwhelming anybody (even if some of the information only gets into 5% of the newspapers.) All information lives in the community database and is submitted through a form and is then reviewed by peers for categorization and prioritizing. In connection with other programs these daily papers can include personal reminders about dates and things to do. Through organizing algorithms information can be both targeted to those community members more likely to find the information useful and to different members of small groups of friends so that among them all they have access to a greater proportion of total neighborhood news items, which they can informally redistribute among themselves as they feel appropriate (hey, did you hear about…?)
• Community Job Sharing Network and small business incubator – As programs come online, task management is handled through an internal economy that looks like a jobs board with tasks and values and associate skill requirements. Some self prioritizing can be achieved through the database. Program participants do the majority of the work and program or RSOP staff take care of the rest. This maximizes community participation and ownership or programs and minimizes overhead and staff management, and by developing some measures of success we can learn how to do things progressively better over time as well as how to identify talented community members. Also, this program can negotiate labor agreements with area businesses to provide high quality, reliable staffing with no sick or vacation or insurance coverage obligations since all that is managed by the program, which can begin to generate cash revenue for the RSOP and its communities while empowering program participants to pick their own hours and vacation schedules and to include a variety of jobs into their lives for variety’s sake so we don’t all get painted into corners by our “professions”. As teams form which are especially cohesive, they can be spun off as new small businesses.
• Local Economic Memory System – Through the Job Sharing program and a jobs and task management application developed by the RSOP to support program administration, a truly local economy can begin to develop, creating institutions like a local market day, local currencies and credit cards, and total community sustainability budgeting processes.
• Child Care sharing network – It takes a village, we all know, but still most parents are left to do it by themselves. This program aims to help not only parents to work together and share resources, but also to help childless members of the community to participate in the process of passing culture on to the next generation while sharing the burden and joy of caring for children.
• Community Security – Protect against both earthquakes and burglaries by getting organized. Coordinate with other programs to make anonymous acts of violence impossible in the neighborhood by planning to maintain continuous obvious pedestrian traffic in the community. Also, work to get to know all the households in the community and to provide each household a level of personal economic and social security which would make any criminal activity much less attractive to currently desperate community members, addressing the problem rather than the symptom (since criminal activity is largely the result of not being able to meet the social expectations of your community through legitimate means.)
• Health Care and Wellness sharing – Provide alternate wellness and health insurance services to participants, work with other programs to prevent illness rather than waiting to treat it, and so limit the community health care burden, by providing opportunities for exercise and activity, eating a healthy diet, and maintaining good hygiene practices.
• Domestic shared resource management services – This program aims to help households run themselves in good order with a minimum of energy and conflict though cultural practices which become common to entire communities, making it easy to be a good roommate almost anywhere.
• Community Surplus Property and Resource Recovery Warehouse – All the stuff community members don’t immediately need can go here, to be stored, redistributed, used, or converted to some other resource, and participants get credit for it which is good for credit through any program.
• Skill Sharing – In conjunction with many other programs, community members will identify valuable skills and knowledge which can be cultivated and shared among program participants to increase the capacity of the community to effectively meet its goals, in a way which replaces conventional educational institutions with apprenticeships, guilds, and lifelong integrated learning practices.
• Media sharing – This is a program which can work in conjunction with the Personal Daily Neighborhood Newspaper to distribute news sources to different members of a Current Events Club to talk about over lunch, or which can allow participants to circulate books, CD’s, DVD’s, sculptures, paintings, poems, stories.
• Distributed Intentional Communities – Put property back into the Commons, not just residential space but also commercial, industrial, recreational and social space, built up over a decade by a group of 300 program participants, with shared equity. As density increases entire city blocks can be redeveloped according to 21st century sustainable and community design principles.
• Zero Waste neighborhoods – This program will simply fall out of the rest through resource recovery programs.
• Local Energy Independence – Build capacity and network locally among up to several hundred homes, developing some local storage capacity possibly though a fleet of plug-in hybrids, and then work to measure and decrease energy consumption.
• Civic Action – We can’t all follow everything that goes on at city hall, so let’s get organized and divide the job up and become the dominant political force in town, with program areas developing policy recommendations.
• Global Networking – To realize both the benefits of human scale institutions and global economies of scale and to work towards total global sustainability, send project groups out into the world to extend these programs to communities near and far, following the natural migration of RSOP members as possible.
But the most significant product of the RSOP is that it will teach people through practice how to work together again, and how to appreciate each other, and how to find community. Food will be an important part of most programs. Localization is the goal of every program.
Ideas: Organize, Decentralize, and Harness Complexity a la Web 2.0
As individuals we are all overwhelmed by an over-stimulating and impossibly complex world where rational decision making and prioritizing give way to emotional reaction as the primary explanation for most observable behavior patterns. As a mass, we act like spoiled children, with no apparent thought for consequences or the effect our actions have on others. It is no coincidence that advertising is most effective when people behave emotionally. In fact, most of our lives are mediated by corporations, who in return for what we perceive to be a benefit take from us all our productive and creative energy so that they may continue to prosper according their own inhuman measures of success while we become essentially wage slaves with a continuously deteriorating standard of living. We are disconnected and powerless and at their mercy. The only strategy to dig ourselves out of this rut is to organize ourselves towards community self sufficiency and to stop participating in corporate mediated relationships.
Teamwork is a fundamental principle of community, so design all programs to schedule work and activities to be done at least in pairs if at all possible, if not in groups of 5. A group of 5 people is incredibly stable and has the potential to work much more effectively than any other size group figured by total group product per capita because of some basic principles of social dynamics. This is the group size used in the Grameen banking system of microfinance which won Muhammad Yunus the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize (www.grameenfoundation.org), for instance. Call this a family group of affinity group.
A group of 300 people is about the maximum number which can be held together as a cohesive community. Beyond that people don’t see each other frequently enough to learn to cooperate and we degenerate back to the status quo of universal defection current in Western Liberal societies. This is an idea from both game theory (see the works of Robert Axelrod) and permaculture (see Bill Mollison.) Call this a village. In between a village and a family is a clan, an association of several affinity groups with membership from 15-50.
A quarter mile is about the farthest people are willing to regularly walk on average according to urban planning conventional wisdom (which at a casual 3 mi/hr pace is a 5 minute walk) and so quarter mile radius areas will serve as a natural geographic organizing units for dense pedestrian communities.
These numbers will be used extensively in organizing the RSOP’s programs in order to realize efficiencies only achievable through informal human scale relationship networks and unavailable to the mainstream economy, in order to eventually out-compete the status quo and to some degree replace it.
The world is a Complex Adaptive System in the sense that Axelrod describes in that we seek to improve our performance by some measure of success and in that essentially all of existence is reducible to populations of agents (people, governments, and computer programs which have some purpose of their own) and strategies (to achieve the purpose) and artifacts (tools without a purpose of their own, like ideas or garden hoes). Complex Adaptive Systems are best guided by clever application of the principles of Variation, Interaction, and Selection. Variety in a system creates opportunities for handling different situations effectively and learning. Interaction patterns determine the structure of a community, how it passes information around. Selection recognizes adaptations which have been successful for some members of a population so that other may try them too. Applying these principles to all programs allows them to be learning systems.
Cooperation requires people to expect to see each other regularly in the future, so that any sacrifice made by one person is more than paid back in the future, such as in Amish communities with barn raisings. Small communities achieve this effect. As an institution to support community, there is nothing better than regular gatherings. Let villages meet on the new moons, clans on the full moons, and families on each of the two quarter moons per cycle, and you have a four week cycle. Whole community gatherings can be scheduled for Saturdays and various program gatherings at these levels on other days according to participant availabilities. Not everybody has to come to every gathering and a critical mass and a continuity can still be achieved through good organizing support and cultural practices.
Program participation is motivated by benefits created for members (time saved, socialization, money saved, and resources gained like workspace or access to a vehicle) and RSOP sustainability is achieved by splitting those benefits between program participants and project administration.
Selection and Interaction Patterns are established cooperatively by program participants through the RSOP and executed by organizers largely though the strategy employed by Google of making good suggestions, but allowing program participants to choose other options as well, within certain limitations. Organizers are selected according to their ability to make suggestions according to RSOP organizing priorities which program participants tend to choose, helping the organization to organize itself overall without forcing any participant into any given course of action. Note importantly that this stands directly opposed to the common progressive ideal of inclusiveness. Inclusiveness leads to dilution and disorganization in every case.
Stewardship is taking responsibility for caring for a common good or resource. Among program participants, stewardships can be awarded to individuals, small groups, or larger associations as appropriate. Stewardships can be contested and even split to allow a variety of strategies to be tried. Winner take all is a poor strategy for awarding stewardships. Stewardship is a job like any other within a social economy.
Decentralization as a principle falls out of the above concepts naturally. Centralization involves grouping people by the millions, and such groups are always organized indirectly, though a mediator, and not by their own natural inclinations, so that again people are easily manipulated for the benefit of foreign systems such as corporations or governments. Organization between groups occurs though cultures, systems, and practices which are more or less common between decentralized groups.
Goals: Just a sampling, many other testable goals possible
• First neighborhood mapped by the end of 2007, first unit of Backyard Organics at 300 members and with all infrastructure in place to grow 15% of their food in urban gardens in place by the end of March 2008 for the Summer 2008 planting
• 20 neighborhoods mapped and built up to grow their own food by the end of 2008
• To be in the black financially by the end of March 2008, using seed support to get things started but then relying on program revenue to cover all program and administrative expenses after that
• 80% of Bay Area residents participating in one or more programs in 5 years (6 million participants total)
• 20% participation of Bay Area residents in 5 or more programs, with more than half of their personal economies coming from within RSOP programs
• 10% of Bay Area residents fully self-identified as members of RSOP generated communities, with none of their personal economies coming from outside of RSOP programs
• 15% of total Bay Area food produced in urban gardens and a total of 50% of Bay Area food produced within the 9 county region in 5 years
• 50% reduction in Bay Area car miles in 5 years
Strategy: Backyard Organics in North Oakland First
Start with Backyard Organics. Introduce neighbors to each other and reduce their food miles while getting more fresh veggies into their diets. The goal is to get to know community members and start building relationships through productive collaborative work experience. In order to help jump start the whole process, take immediate advantage of existing productive landscaping plants like fruit trees, flowers, and herbs. Recruit 300 participants by the end of December to invest now in next summer’s production. Collect $225 per member for the three months April, May, and June, or get a 25 hour commitment to work on installing growing infrastructure or helping in other valuable ways. Also, seek loans on longer term capital projects like building greenhouses for starts and winter veggies which will pay themselves back in 1-3 years. The membership dues collected for Backyard Organics could be all that is needed to start the program, but remember they are an advance against future production, so they’re really a loan that needs to be paid back as well, and whatever seed support we can get initially will offset this eventually. Collecting dues in November and December will however enable Seed Support to be put off until January, and will enable us to solicit grants by showing community support.
Simultaneously begin to recruit memberships into the RSOP, sliding scale, between $25 and $300 per year, on top of the Backyard Organics membership. In general, program fees will be independent of RSOP membership dues. Membership in the RSOP entitles you to receive targeted offers for services which may be of value to you through the various programs, and it entitles you to participate in decision making process, and to receive invitations to member events. Also, contributions above and beyond membership dues will be solicited accepted to continue to accelerate the development process.
Add programs after that as the opportunities present themselves. Develop community members to be organizers of programs like Meal-, Child Care and Transportation sharing, in order to empower and instill in them a sense of ownership of their programs, and develop organizers to be organizer trainers and pioneers.
From the beginning work to incorporate technology solutions into all programs, and include some technology savvy participants in each program group. A website with social networking applications and a related database are immediate top infrastructure development priorities for the RSOP.
In December, recruit Bay Area talents to contribute to building a solid foundation for administering programs. Database development, organizer training and support, program development, and RSOP organizational development will be the first administrative priorities. Offer initially part time positions and build up from there, gradually replacing out of neighborhood talent with local talent as the RSOP extends its programs into more parts of the Bay Area.
For workspace and storage, rely on good organization and take advantage of freely available space in the community as much as possible, but be prepared to rent or buy at least one storefront initially to be an organizing center, just as beyond relying as much as possible on community members to voluntarily work together to do all the work of administering the programs we also provide staff to pick up the slack and provide more reliable labor to high priority tasks.
All programs will be managed with a business sense for productivity, and we will come together to work as hard as we play. But it’ll be on a human scale, and our contributions will be noticed, and the wellbeing of the group will become part of the wellbeing of the individual, and that will be the incentive for progress, instead of profit.
As program groups multiply, the RSOP will evolve into a loose standards organization helping to coordinate between many voluntary and common sense clusters of groups which to a greater or lesser degree use many of the same tools with the RSOP works to develop and maintain. As with other stewardship responsibilities, this job can be contested and split, in keeping with the principle of encouraging variation and so allowing the RSOP to be a learning organization, and to prevent institutional atrophy.
Budget: $47,500 total Seed and Angel Support
An approximate budget can be figured by assuming $15/hr for labor and that labor is 60% of costs, and that we’ll have 5 part time gardeners, 3 part time organizers, and 5 part time administrators for the first 3 months. That’s a total cost of $27,800 per month, with January as the target full startup date as we put together teams and continue to build relationships in the community. December should be half that or less as holidays intervene, about $8,000. November is $5,000 total, for labor by initial collaborators, to reimburse early expenses, and to cover some initial costs. This is a conservative budget. With more support, development would be accelerated.
All programs are to be designed light and self-sustaining through an internal economy. The RSOP will be self sustaining through memberships and program revenue within a couple years at most, and beyond that it should be a grant making organization in its own right.
About Me: Obsessive Community Organizer
Jeff Goddin – I have direct experience managing farm production and labor, field managing outreach operations, managing administrative systems, developing databases, grant writing, managing sustainability field projects including a municipal composting facility in Ecuador, working in the National Park System, organizing events, designing engineering systems, and organizing low income communities. I also have much experience with alternate local economic systems, intentional communities, and third party politics. I’ve been preparing for 7 years for this project, and these are the skills I thought I’d need. I have tested many of the program ideas over the years in practice, growing veggies and going door to door with them just last winter, for example. I’m confident in my ability to give good advice and to help lead planning processes to develop these programs fully.
Thank you for your interest in this project! Please direct all communication to Jeff Goddin at radical_green@riseup.net or (510) 717-6845 or 5740 MacCall St #C, Oakland, CA 94609.
A proposal by Jeff Goddin – November 10th, 2007
The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation. – Bertrand Russell
The Regional Sustainability Organizing Project (RSOP) will be a membership organization whose purpose is to start and support programs which replace global scale institutions with more natural and sustainable human scale institutions through intensive and layered community organizing.
First Programs to implement:
• Community Inventory and Map – Businesses, apartments, houses, flat rooftops, productive landscaping plants, potential gardening spaces, interesting people, parks, and potential backyard social spaces are all examples of what to inventory and map, starting with a single territory of about 200 urban acres in Oakland bounded by Alcatraz Ave, 52nd St, MLK Jr Ave, and Telegraph Ave.
• A network of urban CSA’s called Backyard Organics – Grow 15% of the food for 300 people on about an acre distributed around a small neighborhood with the help of neighbors and five part time gardeners, then multiply the concept into many more neighborhoods. Complementing urban produce with regional produce will help to fill out our diets with 50% or more of our diet coming from regional sources, and it will help us to achieve a maximum efficiency as we learn what works well here and what works better elsewhere nearby, while maintaining the positive social effect of working together while gardening. Also, add herbs, flowers, and other useful or appropriate landscaping plants.
• Mealsharing network – Learn about tastes, cooking abilities, and schedules and then connect people together to share the responsibility and joy of cooking, so that each person may cook twice a week but have fresh healthy food they enjoy for every meal. Coordinate delivery and storage.
• Personal Meal Planning – Designed as a food management application accessible though your phone, PDA, or computer, which refers to a common database of food information which include recipes which program participants use. Connect grocery receipts to household inventories by networking our database with Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, etc. Allow participants to develop cultural frequency preferences (I’d like to have that pumpkin pie once a year in November, and that breakfast of waffles, fresh fruit and yogurt once a week) and taste preferences that enable the application to suggest meal plans which match nutritional needs, household inventory, seasonal availability, and preferences. The same algorithm can plan shared meals in the Mealsharing network. Then generate grocery lists according to the plan and according to local prices, which the program participant can then either take to the store with them or which they can submit to a grocery shopping network to have their groceries delivered. The grocery shopping network can be another extension of the Urban CSA, and meal planning and preferences can be used to plan garden production to align with tastes.
• Transportation share – Map ridesharing potentials and introduce community members to each other, then work to reduce the cars per person statistic among program participants by taking advantage of City Car Share or creating a similar internal programmatic capacity. Increase use of public transportation, bikes, and walking , reducing transportation costs and increasing secondary productive use of time in transit (conversation, reading, or relaxing.)
• Activity Groups – Connect neighbors according to activity interests, prioritizing those activities with fringe benefits, such as community health and cultural maintenance though sports and storytelling, and craft groups which help knit the fabric of community while being productive. This can also include project teams to work for some community improvement or benefit, supported though community grants provided by the RSOP, where neighbors get to apply their talents to common problems.
• Personal Daily Neighborhood Newspaper – Two-four pages print or email for easy consumption and proportional distribution of pertinent information can allow many stories to be told without overwhelming anybody (even if some of the information only gets into 5% of the newspapers.) All information lives in the community database and is submitted through a form and is then reviewed by peers for categorization and prioritizing. In connection with other programs these daily papers can include personal reminders about dates and things to do. Through organizing algorithms information can be both targeted to those community members more likely to find the information useful and to different members of small groups of friends so that among them all they have access to a greater proportion of total neighborhood news items, which they can informally redistribute among themselves as they feel appropriate (hey, did you hear about…?)
• Community Job Sharing Network and small business incubator – As programs come online, task management is handled through an internal economy that looks like a jobs board with tasks and values and associate skill requirements. Some self prioritizing can be achieved through the database. Program participants do the majority of the work and program or RSOP staff take care of the rest. This maximizes community participation and ownership or programs and minimizes overhead and staff management, and by developing some measures of success we can learn how to do things progressively better over time as well as how to identify talented community members. Also, this program can negotiate labor agreements with area businesses to provide high quality, reliable staffing with no sick or vacation or insurance coverage obligations since all that is managed by the program, which can begin to generate cash revenue for the RSOP and its communities while empowering program participants to pick their own hours and vacation schedules and to include a variety of jobs into their lives for variety’s sake so we don’t all get painted into corners by our “professions”. As teams form which are especially cohesive, they can be spun off as new small businesses.
• Local Economic Memory System – Through the Job Sharing program and a jobs and task management application developed by the RSOP to support program administration, a truly local economy can begin to develop, creating institutions like a local market day, local currencies and credit cards, and total community sustainability budgeting processes.
• Child Care sharing network – It takes a village, we all know, but still most parents are left to do it by themselves. This program aims to help not only parents to work together and share resources, but also to help childless members of the community to participate in the process of passing culture on to the next generation while sharing the burden and joy of caring for children.
• Community Security – Protect against both earthquakes and burglaries by getting organized. Coordinate with other programs to make anonymous acts of violence impossible in the neighborhood by planning to maintain continuous obvious pedestrian traffic in the community. Also, work to get to know all the households in the community and to provide each household a level of personal economic and social security which would make any criminal activity much less attractive to currently desperate community members, addressing the problem rather than the symptom (since criminal activity is largely the result of not being able to meet the social expectations of your community through legitimate means.)
• Health Care and Wellness sharing – Provide alternate wellness and health insurance services to participants, work with other programs to prevent illness rather than waiting to treat it, and so limit the community health care burden, by providing opportunities for exercise and activity, eating a healthy diet, and maintaining good hygiene practices.
• Domestic shared resource management services – This program aims to help households run themselves in good order with a minimum of energy and conflict though cultural practices which become common to entire communities, making it easy to be a good roommate almost anywhere.
• Community Surplus Property and Resource Recovery Warehouse – All the stuff community members don’t immediately need can go here, to be stored, redistributed, used, or converted to some other resource, and participants get credit for it which is good for credit through any program.
• Skill Sharing – In conjunction with many other programs, community members will identify valuable skills and knowledge which can be cultivated and shared among program participants to increase the capacity of the community to effectively meet its goals, in a way which replaces conventional educational institutions with apprenticeships, guilds, and lifelong integrated learning practices.
• Media sharing – This is a program which can work in conjunction with the Personal Daily Neighborhood Newspaper to distribute news sources to different members of a Current Events Club to talk about over lunch, or which can allow participants to circulate books, CD’s, DVD’s, sculptures, paintings, poems, stories.
• Distributed Intentional Communities – Put property back into the Commons, not just residential space but also commercial, industrial, recreational and social space, built up over a decade by a group of 300 program participants, with shared equity. As density increases entire city blocks can be redeveloped according to 21st century sustainable and community design principles.
• Zero Waste neighborhoods – This program will simply fall out of the rest through resource recovery programs.
• Local Energy Independence – Build capacity and network locally among up to several hundred homes, developing some local storage capacity possibly though a fleet of plug-in hybrids, and then work to measure and decrease energy consumption.
• Civic Action – We can’t all follow everything that goes on at city hall, so let’s get organized and divide the job up and become the dominant political force in town, with program areas developing policy recommendations.
• Global Networking – To realize both the benefits of human scale institutions and global economies of scale and to work towards total global sustainability, send project groups out into the world to extend these programs to communities near and far, following the natural migration of RSOP members as possible.
But the most significant product of the RSOP is that it will teach people through practice how to work together again, and how to appreciate each other, and how to find community. Food will be an important part of most programs. Localization is the goal of every program.
Ideas: Organize, Decentralize, and Harness Complexity a la Web 2.0
As individuals we are all overwhelmed by an over-stimulating and impossibly complex world where rational decision making and prioritizing give way to emotional reaction as the primary explanation for most observable behavior patterns. As a mass, we act like spoiled children, with no apparent thought for consequences or the effect our actions have on others. It is no coincidence that advertising is most effective when people behave emotionally. In fact, most of our lives are mediated by corporations, who in return for what we perceive to be a benefit take from us all our productive and creative energy so that they may continue to prosper according their own inhuman measures of success while we become essentially wage slaves with a continuously deteriorating standard of living. We are disconnected and powerless and at their mercy. The only strategy to dig ourselves out of this rut is to organize ourselves towards community self sufficiency and to stop participating in corporate mediated relationships.
Teamwork is a fundamental principle of community, so design all programs to schedule work and activities to be done at least in pairs if at all possible, if not in groups of 5. A group of 5 people is incredibly stable and has the potential to work much more effectively than any other size group figured by total group product per capita because of some basic principles of social dynamics. This is the group size used in the Grameen banking system of microfinance which won Muhammad Yunus the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize (www.grameenfoundation.org), for instance. Call this a family group of affinity group.
A group of 300 people is about the maximum number which can be held together as a cohesive community. Beyond that people don’t see each other frequently enough to learn to cooperate and we degenerate back to the status quo of universal defection current in Western Liberal societies. This is an idea from both game theory (see the works of Robert Axelrod) and permaculture (see Bill Mollison.) Call this a village. In between a village and a family is a clan, an association of several affinity groups with membership from 15-50.
A quarter mile is about the farthest people are willing to regularly walk on average according to urban planning conventional wisdom (which at a casual 3 mi/hr pace is a 5 minute walk) and so quarter mile radius areas will serve as a natural geographic organizing units for dense pedestrian communities.
These numbers will be used extensively in organizing the RSOP’s programs in order to realize efficiencies only achievable through informal human scale relationship networks and unavailable to the mainstream economy, in order to eventually out-compete the status quo and to some degree replace it.
The world is a Complex Adaptive System in the sense that Axelrod describes in that we seek to improve our performance by some measure of success and in that essentially all of existence is reducible to populations of agents (people, governments, and computer programs which have some purpose of their own) and strategies (to achieve the purpose) and artifacts (tools without a purpose of their own, like ideas or garden hoes). Complex Adaptive Systems are best guided by clever application of the principles of Variation, Interaction, and Selection. Variety in a system creates opportunities for handling different situations effectively and learning. Interaction patterns determine the structure of a community, how it passes information around. Selection recognizes adaptations which have been successful for some members of a population so that other may try them too. Applying these principles to all programs allows them to be learning systems.
Cooperation requires people to expect to see each other regularly in the future, so that any sacrifice made by one person is more than paid back in the future, such as in Amish communities with barn raisings. Small communities achieve this effect. As an institution to support community, there is nothing better than regular gatherings. Let villages meet on the new moons, clans on the full moons, and families on each of the two quarter moons per cycle, and you have a four week cycle. Whole community gatherings can be scheduled for Saturdays and various program gatherings at these levels on other days according to participant availabilities. Not everybody has to come to every gathering and a critical mass and a continuity can still be achieved through good organizing support and cultural practices.
Program participation is motivated by benefits created for members (time saved, socialization, money saved, and resources gained like workspace or access to a vehicle) and RSOP sustainability is achieved by splitting those benefits between program participants and project administration.
Selection and Interaction Patterns are established cooperatively by program participants through the RSOP and executed by organizers largely though the strategy employed by Google of making good suggestions, but allowing program participants to choose other options as well, within certain limitations. Organizers are selected according to their ability to make suggestions according to RSOP organizing priorities which program participants tend to choose, helping the organization to organize itself overall without forcing any participant into any given course of action. Note importantly that this stands directly opposed to the common progressive ideal of inclusiveness. Inclusiveness leads to dilution and disorganization in every case.
Stewardship is taking responsibility for caring for a common good or resource. Among program participants, stewardships can be awarded to individuals, small groups, or larger associations as appropriate. Stewardships can be contested and even split to allow a variety of strategies to be tried. Winner take all is a poor strategy for awarding stewardships. Stewardship is a job like any other within a social economy.
Decentralization as a principle falls out of the above concepts naturally. Centralization involves grouping people by the millions, and such groups are always organized indirectly, though a mediator, and not by their own natural inclinations, so that again people are easily manipulated for the benefit of foreign systems such as corporations or governments. Organization between groups occurs though cultures, systems, and practices which are more or less common between decentralized groups.
Goals: Just a sampling, many other testable goals possible
• First neighborhood mapped by the end of 2007, first unit of Backyard Organics at 300 members and with all infrastructure in place to grow 15% of their food in urban gardens in place by the end of March 2008 for the Summer 2008 planting
• 20 neighborhoods mapped and built up to grow their own food by the end of 2008
• To be in the black financially by the end of March 2008, using seed support to get things started but then relying on program revenue to cover all program and administrative expenses after that
• 80% of Bay Area residents participating in one or more programs in 5 years (6 million participants total)
• 20% participation of Bay Area residents in 5 or more programs, with more than half of their personal economies coming from within RSOP programs
• 10% of Bay Area residents fully self-identified as members of RSOP generated communities, with none of their personal economies coming from outside of RSOP programs
• 15% of total Bay Area food produced in urban gardens and a total of 50% of Bay Area food produced within the 9 county region in 5 years
• 50% reduction in Bay Area car miles in 5 years
Strategy: Backyard Organics in North Oakland First
Start with Backyard Organics. Introduce neighbors to each other and reduce their food miles while getting more fresh veggies into their diets. The goal is to get to know community members and start building relationships through productive collaborative work experience. In order to help jump start the whole process, take immediate advantage of existing productive landscaping plants like fruit trees, flowers, and herbs. Recruit 300 participants by the end of December to invest now in next summer’s production. Collect $225 per member for the three months April, May, and June, or get a 25 hour commitment to work on installing growing infrastructure or helping in other valuable ways. Also, seek loans on longer term capital projects like building greenhouses for starts and winter veggies which will pay themselves back in 1-3 years. The membership dues collected for Backyard Organics could be all that is needed to start the program, but remember they are an advance against future production, so they’re really a loan that needs to be paid back as well, and whatever seed support we can get initially will offset this eventually. Collecting dues in November and December will however enable Seed Support to be put off until January, and will enable us to solicit grants by showing community support.
Simultaneously begin to recruit memberships into the RSOP, sliding scale, between $25 and $300 per year, on top of the Backyard Organics membership. In general, program fees will be independent of RSOP membership dues. Membership in the RSOP entitles you to receive targeted offers for services which may be of value to you through the various programs, and it entitles you to participate in decision making process, and to receive invitations to member events. Also, contributions above and beyond membership dues will be solicited accepted to continue to accelerate the development process.
Add programs after that as the opportunities present themselves. Develop community members to be organizers of programs like Meal-, Child Care and Transportation sharing, in order to empower and instill in them a sense of ownership of their programs, and develop organizers to be organizer trainers and pioneers.
From the beginning work to incorporate technology solutions into all programs, and include some technology savvy participants in each program group. A website with social networking applications and a related database are immediate top infrastructure development priorities for the RSOP.
In December, recruit Bay Area talents to contribute to building a solid foundation for administering programs. Database development, organizer training and support, program development, and RSOP organizational development will be the first administrative priorities. Offer initially part time positions and build up from there, gradually replacing out of neighborhood talent with local talent as the RSOP extends its programs into more parts of the Bay Area.
For workspace and storage, rely on good organization and take advantage of freely available space in the community as much as possible, but be prepared to rent or buy at least one storefront initially to be an organizing center, just as beyond relying as much as possible on community members to voluntarily work together to do all the work of administering the programs we also provide staff to pick up the slack and provide more reliable labor to high priority tasks.
All programs will be managed with a business sense for productivity, and we will come together to work as hard as we play. But it’ll be on a human scale, and our contributions will be noticed, and the wellbeing of the group will become part of the wellbeing of the individual, and that will be the incentive for progress, instead of profit.
As program groups multiply, the RSOP will evolve into a loose standards organization helping to coordinate between many voluntary and common sense clusters of groups which to a greater or lesser degree use many of the same tools with the RSOP works to develop and maintain. As with other stewardship responsibilities, this job can be contested and split, in keeping with the principle of encouraging variation and so allowing the RSOP to be a learning organization, and to prevent institutional atrophy.
Budget: $47,500 total Seed and Angel Support
An approximate budget can be figured by assuming $15/hr for labor and that labor is 60% of costs, and that we’ll have 5 part time gardeners, 3 part time organizers, and 5 part time administrators for the first 3 months. That’s a total cost of $27,800 per month, with January as the target full startup date as we put together teams and continue to build relationships in the community. December should be half that or less as holidays intervene, about $8,000. November is $5,000 total, for labor by initial collaborators, to reimburse early expenses, and to cover some initial costs. This is a conservative budget. With more support, development would be accelerated.
All programs are to be designed light and self-sustaining through an internal economy. The RSOP will be self sustaining through memberships and program revenue within a couple years at most, and beyond that it should be a grant making organization in its own right.
About Me: Obsessive Community Organizer
Jeff Goddin – I have direct experience managing farm production and labor, field managing outreach operations, managing administrative systems, developing databases, grant writing, managing sustainability field projects including a municipal composting facility in Ecuador, working in the National Park System, organizing events, designing engineering systems, and organizing low income communities. I also have much experience with alternate local economic systems, intentional communities, and third party politics. I’ve been preparing for 7 years for this project, and these are the skills I thought I’d need. I have tested many of the program ideas over the years in practice, growing veggies and going door to door with them just last winter, for example. I’m confident in my ability to give good advice and to help lead planning processes to develop these programs fully.
Thank you for your interest in this project! Please direct all communication to Jeff Goddin at radical_green@riseup.net or (510) 717-6845 or 5740 MacCall St #C, Oakland, CA 94609.
posted by Jeff Goddin at 9:21 PM
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