Emily is incredibly fortunate to occasionally contribute her stories and thoughts to the Lift Blog maintained by some management and leadership experts she deeply admires, Bob and Ryan Quinn from the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, respectively. This father/son pair wrote a book entitled “Lift: Becoming a Positive Force in Any Situation” that inspires the blog. This week, Ryan posted a blog that started to analyze an experience Emily had while trying to progress efforts for large scale environmental education and engagement. Ryan takes a first pass at understanding whether or not it matters if people believe in climate change… in this conversation and analysis- maybe it doesn’t.
Tag Archive: community
The only reason why the story starts here is because I, Emily, am authoring it. I am pretty sure Tad was cooking up plenty of Small Infinity stories long before we met. And, as you’ll see as you follow this blog, plenty more stories are unfolding in the wake of what Tad started here.
The famous Cyndy Cleveland from the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise made the suggestion I meet Tad (connecting people is certainly a small infinity strength of hers!). I was a prospective student and Tad was an alumni in my city Columbus, Oh. I expected the meeting to go as these things normally do: meet once, talk about the program a bit, get some advice, and try not to bother him yet still find ways to keep in touch. That wasn’t what happened.
You might say the Small Infinity stars aligned when we met. Tad had some pretty interesting projects in mind but needed people to help him execute. I was a projectless, recovering accountant looking for opportunities to grow as a leader and explore this consuming interest I had in sustainability. I signed up to help him out and learn a ton in the process.
Tad’s first idea was to create a robust Green Drinks showing in Columbus. Green Drinks is an international, grassroots organization that encourages folks from cities all over the world (714 as of this posting) to convene regularly to learn more about what is happening on the sustainability front locally and to enjoy drinks, which are more often shades of brown than shades of green.
Tad invited me to join a small team of organizers tasked to figure out the monthly locale and speaker for Columbus Green Drinks. The thinking was this on the speakers- why not give a eco- group a chance to showcase what they’ve got going on if all of these eco-friendly people are already merrily convened? We found a bar with organic beers and a great back room (Yay Surly Girl Saloon) and we were off! Over time the locales moved around, the crowd grew, an array of speakers came, bikes were safely introduced to the mix on occasion… but Tad still had more in mind- something larger, something even more far reaching and something that got people to ACT on their interest in sustainability.
For a little bit less than a decade before 2007, Earth Day in Columbus Ohio passed with an ignorable whimper. This clearly irritated Tad. I am speculating now, but I have a feeling that the lack-o-activity bothered him for symbolic reasons. It may be only one day, but what a city does on Earth Day says a lot about its ongoing commitment to sustainability. Anyway, he talked me and an amazing crew of people from all over the city (amassed largely through Green Drinks) into helping him enact something relatively huge for Earth Day 2007. (Side bar: When we started working together on the first city-wide Earth Day (2007), I could see that Tad’s courage, creativity, and pragmatism were enabling him to envision and execute such a large endeavor. At the time, Tad had to convince me that it was acceptable to think SO courageously and creatively. Fast forward to now and I am realizing that Tad was doing a great deal of what Ben Zanders talks about in this video around 6mins 25 seconds in )
That year a team of volunteers pulled off a two part, city-wide Earth day celebration around the goal “a year in a day.” We set out to get enough volunteers at worksites across the city to log the same hours one person would after a full work year. We accomplished this goal and then some. Hundreds of volunteers from around Columbus logged close to 4,000 hours cleaning up river banks, planting trees, etc. To celebrate, thousands of folks came back to beautiful Goodale Park to enjoy the day, delicious foods, music, and conversations with representatives from 40+ green orgs.
My favorite story in the aftermath of all of this comes from a kind-hearted, adorably hipster friend of mine who came to Goodale Park for the afternoon festivities. He came up to me the next day Totally Excited about organic lawn fertilizer. “I didn’t even know it mattered. Someday I’ll have a house and I would have never known to think twice.” Admittedly, I didn’t even know that there was an organic fertilizer organization there that afternoon, but was totally delighted to hear this validating story.
I love thinking about the aggregated small epiphanies that happened that day, during the Green Drinks events, etc. The organizing team alone had so many epiphanies; many about what was possible for the future now that we had made it through that first experience…
This sign is just vague enough to make me laugh. Elizabeth Dean, bless her heart, gave some money to the City of Ann Arbor, and trees became possible! Which trees? All trees? TREES!
The subtitle of Dr. Quinn’s book is actually “How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results”
This is a book that describes HOW individuals become/ live like Ben Zanders, William Kamkawamba, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the list goes on. It is so much more than what we typically think of as leadership: it is about the way you live your life and how you see yourself in the world. Leadership is something that might actually be an identifiable by-product of the process that Dr. Quinn discusses in this book. In many ways this is a book for folks who “get” the small infinity idea and want to fully realize the potential of it.
I have a friend named Annie who I’ve known about a year now. Â She is about my mom’s age, with a physical disability that occasionally confines her to a wheelchair and qualifies her to live in the subsidized senior housing high-rise in Ypsilanti, across the street from the Downtown Ypsilanti Farmers’ Market (DYFM).
DYFM started in 2006, in response to the Washtenaw County Public Health Department’s designation of the south side of Ypsilanti as a “food desert”, with minimal access to sources of fresh food. Â It was intended to provide a source of vegetables for the communities living in the area, allowing alternative payments like food stamps and Project FRESH vouchers, but for Annie it has been so much more.
Annie started volunteering in 2009 in the Ypsilanti Food Co-op booth at DYFM, where they run the Bridge Card machine to allow shoppers to exchange electronic food stamp benefits for wooden tokens to spend with the vendors. Â This is when I met her; she was new to the area, and just thrilled to have a way to get involved and active, especially at this market right across the street from where she lived. Â She worked at the market all season, stayed involved with the Ypsilanti Food Co-op throughout the winter, and in March, she launched “The Farmers Marketeers”. Â She recruited a crew of several seniors, variously abled and aged, to create crafts, grow seedlings and vegetables on their apartment balconies, and (my favorite) stitch unique aprons and handbags out of repurposed thrift-store clothes. Â They sell these wares at a cooperatively run booth at the market, which just started up again for the season on May 4, and they are adorable.
Someone (well, several someones) started that little market, and kept it going. Â Annie started volunteering and followed her momentum from there. Â Now the residents of that high-rise, who were before at high risk for isolation and poor health, have an opportunity to be physically and socially active, get out into the community, and earn a small amount of supplemental income. Â And I got a cool apron.