It's been too long since I posted in this blog. I've been busy teaching, grant writing, and working on my Foodshed to Watershed Environmental Education Curriculum, as part of my Together Green Fellowship through National Audubon Society.
As part of this fellowship, I've been monitoring and researching the development of urban agriculture. The Evergreen Cooperative is actually an organization that I discovered last year through the New Economics Institute Conference I attended at Bard College in New York's Hudson River Valley.
The Evergreen Cooperative was formed to help create viable, environmentally sustainable member-owned businesses in Cleveland's urban core area - where unemployment in this mostly low-income minority community has been extremely high for years. Like many urban cities in the Northeast and the Midwest 'Rust Belt', these low-income neighborhoods surround Cleveland's downtown urban center which is home to numerous institutions including an art museum, hospital and several universities.
In an effort to address the growing income disparity between the wealth of these institutions and the surrounding neighborhoods, a group of local nonprofits, businesses and local government leaders came together to find a way for these 'anchor institutions' to work together with the community to remedy the lack of jobs and income in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding these very wealthy institutions.
The group focused on identifying the key services these institutions utilized, such as laundry services, printing, and food - and then through creative investment - funded the startup of member-owned businesses that will provide these services. Many of these institutions were utilizing 'local' businesses, but still, many of these businesses were located 30-40 miles away. The group argued that a more truly environmentally sustainable business model would be to create member-owned businesses right there in the surrounding neighborhoods where you had a ready and willing workforce in need of jobs. After a lot of trial and error, the Evergreen Cooperative has been a big success.
To date the Evergreen Cooperative has started a number of major businesses including Evergreen Laundry Services, Evergreen Energy Soluations, a solar PV panel design and installation company, and most recently, Green City Growers, the largest urban greenhouse in an urban core area.
Here is a video of some of the employees talking about the urban greenhouse. I just love this concept of developing 'sustainable' businesses which meet our communities' basic needs. I'm looking forward to visiting Cleveland later this year, and will report back after. Until then - enjoy!
And here's a news clip about the opening of Green City Growers in Cleveland.
