The Center for Sustainable Living

We wanted to formally introduce you all to Ryan Doyle. Ryan will be a senior at St. Olaf College in the fall. He will be an intern with the Center for Sustainable Living this summer as part of St. Olaf College’s “Leaders for Social Change” program. Now before you think he’s going to be busy filing away papers in an office or “just getting his feet wet” in a non-profit organization, we’ve gone about his internship in.. well.. quite a different way.

From now until August 1, Ryan will be taking on projects completely of his choosing related to his passions for sustainability, public policy, ways to “make things easier” for folks to live sustainably, and also spending valuable “unstructured time” in nature! You could call it a “self-designed sustainability camp” of sorts. All of his research and projects will go forward with him on his path of leadership, and he will share it all through his own blog and through our organization.
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Northfield is the town of “blogs” these days! A ‘blog - short for web log, is an ongoing diary or journal on the web, but most of you know that already.

Here are some interesting local blogs that we thought we’d highlight that have a sustainability or grassroots community organizing “bent” to them. This list is not inclusive, so if you have others, please share them with everyone in the comments!

• Living in Northfield is a blog by Marcea Frasier, who takes long bike rides, works at Valley Creek Community Farm, makes her own soap, and home schools her children.
• Olivia Frey, our secretary for CSL, has a new blog called Make/Do, where she shares insights and sustainable tips about living more simply. Every post she has a “make/do” tip!
• In Penelopedia, Penny Hilleman talks about her adventures in gardening, bird watching, finding abandoned wasp nests, and living lightly in the world.
• Bruce Anderson hosts a blog on his site, Sustainable Community Solutions. He’s been very busy organizing folks around the issue of cohousing in Northfield.
• Bill Ostrem’s blog, Northern Letter, discusses topics of sustainability, bicycling, energy, and climate change.
• Scott Schumacher (yours truly), has moved his blog to a new site entitled A River Between, where he speaks about unschooling, holistic healing, sustainable living, and raising a more natural dog, Junebug.

If there are more blogs out there, please let us know! We hope you enjoy peeking into the lives of a few Northfielders who are taking steps to live a more sustainable life.

A small gathering of neighbors and friends are beginning to organize a group, the Friends of Lashbrook Park, to help maintain and enhance this park, which sits on the northwest corner of Northfield. If you are interested in joining these efforts to build Lashbrook Park into it’s full original vision as a passive prairie park, you are invited to attend the first of many organizing meetings!

Friends of Lashbrook Park Meeting
2pm, Sunday June 8
Just Food Co-op Community Room
516 South Water Street
Northfield, MN

Help! Your CSL web master is now obsessed with brewing kombucha, a healthy-fizzy-fermented drink, and is looking for any gallon sized glass jars that anyone is willing to give away!

You can view all of the details of this request, plus post your own ad for anything you’re looking for, willing to trade, or willing to give away on our new Community Bulletin Board!

As well as a place for free exchanges and trades, you can continue discussions with regard to Permaculture and the Northfield Commons Café!

Click here to join our bulletin board, or click the link on our sidebar!

Many thanks go out to Northfield Tractor and Equipment for donating tilling services to the Greenvale Park Community Garden! After much wet and rainy conditions, the soil was finally ready to be tilled.

Let the planting begin!

Many thanks go out to the 25 participants who came together for our first Northfield Commons Café! We all drew out pictures of our visions and dreams for community, and after sharing, we came up with our questions. Many thanks to Norman Butler, who brought it two bottles of wine to Tiny’s, yet had to leave to take care of other business at the Contented Cow. And ultimately, many more thanks go out to Tim Sellars of Tiny’s for staying open late for this event! We love Tiny’s!

Pictures will be coming soon of the event!

Here are the questions that came out, all unedited. In our next café, we will wrench through these questions, and begin talking about how we might go about answering them. If you would like to join the discussion, these questions will also be posted on our new Bulletin Board - just register and start the discussion!
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“We are the leaders we have been waiting for.”
- David Korten, from The Great Turning - from Empire to Earth Community

Please join us tonight for our first of many Northfield Commons Café discussions. In these cafés, we will come together - ALL as leaders, to envision and create the community we wish to see - from the grassroots up!

We’d love for you to be a part of something we are very excited about!

Northfield Commons Café #1
“Drawing out our critical questions”
Thursday, May 15, 2008
7pm - 9pm
Tiny’s Hotdogs on Division Street
(Come early for great food!)

A very large embrace of thanks goes out to all who attended last night’s Northfield Park and Recreation Advisory Board. With a room filled to capacity, citizens came out to voice their opinions on the proposed archery range construction, which would have claimed over 30% of the park, destroying the prairie grasses, wildflowers, and habitats for various species of insects, birds, and mammals.

After hearing citizen concerns, in the end, the Park Board voted unanimously to consider other site locations for an archery range. Of the notable concerns, Park Board members were in agreement that their perceptions of the size of the range proposed by the Cannon Valley Sportsmen’s Club were not accurate, based on seeing the area in person at the park. Neighbors voiced their concerns of not receiving adequate (if any) notification from the City to build an archery range in the middle of this nearby park.

Many history lessons were told during the evening - the community organizing to obtain grants and donations of approximately $150,000 to establish the park, as well as the history of the Lashbrook family, who in the 1920s raised prized holsteins, marketed and sold across the country. The Lashbrooks were the “Cows” of Northfield’s motto of “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.”

Because of citizen action, Lashbrook Park, a prairie park with grasses that grow six feet high by fall, was saved from extinction. As one participant stated, “Archery is an admirable sport for all ages, and there may be many locations to create a range - but there is only ONE Lashbrook Park.”

For more information, you can read the article in the Northfield News which recounts the Park Board meeting and results.

Thank you to all who shared their voices to save this treasure of wild prairie land!

“We are the leaders we have been waiting for.”
- David Korten, from The Great Turning - from Empire to Earth Community

We hope you will join us for the first of many of what we are calling the Northfield Commons Café Discussions. In these open-space circle-based discussions, all are leaders and all are learners. As part of an emerging broader effort by the Center for Sustainable Living, we are building upon the idea of creating a “Local Learning Commons” - where citizens and neighbors learn from each other, engage in creative and compelling conversations, and ultimately create their own visions and manifestations for the kind of community they wish to see.

Café Discussion - “Exploring Our Questions that Matter”
Thursday, May 15 - 7pm - 9pm
Tiny’s Hotdogs - 321 Division Street (downtown)
(come early for great food!)

Using art and conversation as a medium, we will begin to draw out that which “we care about deeply” and our “dreams of community” to form the questions that matter - those questions we must address, in the hopes of creating a more sustainable, inclusive, and desirable future community. The questions that will emerge will be the basis for future conversations and cafés. Everyone is welcome. Come as you are.

Everyone is a leader.
Everyone is a learner.

For more information, please email us! info@centerforsustainableliving.org