The Center for Sustainable Living

“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