Category Archives: Association

Green Acres: Report from this evening’s second monthly rotating potluck

By Association, Uncategorized

“Is there any subject that you don’t use to refer back to neighborhoods?” The question, by one of the nearly a dozen neighbors who had gathered for our second newly instituted monthly potluck dinners for the Green Acres Neighborhood, felt punchy, challenging, even mocking. I had been speaking of the I.U. basketball coach Tom Crean, and how he has to deal each year with an ever-changing group of players, and that he seems to know something about team-work, something I’d like to learn that we can apply in our own neighborhood. For Green Acres, as one of Bloomington’s core communities, borders IU, and of course has an enormous number of ever-changing student rentals.

So that’s when she asked that question. And that’s when I answered, instantly and with no hesitation. “No, nothing. Because this is where we actually live, where we actually canconnect with each other in person. If we wish to live the way we choose, then we need to take our power back, to have it spring from below, from the grassroots, rather than being imposed from above.”

I felt strongly then, and I still do, hours later. Perhaps it was the wonderful bracingconversation with fellow ecovillagers from Cincinnati today. Perhaps it was just the real me inside, springing into action. In any case, here we are, and in this dinner we nearly doubled the numbers from our first potluck one month ago. May we have many more, and may they all enjoy as lively a conversation as ensued during those two hours leading up to the Super Bowl.

The spread:

the spread

The meal:
the group

Dear Georgia, with whom I started this Green Acres Neighborhood revival, way back in 2003.
Georgia

I had been at a conference on “intentional Communities” in Ohio. Had watched the new film about how Cuba coped when the oil gave out, back in the early ’90s, hearing about the phrase “peak oil” for the first time. I got scared. Really scared. White knuckled, clutching the steering wheel on the way back to Bloomington, I panicked: “Geez, I’d better join an intentional community right now! Man the barricades! Circle the wagons from all the marauding hordes!” Then, just then, I heard a whispered voice in my ear. “Just change perceptions in your neighborhood.”

Aaaah . . .

That Saturday happened to be the day CONA (Council of Neighborhood Associations) put on its annual neighborhood event at the Farmers’ Market, and I went from table to table, having newly moved to Bloomington from Jackson, Wyoming with my husband (for him to go to law school, and he died after only one semester). I pored over the map at each one, asking myself, “Do I have a neighborhood?” And if so where is it?”

And there was Georgia, behind the “Green Acres” table. Oh! “Green Acres!” It’s where I live! So exciting, to discover its name, and the welcoming woman behind that table. Right then and there, I asked her for lunch.

And at our lunch I started our conversation with this statement. “I want to do this with you, I want to get the Green Acres Neighborhood Association going (again, for it had been active in the past), “but only if we can develop a culture of creativity rather than a culture of complaint.” (For that, as you know, has been the usual raison d’etre of neighobrhood associations, formed in response to some kind of threat, usually to their borders.)

At this statement her face light up like the sun. “Oh! That’s what I want, too!”

And the rest, as we say, is herstory.

We started with GANA, the Green Acres Neighborhood Association. We are now mutating into GANE, the Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage. Check it out:

ganecovillage.org.

 

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Our First Annual Bloomington Neighborhoods Celebration and WOW!

By Association, Uncategorized

The newly resurrected CONA (Council of Neighborhood Associations) decided to hold a Neighborhood Celebration. Created a poster. A big poster. Here’s the top part of it.

Screen Shot 2014-01-29 at 3.39.41 PM

Sent it out to all the neighborhood associations to send to their email lists.

How did the evening go? Well, we were plenty worried. We had rented the ballroom downtown, and who knows, maybe 30 or 40 people would show up, huddled in that giant space on such a cold cold night (Monday night, projected to go to -7° F) . . .

Well, guess what! Something’s going on with the Bloomington grassroots, something wild and strange and rising. Who knows, our next meeting of CONA (Council of Neighorhood Associations) may have to be held in an auditorium! And the best part about it? Everybody lives in a neighborhood of some kind. I mean everybody. No one is excluded.

table.1

Here we are, in full force.

yes yes 2

We spent our evening eating, drinking, and getting to know each other, trading stories about what works and doesn’t work building community in our various hoods. A great time.

yes.3

Even Mayor Mark Kruzan was excited and surprised —

Kruzan — and told a story about being coached in a course called “Macromathematics”s  IU when he was a freshman by one Jon Lawrence, our new CONA president! Bloomington truly is a small town, where lots of folks have known and loved and agreed and disagreed with each other for, literally, decades.

CONA has been around for a long, long time. 20 years? For a few years lately, it had gone dormant. Well, no longer! After a few monthly meetings, the new CONA group decided to hold a celebration, and this was the result.

Just remembered that I got an email with a bit of the history of CONA after inviting our Green Acres email list, from one of my neighbors, Al Ruesink, who shared what he knows in lieu of being too infected with a cold to attend. Here’s from what he said there:

One of my reasons for attending would be to share a bit of the origins of what I believe to be the first CONA in Bloomington.  As I recall, Tom Goby (deceased), Sherwin Mizell (gone from Bloomington), and I were key players in getting it going and my first meeting notes are dated November, 1971.  Though I don’t think he was involved in the first meetings, by the time I went on sabbatical in 1974 it was being led by Jerry Marshishky, who is still in town.  Since that time it has had a series of dissipations and restarts, but I have always considered it a good idea.  It gives a more regular representation from the grass roots than City Council does and it provides a good way to share ideas for making neighborhoods really neighborly.  Sorry I cannot make it tonight.

Wow! 1971. That’s 42 years!

May CONA live on, and may our neighborhoods continue to strengthen internally and with each other. My own vision sees Bloomington as a networked mycellium of villages, each village node intergenerational, and with its own history and character. Hopefully, within ten years, many of us can be living and working in place, helping each other, sharing skills and tools and meals and conversation, secure in the knowledge that we are here for each other, rooted in place, caring and connected to both the vast flow of human creativity as well as to this good, solid, nourishing mother, Earth.

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Green Acres Neighborhood 2013 Harvest Party: (The usual question: “Will anybody come?”) Read on.

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Re-posted from exopermaculture.com.

Saturday afternoon

October 26, 2013, 1-4 p.m.

Harvest Celebration

Green Acres Neighborhood.

Georgia and I were clear, focused, and determined; this party would happen! No matter what! To that end, Georgia bundled up 250 bags with all sorts of info about GANA (Green Acres Neighborhood Association), and she and I managed to distribute them to the doors of  maybe 200 of the 440 homes around here. We were hoping that they would catch the attention of newcomers especially, which means, mostly, in this core neighborhood near Indiana University, students, in their ever-changing, newly-occupied student rentals.

The idea for the party cooked up over the summer, when Forest Gras, of the Forest Gras Band, moved across the street from Georgia and kept telling her that we should have an event. Well, of course, that’s always a good idea, and GANA has held many events over the years, but we hadn’t held one over in her neck of the neighborhood for at least four years. Since 2009, we’ve held events in the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden next door to me, including Harvest events; so I was happy to see this 2013 event move two blocks away, to Georgia’s side yard. I’d help with publicity.

To that end I also sent an invite and reminders to our GANA list-serve three times.

But who knows? Will anybody come?

That’s always the question in a university neighborhood such as ours that has so much student “flow” through it, and where even core people (those who live here for years, hopefully) move out of the neighborhood or out of town, or get too busy with other things to join us in our continuing, stalwart intention to unify and vivify our neighborhood, transforming it eventually, into the Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage (GANE).

How many times have I slipped into depression when one of our favorite active neighbors flew our little community coop? How many times have I had to talk myself out of depression, to see flow from a larger perspective?

“Flow” is also a permaculture term, and usually refers to flows of air and water and soil and seeds and animals, not people! But looking at our neighborhood in permacultural terms, yes, young vital students are perhaps our most crucial, and vital, flow.

Okay. After our flurry of publicity (which also included a sign in Georgia’s yard for the final three days, facing the street), Saturday rolled around.

Refrain: Will anybody come?

Most of the week had been rainy off and on, then turning unseasonably cold. Saturday morning dawned overcast, though not quite so cold. But geez! Will anybody come? (At one point that morning, losing faith, I thought about calling Georgia to ask if we should call it off.)

Okay, 1 p.m. Time to head over there.

Walking those two blocks, hauling chips and salsa, I commanded the sun to shine in ten minutes. And you know what? Ten minutes after I arrived, the sun peeked out, and then remained for the duration, closing behind clouds just after 4 p.m. as the party ended. Hmmmm.

When I got there the place was sort of forlorn. Sweet tables and chairs set up, the four-person band bravely fiddling with sound gear and wires under the stand-up tent, a table with tablecloth and goodies already on it.

Where was Georgia? Where was anybody else? Oops!

Aha. There’s Jen. Think I’ll go with her down the street to investigate her wonderful front yard garden, and chicken coop in the back.

Here’s her front garden. Sweet gate!

garden gate

Here’s her partly finished stand-up greenhouse/cold frame. Yes! Her husband, who works full time, is going to get a friend to help him finish it next weekend. This weekend, he took the kids (two and four) to his parents’ corn and soybean farm.

On the extreme left of the photo, inside the greenhouse, do you see a bunch of dead-looking vines? They cover sweet potatoes, which she’s about to harvest.

hoop house

Here’s Jen with her little family’s backyard coop. Nice. I will come back for a closer look when we put chickens in back of my house next year. I’ll also ask my son Sean, in Massachusetts, for the plans he used to build their coop. And check out a few more local ones. And maybe even repurpose the existing shed?

Jen's coop

Wow, her chickens have a big back yard! Probably twice the size of my son’s back yard, which may be why, unlike his, they haven’t ruined this one with their scratching and pecking.

chickens

Jen is demonstrating self-sufficiency with her garden and chickens. Other neighbors on their block are thinking about doing the same. We’re demonstrating neighborhood cooperation with the Green Acres Neighborhood Garden (GANG). Both are necessary in times to come.

[That’s right: We feature GANA, GANG, and GANE . . .]

Okay, back to the party. The band has started to rev up, and geez, they’re good!

the band starts to playMy body wants to dance. (But will anybody come?) Where’s Georgia? Aaah, there she is, dancing towards Jen and me and Jen’s sweet dog.

Well, it took about an hour. One full hour for people to start sauntering over,

three people gatherdespite that they could hear the band from several blocks away. . . . Luckily, we had gotten permission from the city for this three-hour afternoon event! At one point I walked back to my house, to get my dog, and ran into a neighbor with her dogs, and invited her to join us. She look at me with a pinched face, said “no thank you.” And then asked if we could turn the volume down, because “It’s not the kind of music I like to hear.” I told her I’d see what I could do. But of course the band didn’t turn it down.

Always, in any neighborhood, there are those who have trouble getting into the (temporary) swing of things . . .

When I got back, the sauntering in was well on its way,

more people

including at least four or five undergraduate student neighbors! One of them even played and sang during the band’s intermission. Yay! That’s what we were hoping for! Plus, they all signed our email list, and several of them want to work in the GANG garden. YES!

Just as exciting to me, two youngish men, Malcolm and Rowan, came to the party, men who have recently moved into the neighborhood and want to get more involved. Two youngish men, joined by a third newcomer, Forest of the Forest Gras Band! Yay! Plus there were a number of people I’ve never seen before, including one shy, older man on his bicycle who, when I introduced myself, said he was sorry my dog died (my little white dog Emma, who died two years ago); that when he read my blog posts about her death (I’ve referenced the first one, all five are found on the page The Grieving Time), he cried. I almost cried to hear him say that. Not because of Emma, but because of his sweet, vulnerable reference to his feelings, and because it made me realize, once again, how you never know how your one wild and precious life may be interacting with others’.

Here’s one final shot, showing the crowd that, like me, couldn’t actually stand to be all that close to the loud band, even though we loved the music and the camaraderie.

still more, but away from band

All in all, a wonderful day. Thanks everybody, for sauntering over! Thanks, Georgia! And thank you, The Forest Gras Band! Check them out!

cdbaby.com/Artist/Forestgras

forestgras.com

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May Meeting: longer than usual, spirited, at times contentious, but fun!

By 1 commentAssociation, Uncategorized
frog in the GANG pond

One of the two adult frogs in the GANG pool. I think the female (they’re bigger). This couple has called the GANG pond home for two years now. Polliwogs now swarm . . .

GANA Meeting May 6, 2013

Christian Science Church

2425 E. 3rd St.

7:00 p.m.

Present: Doug, Jim, Georgia, Jelene, Ann and, later, Al

A small coterie of Green Acres residents scooted circled chairs close and proceeded to hammer out our the pre-set agenda items, one by one, until done. The atmosphere was spirited, and, at times, contentious, argumentative, and, amazingly enough, also filled with good will. Somehow we are learning how to air our disagreements without shutting down or hating each other . . .

We greatly missed our friend and neighbor, the late John Gaus, who died about  a month ago, and who would have loved to argue, too.

Agenda:

• Bypass protection: Ann mentioned that Linda Thompson, Senior Environmental Planner for the city of Bloomington, had once told her that when the Bypass widening was done, we should contact her. That the city needs to recreate some sort of barrier for those homes severely affected by the widened Bypass. And yet, as someone at the meeting noted, “Why is no one here from the areas affected? Why should we care, if they don’t?” We also briefly discussed the ideas of possibly applying for a Neighborhood Improvement Grant to construct the barriers, and of reaching out to Bread & Roses, a local permaculture tree farm, for help as well. First step: Ann will contact Linda Thompson and let the group at this meeting know the results.

• Annual Bloomington Neighborhood Celebration, June 1st. Ann, Jim, Doug and Georgia all agreed to help table at this event that brings neighborhood associations together to share ideas and fun. Rather than the traditional “Awards Ceremony,” Vickie Provine of HAND has asked each neighborhood to draw up a “Neighborhood Potluck Idea” to share with other neighborhoods — either an idea that has already become a reality or one that’s in the works. Everybody agreed that the GANG (Green Acres Neighborhood Garden), now entering its fifth growing season, is the obvious choice, for us. Other possibilities included: our visioning process with the city; Jennifer’s new, whole yard garden, GANE (Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage), and the Gift Circle.

Ann agreed to write up the GANG garden and submit it as GANA’s contribution.

• Green Acres Neighborhood Ecovillage (GANE): Doug told the story of how GANE got started, two years ago, when he moved into Green Acres across the street from Ann, as a way of further realizing our long term vision/goal of a sustainable neighborhood. So far, it sits shimmering on the internet as mostly virtual reality, but the information on the GANE website draws at least one or two calls a month from people from elsewhere who would like to move to a place that sounds so ideal; plus Doug spoke for an hour with the man who started Enright Village in Cincinnati, likewise working towards retrofitting an existing neighborhood into an ecovillage. A few of us plan to visit Cincinnati soon to learn more about how they are coming along.

That segued into a considerable discussion about ways to encourage more families, retired people, faculty and other working people, graduate students, etc. to move into the neighborhood, so that it wouldn’t be so dominated by undergraduate rentals. Jelene talked about taking pictures of existing houses for rent or purchase, and Georgia said she would talk to her daughter Lucy who lists them for her neighborhood and might be happy to do so for ours. We could then have a list of properties up on our websites (GANA and GANE) for newcomers. (Neighbor Jane did this for GANA for a year or two, homes for purchase, though not to rent. Thank you, Jane!)

And that discussion segued into yet another one, how to build membership in GANA. We thought of a band night (for all the bands that practice in the neighborhood), with food and possibly a fundraiser. Possibly at the Comedy Club, since Georgia knows the owners. But the idea that seemed to stick was  “movie night,” pairing our meetings with movies, like we did with a Speaker Series a few years ago. It would be easy to do in the new space.

• GANG Garden: Jim, the new director of the garden talked about our SPEA interns (three of them at this point), and new projects there. These include:

  • the Wildlife Habitat designation and sign that we are about to apply for
  • the new and improved teepee for beans
  • renovations inside the green house
  • the John Gaus Memorial bed (made from the Elm tree that died. John was a great lover of trees.)
  • fundraiser (for both GANA and GANG): Yard sale? (Need to plan this further, if so, discussion inconclusive); baked sale? (that may be a problem, in terms of new regulations of some kind. Jelene will investigate.) Or should we just ask for membership dues again. It seems easier . . .

    Gaus bed

    The John Gaus Memorial Garden Bed (teepee to the left, tarp-covered hugelculture bed in background)

  • Kickstarter (crowdfunding) for GANG structures (a new gate with limestone, a new, strong trellis for blackberries, a drip irrigation system).
  • The possibility of adding ducks rather than chickens to the garden system, though ducks are not yet sanctioned by the city. (Ducks are easier to care for, their eggs are bigger, and they eat garden slugs.).

• Final Item: sketches for painting the utility box at the corner of Bryan and 3rd. This was the contentious part of the meeting, saved for last, since we knew that it would be difficult, given that people have different tastes in art, and, as the monsignor used to thunder from the pulpit when I was a kid, “De Gustibus, Non Disputandum Est” (in taste, there is no dispute).

But of course, there was a dispute. And not just about artistic taste, but about just what should the box convey? What are the ideas behind the box, asked Doug. Well, I said, that’s not how Jim and Georgia went about it. They asked the neighborhood list-serve what people would like to see on the box, and they got lots of responses (hmm. So people don’t like to come to meetings, but they do read the emails and they do respond to this kind of request.). And most of the responses were animals: deer, dogs, coyotes, cats — these were the ones that ended up sketched by the artist that Jim chose, who has done public art before and he likes her style. Some of us at the meeting also liked it, and others did not. Some thought that what should be on the box is the logo, since we already have a logo, and it’s beautiful, and it’s on our teeshirts and banners and website, etc. etc. And please! We need continuity!

Jim kept countering that this is an artistic project, and that he’s holding the space for the artist . . .

We collectively decided to drop the deer, since we’d rather not have deer coming through the neighborhood — they eat our gardens. Likewise, drop the coyote (too scary) and replace with a dog. And maybe add smaller wildlife, like rabbits, chipmunks, and squirrels. And, Al said, butterflies! And, I said, several times, tweak the sketch of the bee so it looks more like a bee, and not a hornet!

But why are we so focused on the animals? Why not the people, and the plants? — several chorused. How about change the position of the hands in the sketch to include a seed, asked Jim. How about adding a tree, like is in our original logo, wailed everybody else. On and on.

And shouldn’t it say “Green Acres Neighborhood,” not just “Green Acres,” as indicated by the sketches? And the tone of the sketches look religious! (rays coming out of a sun . . .).

The breakthrough moment came when we all realized that the entire discussion had been operating with two hidden assumptions: one, held by Jim, that this was an art project, not a sign announcing the neighborhood.

As in this description, from the city gov website:

The Adopt a Box Program is part of the City of Bloomington’s Stop and StART initiative which seeks to enliven the mundane and beautify the basic in accessible locations through a series of public art projects.

Proposals may be submitted by any individual or organization and should include a detailed description of the location of the traffic box, a color rendering of the artwork proposed and information on the artist or artist team who will be creating the artwork. A list of artists or artist teams is available from BEAD upon request. Adopters are responsible for supplies including primer and paint.

And the other, that this painting should be our neighborhood’s sign, and should be the logo.

Aaah! How about separating out the two? How about a Green Acres sign with our logo on it, and the art project on the box? Okay, now we can all get behind it.

We hope to apply for a Small and Simple Grant to cover the costs of this joint project.

Jim will send the sketches back to the artist to to alter and refine. And he’ll get back to this group with the results.

 

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