3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship - Majora Carter

So today I'm gonna tell you about some people who didn't move out of their neighborhoods. The first one is happening right here in Chicago. Brenda Palms Farmer was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison. Currently, taxpayers spent about sixty thousand dollars per year sending a person to jail. We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back. I find it interesting that for every $1 we spend, however, on early childhood education, like Head Start, we save $17 on stuff like incarceration in the future. Or think about it; that $60,000 is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well.

But Brenda, not being fazed by stuff like that, took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution: create a business that produced skincare products from honey. Okay, might be obvious to some of you; it wasn't to me. It's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential. She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees, harvest the honey, and make value-added products that they marketed themselves that were later sold at Whole Foods. She combined employment experience and training with life skills they needed, like anger management and teamwork, and also how to talk to future employers about how their experiences actually demonstrated the lessons that they had learned and their eagerness to learn more.

Less than four percent of the folks that went through her program actually go back to jail. So these young men and women learned job readiness and life skills through beekeeping and becoming productive citizens in the process. Talk about a sweet beginning!

Now I'm gonna take you to Los Angeles, and you know I know lots of people know that, you know, LA has its issues, but I'm going to talk about LA's water issues right now. They have not enough water on most days, and too much to handle when it rains. Currently, twenty percent of California's energy consumption is used to pump water into most Southern California. They're spending loads and loads to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well.

Now Andy Lipkis is working to help LA cut infrastructure costs associated with water management in urban heat island, linking trees, people, and technology to create a more livable city. All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs stormwater; it also helps cool our cities. Because come and think about it, you know, do you really want air conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want? How you get it shouldn't make that much of a difference.

So a few years ago, the LA County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools, and Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million dollars of that on asphalt to surround the schools themselves. By presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the LA government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery around the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure.

So ultimately, twenty million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided; electrical consumption for air conditioning went down while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up, resulting in a net savings to the system but also healthier students and school systems' employees as well.

Now Judy Bonds is a Coal Miner's Daughter. Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia, and if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history of the town, it should be Judy. But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines, you know, that her father and her father's father would go down into and then employed essentially thousands and thousands of people.

Now two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months and only for about a few years’ worth of coal. That kind of technology is called mountaintop removal; it can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months. Just imagine that. The air surrounding, you know, these places, it's filled with the residue of explosives and coal. Give some of the people that we were with a strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so—not just miners, but everybody.

And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned, and the coal companies, you know, just move on after the mountain was empty, leaving even more unemployment in their wake. But she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain and one that was reduced in elevation by over two thousand feet.

Three years of dirty energy with not many jobs, or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region's wind. She calculated the upfront cost and the payback over time, and it's a net plus on so many levels for the local, national, and global economy.

It's a longer payback than mountaintop removal, but the wind energy actually pays back forever; the mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals and it gives them a lot of misery. The water has turned into goo, you know, most people are still unemployed, leading to most of the same kind of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience: drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, and poor health as well.

Now Judy and I have to say totally related to each other—not quite an obvious alliance. Literally, her hometown is called Whitesville, Pennsylvania. I mean, they're not like they ain't competing be like for the birthplace of hip hop title or anything like that, Edda, but you know the back of my t-shirt than what she gave me, it says "Save the Endangered Hillbillies." So you know, look, so homegirls and hillbillies, we got it together and totally understand that this is what it's all about.

But um, just a few months ago, Judy was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer, and um, yeah, and it's since moved to her bones and her brain. You know, despite, it's so bizarre that she suffered from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from. But her dream of Coal River Mountain wind is her legacy, and uh, you know, she might not get to see that mountaintop, but um, rather than writing yet some kind of another manifesto or something, you know, she's leaving behind a business plan to make it happen. That's what my homegirl is doing, so I'm so proud of that.

But you know, these three people don't know each other, and but they do have an awful lot in common. They're all problem solvers and they're just some of the many examples that I'm really privileged to see, meet, and learn from in the examples of the work that I do. Now I was really lucky to have them all featured on my Corporation for Public Radio radio show called The Promised Land.

Now they're all very practical visionaries. They take a look at the demands that are out there: beauty products, healthy schools, electricity, and how the money is flowing to meet those demands. And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs, you're left with unemployed people, and those people aren't cheap. In fact, they make up some of what I call the most expensive citizens, and they include generationally impoverished, traumatized vets returning from the Middle East, you know, people coming out of jail.

And for the veterans in particular, the VA said that there's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003. I think that number is probably going to go up. They're not the largest number of people, but they are the most expensive, and in terms of likelihood for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, poor performance by their kids in schools, and also poor health as a result of stress.

So these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands, reduce the social problems that we have now, and prevent new problems in the future. And there are plenty of examples like that. You know one problem? Waste handling and unemployment. Even when we think of talk about recycling, lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or landfilled, leaving many municipalities' diversion rates, or they leave much to be recycled.

And where is this waste handled? Usually in poor communities. And we know that eco-industrial business—that these kind of business models—there's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell.

We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing. And in my hometown, we actually tried to do one of these in the Bronx, but there, our mayor decided that what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot. Fortunately, and because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs, after many years, the city wanted to build a jail. They've since abandoned that project, thank goodness.

Another problem? Unhealthy food systems and unemployment. Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water, and also refrigeration. Mega agricultural operations are often responsible for poisoning our waterways and our land, and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity.

And so we know urban AG is a big, you know, buzz topic this time of the year, but it's mostly gardening, which has some value in community—billions, lots of it—but it's not in terms of creating jobs or pre-food production. The numbers just aren't there. Part of my work now is really laying the groundwork to our integrated urban AG and rural food system to hasten the demise of the three-thousand-mile salad by creating a national brand of urban-grown produce that in every city uses regional growing power and augments it with indoor growing facilities owned and operated by small growers, where now they're our only consumers.

This can support, you know, seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really can't meet the year-round demand for produce. It's not a competition with rural farmers; it's actually reinforcement and allies in a really positive and economically viable food system. The goal is to meet the city's institutional demands for hospitals, senior centers, schools, daycare centers, and produce a network of regional jobs as well.

This is smart infrastructure, and how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day. Our municipalities, rural and urban, play the operational course of infrastructure things like waste disposal, energy demand, as well as the social costs of unemployment, dropout rates, incarceration rates, and the impacts of various public health costs. Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways to help municipalities handle both infrastructure and social needs.

And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who are formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base. Imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability. So I'm hoping you can see a little theme here. These examples indicate a trend. I haven't created it, and it's not happening by accident. I'm noticing that it's happening all over the country, and the good news is that it's growing, and we all need to be invested in it.

It is an essential pillar to this country's recovery, and I call it hometown security. The recession has us reeling and fearful, and there's something in the air these days that is also very empowering. It's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery. You know, now is the time for us to act in our own communities, where we think local and we act local. And when we do that, our neighbors, be they next door or in the next state or in the next country, we'll be just fine. You know, the some of the local is the global.

Hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses, putting people to work, restoring our natural systems. Hometown security means creating wealth here at home instead of destroying it overseas. Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings, wealth generation, and national security. Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America. The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more.

Now hometown security is about taking care of your own, but it's not like the old saying, "charity begins at home." I recently read a book called "Love Leadership" by John Hope Bryan, and it's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear. Reading that book made me reflect on that phrase because I need to explain what I mean by that.

See, my dad was a great, great man in many ways. He grew up in the segregated South, escaped the lynching and all that during some really hard times. But he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times. But like all of us, we had some problems, and his was gambling—compulsively, to him. That phrase, "charity begins at home," meant that Michael's payday, you know, or someone else's, would just happen to coincide with his lucky day.

So, you know, you need to help him out. And sometimes I would loan him money, you know, from my after-school or summer jobs, and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest, of course, you know, after he hit it big. And he did sometimes, believe it or not, at a racetrack in Los Angeles. One reason to love LA, back in the 1940s, he made $15,000 cash and bought up the house that I grew up in, so I'm not that unhappy about that.

But um, listen, I did feel obligated, you know, to him. And I grew up then; I grew up, and I'm a grown woman now, and I have learned a few things along the way. To me, charity often is just about giving because you're supposed to, or because it's what you've always done, or it used to be about giving until it hurts. I'm about providing the means to build something that will grow and intensify its original investment and not just require greater giving next year—not trying to feed the habit.

I spent some years, you know, watching how good intentions for community empowerment that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it actually left people in the same, if not worse, position that they were in before. And over the past twenty years, we've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars on social problems, yet educational outcomes, malnutrition, incarceration, obesity, diabetes, income disparity—they've all gone up, with some, you know, some exceptions—in particular infant mortality you know, but among people in poverty.

But you know lots of great world that we're bringing them into as well. And I know a little bit about these issues because for many years, I spent a long time in the nonprofit industrial complex, and I'm a recovering executive director—two years clean. But during that time, you know, I realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities.

But I really did struggle for financial support. The greater our success, the less money came in from foundations. And I tell you, being on the TED stage and winning a MacArthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived. By the time I'd moved on, I was actually covering a third of my agency's budget deficit with speaking fees. And I think, because early on, frankly my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time. But since then, the pocket has just been a dump. It was featured at a TED 2006 talk; it became this little thing, but I did, in fact, get married in it over here.

There goes my dog, who led me to the park.