Earlier this week, I had a great back to school experience (I teach science at the Biddeford Middle School) during our Welcome Back to school in service training which inspired me to see if I can get a Resilience Initiative started here in our area. Our new principal hosted us in a 10 minute sticky note based brainstorming exercise during which the staff generated some great ideas around how to improve the school both in the short term and the long term. I propose to do a similar exercise in the early Summer of 2015 to kick off the Kennebunk Area Resilience Initiative.
In the first post of this blog, I mentioned that I intended this blog to serve as a virtual Transition Town until we can get a true, face-to-face effort started. In my previous attempt at starting a Transition Town, I found that the project was not clear enough for people to get behind. Hopefully we've all learned a few things since then that'll help us move forward with building a stronger, more locally self-reliant community, capable of getting through whatever comes our way, no-matter if it is an economic recession, a weather related event like hurricane Sandy, 70's-like energy crunch or something else completely unexpected. Moving towards a strong, resilient community like this is what the Resilience Initiative that I propose to start is all about.
How the effort is framed is key. Several weeks ago, I was talking with some friends about preparedness and was joking about preparing for the apocalypse, critiquing the prepper, survivalist mentality as unlikely to be successful (for more on this, please read Arthur Haines' essay on the topic). My friend's wife said she wasn't interested in being around for what is left after the Apocalypse so why prepare for it, and I realized that framing the issue in this way is not helpful. It seems to me that most of us would like to have been able to survive much more likely occurrences such as the great depression, or hurricane Katrina, and time and effort spent working towards developing resilience to help make surviving (and with a minimum of hardship and travail) more likely as time well spent.
I am generally not one to speak in high blown terms, usually preferring to understate things, but this project is truly about taking control of our destiny and working to make the our local future what we want it to be. Certainly the federal government won't be able to do it for us, nor can government at the state level - at best, the government can help foster what we would try to do, and it is up to us to really make it happen. This will only work if community members are involved in significant numbers.
Please join me in making it happen.
