Sustainability – Save Antioch College

Local food activists strategize, plan for a commercial kitchen

A growing interest among villagers around local food has sparked several upcoming events, including a garden tour and a series of potlucks. And the interest has led to an ambitious effort to make the village a regional food hub, with an initial step of creating a commercial kitchen as the first component of a community economic incubator.

“There’s a vibrant local food conversation taking place in Yellow Springs,” said Susan Jennings, executive director of Community Solutions, an organization that is helping to facilitate that conversation. “There’s a lot of community interest.”

Yellow Springs as food hub

The growing interest and energy around local food can be linked to the issue’s intersection with a variety of villagers’ concerns, including environmental sustainability, small town resiliency, economic development, nutrition and physical health, along with the pleasure of eating fresh food.

“We have a good group of people and it’s getting larger all the time,” according to Macy Reynolds of the local food committee of the Resiliency Network.

That energy and enthusiasm has led activists to begin pursuing an ambitious vision of making Yellow Springs a food hub in the region. The first step toward doing so is creating a commercial kitchen to help those who aim to pursue a local-food based livelihood.

“We’re trying to meet the needs of people who are trying to make money from growing local foods,” Reynolds said.

Such a commercial kitchen would serve as a resource for farmers, entrepreneurs, caterers, villagers and Antioch faculty, staff and students, according to a document recently released by Community Solutions. It would provide services such as preparation space for bakers and food processors, storage space for food trucks, teaching space for classes on food preparation and preservation and entrepreneurial opportunities for food businesses.

And the kitchen would be the first component in a larger vision of a community economic incubator, according to the document. Such an incubator would provide shared services and support for start-up businesses.

Community Solutions sees itself not as the sole mover-and-shaker on the project, but rather a participant that enables the process, according to Jennings last week.

“I see Community Solutions as not leading the charge, but being willing to broker the conversation and make things happen,” Jennings said, stating that the conversation around a food kitchen had predated her coming on the job two years ago.

The nonprofit has identified the central back wing of the Sontag Fels building on the Antioch College campus as a potential site for the kitchen. The site, which is adjacent to the Community Solutions offices, is a likely location because it has ample space, including space to build out to create a full community economic incubator, access to an underused parking lot and a central location for both the college and the community, according to the Community Solutions document.

Community Solutions is currently in talks with Antioch College, which owns the building, regarding the project, according to Jennings. While the hope is that the college will choose to partner with Community Solutions on the commercial kitchen and community incubator, organizers plan to go ahead and find a different location if the college chooses to not be involved.

The purpose of a community economic incubator is clearly in line with Community Solutions founder Arthur Morgan’s philosophy of the value of small communities, and the need to strengthen their economic infrastructure by creating many small businesses.

“He saw people as leaving small towns because of the lack of interesting jobs and interesting conversations,” Jennings said. “He believed that democracy thrived in the small community, but that democracy is meaningless if you don’t have economic structures.”

Organizers for the project aim to spend the next year surveying the area and community regarding the needs of those involved in local food production, according to local food committee member Julia Navaro, a 2016 graduate of Antioch College and current employee of the Antioch Farm. Other priorities include creating a business plan and cost analysis. According to Jennings, a very rough estimate is that $1 million will be needed for the project, with half coming from grants and the rest from donations. The group estimates a three-year period for planning, development and build-out, with an estimated opening of the food hub in the summer of 2019.

The time is right to move forward, organizers believe.

“I’m really excited,” said Navaro. “This has been a conversation at Antioch for a while now.”

Upcoming events

Those interested in local food issues can take part in two upcoming events, sponsored by the local food committee of the Resiliency Network.

This Sunday at 10:30 a.m., villagers are invited to join a garden tour of local vegetable and pollinator gardens. The event will start at the Antioch Farm (meet in the parking lot behind the Wellness Center), after which participants will visit the High Street garden of Al Schlueter. Then at about noon the group will tour the Orton Road pollinator garden of Macy Reynolds.

The garden tour is a followup to a similar event held last fall in Schlueter’s large backyard garden, when the focus was on the greenhouse in which he grows greens over the winter. The interest in the tour was robust, according to Schlueter, with about 50 people attending. This Sunday he’ll introduce people to his garden at the peak of the growing season, when he’s ready to harvest “everything you can think of.” At Sunday’s event, he hopes to address people’s questions about all aspects of gardening, including planting, mulching and protecting against animals, as well as learn new tips himself.

“I always get ideas from others,” he said in a recent interview.

Reynolds has been working for about 10 years on her pollinator garden, which contains the various layers of vegetation that insects require for both pollination and shelter, she said recently. She’s also found that creating a garden that draws an abundance of “good” insects keeps down the number of “bad” insects that destroy plants.

“It works,” she said of her garden.

In a second upcoming event, the local food committee will host its monthly Local Foods Potluck, which takes place the last Sunday of every month at 2 p.m. in the First Methodist Church. This month’s event takes place on Sunday, Aug. 28, with a talk by Schlueter on preserving vegetables using the methods of canning, freezing and dehydrating.

The monthly potlucks grew from a series of local food events last November sponsored by the Resiliency Network. A core group that attended the events has been meeting ever since, according to Reynolds, one of the organizers. Other members include Bob Huston, Beth Bridgeman, Schlueter, Navaro, Tim Honcho, Mike Breza, Sylvia Carter Denny, Nancy Lineburgh, Peggy Nestor, Carmen Milano, and Bonnie and Mickey Wilkinson.

The monthly potluck grew from the group’s awareness that some villagers were reluctant to support local community-supported agriculture, or CSAs, because they didn’t know how to cook unfamiliar vegetables. Consequently, each event includes a cooking demonstration by Milano, funded by a grant from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

All villagers are invited to attend the potlucks, and while participants are encouraged to contribute a local food dish, they’re also welcome to join in without contributing, according to Reynolds.

‘Deep green’ architect to talk at Antioch College

Architect Jason McLennan, a pioneer of sustainable design and creator of the Living Building Challenge, will speak this Saturday, Aug. 13, at 7 p.m. in the Antioch South Gym. (Submitted Photo by Paul Dunn)

A “deep green” architect is coming to Yellow Springs. Jason McLennan, recent winner of two major architectural awards and a pioneer of green building design, will give a public talk on Saturday, Aug. 13, from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Wellness Center South Gym at Antioch College. McLennan has designed dozens of innovative green projects around the world, and was recently announced as the designer for Antioch College Village’s cohousing pilot. Seattle-based McLennan and his team will be on campus during the weekend for a series of sessions with college leaders and prospective cohousing community members to kick off the cohousing project. His Saturday evening talk, however, is open to all villagers interested in green design and the ways in which buildings, people and the natural environment interrelate.

“Jason is a very talented designer, somebody in the vanguard of thinking about what it means to develop the built environment in a truly sustainable way,” said Sandy Wiggins, a green building expert and a consultant to Antioch College on the College Village project. Wiggins brought McLennan and the college together; the architect and his team are providing some pro bono services to get the cohousing pilot off the ground this fall.

McLennan is known worldwide as the creator of the Living Building Challenge, a framework that moves far beyond traditional sustainability measures and requires that buildings play a positive, regenerative role in local ecosystems. According to the website of the nonprofit International Living Future Institute, which manages the programs and conducts related advocacy work, buildings that meet all or even some of the Living Building criteria can claim to be the “greenest in the world.”

Talk on Green Design
“Deep green” architect Jason McLennan, a pioneer in sustainability and green design, will give a public talk on Saturday, Aug. 13, from 7 to 8 p.m. in the South Gym of Antioch College’s Wellness Center. The college has engaged McLennan to design the cohousing pilot project for Antioch College Village. McLennan’s talk will focus on connections between that project and worldwide trends in environmental design.

“The Living Building Challenge goes beyond the idea of minimizing harm … to create buildings and projects that are good for people and the planet,” McLennan explained in a recent interview. “It’s a very holistic framework for all the ways [buildings] impact on the world and in turn impact on people’s lives.”

That program led, in 2014, to the creation of the Living Community Challenge, which uses the principles of the Living Building Challenge to set sustainability standards for groups of buildings.

The Living Building Challenge and Living Community Challenge are “the standard bearers,” affirmed Wiggins. “They’re the “tip of the spear,” both in terms of what’s being called for and what’s possible in green design.”

ACV first ‘Living Community’?

At Wiggins’ recommendation, Antioch College adopted the Living Community Challenge as the framework for Antioch College Village, or ACV, in 2014. The college’s embrace of the Living Community standards was one reason he was attracted to the cohousing pilot, McLennan said. “There’s a tight synergy in values and ideals,” he explained.

Though the originator of the Living Building Challenge and founder of the International Living Future Institute, McLennan is no longer an employee of the Institute and is not involved in the assessment of projects.

The Living Community Challenge “scales up” the earlier Living Building Challenge. “Philosophically, they’re siblings,” McLennan said. “But they have different scales and different issues arise.” Rather than assessing a single building, Living Community standards measure the sustainability of a collection of buildings, such as a neighborhood, campus or city block.

There are currently no certified communities, though projects are underway in a variety of cities, McLennan said. The process takes time; the Living Community Challenge includes an upfront masterplan review, so the standards actually help guide the design framework for a project, as well as measure the outcome.

If certified under the Living Community Challenge standards, Antioch College Village could be the first such project in the world, both Wiggins and McLennan emphasized.

In his public talk, McLennan will not only describe the principles and philosophy of the Living Building Challenge and Living Community Challenge, but also provide case studies that he hopes will illuminate “what’s possible in green design,” he said.

One such case study is the Bullitt Center in Seattle, which was billed as the “world’s greenest office building” when it opened on Earth Day in 2013. According to a report aired by Northwest Public Radio on April 18, 2013, the Bullitt Center’s unique attributes include its use of 100 percent sustainably harvested lumber, the world’s only six-story composting toilet system and 575 rooftop solar panels that supply all of the building’s energy. The panels also collect rainwater, which is funneled to a 56,000-gallon cistern in the basement that provides all the building’s water.

The Bullitt Center meets the highest level of Living Building standards. First put forward in 2006, these standards are used to evaluate projects across seven performance categories: place, water, energy, health and happiness, materials, equity and beauty. Each of these has smaller, specific subcategories. Energy, for example, is measured in terms of “net positive energy,” which mandates that 100 percent of a building’s energy needs are self-generated using no combustion-based sources.

While certain metrics, such as for building materials and energy, may overlap with other green certifications such as LEED and Forest Stewardship Council, they are far more stringent than all other existing measures, according to the International Living Future Institute website. And many of the Living Building Challenge criteria bring an utterly novel focus on human well-being, according to McLennan.

“The training of architecture is really about how the built environment impacts the mental and emotional and physical well-being of people,” he said. Under the terms of the Living Building Challenge, these impacts are extended to the health of the ecosystem and the lives of plants and non-human animals within it, he added.

There are currently about 100 Living Building-certified buildings around the world, according to Wiggins, and many more in the process of development. Unlike other certification programs, Living Building projects are assessed based on actual, not projected performance. This means that projects must be operational for at least 12 consecutive months before they are evaluated, adding another layer of rigor to the process, McLennan said.

Cohousing kick-off

Beyond his public talk, McLennan and his team will spend the weekend on the Antioch College campus gathering information for the first iteration of the cohousing design. One key decision is the location of the cohousing project, selected from several potential sites on campus, according to Wiggins. McLennan will also engage college leaders and prospective cohousing residents — specifically, members of the local cohousing group, the Antioch Eco-Village Pioneers — in a programming exercise to elicit basic design criteria for the project, including the design of individual units, the organization of units in relation to each other and the design and amenities of the common house that is a focal point of cohousing communities.

McLennan said he’ll be doing a lot of listening that weekend. “We take a very patient period of listening and learning. We view our project as having two clients: the people and the community writ large, which includes other species and future generations.” So he’ll be making a careful study of place, climate, culture and people, he said.

Though he’s designed many different types of projects around the world, Antioch College Village’s cohousing pilot will be his first cohousing project. And this will be his first time in Yellow Springs and Ohio. But all projects are, in a sense, new to him, he said.

“I don’t like to come into a design project with a predetermined aesthetic. I don’t know what it will look like, and that’s the point. But it will be beautiful,” he promised, with a laugh.

With this weekend’s kick-off session, Wiggins said that the college is on track to complete the cohousing pilot’s conceptual design phase by the end of the year. He is currently raising funds for the pilot, previously estimated to cost $2.2 million for design and planning (an amount that includes some costs of the overall ACV project) and $6.5 million for construction. He is also working with the Village on zoning and planning.

“We’re hoping to begin building this time next year,” Wiggins said.

Groups striving for a local economy of resilience, equity

These are a few of the many ideas and projects that villagers will be discussing this month at a series of free events, organized by Community Solutions and the YS Resilience Network, that focus on the local economy. The goal, said Community Solutions Executive Director Susan Jennings on Monday, “is to build an economy that provides for as many goods and services locally as nationally — to move us to greater self-sufficiency, greater resilience and greater equity.”

The local economy events are part of a months-long series tackling topics ranging from local food to waste reduction to housing. Community Solutions and the YS Resilience Network are the organizers of the series, in collaboration with other local groups and with financial support from the Yellow Springs Community Foundation. Two more months remain in the series: April events will focus on renewable energy, and May will address transportation.

But in a sense, said Jennings, this month’s focus encompasses all the topics. “The emphasis on the local, and the impact of local initiatives in all these different areas on our local economy, really ties the whole series together,” she said.

There are lots of reasons why a local economy is a resilient economy, she added. “When you can meet your needs locally, you’re less susceptible to supply chain shocks or turmoil in the international financial system,” she said. And when you buy and invest locally, the impact of dollars spent and invested is concentrated.

“Studies have shown that if you shop locally, three times more of your money stays in the local community,” she said.

Local economic activity also builds a sense of community and people’s skill sets. “People working together have an opportunity to interact, to bond,” said Jennings. Not to mention the compelling environmental reasons for meeting a community’s needs within the community, rather than relying on goods and services from afar.

One example of an innovative local economy initiative that’s already underway is the Yellow Springs Time Exchange. Coordinated by villager Kat Walter, the time exchange, also known as a time bank, is a mechanism for connecting a community’s needs and skills without the exchange of money.

“These are just popping up all over the world,” Walter noted on Monday.

The local time bank was launched in November, following an earlier iteration developed by Antioch College students last June. The current Yellow Springs Time Exchange is a merge between the two groups, and currently has around 70 members. Services offered and requested range from piano lessons to dog walking to elder care to house weatherization to transportation to simple companionship, said Walter.

“We’re still getting off the ground, but we’ve seen more offers and requests in the past month,” she said. A potluck to bring together existing members and those interested in the time exchange was held on Wednesday, March 9, to kick off the local economy series.

Walter will discuss the time exchange in more detail this Thursday, March 10, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Antioch College Arts & Sciences Building, room 219, as part of a panel called “Regional Examples of the Sharing Economy.” The title refers to alternative forms of economic activity that rely on the sharing of access to goods and services, according to Jennings. The second panelist is Brett Joseph, a Cleveland-based educator and organizational systems consultant, speaking on the Cleveland Evergreen Cooperatives, a connected group of worker-owned cooperatives that provide goods and services to major Cleveland institutions. And the third panelist is Lisa Daris, chapter coordinator for Slow Money Central Ohio, an organization that connects local investors with local food systems.

Jennings said on Monday that there are many ideas bubbling up, locally and around the county, about new and more democratic forms of economy. The concept of a worker-owned cooperative food hub in Yellow Springs is one such idea, and it’s smart and doable, according to both Jennings and Walter.

“We already have a wonderful local food base,” said Jennings. We can expand this into a food hub.”

Such a hub could offer shared facilities (such as a commercial kitchen), shared services (such as distribution and marketing, perhaps even a “local brand”) and access to local financing and business consulting. Working groups at the YS Resilience Network and Antioch College are already deep in discussions of how such a hub would work, said Jennings.

Villagers interested in a food hub and other cooperative economic models are invited to attend a workshop tackling these topics, held Saturday, March 19, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the United Methodist Church. “Toward a Democratic Economy” will begin with a keynote from Peter Block of Cincinnati, an expert in community building and empowerment, and will feature sessions on developing local financing and investing, a cooperative entrepreneurial hub and a cooperative food hub.

Jennings noted that this month’s conversations build on earlier brainstorming and planning sessions. In 2009, Community Solutions brought local economy pioneer Michael Shuman to the village for a workshop on strengthening the local economy by capitalizing on local assets, including time, talent and money, and reducing “leakages” of investment and spending. A number of the ideas that got expressed during those discussions have borne fruit, Jennings said, highlighting Antioch’s Wellness Center, the construction of the Mills Park Hotel and the college’s solar array, as well as recent movement toward a municipal solar array on the Glass Farm property.

“It’s important that people know we have these conversations, and they have a long-term impact in terms of actions and projects in the community,” she said.

The final event of the month is a free screening of the documentary “Money and Life,” by director Katie Teague, on Sunday, March 20, at 1 p.m. at the Little Art Theatre. The film — a look at the origins and meanings of money and a call to revise our relationship to it — touches on some of the deepest implications of the term “local economy,” according to Jennings.

“We’ve been mesmerized into thinking wealth is the same thing as money,” she said, when in fact it is much more: the relationships in a community; the sharing of skills, time and talents; the physical forms a community takes. Underlying the many experiments in new and more democratic forms of economy is a fundamental shift in our concept of wealth and ownership.

“We’re moving away from a sense of abundance that comes from what we [individually] own to what we have in common as a community,” said Jennings.

All local economy events are free. See the Facebook pages of Community Solutions and YS Resilience Network for details.