Getting around Franklin County’s sparsely populated 725 square miles — 70 percent as large as Rhode Island — has long been a challenge for living on a limited income, and for solving the county’s economic problems.
Rural transportation and food-access challenges will be the two focal points of a day-long “rural living” conference being organized for Saturday by Greening Greenfield.
The region’s fourth sustainability conference, from 8:30 to 4 p.m. at Greenfield Community College, will bring together people from around the county and beyond “to see how we can make this rural transportation thing work, how we can develop an auxiliary, on-demand system to augment the existing fixed-route system to help people go where they need to go,” said Susan Worgaftik, an organizer of the forum that last year attracted 150 people from 18 towns around the county.
“If you’re a mom with a couple of kids and you’ve got a job, and you’ve got one kid you’ve got to get to school, one kid to get to day care and get to your job, you can’t do it on public transportation,” she said. “That forces us into a situation where lower-inome folks, if they have a car and it breaks down, the possibility of losing their employment gets higher. If they’re dependent on another person to get to work and that person gets sick … what then? So how do we develop a society where people can stay here? Can they actually live in a reasonable way here?”
Matt George, one of two keynote speakers, is founder and chief executive officer of Boston’s Bridgj — “the world’s first pop-up transit system” — which he and Worgaftik hope can inspire a model for an approach to piggyback onto FRTA’s existing bus system to address the needs of seniors, working people and others.
“How do we develop innovative systems that work for us?” asked Worgaftik, whose group has been working with Franklin Regional Transit Authority, Franklin Regional Council of Governments, Franklin County Community Development Corp., Franklin County Food Council, Interfaith Council of Franklin County and LifePath on the “Innovations for Rural Living” conference.
Leanne Brown, author of “Good & Cheap,” the “Eat Well on $4-a-Day” cookbook, will be the second keynote speaker, offering ideas on how to create healthy meals on a tight budget.
State Rep. Paul Mark, Linda Dunlavy of the COG, Clare Higgins of Community Action, Tina Cote of FRTA and Abdoul Samake of Leyden Woods will lead an open discussion following the talks.
Colrain singer Erica Wheeler will reflect during lunch on “Restoring Connection Between People and Place,” followed by five afternoon workshops to brainstorm real solutions for addressing food access issue and overcoming transportation gaps in rural Franklin County.
Among the workshop topics are “Race and Class in Our Local Food Economy,” “How Food Access Really Works” and “Six Food System Innovations for Your Town, including the Seeds of Solidarity youth garden.”
“We want to get people talking about this and maybe set up a pilot project or two to see if we can make it work,” said Worgaftik, pointing back to tangible results from earlier conferences.
A conference on rural economic development alternatives two years ago, for example, set a team out to work for a year and a half on a project to build a co-operative commercial laundry business with Baystate Franklin Medical Center as the anchor customer. Working with the Franklin-Hampshire Regional Employment Board, the Franklin County House of Correction, and the hospital, the Greening Greenfield-led group explored a business that could recruit people from Community Action and former inmates to do laundry for area nursing homes as well, rather than sending that business out of the county. The $3 million capital startup costs for handling the annual 2 million pounds of laundry proved unattainable, she said. “We were going up against the big guys, but we thought because we were local and responsive, we could compete. But we couldn’t make it work.”
An earlier conference the grassroots group led on agriculture, she said, also played a role in convincing Greenfield to offer land to then-fledgling Just Roots for its community farm, and its second conference led to a community health care initiative to foster better communications between the community and Baystate Franklin, Worgaftik said.
At Saturday’s conference, for which there is a sliding-scale registration fee, she added, “We’re trying to get as many people who are interested in doing something about these issues as we can to sit down and try to figure out some things, and hope some will become projects. It’s not just for people to sit and talk. We’ll see who wants to really work to get stuff done, to say we, ‘We can do that in our town,’ and move that forward.”
www.greeninggreenfield.org
You can reach Richie Davis at rdavis@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 269