Anyone who thinks of Greening Greenfield’s biennial sustainability forum as a pie-in-the-sky menu of fantastic ideas, it has dark clouds for context in the title for this weekend’s day-long event, “May You Live in Interesting Times — Building Just Communities in a Time of Chaos.”
Saturday’s fifth annual conference at Greenfield Community College will include keynote speakers U.S. Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass. and Boston social activist Rev. Mariama White-Hammond.
There will be 13 workshops offering “hope and direction” from community leaders already working on solutions to today’s problems.
“What we saw was that people were getting very discouraged about what was happening in the world, and were having trouble pulling something out of it,” said Susan Worgaftik, who chairs the forum planning committee for the 11-year-old, grassroots organization working to build a more resilient, sustainable future. “As much as everything seems chaotic and unmoored right now, a lot of positive things are happening here right now. We’re trying to show how people can engage with that.”
Thirty organizations responded to Greening Greenfield’s request for workshop proposals , from which a dozen were selected, about solar cooperatives, the tri-state “ecovation hub” being created in the aftermath of the Vermont Yankee plant closure, the effort to overcome hunger in the community and the effort to create a single-payer health-care system among them.
Other workshops will focus on building a downtown economy that can survive e-commerce, reconnecting people to the land to heal social dislocation and working together on common goals involving the climate change and social justice movements.
And, a group of students from Frontier Regional School will lead a discussion presenting their perspectives on climate change and what actions they see themselves taking in response.
Worgaftik, who said that about 130 people are expected to attend, said she would love to see more young people at the workshop — and they will be admitted for free. But even if the presentation by young people is only heard by adults, it’s still important for their voices to be heard.
Prior forums, which have attracted up to 180 people, have focused on agriculture’s potential impact on our economy, envisioning the world in 2050, alternative economic models and transportation and food justice innovations.
Workshop leaders will include conflict resolution leader Paula Greene, Traprock Center Director Pat Hynes and Strong Oak Lefebvre, co-founder of Visioning BEAR Circle intertribal Coalition.
Speaker White-Hammond, minister for ecological justice at Ethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, is a fellow of the Green Justice Coalition, a collaborative of people-of-color-led environmental groups.
McGovern, who was recently re-elected to a 12th term representing the 2nd Massachusetts Congressional District, and expects to chair the powerful House Rules Committee, has been an outspoken advocate on food access and local agriculture, as well as human rights and world peace.
Worgaftik said, “What we’re trying to do, at this time when there are so many anxious people — and it’s not only the political anxiety, it’s that the weather doesn’t seem to work right, everything just seems a little off — so how do we make it so that we can function, and that we can impact what’s happening and not just assume we’re victims subject to whatever’s out there. That’s the idea of bringing out all these options and letting people choose what they want to learn about.”
The forum also tries to help empower people organizer Becca King said. “This’s an anti-depressant right there. People come around to these forums to get a little mojo around what they can do.”
Although Greening Greenfield began working entirely on energy issues, Worgaftik said, “The more we did things, the more we realized that was related to other things. So then we went on to food and alternative ways of doing economic development in town. But, the overall thing has been how do we make this area sustainable. How do we make this very vibrant area able to maintain itself as a vibrant area? We realized there were all these other aspects of things we needed to understand better and learn to participate in.”
Held at GCC’s Cohen Dining Commons from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., the forum has a sliding-scale registration fee that includes a light breakfast, lunch and snacks.
More information and registration is available at:
www.greeninggreenfield.org or by calling 413-773-0228.