More on Community Development Ideas - Ohio

[Wed. March 4, 2009 11:30am Thai Time]
Sunny, a returned Peace Corps volunteer who served in Nepal and returned to Anchorage to become a math teacher and now works at UAA, forwarded an article from NPR. It's about two young men who have returned to their rural Ohio hometown to help out after a plant closure put people out of work. This is the kind of local community empowerment and idea creation and implementation that I've tried to get at in the two pieces on Rural Alaska. Here's a snippet, the link has the whole article.

Rembert is 24, with dark hair and a beard. He almost bounces with enthusiasm. He also was accepted to the Peace Corps and was set to go to Ecuador. But then, DHL Express, Wilmington's largest employer, announced it was going to shut down its domestic air-freight operations, leaving thousands without jobs.

"As soon as the announcement came out I knew, wow, this is going to be some sort of case study in how a small community deals with, you know, an incredible economic shock," Rembert recalls. "So I came back, and I immediately started a blog."

That was his way of trying to figure out what to do. Rembert and Stuckert like to talk things over a lot. And they began to think that maybe some of the Peace Corps philosophy, of helping communities help themselves, might be just what Wilmington and surrounding Clinton County needed — that this might be a chance for some real economic change. Something, Stuckert says, that would last.

We've become a nation of employees who are dependent on organizations - government and business - to hire us, pay us, etc. We work so hard that we don't have much time for real community involvement, real oversight over government agencies and over corporations. It seems that one of the responses to the current economic problems is to have more people take control of their own lives with small scale businesses and cooperatives.

Rather than throw away items because it costs more to fix than to buy a new one, let's take advantage of the people who know how to repair small appliances and who need work. Let's take advantage of all the 'resources' we throw away each week and find ways to reuse them. Let's do more support of local farmers this coming growing season and grow more at home as well.

Larger organizations also serve some purposes, but in the last 15 years or so, we have allowed, encouraged takeover after takeover, until we had organizations that were so large, that so many people depended on, that when they went bad, everyone was hurt. And economists think that we have to pour billions of dollars into saving them. In the meantime, we need to be creative, take initiative, and become a community that doesn't wait for politicians and ceo's to tell us what we can and can't do.