With the Senate moving on a jobs bills, which is great and frankly overdue, they will help create 95,000 jobs a month across the country. That translates to 1,900 for each state (if evenly distributed which is unlikely), and 22,800 jobs over a year in each state. Keep in mind that in December 2009 the country witnessed 85,000 lost jobs in just the one month. Here in North Carolina, December 2009 figures reveal there are 491,578 unemployed. Roughly 5% will get jobs with this plan after 12 months. Quite simply, that's not enough. We need to do a lot more to get folks back to work.
Here are some ideas to kick around. Yes, most of these ideas will immediately raise the question of 'how do you pay for that?' and I would appreciate your insight and strategies on how we answer to that question. No real logical order to these, though some may be connected.
* Do extensive asset mapping at the community level. Identify residents, young and old, employed or unemployed, and all the skills that are present - plumbing, electrical, mechanic, banking, did you sing in the high school or church choir, creative cooks, good picture-taker, even good graffiti artists. This can be done by individuals from various backgrounds or experience, and would be ideally done in a fairly short time frame. Share the map in a GIS fashion in which the information is communicated to folks who seek it (or should be referring to it).
* Local farms to school lunches. This is a monster, but let me set up my argument for the urgency in this way: we have been very dramatically, and somewhat silently, losing family farms - or even small-scale farms (this is disproportionately the case for black farmers). Simultaneously, we also know that food provided at schools are, in general, not fresh, unbalanced, high in sodium and fats. Instead of schools paying some food distributor to drop off cases of cans of foods, does it not seem better for the local economy AND the health of our school kids for the schools to purchase food grown in the region? Now, I know this means increasing the school budget, but are our kids not worth the investment? and our local food producers worth supporting? The current set up is a double tragedy and frankly I believe this kind of fix is way past time. And yes, I realize this means schools will need more cooks/food prep - but guess what: there are folks who need jobs.
* Strengthening PTA's. This is something I need some more feedback on how it will work, but I list it here because of one major fact, and a minor detail caused by the recession. The major fact here is that our schools are failing our kids. No disrespect to the teachers out there who are working their butts off, but our schools have trimmed curricula so they only learn the basics, very little art - and the style of learning in which kids only fill bubble sheets and memorize brief passages: I may be oversimplifying, but there needs more extracurricular opportunities for kids to experience and grow beyond math, English, basic sciences, and recreation. This is something that unemployed community members may assist in some way - mentoring, helping around the schools, establishing and helping maintain a school garden (complete with composting), telling stories of the community - or personal histories (think Story Corps or Studs Terkel). I sort of envision this as a widespread asset building strategy similar to what is going on in Lenior County. The community organizers/leaders who did the asset mapping can help integrate key players into the schools.
* Community festivals. This may not get people to work directly, but it would serve as a localized public works project through social entrepreneurship - neighbors stepping up to highlight their community and the people in it. Show off the talents in the neighborhood. Invite town/county leaders, businesses, neighboring communities to attend. Such a festival would provide that creative outlet for the students of schools connected to the above idea of the PTA's. Most importantly, though, this would catalyze reinvestment from the ground up. {Note: this is an idea inspired from the Emerging Issues Forum last week - a great comment about the event is here}
* Weatherization and housing rehab. We know the hardest hit sector has been the construction sector. There are stimulus funds to help folks make their houses more energy efficient with insulation. Hire crews of unemployed individuals to install these home improvements. Not only provides some jobs but will help those families that receive the improvements stretch out their family budgets.
* Pre-fabricated homes for Haiti. I cannot find the article, but a work colleague alerted me to a design that some folks at NCState have for a solid build-it-yourself house (think of buying a house from Ikea) that would serve the people displaced by the Earthquake in Haiti. Parts would need manufacturing to certain specs (again, putting those construction folks to work), and then transported to Haiti where the NCState folks can train Haitians how they are built, who may then subsequently gather work teams among the displaced families to construct those homes. Probable funding from USAID. This would likely be temporary, but a very beneficial product while also getting people back to work.
* Temporary stormwater treatment. With the establishment of strict nutrient-loading in the Jordan Lake watershed, the towns and municipalities in the watershed have a pressing public works project to address their stormwater treatment. I suggest a sort of middle ground in which some unemployed folks construct a sort of mobile, temporary treatment device, like a sandbag, only it's filled with crushed rock and cement and maybe textiles. These bags can be placed strategically and treat x-number of inches of rain, and then may be simply rotated out with a new one (the one removed may be flushed out responsibly and reused). {and think about it, those shipments of pre-fab homes to Haiti can bring back cement and debris}* Reclaiming the kitchen sink. Between the clunkers that were so widely traded in last year and the proposed program to trade in old appliances for new, energy-efficient ones, there must be something that can be done with the old materials to be reclaimed into something useful in the future economy. I have a crazy vision (obviously, I have many, but I'll stick to one right here) that such materials can be useful in someway in either solar panels or home-based wind turbines.
Allow me to go back to the idea of the schools hiring more kitchen staff to prepare fresh food. I was in a meeting several years ago in a community looking to obtain improved wastewater services, and when the topic of decentralized systems came up that would require management, the county utilities staff member present said 'I don't know about that, I don't think we have the staff' to which I immediately said, 'well, I think there are a lot of underemployed people up here, so I think we can easily fix that.' So I ask each of you to help me out on this: if you hear someone say 'we don't have staff' or 'we need more staff to...' or some variation of that, make note of that - where it was, in what context it was said, the kind of job not being done for lack of that staff... and let's see if we can compile a list of those places and get some people connected.
1 comment:
Bob, I think you are on to something here. I think the key is to get people involved in making decisions about things that affect them at the local level. We have abdicated/outsourced almost everything in our lives short of actually chewing, swallowing and pooping (pardon the 2 yr old language). I think there is a world of opportunity in this recession for improving the quality of American lives, if we can get past the cultural divide of political warfare.
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