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August 30, 2010 in City
Face Time: Nonprofit employee talks about sustainability
Mariah Rose McKay is one of the coordinators of Sustainable September Spokane, a monthlong, communitywide event.
(Full-size photo)
Mariah Rose McKay is one of the coordinators of Sustainable September Spokane, a monthlong effort to encourage people to explore ways to live cleaner and work smarter.
McKay, 26, is an employee at Spokane nonprofit Community-Minded Enterprises. The group hosted the first Sustainable September Spokane a year ago.
Q. How do you explain sustainable activities?
A. Sustainability is essentially the ability for a community to remain vibrant and maintain a quality of life. If there was a nuclear meltdown around us and we were not contaminated, would we be able to maintain our existence to the quality level we currently enjoy?
Q. What’s the goal of the month of events?
A. When people discuss the sustainability movement, it’s an abstract concept that takes some thought to wrap one’s head around.
So how do you talk about that in a concrete way with the public at large? How can you present a cross-section of all the work already going on, in the Inland Northwest, to build a world that is more healthy, more environmentally intact? This (month of events) is the answer to that. It’s a showcase and public education effort.
Q. What’s different this year from last year?
A. Instead of creating a laundry list of events, we’ve created eight tracks for eight topic areas. Each track is a semi-self-contained topic (such as local food, building and landscaping, or health and well being). Each topic has a volunteer committee with a track leader. And each committee has created a featured event and supporting events.
Q. How many public events are there?
A. More than 100.
Q. Where can we find that calendar?
A. It’s all at >sustainableseptemberspokane.org. The calendar color-codes the eight different tracks. … And the committees are still adding events. They’re looking for more partners in the community who would be a good fit and want to add more events to our calendar.
Q. If you’re a busy parent or active person, which events might be of interest?
A. I’d recommend the Main Street Fair, on Sept. 11. It’s a great way to have access to lots of kid activities and free giveaways. It’s a good way to learn about a lot of different organizations.
Another is the Spokane River Cleanup on Sept. 25 (starting at 9 a.m.). It’s popular and fun. It’s become the Bloomsday of environmental events. For instance it has a weirdest-junk contest for pulling things out of the river.
Q. Are the events free?
A. Many are free. Others have to have tickets purchased in advance. All that information can be found on our website. One event (in the Local Food track) is the Trezzi Farm “Ethics of Eating” dinner on Sept. 9. That costs $35.
Q. Will there be another Sustainable September next year?
A. There definitely will be. Despite the tightness of resources these days, this work is of the utmost importance and needs to continue to happen in one way or another.
Ex-Bulldog bar seeks renaming 
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Enter to win tickets to see Adam Carolla at the Knitting Factory 
pablosharkman on August 30 at 4:33 p.m.
Let’s make sure that communities reject any energy source or political tool of subjugation that would precipitate a nuclear meltdown as your subject says here.
Again, the Five E’s of sustainability are greatly practiced in other countries — equity, ecology, education, economics, and energy.
We need to really prop up the discussion tied to social injustice, and demand change. That has to be the underpinning of sustainability in any community — whether we call it Earth Day or Sustainable September or a Green Festival.
The real work is about economic justice, and it takes a much broader and radical set of tools than just green washing us into happiness.
It’s not just about consuming, though you all can go here for some “sustainability” buying tips.
http://www.goodguide.com/
Read on —
The antipoverty approach to food security is inseparable from macroeconomic and social-policy analysis; for example, high rates of unemployment, the polarization of the job market into “good” and “bad” jobs, minimum wages well below the poverty line, inadequate welfare benefits, high costs of housing, regressive taxation policies, off-loading of social programs to communities, and the unequal distribution of wealth.
The welfare state of the past was not perfect: critics argue that it maintained inequality, institutionalized the feminization of poverty, created work disincentives, and failed to promote participation in society.But the antipoverty approach to food security rejects the destruction of the welfare state and the neoconservative values of individualism, competition, and inequality and proposes instead to restore values such as equality, fellowship, democracy, and humanitarianism to the foundation of social policy.
The antipoverty approach is concerned with income security, rather than food and food security per se. Community development within this approach focuses on raising awareness of poverty, advocacy with and for poor people, and community economic development. In the words of one antipoverty activist Debbie Ellison:
“We challenge people who aren’t poor to listen to people who are poor … to join with us in rejecting American style social programs where food and housing are provided for the poor at the whim of the rich … to work with us to change our system to end poverty … to demand that our politicians work for a just society, where people are more equal and where the poor don’t have to depend on leftovers from the rich to subsist.”
Dazzeetrader1980 on September 01 at 7:33 p.m.
It’s nonsense. Get a real job. These non profit units are usually tax exempt. Hide the money till the end of the corporate year then bonus it all out to the high producers…..and the bonus is usually large. Thus there is no profit to tax. Nice…ordinary income folks galore but it avoids corp taxes and it allows these units to keep cash should a nice purchase show up.
Gee thanks libs. Nice job!.