TOWNSHEND — With humble beginnings, a flyer and a meeting place, a paradigm began to shift in Southern Vermont.
On June 13, 2005, in the community room at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, community organizer Tim Stevenson screened The End of Suburbia, a film that addressed “world oil peak and the inevitable decline of fossil fuels.”
“About 15 to 20 people showed up,” Stevenson said. “Most of the people at least knew something about peak oil and global warming issues. We all shared those concerns. We were attuned to the idea of not calling on or depending on Washington, D.C. for a solution.”
With that small gathering, Post Oil Solutions (POS) was born with a specific mission in mind: “To empower the people of the central Connecticut River Valley bioregion to develop sustainable, collaborative, and socially just communities leading to a self-sufficient, post-petroleum society."
Now, the nonprofit is celebrating its fifth anniversary and is taking stock of its accomplishments.
“There's much more involved than just finding a technological solution, or trying to change policy,” said Stevenson, who volunteers as POS's executive director. “We wanted to organize our communities, our towns and the region in a way that addressed the implications of peak oil.”
Stevenson said that from the beginning, Post Oil Solutions “didn't want to be a bunch of people sitting around talking about the problem.”
“We wanted action,” Stevenson said. “We wanted to be effective at getting people involved in their own communities with some special project around our mission.”
One of the issues that POS quickly seized upon was the importance of eating locally grown food.
“Many people who became involved did so because they realized what they were putting in their mouths wasn't necessarily healthy for them, and came from outside the state, or even the country,” said Stevenson.
Stevenson said Post Oil Solutions wanted to support local economies “by becoming at one and the same time both self-sufficient and collaborative in such crucial areas as food, transportation, energy, health care and the like.”
“We are not a membership organization,” Stevenson said. “People need to understand that. We mentor through workshops, being the fiscal agent for another organization to get funding such as the Brattleboro Time Trade, for instance.”
Stevenson called POS “a mom-and-pop organization, and we have very intentionally remained that way.”
“Our numbers haven't really changed,” he explained. “We still have about 15 to 20 people directly involved with POS. We have many who wouldn't say they are a part of our organization, but whom we mentor, collaborate with and support in any way we can.”
But the group is starting to grow. “We have so much going on that we are getting overwhelmed,” Stevenson said. “We need someone to oversee the programs.”
Stevenson said POS is planning to hire a program manager, as well as people to look into raising funds and writing grants for the 2011 fiscal year.
“If we embark on this now, it should be in place next year,” he said. “We have four VISTA [Volunteers in Service to America] volunteers who are doing their capstones on POS for one year of research. One of the people who's been involved the longest of that group is Richard Berkfield. We want to hire him as the program manager. He's stayed with us for three years.”
POS crafted a regional food sustainability plan in 2007, garnering two grants totalling $15,000 from the Vermont Community Foundation. The funds helped establish the Great Falls Food Hub to “make available locally produced food for a fair return to the farmers.” It serves Windham and Windsor counties in Vermont, and Sullivan and Cheshire counties in New Hampshire. Berkfield helped organize and oversee these programs.
The Food Hub has been collaborating with the Southeastern Vermont Community Action (SEVCA), and through that partnership realized $60,000 in grants. The funds will go to hiring a Food Hub project coordinator and finance a feasibility study during 2010.
In 2008, POS initiated the Community Food Security Project, whose mission is to increase accessibility of local food for all and reconnect people with their food. The three other VISTA volunteers are involved in this project.
Some projects undertaken include a “gleaning partnership” with the Vermont Food Bank in Windham County, initiating a two-acre farm at World Learning, a farm-to-school initiative to grow gardens at Oak Grove, Brattleboro Area Middle School and Newfane Elementary, and workshops and cooking classes for the community.
Another part of the food sustainability plan was a campaign that was begun in 2005 to encourage everyone to garden.
Building community infrastructures, such as pledges to “eat local,” began in 2005-06. Support local agriculture was the goal of another community organizing effort.
The Brattleboro Winter Farmers Market, Windham Localvores, community gardens and recent collaborations with Transition Putney around a pilot neighborhood greenhouse make up a list of other projects that Post Oil Solutions supported, funded or organized.
“We were conceiving of regional food sustainability,” Stevenson said. “We wanted to develop a food system that was not dependent on the industrial corporate food system.”
Through memberships in the Windham Farm Bureau Board, collaboration with the Vermont Land Trust, and developing plans around the creation of an incubator farm program through the Greater Falls Food Hub, POS promotes the growth of local agriculture.
POS doesn't stop with food, however. Its activities and collaborations extend into energy, health, education and global warming initiatives that deal with transportation.
“We don't dwell on things like peak oil,” Stevenson said. “We organize the community, get people moving. We want to give people a reason to get up in the morning.”
“The increasingly desperate and risky ways in which petroleum is accessed obviously underscores our concerns,” Stevenson added. “POS makes people self-sufficient and successful in a post-oil world. Community organization is important so all of us can take our lives into our own hands, so we can grow our own food. So we can have security, sustainability and self-sufficiency.”
“We want to empower people,” said Stevenson. “We want to help people begin to do things themselves.”