Greening Flatbush is back, Sunday March 25th. Get involved!

Sustainable Flatbush will host our 4th annual Greening Flatbush: Garden Where You Are, on Sunday, March 25th at 2pm.

The event will be held at the historic Flatbush Reformed Church, host of our compost and gardening initiatives, located on Flatbush and Church Avenues.

This year, Greening Flatbush promises to be better than ever — an event the entire family can participate in and enjoy. Our annual extravaganza celebrating community gardening, neighborhood greening, and urban agriculture will feature, from 2 – 5pm, hands-on workshops, interactive demos, DIY projects, creative arts, and live entertainment, presented by Sustainable Flatbush and a curated roster of community-based groups. The day will culminate in a delicious Community Meal from 5 until 7pm.

What’s New at Greening Flatbush 2012

In addition to interactive displays from a wide variety of community organizations (check out info and photos from last year’s event!), Sustainable Flatbush will offer workshops on Gardening with Native Plants, Composting, Community Engagement, and Solar for Community Gardens.

There will be live entertainment and a delicious meal prepared for the whole community. Like our first Community Meal on January 28, which attracted over 120 people, this is an opportunity for neighbors to meet neighbors and to share, learn, and build relationships around sustainable living in our communities.

Why We Do It

Greening Flatbush: Garden Where You Are engages and empowers people from all over Brooklyn and beyond to participate in creating sustainable urban neighborhoods. Our goal is for YOU to discover (or create!) a project within walking distance of your home where you can get involved in making your community greener — whether it’s by learning to compost, joining a CSA or community garden, adopting a tree, or growing flowers on your windowsill!

While bringing more visibility and participants to sustainable neighborhood-based projects, Greening Flatbush will also be a great opportunity for all of us to get acquainted with like-minded organizations and people, form partnerships, and strengthen the growing network of environmental stewardship in Brooklyn.

You can be part of this event!
Click here for information on how to get involved as a volunteer or sponsor.

Greening Flatbush is free, with a suggested donation of $10 for the event and the community meal.

Details

WHAT:
Greening Flatbush: Garden Where You Are
WHEN:
Sunday, March 25, 2 – 7 pm
WHERE:
Flatbush Reformed Church
890 Flatbush Avenue (corner of Church and Flatbush Avenues) [map]

Let us know you’re coming! Please RSVP here.

Partner with us – Become a Sponsor

We offer a range of sponsorship opportunities that helps your business or organization gain enhanced visibility, brand awareness, and access to potential customers from all over Brooklyn.

Join the Party – Be a Volunteer

Volunteers are the heartbeat of what we do and we all have fun together. Join us for a rewarding experience and amazing networking opportunity.

Sustainable Flatbush is proud to announce a partnership with Con Edison to build the SunBike, a mobile solar electric system that gets around in a retrofitted cargo bike.  The SunBike will be able to provide enough energy to power a small sound system and lighting for up to two hours without access to sunlight, and do so much more.

Making Clean Energy A Reality

A rendering of the Sustainable Flatbush SunBike

A Vital Learning Tool

SF Intern Mark Miretsky and Energy Solutions Project Manager Jocelyn Cohen with our 10-watt charger at Park(ing) Day 2009

The SunBike and You

The SunBike will be a visible presence on the streets of Flatbush starting next summer, at schools, street fairs, on sidewalks at “charging events” under the sponsorship of local businesses, and beyond.  So if you’re walking down the street and you hear a little jingle, it just might be the SunBike coming your way, offering you clean and free power to fuel your day, and showing the way to our clean energy future.

Thanks to ConEd for their generous support of this project!

Learning about solar power

Even more, contacting them was easy, and Anne Pope’s reply was unlike any other I’d received. Previous responses were curt and to the point, businesslike and impersonal, demanding only a CV. Instead, Anne, the director of Sustainable Flatbush, seemed thrilled, asking about my hobbies, education and general interests, meaning about me and not about what I have accomplished on paper. This felt nice, and though I feel accomplished “on paper”, it strikes me as impersonal and insufficient as a summary of self.

I finally met with Anne in late August and accompanied her to a meeting with her colleagues. Diving right into the non-profit institution, I was caught off guard. The people: everything from what is an advisory board, its responsibilities and powers, who actually comprises it in this case, the volunteers, who to thank for the website (Keka), who stewards the garden? The politics: the sources of funding, how to appropriate them, when to ask and for which events? The non-profit: how to declare it and how to run it? The community: how to communicate, receive ideas, make decisions, give answers, accommodate constituents? All in all, a fascinating and endless list of how a seemingly small and local organization copes with complex questions and negotiates its purpose in a local context.

A week or so later we were in the midst of preparing for the Flatbush Frolic as Sustainable Flatbush was hosting the Environmental Fair at the function. This was my first experience writing for the public, promoting an event to a community, and it’s a lot more work than it seems. I spent the day writing and rewriting the blurbs and press releases for our upcoming events. I was becoming overwhelmed and flustered, but by the end of the day a deep satisfaction set in when the script was deemed worthy and catapulted through the virtual world. I was now prepared to actually attend the events that I had researched and written about for days!

The Environmental Fair at the Flatbush Frolic was my first time witnessing Sustainable Flatbush interacting with the community at large. Parents and kids were under our tent all day long, squealing at the worms and learning about composting, farmshares and solar energy, as well as our own role and initiatives in the neighborhood. I met many active community members from the Food Coop, the urban garden, Transportation Alternatives, and more. I talked to neighbors who garden for a hobby in an attempt to acquire some rooftop and urban gardening tips, had discussions about the international politics of aid, food production, climate change, city transport and bicycling. I left with a tangible connection to Flatbush in my hand through meeting the folk that live in and care for the neighborhood.

The following Friday was the celebrated Park(ing) Day! Imagine real grass on the street, a park instead of a car, a puppeteer, free coffee and tons of kids having a blast with fingerpaints, music and the creativity of recycled art projects. We surprised many the unsuspecting community member on their way home from work or to the store, who stopped by to ask about the scene. Most left interested and pleased, with a smile on their face, musing about the conversion of space form parking spot to a community’s open space. We reached out to a lot of new and interested people, letting them know who we are and what we care about.

These face to face community events bring sense to the days I spend writing and editing the virtual posts that go out to people I don’t even know, like our neighborhood blogs, news sources, and email contact list. Little by little I am actually meeting these people and putting their specific smiles together with their blogs or email addresses, and it feels strange and pleasant at the same time. The community takes shape in this way beyond the contours of its geography on the Brooklyn map, beyond the virtual realm of the web, from the nebulous to the interpersonal and real. And it is this abstract shift which occurs almost imperceptibly that I have come to like the most about my internship. It does indeed prove the feasibility of the seemingly intangible and elusive aims to which this small organization dedicates its time and energy, and continues to give me enthusiasm for our upcoming work.

Park(ing) Day 2009 in full swing

Visualization: PowerBike at Park(ing) Day

WE NEED YOU to visit the website, rate our proposal, and  leave a comment! Your ratings and comments give us a better chance of being selected as one of the 10 finalists.

Here’s what we will build if we win:

Sustainable Flatbush off-grid solar PowerBike!

Mobile, clean power

Solar PowerBike Diagram

• * Anybody can charge their laptops, phones or mp3 players at Sustainable Flatbush events
• * The system cranks out enough power to run a small sound system and lights for outdoor programming
• * Local businesses “host” the PowerBike, attracting customers and highlighting their sustainable business practices
• * Our community garden has clean electricity where there is no access to the electrical grid
• * Of course, the PowerBike provides backup power in emergency situations

Turn the crank to point it toward the sun!

An education station makes the PowerBike ideal for teaching school kids about energy and the environment. Through appealing readouts and data-collection software, students monitor system performance like power output and avoided greenhouse gas emissions.

Why:

The residents of Flatbush, Brooklyn are showing what we can do on the neighborhood level to reduce our carbon footprint, fight global warming, and foster community at the same time.

This project is a long-term investment in local renewable energy for our community. Day after day, year after year, the neighborhood PowerBike keeps harnessing clean power, keeps teaching the skills that are the foundation of our new green economy, and keeps modeling a way of life that does not jeopardize future generations.

Visualization: PowerBike at the Flatbush FreeMeet

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I just learned about this 40 KW solar installation at 925 Bergen Street (aka the Monti Building) – the first commercial net-metered solar array in New York City — from Solar One‘s excellent email newsletter. This is one of two projects developed by Big Sue LLC in Crown Heights, Brooklyn (the other is a residential building on Dean Street); both have solar panels, along with other environmentally-conscious features such as radiant heating, green roofs, and extensive reuse of original construction materials.

Solar One’s education and advocacy campaigns played a big role in changing New York State’s net metering laws last year; commercial buildings are now able to sell the excess power generated by their solar panels back to the grid, which is a huge step for renewable energy development in New York City. As mentioned in the video, the Network for New Energy Choices upgraded its rating of our state’s net metering policy from “D” in 2007 to “B” in 2008!

Solar One has a great summary of the day’s events, as does the NY Times. Both focus on what for me was perhaps the most meaningful topic raised: the possibility of creating Solar Empowerment Zones in New York City. These would be “designed to scale up solar capacity in the city at an exponential, rather than incremental rate”, by expediting the permit process, assessing the local grid’s capability to have power flow in both directions rather than just one, and encouraging neighbors to plan solar projects together to take advantage of bulk pricing. Members of the panel seemed to agree that the outer boroughs represent great untapped solar potential, with thousands of square feet of flat open roof space on apartments and industrial buildings. I began to envision Flatbush as a Solar Empowerment Zone, with photovoltaic panels springing up on roofs throughout the neighborhood. I can see it! Can you?

If you are onboard with Al Gore’s challenge, let Obama, McCain, and your elected officials know by signing the MoveOn petition here. Let’s do this!!

…our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges — the economic, environmental and national security crises,” Mr. Gore said. “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has to change.”

He also points out that the more oil we use the higher the price goes, while the more solar we use the lower the price goes. The goal of our neighborhood solar forums is to inform homeowners interested in solar about the new tax credits and higher net metering limits just passed in New York, and encourage networking so they can share best practices and potentially approach installers as a group to negotiate costs. Stay tuned, we will definitely be doing more of this neighborhood-oriented energy education.

Come to the…

Neighborhood Solar Forum
for single family homes

sponsored by Sustainable Flatbush

July 16th @ 8pm
Ditmas Workspace
535 East 17th Street (corner of Ditmas)

http://www.ditmasworkspace.com/

Peter Landy will speak about his experience converting his house to solar power.

Chris Neidl of Solar One will speak about current legislation and initiatives to make residential solar power affordable.

RSVP requested (but not required) to anne@sustainableflatbush.org
Special Thanks to Liena Zagare and Ditmas Workspace

*Spread the word to friends and neighbors!

**The next Solar Forum will focus on multi-family apartment buildings, including co-ops.