Giving Mickey Mouse an Energy Boost Helps the Environment, How One Neighborhood Transformed Itself from the Country’s Worst and More

 
Want Power? Fire Up the Tomatoes and Potatoes, National Geographic
In Florida, scientists discovered that the tomato can be transformed from a lycopene storehouse into an electrical powerhouse. Considering that the annual surplus in South Florida could power Disney World for three months, is a new type of utility — one that’s fueled by food waste — in the state’s future?
How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood, Politico
Simply put, in 2009, Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood was the nation’s worst. When city government couldn’t provide a lifeline to the downtrodden area, a nonprofit private development company stepped in. Now, in just seven short years, the community is experiencing a blossoming transformation.
New California Law Could Keep Guns Away from People Like Omar Mateen, Reveal
After a mass shooting tragedy in 2014, the Golden State proved that it’s possible to pass sensible gun legislation. Its gun violence restraining order can prevent someone from purchasing or possessing a firearm for 21 days if law enforcement or a family member is worried they’ll turn violent.
MORE: The Surprising Second Life of Urine

Improving America, One Conversation at a Time

Is it possible to solve some of our greatest national challenges while chatting over a cup of coffee? The U.S. Conference of Mayors and Starbucks think so.
When the Solutions City Initiative was announced at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Conference of Mayors in June 2014, the idea was that these conversations between mayors and their constituents would focus on supporting veterans, providing access to education and empowering America’s youth. But all five participating cities (Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; Orlando, Fla; Phoenix, and Sacramento, Calif.) have focused on the fact that more than 6 million young people ages 16 to 24 are neither in school nor employed (a group that has been identified as “opportunity youth”). That’s because, when it comes to these cities and some of the issues their chief executives grapple with, “disengaged young people is at the top of their list,” Blair Taylor, chief community officer at Starbucks, tells NationSwell.
According to Taylor, Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, Calif., and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors played a key role in making this partnership happen. “I believe strongly in the power of public-private partnerships,” Johnson says in an email to NationSwell. “The best opportunities allow us to leverage private sector resources to address community challenges. The Solutions City Initiative does just that, by utilizing Starbucks’ corporate citizenship best practices and Community Store model and combining it with the power to convene held by the Office of the Mayor.”
With just a couple months left before the 83rd annual Conference of Mayors in June 2015, NationSwell checked in on the program’s progress. Here’s how several of the cities are faring.
Baltimore
At a Starbucks in Southside Marketplace, a young man named Rashaud Dubose explained how his participation in the Hire One Youth initiative, which connects unemployed youth from disadvantaged backgrounds with work experience in the private sector, led to full time employment as a customer service sales representative at Wells Fargo.
Gathered around him, among the scent of coffee grounds and the sound of steaming milk, were Alan Fink, owner of ABC Box Company, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee Donald C. Fry, and the mayor of Baltimore herself.
“We’ve heard young people share how they didn’t even know about a particular career path,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who moderated the city’s first hall discussion last October. “So many young people are limited by what they see in their home and their neighborhoods. These types of workplace opportunities are such a great way to open people’s eyes to that experience and help these young men and women find their full potential.”
After the first event, which targeted private sector employers, the city planned separate events geared toward nonprofits and foundations, and its upcoming town hall in June will focus on training. ”There are some ideas coming out of the town halls that we’re thinking about implementing,” says MacKenzie Garvin of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Neighborhood Development.
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Columbus, Ohio
Through five town halls and one strategic planning session, stakeholders across sectors came together over fresh brews, bringing fresh ideas on how to bridge the gap between out-of-work youth and businesses in need of employees. (There are more than 20,000 opportunity youth in Franklin County, where Columbus is located, alone.) “Through our meetings, we’ve been able to discover the challenges that these groups face in addressing opportunity youth and also the challenges that the youth themselves face,” says mayor Michael B. Coleman, emphasizing the importance of young people joining the conversation.
Through the Solutions City Initiative, Coleman says that many organizations and community partners learned about each other and can now work together “to help expand and elevate their work.” Coleman and his team will now transition from a convening role to a planning role, figuring out next steps to meet the needs of opportunity youth in the city.
Orlando, Fla.
While it was announced as one of the five Solutions City partners, Orlando has yet to hold any conversations with the community. “When we were approached to be part of this exciting initiative, we explained that we had several town halls for new initiatives under way and wanted to wait to get those completed until we embarked on the Starbucks project,” Kathy DeVault, director of strategic partnerships in the Office of Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, tells NationSwell via email.
The city however, says that it plans to return to the opportunity next month. “We have had several discussions with Starbucks about our desire to convene town halls that will address opportunities for youth, with a focus on the potential for bringing more STEM programming into our After-School All-Stars program which serves some of Orlando’s most at-risk middle school students,” DeVault says.
 
While the full impact of the Solutions City Initiative cannot be known until more of its ideas are implemented, the program is undoubtedly good press for the convening power of the coffee giant. As Taylor admits, Starbucks is in business at the end of the day, and the initiative is part of their bottom line. As the company looks toward the future, they want to have a pipeline of prospective employees and connections with communities that could be home to future locations.
Who knew there is that much opportunity in a cup of coffee?
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(Homepage photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Inside the Business of Turning Your Leftovers Into 33 Million Bags of Mulch

Waste, energy and agriculture. These three massive topics will affect how our ecosystem fares in the future. Harvest Power, a company founded in 2008, is providing local solutions that intersect all three. And they start by changing one unlikely place: the municipal dump.
Harvest Power takes discarded organic waste headed for incinerators or landfills and recycles it into usable electricity and soil. The company’s facilities use anaerobic digestion, a process where zillions of natural, microscopic bacteria eat away at the leftovers from your dinner plate and your front lawn, releasing a renewable biogas (essentially methane and carbon dioxide) that can be combusted to fuel electric generators. Any residual solids become nutrient-rich fertilizer.
Based out of Waltham, Mass., (a town north of Boston known for sparking the Industrial Revolution back in 1813), Harvest Power’s conversion results in 65,000 megawatt-hours of heat and electricity annually — enough to power 5,960 homes for a year — as well as 33 million (yes, million) bags of soil and mulch that are sold at Lowe’s, Home Depot and Walmart. The company derives all that power and compost from just 2 million tons of organic waste, which is just a sliver of the 251 million tons of trash (organic matter is the largest component) that North Americans throw out annually.
“We are proud of our current infrastructure to process organic waste, but this is only the beginning of what we hope is an organics waste revolution,” Kathleen Ligocki, Harvest Power’s CEO, tells NationSwell. “Organic waste processing is still a nascent market in North America. Harvest Power is already the leader in the space and we recognize that many more communities need our organics management solutions.”
One of the company’s most successful facilities is in Orlando, Fla., which accepts pizza crusts, fry trap grease and 130,000 tons of organic waste from the local hotels and restaurants at Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The electricity generated — 5.4 megawatt-hours — powers some of the rides and resorts at “The Happiest Place on Earth.” “We’re able to turn all the waste stream into productive products,” Ligocki tells the Guardian. Like something out of a classic Disney tale, the company transforms “pumpkins to power, waste to wealth.”
Another hub is located in California’s Central Valley. Known as America’s food basket, a significant portion of this country’s hay, alfalfa, tomatoes, grapes, garlic and almonds are harvested in the region, so it makes sense that Harvest Power put roots down in the region, accepting brush, branches and weeds for processing at its Fresno, Tulare and Lathrop locations.
The next step? To increase the amount of waste captured and processed for reuse. To do so, operating capacity at Harvest Power’s 40 existing sites will need to be expanded and more locations will need to be added, Ligocki says.
Getting there requires local action. Although Harvest Power operates across North America, from frosty Vancouver, Canada, all the way down to orange groves in Orlando, the company talks about “local renewable energy” and “local soils” nearly as often as they refer to the big picture across the continent. Commitment will have to begin in mayoral offices and neighborhood associations before a waste revolution can begin.
For this to happen, “the first step is recognition,” Ligocki says. “Communities identify organic waste as a panacea for interlocking issues [like] overflowing landfills, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, reduced soil health and the demand for clean energy.” As soon as cities realize there’s no need to truck organic scraps to faraway dumps, the Harvest Power model can take hold.
From there, the organic waste revolution could take two forms, Ligocki predicts: top-down or bottom-up. On one hand, government leaders could change trash heaps simply “by setting rates and policies in a way that divert the organic fraction [away] from the landfill-bound waste stream,” she explains. On the other, a grassroots movement could take hold of neighborhoods, leading innovators to step in and provide recycling services to “forward-thinking customers,” she adds.
Policy, financing, land, permits, community outreach and product distribution still must come together, but that’s where companies like Harvest Power, which oversees the process from start to finish, are making a real difference.
The movement already seems to be catching on. The company has won a trophy case of awards, including Bloomberg’s New Energy Pioneer Award in 2013 and has been named to the Global Cleantech 100, a list of the top private clean energy firms, for five years running. And recently, Harvest Power surpassed $300 million in financing, including support from Generation Investment Management, the firm Al Gore co-founded, and Waste Management, Inc., North America’s largest residential recycler.
Clearly, Harvest Power is onto something good.
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