My Current Regional Work:
In order of service:
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Green Acton, Board of Directors. The organization advocates for sustainability and environmental justice. My work spans many of GA's committees, my focus is on Land Use, to help ensure more responsible use of land. My hope is that the town can ensure that housing built is affordable to people who work in the shops so that they may be able to walk to work. and that the town forms a Housing Rehab Trust, focused on ensuring that existing housing remain affordable and become more affordable.
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Racial Justice for Black Lives, Steering Commitee. The organization is a regional community group seeking to center Black/Brown voices, and working for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. My work is focused on research and policy
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350MA MetroWest node. Member. This group is a local chapter of the 350MA, working to address climate change. My focus is on leveraging municipal rights to reduce human impact.
See the muniicpal sustainability checklist.
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Assabet Valley Chapter of the Green Rainbow Party. Member. Working for People, Peace, Planet, my work in the chapter this year has been focused on the local chapter's work this year for more robust prisoner rights to healthcare, and to change prisons as we know them to be more about restorative justice and less about punishment.
Pre-2020:
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Harvest Food Coop, member. My work focused on furthering the sustainability and democratic principles of the cooperative.
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Occupy Boston, member. Sustainable Economy, Decolonize to Liberate, Camp Safety/Logistics, Non-Violent Direct Action, and various other
working groups
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Credit to the People, founding member. The group consists of retired and/or professional economists, bankers, brokers, philosophers, artists, [etc.] for the purposes of sharing information about how money works, in the hopes of creating a public bank in Massachusetts, and local currencies that are more people/community centric.
- Member, Board of Selectmen (BoS)
The Board of Selectmen are the "governing" body for the town. See a status of my adventure as a Selectman "click here".
- Historic District Commission
Associate Member, BoS Liaison. The HDC helps preserve the character of our walkable historic villages.
- Design Review Board
Co-Founder, Member. The DRB helps developers understand our "vision" for the town, and helps the town get what the residents want from development. Recent surveys indicate that residents very much desire "walkable communities", and the DRB is helping to make that possible by working with developers and designing bylaws that encourage these environments.
- Green Advisory Board. I co-founded this official committee, as well as the private group Green Acton. See my views regarding the environment on the left of this page, "Sustainable Societies". [from 2011:] This group is new and will be advising the town on what "green" initiatives to investigate. There is a lot of interest in investigating energy usage/buying options. If you're interested, please contact us. [update in 2020: the GAB is incredibly successful, has led the way in MANY very important local sustainability efforts. But since we are still in a Climate Emergency, the work is just starting! We have great hopes for them to help lead us to sustainability!]
- Farmer's Market/Agricultural Commission. I hope that we can create additional opportunities for residents to "get closer" to their food sources. I hope that we can help farmers remain economically viable and sustainable. This effort is just getting started. Please contact us for details on the plans. Meetings are starting up this fall (2008). [2020 update: Yay! the AgCom is up and running! See the town website for details.]
- Cable Advisory Committee, Associate Member. The CAC negotiates and administers the Cable TV licenses in town. It also administers the Technology Fund. Tje CAC brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the town for technology enhancements. I hope that we can increase the contributions from the cable companies to the town, so that we can promote greater/equal access to technology.
- Affordable Housing, Volunteer, helping find lower income people to participate in the condo-buy-down program, to help the town get to our 40B goals faster. [2020 update: we have a Housing Rehab Trust proposal almost ready for public viewing!]
- Finance, Trying to create a more "realistic" cost/benefit models to assess the "value" of strategies like funding "Senior Services", Condo-Buy Downs (to help fund more affordable housing for your $), costs of development. Having a more comprehensive model that estimates the future costs of development will be helpful for negotiating with developers. It will help the Town to get them to contribute their fair share of the costs that you would otherwise have/had to pick up later. The hope is to create a model which reflects ALL of your costs, not just the costs to Town Hall. [2020 update: not much progress here...holistic/strategic planning seems largely in the hands of the developers rather than the residents]
Accomplishments:
- Community Preservation Act Advisory Committee, Member & Promoter of the Community Preservation Act. The CPA has brought millions of dollars to the town for:
+ land purchase
+ historic preservation
+ recreation
+ affordable housing
- Cable Committee, Member of the Negotiating Team which brought an additional $200,000/year into the Town's technology budget
- Economic Development Committee, Original Member, helped develop the charter/goals for the EDC, to create marketing materials and make the town more attractive for businesses by having a single point of contact and streamlined processes to help businesses to get started in Acton. Future goal: "outreach" to industry associations, etc.
- Conservation, Volunteer, helped arrange for the town to get its own consultant to oversee Golf Course environmental impact.
- Petitioned the town to take wetlands out of the allowable buildable lot calculations.
RACIAL JUSTICE FOR BLACK LIVES: help with racial justice efforts.
For more details, please contact me...
