Everything to Gain

What if your neighborhood were toxic? What if you lived by a river, but no one in your neighborhood had walked its banks for sixty years? What if you knew who poisoned your city, and why?

Watch: Majora Carter: Greening the Ghetto

What if you could build a park there? What if you could rebuild a city, and heal the damage done by decades of abuse and hatred? What if you could right a wrong from your parents generation, and pass on a blessing to your children? What if you could build businesses in the community, cut crime, pollution, and disease, and make a profit doing it?

What if the wealthy and the powerful could not do this, but the poor and downtrodden knew how to make it work? What if they knew they had nothing to loose and everything to gain?

And what if you had the opportunity to support them–or to learn from them?

UPDATE:

What if you could share what you know?

“We were talking about the slow-motion collapse here in America, the looming climate crisis, the futility of survivalism; and we began to play with the thought, what kinds of heroes would actually do some good for the communities that get hit hard?

Because if the ruins of the unsustainable are the new frontier, and if, as is already happening, the various economic and environmental transitions we face will leave many people unmoored from their familiar assumptions at the very least and, at the worst, cut loose from their jobs or driven from their homes, a huge number of people are going to need help forging new ways of life…

What would it be like if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed?”

–from “The Outquisition,” a missionary call from Alex Steffen at WorldChanging. (via Remarkk!)