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Today's Date
August 21, 2008
The next steering committee meeting will be held on Wednesday, June 25, in the meeting room of the Hood River Library. It begins at 7pm.
• • •
The Summer Trade Directory is now available! Use the Trade Directory Locations link to find out where to get yours.
RiverHours to Present Workshop at SolWest Fair
Summer 2008
by Zoë Campbell
How To Start and Manage a Local Currency is the theme of a workshop at the SolWest Fair in John Day, Oregon, on the last weekend of July. The intrepid presenters are your very own steering committee members, Bruce Bolme and Zoë Campbell. That’s us.
Our first experience with SolWest was last year, July 2007. Not quite knowing what to expect, we were full of curiosity and everything was fun, informative, wow, and hey, look-at-that. Old Sol himself was in full force, shining brightly and with plenty of heat. Very appropriate.
Bruce Bolme, right, educates 2007 SolWest fairgoers about local currency.
He and fellow steering committee member, Zoë Campbell,
will be giving a workshop at this year's fair entitled
'How to Start and Manage a Local Currency.'
Our experience at SolWest included an impromptu presentation of RiverHOURS local currency. We weren’t on the schedule so we simply set up a chair outside the Exhibit Hall entrance and displayed trade directories and snagged people as they came. Do you know about local currencies? The conversations went from there and the people went away with a trade directory. That was a fun thing to do.
the waiting game
When the fair was closing down, we approached Jennifer Barker, a very accomplished cook with a solar oven, and also the person to talk to about us giving a workshop. She took our names and contact info and said we’d hear from her in February. At that time we gave her our workshop proposal – really a description of what we were going do and what we hoped people would learn from us.
We were accepted and we’ll return in July as presenters on the schedule of events. Both Bruce and I will give the workshop on local currencies and RiverHOURS in particular. And I will tell a story from The World Change Network and do follow-up activities that people can take home, continue to think about, and increase their understanding of how our world works. Maybe we’ll see some of you there!
reminiscences of SolWest 2007
At SolWest, the county fairgrounds provided the setting, with several kinds of buildings and attractive grassy and shady areas. Multiple workshops offered all sorts of energy and sustainability topics. I focused on water – conservation, gray water systems, and rainwater catchment. The presenters were certainly dedicated. They slept in their car under a shady tree. Bruce attended topics about electricity and wiring and other things mysterious to me. Most of the workshops were indoors, and a few were outside when it made sense to be. Watching a demonstration of cooking with a solar oven was fun and we got to eat the chocolate chip cookies. Yum!
the standout presentation
Perhaps the presentation that stood out the most for both of us was Benjamin Gissin’s PowerPoint. In his previous career, he was an agricultural banker. He spoke a lot about currency systems. He was aware of local currencies and put in a good word for us during his presentation. In the Exhibit Hall, a table offered a package deal. A copy of the PowerPoint presentation, a subscription to Touch the Soil magazine with the current year’s back issues included, and a nifty tote bag. A very good deal indeed. Some of you have seen the PowerPoint presentation. The magazine is published by Benjamin Gissin and his wife is the editor. It’s a very good magazine with a unique approach and we have enjoyed it enough to renew our subscription.
some other attractions
There was a solar water heater with shower to experience. A telescope allowed us to look at the namesake of the event, the sun, with proper filters, of course. Seeing the sunspots live was exciting. Before, I’d seen them only on television. Actually bending down to place my eye at the telescope eyepiece, with the object of view itself beating down on my back, was a very different experience from watching a video on a television screen.
The Exhibit Hall was lined on each side, inside and out, with – yep, exhibits. Vendors had set up displays of their products and literature, and were on hand to answer questions. One vendor from Goldendale had information on their wind turbines. That’s local to our GLCC area!
the bookseller
There were a few food booths. One of my favorite exhibits was the bookstore. The owner had brought well over 100 titles from his store. Browsing was really fun, and naturally, an interesting assortment went home with me. I had Arizona’s publication of its code for gray water systems, a solar cookbook or two, some how-to’s for citizen action and community-building. Especially wonderful for me were books of stories with nature and sustainability themes. My favorite was Spinning Tales, Weaving Hope – Stories, Storytelling and Activities for Peace, Justice and the Environment. It is from The Stories for World Change Network.
One of the fun events was the electric car race. Quite small vehicles with room for only one person. They were all three-wheeled, although the arrangement of them differed. The non-existent roar of the engines was appreciated. The absence of stinky fumes was fine.
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The Local Currency Education Project is a joint venture of
the Columbia Gorge Earth Center and Gorge Local Currency Cooperative
updated
June 22, 2008
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