Jesse State's Blog (8)

In 2020 I will be in my 34th year of vegetarianism and be raising my (future) children in the same way. I will be sure that they grow up learning how to garden, care for trees and produce and to measure the impact of the food they choose to buy from other sources. Every meal will have at least 1 major ingredient from our yard and the rest will be from known sources within 100 miles of home. I will also have improved my own meager cooking skills as to take advantage of the abundant natural… Continue

For my mission I have recruited 3 close friends of mine to start a community garden in a backyard this spring. We will donate half our time to our own space and half to a nearby garden that supports a local food pantry for the homeless in northeast Minneapolis. By teaming up this way we are supplying ourselves with homegrown, healthy food and supplying the same types of things to our local community. Updates will follow when it warms up enough to break ground.

Growing up in the rural Midwest, I was constantly surrounded by thousands of square miles of corn and soybeans year after year. I remember when I learned that the vast majority of the millions and millions of ears of corn we produce in the Midwest GOES TO FEED LIVESTOCK, NOT PEOPLE. Rural food culture, in the USA at least, is so meat oriented that people literally do not know what to put in a meal if meat isn't the main course.



To others, this may sound like an exaggeration or overly… Continue

Thought the following links might be interesting to some of you agents out there. I know there is a lot of resistance to gardening in public spaces (or even private spaces that are visible to the public,

like front lawns) in certain places and I enjoy being part of the

guerrilla gardening movement that is replacing grass and empty spaces

with fruits and vegetables to change those attitudes. Once people start

claiming space for useful purposes, then their neighbors see…

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As a current student with only a few short years of work between college and grad school, I already feel like much of my life has been spent in classrooms when I should be out there getting my hands dirty in the real world. Then I remember why I came back to school in the fall of 2009. After spending 2008 as a field organizer in St. Louis, MO for the Barack Obama Campaign, I was both frustrated by the attitudes of those with power to do something and amazed by the willingness of the people… Continue

I thought it was a wonderful coincidence that on the same day that the EVOKE Network went live, the blog Worldchanging: Bright Green posted this piece, "Going Global: Social Innovation."…



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I found this assignment harder than I thought. While I know that there are numerous people worth following out there, most of my first choices have passed away making it quite hard to follow them.



There are a number of writers I follow that I find to be incredibly innovative thinkers and I will continue to do so (such as http://www.worldchanging.com/bios/alex.html) But I found that most of the stories and projects I am intrigued… Continue

I found this tip on social innovation to be widely applicable:

Deliver value; what are the benefits for people using the end product, does it improve a persons life?



I think that my passion can lead me to follow many paths towards social innovation, but this principle applies to all of them. When you produce something, whether a program that people participate in or a new mechanical invention, if it doesn't improve on something, then it won't make a difference.… Continue