Sustainable Cottage Grove

Upcoming events

The Community Food Assessment is finished and available. Email [email protected]) for a PDF. Thanks a million to the author, RARE specialist Jules Reynolds, and to the Oregon Food Bank, which funded her year here in the CG-Creswell-Lorane-Dorena-north Douglas County area.

South Lane Farmers Market: Thursday afternoons, 4-7 pm on 7th Street just south of Main Street, downtown Cottage Grove.
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Unless noted, events are held at the ROP building, 632 E. Main St (across from The Axe & Fiddle).

11/1	Fri	6:30p	First Friday Potluck: Bring a healthy dish to share, and join us in building community one meal at a time.
11/16	Sat	11a-3p	Food Preservation/All About Apples & Holiday Food Gifts: Quince, ciders, flavored oils, vinegars, etc. It's a great time for apples: sauce, butter, leather, cider, juice, and pie. You'll sample lots of apple goodies and take home fresh cider that you pressed. Demonstrations and participation opportunities include cooking down apples for butter and sauce, dehydrating, canning, steam juicing grapes, and pressing cider. Another highlight of the day is making flavored oils and vinegars. Must register at least 5 days before the workshop at 541-942-2360.
12/6	Fri	6:30p	First Friday Potluck: Bring a healthy dish to share, and join us in building community one meal at a time.
1/3	Fri	6:30p	First Friday Potluck: Bring a healthy dish to share, and join us in building community one meal at a time.
2/7	Fri	6:30p	First Friday Potluck: Bring a healthy dish to share, and join us in building community one meal at a time.
2/8	Sat	11a-3p	Food Preservation/Going Hunting? Got Beef? Chickens? Meats, knives, and butchering; smoking, jerking, freezing, pressure canning. Watch demos and try out various techniques. This class also may include a knife skills review. Basic food-preserving skills needed for this class. Taste and take home many delicacies. Must register at least 5 days before the workshop at 541-942-2360.

 

Cottage Grove Screening of We The People 2.0

SAVE THE DATE:  Please mark your calendar for our upcoming screening of the new documentary film brought to you by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Cottage Grove Screening of The Economics of Happiness

Cottage Grove Screening: The Economics of Happiness

Thursday January 30th, 7:00pm
Healing Matrix, 632 E. Main Street, Cottage Grove
$4 - $9 suggested donation at the door (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)

<Watch the trailer for the film>

Going local is a powerful strategy to repair our fractured world—our ecosystems, our societies and our selves.

Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

‘The Economics of Happiness’ describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re‐regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re‐build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Zac Goldsmith and Samdhong Rinpoche ‐ the Prime Minister of Tibetʹs government in exile. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well‐being. ‘The Economics of Happiness’ restores our faith in humanity and challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world.

<Watch the trailer for the film>

Economics of Happiness: Watch the trailer and come to our screening!

Cottage Grove Screening: The Economics of Happiness
Thursday January 30th, 7:00pm
Healing Matrix, 632 E. Main Street, Cottage Grove
$4 - $9 suggested donation at the door (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)
For more information about the film, see: www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org

Paul Cienfuegos on local community rights - Wed 11/20, 6-9pm

WHO DECIDES…
Our community or corporations

Over 150 communities across the country have demonstrated that there is a way to ensure local self-determination of our health, economies and community well-being.



Join us for an eye-opening community discussion with
PAUL CIENFUEGOS
Educator and community organizer in the Community Rights movement

WHEN: Wednesday Nov 20th, 6:00pm - 9:00pm
WHERE: The Healing Matrix, 632 E. Main St, Cottage Grove
Suggestion donation of $5 - $20 to defray expenses
No one turned away for lack of funds

Beginning in Pennsylvania, and now stretching across nine states from Maine to New Mexico, 150 communities have passed legally binding, locally enforceable Community Rights laws that for the first time in U.S. history enshrine the inherent right of a local majority of residents to protect the health and welfare of their local places. Each of these new-paradigm laws defines what the community wants, reins in corporate so-called "rights", and stops legal but harmful corporate activity dead in its tracks.

What is it that most deeply matters to you? What kind of town/landscape do you want to live in ten years from now? 40 years? 100 years? What decisions need to be made SOON to get you where you want to go regarding water, air, energy, fracking, mining, cell phone towers, land and economic development, etc?

By utilizing the Community Rights legal strategy, and joining our voices with others to create empowerment and nourishment, we actually CAN get there from here!

Paul is a high-energy presenter whose engaging style is very effective at delivering the message
citizens need to understand: corporations are the subordinate creations of "we the people" and we
can and must reassert our sovereignty over them.
-- Betsy Barnum, Executive Director, Great River Earth Institute, Minnesota

For more information, email us at [email protected] or call / text Rob at 541-543-5735

Join Our Email List

If you are interested in what Sustainable Cottage Grove is up to, why not join our email list.  

By joining our email list, it will be much, much easier for us to keep you posted on our activities and events.  We'll let you know when we are having meetings, announcing new projects, or even better, when we are having our fun potluck dinners.

It's super easy to join our email list, since all you need to do is join a Google Group called "SustainableCottageGrove".

Just click the "Join this group" link at:

https://groups.google.com/group/SustainableCottageGrove 

Cottage Grove Food Hub

Cottage Grove’s Food Hub aims to develop a robust and integrated food cycle that emphasizes sustainable local crop production, local food preparation, and convenient distribution and use by local consumers. The Food Hub seeks to encourage and support small-scale agriculture.

 

 

Sustainable Cottage Grove -- off and running and needing your help

Attention Cottage Grovers -- we're working hard to make Cottage Grove a better place and need your help.  We've got an ambitious agenda to make our local economy, food network, and transportation infrastructure more sustainable, and we'll need as broad and deep a cross-section of the Cottage Grove community actively engaged in order to make this happen.

Please join our mailing list today and come to our next meeting and learn what we are all about.

To subscribe to our online discussion list, please visit:

http://groups.google.com/group/SustainableCottageGrove?lnk=srg

Cottage Grove Time Exchange -- accepting applications now!

We've just launched the Cottage Grove Time Exchange (CGTE) -- a marketplace and a meeting place for members of our community to help each other.  

The Cottage Grove TimeExchange is essentially an hour bank where we all get to help each other and benefit from each others skills and expertise.  The basic idea is that when you provide a service to another member of the community, you get an hour of credit for every hour of help you provide.  Similarly, when you need something done, you have the rest of the time exchange to find someone with the skills and experience you need.   It's a great model, and has proven itself in communities across the country.

We have a newly installed time-exchange set up by the organization hOurWorld that developed the software and has hosted numerous exchanges around the country.  They have many years experience with time banks and have developed a pretty robust service that we can just use right "out of the box".

By services, we mean those different types of help that we can each provide to our fellow community members.   These could be things like child care, carpentry, garden work, massage, auto repair, computer assistance, web design, school tutoring, photography, driving, music lessons, cooking and catering, legal services, dog walking, decorating, and just about anything you can think of.  See the complete list below.

So.... how do you get started... easy!  The first step is to "join", i.e. to submit a membership application for the time exchange.   Your application then gets reviewed and approved and you can then post the services that you are willing to offer and engage others to provide the services that you need.

TO SEE THE SERVICES AVAILABLE: www.hourworld.org/bank/Services.php?hw=1023

TO JOIN: www.hourworld.org/bank/Join.php?hw=1023

TO LOG-IN AS A MEMBER:  www.hourworld.org/bank/?hw=1023