May 2012
27 posts
ACD Conference in Salt Lake City
As mentioned earlier this month, we’re honored to be a part of this year’s Association for Community Design Conference. Maria Sykes will be speaking on behalf of Epicenter on Saturday, June 9th at 1pm in the Salt Lake Public Library.
Featuring a range of community-based practices from Salt Lake City and beyond, this session will give you the opportunity to engage in some of the local flavor of community design in Utah and see some innovative approaches to engagement.
Each panel member will do a brief presentation of their organization’s work, mission, etc. and then the floor wil be open for discussion or Q&A time.
You can get more information on the ACD Conference here.
National Small Businesses Week →
nationalsmallbusinessweek.com
Yep, apparently May 20-26 is National Small Businesses Week!
The conference is being held all the way over in Washington, D.C., but you can watch the event live from your computer! Additionally, the website does have an list of small business resources that we recommend exploring.
Calling All Melon Recipes!
Play
GRHS: Screenprinting 101
Peczuh Printing →
peczuhprinting.com
Busy Day, Today.
Today, the entire Epicrew (plus Meg Deal!) are in Castle Dale and Huntington presenting our recently completed Green River Town Assessment. Our first presentation was for the Emery County Economic Development board. It was such a success that representatives from Huntington asked us to present the study at their City Council budget meeting tonight. Wish us luck!
Also, we’re attending the Emery County Business Chamber’s Lunch & Learn in Castle Dale. The County Commissioners will be presenting today.
“Can we carry our toolboxes into unexpected roles, architects disguised as high school teachers, public policy makers, and strategists…?”
—
From the commencement address by Emily Pilloton to graduates at UC Berkeley (article here)
Project H here.
At Epicenter, we’re not all architects, but we are adept at utilizing disguises.
Megan Deal in town! →
thethirdofthree.com
Our brilliant collaborator and dear friend, Megan Deal, arrives in Green River tonight! She’s here for a full week to work with her hands (we’re talking hammering, nailing, etc. not laptop computers) on the Habitat for Humanity house. She’ll also be collaborating with Maria on the Sappi Ideas That Matter grant! It’s always a great week when Meg is in town. Currently, Megan in an adjunct professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She visits us every summer to work with us, and she’s awesome.
Megan Deal is creative director for Little Things Labs. In 2009, Megan co-lead the development of PieLab, a pie shop, job-training center and cultural hub in Greensboro, Alabama. To date, PieLab has employed 6 people in Hale County, graduated 34 students from the Youthbuild program in restaurant management and hospitality, and continues to serve as a welcoming place of community engagement for countless others. Megan’s work in the rural south, helped shape her understanding of how simple, small, person-to-person gestures can often lead to larger-scale impact.
Walking a steady line between radical idealism and objective pragmatism, Megan is fascinated by questions and driven by a need to solve problems. Her aptitude in sense-making coupled with her ability to rapidly prototype visual solutions, allows Megan and her collaborators to explore a wide range of possibilities quickly and efficiently.
Megan’s views on design and its place in improving the human condition is informed by her early work with Project M, an immersive program for young designers wishing to apply their design sensibilities for the common good. Her work in place-based problem-solving is shaped by an affinity for Detroit, a city whose future will largely be determined by how effectively we address the pressing social, economic and civic challenges infiltrating the urban fabric today. Megan approaches every endeavor with the same core values: work small, work simply, work quickly.
Megan is a graduate of the College for Creative Studies, where she presently serves as an adjunct professor, teaching courses in typography and graphic design.
(Meg’s bio via Little Things Lab)
Epicenter's Facebook & Such →
facebook.com
We’ve been getting a lot of new followers on our blog, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone about all the other ways you can interact with Epicenter. Like/Follow/Connect to help us promote our goods & services and show your support!
Facebook | Twitter | Etsy Store | Linked-In
Postal Service Holds Back on Closures →
nytimes.com
No worries! Green River’s post office missed the list! No closures, no cut hours, no cut jobs here (unfortunately nearby East Carbon and Wellington did get cut hours). We like to think our insistence on mailing by post has help Joann avoid the cut list. With our Rural and Proud tote bags and our periodic mass mailings to our supporters, we conservatively estimate the Epicenter creates 1500 pieces of mail per year!
Join our mailing list today to receive beautiful, hand-made items throughout the year! Just e-mail info@ruralandproud.org with your mailing address. Just remember to update us whenever you move.
NPR reported a story yesterday that the cuts hit the rural post offices the hardest. The person interviewed, a postal service employee somewhere in Minnesota that had a town population of 60, said the rural post offices represent less than 1% of the USPS budget. Sadly, this appears to be yet another unfair and unequal action on rural America. These cuts appear to only save, at maximum, $300 million (if every one of the 3700 offices under review had hours cut in half), or 2% of the $14.1 billion loss anticipated for this year.
We need one of these: a t-shirt dryer (curer) [pictured below]
Right now, we use what is basically a hair dryer, blowing the hot air over the Rural And Proud bags for 2 minutes each, never stopping moving, making sure not to burn the bags. We’re fearing onset carpal tunnel syndrome.
This great machine is new at $1700. It’s basically a pizza oven: the shirts roll through at 60-70 shirts per hour. Anyone out there have one to donate or give us a good deal on?
Here’s some specifics on this model:
Manufactured by RANAR for the SILK SCREEN industry. The DX200 T-shirt dryer is perfect for the entry-level screen printer. Measuring 24” x 60” with a 18” wide belt and powered by 110 volts drawing 17 amps it can be used in home business or a small commercial store front. Don’t let the small size fool you the unit can cure 60 to 70 SILK SCREENED printed plastisol t-shirts per hour as well as caps.
National Community Design Conference
Our colleagues over at the Association for Community Design are holding their annual National Community Design Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah this year! We’ve been invited to be a part of the Emerging Practices Panel. We’re honored to be a part of the conference, and we recommend it to any of our fellow citizen designers.
It’s been twenty years since the last time we visited the “The Crossroads of the West” in 1992 and this year we will gather to discuss where Community Design has been and what we have learned in the process in order to project how community-based design practices may continue to be helpful in improving our built environment and the larger dialogs that shape it.
Our annual conference offers a chance for Community Design professionals and organization’s staff gather in person to share skills, strategies, and stories. Embedded in ACD’s membership is a wealth of experience in addressing social, environmental and economic justice through a design framework. In addition to providing a forum to introduce and support new as well as long-term practitioners, we also want to celebrate the work of the organizations that serve as local hosts. That’s why we’re partnering with ASSIST Utah and Center for the Living City to bring you “WE ARE: Reflections and Projections on the Legacy of Community Design”.
This is both an opportunity and a request to gather and discuss capacity building for participatory designers working with communities. There is a strong need for shared core skills, especially for young designers and others new to the field including the many volunteers being mobilized by pro bono initiatives and professional societies’ disaster relief efforts.
This year’s conference aims to provide an exchange of this shared body of knowledge for designers working with and empowering low-income communities to successfully shape their built and natural environment. Please join us this June 8th, 9th, and 10th and share your experience by responding to our Call for Proposals by April 27th. We will be opening registration in a few weeks and will be updating to announce panels and sessions regularly so stay tuned to communitydesign.org/ACD2012 for further details.
See you in SLC!
James Wheeler
President, Board of Directors
Association for Community Design
