Greening the Inner-city

Yesterday the Green Inner-city Cluster met at BOB’s offices.  Many were disappointed that Will Allen’s visit to Vancouver had to be canceled due to a medical issue.  We all wish Will Allen a speedy recovery and hopefully he’ll get up to Vancouver another time, we’d love to show him what we’re doing with urban agriculture here.

At the meeting we went over our current initiatives, the most famous of which is the SOLEfood Urban farm.  The inner-city farmers have completed training with help from such folks as Ward Teulon and Michael Ableman.  Most of the boxes are completely built, not sure about the covers (high tunnels) to lengthen the growing season.  SOLEfood needs equipment and materials still so a public call for them is being echoed on this blog.

The other topic that was heavily discussed is e-waste, which will be dealt with in a future post in more depth.

We also talked about the future of this blog.  It was created almost a year ago, and since then Majora Carter has visited Vancouver twice, we started an urban farm, we trained some inner-city residents in urban agriculture, we even helped promote a few conferences.  So what does the future hold for the Greening the inner-city blog?

That is still being determined, but the team behind the blog was strengthened.  The original group of people who stated an interest in writing about relevant themes and issues here only produced four actual authors of posts.  This was never intended to be the Green BOB Blog or heaven forbid the Green Muskblog.  So we’re going to reach out to find some more guest authors, as finding regular bloggers who will write for free and are knowledgeable and able to post regularly is difficult.  Our two biggest additions to the team are Wes Regan who has blogged for Techvibes among others and Emily Jubenvill of Small Feet.  So expect to see them authoring more posts in the future.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post or have a topic you think would be a good subject for a future post write wes.regan@bobics.org.  We are going to try even harder to stick to our chosen categories:

• Construction – green buildings, sustainable communities, de-construction
• Energy – conservation or alternative means to generation
• Green Businesses – particularly local ones or best practices
• Green Economy – both locally in Vancouver and over all
• Green Jobs – locally but with the occasional big picture story or link
• Green Space – local ones but also interesting urban green spaces worldwide
• Recycling – which has proven particularly successful in the DTES
• Waste Reduction – reducing consumption of everything other than energy

This discipline along with the general cleanness of our site and WordPress.com HTML code has apparently lead to our humble blog ranking well in Google for several keywords and phrases.  We will remain on topic as long as I’m still involved.  We also want the blog to be more interactive so expect us to respond to most comments and we’ll continue to cross promote this blog on various other sister sites.