Transcription of Craig Lapine for the show Community #62
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 62, “Community” airing for the first time on November 18, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland, Maine. Today’s show features Maine Magazine writer and author Jaed Coffin. Craig Lapine, founder of Cultivating Community, and Julie Jordan Marchese and Andrea Brown of sheJAMS. We specifically put the “Community” show right in front of Thanksgiving and we did this because we understand that there are many different ways in which people belong to communities.
Author Seth Godin actually refers to these as tribes and a tribe or a community can be what you’re born into. It can be where you work, where you play, or simply built of the people that you love. I have communities built around my own life based on where I’m living. I’ve been in Maine since 1977, but also based on the fact that I am the oldest of ten children. I’m a doctor. I’m a writer, and I’m a Facebook picture taker on my early morning runs. In many different ways I’ve created communities that make sense to me, that feel good to me, that nurture me.
This Thanksgiving I’ll be spending time with my extended family at Atlantic Hall and Cape Porpoise right here in Maine. This is something that my family’s been doing for many years because we simply have so many darn people involved in this community, but I love it. My nine younger brothers and sisters and I and our spouses and our families and our significant others. My cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my grandmother, we’ve all really come to enjoy this regular occasion at Atlantic Hall because we consider it community building time. I’m very fortunate to have a family like this and a family that meets regularly right here in Maine.
I hope you enjoy today’s show with Maine Magazine writer and author Jaed Coffin who is going to talk about his experience with community and growing up in Brunswick and the work he’s done for Maine Magazine including the recent article “What is a Mainer?” Also Craig Lapine who has developed a cultivating community presence working in the environment, working with people, working with education, and doing all kinds of interesting things over the last decade. Finally, Julie Jordan Marchese and Andrea Brown of sheJAMS who have created a community around exercise and fitness and social outreach and well-being on so many different levels.
We hope you enjoy today’s show.
Dr. Lisa: Today’s Thanksgiving show is all about community because we know that various people around the state are getting together in groups with their families and communities. We thought it would be an important day to introduce Craig Lapine from Cultivating Community to talk on this very subject. Thanks for coming in.
Craig: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Now Cultivating Community is something that grew out of multiple interests of yours. Talk to me about that.
Craig: Well I was a school teacher and I was interested in food and growing food as a way to get youth connected with the land and the sources that sustain us all here. Biological, social, spiritual, how we’re all rooted. That was one impulse. I’m very interested in issues of social justice and hunger is one of the more visible examples of unfairness in our world. I’m still working on that issue, and just food’s capacity to bring people together and create community.
As an environmentalist I think a lot of the challenges that we face can be a little daunting when you think about our challenges around energy and housing and things like that. The thing about the food piece of that conversation is that a local and sustainable food system is actually more joyful and more tasty and more nutritious and so it’s a solution that works for us as a species that also doesn’t actually mean any loss. There’s a lot of gifts in that path.
Dr. Lisa: Now before I ask you a little bit more about Cultivating Community, it was interesting when I connected with you about Cultivating Community you wrote me back and you said I think I knew your brother, so you and I already had a community connection. You taught my brother ninth grade English at Yarmouth High School.
Craig: That is correct, yes.
Dr. Lisa: Quite a few years ago now. My brother Brian. Is this something that you find in Maine is that community connections are already in existence and it’s something that strengthening has really been a function that you’ve engaged in?
Craig: I have found that and I’m new too, I’ve only lived in Maine for 14 years, so I’m kind of a newcomer by a lot of standards, but yes I think Maine is a wonderfully close knit place where people are connected, people are looking out for each other. I really appreciate, especially compared to some other places that I’ve lived, just what that instills in terms of the civility and depth of the conversation because you know you’re going to be in relationship with people for a long time and so people, I think, are very good at that not burning bridges and really try to get to solutions that work.
I’m fortunate to be at a lot of tables in the state and in different conversations where people from very, very different backgrounds. If you can imagine fisherman and people who regulate fisheries or farmers that want to farm in a certain way and farmers that want to farm in a very different way and those coming into conflict, and people by and large even though they may differ profoundly on a philosophical level can still be respectful and try to move the conversation forward, and I really value that about this place.
Dr. Lisa: What is Cultivating Community? What are the different aspects of this organization that you’ve been putting your heart and soul in for more than a decade now?
Craig: Yeah. Well our motto is “Feeding our hungry, empowering our families, healing our planet.” If you can think of those three as circles, one is about community food security. One is about community empowerment. One is about community sustainability, and those are the three circles in which we work. Agriculture and food systems is the through piece for all of those, so right now what that looks like is our community food security, our anti-hunger work is mostly built around a farmer’s market and farm stand initiative where we’re trying to literally create access points for people that may not have a lot of resources to get fresh local produce and they can use, if they’re receiving federal nutrition benefits to put food on the table which one in four Maine families are, they can use those benefits at those farm stands at those farmer’s markets that we’re partnering with. We also have a free and sliding scale CSA and an elder share program, so we’re trying to get food out to people in ways that work for them and also work for farmers because that’s an important part, and that sort of jumps us to the next circle which is the community empowerment piece.
Even though we have a lot of hungry people in this state and a lot of people for whom food is out of reach, the other part of the conversation which sometimes can be awkward to engage when we have that today is that people now pay historically low percentages of their family budget for food. I happen to think people actually should be paying more for food and less for the kinds of stuff that I think we can all agree is kind of killing us and the planet. If we did that one of the things about people paying a historically low percentages of their income for food is that it’s very, very hard to make a living as a farmer, so on the one hand we have all these hungry people we’re trying to create pathways for them to be able to access healthy food. On the other hand we’re trying to support farmers and we run a, in particular, a refugee farmer training program, so people trying to build businesses around farming and it’s really important for farmers to be able to get a fair price for their food. There’s a whole bunch of conversations around our own food policy and subsidies and things that sort of bundled up in that question and that challenge.
In another piece of our community empowerment work is really, and this is coming from my roots as a teacher, is around youth and so we run teen programs, first jobs programs in the summer called Youth Growers and Grow Interns. We partner with lots and lots of schools that want to use school gardens and have food as a way to teach leadership and stewardship.
Then that third circle around community sustainability really has to do with the kind of agriculture that we practice and where we practice it. We think cities can produce a lot more of the food. We think we can shorten the distance between field and table and that helps. Then just the way that one treats the land so that you’re putting back as much as you’re taking out. All of those pieces work together, we hope.
Dr. Lisa: If people who are listening have an interest in getting involved in Cultivating Community what types of things are available that they might be able to help you with and how can they find out more?
Craig: Well they should certainly start by going to the website cultivatingcommunity.org and there’s a little box on the front page of the website that says, I think it says receive our newsletter, and if you just put your email in there you’ll get it and I promise we don’t send out a lot of emails. You don’t get buried in SPAM, but you’ll find out what we’re doing and that includes volunteer opportunities. As with any organization we have a range of needs. There’s really kind of hands on stuff and that is obviously heavier during the growing season, so this is the Thanksgiving show our 2012 growing season is pretty much put to bed at this point, but starting in February when the greenhouses start up and in April when we get outside we’ve got a lot of work to do and we welcome individuals, families, large groups to come and help us do that.
Then we also have organizational needs. Like any non-profit we’re always somewhat under resourced so we just get a lot of help on lots of things, communications, outreach. Another thing that people could definitely do and they would get notice in the spring if this was a way they wanted to get involved is if they wanted to buy a community supported agriculture share from one of the refugee farmers in our program. That’s a huge benefit to the work that we’re trying to do. Those farmers market collectively under the banner of Fresh Start Farms, so that would encourage people to buy Fresh Start Farms CSA.
Visit one of our neighborhood farm stands in the spring when we open back up. Maybe volunteer to help out with one of our school gardens. We’re always looking for volunteers and we do a pretty interesting volunteer training if you want to spend a day and kind of get certified as the school garden implementer, so there are lots of ways to plug in.
Dr. Lisa: Can people also donate money?
Craig: People can always donate money. Yes, thank you. Yeah, and that’s super easy. There’s a “Donate Now” button on our website. If you’d rather write a check you can go to the website, again, cultivatingcommunity.org and all that information is there. Yes.
Dr. Lisa: You have a Facebook page, too.
Craig: We do. We actually have two. We’ve got an organizational one and if you’re particularly interested in our youth programs, Cultivating Community Youth Programs has a Facebook page as well.
Dr. Lisa: One final question, why do you think this notion of community has become so much more important of late?
Craig: I guess what I would say is I think we’re in the middle of an interesting transition where we went from a world of lots of kind of independent local communities through a phase where there was this huge integration and homogenization I guess, where the sort of slightly monolithic consumer based, I would say, American culture emerged, and there have always been doubters and naysayers in that. People who have paved the groundwork for what’s happening now, whereas they were sort of rediscovering the opportunity for lots and lots of interconnected but still local and largely self-sufficient economies and communities. I think that that’s where all of the new communications technology allows that interconnectedness but people, I think, are rediscovering the value and in some cases the necessity of having really strong local communities as well that are working together and fairly and all that.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I appreciate all the work you’re doing to create community and to build on the community that we’ve had here in our great state of Maine, so thank you for coming in and talking to us. We’ve been talking with Craig Lapine from Cultivating Community.
Craig: Thank you.