Garden for All!

Garden for all is coming. Last year it was a great success and this year we plan to run three (3) six week series for young people in our community to teach them garden and healthy living skills. How will you participate in Garden for all. We need volunteers to help supervise children, assist with crafts and help with setup and clean up. What other needs are there Maria or Celeste?

EXPO 2012

The HBI is headed toward a really great launch event and EXPO on Saturday, April 14, 2012 on the property of the Community Garden at 1679 Columbia Drive. What role do you plan on serving? Please post your role and let's make sure all our bases are covered.

Good to Great - Flylwheel or Doom Loop?

Take your places. Buckle your seat belts. This rocket is about to blast off!

The “Flywheel” and “Doom Loop”

These two concepts represent positive and negative momentum. A flywheel is a heavy wheel that takes a lot of energy to set in motion - to do so usually requires constant, steady work, rather than a quick acceleration. Great companies’ transformations were like this as well. There was no magic recipe or no ‘aha’ moment when everything changed. Rather, with everything in place, lots of hard work slowly but steadily got the great companies going faster and faster, with a lot of momentum. Once it’s in motion, all that stored energy tends to keep it moving in the right direction.

Conversely, the “doom loop” is the vicious circle that unsuccessful companies fall into, rushing first in one direction, then another, in the hope of creating a sudden, sharp break with the past that will propel them to success. Some attempt to do this through acquisitions, others through bringing in a new leader who decides to change direction completely, in a direction incompatible with the company. The results are never good. The difference between the two approaches is characterized by the slow, steady, methodical preparation inherent in the flywheel, as compared to the abrupt, radical, and often revolutionary, rather than evolutionary changes within the company.

Demographics

Thanks to the work done by Ashley we now know that half the population of Belvedere Park is populated by renters? That means that those residents will have little or no interest in the progress and status of the community. Our question has to be, "How do we encourage renters to be interested and invested in the advancement of the community? Regardless of their renter status they would still benefit from the HBI, healthy eating, active living through policy, systems and environmental change. How do we help them to appreciate the opportunity to enhance the community and take advantage of this opportunity? How do we motivate renters? Ashley reports research that shows renters are most commonly transient and therefore not as engaged in their community. They also have less time to commit to extracurricular activities because of longer working hours, family commitments, etc. How do we overcome this barrier to the advancement of the HBI?

What do you think about becoming a 501c3?

One of the essential questions is should the HBI become a 501c3. What do you think? Please post your thoughts here for all to see. Thanks

Opening Thoughts

The Healthy Belvedere Initiative (HBI) is a partnership between Kaiser Permanente (KP), The Community Foundation and the Belvedere Park community to help reduce healthy disparities in the community and create a sustainable community culture of Healthy Eating and Active Living through policy, systems and environmental change.

The HBI has three thrusts: Healthy Eating which has the primary emphasis of the community garden; Active Living which has as primary the walking clubs, MoveME, and other groups such as yoga and 5K races; and third the policy, systems and environmental change group that seeks to discover what the HBI can do to help reduce health disparities on the level of legislative policy, community systems and environment.

The Initiative is in its fifth and final year of funding from KP and the question for the current Healthy Belvedere Steering Committee (HBSC) is how to organize to go forward in a way that continues to serve the community and provides for sustainability of the initiative. There are basically three options:

1) Organize as a 501c3 to seek grants on our own and continue to keep all three initiatives in house.

2) Take the three thrusts and allow community partners to take them all and HBI will not need a 501c3 or significant staff because those issues will be assumed by the partners. For example, partner with the YMCA to promote and sustain the Walking Clubs and other active living initiatives and partner with Peace Lutheran Church to sustain the garden. In this scenario the home owners associations and community groups would be the partners for environmental and policy changes.

3) Some combination of the two so that the HBI will organize as a 501c3 so that the organization would be able to pursue grants and maintain staff as well as work with partners to sustain and enhance various intitiaves.

This is the issue that we are facing and we desired to host a retreat on March 31st but that is no longer possible so let's have the conversation online through this blog so that we can come to a conclusion. We still need to make a decision by March 31st so that we can go forward with our sustainability plan.

Thanks for your input. Ready, set, blog!