Transcriber: Krystian Aparta Reviewer: Camille Rouliere
So today, I'm going to tell you about some people
who didn't move out of their neighborhoods.
The first one is happening right here in Chicago.
Brenda Palms-Barber was hired to help ex-convicts re-enter society
and keep them from going back into prison.
Currently, tax-payers spend
about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail.
We know that 2/3 of them are going to go back.
I find it interesting that for every one dollar we spend,
however, on early childhood education like Headstart,
we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future.
Or, think about it,
that 60,000 dollars is more
than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well.
But Brenda, not being fazed by stuff like that,
took a look at her challenge
and came up with a not-so-obvious solution:
create a business that produces skin-care products from honey.
It might be obvious to some of you, wasn't to me.
It's the basis of growing a form of social innovation
that has real potential.
She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees,
harvest the honey, and make value-added products that they marketed themselves
and were later sold at Wholefoods.
She combined employment experience and training,
and with life skills they needed,
like anger management and teamwork,
and also had a talk to future employers about how their experiences
actually demonstrated the lessons they had learned
and their eagerness to learn more.
Less than 4% of the folks
that went through her program actually go back to jail.
So these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills
through bee-keeping and becoming productive citizens in the process.
Talk about a sweet beginning.
Now, I'm going to take it to Los Angeles.
And I know lots of people know that L.A. has its issues,
but I will talk about L.A.'s water issues now.
They have not enough water on most days,
and too much to handle when it rains.
Currently, 20% of California's energy consumption is used to pump water
into mostly Southern California.
They're spending loads, loads, to channel
that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well.
Now, Andy Lipkis is working to help
L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management
and urban heat island,
linking trees, people and technology to create a more livable city.
All that green stuff that actually naturally absorbs storm water
also helps cool our cities,
because, think about it,
do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want?
How you get it you shouldn't make that much of a difference.
So a few years ago, the L.A. county decided that they needed to spend
2.5 billion dollars to repair the city's schools
and Andy and his team discovered
that they were going to spend 200 million of that
on asphalt to surround the schools themselves
and by presenting a really strong economic case,
they convinced the L.A. government
that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery
meant that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy
than they spend on horticultural infrastructure.
So ultimately, 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided
and electrical consumption for air-conditioning went down
while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up,
resulting in a net saving to the system,
but also healthier students and school systems employees as well.
Now, Judy Bonds is a coal-miner's daughter.
Her family has 8 generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia,
and if anyone should be clinging
to the former glory of the coal-mining history, and of a town,
it should be Judy.
But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines
that her father and her father's father would go down into
and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people.
Now 2 dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months
and only for about a few years' worth of coal.
That kind of technology is called mountain-top removal.
It can make a mountain go from this...
To this, in a few short months.
Just imagine the air surrounding these places,
it is filled with the residue of explosives and coal.
When we visited,
it gave some of the people with us this strange little cough
after being only there for just a few hours or so.
Not just miners, but everybody.
And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned,
and the coal companies, you know,
just move on after the mountain was empty
leaving even more unemployment in their wake.
But she also saw the difference
in potential wind energy on an intact mountain,
and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet.
Three years of dirty energy
with not many jobs or centuries of clean energy
with the potential for developing expertise
and improvements in efficiency
based on technical skills
and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region's wind.
She calculated the upfront cost and the payback over time,
and it is a net plus on so many levels
for the local, national and global economy.
It's a longer payback than mountain-top removal,
but the wind energy actually pays back forever.
The mountain-top removal pays very little money to the locals
and it gives them a lot of misery.
The water is turned into goo,
most people are still unemployed,
leading to most of the same kind of social problems that unemployed people
in inner cities also experience:
drug and alcohol abuse,
domestic abuse, teen pregnancy
and poor health as well.
Now Judy and I, I must say,
totally related to each other,
not just quite in obvious alliance,
literally, her hometown's called
Whitesville Pennsylvania...
(Laughter)
They ain't competing for the birthplace of hip-hop title
or anything like that! (Laughter)
But, the back of my T-shirt, the one that she gave me,
says, "Save the endangered hillbillies."
(Laughter)
Home girls and hillbillies,
we got it together and totally understand that this is what it is all about.
But just a few months ago,
Judy was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer.
And...
Yeah.
And it's since moved to her bones and her brain.
You know, I just find it so bizarre
that she is suffering from the same thing
that she tried so hard to protect people from.
But her dream of coal-river mountain wind is her legacy.
And she might not get to see that mountain top,
but rather than writing some kind of another manifesto, or something,
she is leaving behind a business plan to make it happen.
That's what my home girl is doing,
so I'm so proud of that.
(Applause)
But these three people don't know each other,
but they do have an awful lot in common:
they're all problem-solvers
and they are just some of the many examples
that I'm really privileged to see, meet and learn from,
in the examples of the work that I do now.
I was really lucky to have them all featured
on my Corporation for Public [Broadcasting] radio show
called thepromisedland.org.
They're all very practical visionaries,
they take a look at the demands that are out there,
beauty products, healthy schools, electricity
and how the money is flowing to meet those demands.
And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs,
you're left with unemployed people,
and those people aren't cheap.
In fact, they make up some of what I call the most expensive citizens,
and they include generationally impoverished,
traumatized vets returning from the Middle-East
and people coming out of jail,
and for the veterans in particular, the V.A. said
that there's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003.
I think that number is probably going to go up.
They are not the largest number of people,
but they are some of the most expensive,
and in terms of likelihood for domestic abuse,
drug and alcohol abuse, poor performance by their kids in schools
and also poor health as a result of stress.
So these 3 guys all understand how to productively channel dollars
through our local economies to meet existing market demands,
reduce the social problems that we have now
and prevent new problems in the future.
And there are plenty of other examples like that.
You know, one problem: waste handling and unemployment.
Even when we think we talk about recycling,
lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated
or in landfills, and leaving many municipalities' diversion rates...
They leave much to be recycled.
And where is this waste handled?
Usually in poor communities,
and we know that Eco-industrial business with these kind of business models,
there is a model in Europe called the Eco-industrial park
where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another,
or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell.
We can recreate these local markets
and incenses for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing.
And in my hometown, we actually tried to do one of these, in the Bronx,
but our mayor decided
that what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot.
And we wanted to create hundreds of jobs.
The city wanted to build a jail,
but after many years, they abandoned that project.
Thank Goodness.
Another problem:
unhealthy food systems and unemployment.
Working class and poor urban Americans
are not benefiting economically from our current food system.
It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization,
big use of water and also refrigeration.
Mega-agricultural operations are often responsible
for poisoning our waterways and our land
and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions
in healthcare and lost productivity.
So we know that urban agriculture is a big buzz topic this time of the year,
but it's mostly gardening, which has had some value in community building,
lots of it, but it's not in terms of creating jobs or food production.
The numbers just aren't there.
Part of my work now is really laying the groundwork
toward integrating urban Ag. and rural food systems
to hasten the demise of the 3000-mile salad
by creating a national brand of urban grown produce.
Every city uses regional growing power and augments it
with indoor growing facilities owned and operated by small growers,
where now, they're only consumers.
This can support, you know, seasonal farmers
around metro-areas who are losing out
because they really can't meet the year-round demand for produce.
It is not a competition with rural farmers, it's actually reinforcements.
And it allies in a really positive and economically viable food system.
The goal is to meet the cities' institutional demands
for hospitals, seniors' centers, schools, daycare centers,
and produce a network of regional jobs as well.
This is smart infrastructure.
And how we manage our built environment
affects the health and well being of people every single day.
Our municipalities, rural and urban,
play the operational course of infrastructures,
things like waste disposal,
energy demand, as well as social cost of unemployment, drop out rates,
incarceration rates and the impacts of various public health costs.
Smart infrastructure can provide cost saving ways
for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs.
And we want to shift the systems and open the doors
for people who were formerly tax-burdens to become part of the tax-base.
And imagine a national business model
that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure
to improve local economic stability.
So I'm hoping you can see a little theme here.
These examples indicate a trend.
I haven't created it,
and it is not happening by accident.
I'm noticing that it is happening all over the country and the good news
is that it's growing and we all need to be invested in it.
It is an essential pillar to this country's recovery and I call it
home(town) Security.
The recession has us reeling and fearful
but there is something in the air these days that's also very empowering.
It's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery.
Now is the time for us to act in our own communities.
We think local and we act local.
And when we do that, our neighbors, be they next door
or in the next or next country, will be just fine.
You know, that some of the local is the global.
Home(town) security means
that we're building our natural defenses, putting people to work,
restoring our natural systems.
Home(town) security means creating here at home
instead of destroying it overseas.
Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time, with the same solution
yields great cost saving, wealth generation and national security.
Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America.
The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more.
Home(town) security is about taking care of your own,
but it's not like the old saying "charity begins at home."
I recently read a book called "Love Leadership" by John Hope Bryant,
and it's about leading in a world that really does seem
to be operating on the basis of fear.
And reading that book made me reexamine that fear because...
I need to explain what I mean by that.
See, my dad was a great man, in many ways.
He grew up in the segregated South, escaped lynching and all that,
during some really hard times,
and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings
and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times.
But, like all of us, he had some problems.
(Laughter)
And his was gambling, compulsively.
To him, that phrase "charity begins at home"
meant that my payday, or someone else's,
would just happen to coincide with his lucky day.
So you know, you need to help him out.
And sometimes I would loan him money,
from my after-school or summer jobs,
and he always had the great intention of paying me back,
with interest, of course, you know, after he hit it big...
And he did sometimes.
We were at a racetrack in Los Angeles,
one reason to love L.A.,
back in the 1940s,
he made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that I grew up in.
So I'm not that unhappy about that.
But, listen, I did feel obligated to him.
Then, I grew up.
And I'm a grown woman now
and I have learned a few things along the way.
To me, charity often is just about giving because you're supposed to.
Or because it's what you've always done,
or it's about giving until it hurts.
I'm about providing the means to build
something that will grow and intensify its original investment.
And not just require greater giving next year.
Not trying to feed the habit.
I spent some years, you know,
watching how good intentions for community empowerment
that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it
left people in the same, if not worse, position that they were in before.
And over the past 20 years, we've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars
on social problems, yet educational outcomes,
malnutrition, incarceration, obesity,
diabetes, income disparity, they've all gone up,
with some exceptions,
in particular infant mortality among people in poverty.
But you know, what a great world we're bringing them into as well.
And I know a little bit about these issues because for many years,
I spent a long time in the non-profit industrial complex.
And I'm a recovering executive director, two years clean, but...
(Laughter)
During that time, I realized that it was about projects and developing them
on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities.
I really did struggle for financial support.
The greater our success, the less money came in from foundations,
and I tell you, being on the TED stage and wining the MacArthur
in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived.
By the time I moved on, I was actually covering
a third of my agency's budget deficit with speaking fees,
and I think because earlier on, frankly,
my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time.
But since then, the park that was just a dump
and was featured at the TED 2006 talk,
became this little thing...
But I did in fact get married in it, over here...
There goes my dog who led me to the park at my wedding...
(Laughter)
The South Bronx Greenway
was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006.
Since then, we got 50 million dollars in stimulus package money
that come and get here, and we love this,
because I love construction now,
because we're watching these things actually happen.
So I want everyone to understand the critical importance
of shifting charity into enterprise.
I started my firm to help communities across the country
realize their own potential to improve everything
about the quality of life for their people.
Home(town) security is next on my to-do list.
What we need are people
who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises,
who are partnered with folks like me
to identify the growth trends in climate adaptation
as well as understand the growing social cost of business as usual.
We need to work together to embrace and repair our land,
repair our power systems and repair ourselves.
It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums,
and other tributes to all of our collective failures.
It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)