Is DailyActs.org Ready for a Global Reach? Interview #3 with Executive Director Trathen Heckman from PlanetShifter.com Magazine & Networks

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Is DailyActs.org Ready for a Global Reach? Interview #3 with Executive Director Trathen Heckman from PlanetShifter.com Magazine & Networks

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Who is on the new DailyActs.org Board? How were these folks selected and what do they do?!

Holy smokes, we have some stellar folks. Christopher Peck is our Board Chair, Tiffany Mitchell, Julie Young, Mike Heaviside, Robert Sabini and Ian Munc round out the list. As for selection, it has been an organic process. Julie and Mike were some of Daily Acts original founders and are still rocking it. Christopher has been a long time Daily Acts donor and supporter and Tiffany, Ian and Robert are newer to Daily Acts but are all great supporters and contributing significantly. Some folks have brought specific skills to the table such as being a lawyer or CPA, but each one of them has just really been passionate about our work and has wanted to contribute. As for what they do? Everything. They work on governance and policies, fund raise, help out with our programs, you name it.

Give us some highlights from your new governance process and policies? How will these support success and growth?

Being a small but growing non-profit, we’ve long been powered by volunteers with incredible community support. Over the last year, we’ve added several new board members with a great deal of board experience and are really moving towards a stronger managing board versus more of a strictly working board. Our bi-laws and policies are being updated right now so it’s a bit early for highlights. What is exciting to me though is having such a strong, committed and competent team, that also loves to have fun and live the values we are teaching and growing. I feel good about our board, staff and our incredible volunteer community and their ability to navigate the opportunities of a world in such dire need of inspired solutions rooted in the power of mindful daily actions.

Please compare and contrast DailyActs.org from the other permaculture edu groups in the area?

I don’t know that I could make a good comparison. Though we do have several amazing allies that work in the realm of permaculture education. Kevin Bayuk and the San Francisco Permaculture Guild have some really exciting and innovative projects they are working on including the Hayes Valley Farm. Brock Dolman and Occidental Arts and Ecology Center are always rocking it with a diversity of really stellar courses as well as a beautiful piece of land that they steward. Penny and James at Regenerative Design Institute have been great mentors and friends and are always kicking the inspired action up a notch. While not in comparison, an area of focus we are really working on at Daily Acts is both mobilizing grassroots action and home scale models, but also working to change policy with things like greywater and working with municipalities to integrate more of the hands on ecological design. An example is the Cavanagh Center food forest we installed in collaboration with the City of Petaluma.

What are your criteria as you reach-out and establish sponsors and partners?

While things are always growing and evolving, we just look for organizations and companies that are strongly aligned with our values. In our work we focus on who and what inspires us and we love to work with partners and sponsors that equally inspire us, where we can focus on local companies. While not local to Northern California, one of our favorite business supporters has been New Belgium Brewing Company. They make super tasty beer, have a great culture, have been a long-time leading green company and are also very philanthropic. What more could you ask for? Though we are really fortunate to have many amazing supporters and partners. Relationships make the world go around and it’s definitely what powers Daily Acts.

What events / opportunities are coming for the summer and fall?

Now that the 350 Garden Challenge is over, we are excited to pause and rest a bit. Though we have a pretty inspiring schedule throughout the summer of tours, workshops, events, a fashion show, all sorts of goodness. Just in the next two weeks we have workshops on Seaweed Harvesting, making a Cob Oven, creating a simple greywater system, and learning about permaculture food forests at the Cotati Pocket Park Food Forest we’ve been installing with designer Patrick Picard of Equinox Landscapes.

What are the successes from the recent 350 Garden Challenge? How will you leverage and celebrate this event moving forward?

The 350 Garden Challenge really was an incredible collaboration. With only 15 weeks to organize it all from scratch, setting the goal of planting and revitalizing 350 gardens in a single weekend to save water, grow food, address climate change, support the local economy and empower citizens felt incredibly ambitious. That we finished with 628 gardens of all shapes and sizes is truly amazing and a thing of hope given the scale of the challenges we are facing. The Sonoma County Water Agency was a huge support, all the cities of Sonoma County signed resolutions of support and over 40 businesses, churches, schools and non-profit partners came together to make it happen.

There are so many amazing successes and stories that are emerging from it. We will have some up on our website in June. As far as next steps go, we are doing an assessment of what worked and where to go with it. The big climate day of action for 350.org is 10/10/10, so we are looking strongly at that. And we are already being contacted by organizers in other cities who want to learn from and replicate our success. We definitely want to share anything we can to help leverage our resources, so others can take it even further.

How are you reaching out to the wider NorCal and USA communities? What are the challenges in trying to work outside of Petaluma?

We are reaching out through the media we receive, our videos such as our Greywater video has been seen by tens of thousands of people around the world. I also do quite a few talks and workshops in other communities to spread the word on how our models work. Recently I joined the board of Transition U.S., so that is becoming more of a focus, to help support the emerging Transition Initiatives around the U.S. While we’ve been honing our models for almost 9 years now, we’ve always had our eye on how to spread these tools to help others affect change more quickly through our lessons learned.

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Tra's Bio -

Trathen Heckman is the founding director of Daily Acts, publisher of Ripples Journal and a backyard farmer. Former director of Green Sangha, he serves on the board of Transition US. Trathen inspires, educates and collaborates with communities, business and municipal leaders to harness the power of nature and inspired action to restore the health of our lives and communities. He lives in the Petaluma River Watershed where he grows food, medicine and wonder while working to compost apathy and lack.

Connections –
Trathen Heckman, Executive Director
DailyActs.org
707.789.9664
Trathen at dailyacts.org