Celebration Gratitude from Sustainable Solano

Sep 30, 2024

By Sustainable Solano

Attendees could view a timeline of SuSol’s 25-year history (Photo credit (all): Luke George)

We would like to extend a warm thank you to everyone who attended our 25th Anniversary celebration! Your presence truly made the evening special, and it was wonderful to see so many familiar faces and meet new friends who share our passion for the mission of our organization.

A special thank you to Assemblymember Lori Wilson, and the representatives for Congressmen Mike Thompson and John Garamendi for attending our event. We are grateful for the state Legislature recognition, Congressional commendation, and recognition from Wanda Williams with the Board of Supervisors. Your support means the world to us and helps us continue our work!

Assemblymember Lori Wilson recognizes SuSol / Attendees enjoy a farm-to-table dinner from Chef Lindsey Chelini

It was fantastic to witness everyone coming together, sharing their insights, and contributing to our vision board. Your ideas and perspectives are invaluable as we shape the future of our programs. Look for a blog in November where we will share some of the insights we received from attendees, how they intersect with our current work and where they guide us to look in our future work.

We’d love for you to stay involved! Whether it’s attending future events or making a donation to keep this work going, your support is crucial in helping us continue our mission. Every little bit counts and makes a difference.

SuSol staff and a Youth Leadership Council alum discuss programs with attendees

Thank you once again for being part of our journey. We’re excited to move forward together, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds!

Internship Addresses Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, Solutions

Aug 2, 2024

By Alan Candelario, Suisun City Nature-Based Solutions intern

Our Nature-Based Solutions internship in Suisun City focused on the risks posed by sea level rise and possibilities with nature-based solutions to flooding. Interns learned about these approaches and brought their insight to community gatherings to get resident insight about risks, how they use the waterfront, and what types of solutions they prioritize. Here, Alan shares about his experience in the internship.

Interns offer feedback on a map of downtown Suisun City during a community workshop

I’ve learned many things regarding climate change and what to expect for Suisun if nothing is done to combat rising sea levels. If we do nothing, Suisun could be practically submerged in 50 years time. I also learned ways to combat flooding – for example putting seawalls or a levee or nature-based solutions like marsh restoration, which restores the wetlands so animals can have a better habitat and the area around can be better. This could mean people being able to walk to it and just relax, and also for wildlife to have an area to call home.

I also made new friends here at the internship. Everyone at the internship was nice and explained things to us clearly. Some of my favorite events were the flood walk, which helped paint a picture of what parts of Suisun would be flooded if action isn’t taken. A flood walk is a great event to attend if you want to learn more about what the city is already doing to prevent flooding and what they could do in select areas to combat flooding.

Outside of Raley’s we helped hand out flyers to people in hopes that they would attend a workshop and get information about flooding and sea level rise in Suisun. The workshop was an event people could attend and learn about sea rise levels, ask questions if they had any concerns and share their perspectives. I also attended a garden walk where people went to get information on how to make a good garden for the environment which uses rain and rainwater. It also helps prevent floods if enough people do it.

At the end of the day my experience with the internship was amazing. I met cool people, I learned valuable things about climate change, and I had fun. If I were asked if I would do this again, I would say yes 10/10 would recommend. I also joined this internship since I wanted to see what the city was doing to combat climate change so people could have a better future here in Suisun.

This internship opened my eyes more to the world of environmental science. I was already interested in it since I had taken a class my junior year, but the internship helped me see the bigger picture like flood prevention. So I plan to hopefully study environmental science later in life and help prevent things like sea level rise.

SuSol Celebrates its 25th Year with Milestone Event

Jul 1, 2024

By Sustainable Solano

This year marks a significant milestone for Sustainable Solano as we celebrate 25 years of fostering sustainability, resilience, and community well-being in Solano County. To commemorate this achievement, we invite you to join us Sept. 21 for an unforgettable evening in the picturesque Suisun Valley. Set amidst a beautiful vineyard, our anniversary celebration promises to be a night of reflection, celebration, and forward-looking vision. We will take time to share memories from the past 25 years and talk about our impacts in community resilience, local food, green infrastructure, and youth empowerment.

The equinox, with its perfect balance of light and dark, provides an auspicious backdrop for our event. This time of equilibrium is ideal for making important decisions about the future, and it is symbolic of the balanced and sustainable future we envision for Solano County. As we gather on this special night, we will take time to recognize the collective efforts and special people that have brought us to this point. Most importantly, we will look forward to the next seeds being planted for resilience in Solano County and invite you to be involved in shaping our work ahead. We’ll officially launch our new business recognition initiative, Doing Good, which will provide an opportunity to spotlight local businesses that are making a positive impact on our environment and community.

The evening will feature a farm-to-table dinner prepared by local Chef Lindsey Chelini of BackDoor Bistro, showcasing the best of our region’s bounty. Each dish will highlight fresh, locally sourced ingredients, emphasizing our commitment to sustainable agriculture and community health. Paired with local wines from Backroad Vines, the meal will be a culinary journey celebrating the flavors and richness of our county.

Mark your calendars for Sept. 21 and get ready for an evening of great food, inspiring conversations and dancing. We look forward to celebrating with you and charting the course for our next 25 years.

General tickets will be available in August. Tables of 8 will be offered by request. Keep an eye out for more details!

Farm Field Trip Highlights Connections to Food and Well-Being for Interns

Mar 28, 2024

By Taylor Collins, Development & Communications Coordinator

Morningsun Herb Farm’s Rose Loveall leads Youth Wellness Program students from Fairfield High on a tour of the farm

Student interns attending a field trip to Morningsun Herb Farm in March had an opportunity to touch, taste and smell a variety of plants and herbs as part of our Youth Wellness Program. The grounding, multisensory experience of visiting Morningsun provided a unique opportunity to engage with herbs, and invited full-bodied mindfulness, encouraging our students to slow down and be present with their thoughts and each other.

Morningsun Herb Farm is a family-owned farm in Vacaville. The farm grows over 600 species of herbs, succulents and heirloom vegetables. The land is full of trees and wildly growing shrubs. Whimsical metal art and cute sculptures dot the landscape and there are several canopies, greenhouses, and hoop houses surrounding the farm.

During our field trip, Fairfield High School students in the Youth Wellness Program visited a large hoop house with thousands of small herbs. These herbs were all grown from seeds or propagated from larger plants growing on the property. There was a striking variety of lavender, basil and sage. Rose Loveall, the owner of the farm, picked up a basil plant and spoke to us about the essential oils in the plant that produce its aromas and flavors.

As she passed the basil to a student, she said, “Herbs want to be touched. As you pass them around, feel their texture and take in the scent that is produced from their leaves.”

The group questioned this notion. “How do we know that the herbs want to be touched? Do they grow better when they are handled?”

For those of us who don’t live or work on farms, the origins of the food we eat can feel distant and abstract. We may intellectually understand that the basil we consume was grown from the ground, but this knowledge alone fails to capture the impact of physically experiencing the basil plant – feeling its delicate leaves in our hands, inhaling its aromatic fragrance, and being transported to memories of meals where its flavor enriched our dishes. While we may not know for sure what the basil wants, our sense serves as our bridge to communicate with the more-than-human world.

Plants use fragrance to attract pollinators to aid in their reproductive cycle. As we stood in a room with thousands of growing plants, it would appear that the basil got what it wanted. Breathtaking sights often draw humans to nature, but our less-dominant senses hold deeper lessons for us. Deep listening, taste, smell and touch open us up for a more profound connection to the life that sustains us. Considering the needs of a plant like basil can help break down the hierarchies that separate us from our wider ecosystem and these experiences can help us understand that we are not just observers of nature but in partnership with it.

The Youth Wellness Program helps connect all of these dots. As the students engage with plants in the garden, on the farm and in the kitchen, their relationship with them is recontextualized. The program brings together a cohort of 20 high school students for hands-on instruction in practical skills related to gardening and cooking. Each week, in groups of 10, the students build relationships with each other as they learn side by side. Building on a pilot “Healthy Local Food” program offered in partnership with Innovative Health Solutions and Armijo High School during last school year, Sustainable Solano was able to expand the program this year to add more focus on mental health and bring it to more schools. This year, the Youth Wellness Program was offered at Armijo, Fairfield and Vacaville high schools.

We left the hoophouse and followed Rose through a doorway made of wildly growing vines and squeezed into a small circular courtyard punctuated by a stone fountain in the center. Under the dappled shade of trees, we passed around and tasted several kinds of flowers and stems of lavender, geranium and bergamot. All of these plants are a part of the mint family, Lamiaceae, and have varying notes of menthol and bright, citrus-like flavors.

“Doesn’t taste like a grape, but doesn’t taste bad,” said Johan, a Fairfield High senior, about grape-scented lavender. Jinny, another senior, remarked, “It tastes like sage, or like medicine.”

The berries on a tree caught the eye of one of the students. It was a myrtle berry and a few of us tasted it. The flavor was pungent, peppery, and slightly sweet.

As we touched and tasted the various flowers, berries, and herbs, most of the students listened to Rose with rapt attention as she described each plant. There were a few side conversations but they were all about the flavors and sensations of the farm.

I can admit that my attention span has shortened considerably over the last few years. The pandemic had us all focused on our various screens and led to decreased social connectedness for everyone, especially students.

Morningsun is not far from the high school, but the rhythms of this experience made us feel much more off the grid. The earth felt softer beneath my shoes and the vibrations of the insects and birds moving through the trees was palpable.

This gentle, sensory immersion was a stark difference from the busy, digital-centric routines of our lives. Research suggests that time spent outdoors is linked to renewed attention, lower stress, and a balanced nervous system. Planting a garden is an act of optimism, which is especially important for young people on the precipice of adulthood. The culinary instruction is an opportunity to put new skills into practice, exercise teamwork and trust.

As the trip concluded, the students had the opportunity to interact with the animals and explore the array of plants. Each student selected an herb to plant in their school garden and use in the kitchen. This excursion reinforced the significance of grounding experiences for youth. Reflecting on my own experiences in nature, those moments of clarity and connection with the world remain vivid in my memory. I am eager for our students to embark on more enriching journeys with the land that promote growth, foster connections, and enhance their overall well-being.

The Youth Wellness Program is generously funded by Solano Public Health

Community Action Plan to Create a More Breathable Future in Fairfield

Dec 4, 2023

By Alex Lunine, Resilient Communities Program Manager

Fairfield residents will come together to create a path towards cleaner, healthier air in their community at a public community action plan workshop 12-3 pm Sunday, Jan. 28, at the Fairfield Adult Recreation Center.
Register here.

This indicator map through CalEnviroScreen shows the high asthma rates in Solano County 

Solano County, on the whole, has the ninth highest asthma rate in California, with the majority of Fairfield neighborhoods east of the I-80 having a more severe asthma burden than 90% of other census tracts. To address our air pollution and empower the community to tackle the air quality issues afflicting their city, Sustainable Solano will be facilitating the creation of an Air Quality Community Action Plan with Fairfield residents in a public workshop Jan. 28.

During the creation of this community-driven action plan, residents, governmental agencies and air quality experts will highlight the vulnerabilities they see in Fairfield’s short- and long-term air health, and identify priority actions they wish to see taken by the city to ensure that current and future generations in Fairfield have equitable access to clean air.

The Youth Air Protectors led a sustainability walk through Fairfield that highlighted air quality concerns in the city

This event will build off of earlier roundtables hosted in Fairfield, where a few of the key concerns raised by community members included air pollution in relation to traffic, improving Fairfield’s walkability and bikeability, air quality concerns regarding agriculture, setting up a community air monitoring station in Fairfield, and Travis Air Force Base’s impact on air quality.

By participating in the creation of a community action plan, residents can have a voice in how important issues are addressed within their communities. We’ve seen the value of such community engagement in Suisun City, where a community-driven action plan around flood risk and resilience continues to inform city decisions and future planning. We hope to see a similar impact in Fairfield around air quality.

 

The Vision for a SuSol Education Center

Oct 26, 2023

By Sustainable Solano

Sustainable Solano has had a vision for a while now: To have an office space that serves as a place of education around the many things we teach about, such as sustainable landscaping, water capture and reuse; cooking with seasonal, sustainable local food; and building community resilience.

We have been lucky to spend the past few years in our office at the Global Center for Success on Mare Island. This office space puts us near nonprofit partner organizations and the beauty of the Vallejo People’s Garden and the Pollinator Pathway garden we installed with them and Solano RCD in front of the building. But as our team has grown in number, we find there are limitations in a one-room office, both for our team members’ needs as well as ways we would like to interact with all of you in the community.

And so we are returning to that original vision.

We would love to find a safe and beautiful place where we can create and exhibit the solutions we’ve been teaching and demonstrating for nearly 25 years. These may include a permaculture garden or farm, sustainable water techniques, solar energy and maybe even chickens. There could be a commercial kitchen space for teaching classes and preparing food (or the potential to add such a space). We also need a shared workspace and a place to gather around a table for large team or partner meetings, and an area to house tools and equipment, promotional materials and office files. The property would need to be zoned to allow for office space and would need to be able to support visitors coming to the site for meetings, classes and demonstrations.

We’ve seen creative and innovative ways individuals, organizations and cities have supported such projects. In Berkeley, the Ecology Center runs EcoHouse, which was founded in 1999 when a group of individuals “collectively purchased and transformed a small, dilapidated North Berkeley home into a demonstration house and garden.” In American Canyon, the city offered up an old public works yard to be transformed into the Napa River Ecology Center in partnership with the American Canyon Community Parks Foundation. Santa Cruz Permaculture now stewards a 26-acre farm under a 30-year lease as part of its operations.

We’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions for supporting this vision! Reach out to us at info@sustainablesolano.org

Even with this active vision for an education center, Sustainable Solano is committed to continuing hands-on sustainable landscaping and resilience-building workshops, cooking classes, and internships within Solano communities, because these are the very heart of our work. Our goal is to bring neighbors together in ways that help them connect with each other, the Earth, and themselves.