This video is an introduction to Bright Neighbor. An event designed to rally neighbors for growing and fixing farms outside the city.
After helping author Portland, Oregon’s groundbreaking Peak Oil Task Force report, Randy White started a technology company called Bright Neighbor to create a transition tool. Since launching in November of 2008, over 4,000 Portlanders have joined the network, with a focus on creating a sustainable city based on earth-balanced living. Members include those who are associated with other transition projects, including Transition Towns, permaculture guilds, green living groups, and even corporate executives from large, institutionalized organizations.
One main focus of Bright Neighbor is to mobilize the community to start worm farming operations within the city, and to offer a portion of the worm castings, living soil, and seeds to farmers outside of the cities for fixing dead, fossil fuel soaked soil. Thus far, the Bright Neighbor system has been a pilot project in Portland, and in September, it will roll out nation-wide across America and Canada. By creating worm farming operations in each of Portland’s 95 neighborhoods, the city can redirect waste paper, food scraps, and cardboard to hungry worms that output magic to fix our soils.
On the business side, Bright Neighbor’s staff work closely with companies (Portland general electric, Gerding Edlen development, Portland Trail Blazers, etc.) to help them prepare mitigation plans and business-continuity strategies. With the Bright Neighbor methods as well as the technology – citizens, businesses, and even Portland city government are deepening local relationships, resilience, economies, and building permaculture into every-day living. Bright Neighbor features include a city-wide neighbor-to-neighbor barter system, ride sharing, documented videos of neighborly behavior, and a variety of innovations.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks, Bright Neighbor is dedicated specifically to helping people learn and execute behavior associated with post-peak living. It is, of course, impossible for each citizen to create a deep, personal relationship with the other 600,000+ people living in Portland (or any town for that matter). With Bright Neighbor, even as the economy disintegrates, community members track and report their own progress, which are assigned point values. These points become credits along the lines of time banking or favor banking. These credits are then used to get people what they need based on peer-to-peer economies, eliminating the existing middle bottleneck called money.
