A Relocalization Inspiration Revisited: The Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL) Organization
Last week, I posted about the tremendous relocalization efforts of the small town of Willits, CA. Earlier today, I had the chance to speak with Liam UiCearbhaill, the Operational Facilitator for Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL), the Willits relocalization group, about a variety of topics, including WELL’s community involvement, current projects, and future plans.
What is your specific role in the WELL organization?
My title is operational facilitator. I perform a number of functions, but the real focus is to help things happen. We try really hard not to be too possessive of any project. We look around the town and see who is already doing something good in a particular area and find ways to help them, and we look where nobody is doing anything and try to find ways to get things started. By using that approach, a lot has happened. There’s an alliance of groups that gets together to do grant writing, for instance.
How did you get involved in WELL?
I moved to this area about 5 years ago because I could perceive there was a problem [environmentally]. As I looked around, this looked like the most survivable area for this stuff I saw coming down the pipe. I was thinking of the environmental catastrophes I saw coming down the horizon, not necessarily peak oil. When WELL started up, it was pretty obvious to me that this was something I needed to get involved in.
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What are some current collaborations with other organizations that WELL is working on?
We’ve recently applied for a number of grants. The one that we’re crossing our fingers on is about $187,000 coming from the California Department of Transportation. It would give us the money to complete all the inventories that we feel are necessary for localization here, as well as move along focus groups and public meetings to make recommendations for policy for the city council. Everything from food, water supply and watershed protection issues, transportation, housing, a whole list of different things. Pretty much everything we set out to do 3 ½ years ago when WELL began. This would pay for that process.
Last year we applied for a water conservation grant through the California State Toxics Control Department. It will pay for a Water Conservation Officer who will be developing a water conservation booklet, who will be working with various people on city water system to help them conserve, as well as working on ordinances at the city, county, regional and state levels to allow us to put in things like greywater recycling systems, to encourage rainwater catchment, and to experiment with bioswales. It will also put in demonstration sites at two public areas for rainwater catchment, a test site for greywater recycling, and a test site for bioswales.
We’ve also been working with Brookside Energy Farm. That’s a CSA that is on the grounds of an elementary school here. The kids help out sometimes, and it is a good educational process for them. The CSA gets more and more produce into the school cafeteria, sells shares to local residents, supplies local fresh vegetables to restaurants nearby, uses waste from restaurants in a worm bin to develop compost and does it all without the use of fossil fuels .
We work with the local Grange on a number of different events, including Eldertalk, where we ask older members of the community what life was like 80 years ago, how the economy was different. This has given us a lot of insight into how we might change things now.
What is WELL planning for the future?
We’re floating a concept to FEMA that in terms of emergency preparedness, our single biggest vulnerability is food. We have roughly 3 ½ days of food on store shelves at any given moment, and probably 7-8 days worth in people’s houses. And virtually all of our food comes in by truck. The amount that’s growing here locally is not significant compared to the calories consumed. What we’re asking FEMA to do is to underwrite the installation of homeland security gardens (based on the Victory Garden project of World War 2). That’s something we’re still trying to figure out.
How much of the Willits community is involved in WELL?
There are roughly 13,500 people in the zip code. Membership rolls are currently 300, of which a little over 200 are paid up. Our email list is probably 2-3 times that amount. It would be reasonable to say 5 percent or more of the population have expressed an interest or are directly involved in one way or another.
The Chamber of Commerce is one of our closest allies, but they are concentrating on local business ownership, buying local, and working towards local supply sources. And it’s paid off — for instance, Willits is the only tax district in the county whose revenue has actually gone up in the past year. Primarily, it has gone up in sales tax while our motel tax revenue has gone down. And we’re a major tourist area, so the fact that this happened tells me that the price of gas is affecting tourism, but we’re still getting more sales because people are buying things locally. So we’re having something of a business renaissance here, and the localization movement is right at the heart of that.
