Place Corps Grows Solutions for the Future

Mission Driven Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Businesses designed to shift from a take-make-waste economic model to a circular one promise to unlock trillions of dollars in economic value and about 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions can be addressed through the circular economy, says Ellen McArthur Foundation. 

Local leaders who invest in building community simultaneously build climate resiliency by implementing mutual aid networks and having communities of care in the face of catastrophe. 

Politics, Ethics, & Aesthetics

Just climate solutions are informed place specific strategies to transition whole communities from extractive living and instead build thriving economies and ecologically sustainable livelihoods; that are democratic and ecological resilient.

Practical Life Skills

Growing and eating healthy local foods and building context-appropriate structures and landscapes honor natural resources. They cut down on greenhouse gas emissions by shortening the chain and supply link in food and building production by using regenerative resources and building healthy soil.

Creative Praxis

Growing our ability to respond to climate challenges is another way of saying “taking more responsibility;” we do this by healing and strengthening our bodies, minds, and spirits. Innovative climate solutions are creative and inspired solutions. The arts inspire action to protect what we love.

Communications

The sharing of ideas by telling stories allows humans to collaborate in large numbers in extremely flexible ways. This has been a reason humans have survived thousands of years. Story is how we translate thought into collective action across geographies and time.

Mission Driven Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Place Corps programs integrate with each location in a circuit of learning that uplifts work already happening. In doing so, we invest in local businesses, organizations, institutions, and creatives, stimulating the local economy.

Politics, Ethics, & Aesthetics

We work collaboratively with community organizations to become a climate solution and share projects for impact. Sustainable livelihoods advance economic growth and stability.

We recognize the importance of the interplay between economic dynamics and wellbeing solutions. A holistic approach to sustainable economic development calls for us to create systems in which we work together and interact with each other, including businesses, workforce, and infrastructure. Each has interdependence to the rest and are all necessary in moving towards flourishing socio-economic and environmental systems.

Practical Life Skills

Practical life skills offer an alternative pathway to learning resource management and employability skills, along with critical thinking, that in turn improves quality of life, advances the economics of wellbeing, and builds sustainable livelihoods. By returning to traditional skills including farming, we are building skills of resilience that will subsist throughout system declines and disruption like the current pandemic. In this way, Place Corps is an economic solution for late capitalism that teaches the literacy to navigate our current economic climate while also existing in alternative subversive systems.

Creative Praxis

Innovative economic solutions are creative and inspired solutions. According to the American Bar Association, creative industries are one of the highest growth sectors in the global economy, a strong driver of both economic growth and great disrupters to economic infrastructure. Urban studies theorist Richard Florida identifies creative and knowledge based workers as a leading force in economic development because of their ability to spur growth through innovation. Creative praxis have an impact on micro and macro levels of the economy. As UNESCO reminds us, “Creativity is a renewable, sustainable, limitless resource that we can find anywhere around the world.”

​​Communications

We believe accessible, effective communication with adeptness in interpersonal and digital communications leads to increased employment opportunity, innovation, and enterprise development. Adaptability is a key skill for navigating the future workforce and communication is a key universal working skill.

Mission Driven Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs set the values and standards that they live and work by. Place Corps teaches youth the skills necessary to be self directed in their work and be intentional in creating sustainable, equitable standards. Innovative leaders with a strong mission lead innovative enterprises that shift social norms and effect just change through the work they do. 

Politics, Ethics, & Aesthetics

Whole systems solutions incorporate social equity by design. Through teaching a community-oriented, holistic design process that integrates into and contextualizes within place, solutions are more likely to withstand, adapt, and evolve through the changing times. Solutions without an equitable perspective lack sustainability.

Practical Life Skills

Practical life skills are the backbone upon which we can build sustainable livelihoods. Practicing equity starts in the home. We teach community oriented models of growing and sharing food to house governance and conflict resolution.

Creative Praxis

Social equity is an active practice and commitment  that needs continual, intentional implementation. Oftentimes to break biases within ourselves, communities, and larger systems requires radical imagination and creative innovation as well as healing and dismantling internalized structures of oppression. To have longevity as an ally and activist requires practices of self care for sustainable action.

​​Communications

Effective interpersonal and digital communications creates accessibility with diverse representation. Accessible communication is a practice of social equity, as it invites dialogue and collaboration for problem-solving and imagining.