The Environment Council of RI does a yearly Issues Day. This year ECRI thought it would be timely to do an Issues Day focused on the Economy/Ecology interface in RI. At the same time a group of people came together to create the RI Sustainability Coalition to address issues of long term sustainability in RI. They decided that a sustainability conference would be a good means of introducing themselves and their work to the larger community. Given that the Ecology/Economy interface confronts similar issues to those a group focusing on sustainability would confront, we all sat down and decided to jointly put on a conference.

Since that decision many other partners have been brought into the process. Most conferences on sustainability have focused on the most advanced technologies or solutions that are only accessible to people with a fair amount of money and the time to do extensive research. We are presenting a conference that while providing material and workshops on the newest and latest, is on the whole much more focused on accessibility. Sustainability will never become a real force in American society unless energy efficiency, access to local produce that is grown organically, new modes of housing, locally self reliant manufacturing and economic development, and recycling are truly accessible to the urban poor and become an integral part of their lives and the efforts to improve them.

The conference planning committee has three specific ways by which it insures that the conference focus is kept on the path to a healthy planet while helping to create a better quality of life by bringing the best technologies and community organizational structures into the lives of low income people. The first is that the organizing committee would come up with 5 overarching questions that each workshop would be asked to focus their discussion on. The second course of action is that while the original conveyers of the conference come from the traditional environmental community we had early on in the planning reached out to organizations in the community that work with and advocate for low income communities. Groups like SWAP, DARE, and CHISPA are now a part of the conference planning process and the outreach continues. Finally, while the conference committee opened up the workshop process, encouraging people to volunteer to organize or run workshops, the organizing committee suggests to workshop presenters that they stay close to the conference theme of sustainability in the city.