January 26th 2013, 1-4pm
Vineyard Lane – Fireside Room, Bainbridge Island
We want your ideas! Are you interested in joining the Grow Team to explore intergenerational living options at Grow Community? We will be hosting a workshop to gather your thoughts and plan these spaces. Click the link below for more details.
Let the fun begin! Now that Grow Community is under way, we are ready to begin the next phase – design of the community center. This is your building, your place to hang out with friends, host a birthday party, read a book by the fire, work on your bike, participate in a yoga class. Art studios, rooftop gardens, freezer storage, tool library and workshop, movie room, playroom, the list goes on. As with everything at Grow, the possibilities are endless. But it won’t all fit in one building, so we’ll have to choose. And the choices are yours. Please join us for an interactive workshop to share your ideas for this space.
Click here for more details and to RSVP | All are welcome
We have a new idea! We are not sure what form this one will take and we want your help. The concept for Grow Community has always been based on an intergenerational community. What does that mean to us? We imagine a neighborhood where families, young children, singles, retired couples, and elders all live in homes that suit their needs. But not only that, the community, in it’s physical and social design is intended to encourage interactions amongst all these residents. We imagine a neighborhood where relationships are formed, spontaneously and intentionally, where young and old play together in the garden, share experiences and care for each other.
The next buildings we construct will be designed to take this intergenerational concept to the next level. The beginning of an idea has taken shape as we’ve listened to your feedback over the last several months. A building based on Universal Design principles, with one-level flats, accessible spaces, comfortable spaces, spaces designed for young families and elders. We are not quite sure yet what this building or the homes within it will look like. We want to hear from you. How do you want to live? Come help us design your new home.
Click here for more details and to RSVP | All are welcome
January 12th 2013
Vineyard Lane – Fireside Room, Bainbridge Island
We want your ideas! Are you interested in joining the Grow Team to help shape the neighborhood Community Center at Grow Community? We will be hosting a series of interactive workshops in January to gather your thoughts and plan these spaces. Click the links below for more details. Grow Phase 3 Workshop – Community Center Design: Sat, Jan 12 – 1-4pm
Tuesday, January 8th 2013, 9am – 4.30pm
Grow Model Homes, Bainbridge Island
This 7-clock hour class is designed to give Puget Sound real estate brokers and home inspectors a thorough knowledge of green and energy efficient features and benefits from the appraiser’s perspective. You will learn to identify the specific components of green and energy efficient homes with an understanding of the added value components bring and which components have social/marketing value and which components have quantitative value.
We, the Grow Team would like to wish you all a wonderful holiday season! As the days get colder and the holidays are upon us we would like to take a moment to reflect on the past year. In 2012 we opened our first three model homes to the community for tours and are now underway with construction of the next 20 homes and 20 rentals that will make up the first phase of Grow Community. After the New Year the first residents will be moving in and calling Grow home. The Grow Team has been working behind the scenes on this project for over two years now and it is wonderful to finally see the community begin to come together.
With Grow Community, we presented the concept of One Planet living – a community that allows residents to reduce their ecological footprint while maintaining a happy and healthy lifestyles. In a year where health, global climate and community wellbeing has risen to the top of our consciousness, we hope that our small project will provide an example of how we can all impact change in our communities.
We know we are incredibly lucky to be living and working on Bainbridge Island. Our island is just the place where our dream of a healthy, safe, and intergenerational community can become a reality. As Grow Community takes shape we continually strive to create a place that both fosters community and is also restorative to our earth. We are impassioned every day when we meet community members that share our vision and that are dedicated to improving the world around us.
We are thankful for our family, friends, neighbors, fellow co-workers and the community we live and work in. We hope that you will continue to contribute and help us to build positive community on Bainbridge Island in whatever way inspires you.
From our family to yours we wish you a safe and happy holiday season.
The Grow Team
The following is part of our Five Minute Lifestyle series. Living at Grow Community makes getting out your car easy with all of your local amenities and transportation needs met within a quick 5 minute walk or bike ride away. Our Five Minute Lifestyle posts are dedicated to spotlighting nearby local businesses, transportation options for residents, community resources and the spectacular local attractions of Bainbridge Island and our surrounding community.
By our Health and Happiness Champion, Leslie Schneider
As a 12-year-old, I remember well the territory I was comfortable exploring on my bike with friends and siblings. We could ride on a dirt path from the residential road through an empty lot to the usually vacant parking lot behind Safeway. The empty lot had little hills that helped us hone our bike handling skills. And the Safeway store offered us refunds for empty bottles and plenty of ways to spend the new cash.
These days, as parents we put a lot of money and time into taking care of our kids. Different families make different choices, but the community we live in makes many choices for us too. During the week we drive our kids from one activity to another, and then on weekends we drive to big box stores to provision ourselves for the coming week. These rituals can be fun… come on, admit it, Costco has us nailed, offering free samples of prepared food sold in volume, cheap pizza or a cone at the checkout. But it is not a kid’s world. We don’t feel safe letting our children run around by themselves as we shop.
Going somewhere and buying something… that is what grown-ups do. So isn’t it the Holy Grail of freedom for a kid to be able to get somewhere by themselves and purchase something of high kid-value? How many parents with school-aged children in your neighborhood would think it safe to send their kids to the grocery store alone? Architect Ross Chapin is an advocate of small scale communities. In his book “Pocket Neighborhoods”, Chapin describes what he calls the “Popsicle Index” – the percentage of people who think it is safe to let their kid walk to a store and buy a Popsicle without adult supervision.
On Bainbridge Island, we are lucky to have Mora’s Ice Cream, surely a part of many families’ ritual outings long before a kid has much independence. So. If you lived within walking distance from Mora’s in downtown Winslow, would you let your daughter walk there by herself to buy a treat?
To reach that Holy Grail safely, a child needs to start much earlier in life with smaller circles of independence, or safety zones that expand with the age and confidence of the child. A safe base creates independence. The Grow Community is designed so that no one ever crosses a street while inside the community. Courtyards between homes are the protected close-in zones, with opportunity to meet the neighbors as the first integration into the larger community. Living in this community, a child will graduate to playing alone at the community center, with helpful eyes watching out for the unexpected. It takes a community to keep an independent child safe, to contribute to raising independent children.
When children graduate to the outer circles of the community, there are many options for walking and biking—to get to two nearby elementary schools, Ordway and Odyssey, the two Island middle schools, Sakai and Woodward, and the high schools, Bainbridge and Eagle Harbor. The library and a park is even closer. The Farmer’s Market is practically across the street. Hmmm. Maybe this smaller world helps us stay out of our cars and gives our kids the autonomy they crave a little earlier!
C
heck out ‘5 Minute Neighborhood for Kids’ also written by Leslie Schneider
Leslie Schneider is a marketing and communications specialist with a history of building community. Leslie has worked with both start-ups and software giants offering messaging, marketing collateral, and training development. She is also a founding member and ‘graduate’ of cohousing, having developed and then lived in Jackson Place Cohousing (near downtown Seattle) for eight years. She served on the cohousing development LLC managing board for five years and was the owner’s representative for the 27-unit condominium construction. You can find her at Office Xpats, a co-working and conference center based on Bainbridge Island.
PHC Construction and Grow Community will be co-hosting the next GROWdrinks – a Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce After Hours event at the Grow Model Homes on Thursday December 13th. Join us and the community at large for an evening of hospitality and a great opportunity for networking.December 6th 2012, 3 – 5pm
Marja Preston, President of Grow Community, will be one of 4 panelists for Part 2: Summing up Sustainability, of a discussion, hosted by AIA Seattle, about LEED vs Built Green in Multifamily Buildings. This discussion will continue this conversation by addressing the more visionary sustainable certification systems of Passive House, Living Building Challenge, and One Planet Living in the context of multifamily housing. These certification systems challenge the city and developers to take sustainability a step further. Practical implementation of these systems will be discussed by leaders of these organizations and the city.
Go here for more details and to register for the event.
December 7th 2012, 9 – 1pm
The Metrocenter YMCA (909 4th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104)
Join some of our youngest environmental advocates at the annual YMCA Earth Service Corps Vision 2029 Summit! TOMORROW. Grow team member Greg Lotakis will be hosting a discussion table on Low Impact Design. Click here for more details.
I decided to get involved in the Grow project after meeting Jonathan Davis. He is a long time family friend of my wife, Haripurkh Khalsa , and previous student of her father Guru Singh. Jonathan explained the One Planet concept and I was thrilled. The core of The One Planet concept is exactly how I try to live my life, and exactly where we need to be striving towards with all development. I have an electric truck, electric tools and don’t use any pesticides or harmful chemicals in my work. I have spent the last 10-15 years planning and working on community gardens and I could not believe that a private development actually could be so focused on growing food as a means to build and create community!
The network of community gardens will create a better place for the residents by (1) reducing the amount of trips they need to take to the grocery store, 2) eating and living healthier lifestyles 3) building strong friendships and community 4) donating fresh foods to local food banks 5) educating residents and the broader Bainbridge community about growing food and building sustainable community through modeling and 6) providing fun community events in the beautiful outdoor garden spaces.
I believe that the network of community Gardens built into the overall design of the Grow Community is the key piece that can make this innovative concept work. Community gardens/farms take teamwork and community involvement to run. They will serve to connect neighbors in Grow with each other, and with the surrounding community.
The shared goal for Grow is to provide an important educational opportunity for children and creating future advocates for community gardens.
A few weeks ago Scott engaged local elementary students from Madrona School in the first harvest of our welcome garden. The effort was part of an educational program in local and organic foods. The kids harvested, learnt to cook with some of the vegetables, and provided some to the local food kitchen at Helpline House on Bainbridge.
For more about Scott’s organization Alleycat Acres, click here.
Grow Community is an urban Net Zero neighborhood on Bainbridge Island, just a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. With beautifully designed solar-powered homes, shared community gardens and clean transportation options, Grow allows all generations to enjoy a high-quality and healthy lifestyle.
