Very special thanks to: Jon Alpert Janet Biehl Joseph Boland Marc Bouvier Peter Britton Tal Carmi Steve Johnson Lee Johnson Dennis Kuklok Paul Ollswang Hye Jung Park Ross Randrup Leslie Rubinstein Dick Ryan Lance Scott Arun Narayan Tok6 Jan VanderTuin Robyn Van En Brian Wilga Illustrations: Dennis Kuklok Paul Ollswang Photos: Peter Britton Greg Bryant Arun Narayan Tok6 Photo Lab: Cliff Coles Halftones: Craftsman House Printing: Lenora Atwood, Jim Stensberg Editors: Greg Bryant, Danielle Janes Unattributed articles are the work ofthe editors. Rain is published Quarterly. Subscriptions are $20/year, single issues $5, available from Rain, P.O. Box 30097, Eugene, Oregon, 97403, USA. Letters and unsolicited materials accepted. SASE for guidelines, or to have material returned. Copyright ©1992 Rain Magazine. Permission given for use of up to 2,000 words, with a graphic or two, but only with the source clearly noted. Greater lengths require written permission. Please send us a copy of anything used in the above fashion. Right: Workbike activist Jan VanderTuin (left) and Rain editor Danielle Janes discuss transportion alternatives. Given the current worldwide slump, these could be great times for organizers to reach out with radical ideas; but because of the stump there are no funds to do mass outreach. So now is the time for all the talk about mutual aid, low-cost neighbor-to-neighbor projects, cooperative development and alternative conununity economics to be put to the test. Although the alternative economy in Eugene struggles to avoid established economics like it would have to in any other town, there are problems here that are rather unlike the rest of the country's. We have thousands of people interested in or experienced with worker's co-ops, buyer's co-ops, barter networks, energy efficiency and social justice projects, but they all saw some of the biggest and most promising programs disappear under Reagan's false Boom Years cum government cutbacks. Burn-out and skepticism rule just now, but this may soon turn around. On balance, Eugene is lucky to have significant remnants of an alternative infrastructure. We’ll report on these in the future. Rain is embarking on a project to create an Appropriate Technology school and neighborhood co-op organizing center. Our city is in a budget shortfall, and we're out to demonstrate that neighborhoods can administer themselves through direct democracy and face-to-face economic relations. We are getting involved in part because we’d like to further test the principles that we espouse, making us better able to report on good projects we run into. But we are also joining this project to get community support for doing a higher level of research into appropriate technologies and social models. Without such support, we would be unlikely to publish this much material on a quarterly basis, and we hope that our publishing will in return support all communities, not just our own. Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XiV, Number 2 Page 55
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