Can communities develop local solutions to the energy problem? Future Power, a program created by the Rocky Mountain Center on the Environment (ROMCO) was designed to test this idea: Three diverse communities were selected to participate-an affluent urban middle-class neighborhood, a low-income rural Hispanic community, and a prosperous rural town. Local citizen steering committees coordinated activities ranging from energy information fairs and seminars to solar greenhouse and water heating workshops. The success of the program varied with the parrjcipating groups. The rural Hispanic community experienced a sense of power. Solar units in the area in two years increased from 8 to 200. In con ~ trast, the urban middle-class neighborhood, content with the status quo, failed to respond to the volunteer, action style of the project. ROMCO comments revealed that despite the higher-thanaverage education level of the residents a feeling of political impotency existed. There was a "striking lack of imagination and initiative in generating new ideas." Three very good booklets documenting and critiquing the program are available for $3 .75 from: ROMCO 1115 Grant St. Denver, CO 80203 -PC It's Your Move: Working with Student Volunteers-a Manual for Community Organizations, Action's National Student Volunteer Program, 58 pp., 1976, free from: Action/NSVP 806 Connecticut Ave. N.W.; Rm.1l06 Washington, DC 20525 800/424-8580 (ask for NSVP on Branch 88 or 89) Having recently recruited some volunteers for RAIN, I have become acutely aware of some of the problems ont: must deal with when dealing with student interns. This booklet, from the folks at Action, addresses these problems and provides useful suggestions on how to avoid them. Contains various checklists and sample forms which would be helpful to organizations planning to tap the tremendous resources of student volunteers. - YL MONEY FLOWS WHERE HEARTSTRINGS GO Having given up the joyful ':lsk ofD.C. watching fo" more constructive things, it was interesting to see in Acorn that the National Science Founation's Board of Directors recommended to Congress not to allocate any funding to them for a. t. Good to see where their values are at after all the hoopla ofspending at least a million dollars of our time and money to get people around the country lined up for the non-existent dollars. A clearer sense ofgovernment energy priorities can be found in the following excerpt from an essay by George Sa/zrna11 in Science for the People, Marchi April '79. (Science for the People is published bi-monthly, $7lyear from 89 7 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02139.) -TB An article appropriately titled "Run for the Money" (in the Sept.-Oct. issue of New Roots) reports that $1.2 million will be granted in the fiscal year 1979 (FY79) for the entire region consisting of the six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It is estimated that only about five percent of the several thousand proposals anticipated will actually be funded. Since the allocations are to be proportional to the populations of the individual states, the rotal national figure should be just about $6 million. Small is in this case not only not beautiful, but parsimonious in the extreme. The Research and Development (R&D) part of the DOE FY79 (this is turning into alphabet soup!) budget is S5 .4 billion . Thus the DOE is spending just a bit over one-thousandth of its R&D pie for a.t. When one keeps in mind that this is the only technology which would not promote continued corporate control of energy supply and distribution, then it is manifest that the DOE expends nearly all the resources at its disposal to maintain corporate capitalism. Let's see how the R&D pie goes. The part of the DOE R&D budget for ails aspects of nuclear power amounts to S3.2 billion, just over 59 percent. Then, in descending order, fossil fuels energy takes S6.7 hundred million, 12.4 percent; solar S4.4 hundred million, 8 percent; conservation S3.9 hundred million, 7 percent; geothermal,S 1.6 hundred million, 3 perc.ent; biomass $42 million, 0.8 percent; hydroelectric $28 million, 0.5 percent; and finally, last and least, a. t. $6 million, 0.1 percent. Although it is true that some of the other R&D categories may have limited spin-off contributions to a.t., it is clear that the intent of the funding allocations is to support large corporate interests. In order to distribute the a. t. small grants the DOE is establishing a sizable bureaucratic grant review procedure involving active participation by a.t. activists. The overall picture which emerges is that of the federal government taking, through taxes, at least S1,150 per person, most of which will come directly from us, and then to signify its desire to help us achieve local community self-reliance through the development of a.t., "giving" us 3([ per person of "federal money" through a highly competitive process that itself will consume much time and energy of a. t . ac t ivists.
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