Olympia mayor at GHC Saturday to discuss civic engagement

Olympia Mayor Stephen Buxbaum will be at Grays Harbor College Saturday to speak on the topic of civic engagement in a time of rapid change, particularly in the context of climate change.

Buxbaum will speak to The Evergreen State College’s Grays Harbor program class, “Health From the Inside Out,” but the 1 p.m. event is free and open to the public.

Buxbaum has 30 years of work in community and economic development, including more than two decades in Grays Harbor County. He will discuss best practices used by individuals and communities to address climate change. “Social, economic and environmental challenges are coming at us simultaneously and very rapidly,” said Buxbaum, who believes issues such as food and energy policy need to be addressed at a community and individual level if they are to be successfully resolved.

In the 1980s Buxbaum worked extensively on sustainable agriculture initiatives, including organizing farmers’ markets and distribution cooperatives for organic farmers. He organized Farmers’ Wholesale Cooperative, one of the nation’s first and largest distributors of organically grown produce. He later worked for the State of Washington as an executive manager of community and economic development programs. While working for the state Buxbaum, was directly involved in developing projects such as community centers, day care facilities, farmers’ markets, homeless shelters, affordable housing and water and waste water facilities across the state of Washington, including Grays Harbor County. He is a founding member of the Safe Energy Leadership Alliance, an organization of local elected officials from Pacific Northwest states and Canada who have raised concerns about the transport of coal and oil by rail.

In 2012-’13 Buxbaum collaborated with two faculty members from Evergreen to teach a program in Grays Harbor - “Telling Our Stories – What Makes Communities Work.” As a result of that class, the Grays Harbor resident students self-published a book called “Voices from the Harbor,” the first anthology of stories and poems about the Grays Harbor area to be written by people from the region.

Evergreen runs one eight-credit upper division program each quarter at Grays Harbor as well as other four-credit classes, ensuring that Grays Harbor Community College graduates have access to upper level college courses in their own town.

Buxbaum, who will teach a full program at Grays Harbor in 2015-16, said he was moved by his last experience instructing in the area. “I am very grateful that I have had the opportunity to work with students from the Harbor Region,” said Buxbaum. “The work they did collecting information about their communities was transformational.”