Welcome to GRASS ROOTS!

Hello all! I’ve gathered here many of the people who helped make my research possible. If you’re receiving this email, you’re part of an eclectic mix of communitarians, activists, and cool people across the U.S. and Canada. Some of you are my friends and family, faculty and staff, or interviewees and community leaders that participated in my research last summer.

As you may remember, my three-month trip in the summer of 2023 took me from drinking wine at sunset in an off-grid anarchist compound in New Mexico to harvesting potatoes with a queer farming commune in upstate New York. Throughout this, my research gave me a unique view into how community groups across the country are working to fight off the climate crisis, the loneliness epidemic, and more.

I finished my formal thesis paper this past spring, and I’d love to share with you all what I’ve learned. Each week, I’ll share cool interview quotes, crazy travel stories, and actionable results from my policy analysis — tips and insights that can help your community operate better, or help you better understand the systems that enable and inhibit community activism all around us.

And don’t worry, I’ll keep it short and sweet!

If at any point you decide you want to LEAVE this email list, you can unsubscribe by clicking the button at the bottom of this email. If you want to ADD someone to this email list who might be interested (please do!) you can input their email here on the home page. Or, if you’d prefer these get sent to a different email, you can SWAP the email address by unsubscribing below and then adding your preferred email here again.

I’m so excited to start to bring this community together 🙂 I’ll leave you with this:

Much love,

Jasper Lydon