Meet every person’s Physiological and Safety needs first as defined in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
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The following action steps are written in SMART Goal format. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Community members are encouraged to utilize this page to determine if their local community could benefit from implementing these action steps. Consider these as guidelines for further discussion in the direction of tax dollars to provide ideal environments for children and citizens. Take your community’s resources, economic and social strengths, and crime rates over the last 25-50 years into consideration.
Spot the 📽️ icon? Click it for a short video that goes deeper into the goal.
Action Steps at the Town Hall Level:
Incentivize Gardening and Farming
- Specific: Establish a community garden and offer property tax reductions to houses that grow food and buildings that have community gardens or a resident food growth program.
- Measurable: Serve 500 families per month within 1 year.
- Achievable: Partner with local forms, grocery stores, and nonprofits to source and distribute food.
- Relevant: Increasing the number of community members growing food will ensure nutritious food is available to all, regardless of socio-economic status.
- Time-Bound: Roll out tax-incentives and open the public community garden within 6 months and reach the target goal within 12 months.
Build Aeroponic Tower Farms 📽️
- Specific: Repurpose 2 vacant lots/buildings into aeroponic tower centers producing fresh, grab-and-go food for food-insecure households.
- Measurable: Grow 5,000+ lbs of produce annually; distribute to 300+ households/month by Year 2; reduce local food insecurity by 15% within 3 years.
- Achievable: Partner with Agrotonomy for towers/training; fund via municipal budget, USDA grants, and sponsorships; hire 4–6 staff (prioritize unhoused individuals when possible).
- Relevant: Cuts local food waste, eases family financial strain, provides hunger relief, and creates jobs using underutilized space.
- Time-Bound: Secure site/funding (months 1–6); install/train (months 7–12); launch distribution (month 13); hit full targets by Year 2; evaluate by Year 3.
Ensure Access to Clean Water 📽️
- Specific: Set up vertical rainwater filters attached to residents’ homes and buildings. Train building supers on how to replace filters.
- Measurable: Setup vertical rainwater filters for 500 residents within 1 year.
- Achievable: Partner with local nonprofits or college graduate students of engineering to train volunteers/employees on how to set up filters and funnel clean water into existing piping.
- Relevant: Most water comes from groundwater; by providing simple, sleek filters that filter rainwater as it falls down the sides of buildings/homes and into existing systems, access to clean water is further ensured.
- Time-Bound: Train 50 people to install filtration systems within 3 months, then reach resident access goal within 1 year.
Increase Access to Nutritious Food [with Sustainabites] 📽️
- Specific: Install solar-powered, free-vending kiosks in accessible public locations (libraries, transit centers, community health clinics) stocked with nutritionally complete, shelf-stable meals.
- Measurable: Pilot program with 5 kiosks distributing 200 meals/day minimum. Expand to 25 kiosks distributing 1,000+ meals/day within 3 years.
- Achievable: Partner with commercial food production facilities to produce Sustainabites – a blend of corn, beans, potatoes, beets, kale, coconut oil, a multivitamin powder, and a touch of honey. These Sustainabites should be produced in bulk, stored without refrigeration, and dispensed dry.
- Relevant: Not everyone feels safe or comfortable in traditional soup kitchens. People with social anxiety, PTSD, agoraphobia, or past trauma may avoid group settings entirely. Others face judgment, long waits, or inflexible hours. Solar powered vending machines are a sustainable, dignified, and nutritious source of food. Even if people who aren’t facing acute hunger decide to get some Sustainabites, the cost of production is low enough that it wouldn’t take away from those in need. This addresses food insecurity, mental health accessibility, sustainability (solar power), and food waste reduction simultaneously.
- Time-Bound: Secure funding and launch pilot within 12 months. Citywide expansion within 36 months.
Expand Access to Healthcare Services
- Specific: Work with local hospitals to determine the top 5-10 most common treatable diseases, then open a mobile herbalist-based health clinic to provide free or low-cost healthcare services to underserved populations.
- Measurable: Serve 300 patients within 1 year.
- Achievable: Partner with local healthcare providers, herbalists, and community gardens to secure funding, staffing, and supplies through grants, donations, and self-grown medical herbs.
- Relevant: Using natural remedies to treat common diseases will keep the cost of supplies down while providing physiological need for healthcare.
- Time-Bound: Begin clinic operations, including herb growth, within 6 months and evaluate impact after 12 months.
Deploy Rent-to-Own Programs 📽️
- Specific: Launch a rent-to-own program in 50+ unit apartments owned by municipalities or partner landlords.
- Measurable: Prioritize launching the program for low-income families and essential workers, aiming for fifty or more households to be enrolled within 2 years and 75% or more of enrollees to achieve full ownership.
- Achievable: Use a combination of grants from HUD’s Home Investment Partnerships Program and developer partnerships to fund the program and hire one full-time program coordinator. Refer to the City of Rochester, MN’s model which achieved an 83% success rate.
- Relevant: “Property” is specifically listed as one of the Safety Needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. A Rent-to-Own program would create opportunities for citizens to build generational wealth that they otherwise would not be able to afford to do living paycheck-to-paycheck.
- Time-Bound: In year 1, secure funding, identify properites, and draft contracts. In year 2, pilot the program with a smaller 20 unit building and keep failed contracts under 10%. Based on feedback, scale to 50+ unit buildings in year 3.
Develop A “Green Spaces For Well-being” Initiative
- Specific: Transform underused areas into communal living shelters with community gardens, meditation areas, and art spaces.
- Measurable: Create 5 new spaces within 2 years and survey users on improved mental health on a quarterly basis for the first 2-3 years after space is opened.
- Achievable: Collaborate with landscape architects, volunteer groups, engineers and nonprofits to build and maintain earth homes.
- Relevant: This initiative combines nature, creativity, and mindfulness to meet Self-Actualization needs. The communal style creates an alternative style of living for those who need a stable place to heal and build loving relationships to help maintain their sobriety.
- Time-Bound: Break ground on the first space within 8 months.
Action Steps at the School Level:
Build a School Garden
- Specific: Create or expand schools’ community garden to yield fruits, vegetables (especially potatoes) to feed at least the entire at-risk student population for two meals/day.
- Measurable: Ensure 100% of harvested fruits and vegetables are sent home with students and/or used by school cooking staff to provide hot meals at breakfast and lunch.
- Achievable: Collaborate with landscape architects, volunteer groups, and nonprofits to build and maintain spaces.
- Relevant: Nutritious food is a physiological need blocked by a financial barrier for urban residents and most suburban residents as well. Having a community garden is both educational and alleviating to students facing food insecurity.
- Time-Bound: Establish a timeline and budget to build the community garden and attain the appropriate equipment and seeds to yield nutritious food continuously at a rate appropriate to feed the at-risk student population.
Create a School-Based Dormitory 📽️
- Specific: Create a small, supervised dormitory for school counselors to allow access to students in need of short-term safe sleeping arrangements.
- Measurable: School counselors allow overnight access to students five or more times per semester.
- Achievable: Allocate unused spaces in or near the school for bunk beds and appropriate access to bathrooms and showers. Take donations to provide clean bedding and hygiene products. Use grants to set aside wages for on-call male and female overnight supervisors as well as a professional cleaner to follow up with refreshing the space and bedding after the students’ stay.
- Relevant: According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 29% of people experiencing homelessness do so as a family with at least one teenager and one child under the age of 18. In addition, fear of the abusive foster care system and/or betraying their caretakers to police leads children enduring abuse who don’t have trusted adults in their lives to sleep in unsafe conditions – on the street, in parks, or in unsupervised shelters. Providing a dormitory space that can only be utilized on que of the school counselor ensure that students have a safe place to sleep and an action plan is in progress to restore healthy relationships at home.
- Time-Bound: Establish a timeline to build/restructure space for the dormitory, install beds, bedding, washing machine accessibility, and hygiene products, and cleaning services within 3 months.
Teach Sewing Classes 📽️
- Specific: Introduce tailoring skills to students with appropriate motor skill development (typically 4th grade or higher).
- Measurable: 80% of students should pass an Intro to Tailoring course with a grade of C or higher annually.
- Achievable: Work with local businesses, shelters, and non-profits to schedule field trips to secondhand stores where students can choose clothes they will resize to fit themselves.
- Relevant: There is a financial barrier to access to clothing, which is a physiological need. Tailoring skills would allow families to provide a healthy array of clothes to their children at little to no cost throughout children’s growth spurts.
- Time-Bound: Create/restructure a learning space and provide necessary equipment and material for a tailoring class as well as an instructor in time to launch the course for the next academic year (12-9 months).
Provide Financial Wellness Courses 📽️
- Specific: Enroll all high school students who are of working age into online financial wellness course, which includes a series on setting up investment accounts, trusts, reporting financial growth, protection from fraud, opening a secure credit line, setting up appropriate auto-payments, creating and reporting monthly budgeting spreadsheets, and a series on strategies to stay on budget (such as the “cash envelopes” method).
- Measurable: Enroll 100% of students who are eligable to receive work permits and provide students with at least 1/2 credit towards their diploma upon passing the course.
- Achievable: Students can complete lessons at their own pace or use their advisory or a free period to complete their lesson for the day with adult support. Purchase or set up an AI program to review submissions and partner with trading platforms (e.g. Stash, Robinhood) to encourage students to open beginner-friendly investment accounts.
- Relevant: There are financial barriers to accessing Safety and Physiological Needs; students earning money can start to build their savings and learn habits to ensure continued access to those basic resources.
- Time-Bound: Setup the auto-graded online course within 12 months and launch at the start of the following academic year. Give families regular updates about the new course starting April of the academic year before it will be launched.