OUR STORY
Working Towards a Better Tomorrow
What is a Rainbow Foundry?
The Rainbow Foundry is a new vision of community enabled urban futurism. A combined living, working, and recreational space in a single building or complex. The Foundries are designed to be self-contained, resident-owned neighborhoods in a minimal geographic footprint.
Each Foundry will be incorporated as a cooperative, and will provide members with living quarters, food, and meaningful work. Each household (of however many residents) will have a private unit, with sanitary facilities, sleeping quarters (how many to be determined by the household) and the capacity for at least basic food storage and preparation.
In addition, each Foundry will have a number of communal amenities available for residents. Prepared food will be available in an open refectory, and delivered to individual units at need. Residents will also be able to request groceries through the refectory’s bulk ordering system, and there will be a small general store attached where residents can get groceries and necessities. There will be childcare facilities, staffed by fellow residents, as well as a small clinic staffed by a Nurse Practitioner(s) to assist residents with day to day medical issues.
The Rainbow Foundries will be self-supporting, via resident operated enterprises of various sorts. The Foundry will hold a machine shop and fabber bay, with associated carpentry shop, manufacturing custom parts for bicycles and other vehicles, furniture, and assorted household goods. There will also be a textile workroom, equipped for spinning, weaving, knitting, and sewing. This lets the foundry make clothing, linens, towels, and soft goods. Rounding out basic manufacturing capacity will be aeroponic farm pods, where as much as possible of the Foundry’s food will be grown.
Automation is the future, and the Foundry will take the greatest possible advantage from it. The manufacturing areas will be equipped with as many labour multipliers as possible. The Foundry will have a robotics lab to look into new and improved labour multipliers.
Those products in excess of the needs of residents will be sold on the internet and in an on-site shop. The Foundry will also include a public house separate from the refectory. This may expand into a microbrewery and/or coffee roaster.
The Foundries will be designed or retrofitted with energy efficiency in mind to the greatest extent the structure will allow. Where possible, there will be ground-source heating, solar water heaters, and wind and/or solar electric installations. The Foundry’s sewage will be fed through an anaerobic digester to provide fertilizer and fuel.
Foundry Seeds
Once operating, each foundry will be able to manufacture in-house 90% of the necessary equipment* to start a new Foundry in any appropriate structure. With time, the Seeds may expand to include a large-scale 3D printer to make a structure where none exists.
*Actual manufacture of electronic components requires specialized, and quite large, equipment, which cannot currently be feasibly put into most potential Foundry sites.
Who we are
We are a coalition of the marginalized who want a chance to live, create, and participate in society. We are artisans and cooks, scientists and educators, writers, artists, and musicians. We are poor, unemployed or overworked, and live in constant danger of homelessness. Most importantly, we are people, and we seek the right to exist, live, and thrive, for ourselves and all those like us. The Rainbow Foundries are our effort to start to make that right a functional reality. Each Foundry will immediately help 50-100 people (and future Foundries may be larger). Each Foundry will also increase the rate of creation of new Foundries. Every city has homeless people and unused buildings. Every place has people who are marginalized and abandoned by the existing systems. There is space, there is a need, there is a solution. We need your help plant the seeds of a better future.
Where we are
While we are distributed across the U.S and Canada, we plan to put the first foundry in Portland, OR.
In light of rising fascist activity in Portland and the Northwest, it is vital that there be strong, visible, bastions of progress and acceptance, which purpose a Rainbow Foundry[ies] would admirably serve. It will provide a space free of hatred where people can gather, and materially support counterdemonstrations where fascists gather.
On a less symbolic note, one of the major problems in Portland is the ever increasing cost of housing, particularly of rentals. Many people are being forced out of their homes, to face higher rents for worse housing elsewhere, or end up on the street. As always, marginalized groups are hit first and hardest by this, and have the most trouble recovering. There are a number of unused building suitable for conversion into a Foundry, and
successfully starting one there will provide a seed for more, as well as possible impetus for better housing policy over all. In addition, it will provide housing and employment directly for up to 100 people.
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Why Should You Support the Rainbow Foundries?
You should support the Foundries because there’s too little support for those who need it to flourish. Because support and accommodation are the difference between living and surviving, and sometimes between living and dying.
You should support the Foundries to help fill in the cracks that too many people are falling through. Because you don’t think people should have to crowdfund their medication every month, or their rent. Because the streets are full of people with nowhere left to go, and the burden of homelessness falls heaviest on women, people of colour, disabled people, and the LBGTA community, and members of those groups have fewer resources to fall back on.
On a less personal scale, you should support the Foundries because they will produce fresh food in urban environments, reduce local carbon footprints, and serve as nexuses for community revitalization. Foundries will provide a safe and welcoming space for people who haven’t many of those, and will allow people who are currently choked by lack of resources and support to blossom to their full potential.
You should support the Rainbow Foundries because you want to make a difference. They are a mechanism to build the future and improve the present. Supporting the Rainbow Foundries is supporting a more humane world and a more sustainable future.