This is what’s fresh at Electric City!

This is where we’ll keep you up-to-date with what’s happening,upcoming events, announcements, who’s talking about what, and how you can get involved. Got questions, issues or something you want to know more about - reach out!

Featured News:

In the News! Schenectady food co-op aims to end downtown food desert by 2026

Check in with our Dream Team Campaign!

Here the latest from our Site Committee

Signs have gone up in our future site!

Upcoming Events:

Member-Owner of the Month:

Julia Durgee

This month, we're delighted to shine the spotlight on Julia Durgee (MO#501) in the Beet, and on Friday at SEAT as we celebrate creativity, meaningful work, and mutual flourishing in Women's History Month.

Julia is an accomplished impressionist painter, winning "Best in Show" at the 2024 Stockage Villagers' Outdoor Art Show, and an incessant volunteer.  She guided Union College & Schenectady's SEAT Center students in the creation of an indoor mural and volunteered her artistic talents to "live-scribe" the Schenectady County Food Council's Food & Poverty Speak-Out last May.  Julia was also recently featured in the Schenectady Gazette & WTEN for her "Galapalooza" challenge: attend one Capital Region gala a month in 2024.

Julia is a Niskayuna resident and Sr. Manager, Omnichannel Marketing & Insights at Beech-Nut baby food in Amsterdam, N.Y. She has an B.S. in apparel design from Cornell University and an M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. She went to Shaker High School ‘98 and lived in NYC, Florida, Maine, and finally returned home to Albany, NY in 2020.

Check out some of our featured recipes!

Seed Share Salsas

Aldo Juárez-Romero

Broccoli and Feta Frittata

Elizabeth Walsh

Earl Grey Cream Pie

Henry Moore

Beyond Waste:
Designing Systems for Wellbeing & Beauty 

This month we’ve been shining a spotlight on Waste Warriors, including all the community-driven clean up efforts happening across the city (#schenectadycleanup2025) and Member-Owner Khila Pecoraro’s leadership as our Schenectady County recycling and composting educator and leader of Repair Cafe Schenectady. 

On April 12 and 13, 39 volunteers - including 16 ECCG Members-Owners - took on the herculean task of removing 195 tires and 2 dumpsters full of construction waste and other debris that had been dumped over the hillside from Wyllie Street towards I-890.

It was incredibly satisfying to see such impressive, immediately visible progress and witness our collective strength!  We had great fun - by putting people first and prioritizing safety. Plus, Board Member Angela Williams brought donuts, coffee, and contagious joy; no doubt, smiles were in abundance.

And yet despite our great success, as we pushed tires up the hill, at times it also felt like an impossible task in a modern world that appears to have been designed to produce waste more than to produce wellbeing.  How can we get to the root cause of the waste problem so that it doesn’t just pile up again in a few months when illegal dumping begins again? 

On May 8, Khila Pecoraro and other waste warriors will be hosting a community forum to explore strategies that are already working in Schenectady County and ready to be scaled up, as well as new ideas for inspiring systemic change towards a waste-free Schenectady. 

Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by a coalition of corporations—including beverage and packaging giants like Coca-Cola and the American Can Company—not as a grassroots environmental effort, but as a strategic move to protect their profits. At a time when single-use packaging, especially plastic, was beginning to flood the market with ads celebrating the convenience of "throwaway living" (see the August 1955 LIFE magazine photo as an example), public concern about waste and pollution was still growing. Rather than address the root issue—corporate responsibility for the explosion of disposable products—the industry launched Keep America Beautiful to reframe the narrative.

Through iconic campaigns like the "Crying Indian" commercial, Keep America Beautiful portrayed pollution as the fault of careless individuals, coining the term “litterbug” to shame consumers while diverting attention from systemic, corporate-driven waste. This effectively shifted the blame away from producers and toward the public, enabling the continued rise of disposable packaging and stalling meaningful regulation or industry accountability. 

In this issue of the Beet’s Food for Thought, in celebration of Keep America Beautiful month, we’re exploring the question “What if our larger world were - like our cleanup day - designed to prioritize people, wellbeing, and beauty instead of waste?  

There’s a lot to celebrate about Keep America Beautiful month. Not only do we live on a continent rich in its diversity of beautiful places, it’s a great thing to celebrate the inspiring people who unite to care for the land, water, and air in the places we call home.  Yet, even as we celebrate by doing our part to clean up and beautify our neighborhoods, it’s also important to consider the “dark side” of this month as we look to create the more beautiful world our hearts know to be possible. 

This historic pattern of designing for waste over wellbeing and beauty felt all too present on the slopes above I-890, where a lack of contractor accountability has generated a persistent eye sore and stigma upon the Hamilton Hill neighborhood and our larger city. It also feels all too present when grappling with the statistic that over one third of food in the United States is wasted. Even worse, that wasted food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills, where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. 

This all begs the question, “how is the current dominant food system designed to produce food waste rather than to produce food, health, wellbeing, and a thriving planet?”

The short answer is: the dominant food system is designed for profit, not for people or the planet. Here's how it's structured to create waste instead of well-being:

  • Government subsidies incentivize farmers to plant large acreages of monoculture commodity crops - corn, wheat, soybeans. Surplus requires extended storage, frequently results in spoilage, and is often converted by food scientists into low-nutrient, highly processed foods. Our Emergency Food System developed to redistribute this surplus, but the National Right to Food Community of Practice observes that a root cause of food insecurity has been the erosion of local food sovereignty.

  • Food travels thousands of miles - from west coast to east coast sometimes. Food has a shelf life. Spoilage happens - en route, in storage, and on shelves.

  • Grocery stores don’t do ‘ugly.’ Most throw it out.

  • If food won’t make a quick profit, it is thrown out rather than redistributed. Food is considered a market good rather than a right: if folks cannot pay for it, they don’t deserve to have it.

  • Policy represents those with money. Paid lobbyists are powerful and get laws passed that benefit large corporations rather than the food-insecure, small farmers, or food workers. 

  • Our dominant food systems waste and deplete natural resources. Land and water are often used to grow food that’s never eaten and to raise animals in exploitive and extractive industrial meat systems. 

How can we prioritize wellbeing over waste? As individuals at home, as Member-Owners in our start-up food co-op, and as advocates for structural change in our city?  Here are some strategies. 

Compost your food waste! There is joy to be experienced in the transformation of food scraps to black gold! Composting transforms food wastes to regenerative power for soils! Join Schenectady’s Community Compost Program, and/or come to the May 8 community forum about Moving Toward a Waste-Free Schenectady to learn more!  

  • Buy food in its least packaged form. Packaging makes food more expensive and ends up in the landfill or, sometimes, on your street or in your parks. By this time next year, we can shop bulk at the Electric City Community Grocery! We will be able to bring our own containers to reduce packaging waste and buy exactly the amount we need.

  • Eat locally produced food. Supporting a strong local food system keeps dollars in the community rather than sending your dollars to large corporations. Locally produced food is fresher, more nutritious and will minimize spoilage. While you’re at it, Eat less processed food and more ‘ugly’ food!

  • Shop at farmers’ markets for the freshest, most nutritious food. Show our hard-working local farmers the love - in person! Our Schenectady Greenmarket needs some extra support after federal funding cuts - consider making a donation today.

  • Shop when you can at our local food co-ops that already prioritize our local farmers - Niskayuna Food Co-op and Honest Weight Food Co-op have strong local purchasing programs and we will too!  Plus, the bulk options at Honest Weight reduce all kinds of waste! 

  • Advocate for local food purchasing. Ask your children’s school to purchase ingredients from local farms and producers - and follow the great work of the City of Schenectady’s Farm to School program, leading the way!  Could we advocate for local food purchasing policies that build on the success of other cities? 

  • Advocate for farm policies that support farmers that grow specialty crops as we phase out subsidies for commodity crops - corn, wheat, soybeans. Reach out to your federal and state representatives. Ask them to support local farms and farmers and to encourage regenerative farming

  • Advocate for long-term solutions to design our city’s food system for wellbeing through the Electric City Recharged comprehensive planning process. Can we use SMART Growth principles to protect our farmlands by directing development towards existing neighborhoods?  Can we create policies and programs that support urban agriculture?  Let’s remember that making sure people in our communities have nutritious food IS economic development policy - developing a healthy, strong, and resilient workforce.  

  • Participate in the Schenectady County Food Council - next meeting on April 24! Show up. Use your voice!  The Agriculture and Food Systems Working Group is partnering with the City and County to revitalize under-utilized land for urban agriculture. 

  • Advocate for fair, living wages. A full-time job should provide resources for purchasing nutritious food!

The take-away: Food is a right, more than a commodity.

As we reflect on what it means to Keep America Beautiful this month, let's keep exploring how we can move from cultures of disposability to cultures of care.  Let’s use our voices and collective power to design for beauty and wellbeing, beyond waste.  


Things judged truly beautiful will in time be regarded as those that raised the human spirit without compromising human dignity or ecological functions elsewhere.”  – David Orr, Design on the Edge


Get The Beet or explore issues from previous months: