Mayor John Stromberg is an unusual blend of visionary and realist. Last fall you may have heard him outline specific ideas that could make Ashland a model for sustainable communities, a town resourceful and agile enough to adapt to the rocky ride ahead. It was exciting stuff.

The realist kicks in when you start talking details. Just about all of these visionary possibilities call for persistent effort and resources, which puts them in competition with basic ongoing services that city government is obliged to keep providing; it's tough, some say, to overhaul an airplane's engine while it's in flight.

I sensed this tension as I watched the mayor at a recent gathering of 200 people at the Elks Lodge. They were there to rev up each others' thinking about building sustainable community, and to spread the word about projects they were already lifting off the ground, or wanted to (which made the Elks a perfect venue; I kept wondering how many community-building projects had been hatched over the last century under those big antlers). As creative ideas flew like popcorn around the room, I watched the mayor's wheels turn and imagined what he was thinking: "This is all great, but I sure hope these people understand real-life math. Before we fund anything new, we have to figure out how to put together the next budget without major bloodshed. I'd love to see some of this stuff really take off — that's why I ran — but I don't see us offering much help right now."

Okay. How about a little help?

Here's the thing about good ideas that have good champions: When the time is ripe, they may not need much financial help. We're not talking about massive overhauls of city infrastructure or systems. We're talking about moving a well-developed idea to the demonstration or pilot stage, where theory can be educated by reality, and where more people start to notice. When that happens to a good idea, additional energy and resources suddenly show up. That's how good ideas change the world. Setting those ideas into motion doesn't take gallons of fuel, but rather a few drops of lubricant.

So, Mr. Mayor, members of the City Council: do I have a deal for you. You can harness the best of this surging energy to pull Ashland forward for about 1/40th of 1 percent of the total city budget. Here's how.

Allocate $25,000 of the pending budget to a Sustainable Innovation Fund. Put out a request for demonstration-project proposals that will grow Ashland's resiliency, self-reliance and green job opportunities. Delegate the job of awarding $500 to $2,500 grants from the fund to a panel of two councilors who like this idea and three citizens who know how to sift substance from sizzle. Give them a few clear criteria for their decisions: The importance to Ashland's future of the targeted problem, the amount of volunteer effort and private funding the grant will leverage, the coherence and practicality of the implementation steps, the likelihood that something will actually happen in the next year.

Do NOT make a big bureaucratic deal out of this. Citizen activists are spread too thin to spend a week filling out applications (three simple pages should do the trick), and your staff's too busy to spend hours and hours monitoring outcomes. Meet your minimum fiscal accounting requirements, and ask your grantees for simple reports on their progress after six and 12 months. If you can see your way to eventually spending $100,000 — $25,000 annually for four years — you can hold out the prospect of renewing grants to those delivering the best results.

Here's a guarantee: Not all the funded projects will pan out. Maybe most won't. But think of this as a numbers game. What if these little grants lift three or four powerful ventures off the ground? Or even one? Would the launch of just one idea that makes Ashland's food supply more secure, creates a complementary currency that pulls people from the rugged margins into the heart of a real-work economy or stimulates green business activity that adds a sturdy cornerstone to Ashland's job base — would any one of these deserve 1/40th of 1 percent of the city's budget?

Your head's moving up and down, right? But first you'd like to know which idea's a winner? Sorry, but you can't. Ante up now and enjoy the discovery process for a year.

This offer is not available in any store! So be sure to act now, ladies and gentlemen, because operators are standing by!

It's time to get them operating instead of standing by.

Jeff Golden is the author of "Forest Blood," "As If We Were Grownups," and the recently released novel "Unafraid," with excerpts available at www.unafraidthebook.com.