Weeknotes 26.09.20
This week’s notes are not so much weeknotes, as fortnight notes as somehow, last week they didn’t happen.
That was driven last week by the work — and anxiety — associated with organising an online community meeting for the street to relaunch the debate about traffic calming (and the idea of closing off our road to rat-running). I had invited our MP, Kerry McCarthy, to speak as well as two local Councillors and a representative from Bristol Liveable Neighbourhoods campaign. A local journalist was also present. It went off well in the end, but I found the process incredibly draining. I then did something similar this week in a work capacity, hosting a workshop to share the findings from and gather feedback on the work we have been doing to map the land for trees in the Bristol and Bath greenbelt. I am very proud of this work, which I think is innovative, (positively) challenging and has the potential to make a real difference. It was lovely to get some of that feedback on the call, but slightly marred by the very negative response of another stakeholder earlier in the week, who was aggrieved that they hadn’t been engaged earlier on. It’s left me reflecting on what lessons I can draw from both these experiences.
- Online lends itself to a lot more frustration, that’s often directed at the host. When people couldn’t join either of these meetings (for reasons that I can’t explain) their tendency was to blame me personally.
- We don’t always assume good intentions. My street meeting appears to have caused some bitterness about people who were ‘excluded’ etc. (mostly people who didn’t hear about it in time). It’s very easy to gripe on social media, and somehow assume that people who are acting in a voluntary capacity have a duty to reach everyone.
- Digital exclusion is a real problem. I spoke to a couple of (older) people in the street afterwards who aren’t online, had seen my posters, but had no way to engage at all. We will be doing a paper consultation — but if face-to-face is your only means of civic participation it’s very isolating (and we are missing out on all those people’s views). Both, incidentally were supportive of the bigger changes.
- It’s exhausting — without, for me, the reward. Organising face-to-face workshops is tiring too, but there is a buzz afterwards, an energy from the other people in the room. In both cases this just felt tiring.
I subsequently came across this set of tools for online meeting organising almost all of which I had applied anyway (fortunately I think these practices are well embedded at Friends of the Earth). This and Eiffelover’s recent ‘boring post’ will be good checklists.
Related to this, at this time of year we would normally be hosting a quarterly meeting for our team. This tends to be a mix of planning / prioritising time, more creative work and social time, time connecting as humans. The first we can manage, but the latter still feels elusive. Tech / location challenges also mean we can’t really do a walk-and-talk. So what are the best ways to build connection when we can’t connect?
When I first saw the title of this article, shared by a kind friend, I groaned inside. I don’t want to hear “there’s no time left not to do everything” — it feels exhausting. But in fact, it turned out to be a really useful read, and further vindication of the experimental approach in a time of climate emergency. It makes the case for hands-on community-building work alongside political campaigning, but crucially, not as an either / or but as a key part of the same ecology.
Community building creates hope for people by actively involving them in building our common future together. Instead of recruiting people to our ‘mass movement’ to ‘demand’ policy change, failing to get that change, and having to reach out again to ask for the next thing, community building recruits people to get involved long term in fun, creative, mutually beneficial activities, projects that make people’s lives better while also benefiting the community and the environment. It then, subtly and gently, cultivates those separate and diverse projects as the seeds of a new set of democratic institutions, grown from the grassroots up. […]
The keystone of this approach is the shift from alternative to transformative, connecting diverse projects into a collective whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts — an ecology of projects that grows from random ideas at the margins into genuine new, distributed democratic institutions of the commons. For this to work, it must be collective and coordinated but not dominated by centralised power.
The article talks at more length about how that shift from grassroots activity to democratic reform works — it’s an article I’ll be coming back to again and again. This fortnight I’ve also been exploring with colleagues what an ‘experimental’ approach to campaign development looks like. There are lots of cultural challenges here, not least the willingness to work in the messiness, with the confidence that the sum may turn to be bigger than the parts, even where you can’t tell neat story (yet) about them. This article helps explain why that might be what we need (and makes nice reference to Friends of the Earth’s heritage here too).
The other theme of the last two weeks has been the turning of the seasons and the autumn equinox. The equinox is about the harvest, and about the balance of light and dark in our lives. I’m interested in the ways in which we pay attention to this things — we are blessed with having no choice, as large amounts of time has been taking up with trying to process the super abundant harvest of our great apple tree. (Last year done collectively, with the help of friends and neighbours). Another tradition for this time of year is the bike light audit — we are suddenly out and about at dusk more, and these things become more pressing (and I am so very grateful to the rhythms of school life and children’s clubs which mean that our days do still have a start and finish). But I’m also observing the equinox in the changes in my own energy, linked to the continued restrictions in our lives. The call inwards — a form of hibernation — feels stronger, and I’m no longer driven to get up early to exercise or read or write. A surprise delight though has been reading Finn Family Moomintroll with my daughter. Leaving to one side its awful gender-normativity (bordering on misogyny in places) it is a little gem of a book, which follows the course of a magical spring. As the book closes, so the nights draw in
It was the end of August — the time when owls hoot at night and flurries of bats swoop noiselessly over the garden. Moomin Wood was full of glow-worms, and the sea was disturbed. There was expectation and a certain sadness in the air, and the harvest moon came up huge and yellow. Moomintroll had always liked those last weeks of summer most, but he didn’t really know why.
Until, at the end of a wonderful gathering:
It is autumn in Moomin Valley, for how else can spring come back again?
We will hold this thought in mind this winter.
A highlight of the last two weeks has been rekindling some conversations with Dark Matter Labs about their Civic AI work. I got back in touch because it seemed like their work was evolving in a way that was very complementary to ours, with a focus on green infrastructure, collective climate action and community energy. We had a really productive exploratory conversation and I’m going to be appearing on a panel with them soon. It was a useful reminder of the ‘long tail’ of innovation work — our AI design sprint was over two years ago, what if it started to bear (more) fruit now? — and it’s been really interesting to be able to switch between two perspectives in my thinking: the local, super-grounded and the digital, deracinated. For example, cycling through Pear Tree Walk on the edge of Bristol last week we came across carpets of pears on the road verge, in common space. In a world and a city where many families struggle to access fresh fruit. But is the solution to this really predictive AI — where a sensor would generate an alert on your phone to tell you the fruit is ready (this is one of Dark Matter’s ideas on urban tree maintenance) or is it something much simpler, but also messier, about the networks of local, place-based knowledge?
Bits and pieces
- Bristol published the Ecological Emergency Strategy. And we’ve had early stage conversations about how the Hope Spots work might inform some of the deliverables. I’m impressed, overall. It’s clear and actionable. But there’s a big gap around education and the next generation.
- A final river swim of the season coincided with the terrible news about the ecological health of our rivers. The scene-setting at the start of our quarterly leadership meeting painted a grim picture about the assault on environmental protections we can expect in the next few months (and reminded us of the humbling tenacity of our activists in Northern Ireland who know exactly what it’s like to act for nature in an legal and enforcement vacuum). Their work also reminded me of a (seasonal) insight from fellow Boundless Roots-er Louise Armstrong about facilitating the messiness of change. “Persistence — act like a squirrel cracking a nut.”
