3 examples of community strengthening - Eden Project Communities, Cambridgeshire Climate Emergency, Warwick Change Festival
From the Change Festival in Warwick
We are committed to covering the small fractals, as well as the big teeming picture, of community empowerment - and here are three fizzing bundles of local imagination and initiative that you should either get involved in, or copy their methods and start something similar where you are.
Eden Project Communities
This is a community outreach project from the world-famous environmental community, the Eden Project. But they explain how the Project leads into community below:
Our first project was making a 35-acre global garden in a 50m-deep crater that was once a china clay pit, to demonstrate transformation, regeneration and the art of the possible.
We are inspired by the belief that people are more than capable of changing things for the better, and through creating Eden we’ve learnt what ingenuity, resourcefulness, hope and determination can do. We all know that the 21st century brings many challenges: food security, moving and rising populations, plant and animal extinctions, rising energy costs, an ageing population, economic shifts and the increased risk of climate change.
These challenges will demand the best from all of us; our creativity, ingenuity, understanding, science, enterprise, humanity and our ability to work together. Through Eden Project Communities we support ordinary people to do extraordinary things as they build their skills and confidence to create positive change where they live.
How does your community affect you? Find out more about why this stuff matters to us all.
Eden Project Communities, in a similar way to Fun Palaces, has identified a yearly event (in June) that can focus any community’s activities - called the Big Lunch - but these can be organised at any time. Other activities (and there are many) include pulling together a Disco Soup event, or a Love Where You Live week. These are clearly “convivial” entry points to the bigger discussions that are around the Eden Project.
We’re also struck by the way the geographical spread of the events radiates out from the Project’s site. It makes you wonder whether replicating this elsewhere would benefit from identifying somewhere “iconic” or meaningful, unique to that particular area. An “anchor” institution—but for values and culture, not economics.
Cambridgeshire Climate Emergency
This is an attempt - early stages, we think, but still worth supporting - to create a “citizens action network”, as we would call it, to act on climate emergency in Cambridgeshire. The “About” page says:
Cambridgeshire Climate Emergency has been set up by Stefan Haselwimmer, a trained community organiser. During 2015, Stefan set up Cambridge Refugee Resettlement Campaign to coordinate the Cambridgeshire community response to the Syrian refugee crisis. To get in contact, send a message to camemergency at gmail dot com
The “Climate Emergency Control Room” concept was developed as a result of conversations with CERN scientist Daniel Dobos who was involved in the CERN “Atlas Control Room”.
What’s a “Climate Emergency Control Room”? Well, one might imagine it as a community space which can show the state of play about sustainability and regenerative action, on display screens and maps, so that interventions and adjustments can be made on a regular basis.
The project has already used Open Street Map software to map activity of this kind in Cambridgeshire - icons showing where initiatives are happening (see picture).
They’re also, following their network model over refugees, trying to organise participants to accept a “15 x 20" challenge - which is to reduce total CO2 emissions for your area by 15% by end of 2020.
After registering your interest (via their “people power grid”), the full community-mobilisation strategy is laid out here, step by step.
And, reminding us of the “Action” stage of our own collaboratory process, the project will set up a “Pitchfest” (date to be announced), where those interested can lay our their plans to hit these targets.
We are fascinated by the ambition here, and urge those in the area to get involved. How do initiatives like this mesh with more powerful and nationally/globally viral environmental action networks like Youth for Climate Strike, or Extinction Rebellion? Or is the bottom-up spontaneity and locality of such initiatives the key to their vigour and authenticity?
Warwick’s Change Festival
We will disclose that A/UK was advising to this festival early in the year - but that doesn’t stop up from celebrating it as an example of localist imagination and ambition.
From Warwick Change’s “About” page:
We live in worrying times. Sometimes it’s hard to see the bright side. But a better future is possible with a little imagination.
CHANGE Festival is a new arts festival inviting audiences to imagine better. Better food. Better homes. Better communities. Better lives for ourselves, our friends and generations to come.
Taking place at Warwick Arts Centre Friday 18th – Sunday 20th October 2019, the festival will gather performers, speakers and audiences from the West Midlands and beyond to imagine, play and explore. Whether you’re into theatre, comedy, spoken word, family shows or talks, we’ll have both familiar faces and new performances enjoy.
We note some excellent items - an immersive theatre of Cloudscapes, participation in a Robot Rebellion, comics asking the question “What Will We Tell Our Grandkids?” (full list here). And some familiar items too, which we have profiled here before - a showing of the climate utopian film 2040, the Peoples Palace of Possibility (launched at Sheffield). The festival has also commissioned a play based on the work of Jonathan Porrit, called The World We Made.
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Are you involved in community-strengthening activities like these? Or do you want to set up a citizens action network to do so? Please contact us here, and we’ll promote your initiative or help you set something up.