March 1st marks four years since the birth of The Alternative UK! Firstly, thanks everyone for being part of this journey – whether you are one of the wave of recent subscribers or an original. Or maybe you are one of our 400 signed-up co-creators who offer your valuable skills and time to help expand the knowledge we’re generating, and share it further: we’d publicly honour every one of you (if the data rules allowed)!

This time last year we had just shifted our modus operandi from a simple news stream to the opening up of Loomio groups - uniquely accessible to co-creators, so that they could have somewhere to meet and plot. We offered eight possible entry points, which we had identified as different ways to talk about the task of transforming the socio-economic-political system, in order to give rise to a new politics.

Just over a month later, towards the end of March 2020, we were all in lock-down. But as you will see from our steady stream of newsletters and on-line gatherings, the pandemic only helped to deepen our understanding of the urgency of this moment in time, for our cosmolocal communities and for the wider world we are all part of. If anything, the intensity of our virtual, non-local meetings on Zoom, supported by the plethora of new platforms available for easy connecting, has accelerated the call for – and the emergence of – an alternative.

Out of these, the interest in building Citizen / Community Action Networks (CANs) easily displayed the most energy in our Loomio groups. As we’ve been describing in these editorials, CANs have been springing up all over the world, often at neighbourhood level but also across towns and cities, and directly in response to the Covid crisis. The implicit connections between those living in the same place rose quickly to the surface, manifesting as organic care systems for those made vulnerable by the lock down.

The phenomenon of people coming together to ameliorate a multi-dimensional crisis, putting an emphasis on building safety and trust and coming up with practical solutions, was a narrative shared with more established CANs like Transition Towns or Ecovillages (though there’s mostly no direct connection). These established CANs started in a similar way but have since become wholistic, systemic islands of activity in our otherwise flatter landscape of activism.

If protest movements were until recently our only popular option for rejecting the current socio-economic system – an action that often polarized communities – then CANs, in our understanding, aim to cross divides and bring us back to the ‘more we have in common’. They emphasize connection in all its forms – to each other, the community and the planet.

But not all CANs are immediately recognisable as community care or transformation groups. In the past year we have come into contact with at least eight different ways of describing the reason for people coming together in a place-based community:

· CAN as a sangha/church, looking at beliefs and new ways of becoming agentic

· CAN as the place to generate a 4th sector economy built on community wealth/commoning

· CAN as a space to explore and experience creativity

· CAN as a democracy hub - experimenting with participation, governance

· CAN as a learning club, upgrading ourselves for the 21st century

· CAN as a farm – aiming for food sovereignty

· CAN as a care-system

· CAN as a community hub, offering interaction, identity, belonging

As such, the mnemonic has become flexible. C can mean citizen, community, creative. A can indicate action, agency or simply “and”. N tends to mean network but has also meant neighbourhood or even nest!

When you add these all up, you get the essential definition of a CAN as a firelighter, drawing out of those living together in loose community their collective potential to spring into life. A CAN gives them a space in which to grow, each person a flourishing system within the bigger system of community and planet.

Of course, any particular CAN might also be a mixture of many elements in that list. But some are singularly focused. In the Loomio groups we’ve done some vital work in identifying their features including tools and practices that can be shared and developed between them.

A special shout out here to David Wilcox, Phil Green, Deana Wildgoose, Mags Mulowska, Roberto Hinestrosa, Anton Chernikov and Mike Riddell all of whom have done presentations on their own fields of activity. See our blog this week for some of the learning they have generated.

In our Co-creator groups we have welcomed initiators of all kinds of CANs from across the UK and Europe, Mexico, South Africa, India, USA. Each have brought different versions of a similar pattern of relationships and behaviours – described by Karen O’Brien, Jeremy Lent and others, as fractals.

In response we have begun the early work of generating the CAN of CANs – a global eco-system of these cosmolocal communities (connecting I-We-World) that bring with them the knowledge we need for better forms of global governance. Imagine if everyone one of us could be part of a deeply connected, generative CAN in our own community - a container which was itself part of a global CAN of CANs telling a whole new story about our global civilization going into the future. Is it coming? Watch this space.

At the same time, over this past year, we have been looking intensely at the narratives building around the question of power. Having produced a Daily/Weekly Alternative for four years, we are more convinced than ever that a new media system is vital. Some communications structure, somewhere, needs to tell a consistent, connected and future orientated story about our personal and social potential and possible impact on the planet. See our blog on Editor Pat Kane’s presentation to a group of media innovators, taking the first steps to a new media initiative due to take shape this year.

In the meantime, in order to help nurture the context within which such projects can thrive, we have been actively participating in a number of systemic initiatives, including:

1. PERSPECTIVA – an ‘urgent, 100 year project’ to reconnect systems, souls and planet

2. LIFT – a European Leadership for Transition project which brings together innovators in sense-making, democracy design, education, environmentalism and looks through an integral lens towards the new politics arising

3. BOUNCE BEYOND – a two year project to connect, cohere and amplify the numerous ‘next economies’ ( for example doughnut, circular, well-being economies) that have such potential to transform our future

4. CTRL SHIFT – a group of wholistic civil society organisations working actively together in the UK to shift power towards the people

For a chance to see how all these initiatives can give rise to a new politics, watch out for AUK Co-initiator Indra Adnan’s book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age which will be out on Perspectiva Press in May 2021 (see this week’s blog).

We finish by turning back to you. Some of you reading will have had a cruel experience over this past year, losing loved ones, facing economic and social hardship or suffering directly from the virus. We hope that the energies we have generated, and the possibilities that we reach for with all those we feature and platform, reach you - as worthwhile efforts to change the systems that have so signally failed us all.

We believe a different future is possible today, and incrementally so for generations to come.

The coming year for A/UK – Year 5 – will be a defining year. We hope to see more of you all in the pages and spaces we see opening everywhere.

Alternative Editorial: We Are FOUR