Transition Culture

6 May 2015

The 8 Paradigm Shifts at the Heart of REconomy

For the next two months here we will be talking REconomy, looking in depth at this aspect of Transition which is about creating new enterprises, new economies, new livelihoods.  We’ll talk to entrepreneurs, to people in local authorities embracing this approach, to people about to launch local currencies, to people around the world working to make this happen.  Something remarkable and vital is happening, and we want you to be blown away by it.  

When I visit Transition groups around the world, I hear many of the same questions over and over.  “How do we engage a wider cross-section of our community?”/”how do we make a living out of this stuff?”/”how do we build stronger bridges to the local council and local businesses?”  

REconomy is one of the best responses to all these questions, offering a series of activities, and a fresh way of thinking that meets more widely perceived needs, while also building a real relevance to far more people than just talking abstractly about “building local resilience”.  It’s the invitation to shift our thinking, shift what we do, and step up in truly exhilarating ways.     

Central to it is the idea that WE can do this, that creating the new economy that better meets our needs starts with us, here, now.  In terms of what REconomy is, I will assume by this stage you are familiar with the general idea, and if not here is Fiona Ward to give you an introduction:

For me, there are several key leap forwards at the heart of REconomy, steps away from what is expected of those working to make the world a better place, which have huge promise in terms of scaling the ideas at its heart up to another level.  Let’s go through them one by one: 

1. From “anywhere” to “here”: one key aspect of REconomy is that it is about economics that are rooted in place.  Most business responses, such as those being touted by candidates in the runup to the Election, have no sense of place.  ASDA’s solution to providing food to people, for example, looks exactly the same wherever in the country you find it.  But REconomy enterprises emerge from, and embody the places from which they emerge.  For example, Brixton Energy could only have come from Brixton and is embedded in it.  

 

The same applies for many of the examples below, mostly drawn from the UK: it’s about creating a new economy that’s rooted in the place, the culture, the history, the hopes and dreams of a particular place.  One example of this is in the role that local currencies play in celebrating local history and culture.  For example, the Exeter Pound, set to launch September 1st, will feature on its £5 note Adam Stansfield (see below), former Exeter City number 9 who died young from cancer, and whose Number 9 shirt was then retired.  Much of the football club’s fundraising work has since been around cancer prevention, in his memory.  The story of the Exeter Pound, and how they are, from the start, rooting it in the local community, is told in our Exeter Pound podcast. 

2. From theirs to ours: who owns the key assets in a community plays a big role in who is able to meaningfully affect change there.  Transition is very ambitious, wanting to change the way the places we live feed themselves, house themselves, employ themselves, power themselves.  Being able to do that requires access to more capital, popular support and ability to move fast and to make things happen than we are used to.  While owning assets brings risks, it also brings opportunities.  

This is particularly important in the context of austerity and local authorities keen to jettison responsibility for land, buildings and other assets, there is an opportunity for community groups, whether actual Transition groups, or Transition-informed community groups, to begin to pull together a portfolio of assets which can then be used as the foundation for doing other projects.  The community ownership of assets is a key strand of the REconomy approach. 

3.  From “divest” to “reinvest”: the divestment movement is gathering pace around the world as the message sinks in that if you hold investments in fossil fuels, you want to be among the first out of them, not among the last still holding onto them.  Many individuals and organisations now find themselves rethinking where and how to invest.  Community renewables have created the most ambitious investment opportunities for people so far.  

For example, Bath & West Community Energy have thus far, including groups they have partnered with, raised nearly £10 million through 7 community share offers, ranging from £350,000 to nearly £3 million.  West Solent Solar, which grew out of New Forest Transition, raised £2.5 million for a community solar farm.  In Belgium, Vin de Liege, which emerged from Liege en Transition, raised €2million to create a community vineyard.  

But investment opportunities need not be so huge.  The Green Valley Grocer in Slaithwaite raised £18,000 from local people to reopen a grocers shop as a Co-op.  As we’ll see below, the Local Entrepreneurs’ Forum model is about the investment into new enterprises of a lot more than just money, but community engagement and support.  In the many and growing discussions about divestment, little is said about what else those funds might support.  For Transition groups who are seeing and supporting a number of new enterprises emerging around them, pulling those together to form a kind of ‘portfolio’ of local investment opportunities might be a way to invite divestment to turn into investment.  

4. From “someone should” to “let’s”: the current election campaign in the UK (nearly over) has seen lots of grand promises, especially around jobs and housing.  “We’ll build 200,000 houses”, “we’ll build 300,000” … “we’re the best, because we’ll build 500,000!”  Yet if what’s already being built is anything to go by, there are houses and there are houses.  There are what the market offers, “affordable houses” that nobody can afford, which increase debt and carbon emission, and which are based on a model that extracts wealth to distant investors, and then there are those such as Lilac Leeds and Transition Homes, that are approaching the creation of new housing in a way built around affordability, sustainability and the maximum benefit to local economies.  

The new Enterprise Centre being built at University of East Anglia is taking the concept of local materials to a mainstream audience in a fascinating way.  The walls are being built using thatched panels, so it is the walls, as well as the roof, that are built using local thatch and local skills (see right).  Imagine the impact on local economies of starting with what’s local being where most developments begin, like starting planning for each meal starting with “what’s growing in the garden?” rather than “what’s in the freezer?”  It’s an approach that Totnes Community Development Society’s Atmos Totnes project will be using on an 8 acre site as a key strategy for community economic regeneration. 

Similarly, there are jobs and there are jobs.  Over the past few years in the UK, a million public sector jobs have been replaced by minimum wage jobs, and more than one fifth of UK workers earn less than the living wage, living hand to mouth, often requiring government benefit support to make up the gap, a subsidy to the private sector.  Most REconomy enterprises are committed to paying a Living Wage, and to enshrining workers’ rights from the outset.  

Rather than assuming either that voting will create the kind of world we want, or opting out of voting, I’m with Dougald Hine on this one, it’s not about ‘Don’t Vote’, rather ‘Don’t Just Vote’.  Rather than complaining about the energy companies, the supermarkets, the housing developers, REconomy is about becoming our own community energy companies, food systems and housing projects.  It’s an attitude summed up beautifully in a newspaper article last week about the new Transition Neath in Wales, which quoted them as saying “it’s a negativity free zone — we will be focused on what can be done rather than what can’t”.   

5.  From “Old Boys Network” to “Everyone an Investor”:  the conventional approach to funding new economic activity is to seek either investment from the bank/investors, or government funding.  The Local Enterprise Partnerships represent the Old Boys’ Network approach, a model for distributing government Regional Growth funding based on who you know.  As a result they tend to be about new bypasses, new regional distribution hubs, and the preservation of business as usual.  But business as usual is no longer an option.  As Naomi Klein puts it in This Changes Everything, “there are no non-radical solutions left”.  

So how can we, as communities, fund the new entrepreneurs, the new enterprises and innovations that we need, ourselves?  One of the best models for this is the Local Entrepreneurs’ Forum, begun in Totnes (the next one is May 14th, very soon) and now popping up elsewhere (the first outside Totnes is in Brixton on June 2nd, with others to follow).  

Another way of doing this, and often a good follow up to a LEF, is crowdfunding.  Many Transition projects have successfully used crowdfunding.  Here for example is a great crowdfunding appeal that just kicked off in Totnes, looking at putting in place the infrastructure to enable the local food economy to grow, process, store and sell those most staple of food, grains.  It’s the Grown in Totnes project.  Please support their appeal:

 

6. From niche to mainstream: these ideas are rapidly moving out of the niche and into the mainstream.  One of the most exciting examples of this has been the work the Centre for Local Economic Strategies have been doing with Preston Council, looking at how the main stakeholders in the city spend their money, a kind of Economic Blueprint for the city.  Together, the stakeholders (two local authorities, a higher education institution, two further education institutions, police, fire and rescue, hospitals, and housing associations) spend £750 million a year, of which only 4% is actually spent in Preston itself, and only 29% in the county of Lancashire.  The report identifies a number of strategies by which a shift in focus could “enable a good local economy”.  It’s work explained in this short video from New Economics Foundation:

A similar process is underway in Bristol as the City Council explore how weaving the Bristol Pound into its procurement approach can boost keeping money within the city. This idea, that we base our economic planning on the Multiplier Effect, is growing fast.  REconomy is ahead of the curve.  

7.  From “not again!” to “never again”: all too often the conventional approach to economics and development is something that is done to communities, rather than by them.  All too often, another proposal for a supermarket, for a new, bland, identikit housing development, are met with raised eyebrows and a resigned “not again!”  Communities find themselves unable to resist developments due to the ability of developers to hire better lawyers on appeal and to steamroller local opinion out of the way.  

However, if communities are able to own assets, to generate revenue through their use, then their ability to influence outcomes locally is transformed.  It puts the community in the position to be able to say “never again” with a firm sense of purpose, to make sure rubbish housing developments don’t happen by buying the options on the sites and either not doing them at all, or doing them, but so, so much better.  Our “never again” becomes assertive, empowering, yet underpinned by a commitment to doing things much better, rooted in the genuine wishes and desires of our local economies, an approach we have previously defined as a ‘SWIMBY’ approach (“Something Wonderful In My Back Yard”) as opposed to a NIMBY approach.  

8.  From ‘Clone Towns’ to ‘Places of Possibility’: Growing Communities in Hackney are a brilliant local food project in the heart of London. They describe themselves as “a community-led organisation based in Hackney, North London, which is providing a real alternative to the current damaging food system”.  One of the most fascinating aspects of their work, for me, is the following diagram which, based on their experience, is their attempt at speculating on what a more localised food system would look like for London, their answer to the question “could London feed itself?”

It’s quite complicated, and its colour scheme is really best viewed through the kind of glasses you are advised to use to watch an eclipse through, but the key point is that looked at through REconomy glasses, it’s extraordinary.  It’s really the model for a new food economy for the city.  

It’s an invitation to innovation and entrepreneurship and creativity the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations.  And the coolest thing is that it is already happening.  Across the city there is a flourishing of new enterprises: new urban market gardens, people growing mushrooms in abandoned Underground stations, craft breweries across the city, new orchards being planted, new markets, such as Crystal Palace Transition Town’s amazing Food Market which last week was a runner up in the BBC Food and Farming Awards, making it the joint second best market in the country.  Where are the best places to look for the creativity, the innovation, the flavour, the taste, the community. the laughter, the future?  At Lidl or Asda, or in this emergent new model?  As Julian Dobson put it in his brilliant ‘How to Save Town Centres’: 

“The best future for our town centres is not merely as places to buy, but as places to be; places where we can live and act as citizens rather than as consumers.  Then they can be places where we rediscover local identity and community, where we can be more fully alive and more fully ourselves.  As many a shopkeeper has said, why settle for less?”. 

Why settle for less indeed.  We stand on the cusp of a historical shift, a historical transition, as economic globalisation starts to go into reverse.  Savour the moment – it is rich with possibility.  Enjoy our exploration of REconomy, and do let us know your thoughts.

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5 May 2015

Our "Everything-you-could-ever-want-to-know-about-the-Exeter-Pound" Podcast.

A couple of weeks I took the short train ride to Exeter to meet Ian, Melanie, Adam, Martin and Gill, the group working hard to make the Exeter Pound a reality. With their launch set for September 1st I wanted to find out how’s it going.  How did the idea come about? How did it step up to become a reality?  

Did you know that a successful launch of the Exeter Pound is Exeter City Council’s second highest economic priority? Or what links a group of black gospel singers who toured England in the early 1800s, the Rugby World Cup and the Exeter Pound £15 note?  Or the role New Economics Foundation’s ‘Clone Town Britain’ study had in inspiring the Pound?  All is revealed in our “everything-you-could-ever-want-to-know-about-the-Exeter-Pound” podcast.  

Here is the £5 note: 

… and here’s the special limited edition £15 note …

Keep up with developments at www.exeterpound.org.uk.

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30 Apr 2015

Mandy Barnett: "Make, be, dance, pedal, shape the future".

“My name’s Mandy Barnett. I’m a…now, what am I?! I used to be a designer in the cultural sector. I worked in museums for years. Then I became a manager and I’m a manager consultant now. My work is all about social impact in the cultural sector but my personal life is a lot about Transition and green issues. Now the two things are starting to merge quite a lot because I feel like I’ve come out of the closet at work. I’m working in a lot of areas where the environment is at the forefront like Happy Museum. It’s great to be doing that stuff in my community too, so I can talk about that at work in a very real hands-on way as well as bringing expertise into my community.

And you’re involved with Transition Kendal as well, is that right?

Yes. Our local group is a merge group between the Action on Climate Change group and the Transition Town focus, if you like. It’s called South Lakes Action on Climate Change towards Transition (a bit of a mouthful). I’m the person in that group who really pushes the cultural sector stuff and the art stuff.

We’ve got a fantastic arts community in Kendal. We’ve got a really good arts centre called the Brewery Arts Centre and lots of very creative people. The kind of stuff that I do here is about working with people who haven’t necessarily got the environment at the forefront of their thinking but are very much about community, resilience and having fun, that’s a big focus. I’m trying to work with them, but doing it in a way that is sustainable and just slightly raises the message.

So do you consider yourself to be an artist or more of an enabler?

No, I’m not an artist, and never was an artist, although I was a designer. A designer is a bit like an artist with a clear purpose, whereas artists are often driven by creativity and exploration, designers tend to be delivering against a certain task or brief. I suppose that’s what my creative practice is: I do something with the objective of trying to raise awareness and people trying to get a message across, it’s designed around that. It’s very creative and I work with lots of people who are artists and who are designers and who are creative people.

Those barriers are really being broken down, actually. One of the projects I work with is called Fun Palaces and we are going to create a Fun Palace here in Kendal this year too, on a voluntary basis for me. That has the mantra ‘everyone an artist, everyone a scientist’ and that’s what’s behind my thinking. Everyone is creative in some way or another and everyone has an element of wanting to discover and invent in them. It’s about enabling people to do those things and have fun with it and build relationships, and all that kind of stuff.

Many Transition initiatives are familiar with the idea of a social return on investment. You talk about a ‘cultural return on investment’. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that, how you measure it and why it matters.

It might be a bit technical, and it is in some ways for the cultural sector. I work with the technical analysis social return on investment all the time. One of the things I observe is that the arts and museums and heritage are not very good at making the case for how valuable they are. But they’re absolutely fundamental to society. There is not a person in this land who doesn’t have a picture on their wall or listen to music or read books or access films. It’s fundamental to us.

One of the problems we have is we try and talk about our social return without thinking about the difference between our social and cultural return so we end up not making the case so strongly because there are other things that work with social return. There’s something about culture which is uniquely about your sense of belonging in a place, your ability to think creatively and empathise with other people, and so I think we need to start talking about cultural return to try and get that message across so that the cultural sector is better placed.

But I don’t think most people care about that, to be honest. In my community, I wouldn’t talk that language because they just want us to have fun. Thinking about it, last year we did a great project called Breaks and Beats, which was a combination of kids doing stunt bike dancing, so we choreographed a dance on their bikes with a brilliant beatboxer called Nathan Loot. So all low-tech stuff, all powered by a bike generator that we built a couple of years ago.

One of the mums of a really little girl who was 8 or 9 who was involved with it said the best thing about it was the mix of people she was dealing with. She comes from an arts background, very privileged in a way in terms of the access she has to different things in her life. There was a lad in it who came from the youth club who was bullied at school and had been referred by the youth club. Another lad who’d been involved before who led the project. Some other kids who were just passing by, a couple of kids who were autistic and couldn’t get on with some of the other stuff.

It was that mix that this woman thought her little girl benefitted from. That’s what it’s all about. Building that sense of culture in a community so that you understand other people and you empathise together and have a strong sense of place. That’s what cultural return on investment is all about.

A lot of your work is about measuring the impact of things like Happy Museum and those kinds of impact. I wonder what your thoughts might be on what might be a more realistic and practical way of measuring the impact a Transition group has?

It gets interesting when it’s about measuring wellbeing, and a focus on wellbeing with less consumption. It’s about raising awareness isn’t it? What made me excited with the projects that we’ve done here is, not that we converted people to behaving differently. We weren’t there yet. But there were people after people who came up to me and said things like “I hadn’t really thought about the environment, that’s really interesting”, as opposed to saying “stop ramming that down my throat because you’re just telling me how to behave”.

And on the film we made at the end of Brakes and Beats last year, the dance choreographer from the arts centre, I interviewed her, said “why was it good?” She said it was really important to get across the message of sustainability. I had no idea she was really interested in that.

It needs to be much more anecdotal, which doesn’t mean to say that it’s not robust. What you need to do is collect that information systematically. In work, I would do things like get people to keep project logs where they might record comments over a period or record the feedback that people give and then analyse it to see whether there’s any kind of shift in that language. You will often see the shifts we’re talking about: happiness and learning and relationships.

It’s about being clear that leading indicators are a useful measure. So if you’ve got a load of people involved with a project who haven’t been involved with a project before, in anything that’s anything like this, then you can’t prove that you’ve made a big impact on their behaviour or on carbon dioxide emissions or whatever it is. But you can show that you have raised awareness. And I suppose that’s where I sit.

Because I do so much of this at work, I don’t want to do it at home as well!  When I’m doing my local stuff, I really struggle, like everyone else does, to find the time, to find the energy, to do all of the technical evaluation stuff. It’s too much like work then. I guess what we do, we make films.

Both of the two really creative projects that I’ve done in the last couple of years, we’ve made films and put them on YouTube and shared them with funders and shown them whenever we can, that sort of thing.

My objective is, I want people to have fun. I think, once they’ve had fun, they will like you. Next time you try and talk to them about insulation or whatever, then they might be more willing to listen to you. You have to be really careful about undermining the fun that people have by making it like work.

So for you personally, when you approach Transition and the work that you do in the group in Kendal, to what extent do you see that as being an arts practice? And if it is, how does that shape how you approach it?

I see it completely as an arts practice. That’s because – so here’s a selfish thing. For years I lived in Dorking and did stuff like fought the local supermarket. We set up a campaign called Dorking SOS. Then we set up a Local Food Float once we were successful fending off the supermarket, selling local food. Then I got fed up with feeling like it was hard work and I thought – I want to do something that I just wholeheartedly enjoy. Like lots of people, I need to be creative. I need to make, otherwise I get miserable. There are people like that, aren’t there? There are similar people who need to do sport as well.

So it’s definitely an arts practice and it’s always about being creative. One of the things that then means is that it’s not necessarily going to be brilliant. It’s risky and not necessarily going to be successful because it’s also about being very inclusive. When we did Breaks and Beats, we had kids who were 7-8 up to teenagers who were 14, 15, 16. So it was a real mix, and you have to accept that. It comes naturally. I don’t think it’s something I think about, it comes naturally that I wanted to be creative because that’s what gives me a spark and also the other creative people I work with.

It means that I then look for the local community artists, the local fashion designer who helped with designing t-shirts and teaching kids to print their own t-shirts. So rather than going and getting some t-shirts printed in the local shop, we would a, buy stuff from the charity shops because then we’re reusing, and b, screenprint the design ourselves. The design is designed by a local lad who wants to be a graphic designer when he grows up. So I guess it just comes in at every little stage. You never buy something or consume something that you can make instead.

What would your advice be, having been around quite a lot of different community arts projects and so on, for Transition groups who are wondering how they might bring the arts more into what they do?

Find the people locally who are creative and they might not be where you’d expect. They might not be creative in their work, they might be privately creative. Don’t make it too arty. Make it around fun. Make sure ordinary people can get involved who don’t think that they are artists. All just respect each other.

In Kendal al lot of the people involved with Transition are outdoorsy. There’s a lot of fleeces, there’s a lot of cyclists. When I first started doing the arts stuff, some of them really didn’t get it. They didn’t think it was going to be doing the job. They thought our job was too urgent to waste time with something that was a little bit more upstream. I suppose that’s the thing I would say: trust that doing that long-term stuff is about building your community and partying together is worth doing. It’s valuable like getting across an explicit message and changing behaviour is also valuable.

At the moment it seems like funding to the Arts is being cut and cut and cut. Do you think that taking the kind of approach that we’ve been talking about and which is central to ‘Playing for Time’ is something which offers a new way forward in that sense?

Yes, absolutely. There’s no doubt there’s a crisis for the arts at the moment. At the same time, I think there’s a really big opportunity. I work with the process of commissioning the arts for social impact. Lots of people in the arts don’t like that because they think it’s dumbing down I guess, that shouldn’t be your starting point. But I think it gives us the scope to say that rather than the arts being funded as a separate thing that ends up being a little bit elitist often, it’s actually something that’s embedded across the whole of public services because it is so valuable and makes such a difference.

One example is a project I work with where artists trained care workers in older people’s care homes to have creative conversations with the residents and to have better relationships as a result of that. They’re now talking about that being part of the 25 year contract with care homes in Suffolk. It’s really exciting. Projects within Kent, working with the public health funders to do some projects that are specifically to do with vulnerable young people and their wellbeing. Then you’re getting to people who don’t understand the arts, like public health commissioners, but when they see it, they realise what phenomenal value for money it is because it’s really engaging for communities and arts organisations are often really embedded in communities and really place-based.

It is a big opportunity. The business about getting across the message about resilience and upstream stuff before we need to repair the damage with mental health projects is the real challenge. So getting that investment in healthy communities rather than with ill people is the big political challenge.

As a country, mental ill health costs us £105 billion a year. That’s more than heart disease and obesity. It’s more than crime. It is absolutely phenomenal. And yet the NHS invests 0.1% of its budget in prevention, about 11% in mental health services. It’s taboo and it’s short-term and it’s inefficient. That’s a big opportunity for the Transition movement. Promoting wellbeing and tackling over-consumption are coming together in a way that enables us to have a positive message rather than a negative one.

What’s the role that you see for young people in making all of this happen?

It’s pretty obvious that a lot of what we’re doing’s about the future, and that’s the future of our young people. I’ve got kids who are 10 and 12 and it makes me weep to think what we’re leaving behind for them. The other thing is that they’re not taught this stuff at school. We’ve been talking a lot about the election and my kids say to me “the only thing we know about climate change is what you tell us!”

One of the things that really interests me is doing projects with young people. There’s one lad who we’ve worked with over 3 years now who started as a participant on our Biked Up project, was a biker. By the time he worked on another project 2 years later, he was teaching the other kids bike skills. He was one of the organisers. He’s only 15, and he’s set up his own events company locally. Getting those people in and getting that message of doing things sustainably through to them just by doing it, so it’s experiential, you’re not teaching them. You’re working creatively together on how you put together a performance, but then you say you can’t use that because that’s petrol, or that’s a lot of energy. That, I think, is really exciting too.

What we’re modelling through Transition and other things and a lot of what you’ve been talking about is that kind of joined-up approach that values everybody’s voice, that is based on a good motivation and trying to do good. Do you have any thoughts on how one might bring that more holistic approach more onto the radar or make it a reality?

One of the things I’m involved with nationally is setting up a network called Making Culture Work. We were talking earlier about cultural value as opposed to social value. That’s what we’re trying to get across with Making Culture Work. To be explicit about what the value is, how you do it better and how you make it work. One of the methodologies we’re looking at is a thing called Culture Cubed.

It’s basically the triple-bottom-line for culture where we will be getting communities together but with their cultural organisations so their museums, their libraries, their arts centres. Those are the places where public space still exists in towns. Often shopping centres have been privatised. There are kids who are not allowed into shopping centres with their hoods up in various places. So the idea is to get people together in communities talking about the whole social network, cultural supply chain.

Places like Kendal are really healthy towns, partly because we’re quite isolated. We have a very big rural area around us, so people often live and work here and socialise here and do their cultural consumption here and so on. It’s a very strong community. It’s very networked and you can see how a big arts presence, lots of cultural organisations all work together to create lots of voluntary stuff as well. Those people can’t stop creating. They love making stuff, they love doing stuff in the community. It’s understanding networks and all the relationships between things that is really important.

Mandy is just one of over 60 artists who have written sections for Lucy Neal’s forthcoming book ‘Playing for Time: making art as if the world mattered” (see cover, right).  The book is now published.  TransitionNetwork.org readers can get £5 off Playing for Time.  Simply enter this discount code at oberonbooks.com – ONPFT2015.  Valid until 31 Dec 2015.

 

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28 Apr 2015

Filipa Pimentel on how knitting can help us connect.

A while ago I attended a meeting via Skype.  It was taking place in Brussels, and featured a number of high profile people from government and from the business sector discussing resilient economies.  One of the highlights of the meeting for me was the fact that Filipa Pimentel knitted throughout the whole meeting.  I even took a screengrab photo of it (see below), so impressed was I.  Filipa is Portuguese and works with Transition Network as the International Hubs co-ordinator.  She also does some work with the European Union Institutions, and play a role in Portalegre em Transição,  her local initiative back in Portugal. And she knits.  Lots.  With our theme on Social Change and the Arts, and inspired by our recent piece on Craftivism, I wanted to find out more about what knitting means to her.  I started by asking her how she got started. 

“I was around 5 years old. I wanted to do as my grandmother did, so I stood behind her shoulder, then I just tried it and I got it! I had a very limited number of toys, and most of my toys I made myself with stones. I had one doll that my grandmother made and gave me, and every time I asked for clothes out of my birthday or Christmas my grandmother would invite me to make them myself so I started to do it like that, knitting little jumpers for my doll.

What can you do? Can you itemise your hand-making skills?

I think I can do almost everything. It’s a difficult question, because there’s knitting for doing something and there’s knitting for itself. Sometimes I don’t make anything, I just do big blankets or scarves. Also, when a child is going to be born I really think it’s very symbolic to do something for the baby arriving.

It’s like you put something of yourself in it. You think about the baby and it’s this lovely thing. It depends a lot. I do a lot of things, jumpers for kids, for my own kids and for other kids, for babies that are arriving. That’s the kind of stuff I do.

And why? What do you get out of it? What does it give you that watching the television or just going and buying a jumper wouldn’t do? How does it feed you?

There are these two sides to it. One is the symbolism. It’s like a ceremony. When you are making something to offer someone it’s really something very important. You spend all this time building something, it’s not only the jumper that you are giving but also all the thought and time you put into it. It’s like a mantra, something like that. For me, when I am giving something that I made to a baby or to someone I really like, it’s really a symbol that I put myself in it, something from me inside. This is something really important.

Then there is the other why.  The other why is I discovered I have too much energy. It’s really something very difficult for me to stand still and listen without jumping around or my head goes in circles and I really have trouble to keep quiet and not interrupt people. My mind is really like a monkey!

I discovered that doing the knitting or crochet or something like that, I really go into a level of listening, it’s really another level. It’s very similar to all the descriptions people have of meditation. My breath goes down, I get calmer, I have sensations that I can listen clearly to everything without being nervous or wanting to intervene. I feel much more capable of choosing to time to speak, or to choose what to say that makes the difference. That’s why, when I need to be focused in meetings, I take my knitting with me.

You talk about taking your knitting into meetings. You’ve taken your knitting into some very high profile meetings and meetings with important people, meetings in the European Parliament. I imagine you’re probably the only person who is knitting in those meetings (?) What’s the reaction to your knitting in those meetings and do you have any sense of how it affects or influences the meeting that’s taking place around you?

Before I answer that, just let me say that I don’t take my knitting to provoke anything in people. People ask me if I’m doing this because I’m an activist, making a point, going to get my knitting. But that’s not the process I have in my mind. The process in my mind is that I don’t think that a place like this should stop me doing what I normally do. I need my knitting, I feel comfortable with my knitting, and it helps me contribute in the best way. I’m like that in all meetings I go to. I don’t think I should stop myself doing so if it’s a high-level meeting.

The second thing is the reactions. I only know what people tell me. Maybe people think it’s really stupid, but no-one has told me otherwise.

Like “who is the crazy woman?”

Yes, who is the crazy woman! I’m not sure if it’s positive or not. It might be a little bit puzzling because I go to meetings dressed like they are. I don’t go dressed in a different way so I don’t stand out as someone really different when I go to these meetings. I worked for a long time, until now in the EU, so I know how I should present myself.

The only thing that’s different is I knit, so people get a little bit puzzled. I’ve seen very interesting reactions. I’ve seen a lot of smiles. I’ve seen people try to look the other way for me not to feel that they’re observing me. I had already people looking at me and saying – what are you doing?

Overall, I’ve never felt uncomfortable. Only the opposite. I always feel that there is a positive thing around it. I think you were in a meeting at a high level, right, where I was knitting? You didn’t see anything wrong with people’s reactions?

No, I felt it kind of grounded the meetings. It felt like it connected it in that way. I really liked it. It was a bit like the difference between having a meeting around a real fire and a television.

What I feel, people told me that it’s like making the bubble explode, like you’re having a very high level meeting with ministers, and you are in a bubble talking about abstract things. Suddenly there is something that explodes the bubble and reminds us how human we are, this kind of thing.

Have you ever felt that you’ve brought that into a meeting and it’s changed the spirit of the meeting or changed the way people related to each other?

I don’t know. If I was doing it by strategy I suppose I’d be more attentive to that, but I’ve never done it from that perspective. I take my knitting out because I need to focus, so I’m not focusing on how people are relating to each other. What I see is smiles, people coming up to me and talking about the knitting in the breaks.

I’ve seen things like people in Transition or that are connected to the movement in these meetings that sometimes are nervous because they are in this bubble. Suddenly they think “ah, this is so much better” and they get calmer. They smile and the tension disappears. I’ve heard that several times. The fact that I do that, people that are tense because they are in the presence of very high-profile people, they relax somehow because I am doing that.

How different do you think things would be in the European Parliament if everybody was knitting? If a substantial number of people turned up with their knitting, how do you think it might affect the quality of how people relate to each other or the quality of conversations that take place?

If people have the same need as I have.  I suppose there are an awful lot of people at that level have the same kind of need, of meditation and quality of listening. I’ve seen many times people that are really going super fast in life, they don’t have time and do so many things. You are in meetings, looking at your computer, looking at all these things. You head is going very, very fast and you don’t really listen. So this is one of the things.

It would be helpful for people to look for this kind of stuff that can help them to be grounded to the conversation, to listen and to respond when they should respond, and to respond in a way that is related to the conversation.

The other thing is if, really, the fact that someone is knitting in a meeting, it grounds it into this human tradition, not to take ourselves too seriously and to talk about real things that other people who don’t normally have access to this kind of meeting will have, because they feel more comfortable and they will more easily take the floor to talk. It might be something that helps them to do that as well.

Another thing that I’ve seen as well a lot in this kind of high level is the way that you connect to each other as professionals. All the human contact gets into second plan. Somehow, this eases the connection between people so this might be something very good as well!

Here is the podcast of our conversation. 

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22 Apr 2015

Berkhamsted: the last Transition Roadshow (for now)

The final in our series of five ‘Transition Roadshows’ took place in Berkhamsted, joinly organised by Transition Town Berkhamsted, Transition in Kings, Haddenham in Transition, Tring in Transition, Transition Milton Keynes and others.  I have to confess that prior to going I didn’t know that much about Berkhamsted other than it’s a rather beautiful market town, so here’s what Wikipedia has to offer: 

Berkhamsted is a historic market town on the western edge of Hertfordshire, England. The present day affluent commuter town is located in the Chiltern Hills, 26 miles (42 km) northwest of London. Berkhamsted is acivil parish, with a town council within the larger borough of Dacorum.

The layout of both the town and the event was captured in this rather fine map which was given to participants:

 

The Roadshow opened on the Sunday morning with an opening circle and a welcome from John Bell of Transition Town Berkhamsted. 

We then did a series of milling activities to find out who people were, how new they are to Transition and so on.  This was followed by a mapping activity, so people could see where everyone was from.  While participants were mostly from the general Berkhamsted environs, there were also people from Canada, Norway and Brazil.  And Ipswich.

People then headed off to one of three venues across the town for workshops.  Their choice was between An Introduction to Transition with Sarah McAdam, Deepening with Mike Thomas, or one on Transition Streets, from John, who has developed a generic, non place-specific version of it (more on that soon).  I went to the Introduction to Transition session, which included the Transition Animal and interesting discussions about David Holmgren’s Future Scenarios graph.

 

In the next session there was a choice between sessions on REconomy, Permaculture, a local currency for the area and saving energy in the home.  I have to admit I popped to get something to eat during this session and managed to get 15 minutes in the town’s rather brilliant Oxfam bookshop, where I picked up the 12″ of the rather fine ‘Baby I Love You So’ by Colourbox.  In case you’re interested.  

This was followed by an Open Space event, called ‘The Big Question’.  About 60 people gathered in the Civic Centre for a session in two halves, with a wide range of questions being explored around the tables.  Then everyone was off to the Centenary Theatre for the event’s culmination, food and a ‘Transition Conversation’.  There was much discussion and connecting over food, which was unfortunately slightly under-estimated, prompting a call out for much needed pizza which certainly helped the evening move smoothly into its final stage.  

The ‘Transition Conversation’ was built around a talk by me, looking at Transition nationally and internationally and reflecting on the day and some of the key questions I had heard people raise.  I noted that the questions many people brought, i.e. “how do we engage more people?”, “how do we widen our group?”, “do we need to work more closely with the local Council?” and so on, are questions we also heard in every other place where the Roadshows have gone.  

Following the talk and an audience ‘digestion’ of the talk, we had a Q&A session, with other members of Transition Network and John Bell joining me on stage to share the questions and draw on a great pool of expertise.  The last part of the evening was poet Matt Harvey, who talked about SWIMBY: The Musical and read some of his poems.  My highlight, for an inexplicable reason but it made me chuckle, was when he introduced a poem of his inspired by Dr Seuss, saying “Everyone loves Dr Seuss.  Or did”.  

And that was that.  A very wonderful and inspiring day.  The Totnes contingent headed off into the night for their 4 hour drive home, taking the remains of a cold pizza with them for the journey.  The next day, John Bell got in touch to share some of his thoughts on the day:

“It really has been a joint effort from the local TI’s.  And an absolute pleasure to meet and work with the incredible people at TN, something to tell the grandkids.  I am very much looking forward to collating all of the fabulous stories that have come out of the day, not least the dormant but excellent Transition Town Chesham being inspired to start up again.  Everything is worthwhile knowing that.  At the end of Sunday, I was expecting to feel elated, as though I’d just finished my exams.  Instead I feel I have just turned the page on a new chapter on this page-turner of a life that is Transition, and the title has me ready to dive in”.

And so the Roadshows draw to a close.  We will soon post a reflection on how they’ve been, and our learnings from them as a whole.  

Deepest thanks from everyone at Transition Network to all the organisers, to all our very kind hosts, to the unnamed Tweeters who took some of the photos above, to Matt Harvey, to everyone who made the event what it was.  

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