Recently I attended my first forum theatre performance. It was the last in a week-long series of performances of The Great Austerity Debate taking place around the country done by the Menagerie Theatre Company. They’d been commissioned by two geography researchers, Prof. Susan Smith and Dr Mia Gray, from Cambridge University. Performances have been filmed, […]
In mid-January we blogged about one training collective changing name and form. What we didn’t do was highlight ourselves and the other training collectives that each in our own way try to support grassroots groups striving to make the world a better place. With the forces that are swirling out there at the moment, Rhizome […]
We’ll be discussing and debating along with other co-ops tomorrow in Manchester about radical alternatives to austerity and capitalism, shaping a shared vision of a prosperous caring society based on a principles of democracy. Rhizome is looking forwards to see co-op friends old and new, to chats in the sidelines about how to build the […]
Oxford Seeds for Change has become Navigate. A warm welcome to Navigate, to ‘the field’ we plough furrows in too, of social change facilitation, training for co-ops, NGOs, campaign and community groups, and many more. The story of how Navigate was born can be found here. Lancaster Seeds for Change becomes simply Seeds for Change […]
Following on from our Convergent Facilitation blog post, here’s an illustrative case study. Child custody is often a battleground in American legislatures, like abortion and gay marriage, with the additional ferocity provided by the divorce courts. In Minnesota, these struggles have gone on for more than a decade. In the end, some opponents just avoided […]
In 2011, Cherán a town of nearly 20,000 people in Michoacán, Mexico, locals threw out not just the loggers that had been threatening their forests, but the politicians and police too. After years of corruption and violence, they said loudly ‘Enough is Enough’, following it through with effective action. What can we learn from their […]
In my last couple of blogs, I’ve talked about Convergent Facilitation and how it panned out in Minnesota. In this one, I’m going to talk about an approach I’ve never met in person, called Dynamic Facilitation, devised by an American called Jim Rough. I missed my chance when Andrea Gewessler of Change That Matters brought […]
A few months ago I dusted off an old group dynamics exercise that I’d almost forgotten about – the Tinkertoy game. I first came across it in the hallowed pages of the (now out of print) Resource Manual for a Living Revolution. Somewhere in the intervening 20 years it had slipped off my radar. I’m […]
I’ve recently finished my second stint doing jury service. Jurors are cautioned not to talk about their experience of their time as jurors but trials are held in public so I am allowed to talk about information that’s in the public domain. My first time as a juror was around 35 years ago in the […]
So what can we make of the US election results, and what’s that got to do with us over here? Is it a last hurrah of a beleaguered set of people feeling left behind in a changing world? Is it simply another demonstration of the dangers of populist leaders stirring up the depths of racism, […]
