Perry and I were delivering a day’s training on consensus for Talk Action yesterday. The day covered an overview of formal consensus (often simply called consensus or consensus decision-making) and an introduction to Crowd Wise. We rounded off with a ‘clinic’ – collectively troubleshooting a consensus-related issues for one of the group and trying to […]
Hannah and I were at work with the Detention Forum on earlier this month, facilitating a 5 hour session on consensus decision-making. The Forum is “a loose network of over 30 NGOs who are working on immigration detention issues” and as such is evolving its processes all the time. The co-ordination group are trying to […]
Just in from a friend of ours: The workshops/film nights aim to provide a nourishing and inspiring space, a time to slow The workshops/film nights aim to provide a nourishing and inspiring space, a time to slow down and breathe, to learn something new and have some fun. Most of them are being held at […]
Mediated a dispute between members of a core group in a direct action group. The agreement was to keep the content and fact of the mediation confidential, so I can only talk about the process without any reference to the members of the group or the group. One member of the group, that had agreed […]
http://kindertrespass.com/index.asp?ID=37
We tend to forget how long it takes for the dreamed of, planned for, struggled for change to actually take place. It is very easy for activists to feel disheartened and defeated after the early exhilarating stages of a campaign, or the excitement of an act of civil disobedience. It’s a long slog and much of it is just sheer bloody minded persistence. The anniversary this week of the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932 reminds us how very long it can take. I don’t just mean the 68 years from 1932 till the Countryside and Rights of Way Act was passed in 2000, but all the centuries of struggle by working people, the poor and the dispossessed for equal rights to the land, appropriated by the wealthy and powerful for leisure and profit. From the Peasants’ Revolt in the 14th century, which conjures the names of Wat Tyler and John Ball, through to Wynstanley and the True Levellers in the 17th, radical writers such as Blake and Thomas Paine in the 18th, and the work of Victorian liberals and radicals who founded the Open Spaces Society
After the workshop I participated in at the end of March, I’ve continued a dialogue with Caroline from Insider Autism Training. We spoke about ways in which the training could have been made more experiential. That led us to the question of “experiencing what?”. Experiencing autism is clearly not possible, and we agreed that there’s […]
I spent Sunday morning in Southend-on-Sea at the Occupy National Conference. I was there running a short (2 hour) nonviolent direct action (NVDA) workshop, as well as getting a feel for this particular moment in Occupy UK. Whilst you can’t satisfy everyone in every workshop, the energy, engagement, and conversation afterwards spoke to a decent […]
It’s been a funny few months in terms of feedback on training I’ve been involved in facilitating. In February myself and a co-facilitator received one of the most affirming pieces of feedback I’ve ever received. To paraphrase we were told that we didn’t teach the group anything, but they learnt loads. Music to the ears […]
The UK government lurches from crisis to crisis. They announce a policy initiative. There’s an immediate and fierce backlash. And then they fudge something to avoid too much humiliation whilst letting the powers that be go about business as usual. Hardly what I’d describe as ‘government’. However on one level I like the aspect of […]
The destructive power of hope? The futility of environmentalism? Sustainability as preserving the world we know, a “project designed to keep this culture — this lifestyle — afloat”? Dave Pollard’s latest post Giving Up on Environmentalism over at how to save the world, in which he extensively quotes Paul Kingsnorth is a challenging read, but well, […]
