One theme that emerged out of Saturday’s Reclaim the Fields UK gathering was the dominance of meetings as the way of discussing and deciding. Unsurprisingly in a group of urban and rural growers there were a significant number of people who don’t find meetings a useful tool. They do. They don’t talk about doing. This […]
Saturday, I was co-facilitating a day’s meeting with the emerging Reclaim the Fields UK network. RTF exists elsewhere in Europe as a network of mainly young people trying to take back control of food production. Until Saturday there was no equivalent network here in the UK. 45 people came together from a range of projects, […]
I’ve been pondering what Training for Change call emergent design a fair bit of late – comparing it to what I do at the moment, wondering how much further I have to go to be allowing the flow of a workshop to be genuinely emergent. I often plan in detail. I have argued in the […]
Following our earlier phone meeting which I blogged about at the time, I met with Steph and Jeannie today to progress work on creating “effective meeting” resources for Transition initiatives. Steph and her son have produced a great 3 minute video – a Graphic Guide to Groups which draws on John Adair’s action centred leadership […]
I spent Saturday night and Sunday with a Dorset co-housing community – The Threshold Centre. Their numbers have soared in the last year, from around 8 people to over 20 so they felt it was appropriate to pause and reflect on their group decision-making process. 18 of the community came together for the workshop. The […]
I’m going to send you over to Dwight Towers blog (again!) – not for his usual righteous anger about the lack of participation in activist meetings, events and movements, but for some bona fide participation-building inspiration. In his post Gay marriage rally and movement building he gives us the speech he would have made had […]
One of our jobs recently was to provide some mentoring support to groups organising an Open Space in the wake of 6 Billion Ways. I spent an hour with people from FoE, WDM and the Jubilee Debt Campaign talking through how they might use an Open Space format with anything from 20 to 200 people. […]
I recently left a comment on Dwight Towers blog. It turned out to be quite a long one and had the makings of a post in its own right. So I’ve taken it and made it even longer. The problem as posed by Dwight: there are also some people [and their track record goes on […]
Towards the end of last year I spent a day with a small group of folk planning a bike ride to Palestine. The plans are now complete and the group is now P.E.D.A.L. an acronym that stands for their aims: Popular resistance movements Environmental justice Direct action on BDS Art and culture Linking stories of […]
Nip over to Political Dynamite for a quick preview of this weekend’s 6 Billion Ways event. Carl’s been busy mentoring a handful of the organisers in facilitating the Open Space session on Sunday. Meanwhile I’ll be in Dorset, working with the Threshold Centre, a co-housing project, on their consensus process. More on that next week.
