Greenpeace UK have a vision of having a trained lobbyist in every constituency in the UK. Their reputation is in taking direct action, but lobbying MPs (and I include MSPs, AMs and MLAs in that), MEPs, councilors and corporate representatives is also an essential part of the work they do. To that end, this weekend, […]
Thanks to Dwight Towers for nudging me towards Chris Johnston on social change. In particular I’m mulling over Chris’s post Death to the agenda meeting. Like Chris I’d also invite you to take a look at Dwight’s post Adventures in the Liminal Zone – why do newbies not come back? and the discussion that it provoked. […]
Chris Rose of Campaign Strategy has drawn our attention to Earthscan’s latest Earthcast – a “free live interactive web event”. This one’s on Communicating Climate Change and will help you to: Learn behaviour change strategies for encouraging sustainable lifestyles and communities Learn effective communications strategies for engaging the public with climate change – (and why […]
It seems like I’m blogging about Open Space with regularity nowadays. Awareness of the technique is clearly growing amongst the campaigning NGOs and networks with whom I do a lot of my work. And it’s being used to good effect. Of course it’s a far from perfect methodology and some of the issues were […]
Regular commentator on this blog, Dwight Towers, brought the 30 year old booklet Co-operative and Community Group Dynamics…. or your meetings needn’t be so appalling to my attention. My interest was piqued so I found myself a secondhand copy. I can confirm it’s well worth a read. 30 years on and many of the lessons […]
For weeks (if not months), I’ve been meaning to go back to a post I read on emergence. Today I started the journey, leaping from one stepping stone to another and now have two streams of thought competing for attention – one around strategy and the other around groups and consensus. I’ll stick with this […]
It’s common for people who value consensus to want to make the meetings they have as part of their everyday lives more consensual. So the question of how to use consensus in more traditional, often hierarchical, settings comes up regularly. Saturday’s Transition Leicester group was no exception and it’s spurred me to share a few […]
On Saturday I had the rare experience of having to walk just a few hundred yards from home to deliver a 1 day workshop on consensus decision making to the good folk of Transition Leicester. We met in the Friends Meeting House (well-priced, good access, well equipped kitchen, lovely garden). The group was wide-ranging in […]
Emily, from Transition Leicester, and I finally got round to debriefing the Footpaths Community Carbon Reduction training for trainers that we co-facilitated in September. We’re preparing for the first of 2 drop-in evening sessions to give ongoing support to facilitators and wanted to ensure we’d learnt the lessons of the training for trainers. Whilst the […]
