Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For almost 50 years, Beth Mount has worked towards the ideal that every person with a disability can be a valued member of community life, promoting the positive futures and potentials of people with disabilities throughout the world who are together working to create more inclusive communities.
Over the last few years my organization, Green Releaf Initaitive, has been prototyping our permaculture gardens on select sites affected by disasters and displacement. At the core of our theory of change is not just “design” but regenerative design that invites us to go beyond sustainability and ways that we can apply it in contexts of aid and development.
One Blue Earth seeks to raise public awareness about the consequences of global warming and to educate our communities about current scientific and grass-roots efforts to develop workable solutions to mitigate and reverse climate change.
What is possible now that wasn’t just 6 months ago?
This question birthed my new podcast and video series, What Could Possibly Go Right? sponsored by Post Carbon Institute.
I’ve invited cultural scouts—a diverse set of long-term changemakers—to let us see, through their seasoned eyes, the landscape in front of us.
How did we do that? The possibility of Rapid Transition, by Andrew Simms and Peter Newell, STEPS Centre & New Weather Institute, 2017 shows what we can learn about rapid change through examples from history and the present day.
It was billed as “an emergency summit for change”, and it was a call that drew around 150 people from across the UK, and even some from further afield. Hosted at The Edge, a community-funded church building in the centre of Wigan just round the corner from the actual Wigan Pier (yes, that one, the one with the road famously leading to it), the event, exactly a year before Brexit becomes (or doesn’t) a reality, was co-presented by at least 40 organisations.
I have been running POST PRESENT FUTURE for almost a decade. It’s a simple project where I invite people to write a letter to their future – anything they want as long as it’s to themselves – which they receive in the post five years later. It’s like an alternative post service – just with a five-year delay.
What is the Eroles Project? I could give several answers. It is a network of change-makers connected through a set of evolving principles, annual learning-for-action residencies, an online community platform and a library of resources. It is a threshold marked by a cobalt blue door. It is a small core team of organisers, a growing number of alumni and an advisory board. It is projects and workshops that root around the world. Mostly though, in whichever form, I feel it is an opportunity to inquire.
Beautiful Trouble lays out the core tactics, principles and theoretical concepts that drive creative activism, providing analytical tools for changemakers to learn from their own successes and failures. In the modules that follow, we map the DNA of these hybrid art/action methods, tease out the design principles that make them tick and the theoretical concepts that inform them, and then show how all of these work together in a series of instructive case studies.
Searching for ways to reconnect and renew, a non-profit organization called the Community Learning Partnership is providing students, instructors, and community groups a model for preparing the next generation of local leaders and activists.
I believe the New Urban Agenda has the potential to start a whole new conversation about food and cities and bring a whole lot of new people up to speed with where the early adopters have been — left out standing in their field, looking for someone to talk to – for some time.
So, shine on you crazy Transitioners, and Changemakers of all Hues and Persuasions. Shine harder than you ever shone before…
