#futureshift festival – notes from the day: Maurice Specht

Futureshift is designed to help civic activities and civic good flourish in Birmingham and the Black Country

FutureShift has brought together a powerful mix of spaces, resources and investment for idea development and new initiatives. FutureShift will enable you to become a bigger part of this exciting and important shift towards co-designing society in a more sustainable way, economically, socially and environmentally.

Here are some notes form some of the sessions.

Maurice Specht

Guerrilla knitting going on in Holland – it’s nice but it isn’t going to change the world.  But grannies finest might – it connect design students who have to make products to elderly who are lonely. The students develop their talents and the elderly are less lonely – without money from government.  They wanted to grow – growth means capital.  They want to the bank – who said this is to social. they went ot the government who said you are too commercial.

Mentions communty lover guide.

Desire path’s demonstrate how we want to go – not how the system wants us to move. What if we translate this idea into how we want to organise out society.  The stories in the community lovers guide might be quantitativly small – but point to a qualitative change.

eg Voedseltuin in Rotterdam which grows food for the foodbank.

Government is trying to create pockets of centralised activity – robustness comes from connected local efforts.

Zorgvrijstaat Rotterdam West  connects caring organisation to improve their chances of bidding for public money.

http://wijdelfshaven.nl/ is a coalition of citizen initiatives which is now running for electoral office`

Distinction between practicing and rehearsing.  Practicing is what you do on your own. Rehearsing is what you do with a collective – where you learn to work with others.  We need rehearsal space to learn how to work towards learning new ways of organising our society and democracy.

New motto – dare to make.