Category: Neighbourhoods

#futureshift notes – Pam Warhurst, incredible edible.

Incredible Edible – if you eat you in (reminds me of the New Optimists Food futures here in Birmingham

RSA_-_The_Big_Idea__the_power_of_small_actions_on_a_community

I missed the beginning so here are some lighter notes.

  • This is not community development – it’s the will to live life differently.
  • We don’t need strategy documents we create propaganda gardens – not guerilla gardens, too aggressive.
  • Do people a favour – don’t ask permission. After we started a garden the council later mowed the lawn and put a bench in.
  • People gradually change the way they work.  Kids would pick cabbages and herbs – they started to sue the gardens first.   They found that people made food from the veg picked from someone’s garden and came back to give them the finished food – a bowl of soup or whatever.
  • Don’t tell us to eat five a day – instead surround every public building with edible plants.
  • Gradually changes behaviour.
  • Scouts created incredible edible badge.
  • Policing – vandalism down because people don’t vandalise food – community relationships improved because a police officer with veg is disarming.
  • If people help themselves to entire bed of potatoes they only do it because they need it – plant more potatoes.
  • The only thing we asked of the job centre could we plug our drill into your electricity – they said no.
  • 57% of local residents are now growing food.
  • We have created vegetable tourism.
  • People can make a better world of the people in power get out of the way.  We set up a farm (without planning permission!).  and http://incredibleaquagarden.co.uk/
  • Stop being a victim and find a simple way to communicate.
  • People building initiative which used food as a universal langiage.
  • To gte involved go here.  http://incredibleediblenetwork.org.uk/
  • Believe in the power of small actions.

 

#futureshift festival notes: Megan Deal.

Tomorrow_Today

Megan Deal

Megan talks about the raneg fo places she has lived in – including declining cities.  now working in the Brewery district in Cincinatti.

She designs labs and tools to strengthen cities. Labs are places and tools are programmes. We advance talent and showcase place – building around people and places.

Examples.

Pie Lab – food as a catalyst to bring people in a respond to conversations with projects.

Next developing a philanthropic lab.

A moment of clarity – we realised we were lacking inspiration – bored with boardrooms.  We needed to go out and see what was happening.   Connect people together and also learn common problems and solutions.

Chasing Innovation lead to lots of interviews and ideas.  Here are some:

Glasshouse Collective, Chattanooga.   A neighbourhood collective.  Run by two young women.  Marketing and design background. Bought a building looking at improving physical spaces. Annual budget $250k

  • they only work in a one mile corridor.  that focus makes sense.
  • rallying local people and working with existing projects.
  • compensating your connectors if what thing they do.
  • they aim to turn artists into entrepreneurs
  • they says it’s important to make friends with your mayor.

Big Car Indianapolis – Mid western city. Suburban lab – sits in a mall parking lot in and old tyre servicue centre. A group of artists.

  • Invite community to be co creators.
  • start small and stay small.
  • don’t be a fire station – don’t react all the time.  Don’t be the place that responds to every idea.

D:hive Detroit. A store that helps connect people to opportuntiies- is an “air traffic controller” – directing people.

  • be welcoming
  • be a connector
  • has a finite timeline – will close within threes years. Can add a sense of urgency to your work.

Themes and trends

  • They often have a chief visionary – one or two people at the maximum.  They often come from diverse backgrounds. are entrepreneurial.
  • Teams are often credited. They have key roles,  curator (develops programme), connector (intentionally building relationships)   Manager – makes things happen, communicator makes sure the right messages.  When projects start one or two people do this.
  • They have a core mission and those that succeed tend to focus on that.
  • They nurture talent
  • They have a patron or a number of sources of revenue.  Grants or a product.
  • They share their story widely.

Barriers?

  • Two many roles for the people who get things started
  • Documenting and sharing can be a challnge
  • finding money to operate and experiment
  • share story succinctly is a problem (to focussed on measuring)
  • sharing impact.

Hown to help?

  • Build project SWAT teams
  • Toolkits to package up projetcs
  • Knowledge exchange for visionaries – form different cities and countries
  • Scale investment over time – grant grows as project grows.

Lessons

  • Use English  –  speak in concrete terms, what are you doing?
  • Think on paper.  Write things down on one sheet of paper.
  • You can do anything but not everything.  Be proactive not reactive.  Say no – it’s ok.
  • Flirt with failure – it helps the whole process.
  • The lone ranger is dead – find a buddy.  You can do more with a partner. Two people makes things better
  • Simplify:  the way you communicate and talk about your work
  • Compensate connectors.
  • Investing in place starts with investing in people.

Finally…

  • What do we have
  • where do we want to go
  • how can we get there?

 

  • What am I good at?
  • what do I care about?
  • is there a need?
  • will someone pay for it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Live Streaming Council Committee meetings – How we helped Birmingham City Council Billesley Ward Committee get online.

I’ve mentioned about how we’ve worked in South Birmingham in conjunction with the South Birmingham Community Safety Partnership when we wrote about what Austin Rodriguez , South Birmingham Safer Places officer had to say about the project.

What I haven’t said yet is that we’ve been working on a second phase of the surgeries with him.

Austin has been doing a great thing empowering the people he works with to use social media to talk to each other, to improve where they live and  to  build a stronger communities and with him we’ve continued to build on the momentum from phase one of the project.

In February we were holding a surgery in Bartley Green that  Alex Buchanan  – Ward Councillor of Billesley – attended. He came along with Austin with the idea that he’d like to trial live streaming his ward committee meeting .  Birmingham City Council have been live streaming their meetings from the council house and he wanted to see how he could make that work locally.

The Technology

Out in the community centres and church halls where community meetings are usually held there isn’t the infrastructure the council have  – there isn’t high speed Wi-Fi or  high definition webcams and high quality controlled audio. Nor is there a bespoke website to send the feed to,  so we had to look at what was available. 

Councillor Buchanan had invested in a laptop with a webcam and a decent microphone so we decided Google Hangouts would be the way to go, using the On Air function to stream to Youtube, which also meant it could be shared via other platforms and embedded into blogs – We spent about an hour looking at how this could work for them and then on the 20th February they put it into action.

Some observations – Be brave.

You can see in the video above that while the camera was positioned in such a way that the whole top table could be seen – the microphone struggled to pick everyone up. As the people farthest away from the set up took their turn to speak at times the audio wasn’t very clear at all but then they weren’t using a multi-directional mic that can pick everyone up like at the council house. What they had was a small mic plugged into a laptop  –  but  it could have been moved to pick up more voices.

This seems obvious watching it back but again it comes back to the fact this was a trial and a learning experience. What it needs next is just a bit of bravery, Bravery to do it again and to take what they’ve learned doing this and apply it. If during the meeting they were willing to pause proceedings by just a few seconds to re-position the mic before people took their turn to talk this would greatly improve the quality of the audio, make better use of the technology they have available and improve the experience for the community watching.

In saying that though it is fantastic that Councillors are looking at ways to open up the local democratic process to more people, and live streaming of meetings is definitely a good way to go. The fact that Councillor Buchanan was willing to even consider giving this a try is fantastic and who knows what could be next? What other public conversations could take place in – well – public?  

More links and things we’ve been up to: Care Data and some other stuff

The end of Stirchley Community Centre and some fab social reporting.

We’ve been working to get local volunteers and local officers sharing the changes around Stirchley Baths.  A couple of peopl we taught with out social media surgeries di some cracking social reporting of the last days of the Stirchley Community Centre (closed down because of a Tesco development and being moved to the Stirchley baths site when the work there is done:

Here a link with plenty of videos from Stirchley.   And here’s a video of the Stirchley Stitchers created by the brilliant Jess Allen – who’s natural social reporter.

Bishops Castle and Household Energy, homeless young people and women in Wolverhampton!

Steph has been all over this week – helping out some people starting a social enterprise in Bishops Castle – the Household Energy Service –  and also a group of women as part of the work we’ve been doing with Women of Wolverhampton.    Lloyd Davis has been an loved extension of Podnosh with our work with the Foyer Federation in Stratford,  East London.  Some young people in the E15 Foyer have started a site about life in East London (after a good discussion about ways to build stronger relationships with the local community and potential employers) – although we’ve still to crack the business of getting them publishing between out visits!.

Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery

We worked with fbec a good while a go to help them get a site set up which gave them control over what they could publish.  We also supported them with a number of sessions of one to one help to encourage them to share useful material and share it often.  Sometimes you look away and hope things stick.  I looked back today  and can see how often they’re publishing now – simple things like a notice for the AGM – or a report on a visit from the Lord Mayor.  I wonder if they’ll be bold enough to liveblog their AGM?

How much does it cost to look after people?

Lesley Curtis of the Personal Social services Research Unit in Kent has published this research on the Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2013>  Only available as a pdf – would be much more useful if the data were available as a spreadsheet.   Potentially useful for Paul Bradshaw’s Help Me Investigate Health.

Unit Cost of Health and Social Care 2013.