Hay on Earth: £40,000 for sustainable innovation & leadership

It's a pleasure to confirm funding and arrangements for the 2010 Hay on Earth sustainability workshops that will once again be running at the internationally reknown Guardian Hay Festival. In this third year of the event, there's great news.

With support from the Welsh Assembly Government, four groups will be given a £10,000 grant that turns heads, engages the community and makes a real difference to change. The application form can be downloaded here, and the programme from here.

Eight groups will be shortlisted under each day's topic focus, and others are invited to attend to share, learn and develop their own ideas. The morning and afternoon sessions of each day are ticketed and free.

Hay on Earth 1: Food

Hay on Earth 2: Low carbon travel

Hay on Earth 3: Enterprise and business

Hay on Earth 4: Community and homes

The paragraph below gives a taster for what the selection panel will be looking for in the 'Green Dragon's Den' style sessions:

"Tim Smit, Founder of the Eden Project, talks of the need for leadership in sustainability being “big, bold, dangerous, compelling, sexy, aggressive and rock and roll”. Successful projects in sustainability stay away from doing what they’ve done before because it’s easy and focus on what needs to happen first, then on how to make it happen. Einstein talked about doing the same thing and expecting different results being a sign of madness. Your project should be something that Tim Smit (and Einstein) would relate to…"

CSA St Davids

Something much more useful than the CSI cloned TV programmes from Channel 5 happened in St.Davids, Wales UK last evening that will result in less drama and better outcomes. Gerald Miles, tractor-driving hero of the 2009 Do Lectures shared his vision for a new kind of food supply business where farmers, community and the environment benefit. For every 50 families in the community who sign up and commit to the farmers who grow their food, a farming job is created, seeds are planted, and a chain of restorative events slowly let loose that build relationships, health and soil.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes in Moray, Scotland and Stroud, England have already shown what’s possible when householders stick together. It seems that, in the long run, it’s not possible for supermarkets, communities and farmers to get maximum benefit; in the past, it’s been where we live and our environment that have lost out.

Now it’s time to turn the tables, and reclaim our food chain. A little Do? Read up about CSA, get 19 other local households together, and start a small CSA scheme of your own. Fresher, more nutritious, cheaper…



Do change

Here's a flavour of what's in store for the Do Lectures 2010 participants - an edited version of the intro I gave at the 2009 event. The issues are the same, just a bit more urgent. If there's one event that you attend in the next five years, I'd make it this one. www.dolectures.com

Do Lectures 2009 from Andy Middleton on Vimeo.

Food Security - feeding on good ideas

Next Friday sees the launch of a new combined research project that's been exciting us here for some time. The project's start was at the Hay on Earth food workshop in May last year, when we brought together aronud 65 leading food thinkers to consider the practical challenges of moving towards food sustainability and security at a national level.

Largely as a result of synchronicity and serendipity, one of the attendees was Dr John Fagan, who was in the process of setting up EOS - the Earth Open Source Institute. The Do Programme, borne out of the Do Lectures, was already running as a six month action learning project to investigate and develop new ways of teaching sustainability in workplaces and schools, so it was a natural extension that the idea of launching a more detailed food security project came about. We're lucky to have three enthusiastic researchers from Quebec, Chile and Wales embarking on the journey with us, supported by a great 'mastermind' group including all those you'd want - policy makers to practitioners.

Our goal is to map out the objectives needed for Wales to be self sufficient in food essentials within 20 years. If you've got an interest in sustainable food production, processing, marketing or management and would like to join in the fun, drop us a line, and help develop the project ready to for Hay in 5 months' time.

Insight - The Community Development Foundation

Which community? What is development - CDF's definition is work around:

Working with individuals and communities

• Challenging opression and inequality
• Bringing about social change and justice
• Empowerment
• Wellbeing

Community engagement is about involving people in the decisions that influece their lives. In the world of citizen-centered policy, employee, employer, individual, volunteer, carer, representative are all roles to take into account.

The latter of participation:

Information - supporting - consulting - deciding together - acting together - it's important to know where you are meeting people, and where you hope to take them to.

Decision making in the round - 1) holding to account, 2) giving account, 3) taking into account, 4)dis-counting (not going to be used because timing or context is out). The lack of feedback kills engagement if actions don't develop from input and suggestions.

The Community Development Worker - work alongside local people building relationships, helping communities develop common concerns.

Project example - working with CCW on Come Outside - trying to generate sustainable levels of community use of nature. Engagement motivators included enjoying greens space, creating usable space, meeting people - barriers included distance, fear, lack of knowledge or neglect of the spaces.

The role of community development agents is going to be key for rapid progress, particularly so taking the knowledge gap into account.

In a Times interview, 41% of people interviewed believed that we needed to act quickly on climate. To protect community, we need connectedness, care, concern and commitment. And action.