I’ve been freelance (or a better word is ‘free’) for at least 23 years of my working life. I love having a multiplicity of different projects and being able to choose work that is aligned to my values. I especially like it when different projects weave together and enrich each other with new learning.
Currently, amongst several other projects, I’m working on the following:
- An evaluation framework for a group of City museums to bring them together around environmental responsibility and sustainability.
- A Creative Climate Celebration that invites citizen activists and climate academics to look back 25 years and forward to the future of climate research.
- Helping a natural history museum develop a future-facing narrative and activity programme.
- Evaluating a green career and nature conservation programme for young people.
- Delivering activities in Norwich, reviving the radical change-makers of the City’s history to inspire a regenerative future. One of these will be in the new Norwich History Festival.
- Continuing to facilitate my Earth Talk course & practice community. (A new cohort is invited from June.)
- Supporting the collective of Climate Museum UK in a few more current projects.
- Supporting Culture Declares Emergency on a crowdfunding campaign and developing a new toolkit for place-based regenerative projects.
- Being a critical friend for CoLab Dudley for their Lottery-funded Dudley People’s School of Climate Justice.
There’s a multi-coloured thread running through all these projects, which is: ecocentric; regenerative; place-based change; participation; possible futures; and the potency of Arts and Heritage.
In my work for CoLab Dudley, I helped facilitate their Kith and Kin Living Lab. Narrow framing of practices in response to the Earth Crisis can lead to silos in funding, education and local initiatives. These might be based on limited assumptions about where and how such practices can happen and who is capable of contributing. Regenerative practices can be framed only as Local and Ecological, failing to engage Social dynamics or Political challenges. This encounter with CoLab Dudley has inspired me to develop a new compass resource to:
a) help people with differing capacities identify regenerative practices available to them in the spaces & places familiar to them.
b) encourage groups in particular sectors to look across the compass for collaborations.
There are four key directions:
- Social: Tending to people, tackling inequalities and ensuring that people’s needs are met
- Environmental: Stewarding life, and holding more-than-human life as kin
- Local: Imagining futures, and flipping the story of domination, for the benefit of people and planet in places.
- Global: Activating change, being empathetic and systemic in all work to tackle territorial conflict, wealth hoarding, authoritarianism, and collapse.
The diagram is a first draft and, in time, will be supplemented with information on the practices that are possible. Sign up here to receive news of this and other resources.
When I was developing this, it was timely that the inspiring Jenny Andersson launched her report on Place-based Community-led Regeneration, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
There is much of value to dip into here, especially the stories of ‘islands of coherence’, where interdisciplinary partners come together in spaces to explore and rehearse regenerative approaches. The study says these kinds of initiatives could be better enabled to accelerate the potential of place-based community-led regeneration including:
- Place ‘ready-ness’ to engage in transformative systemic work is determined by the cultural scaffolding in place.
- Centres for Life — whether they are social movements or physical entities which culturally support and exemplify future potential — are essential to encourage other courageous efforts.
- Capacity building in regenerative work through communities of practice, place and system but under-funded and often inaccessible
- At the same time, we acknowledge that widespread capability exists but there are gaps in deep ecological knowledge; pattern, economic and financial literacy; systems seeing and nodal acupuncture
- Place-centric individuals play critical roles as pioneers, trust-builders, futurists, visionaries and field builders but these roles are often unrecognised and under-funded which can reinforce privilege or encourage hardship.
I particularly appreciate the call for cultural scaffolding. There’s more to say about the role of Arts, Design and Heritage practitioners and organisations to provide cultural scaffolding. Ecological and Artistic forms of imagination and practice are the most under-valued in our extractive capitalist system. This leads each vital field to defend its value in siloised ways. See my growing collection of Cultural sector advocacy reports or manifestos that ignore the Earth Crisis and ecological practices.
This meta-mega-crisis creates massive quakes and storms, literally and figuratively. So, the Ecological and Cultural sectors need to collaborate to reinforce each other’s value. Maybe the Regenerative Practices compass will be useful to them, and maybe funders will see the wisdom of integrating initiatives across the domains of the cultural, ecological, social and political imagination.
