Adaptive Communities - Seeding Our Future

Strengthening local communities will be crucial in the years ahead, to help us all to live with increasing levels of disruption, e.g. to food supplies, utilities, weather patterns, and probably social cohesion. SoF can offer a range of insights and processes, drawn from our pilot projects and research, to help communities. These include:

CLAAR Project: Community Led Adaptation and Resilience: The climate crisis and related impacts are worsening fast. National responses are inadequate, and this looks unlikely to change soon. Responses at community level may be the best option currently, and even though many communities don’t yet have the critical mass for significant action, there are some infrastructure actions which would enable this when conditions worsen.
At present, CLAAR is an emerging project, with a number of organisations informally involved. Through collaboration with members of Network for Social Change, funding has been provided for a study to understand the current situation and future needs in the community resilience sector. See brief here. Currently the two main areas of exploration are:
1. Connecting and enabling network: There is a growing number of local organisations engaging with aspects of community resilience and adaptation. However, it seems that many of these do not draw on expertise from other projects or supportive networks, and risk reinventing the wheel. One aim of Project CLAAR is to clarify the kinds of network support most helpful for local community groups, and to help create this.
2. Resource Toolkit: Initial research suggests that there is no obvious, easily accessed source of know-how that community groups in this sector could draw on. Relevant resources could include processes (e.g. deliberative democracy), case studies of best practice, guides to funding sources and legal structures.
A Resource Toolkit could be a website, searchable on multiple dimensions, and progressively expanded and updated. We are not aware that anything suitable exists for the UK, and the North American counterparts generally focus on disaster response (e.g. wildfires) rather than systemic failures (e.g. food supplies, IT systems).
Alan Heeks first saw the need for this in 2012, when he commissioned an action research project by Reos Partners on how to raise community resilience. This research showed that for most issues, a few good role models were up and running, and the problem was reproducibility. One way to help this would be to document successful projects to show others how to emulate them. For a summary of the Facing the 2020s report, click here.
Future Risks Review 2030: In 2023, Seeding our Future commissioned desk research from Schumacher Institute exploring the major challenges likely to hit communities in the UK over the next 10 years. This gives a useful indication of some of the key issues, and resource gaps in responding to them: see report here.
Future Conversations: This is a set of workshops which SoF has successfully piloted, to help communities build resilience skills. See more here.
Deep Adaptation: This approach, originated by Professor Jem Bendell, offers a range of processes for practical and emotional adaptation to climate change and other major disruptions. SoF has led a variety of workshops helping community groups and others to explore and apply Deep Adaptation approaches. See more here.
Intentional communities: Cohousing neighbourhoods and similar projects have evolved good processes for group-forming, decisions, resource-sharing, etc., which can be useful for communities of all kinds. Alan Heeks co-founded and lived in a cohousing community for 5 years, and has also taught on the Eco-village Training at Findhorn Foundation. See more in Resources below.

Resources

I’ve been exploring different aspects of community for 30 years, since I first stayed in an intentional community, the Findhorn Foundation, in 1990. Here are some resources which may help you in your exploration:

Adaptive Networks and Hamlets: this recent blog gives an overview of my ideas on two of the main ways to evolve Adaptive Communities: click here.
Natural Happiness: this is my model of learning about human resilience and wellbeing from natural ecosystems. For the overall Seven Seeds model, see here. To see how community qualities in ecosystems can help you, see here.
Community resilience: In 2015-17, I ran a project, Facing The 2020’s, exploring how local communities can grow their resilience and their capacity for positive collective action. For an overview of my conclusions, see here.
Communities and climate change: working through communities is a good way to encourage individual action, and some climate responses require collective action. For info on my Bridport Climate Response initiative, click here. For some reflections on what we’ve learned, see this blog.
Cohousing: this is a community which combines some shared resources (e.g. market garden, dining/group room, guest bedrooms, pool cars) with private dwellings, each with their own front door. I have started two cohousing projects, and lived in one for five years. Creating a new bricks-and-mortar cohousing project can take many years, but there may be quicker ways to do this using Tiny Homes or converting existing buildings. For a case study and resources, see here.
Seven kinds of community: you may get confused because the term community is used in different ways. For a simple guide, see here.
Ecovillages: these are larger, low-impact communities where people live, work, and play, in harmony with the Earth. Learn more via the Global Ecovillage Network: www.ecovillage.org. For a briefing on the Dorset Ecovillage project which I explored in 2003-2007, see here. Such a project could be a brilliant catalyst for positive change: I stopped my work on it because the planning authorities at the time were unsympathetic, and we did not have access to the scale of funds we needed.

Current Events

Men’s Elderhood Retreat | May 10-12

Our venue: Trwyn Tal in the Llanthony Valley, Wales A men’s peer group This weekend offers a shared space to explore as a peer group how we harvest the fruits, enjoy the blessings and adjust to the downsides of getting older: a chance to look afresh and consider the future we’d like to help create. How can we serve as elders in these troubled times, and be good ancestors to those who come after us? What’s the balance, in later life, between inner contemplation and outer action? This retreat is intended as a supportive circle for questions like these, or whatever we choose as a group. Dates: May 10-12 Location: Llanthony Valley, Black Mountains, Wales Bookings: For more info or bookings, please contact Simon Chinnery: .

Featured Blog

How can we raise community resilience?

The Facing the 2020s report As the pressures on all of us keep rising, we can see mounting discord about best priorities and solutions. One of the few topics on which almost everyone agrees is that increasing the resilience of local communities is getting ever more vital. This has been a focus of my work since 2012, so I’m offering an overview of some of my insights. As part of a project called Facing the 2020s, in 2012 I commissioned a substantial piece of action research on UK community resilience by Reos Partners, which included over thirty diagnostic interviews, extensive desk research, and exploratory workshops in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff with potential stakeholders, including national and local government, NGOs and community organisations. This blog is a summary of the insights I gained from this research. The terms community and resilience are so heavily used that a short explanation of what I mean by community resilience may be wise: the collective capacity of a group of people to handle and grow through crises and challenges. I’ve set out below some of the main aspects of resilience in this context: part of this capacity could come from organisations, including local authority, public services and non-profit groups. Material: some capacity to respond locally to interruptions in food, energy supplies, especially for elderly and vulnerable people. Environmental: response to ecosystem damage, eg habitat loss, pollution and to extreme weather, eg floods, droughts.Wellbeing: for everyone’s emotional needs, especially those who have mental health or isolation issues.Inspirational: maintaining and renewing a sense of vision, cohesion and purpose in the community in the face of a crisis.Connective: good communication within the group, including the skills of hearing, voicing, reconciling strong differences in opinions and values. The main insights from the Facing the 2020s research are these: Reproducibility: On most aspects of community resilience, there are successful exemplar projects somewhere in the UK. For a concise, inspiring range of examples, see the book The New Road, by Alf and Ewan Young. Why have these not been widely reproduced? One reason is that many good community resilience initiatives have depended on a few superhuman people, who just kept going against impossible difficulties. How can such interventions be systematised so that regular humans could implement them in a bigger number of communities? Recording what was done in an accessible toolkit form would help a lot. Sustainable funding: Many good initiatives have also depended on funding that was not reproducible, e.g. a slab of one-off grant funding as part of a pilot programme by an NGO. Sustainable funding sources could include raising capital from local communities themselves, (eg crowdfunding), or a social enterprise model, or a couple of larger foundations offering a grant scheme plus support to use it. Professional services: Many community initiatives struggle to find professional support geared to their particular needs, in finance, legal, property, HR and other areas. The emergence of specialists for this sector would greatly assist reproductivity. Systemic catalysts: In my dream of raising UK community resilience, a focal role would be played by trained advocate-facilitators, who would go into a community to understand its needs and dynamics, help gather support and a project team and could provide access to reproducible role models, sustainable funding, professional services and more. Working with minority groups and communities of identity: Some communities will be more vulnerable to shocks than others, and history tells us that unresolved social tensions bubble up at times of stress. Resilient societies and communities rely heavily on social cohesion. The benefits of working on community resilience now include the opportunity to pre-empt more severe ruptures to social cohesion which are likely to arise from the major stresses ahead. It is important to involve minority communities in the resilience journey, and communities of identity such as LGBT, instead of focussing solely on geographic communities. Wider participation: Many places don’t have a strong sense of community, and in most of those that do, only a tiny percentage of people participate actively in community matters. How could larger numbers of communities, and larger numbers of people, have a motivation to participate in community resilience, including ethnic and low-income communities? This is a crucial issue, which will become more acute amid the pressures ahead: it would be great to see a couple of enlightened large NGOs fund pilot projects and gathering of best practice to move this forward. Engaging local authorities: As funding for services has moved from central government to local authorities, many local authorities have worked to further devolve decision-making and budgetary decisions to local communities. This means that in some parts of the country, local communities are strongly engaged with the local authority, and structures exist to support these partnerships. This move towards greater local control highlights the exciting potential to tackle many priorities (environmental, public service reform, etc.) by adopting a resilience approach and involving local people in community action and resilience building. In recent years, some local authorities have become real innovators in new forms of service delivery, partnership working and more. The replication issue applies here too. Is there currently an easy way to access best practice and role models in this area? Building national resilience: Most approaches towards community resilience take place at a geographic community level. However, examples from UK history and from other countries indicate real benefits in national-level approaches towards resilience. Some of the countries that are considered the most resilient, such as Japan, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, have a strong national resilience policy. If the UK had this too, it would make local initiatives more effective. Online resilience services: A massive opportunity for innovation! If I continue to dream, I imagine social entrepreneurs and progressive NGOs helping to create new apps and web services, alongside businesses.