How Bridport is moving forward with climate change responses

Positive outcomes from September 21 meeting

As part of Great Big Green Week, on September 21 a well-attended open meeting was held to explore positive, practical local responses to the climate crisis. It was jointly hosted by Bridport Food Matters, Transition Town Bridport, and West Dorset Friends of the Earth.

Over sixty people attended the event, including invited representatives from a range of local organisations, including parish councils, churches, and clubs. There were short briefings on four topics:

Food security: Candida Blaker of Bridport Food Matters
Home energy: Sam Wilberforce of Transition Town Bridport
Mutual support and emergency planning: Alan Heeks of Seeding our Future
Town Council: update from David Dixon, Community Projects Manager

Highlights of their briefings and of the small group discussions on these themes are set out below.

Several issues emerged as priorities from the evening overall:

Emergency preparation: the increased risk is understood, as is the need for more preparation at household and community level.
Volunteers: these have played a vital role in the local covid responses, and it’s desirable to have a volunteer network with expanded capacity and remit in place ahead of future emergencies.
Wider engagement: there was support for steps to achieve much wider involvement, such as the proposed Climate Forum.
Communication: more local communication is desirable about climate actions needed, and also about existing projects and resources available. Ideally this should include print media as well as online channels.
Waste: there are many opportunities to reduce food and other waste, which could be promoted more widely.

Highlights by topic

Food: Candida Blaker underlined the urgency for us to step up our action on Climate Change; emphasising that food and farming can be part of the solution; and local action – such as buying local, and supporting policy change – makes a difference. www.bridportfoodmatters.net signposts to local initiatives and resources.

Food discussion

Participants were proud of the extension of the Edible Gardens project to a second location: Bridport Primary School. More volunteers are sought to help implement the Edible Gardens 2, and to help to extend food and climate initiatives to Colfox School, the Minerva Trust, and Youth Centre. Contact " target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Sarah Wilberforce or " target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Tina Ellen Lee to find out more. The group recognised the importance of working with young people, particularly in view of the levels of anxiety about the climate emergency.
There was overriding support for the need to develop more work linked to food waste, possibly using a slogan such as ‘Zero Hero’. This could involve working with the restaurants and hospitality sector, the market traders, and also involve household and wider community initiatives and public awareness campaigns. This proposal will be discussed at the next Bridport Local Food Group meeting, particularly in relation to the hospitality sector.
Other suggestions included guerrilla gardening and a campaign to encourage people to disinvest in food corporations. It was felt important for our messaging to emphasise the benefits to the local economy of climate-friendly food habits (e.g. buying local and seasonal produce from independents – £10 spent locally is worth over £17 to our economy) and to focus on increasing ‘resilience’ rather than ‘climate change’. We could develop our own ‘advertising’ campaigns promoting our messages – for which Robert Golden could provide photography.

Home energy: Sam Wilberforce described easy steps to cut energy use and cost, such as insulation, as well as bigger steps like heat pumps and PV panels.

Home energy discussion: This covered a range of topics including:

The new energy conservation initiative from Bridport Town Council, including the climate champions.
The work of Bridport Energy Local, which is creating a local grid for renewable energy.
Grants that are (or mostly aren’t) available.
Bridport Housing week, run by Bridport Area Community Housing (BACH) which hare running a series of workshops on Lowering Household Bills on 30 October. They are associated with Raise the Roof, which aims to source building materials locally.

Mutual support and emergency planning: Alan Heeks described how both the UK Government National Risk Register and the Dorset Community Risk Register describe a substantial risk of a range of emergencies affecting us within the next couple of years: these include severe weather events, and various other risks, including a serious failure of the electricity supply. The UK Government advises all households to take basic precautions, such as a supply of drinking water, torches, and a camping stove. We can also know who our neighbours are, and who is vulnerable and may need special help. A network of volunteers who can help the public services in an emergency would also help our local resilience substantially.

Discussion: This group covered both this topic and the Town Council. Main points covered were:

Advice and issues around setting up a volunteer network ahead of future emergencies.
Improving local communication: see more details above.
A suggestion that Frome provides a useful role model for some of these topics: apparently Bridport Town Council are already liaising with them.
Support for a Climate Forum as part of a wider initiative to extend engagement across the local community.

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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: .

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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.

Positive outcomes from September 21 meeting

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