, Author at Seeding Our Future

How Bridport Climate Café aims to help climate responses

On Thursday November 18 and December 9, there will be a pilot Climate Café in Bridport, at Soulshine Café, South Street, 2-3.30pm. In the past couple of years, there has been rapid growth in climate cafés across the UK, and a small team is now doing training to host them in Bridport. A climate café … Read more

Bridport Climate Café: Thursdays November 18, December 9, 2-4pm at Soulshine Café, South Street

A climate café is an informal, supportive space where you can talk about your feelings on climate change. The group will be supported by trained volunteer facilitators: it’s a confidential space for respectful listening, whatever your views. All are welcome, including young adults from 16 up. It’s not a therapy group, and it’s not a … Read more

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 … Read more

Nature Immersion Course for GPs – 21-22 October 2021

Overview The Tamar Faculty and the Hazel Hill Trust are delighted to be running this two day nature resilience immersion course with overnight stay. It will offer a different way to gain new insights and skills and to raise your resilience and nourish your wellbeing. The course is being held at a farm located in … Read more

Soul Resilience Circle – monthly online group – October 20 and November 17

On October 20 and November 17, 7.30-9pm UK time, you can join an online group to seek and share soul resilience insights. We will explore different ideas of what soul is, and ways to contact it, to find soul guidance about staying positive and finding our life purpose in these troubled times. Our aim is … Read more

Climate change and collective trauma

This blog is from the latest newsletter of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA): this is a network of therapists and counsellors who are sharing best practice and developing new ways to help people handle climate distress. This blog by Steffi Bednarek has useful insights about the collective quality of the trauma many of us are … Read more

Book blog: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller

Subtitle: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief You may have noticed, as I have, a growing number of grief tending workshops, grief rituals and similar events in recent years. What’s your reaction to them? I admit that mine has been a mix of mild interest and some resistance. Francis Weller is one … Read more

The Politics of Climate Change: What can we do?

A useful blog by Belinda Bawden, who is a local councillor in Lyme Regis, Dorset, exploring how we can seek some influence on the politics of climate change, and with a lot of useful links.

Have green values been hijacked by capitalism?

Insights from Paul Kingsnorth Paul Kingsnorth is one of the deeper thinkers in what could be called the broad environmental scene. I’ve been reading his book Confessions of a recovering environmentalist: you can see from the title that he has grave doubts about the green movement and where it’s heading. Before this book, I had … Read more

Practical local climate change responses

A briefing and discussion evening, Tuesday 21 September at 7pm United Church, East Street, Bridport, DT6 3LJ There are plenty of practical, positive ways that households and community groups can respond to the increasing climate extremes we’re seeing both locally and across the world. This evening is part of Great Big Green Week, and is … Read more

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.