Adaptive Communities Archives - Seeding Our Future

Book blog: Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield

October 11, 2024 by Alan Heeks

Spiritual purpose and community

September 5, 2024August 16, 2024 by Alan Heeks

Why we all need collective power YouYou may wonder why I see community as important in the field of spiritual purpose. It’s a belief that has only emerged for me in the past few years of mounting turbulence. It’s now very hard for lone individuals to sustain their spiritual beliefs, as well as a healthy, … Read more

Book blog: A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit

July 25, 2024 by Alan Heeks

Positive news on community responses to disasters We’re clearly in an era of mounting disasters: not just incidents like hurricanes, but longer-term systemic disasters like habitat loss and food supply failures. This is a highly perceptive and reassuring book for our times. Rebecca has thoroughly researched a number of major disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 … Read more

Garden hamlets: a sane response to crazy times

July 26, 2024April 8, 2023 by Alan Heeks

Improving food security and affordable housing supply There’s a widespread view that strengthening local communities will be crucial in the years ahead, to help us all to adapt to increasing levels of disruption, including food supplies, utilities, weather patterns, and more. One way to speed up this process is to create garden hamlets, which would … Read more

How can we raise community resilience?

December 15, 2023November 27, 2020 by Alan Heeks

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 … Read more

Cultivating Community – the time is ripe!

August 9, 2023June 29, 2023 by Alan Heeks

Insights from Glastonbury… Yes, we’ve been talking about strengthening communities for years, but now we really need them. This blog shares insights from two sources: one is the Deep Adaptation Conference held in Glastonbury in June 2023, the other is the impressive community resilience initiatives happening in and around the town of Glastonbury. The conference … Read more

Book blog: At Work in the Ruins, by Dougald Hine

June 13, 2023April 26, 2023 by Alan Heeks

Why down to earth beats fishtank modernity This is a very helpful, illuminating book, though not in the ways I hoped. The idea of ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis is long gone for me, but I am thirsty for guidance on practical adaptation in local communities. Dougald’s book only hints at this, but it has … Read more

Deep Adaptation in local communities

November 7, 2022 by Alan Heeks

Two of my current crumbs of comfort are a sense that many more people now recognise that we’re in a crisis, and that I hear the need for adaptation being widely accepted. Whilst I used to get annoyed that newer crises were distracting from the climate emergency, I now feel they’re all connected, all part … Read more

Advice for starting a community

November 7, 2022 by Alan Heeks

Some pearls of wisdom Because of my experiences as founder of the Magdalen Farm Centre, and two cohousing projects, I am asked this question regularly. This document is an attempt to sum up some of the general conclusions from my experience, hoping this may be helpful to others exploring intentional community or other pioneering projects. … Read more

Creating a Life Together, by Diana Leafe Christian

November 7, 2022August 16, 2022 by Alan Heeks

Invaluable wisdom for community projects This book is a must for anyone wanting to set up or join any kind of residential community, such as a cohousing group or back-to-the-land settlement. The author was editor of Communities magazine in the US for many years, and lives in a delightful ecovillage which I’ve visited. There are … Read more

Current Events

Faith, Hope, Resilience | Saturday November 9

A reflective day With Alan Heeks and Simon Lockett How can we find our steady centre in these uncertain times? Where do we place our faith and our hope? What would spiritual resilience look like, for us and our communities? This day of exploration and support will include times of prayer, meditation and sharing, with periods outside for walking contemplation as a micro pilgrimage, and for communing with Nature as a micro vision quest: recognising the power of space and silence. Our venue is Garn Farm, a conservation smallholding and woodland near Longtown, in a beautiful valley overlooking the Black Mountains. We’ll have a warm indoor group room with woodburner and kitchen, and wonderful spaces outside. See more at www.warmthandwonder.co.uk. Alan Heeks has many years’ experience exploring Nature and faith as sources of resilience, and is deeply interested in how communities can deepen to help us adapt to climate change. Simon Lockett is a pioneer in re-introducing pilgrimage to Herefordshire, and has a long-standing love for contemplative prayer and spiritual connection with the natural world. Practicalities Cost: £40, concessions £25. Bring lunch to share. Timing: Arrive 9.30am for 10am start. Finish 4.30pm. Venue: Garn Farm, near Clodock, Longtown, Herefordshire HR2 0PD. There is some overnight accommodation at Garn Farm: contact Alan about this. Bookings/enquiries: Contact Alan Heeks, , 07494 203014. Group size limited to 12 people.

Featured Blog

Book blog: Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield

Why we need to do something: community hubs? This is a really useful, thought-provoking book, whose core idea is that every local community should have a Lifehouse: a form of community hub to provide mutual care and practical resources, as normal services increasingly fail us. His inspiration for this idea comes from a range of emergency response projects described in the book: some short-term like Occupy Sandy in New York, others lasting several years, in Greece and Rojava. I fully share Greenfield’s view that local communities are the best focal point to raise adaptation capacity quickly: this is the aim of the Community Climate Resilience Project which I’m involved with through Network for Social Change. His Lifehouse concept is certainly worth exploring, so here’s the gist of it: A physical place serving a neighbourhood, which could be a repurposed shop, school, church, etc. The local focal point for providing and organising mutual care: see more below. With a secure backup power source to recharge phones, operate medical equipment, refrigerate food. Power failures are more likely in future due to storms and grid overload. Cooking and storage capacity for communal catering when there are food shortages (increasingly likely, see my blog here). A socialising and sleeping space if an emergency displaces people from their homes. Capacity to repair and maintain basic tools and equipment. A store of drinkable water. Capacity to grow some food (e.g. vertical farming?). Lifehouses or community hubs? I agree that every local community needs the kind of facilities he’s listed, but I really question the idea of trying to get them all in one building. Probably many communities already have some of these items, but across several locations. The finessed vision I suggest is for an umbrella organisation coordinating a number of elements to form a community hub, using and upgrading existing locations where possible. More specifically: A smallish central space could be the access point to all services and mutual care. Parish halls and similar could be quite easily upgraded with a backup power supply, larger-scale catering capacity, and emergency food supplies. They could provide a social and sleeping space. Food growing and processing will often need a larger site, and may be better organised as a dedicated Community Supported Agriculture scheme. Repair cafes and sheds could handle maintenance and repair tasks. One of my major questions about the Lifehouse vision is money. To buy or rent and equip a building for all the roles he describes will need a large amount of money and human effort. These initiatives will usually rely on a handful of overstretched volunteers, and their limited capacity could be better spent on upgrades to existing facilities, on connecting them as a network, and evolving a culture of mutual care. Rather than the great effort of starting a new organisation from scratch to create a Lifehouse, I’d hope that in many locations, a coming-together of existing organisations, or one taking a lead, could co-ordinate a resilience network and add whatever capabilities it still needed. Climate Action Centres are just one example. Mutual care This is an inspiring major theme of the book. In Chapter 1, The Long Emergency, Greenfield highlights how impersonal and demeaning a lot of services have already become, and how public services are certain to degrade and ‘retract’ in future, as demand keeps growing but capacity shrinks. Just think of all the automated phone systems and online hoopla we suffer now, compared to 10 years ago. Solidarity clinic in Thessaloniki, Greece His most impressive example of mutual care is the solidarity networks which sprang up across Greece after the massive austerity measures of 2011. By 2020, this provided much of the healthcare for 10% of the Greek population, and for many refugees excluded from the state system because they had no social security number. Here, and in other examples he documents, the system was ‘horizontal’, free of charge, egalitarian. It recognised that many health problems arose from social issues, and mutual care seeks to address both. In these clinics, the first visit lasts 90 minutes, and is with three staff: a physician, a psychotherapist, and a social worker, who had time to understand and form responses to all aspects of the case. Whilst this example involves professionals volunteering their skills, most of them involve regular people helping each other, as in emergency responses, and also in the remarkable autonomous region of Rojava in Kurdish Syria. The Sad Ah But As with Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, this book gives an encouraging picture of how empowering, satisfying, and effective it can be for people to do something, in his catchphrase: especially, to do something collectively to nourish your local community. What is poignant in both books is that none of their examples evolve ahead of a crisis, always in response. My own efforts to raise local resilience in anticipation of problems have also foundered. It seems that even now, almost no one can find the will to take on the major effort and disruptions from normality needed to create this resilience. Surely we could make community food provision better than this? I’m reminded of a conversation earlier this year with Professor Tim Lang about preparation for food shortages. I asked him, how do we persuade people to prepare: he replied, sadly, “It’s going to have to get a lot worse before people act.” However, I continue to hope that a small minority of pioneers will start to create community resilience hubs now, so that we at least have some examples to learn from and share. This is one of the ideas I hope we can explore in the new Community Climate Resilience Project I’m involved with.