Future Conversations: Programmes

Future Conversations is a series of facilitated workshops, designed to help communities raise their resilience to adapt to climate change and other challenges.

The Future Conversations programme aims to:

Connect to share our hopes as well as our fears and challenges.
Build your inner resilience by learning valuable lessons from nature and new life skills.
Open up to your creativity and motivation to build adaptive communities
Challenge our beliefs and norms to allow what’s possible to emerge, particularly the impact of the climate emergency, and related social justice issues.

Seeding our Future ran three pilot FC programmes in person in 2019, and ran an online programme in late 2020. For 2021, we are offering several options, which can be booked by community or environmental groups, or individuals: see full information below.

Programmes you can book for a group
Eight sessions for 10-20 people: Online: £1800 or In Person £2800 plus travel costs A one session taster of 1.5hrs: Online only: £200

Facilitator training
If you’d like to take part in a training as a facilitator of FC, let us know. The training is 14 hours and provides an overview of the 8 sessions and the materials used, as well as experience of and opportunities to practice the various techniques used in the 8 sessions. £400 per person. It is envisaged this training will be done online, over 4 sessions, unless a minimum of 8 people are attending in one location.

For enquiries about possible bookings click here.

Join our team
We would like to add 2/3 more facilitators to our team: your remit would be to identify potential client groups, negotiate outcomes, timings and costs with them, and facilitate the programme. Full training and support will be given. To enquire about this opportunity, click here.

OVERVIEW OF FUTURE CONVERSATIONS

Almost everyone agrees that strengthening the capacity of communities will be vital in facing the troubles ahead, but what does this mean, and how can we do it? Future Conversations is a series of 8 facilitated sessions for 10-20 participants, ideally all from the same community. The content of the sessions is flexible, aiming to meet the needs of the individuals involved and of their community as a whole. Typically the content includes some resilience and adaptation training, community and organising skills, and ways to understand and respond to the climate crisis. If possible, we use an outdoor setting for some sessions, and ways to learn about resilience and community from natural eco-systems. In 2019 we successfully ran complete pilot programmes with three communities in London, the Midlands and Scotland, and we ran 3 online programmes during the pandemic. We are developing further formats based on our experiences with these communities.

Online format: we can deliver the programme in 8 sessions of 1.5 hrs using zoom calls, with a recommend group size of 10-20 people.
Online taster: We have a 1.5 hour online workshop to give a flavour of the full programme, and enable people to decide if they wish to commit to that.

FORMAT AND CONTENT

Each programme is a series of sessions, each 2 hours long, for a group of 10-20 participants, with two facilitators. The interval between sessions is between weekly and monthly. The aim is to recruit people with an actual or potential connection, e.g. living in the same neighbourhood, members of one organisation such as a community group, etc. The venue is ideally a community garden, or local community centre with green space close by.

The first session is a ‘taster’, preferably for 12-20 people, at which people are invited to commit to the full series of sessions. All details of the sessions are open to negotiation with local partner organisations. Sample session content for the series includes:

Taster: exploratory session sharing how you feel, what you think about the future, or how you avoid it. Various ways to consider the future are explored. What Future Conversations offers, including the potential topics, especially climate emergency. Consensus about the shape of the programme. Aim to agree practicalities like length of sessions, and the target content of the sessions.

2.	How About You: your present and future concerns about your own life and work, e.g. health, finance, housing, food supplies. Some basic resilience and positive psychology skills. Handling difficult feelings, finding resources and support.

3.	Natural Happiness: learning about human nature, and how to grow your own happiness, by learning from nature and gardening. For example how to ‘compost’ your concerns and stress, how to nourish your roots and support network, including community connections.

4.	The Big Picture: using a deep ecology process to face fears about the future, find new perspectives, and a new sense of fellowship and purpose. Finding a sense of hope and what you can believe in, both individually and in your community.

5.	At Home with the Planet: exploring fears, facts and practicalities around environmental sustainability and the climate emergency. Exploring different views and ways to respond to it, including Deep Adaptation and Extinction Rebellion.

6.	Community Matters 1: What does community mean to you: what do you need, what can you offer to your communities (e.g. your neighborhood, family, faith, work groups?) Skills and resources to help community groups to function better.

7.	Community Matters 2: Exploring current and future issues around the front-line services that you and your community need, such as the NHS, local authority services, education, etc. Considering how to adapt to new pressures and take an empowered approach, including community action.

8.	Completion and beyond: wrap-up session. Celebrating the shared journey. Exploring follow-on hopes and plans, and how to find support and information to move forward from here.

LEAD FACILITATORS

Pam Candea, of The Surefoot Effect, CIC, trains group work facilitators, runs personal resilience workshops, assists community groups with defining and implementing their values into their work, and works with corporates to lower their carbon impacts. She ran a pilot series of Future Conversations for Belville Community Gardens in Greenock. She has been using the elements of Joanna Macy’s ‘Spiral of the Work That Reconnects‘ in workshops for several years, is very familiar with Deep Adaptation… and is still enjoying the learning!

Georgina Wilson: Founder and CEO of BUD: Overseer, Serial Social Entrepreneur, Community Organiser, Programme designer, Project Manager, Systems thinking, Facilitator, Host and Coach. Supports leaders for positive change in enterprise and community using a variety of methods and tools. Her focus is to enable emerging leaders to unearth their potential and power and to move them towards action and creating change. Previously collaborated with TfL, Local authorities, Semble, Power to Change, Specsavers, Community Organisers Ltd and more.

We also have a network of associate facilitators, and are open to working with a facilitator from a group client.

PARTNER ORGANISATIONS

We are interested in working with additional partners for the next stages of the project.

Single Conversations series partners: these could be local projects, or national organisations.

Roll-out partners: we are seeking a few regional or natural partners who could use this process through their network. We would hold a facilitator training for you and then support the newly trained facilitators to prepare for and deliver the sessions.

FUNDING

The research and development to date, has been funded by Seeding our Future. SOF has limited funds for further programmes, and we are seeking to work with local partners, who can self-fund this work or partner in fundraising.

CONTACT

Pam Candea: 07970 327975

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.