Thriving too

I 'heart' London

I'll admit it, I was getting a little tired of the rush and bustle, the concrete and the mess. Then I took a little break away carting the Mindapples tree round to festivals (more shortly) and came back home to find my local shops boarded, windows broken, fires being started. Hmm. Didn't help my urges to jack in city living and join the circus...

Then something special happened and I remembered why I love it here, and why it's still home.

Incident 1: Passing Clouds, Dalston.
Passing Clouds is an artist / musician owned venue in east London and Saturday night was a glorious 8 piece African drumming band which I went to with a friend from FARM:shop that I started volunteering at this time last year. We had our faces painted by some lovely ladies wearing head-dresses made from recycled plastic bags and danced til we dropped with new friends.

It's also home to the People's Kitchen on a Sunday - food by the people, for the people - using food surplus that would otherwise go to waste. Turn up from 3pm and help chop, peel and wash. Or come for a communal dinner and film in the early evening (for a donation.) Last time I was there I was so bowled over by the feast I forgot to take photos! So you'll have to do with the one I found above. We had soup and bread, salad and veg stew, fruit and yogurt, banana milkshakes, plus an amazing plum crumble from a mirabelle glut over in the park. SCRUMMY!

Incident 2: Bethnal Green Superstore
THis is my local mini-mart on Bethnal Green road and I've been shopping there for 7 years. Hassan let me walk out with £15 of shopping when I forgot my wallet once. I went last week to check his shop was ok in the riots and he was one of only two still open in the evening. And we had a giggle on Saturday when I did my shopping at 3am on the way back from Passing Clouds still covered in swirly blue face paint.

Incident 3: Love in a Cup
So then to Sunday. I went to the FARM:shop to help at Grow Sunday, then cycled back home via  Broadway Market and bumped into Christian from East London Furniture, and met Cash from Love in a Cup. This morning I popped in on my way to Mindapples HQ in town to say hi. Not only can I highly recommend the special with a curl of orange peel (which makes a flat white taste like a chocolate orange - YUM!) but the guy is a one man community making machine. He'll remember your name, your favourite coffee and your last conversation. I was there for less than 15 mins before 3 regulars dropped in to say hi and chat. "Hey Dom, double flat white with brown sugar? And did you find something for your mother's birthday present?"

And here's my point (finally!). London feels like home when you know people's names. When you walk or cycle the streets and stop to say hi. When you can join the dots. I've read 'Watching the English' by Kate Fox recently, and got rather downhearted about the analysis of the English social inadequacy and how we need props in order to talk to one another. Got me thinking what 'props' we already have we could use as an excuse. Cups of coffee? Communual meals? Buying your shopping?...

Social Spaces: First Community Kitchen in Lambeth Tomorrow Night

Lambeth Council, better known as the first Co-operative Council, is hosting a 'Volunteering Speed Dating' event tomorrow night 17th August between 6pm - 8pm.  The idea of the event has come out of the many offers of support the council has received over the last week following the civic disturbances.

As Lambeth have described, the evening will be an opportunity to:

• Meet people like you from across the borough
• Talk to community organisations and groups needing further support
• Get advice on how your skills can be used in Lambeth
• Commit to volunteer or just talk to experts about the sort of thing you want to do
• Get involved or be a wallflower, you can just listen to what's being discussed
• Celebrate what they have here in Lambeth.

Social Spaces will be running a Community Kitchen workshop in the Canteen between 7pm - 8pm for all residents who would like to start conversations about how the community can build further in the wonderful spirit in the area.

In planning for months now, the Community Kitchen is a new project planned to launch in the next few weeks, but we are bringing the project out early for this event.  Community Kitchen has evolved out of the Travelling Pantry project, and aims to give communities a new tool around which to hold positive conversations for stronger communities.  Community Kitchen will take on different guises and formats, but we hope that they will become, with the help of some accessible tools, regular self-arranged get-togethers for communities.  

Unlike traditional committee meetings and forums, Community Kitchens will encourage informal and creative conversations around developing new community projects with an asset-based focus rather than a problem solving or deficit-focused one.  The full launch of Community Kitchen will officially begin in September, and will see a large number of workshops being rolled out by a Local Authority as part of their innovative Community Engagement Strategy. 

Please join us on Wednesday 17th August between 7pm - 8pm in the Canteen (appropriately) at the Assembly Hall, Lambeth Town Hall, Town Hall, London SW2 1RW

We will be re-opening the free Travelling Pantry project in the next few weeks  - offering workshops to community groups in response to requests following the riots -  in Lambeth and Peckham... and other areas .... so please register your interest here.

This is Community: Why the Clean-ups Are So Important

The analysis in the media of why the UK erupted in street violence last week have offered us a buffet of reasoning across the political spectrum.

We've been offered: greed, gangs, the recession, unemployment, bad parenting, cultural disintegration, harsh policing, lax policing, slack sentencing, attitudes, social norms, the media scandal, the banking scandal, the expenses scandal, government cuts, professional incompetence, social contagion, opportunism, backlash.  

We've seen the argument swerve dangerously (usually in the same programme) from individual responsibility to state responsibility - depending on which political party you are supporting. 

Finally the arguments ended the week  in a horrible intellectual heap of ridiculousness at the doors of David Starkey.

I offer my own brief observations with some understanding that a week on we have all pretty much had enough of the analysis and political point scoring. So I am sticking to some person thoughts from my own experience... and reflecting on things that have been helpful this week.

A great many young people involved in the riot activities in the last week will have been 'known to the authorities'.  It is unusual to go from a stay-at-home teenager to looting in one step.  If the are 'known' at all, they will have been on the system of several agencies, possibly including youth offending, social services, the police, education teams, employment schemes.  Having worked for a short period in a Youth Offending Team (YOT) I can assure you of the tightness of these processes in steering a young person through a system.  There is hardly a crack through which any small degree of anti-social behaviour can slip through.  There are endless rounds of meetings they must attend.  If they miss meetings they are back in court for further measures.  They are sent on courses, their parents are counselled, they go on restorative justice programmes, they do 'community service'....  Seriously, there is very little not deployed to reform and shape a young person's behaviour to a more pro-social way of living.  

The government has made cuts to Youth Offending Teams - and probably this is one of the many reasons why the violence erupted... but the professional practice of YOTs will not have altered much with the change in government.  

But my own experience of YOTs work, as valuable and important as it is, is that it does not compensate for what a caring community could do for young people.  Most kids with ASBOs are shunned by the community in which they live, the families are shunned and likely to schools exclude those children.  I wrote about these experiences in more detail in this post on Protective Factors, Systems Thinking and People Power.

The main point here being that communities can do for young people that no amount of services can do for them.  These services cannot give them a feeling of belonging, a feeling of importance, a sense that their talents and contributions to society are valued and valuable.  These services cannot help them build relationships with helpful adults, build their own social capital and empower them ultimately into economic independence and civic participation and contribution. There are things that only communities can do for each other.

The citizen-led clean-ups that happened across the effected areas in the days that followed the riots, lifted our spirits and gave us back a bit of hope that society hadn't quite unravelled in the way much of the press seemed happy to promote.  But they are much more important than simply extending hope.  They were statements of ownership across those neighbourhoods.  They were statements about the strong feelings of anger that local residents had towards the violence and the destruction of neighbourhoods.  

And the Local Authority clean-up squads couldn't send that sort of message.... and instinctively these local folk knew that the message was as important as the clearn-up and the message could not be delivered by the local authority.

I wrote recently about a programme in Chicago called CeaseFire designed by an expert in the spread of infectious diseases called Gary Slutkin who has used the power of community outrage as part of a detailed strategy which has reduced violence by 45%  - 75%.  Every time there is violence the community demonstrate against the violence. Note:  They don't march against the authorities to stop the violence, they march against the violent behaviours from their own community members.  They express a collective rejection of these behaviours.  As Slutkin says ‘for these communities violence is simply normal – we work to make it unusual’.

The Peace Rallies which have started to emerge this weekend are further really powerful examples of how citizens see this need to make social expressions of peace.

And this is essentially what these clean-ups have done, with the addition of showing pride on where these residents live.  And perhaps all rolled up that is why we have found them so heartening, and why more than likely they have contributed to the riots reducing. 

Now all we need to figure out is how to make young people get more of their sense of community from the clean-ups teams and less from their gangs - and thankfully that small detail is very much in our hands.

[For a more detailed and academic exploration of encouraging autonomy in young people I wrote this RSA article in 2008 following my own research.]

Pic: Notice board in Peckham where people posted messages of peace and tolerance.

 

Social Spaces: Solar Powered Pops

Isn't this beautifully done... Solar powered van selling ice pops....

Social Spaces: The Wrinkles of the City

We have blogged a lot about the work of photographer JR.  Many of his works address issues of gender and culture as he pastes giant sized images of people on buildings (and the top of trains also) around the world.  

I can't choose a favourite - but I really do love "The Wrinkles of the City' work he did in Los Angeles (Pic above) We can shout  or grumble about ageism - but doesn't this image do such a better job of adjusting attitudes to beauty?

Below one of my favourite photographs of all time.  I am not surprised JR got the Ted Prize last year - are you?

 

Social Spaces: Real Time Farms

There are many social media driven platforms out there which are are going to waste... but Real Time Farms has enormous potential to drive proper change around food production - both perceptions and behaviours ... and works with the whole chain - from grower, to markets, restaurants, cooks, to consumers.  Look forward to this one spreading!