We're excited to introduce you to the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait, painted by many people together in Ladywood
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
—David Graeber
Building on over 3 focused years of taking the ideas of Doughnut Economics off the page with neighbours, researchers, partners, visionaries, and previously many more people at Impact Hub Birmingham exploring what the Doughnut could mean in our context, we're so excited to celebrate all those working to move us towards safe and just futures for our neighbourhoods as we launch the first ever Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait in Ladywood, Birmingham UK.
Following an in person celebration and portrait launch in our neighbourhood Thursday 27th - Saturday 29th October 2022 and a digital portrait launch event on Hopin on Wednesday 7th December 2022, we couldn't be prouder to make our portrait available online here on the DEAL platform first, in contribution to the abundant commons being stewarded here by Doughnut Economics Action Lab.
Introduction
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”
—Angela Y. Davis
Today we are seeing how multiple globalised systems are entangled in ways that have cascading impacts on society and the natural world we rely on. This global ‘polycrisis’ affects every aspect of our lives, and is experienced most viscerally as multiple impacts begin to converge on the places we live, play, eat, rest, learn, love, heal and grow. Our homes, streets and neighbourhoods bring together the big picture, our bold goals, expansive dreams, immediate everyday challenges and opportunities, as well as the experience of crisis, mutual aid, and real barriers to overcome, which manifest in a way that we can interact with, share in and feel the effects of as neighbours.
Our neighbourhoods are also where our agency and ability to organise is highest, and are sites that can help to alleviate our grief and sense of powerlessness, making them the foundations of the hopeful, creative, just transition that we know is in our hearts. Movements, stories and organising for new economic possibilities is nurtured, demonstrated, and crafted through everyday actions, and we have the collective energy to rehearse and manifest bold visions for our futures if we can change the goal, create a compass like the one we present in this portrait to guide us, establish new shared metrics, take up roles stewarding the miracle of our abundant commons, and demonstrate the different transformations that are required in governance, finance, and many other areas to deeply (re)design and build life-affirming realities.
Approaches from the neighbourhood up are, therefore, not only a moral imperative, nor simply a ‘nice to have’ or a way to consult on decisions that have already been made. Our neighbourhoods are a fundamental unit of change that we need to understand, without which we render ourselves unable to meet the challenges of this century. Just as the founding of the NHS brought national and regional infrastructure, but also required crucial democratic access to healthcare at the neighbourhood level through GPs, and as public libraries and social housing movements acted as a means to distribute access to knowledge and safety, such is true for 21st century transition infrastructure to be built at the scale of our streets and neighbourhood in this time of deep transformation. These are the drivers that carry this portrait forward, and we invite you to carry these words with you as you explore this picture painted by many people together.
Design
“The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being.”
—Donella Meadows
What happens when a neighbourhood starts to tell its own story, from all its different vantage points, through the many lenses we see our lives, our place, its challenges, its opportunities? The chance to paint our own portrait gives us an opportunity to not only see ourselves and celebrate our strengths, but also notice where we fall short, share stories and hopes of how we wish to be together in the future, and reframe what might be possible.
As we find ourselves in increasingly difficult, uncertain, complex times with many crises being felt all around, what power do we have together? When we can tell a new story of who we are, reframe our collective goals, and build out civic power, we can unlock even more of the collaboration, creativity, and courage that is inherent as communities. The beautiful thing about a portrait is it doesn’t have to perfect, there doesn’t just have to be just one, it can be created by looking through many lenses and from a range of vantage points. When we make our portraits visible to one another, we can also see what and who is missing, where we like what we see and want to do more, where we don’t and want to change and, when we invite our imagination, we can envision more beautiful futures than we dared to dream of, and bring them, lovingly, into being.
“Both hard and soft evidence is used, thereby avoiding the common trap of giving preference to the quantitative above all else, which is especially dangerous when working in areas of knowledge where reliable measurements do not yet exist or data is overwhelming.”
The tools by Doughnut Economics Action Lab encouraged us to explore our portrait and, along with hundreds of neighbours and partners over 3 years, we unrolled the Doughnut and surfaced our Community Portrait of Place and Data Portrait of Place. We are incredibly inspired and thankful to the work of Leeds, Amsterdam, Brussels, Cornwall and others who pioneered this work, and motivated and supported us to build upon it. We of course will do the same to others who follow afterwards.
The Doughnut Unrolled set of tools suggests a number of ways to create this portrait, through the four lenses and specific dimensions within those. At this stage we have taken a bespoke approach to each aspect of the portrait, related directly to the context of and what matters most in our work, our location and other interdependencies. We are now in the early days of synthesising the learnings and weaving together the different elements, which we invite you to explore.
Community Portrait of Place
In this chapter and subsection of the work, we use the term community to refer to all of the many communities we are in relationship with, inspired by and work alongside, as well the geographical neighbourhood we call home as described in Our Neighbourhood.
We use this language to acknowledge DEAL’s methodological Community Portrait of Place approach and thoughtful differentiation between the data and community portraits as equally important ingredients, whilst also recognising the term community is plural, that it can have many different nested meanings, as well as the geographical focus of our work. Therefore, we use the term openly as an expression of the many relationships and connections as part of an ecology, and we attempt to make clear when we are referring to our geographically neighbourhood, and where we are referring to a wider community of practice, place and partners.
For CIVIC SQUARE’s adventure into this work, movement building started in 2017 as explained in Historical Context, as we began to understand early on what happens when you put the ideas into people’s hands. Between 2017 and 2022 we have crafted hundreds of entry points, documenting as much as we can, in as many different ways as possible, as we go.
In 2020 we designed this into a first phase of intentional co-creation. It’s worth nothing that, at this stage, the DEAL methodology didn’t exist for these ways of creating a portrait with your community. As we have progressed on this journey so far, we focused on many and varied entry points that were creative and immersive, experimenting with bringing together the dark, dream and everyday matters (as described in How We Organise).
As we learnt more every single week through this way of being, we built and iterated upon it, and continued in this manner over the last three years. At this stage for this work, it means this organising and portrait is more about the stories and methodology; the types of entry points and why we chose them. It is not necessarily as plotted against the lenses or specific domains as the Data Portrait of Place, nor a deep synthesis of the learnings yet. We also have deep gaps in the history of our neighbourhood that we hope to dive into more deeply in 2023, but it’s been an honour to work alongside neighbours of all ages from our neighbourhood, people exploring at this particular scale around the world, as well as people interested in regenerative, human(e), playful economic possibilities for our places across the city and country over the last 5 years.
DEAL share their Community Portrait of Place tips, guide and methodology here.
Data Portrait of Place
Our Data Portrait of Place is more directly derived from the most recent DEAL methodology. 2 months after the launch of the Doughnut Unrolled methodology and associated tools in February 2022, the Climate Action Leeds team launched the Leeds Doughnut, and this was a game-changer for our work. They were a multi-disciplinary team who had unrolled their doughnut, with researchers for each lens and a dynamic in-person launch, that we could touch see and feel. We were privileged to deeply connect with the team, and build a research team (Catriona Rawsthorne, Irena Bauman, and Jenni Brookes) to take the Neighbourhood Doughnut data portrait further, under Kavita Purohit (our Neighbourhood Doughnut Economics Researcher)'s leadership.
The first Neighbourhood Doughnut Data Portrait of Place is a rigorous deep dive, of what stories you can really tell about the neighbourhood level using data available, and what has to be generalised at the city, regional or national scale. Key facets of the data portrait included looking at neighbourhood and city targets and indicators for each dimension, and what our place is already working towards, asking: is this ambitious enough? Is the baseline acceptable? Are people already doing it elsewhere in practice, or better? If so, how can we learn from them? Is how we are defining a dimension right for our neighbourhood and, crucially, how are we performing in that dimension?
Creating a snapshot is about just a fraction of the data available, rather than overwhelming with detail, which at the first stage helps to give an overview, inviting us to reflect holistically and appreciate the complex interactions that underpin it. It opens up the space for anyone to go deeper into an area as appropriate, as well as see a connected picture; to be able to plot systemic and transformative ways forward that have multiple benefits, rather than seeing every dimension in isolation, or not given dimensions the depth, specificity and context they also need. They are to be taken for what they are: entry points; an overview; a start point.
There were many drivers of this work, many of which are discussed through the Historical Context, Current Context and Introducing Neighbourhood Doughnut. One fairly significant one was laid out in CIVIC SQUARE’s 2019 Vision & Strategy work — the need to redefine as we termed at the time ‘Metrics for an Uncertain Future’. Asking many open questions at the time, refining them over the last three years:
How do we measure learning, iteration, discovery, the craft of new possibility in a long emergency and polycrisis?
How do we flatten hierarchical one way accountability structures with funders, and stand side by side accountable to the challenge ahead?
What is all encompassing enough, but can be measured through many types of knowledge, practice, ways of doing and being?
How do you quantify, measure intangibles, or work that has not yet be built, only imagined — but on the cusp of manifestation?
If we make what we measure, how do we measure what it means to usher in a new economic paradigm, and multiple large scale transitions that were required. We proposed in 2019, that a co-created Doughnut, could be nuanced, co - created, rigorous as well as measure the progress we need, and this dashboard speaks to the co-produced first three years. Having developed deeply and far beyond the initial proposal, we are more certain than ever of the potential of this type of framework, that encompass multiple knowledge and practice bodies into it, can visualise the scale of the challenge, and opportunity and is able to have a range of data points hard and soft to measure progress should be at the heart of our collective accountability going forward. A compass for 21st century progress and the goals of this work.
We are currently working on rerolling all four lenses of the Neighbourhood Doughnut, which we’ll be excited to share experiments and progress from later this year, or hear from others who are working to visualise this. For now, we have rerolled two lenses to share our first Neighbourhood Doughnut work-in-progress, based on The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries, with credit to Kate Raworth and Christian Guthier (CC-BY-SA4.0).
The v1. iteration of this work was a first step in annual process of the work that will continue to help us to move into the safe and just space, that the Neighbourhood Doughnut illustrates. However, we are not naive we understand the scale of the change and transformation required, the Ways Forward: CIVIC SQUARE 2023-2030 chapter describes, the precise focus of 2023 - 2025. With a deep focus on practical system demonstration, at scale, and with a pace that respects what it means to work in the neighbourhood, but understands the urgency of the work ahead. In How We Organise we share at a high level why the crafts of making systems visible, knowledge justice and unpacking complexity together is so crucial to unlocking agency and action. We see this work crucial to that.
From looking at the data, we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that we are not meeting the needs of our own place, our collective responsibilities to each other or working within ecological boundaries.. Whilst this can feel alarming, it’s also a chance to deeply and honestly look at where we are, and where we need to get to, knowing that we might have to oppose a lot and, more importantly, propose and demonstrate a lot more, but that together we are able to do so.
Overwhelmingly, the Community Portrait of Place revealed deep, untapped vision, energy and passion in every corner of the neighbourhood, at a scale that the climate transition and the bold vision of the Doughnut requires of us.
The deeply and actively hopeful part of this Portrait is that there are so many routes already starting to pave the way, on a global scale – with new technologies helping us identify what climate mitigation is possible – and also a local scale; in the field of civic power, agency and care. From CIVIC SQUARE and our neighbours’ collective work in creating a Community Portrait of Place, to others near and far that are Reimagining Economic Possibilities and Those Moving Us Into Doughnut , we are all part of a growing, eclectic field of people working towards an economic system fit for the 21st century.
It is now about how we collectively harness this. To continue doing bold work and building legitimacy with care. To demonstrate systemically, work in ecologies of community with a thoughtful urgency, knowing that this is the work that the transition requires of us all, and that our liberation is entangled with one another at a planetary scale.
The stage is set. The goal clear. Our current position visible. The possibility and energy abundant. The future is ours to make.
Newspaper design by Robert Lockley, with illustrations by Charlotte Bailey.
Those Moving Us Into The Doughnut
Taking into consideration that which has been described throughout the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait as story of people, data, systems, bold goals, imagination and transformation; in the words of the Anna Bullen from the Centre of Alternative Technology when describing the route to net zero: “we have all the ideas, we have the technology, we know what to do, we just need to get on with it.”
Our journey across the Portrait describes a story where we know our neighbourhoods are a crucial foundation for transformation, we know there are green shoots of the new economy, and futures being rehearsed today, practiced and imagined hand in hand in everyday ways, in bold imaginative ways, in systemic ways, and often dancing between them all. Who is already working to move us into the doughnut, where are the green shoots, how does their work connect up? How do we amplify and grow this, and hospice and let go of that which no longer serves us? Perhaps, by spotlighting the ways forward, we can grow in our hope, confidence and possibility, more easily leaving behind that which no longer will service.
"[Seeing the big picture] sets the stage for a twenty-first-century economic play – one whose characters and script can help bring us back [from the brink of collapse] and into a thriving balance."
— Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics
What if we can meet those characters of the new economy, all around us in our homes and street, and what if the neighbourhood was the stage for the first act of the twenty-first-century economic play?
Our curious team of storytellers, designers, connectors (newly crowned as renegade economists) went to meet some of them: those we had worked with, alongside, and admired from afar in our neighbourhood, and collated stories and ecosystem mapping into the form of a neighbourhood newspaper: the first edition of the Good News of B16.
Stories for the paper were co-written using a canvas* that encompassed many questions and invited the pioneers to not only tell their own tales and share their journeys, but engage with Doughnut Economics from their perspective and share their dreams of thriving in balance. When designing the conversations, on every level we aimed to make the experience mutually beneficial, and to honour the time taken out to reflect we asked them what would be a fair exchange for their time. Some of this took the form of financial contributions to their work, but also in other exchanges such as gifting seeds, and our team spending a day supporting some of their work practically, such as sorting through food at a sharehouse.
*This tool will be uploaded in full for open-source use, with instructions and an interview guide, and we will link it back to this story when this is ready to be made use of.
Register here if you'd like to receive a printed copy of Good News of B16: Doughnut Spotlight Edition as part of a printed collection of the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait work, which will be available for both UK and international postage in February 2023.
Postcard designs by Magda Iris
Reimagining Economic Possibilities
“One of the most insidious mechanisms by which colonialism survives is through creating the false impression that there is one universal imagination or way of being.”
—Araceli Camargo
In DEAL’s own principles, they describe clearly that they wish to be part of a movement, and not the movement in itself. In our work, until now, we have always wished to centre more marginal voices, spotlight those often missed, search beyond our own dominant view points that are often steeped in global north bias and a lack of decolonial thinking at the heart of the stories we live, listen to, hear, and are in systems of.
In a healthy way, we have sought to critique elements of the Doughnut that struggle to convey some of the tensions, such as the colonial undertones of the SDGs, and their limitations, whilst also recognising the positionality of the initial text, arising through a white, western, academic lens. Much of this critical analysis is encouraged by Raworth herself, but is not necessarily easy to discern that this is welcome, whilst holding the integrity of the framework, at first glance. In addition, we hope to surface and share the stories and visions of many radical imaginaries in this growing space, working at many scales, and help to inform, broaden and decolonise our own thinking and practice, as we move through this journey together.
To coincide with the launch of the portrait and the Good News of B16 publication, we are launching Reimagining Economic Possibilities, an ongoing open publication to deeply tap into the Dream Matter we discussed in How We Organise, and continue to listen and learn from the imagineers, dreaming boldy, beyond current limitations, deeply, imaginatively, creatively and radically. With deep gratitude to Rob Hopkins for the power of ‘What if..?’ framing, that we centre in the first 16 essays of the series.
The series brings together commissioned works by visionaries who are reimagining economic possibility from a number of different angles. We are deeply passionate about Doughnut Economics and recognise the wealth of possibilities it unlocks, as well as its limitations. As Kate Raworth has said, quoting British statistician George E. P. Box, “all frameworks are wrong, but some are useful.” Therefore, we want to be able to stretch as far and wide as the Doughnut Economics Action Lab invites us to see it as a platform to organise, whilst also able to encompass a plurality of bold visions.
“If we can’t be truthful about the interwoven nature of economics, capitalism and racism, then there will be no new world of economics, just a new way of keeping certain communities and people in power.”
Register here if you'd like to receive an imaginative series of printed postcards featuring quotes from the visionary thinkers and doers who contributed to the first series of our Reimagining Economic Possibilities publication, as part of a printed collection of the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait work, which will be available for both UK and international postage in February 2023.
Tools
There are a range of ways to engage with our first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait, whether you want to get deep into the working data spreadsheets, find out ways to host a Doughnut After School Club, learn more about the Doughnut for the very first time, or simply follow your curiosity and get a taste of what has been happening here in Ladywood, both on and offline.
Open Dashboard
The entirety of the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait has been compiled into an open dashboard built using Notion to give an extensive and multi-layered deep dive into our work. It takes the form of an information-rich wiki that will continue to grow and change in the short and long term, with new tools added as we go. We recommend you navigate this space by zooming in on your interests, follow your curiosity and come back for more of the big picture later on.
For those wanting something more concise, we’ve also put together a Neighbourhood Doughnut Workbook which can be viewed digitally here. With a spread for each chapter of the Portrait, these are there to give you a window into a wider picture. We hope you are able to get a lot from this document on its own, but the full dashboard is accessible with links throughout to go deeper. We therefore invite you to explore this workbook with curiosity and creativity, moving towards the parts that speak to you or that you can formulate into action in your contexts.
Register here if you'd like to receive a printed copy of the Neighbourhood Doughnut Workbook (v1.2) as part of a printed collection of the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait work, which will be available for both UK and international postage in February 2023.
Printed Documents
A printed collection of the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait work will be available for both UK and international postage in February 2023. This collection will include:
Neighbourhood Doughnut Workbook v1.2 An overview of each chapter of the portrait, with space to reflect and draw connections in a handy format to carry around with you and write directly onto. This is for you if you hope to take parts of the work to kick off or deepen work in your own neighbourhood(s).
Neighbourhood Doughnut Long Report v1.0 A longer form document with the entire content of the open dashboard, in a linear long read format.
Good News of B16 Newspaper A neighbourhood newspaper co-curated by our team and neighbours in Ladywood, focusing on people, projects, movements and organisations that are already moving us into the Doughnut.
Reimagining Economic Possibilities Postcard Set An imaginative series of postcards featuring quotes from the visionary thinkers and doers who contributed to the first series of our Reimagining Economic Possibilities publication.
If you would like multiple sets of documents for your neighbourhood, community or organisation we would be happy to arrange this, or provide you with our print ready files in February 2023 onwards. E-mail info@civicsquare.cc directly so we can help to arrange this with you.
More In Development
There are also countless tools within tools (within tools) to unpack and share from our first three years from across our work and co-creating the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait with many people, which we are currently preparing to upload to the DEAL platform in their own right, along with further stories to tie them together in context where relevant. We thank you for your patience in allowing us the time we need to as a team reflect who have been busy actively and consistently making and doing in place we love, as well as the desk-based research, design and wider forms of stewardship our work requires, and to now prepare these thoroughly and honestly in order to make them as useful as possible.
"The Neighbourhood Doughnut Launch was a brilliant demonstration of how we can move from words to practical, tangible, scalable action. We can achieve so much by moving through the world with kindness and compassion." —Sharlene
"Absolutely amazing to hear the depth of consideration on the global health dimension and the health impacts of colonialism. Such important work and conversations." —Hayley
"Thanks so much for all the presentations. What an amazing body of work and practice. Love the emphasis on this needing to be lived reality in our places. Helped to shift my thinking from a more academic exercise! Thanks also for the generosity with which you're sharing your work."—Robert
"I really enjoyed the points throughout and highlighted at the end 1) Limitations of the SDG 2) Not needing to start with a city council 3) the meticulousness of data work alongside everyday community convening. Plus also the threads at the end around dreaming, every day and hidden structures we have today."—Liz
"This work carries such an important message. So many think or are searching for a quick fix, but it's a learning journey and we have to work on it together." —Rieta
"It gives me hope seeing people gathered together feeling their collective power and possibility."—anon
"I am enjoying Anab Jain's essay: To doubt, to question, to say ‘enough’: an emergent lexicon for critical activism. I like how the Reimagining Economic Possibilities blog posts have text to speech and I'm just watching their amazing video now."—David
"Always a nourishing experience to be hosted by CIVIC SQUARE and was an honour to contribute to the online celebration launch of such visionary work: writing this essay made time and headspace to weave together so many (un)learning threads and each time I talk of it, more crystallises."—Scott McAulay, Contributor to the Reimagining Economics Possibilities series: 'What if architecture was imagined for a new economic reality?''
"Amazing to be watching the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait Digital Launch and seeing how they've been using the Biological Inequity Index in their local economic doughnut mode."—Centric Lab
"I love the deep ecology work, the work on health and global impacts, and the playful, experimental approach to bringing ideas to life - it all gives me hope. Thank you!" —Hayley
"Only CIVIC SQUARE can pull off events like this! In awe."—Giulio
"I wrote a little quote about the power of the pencil - and then CIVIC SQUARE grabbed the pencil and started literally redrawing the world : )"—Kate
What's Next?
“Arundhati Roy writes: ‘What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that.’
But that reimagining requires us to assemble the tools now to help people to feel that longing deep in their bones, that aching, pining, for a new economy, a new world, a thrilling new culture.”
—Rob Hopkins
The Doughnut will take the form of a compass to guide us as to the scale of challenge and opportunity. This will not be used to give prescriptive, single point solutions or see the Doughnut as a panacea, but instead continue to orient us in the direction of the safe and just space of thriving in balance in our neighbourhood. Fundamentally, it is crucial to not see this as a static research report, but a foundation and direction for the urgent transitions we need. If we become what we measure, it’s crucial for us to be very specific about what that is.
Dynamic in its co-creation, building on the last three years more deeply, then unrolled and rerolled on an annual basis, this will serve as a new set of collective metrics to be accountable to; a 21st century change of goal to collectively hold our progress, action and roadmap. We will take what we’ve learnt, discovered and been inspired by in the first Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait and weave research, data, technology, fieldwork, participation and demonstration together in the years to come with a thoughtful urgency.
This will include deep dives into topics of particular interest such as soil, waste and water, as well as unpacking the new dimensions we have added in more depth. The dashboard, data, research and co-creation processes will underpin our other two demonstrators, as well as our overall organisational design, governance, and finance. Critically, we will weave many ways of knowing, doing, being, knowledge systems, and research methodologies to co-create the compass, particularly through our Neighbourhood Science participatory work.
As we go into 2023, the Neighbourhood Doughnut will take up its position of one of three deep demonstrators as part of CIVIC SQUARE 2.0, alongside Neighbourhood Transitions and Regenerative Infrastructure.
“The world needs a new breed of of economist-slash-storyteller armed with the fundamentals of economics, and a million creative ways to tell an impactful and lasting narrative.”
—Howard Collinge, Beautiful Economics
As we outlined in The Scale Of The Challenge, the IPCC fundamentally states that it is going to need all of us to shift our trajectory back towards the safe and just space of thriving in balance with the scale of long emergency, polycrisis, and planetary scale challenges.
We hope you will digest some of the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait process and findings so far, and we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, as well as see where you take the ideas, methodologies and tools forward in your places.
Join us in the midst of a neighbourhood movement, connecting artists, designers, economists, ecologists, gardeners, teachers, neighbours and many more to redesign and get to the heart of new economic possibilities for our neighbourhoods and the movements to craft and build them. Now more urgently than ever it really will need all of us; our skills, creativity, wisdom, hopes and imagination, to pave inspiring, collective, regenerative ways forward together.
The Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which you can find more information about here. This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. creativecommons.org
Co-authors
Hundreds of authors contributed to this work, their work build on hundreds more, and they are entangled with hundreds more.
This is for the work that came before; the work that will come after; those we don’t credit enough; those whose work is overlooked; to the many neighbours; the children across the neighbourhood; the Impact Hub Birmingham community; our partners; our partners’ partners; the field we are in; the funders who are bold and who enable; the storytellers; the artists; the gardeners; the carers; our current team; all the team who joined us for part of the journey; the pioneers; the visionaries; the councillors; policy makers; those committing everyday, over the long term; those who move the tables, water the plants, share, connect, support, care, love, hold us up, believe in our collective dreams, challenge us to be better, critique with love; those who make space, who take space; who glue themselves to the road; who research, philosophise; those who play, and serve the dinners; who help the children across the road; who smile as they walk past you standing in the rain, hoping a neighbour may chat to you about a big idea. To those who helped us see further, broader, deeper, inner, this is for you.
We also address this portrait to the many co-authors of the future; those who will make the regenerative futures we dream of together.
With Deep Gratitude
There is no work like this, or any sort, without deep long term relationships, friendships, rolling up your sleeves together, generous open learning and sharing, and often travelling through the trenches together. All work depends on the ecologies we are in: the generous learning, sharing and caring that happens amongst us all.
It is through these bonds we believe deep transformation is possible, they are unwaveringly generous, forgiving, visionary, long term, with collective missions beyond any one of us. It is an honour to travel alongside you.
Fantastic! Thank you so much for what you have done and for sharing this inspiring report. Here in western North Carolina, USA, we are preparing our workbook for neighborhood DE community portraits in the Swannanoa watershed. Your report will be very helpful in our efforts.
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