The Problem.
Those people (1) who actively think about climate change are a pretty small and scared bunch.
When people feel outnumbered and ignored, they have certain emotional needs. Normally those needs are not met. Then someone calls a meeting… And it’s like ants to honey, moths to a flame….
That is, as has happened so often – the danger in calling a meeting is in a whole bunch of people who don’t know each other come together, feeling good for having denounced the Tories/Manchester City Council/the species and then going home and waiting for another opportunity to do the same…
There is no consequence for taking up time and energy of virtual strangers, and the facilitators tend not to intervene to shut people up, because it would be an ‘infringement’ of ‘people’s need to express themselves’. But by confusing emotional processing with political planning, nobody ends up happy. Those who want to express themselves inevitably feel cut short, and those who came in the hope of doing something concrete go away irritated that they were basically used as a captive audience for other people’s angst.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We can design meetings that get beyond this, and if we follow through on the design, and facilitate with firmness and compassion, something better can emerge.
(Fwiw, my proposed) Solution
Before the meeting
Explain very clearly – via a short blog post, and even a video if resources exist – what the meeting IS for and what it is NOT for.
I would have something like
“This meeting is for people who want to meet other people who are deeply worried about climate change and offended or angered by the lack of a decent response by both local and national government. It’s for people who are busy with their lives but who also want to take sustained action (over months and years) – perhaps only 15 minutes a week, but as part of a group that does more than just goes on marches or sign petitions.
The meeting will be about two things. First, our emotions and how we cope (or don’t). Emotions matter – we are not robots, despite what our society tells us to be. But emotions are not enough.
That’s why most of the meeting is going to be about what skills and knowledge and connections each of us has, and each of us wants to have. The meeting will be about connecting people who have skills with those who want them. The meeting will be about finding out what knowledge people feel they need to be effective in their actions for a saner world. The meeting in and of itself will change nothing.
This meeting is NOT for people who just grandstand and preen, who want to sell their newspapers or ideology, or demand that everyone join their political party or go to their protest.”
The post/video should also explain to people who cannot be there how they can be involved, get their involvement.
“If you can’t come to the meeting – because of childcare or work or other commitments, you can still be involved! Please check out our list of things you could do – divided into jobs that are simple, jobs that are complicated, jobs that are quick (15 minutes or less) and jobs that take a bit longer. ALSO, send us an email telling us what skills you have, what questions you have about climate change and its impacts.”
We’d love to have your statement on the wall of the meeting room, to show people who come that many others who wanted to could not be there, but we will only do this with your permission.
During the meeting
As people arrive, give everyone a name badge, and a label so they can write what suburb/part of Greater Manchester they are from, so they are more likely to start talking to people who might live close to them.
Give everyone the blurb about what the meeting is for, in case they’ve not seen it online.
Have flip-charts up on the wall with a few key questions and marker pens for people to start writing. Questions might include
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What practical things can we do in the short term (next 3 to 6 months) to make sure that we and our friends, family and neighbours are better prepared for things like floods, power failures, etc.
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What can we do force politicians to keep the fine promises they have already made? (please do not say “marches” and “petitions” – these will happen anyway, because there are groups that are simply addicted to them)
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What can we do DIFFERENTLY as environmental groups to stop a wave of concern turning into puddles of apathy and burnout?
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What do we need to differently so that people who are busy/don’t like meetings still feel part of a ‘movement’ that does things that work to increase connectedness, that increase our ability to look after each other and force politicians to make and then keep promises?
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What don’t you know about climate change that you need to know?
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What skills would you like to learn in 2016 to make you a more effective person to make changes in Manchester?
Encourage people to get together with someone else (either someone they know or someone they don’t, it doesn’t matter) and write answers.
Have statements of people who can’t be at the meeting on the wall too.
Call the meeting to start with applause or something similarly upbeat. Ask people to leave spaces near the door for inevitable late-comers.
A very brief thank you to everyone for coming.
Ask everyone to introduce themselves to someone they don’t know, and chat for a couple of minutes about why they’ve come, what they do etc.
First part of the meeting is about people’s feelings and the coping strategies that they work for them.
Ask people to BRIEFLY articulate their feelings, and also what they do in response.
[The key in this bit is to collect a lot of ideas about coping strategies. If it gets bogged down in people venting, then lots of people will mentally leave, and do so physically as soon as they decently can.]
Because you’ll have been talking about dark feelings for a bit, the mood may lower. You need a way/multiple ways of getting people energised. That might be reading out messages from people couldn’t come, or giving news of cool stuff that was happening elsewhere.
Personally I’d run “novice lines” based around the flipchart answers to the question “ skills would you like to learn in 2016 to make you a more effective person to make changes in Manchester”.
What’s novice lines? Well, briefly, have everyone stand against the wall. Then say “If you are good at skill x, step forward 1 metre. If you are really good, step forward 2m. If you are a ninja at the skill, step forward 3m. Then everyone quickly see who has some of the key skills. In the break they can share email addresses etc with those who want to know. You can also ask those people to perhaps do workshops at a future date.
At the half way point I’d have a ten minute break. Give people an opportunity to de-compress, catch up with old friends, make new ones. And leave if they want to.
In the second half (again, brought together with applause), I would focus more on what is currently happening that is good and just needs more participants involved (personally, I think there is very little, but I’ll admit to being out of touch) and then also on what we “should” be doing in Manchester. Perhaps a quick brainstorm about ideas [inevitably people will say ‘a march!’ or ‘a meeting in a church with loads of speakers’. We have tried these ideas. We know that, unless they are done quite differently, they suck in time, energy, commitment, and then the ‘afterwards’ does not happen adequately, leading to cynicism].
Perhaps focus on generating loads of things that individuals or small groups (of three or four people) could do to
a) build the capacity of individuals and small groups to make a difference in their street, in their place of work or worship
b) build the capacity of individuals and small groups to force decision-makers to make better decisions [good luck with this. I think it’s impossible; our lords and masters are, with rare exceptions, clueless muppets who have prospered in hierarchical institutions primarily because of their ability to compartmentalise, believe whatever lie they need to in order to shaft others sincerely, and generally play office-politics.]
The purpose of this section would be to build a list of “tasks”, that could later be divided into simple/complex/quick/long/recurring that can be put up on a website, but ALSO that people who are at the meeting can start doing as individuals but also ideally in pairs/threes/fours, with other people at the meeting, or others again.
Promise to hold the meeting again in three months time to see how people are getting on.
Finish with something uplifting, natch.
Have anonymous feedback forms for people to say what they thought, make suggestions for improvements to future meetings.
After the meeting
Get that list of jobs – divided into “simple and quick” “simple and long”, “complex and quick” “complex and long” circulated, where “simple” means no special skills needed” and “quick” means no longer than 15 minutes – posted asap.
Send out an email to everyone who came/wanted to but couldn’t, thanking them for their input, and including a link to the list of jobs.
Footnotes
(1) i.e. not those who don’t know about it, don’t care, or who have given up on knowing and caring and are instead intent on just getting through the day(s) without melting into a puddle of melancholy.
manchester climate monthly 
This sounds good to me, although I think I have a tendency to be one of the people who tries to get through each day without succumbing to melancholy (lifelong history of clinical depression). I was wondering if there could be a live video or twitter feed for people who can’t make it. Maybe one or two people could be designated as twitterers for the duration of the meeting.
Just wondering about the political thing. I wonder if constituents from each ward could set up a rota to contact their local councillor to express concern/ideas about climate change. Without the councillor knowing that it’s a rota of people who have agreed to do this… I don’t know if psychologically pecking someone’s head in this way is the best way to get a councillor to pull their finger out but I can’t think of any other way. If the folk on the rota could offer small, concrete steps in the right direction that might engage some councillors.
Is there any mileage in small but uplifting actions? Like guerilla gardening eg sowing wildflower seeds in cracks at the bottom of building walls in the city centre. Or setting up birdfeeders in unlikely places (with a person or people who agree to keep an eye on them and refill/maintain when appropriate). Small things might increase awareness and energy to tackle bigger issues. (I know the time for small things is past, but anything is better than nothing!)
” … our lords and masters are, with rare exceptions, clueless muppets who have prospered in hierarchical institutions primarily because of their ability to compartmentalise, believe whatever lie they need to in order to shaft others sincerely, and generally play office-politics.”
How very, very true!
“Like guerilla gardening eg sowing wildflower seeds in cracks at the bottom of building walls in the city centre.”
NO!!!! First of all you’ll mess up my botanical records! And second “guerilla gardening”, and thinking that we can garden our way out the environmental mess we’re in, is PART OF THE PROBLEM! It’s small-scale geo-engineering (which, itself, is a recipe for disaster). If we’re going to save the environment, a key thing we need to do is to start f***ing LOOKING AT IT and understanding how it works and how we relate to it. A much more important task is to identify biodiverse sites and to manage them in ways that increase their biodiversity.
Incidentally, walls and pavement cracks, in the city centre, are often full of plants that got there naturally. Such plants are usually dismissed as “weeds” i.e. living organisms which have no right to exist because we didn’t plant them where they choose to grow. Near Victoria station, until recently, there were some old buildings with magnificent ‘hanging gardens’ of ferns cascading down their walls (their exuberance aided and abetted by broken guttering). I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was only me – and possibly a handful of others (?) – who mourned when they were destroyed recently in the name of tidiness (I wonder if the gutters were mended at the same time?).
Fwiw, I liked Tracy’s points. I share your reservations about Guerilla Gardening, Dave (and I know better than to get you going on the subject of tree planting!). But I think what you may underestimate is just how dis-connected people feel (and are) from “nature”. And if we aren’t connected to it, we don’t value it, except for the “services” it offers us. Ho-hum…
I know that guerilla gardening or gardening full stop isn’t the answer, Dave. That’s why I said at the end of my post that the time for small things is past. But the idea behind my suggestion was to engage people – as Mark says, so many of us are totally disconnected from nature. Perhaps if it was right there in glorious technicolour it might creep into people’s consciousness. Raise their energy a bit, make them feel a bit better and more willing to act. There’s plenty of evidence that ‘starving’ people (physically and I would guess also emotionally and psychologically) disheartens and disempowers. Very few of us can act from that position – we tend to batten down our personal hatches. More is achieved if people feel a bit of hope or achievement or compassion/consciousness for what’s in front of them.
But Mark and Tracy, nature is there – right in front of all of us – in full, glorious technicolour – if we just learn where, and how, to look. I’ve lived in Chorlton for the past 43 years and I’ve learned a huge amount about nature – particularly about wild plants – in that place and time. The Mersey Valley is an inexhaustible treasury of plants and other organisms. A few years ago, I lost my job to redundancy and eventually realised that I could retire. I then began to spend lots of time collecting botanical records in the MV. Spending my time examining my environment in such detail gave me, I believe, a different perspective on the environment and on my, and my species’, place in it. And, incidentally, it did wonders for my mental and physical health!
Another thing that I did was collaborate, with other local people, on the formation of a group called, ‘The Friends of Chorlton Meadows’. We now spend lots of time actively managing our local wildlife sites trying to make them as biodiverse as possible.Incidentally, if anyone fancies joining our group, just e-mail me at davegbishop@aol.com and I’ll send you our latest programme.
By the way, there’s nothing wrong with gardening, per se. I love my garden and can hardly wait for Spring so I can get stuck in again. It’s really all about perspective.
Thanks to Marc for writing this blog post.
I’ll be trying to use a lot of this advice here in the coming year under my own initiative.
I’ve again over the last couple years trying to re-engage, attended too many dysfunctional NGO meetings, conferences, etc…that exhibit all the problems you’ve documented over your years of posting on this stuff.
Gotta’ start on my own incorporating/modeling some of functional stuff described by Marc.
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And by the way, here in Edmonton, AB, Canada, we have some small steps underway re: native plant restoration… native food/fruit trees… see excerpt below.
Or full story link here:
http://dustinbajer.com/edmonton-river-valley-food-forest/
…serves as an entry step for some people.
Edmonton was almost fully treed when it was settled some 150 years ago… we saved almost no old-growth forests. Everything was logged. And we’re only back up to 10-20% tree cover since.
Gonna’ need lots more to avoid baking from the heat-island effect as it warms.
And most of our native fruit trees are quite heat and drought hardy. Our northern inner continent great plains have even before the warming experienced heat and drought waves of decades length.
Best wishes in the new year for all your efforts in Manchester.
Cheers,
Sam Gunsch
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excerpt: Planning The Food Forest The City of Edmonton has an ambitions goal of doubling it’s urban forest. It’s also serious about naturalization (Here’s a link to the city’s Naturalization Plan). In 2012, the City of Edmonton established Roots for Trees “an enhanced planting initiative which intends to increase tree planting within the city, through continued partnerships with corporations, individual residents and community groups. The annual target of this initiative is to plant an addition 16,000 trees annually on public and private land.” Meanwhile, public support for increasing food security and urban agriculture continues to grow. The idea behind and motivation for Edmonton’s first public food forest was to combine all of these initiatives into one project.
Installing The Food Forest The idea behind the food forest was to create something self-sufficient and self-maintaining. The city is concerned with two things; (a) that plants are native and (b) that it won’t require future maintenance. So we know that we have to hit these targets. In addition, the design needed to be simple and reproducible yet take into account the specifics of the site. Here’s are two concept sketches and a video explaining the logic behind them.
Good luck!
Let us know how you get on.
NOT comparing myself to Orwell, but there is that line at the end of his essay “Politics and the English Language” – “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” As in, please don’t do anything that feels wrong or doctrinaire!
All best wishes!!
Marc