Green Drinks: Bungay Community Bees -Tuesday 15 February

Green Drinks: Bungay Community Bees
Tuesday 15th February, 7:30pm at the Green Dragon
With Elinor McDowall, Gemma Parker and other members of Bungay Community Bees

Inspired by a desire to help everyones favourite (indispensable) pollinators, Sustainable Bungay established what is probably the first Community Supported Apiculture (CSA) scheme in the UK – possibly the world! Lauded by the Soil Association and a major influence on the Mayor of London’s Capital Bee project, Bungay’s Community Beekeepers are entering their second year with plans for exciting new education and outreach projects.

We’ve invited community beekeepers Elinor McDowall, Gemma Parker along with other members of BCB to tell us more about the plight of the honey bee, how community beekeeping works and BCBs plans for 2011 and beyond. As usual we’ll ask them to speak briefly about what they’re doing, answer questions from the room as a whole and then circulate as we break into less formal conversations.

Over the past year lots of other groups have expressed an interested in community beekeeping – some from as afar afield as Canada and the USA – but most quite local. BCB has promised to organise a weekend workshop for these groups but it won’t happen until the bees are more active; the Green Drinks evening will provide an excellent insight into the workings of the project. For those who don’t know anything about BCB there is a short precis below – there is also lots of information on the Sustainable Bungay website.

Bungay Community Bees in brief:
Bungay Community Bees (BCB) demonstrates the emphasis Transition places on raising awareness and building a sense of community through practical actions and activities. To date BCB has been funded through a subscription scheme based on the increasingly popular community supported agriculture (CSA) model. This year the group is considering adopting a more formal structure, becoming a social enterprise and moving out from the umbrella of transition initiative Sustainable Bungay.

In its first year BCB has:

•Raised £800 and bought hives, equipment, training and insurance
•Engaged 37 members who’ve bought annually renewable £20 ‘shares’ in the project (representing about 90 people)
•Established two small apiaries on the outskirts of Bungay
•Held regular meetings, opportunities to visit the hives and offered formal training Actively communicated the work of the group through: blog posts, press releases, social networking, local TV and radio
•Established two subsidiary groups, Plants for Bees and Education and Outreach. In 2011 these will work with local schools and community groups
•Inspired other groups all over the country (and internationally) to do the same. Most significantly the BCB model has been a major influence on the Mayor of London’s Capital Bee project and BCB members spoke at the recent Bee Summit held at the Royal Festival Hall – 50 similar groups are now being established in London
•Created a community of friends around the hives and a feeling of mutual support and learning – none of the BCB beekeepers were particularly experienced at the start of the project
•Engaged with other local beekeepers through the Waveney Beekeepers group.
BCB members feel confident and inspired and Sustainable Bungay plan’s to apply the CSA approach to other food and craft projects. BCB shows how Transition initiatives act as a catalyst for change, gathering people and ideas together, building trust and empowering them to act. Projects like BCB evolve at their own pace – often this can be a (frustratingly) slow process - but it’s vital to ensure community leadership and ownership. Hard work, a clear collective vision and a certain amount of trust are also required if projects like BCB are to work.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday!

Transition to a Sustainable Swaffham: The (short) story so far

We're still pretty new, having formed the core group in December 2010. A few of us were mulling on our own how to get an initiative started, but thanks to "synchronicitous" mechanizations beyond understanding, we were put in contact and things began to happen.

Right away, two of us managed to get in on a Transition Training weekend that was held in Ipswich at the beginning of December, led by Naresh Giangrande from Totness and Marina O'Connell of the Apricot Centre in Suffolk. (Thanks to Steve Marsden of Transition Ipswich for making that possible). Soon after, we held our first core group meeting and set our sights on hosting a January film screening for as many people as we could get  to come.

In the meantime, we've enjoyed a couple of impromptu, fun social get-togethers over food and wine with interested neighbors and friends, who were quite receptive to the Transition message. We've also developed a Web site and blog to promote our presence and keep people up-to-date, and are slowly-but surely building our mailing list. We've fortunately already attracted attention of certain town movers, and have found a seat in at least one of four community partnership groups developing a plan for Swaffham's future. So things look quite promising at this early stage.

Last night (Sunday, Jan. 23rd) we held our first "public" event in the nearby village of Castle Acre, with a very good attendance (16 that could make it, though others that support us were unable to come). We screened the film "In Transition," fielded a few questions afterward, and shared a brief open space session. All-in-all, a fine first outing, and another event is already planned for February 13th.

News from Transition Ipswich

The lastest Transition Ipswich newsletter is here!
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Bungay - Green Drinks: Shifting Cultural Values - 18 January

With Dr. Rupert Read, reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia, co-founder of values-change blog Green Words Workshop and Norwich Green Party Councillor.
The Green Dragon, 18th January, 7:30pm

To date our Green Drinks themes have had quite a practical focus, but this month we’re tackling something that at first glance seems a little more esoteric – shifting cultural values. In fact it’s pretty much central to all Sustainable Bungay’s projects and is at the heart of Transition; but we generally only acknowledge it in so much as we recognise that, if we’re to tackle climate change, come to terms with finite resources and cope with a radical economic readjustment we’ll have to change the way we think about each other and the world. At Green Drinks this month and with the help of Dr. Rupert Read we’ll delve a little deeper.

Ready to be nudged?

The Government is keen to ‘nudge’ us into making ‘better’ choices and believes that this approach could replace regulation to help it achieve its commitments to public health, the environment and well-being. But many argue that without big shifts in our values approaches that attempt to shape behaviour are likely to have little impact in a culture where the consumer is still king and economic growth is the most important measure of national success.

A Common Cause

At our first Green Drinks evening we talked briefly about a report called Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values published by a consortium of organisations including WWF, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The report makes a clear case for a wide range of civil society organisations to work together in order to strengthen those cultural values that have been shown to underpin people’s concern about a whole range of problems – from climate change to global poverty. It goes on to argue that the public will only place enough pressure on politicians if they place greater emphasis on those ‘intrinsic’ values (which include the value we place on things like relationships with other people, the natural world, a sense of place/belonging).

We’ve invited Dr. Rupert Read, reader in philosophy at the UEA, co-founder of values-change blog Green Words Workshop and Norwich Green Party Councillor to help us think about some of these issues. As usual we’ll ask Rupert to speak for 5 or 10 minutes then open the floor for questions and a general discussion before breaking up into smaller informal conversations. It’s never possible to say exactly what might come up at Green Drinks but we might talk about;

•What kinds of values do we need to shift to and what are we moving away from – is it as simple as a move from ‘Me’ to ‘We’?
•How can we strengthen the kinds of intrinsic values outlined in the Common Cause report and bring them to the fore locally?
•Should we begin talking to other local groups about emphasizing these values? How?

And much more besides… there is bound to be a lively discussion!

Events for Community Food Enterprises

GOOD GOVERNANCE & COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR CO-OPERATIVES

A training day for individuals, employees, volunteers, public sector organisations, transition groups, community groups & co-operatives
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10 - 5pm Saturday 22nd January 2011
Friends Meeting House, Fonnereau Rd, Ipswich
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This event isn't restricted to food enterprises; I want everybody to come!

The skills on offer may not at first glance seem meaty or applicable, but it's been proven that when community projects fail it's often due to the membership or employees not having the basic skills to work together, or not understanding the infrastructure and systems of the entreprise.






















A MINIATURE FOOD CO-OPS CONFERENCE FOR THE EASTERN REGION

For interested individuals, new and established community-owned food entreprises, and food access or ‘5-a-day’ projects

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Tuesday 25th January 10:30 - 4:30
Museum of East Anglian Life, Stowmarket, Suffolk
www.eastanglianlife.org.uk
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Discover what support you can get from Sustain’s Food Co-ops project, where your nearest co-op is, hear from experienced food projects, and exchange ideas for the future!

Speakers:

- Kirstin Glendinning - Swillington Community Supported Agriculture & the Soil Association
- Gemma Sayers - Food Co-ops Project & Ipswich Food Co-op

A Plenary with:

- JP- Hastings Community Fruit ‘n’ Veg project
- Jacqui - Community Food Entreprise, East London

+ Networking with local groups and Action Planning to help set up or improve your community food project
+ Delicious lunch of local seasonal produce

This is a FREE event but booking is essential
Contact: http://www.blogger.com/gemma@sustainweb.org or 07971 863 586

More information and a toolkit showing how to get started is available at http://www.blogger.com/www.foodcoops.org

If you are involved in the local food, community food, or food production sector, this event is for you. Likewise, if you are faced with transitioning to a more sustainable and autonomous future. But you are welcome even if your interest is simply in the consumption of good food!

I have chosen the speakers to cater to a variety of groups; those needing templates for making their entreprise stand alone when they've previously been shored up by local authority funding and support; those looking for radical ways to take control of their food supply, those needing specialised information on ambitious independent systems like CSA's; and anybody who'd like to know what's out there that can make good food more affordable and accessible.

There will be plenty of time for Open Space discussions at the event, and that includes food co-ops and others presenting about the work they do, bringing any issues they've encountered to the forum, or thrashing out ideas for a project step-by-step.

Training for Transition comes to Suffolk

Last call for the few remaining places on the official Training for Transition course running in Ipswich from 9.30 to 5.30 on 4th and 5th December. Thanks to support from Suffolk Climate Change Partnership we’ve been able to keep the course fee down to £30.

The venue is the Reg Driver Centre, in Christchurch Park. We feel its environmentally efficient design makes it a perfect venue for such an event! Here’s a link to Google Maps: http://bit.ly/cOniuv - just zoom out of street level and click “map” to plan your route.

The course will be along the lines described here, though adjusted to meet participants’ needs and updated to cover the new Transition ingredients, or pattern language.

The trainers are Naresh Giangrande, a founder member of Transition Totnes and the Transition Network, and Marina O’Connell who runs the Apricot Centre just over the border in Essex. Naresh’s details can be found here. As Marina’s recently qualified as a Transition Trainer her name’s not on the Transition website yet, but she’s also a highly experienced trainer and lecturer in permaculture, horticulture and sustainability.

To register email steve_marsdenbtopenworldcom or call/txt 07889 751578.

Norwich - Zero Carbon Concert - 27 November

Climate campaigners have organised a zero carbon world concert on the eve of the next UN climate summit to demonstrate that a zero carbon world is both achievable and fun. The concert will consist of a number of events all over the world – in England, Wales, Holland, Italy, Poland, Sierra Leone, China, Australia and the USA.

The summit begins on 29 November and there will be an event in Norwich on 27 November featuring Vic Salter, Pedalo, Ruth Gordon and Jimmy and the Magic Shoe in the St Thomas Church Hall, Earlham Rd. It will be acoustic so that it causes no carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, people will be encouraged to travel to the event without emitting carbon. They are asked to walk, cycle, or use public transport instead of driving – unless they have an electric car powered by green electricity, or a diesel vehicle using waste vegetable oil. Also, the venue will be unheated - we've asked them to turn off the gas central heating - so dress accordingly!

N.B. Norwich Critical Mass Bike Ride is on Friday 26th, NOT Saturday 27th as stated in error on some Zero Carbon Concert posters. Concert organisers apologise for this error.

Tickets are £2 in advance or £3 on the door. You can have a look at the website for the zero carbon world concert for a zero carbon world at http://www.zerocarbonconcert.org/