Looking forward to our Re-launch, celebrating progress and getting back into action

We had a great core group meeting on Monday evening, everyone was very enthused and looking forward to the re-launch on Saturday the 26^th.  There was a lot of chat about. Not a lot has happened over the last few months as we are all busy people, but our hearts are in the right place. We are excited to celebrate what we have done, describe what we want to do and showcase all that fantastic work the pupils of St.Briavels did over the summer.

We would love a bit of extra support for the 26^th, jobs that need doing are:

• Set up from 9.30am – 10.30, this involves helping to arrange the hall with displays, children’s making table (from rubbish of course), putting on the kettle, setting out clusters of chairs – stuff like that really.
• Help during the day to be there to chat to people who drop in. I will be there all day and members of the core team will commit to an hour or so each, but the more the merrier.
• Make a cake to go with the tea and coffee
• Make a pledge to test our idea of ‘People Power Pledges’
• Help tidying up at the end of the event – from 2.30 – 3.30

So what are people power pledges: 

Well we are all passionate about different aspects of waste and so if you have a particular thing that bugs or upsets you about waste, you are best placed to think of the ‘Waste Challenge’ that would reduce the waste item or address the waste issue that really gets your goat, or simply begin to look more closely and through action to explore the issues involved in it.  Most importantly though and key to this idea is that once you have described your pledge or your waste challenge you then recruit some people to do it with you, it could be 2 people or 20 people.  Possibly I am beginning to sound like the ‘stay campaign’ or even Hilary Clinton but I think it is the case that ‘Together’ is stronger and more sustainable than alone.

We will support you to gather your group.  You can fill in a people power pledges form from the web site, you can email me at sarahmclellan20@gmail.com and I will create you a Facebook event on the ZWVI Facebook page, share it on the web site and we can start to gather your group.

The idea is that for a certain period of time, you and your group attempt to meet yourself a set challenge. You then report back to the Zero Waste Village Community, what you have discovered, questions you want answered and what you want to share about your experience.

The web site  and our series of community events will act as a communication hub for your pledge, how many of you are doing it and for how long it will be on the pledges page of the web site. When you report back, your thoughts will be shared on the web site and at our events.

We need to capture your questions – at the core group meeting we all acknowledged that we go round and round with the same questions, so lets capture them and at the same time the research team (please feel free to join our research team, just email me and I will put you in touch with the current team) will take the questions and start to explore, ask and find out what the answers are.  The web site and community meetings will act as a sharing forum for the gathering of our questions and notice board for our research findings in relation to each question.

If we work together we can share the difficult feelings our rubbish inspires and which on our own often leads us either to personal inaction or frustration and resentment of others.

Our waste and other people’s often leaves us feeling overwhelmed.  In my experience, when we as householders refuse to put certain symbolic items (chosen to explore specific issues) such as my yogurt pots, or disposable nappies in the bin, we take back our power.   As we then gather our piles of non recyclable waste we create a tension, we put ourselves in a more powerful position to ask questions and we draw attention to both our actions and the waste.  From here we can begin to find our voice, from here we can begin to refute the claim of many of the stakeholders involved – Supermarkets, packaging manufacturer’s, goods and food producers that is us the householder who demands that this waste is created!  I for one want to shout from the roof tops that I don’t demand it, quite the opposite, I demand that all the stakeholders me included find creative ways of using less of the planets resources, find creative ways of recycling what we do use, find creative ways of supporting each other to face the mounting problem of our rubbish.

Volunteer:

Over the next few weeks in the run up to the re-launch myself and the core team will be identifying clear volunteer roles, we will put these up on the web site as well as having a volunteering board at the re-launch.  If you can think of a role you would like to take on or think would be a useful job to get done but cant commit to doing it yourself feel free to share it and we will add it to the list.

Thanks for reading this.

Here’s householder voice, and being impossible to ignore!

Sarah

9^th November 2016