Pledges

Welcome to Zero Waste ‘People Power Pledges’ Page

After some thought and quite a lot of chat it seemed clear that many of us wanted to have a go at reducing the bits of our own household waste that particularly upset us as individuals, for me this is plastic hence my plastic yogurt pot installation project.   However when we head out on our own to change the world one yogurt pot at a time, it can feel overwhelming at best and useless and disempowering at worst especially as we bump up against a whole range of things that make it hard for us to achieve our target.

So we had our ‘People Power Pledges’ idea – key elements of People Power Pledges are as follows:

YOU decide on one simple action that you want to take for a while to reduce one element of the waste in your life.

YOU decide how many other people you need to do it with you for you to feel its all worth it.

YOU decide how long you want to do it for

TOGETHER – you keep in communication with each other, to offer support, advice, share frustrations, learning, tips.

WE –The ZWVI core team,  support you to describe your pledge, gather your target number of pledgers, share your findings, answer your questions via our research team and organise a campaign (if you decide that’s what you want to do).

TOGETHER  – you share your experience, learning, advice, thoughts, questions, tips, new pledges, campaign ideas with the rest of the ZWVI community via the web site, Facebook page and our regular monthly public meetings.

Here is the idea explained in a bit more detail using an example to demonstrate how it might work:

Individual Identified an Action – their pledge

  • An individual identifies an action that they are going to do to reduce an element of their waste: eg ‘I am going to use washable nappies during the day time.’

Set a target for how many others you need to join you in your pledge:

  • (We got this idea from the Compassionate Revolution  https://www.compassionate–revolution.net/).  The idea is that the team of people who follow your pledge become a support and witnesses for each other.  eg ‘I am only going to do this if 5 other people do it with me.’

Set a time frame for the pledge action of you and those who join you:

  • It is a pledge taken with a view to experimentation a light touch approach to any achievements, but with an open-ness to deepening understanding of the issues, after say 2 weeks you might decide together to change the pledge a bit in the light of your experience of the previous two weeks. eg ‘I am going to do this for 7 days then review it.’

This is a shared learning experience:

  • Via this website, Facebook page and public meetings, we will share your findings from your joint experience.  Part of making your pledge is to feedback using the form provided below at least every month so that we can share your experiences and learning with the wider community.  Gather others in our community to the cause, gather other villages to join us and use our collection of actions to provide a springboard to effective campaign work to create change beyond what we as a community can achieve through our individual and group commitments to reduce our waste.

Giving the householder a voice!

The act of reducing your waste off your own back, beyond what you are supported to recycle via your local authority gives you a voice, a loud and un-ignorable voice.

Ultimately we will need to dialogue with all the stakeholders who create and deal with our waste and it is by being ‘in action’ that we will have something to say that  will have an impact.

The Web will help gather, explain, share and organise our collective actions, experience, questions, research, meetings, campaigns and vision.

To start with we will have the following page headings to try and give clarity to this sharing of our experiences, actions and ideas.

 

  • A Pledges Page – where we will record all pledges, share the outcomes of your collective actions, including any changes to your original pledge or new pledges that you make in the light of your experience.
  • Questions page to record the questions raised throughout your pledge action or as well as gathering all the questions that our work as a zero waste village initiative raise.
  • Research undertaken by you or the research team in relation to the questions you raised.
  • Campaigns Page – your pledge may develop into a campaign fueled by the action of you and your community of fellow pledgers.