Latest Winners of a Citizen Power Award
This post was originally posted on Project Dirt, where we are building a cluster for all the community-led environmental projects in Peterborough.
Here at the Citizen Power Peterborough* project we’ve been working with community groups that have ideas which could make Peterborough a greener place. One way we’ve been doing this is by running workshops that allow people to develop their ideas and meet others, then help them apply for a Citizen Power grant that will allow them to test that idea on the ground.
So far we’ve funded further development of a well-loved community garden in Paston and a group who are in the process of assuming responsibility for a section of ancient woodland in Bretton. The latest decisions on funding were made at an event last Friday, when eleven individuals and groups applied for grants to allow them to put their ideas into action.
The three judges were environmental innovators Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden and Hermione Taylor of The DoNation, together with Councillor Sam Dalton – the member of Peterborough’s cabinet with responsibility for environmental issues. The judges heard from each group, who pitched the idea of their project for the chance of a grant.
People developing project ideas at an earlier workshop (photo by Adrian Stone)
Among others, the judges heard from one group who wanted to replicate the success of a Cambridge paint upcycling project in Peterborough. Rather than sending paint straight to landfill, they planned to collect waste paint from local recycling centres, store, sort and redistribute it to community groups and families.
A group of students from Peterborough Regional College presented a plan to convert old unused bicycles into safe and usable bikes. The improved bikes will be available for college students to buy at low weekly cost over the course of a year – making travel a more active and healthy experience, as well as being better for the environment.
The judges also heard from another individual who wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of alternative energy systems like hydrogen power to people at public events. He planned to use an education fuel cell to power a low-energy projector, at the same time demonstrating and explaining the physics behind the post-oil future.
In the end, the judges opted to fund all eleven projects for amounts between £300 and £500 each. Each project will be creating a profile on Project Dirt (if they don’t have one already), so in time you’ll be able to keep track of their progress through the Peterborough cluster on Project Dirt.
Well done to all involved!
* Citizen Power Peterborough is an initiative from the people of Peterborough, the RSA, Peterborough City Council and the Arts Council, East
The full list of winners:
- Peterborough Repaint Scheme from Kevin and Fiona
- The Backyard Food Group Shop from Sophie
- Green Backyard Woodskills from Renny
- Rake and Bake Gardening Club from Parents United
- P£anet Bikes from Peterborough Regional College students
- Pond & Frogs project from Peterborough Regional College students
- An Introduction to Hydrogen Fuel Cells, HHO and Alternative Energy from Jordan
- Bike workshop from Dominic
- Slow Sewing from Lorena
- The Little Miracles Peterborough Sensory Garden from Michelle
- The Olive Branch Community Garden & Allotments from Mark
Promoting recovery in Peterborough
Talk about ‘recovery groups’ can often lead to a discussion of 12 step based groups, SMART groups, service-user groups and so on. These types of groups are fairly easy to understand from the ‘outside’ and thanks to the media portrayal of some recovery groups, there can sometimes be a narrow view of them. They can follow particular formats, they can have certain traditions or rules and they can aim for specific outcomes that may be measurable.
But there are also those recovery groups that are simply individuals that come together on a regular basis to a venue with no particular objective other than to have something fun or different to do and meet like-minded people.
The FREE group in Peterborough is a good example of this. The group, which developed out of a series of activities for the Recovery Capital project, has doubled in size since forming just 8 weeks ago, they now have a new permanent home and are beginning to meet more frequently. As one member put it at our co-design event in mid-January: “we get together and have a giggle!”
The group are already having a big impact on each other’s recovery and lives and want to do more to help others in the city. But they have found – as we did in our Recovery Capital project research – that people are reluctant to get involved in activities like this; they have preconceived ideas of people sitting around in a circle and talking about their addiction generated by years of myths, few opportunities available in the past and the media representation of recovery support groups.
So together we made a short film to tell people about FREE – which stands for Free Recovery for Everyone Everywhere – and what to expect if you attend and the impact it has had on their recovery.
I hope you’ll agree they’ve done a great job!
You can find out about when and where the group meets by visiting www.citizenpower.co.uk or contacting recovery.intern@rsa.org.uk
Expressing recovery
It has been quite an eventful week for the Recovery Capital project in Peterborough which accounts for the semi-radio silence on the blog front. But as the week draws to a close I thought I would share some of the excitement and ease you into the weekend.
On Monday I took six people in recovery to the Key Theatre in Peterborough to meet the writer, Director, producers and actors of a play being developed for Eastern Angles called ‘I heart Peterborough’. The play tackles issues of addiction and recovery in Peterborough and they wanted to make sure that they portray a true and not wholly sensationalised version of it. The cast and crew are committed to not perpetuating the stereotypical ‘addict’ who cares for nothing and would be happy to mug a granny, and to use the play to educate a broad audience.
We spent nearly three hours talking through a few of the scenes, with the cast asking lots of questions about the realities of using and recovering in Peterborough. It was amazing to see how quickly changes were able to be made to the script to incorporate the ideas and suggestions put forward. The script is still being developed and we look forward to contributing further and seeing the final play. You never know, it
might come to a theatre near you one day…
On Wednesday we had the first ‘Expressing Recovery’ activity which is designed to get people in recovery talking to one another in an informal setting; start to build relationships and strengthen the links between one another; provide the space and time for participants to think about their own recovery, talk about it and express it in a variety of ways including through painting (check out the pictures); somewhere to come into the warmth and have a cup of coffee; provide information and a Q&A session 
about the new CRi Recovery Service coming in January 2012; and then end with a recovery peer group meeting with the local Recovery Champion.
This is the first of three initial events. If they’re popular then we will look to continue them. I certainly enjoyed myself and got to meet some incredible people who are chomping at the bit to be at the forefront of the developing Recovery Community in the city.
I can’t wait to see what next week brings!
Getting people together isn’t the challenge – it’s getting things done…
In my experience, whenever a new local Fellows’ network launches, there is always a mixture of curiosity, enthusiasm and trepidation. Curiosity about who other local Fellows are; enthusiasm for getting involved in the good work the RSA is renowned for; and a trepidation that is only natural when meeting a room full of strangers. Thankfully, the trepidation soon dissipates as the ideas for how to make a difference locally begin to flow and the Fellows leave full of optimism for what the network can achieve.
But that’s the easy bit…
How do you then ensure that initial enthusiasm turns into constructive action? How do you decide which of the ideas to pursue before people stop coming along because nothing’s happening?
Introducing Amie
This is my very first blog post (inside and outside of the RSA) and it seems fitting that my opener is on a subject about which I am fiercely passionate.
As one half of the Recovery Capital Project internship team, my focus over the next 3 months will be to come up with organise a range of artistic (I use this term loosely) activities to engage and inspire current and former problem substance users in Peterborough. The time-frame is dizzyingly short, but having had a look at the creative endeavours the city already boasts, I feel confident that we can pull this off.
The idea that artistic expression can be an effective way to spark, support or even sustain recovery has become increasingly accepted on the treatment circuit. Art therapy and relapse prevention role-play are often included in the programmes of facilities that take clients beyond detox – although I hear these will be the first for the chop in the wake of spending cuts. Beyond treatment, there are a number of independent theatre companies that champion recovery and produce impressive, widely respected work – just look at The Outside Edge Theatre Company.
But what’s in it for the service-user? I can only relate my own experience, but the creative arts were an invaluable part of my own early recovery. Whilst I might not have taken it wholly seriously at the time, I only have fond memories of the art therapy sessions I attended in my first weeks of treatment. It is the sense of fun, the sudden exposure to colour and the license to create and emote without censure that was so appealing. Others found their artistic home in moderated creative writing sessions, where some of the pieces produced were mind-blowingly dark, beautiful, poetic or a combination of all three. I know of still others who regained their confidence (and their sense of humour!) through participating in the aforementioned relapse prevention role-plays. Further down the line, I was lucky enough to get involved with Clean Break, a theatre company that works exclusively with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system. They support women of a shared experience to develop personal, social, artistic and professional skills and provide opportunities to enter into further education or work placements.
The point is, there is everything to gain and nothing to lose when it comes to getting creative in early recovery. Whether it is an opportunity to share your experience, connect with others, play to your strengths, regain self-esteem or just break the isolation of active addiction, the creative arts provide a non-discriminatory outlet. Anyone can get involved and no-one can get it wrong – essential when you consider the shame and sense of judgement an addict might feel about his or her past and present.
My hope is that by bringing similar activities to Peterborough, together with the collaboration of the city’s thriving artistic community, we can start to change the tide of how recovery is experienced and viewed.
Mutual Attraction
Welcome to the arts and society blog. The voices you’ll be hearing most from will come from the Arts and Society team of Jocelyn Cunningham (Director) and Georgina Chatfield (Senior Developer) but we also have an extended team that lead on various parts of our programme.
This first posting very appropriately is by Michaela Crimmin who was previously Head of Arts at the RSA, and curated Arts and Ecology. She is co-founder of Culture and Conflict, a new brokering agency developing networks of people across disciplines and sectors to build the role and recognition of cultural activity in conflict and post-conflict situations.
Michaela is programming a key event in Peterborough this week and offers her reflections:
Reflection for too many of us comes fleetingly, often at the wrong moment, and tends to stay within our own heads. But for me, now, a pause as I look back to Arts & Ecology, a five-year programme I ran for the RSA from 2005 until last year. It is the week before a related event is presented by Citizen Power in Peterborough. Entitled ‘Cross Pollination’, this takes place next Wednesday 19 October. We have the rising star artist Andy Holden talking, together with the ingenious Marcus Coates. They will both bring, I know, everything that I value about art. With them Peter Holden, a remarkable ornithologist, who does a double act with his son demonstrating that connections reach from within families to the natural world with consummate ease, imagination and astuteness.
Despite the gamut of evidence, there are always too many people shrieking ‘Why Art?’ as soon as you take art beyond the confines of a gallery or museum as we do next week. Max Andrews (someone who both ‘gets’ art and the complexity and wonder and terror that is sometimes called ‘The Environment’) edited the book that was one of Arts & Ecology’s consummate successes and this is his riposte:
Whatever its mode of address, art always exhorts an infinite capacity and context for our critical acuity. And as we look to the future, it would seem that a keen aptitude for sensing what we really value is more invaluable than ever.
Arts & Ecology was all about value in its biggest sense of the word, with artists exploring its various meanings. It was about a network, about mutual support and about collaboration. These will be demonstrated afresh next week. The exchange of interests between different, shall we call them, disciplines, only serves to amplify that what is seen by an ornithologist is not always registered by a politician; that what is made visible by an artist, can be an entirely fresh perspective for that same ornithologist – and so it goes on. We know why we compartmentalise and ring fence and build barriers, but so must there be opportunities for exchange as are fostered variously by the mighty Wellcome Trust that runs awards expressly to encourage this; and the small but potent Wysing Arts Centre that particularly welcomes non arts people into its domain. There simply are not enough of these opportunities. Not in higher education, not in civic life, not in environment circles, not in the arts.
There is a talk available online delivered by dramatist and politician Vaclav Havel that I recommend reading. Havel, a poet and a politician, writes of both value and connections. In a modest way Arts & Ecology sought to amplify perspectives on diminishing natural resources and the conflict that often results, on fragility, but also continuously to reassert the joy of being genuinely related to the world around us in ways that will help to ensure it flourishes.
The Ecology of Innovation
One of the component parts of Citizen Power (a two year programme of innovation, participation and place-making in Peterborough) aims to spark and support local people’s ideas that could make “green” behaviour easier throughout the city. When planning the project we were inspired by insights into what can influence people’s behaviour and decision-making (such as the dramatic effect of social proof).
Our approach has been to teach these principles to local residents and help them apply them to the behaviours that underlie local environmental problems. We think that giving community activists the knowledge and support to “nudge” their neighbours could be a better way of encouraging behaviour change. National attempts to apply these principles could leave people feeling preached at, or alienate people by taking covert approaches.
Instead, we think that training community activists with the knowledge they need to nudge their neighbours can harness their local knowledge, their “one-of-us” status, and their existing trusted relationships with their community.
Towards the end of last year we tested this approach in a two-day workshop. Twenty-five enthusiastic residents learned about the effects of personal, social and infrastructural factors on human behaviour, then worked together to apply this knowledge to Peterborough specific problems. After a pitch to a panel of judges, two ideas were selected for seed-funding and non-financial support to allow them to become pilot projects.
One of the pilots will encourage a wider segment of the community to manage local plots of unused land. The group behind this project plan to map unused land in their neighbourhood and throughout Peterborough, then run small interventions to encourage local people to take an active role in stewarding the land.
The other pilot will encourage residents living near an area of ancient woodland to take an active forest management role. Currently neglected and the scene of anti-social behaviour, the community decided to create a woodland walk to make walking through the forest a normal activity for local residents.
Part of this approach to local nudging was informed by a paper – The Ecology of Innovation - that we published just before Christmas. It presents a few simple principles that could be used to encourage and support local people in getting projects off the ground. These principles include ensuring that local community organisations are able to participate in contributing their ideas, and supporting their ideas with financial and non-financial support so that they can be tested. You can read the paper online or download it here.
In 2011, we’re looking forward to getting these ideas off the ground, and also holding more workshops to encourage and support more ideas that could make Peterborough into an even greener place to live!
Actually, prison can work
I was only 11 years old when Michael Howard declared that ‘prison works’ in 1993. I had little interest in anything other than hockey and who was going to be on Top of the Pops so you can imagine where this revelation registered on my radar.
My interests and priorities have expanded slightly since then so I pay attention when the Justice Secretary describes current prison numbers as ‘astonishing… impossible and ridiculous,’ and lambasted the revolving door of crime.
I support Clarke’s calls for a more sparing use of prison, especially if that means less use of short term sentences that do little more than exacerbate already difficult circumstances for people. But it should be remembered that, done properly, prison offers an opportunity to provide intensive interventions that address offending behaviours and the reasons for those behaviours. Those interventions can begin to develop the foundations needed to support long term recovery from substance misuse problems or the dismantling of sometimes deeply entrenched cycles of criminal behaviour. This is certainly the overarching message in the RSA Prison Learning Report published earlier this year which laid out the principles for prison reform.
It is encouraging to hear the support of new initiatives such as the Social Impact Bond pilot in HMP Peterborough which will be seeking to develop some these intensive interventions in line with the ‘payment by results’ model Clarke mentioned. I met with those leading the pilot yesterday and am excited by its possibilities not least as Peterborough prison will be the site of the RSA’s Recovery Capital Project being launched on the 19th July.
Let’s hope this is the new era of radical penal reform that will seek to do more than save the pennies.
Holding up a mirror
This week Matthew Taylor outlines a vision of twenty-first century enlightenment that acts as a call for some paradigm shifts to our ways of thinking and a reimagining of core enlightenment ideals which may be needed for the coming years. Answering the complex, rapidly-expanding challenges of today and tomorrow means having to live differently, which in turn means appreciating that we are going to have to think differently.
Without doing so we’re going to find it harder to close our social-aspiration gap: that gap between the world in which we aspire to live in and the world which we are going to create through our present behaviour. Essentially, this vision says that what we require is a revived consciousness but more importantly it says that we must have a conviction to act on that revived consciousness.
Published today, Matt Grist’s Steer puts forward one possible way of moving towards this rejuvenated awareness. Based upon an ‘holistic reflexive’ approach to behaviour change, Steer suggests that by becoming more aware of how our brains operate and by being attentive to the myriad of influences and subtle forces that may affect our judgement and behaviour, we will be far better placed to make improved decisions for our own health and happiness. This “thinking about thinking” model puts forward a refreshing alternative to the context-specific nudge set out by, among others, Thaler and Sunstein and comes at a time when the old carrot and stick behaviour change methods are once again being called into question.
Catherine Bennett, a notable ‘root vegetable sceptic’, recently pointed out the problems with a simplistic incentive-led approach to behaviour change – especially the NHS trial of using cash rewards for weight loss and the chip’n’bin scheme for recycling – and described how these methods may actually end up undermining people’s motivation when the financial incentives stop.
At the same time, these sort of approaches hit upon a moral-reasoning dilemma – that 
coercion or reward for partaking in a certain behaviour may ‘crowd-out’ and cheapen positive and pro-social actions that an individual was willing to partake in anyway. Steer, on the other hand, tries to avoid many of the problems of these clunky top-down approaches and instead strikes right at the heart of Charles Taylor’s idea of positive freedom. Alain de Botton recently put it that people tend not to lack freedom as the chance to use it well – the methods behind Steer allow us to effectively use what you might call positive cognitive freedom to understand what actions our behaviour might have on ourselves and others while allowing us to achieve the lives that we aspire to lead; closing our own social aspiration gap through the merits of our own thinking. Without the need for cumbersome carrots and/or sticks.
How then might the results of these findings be best put into practice? Matt Grist offers a number of different areas where this model might be implemented ranging from teaching about thinking within schools through to helping those in rehabilitation to change their habits. But in reality this research can add a great deal of value to a whole range of different areas including a number of our own projects at the RSA. If, for example, we take the Civic Health Audit strand of our Citizen Power work in Peterborough, we can embed this reflexive holistic approach as part of an additional strategy to improve civic participation. This project is essentially about designing a tool that can be used to better understand civic health in any particular group or locality by measuring the presence of core capabilities and qualities needed to effectively place-shape. But from the findings laid out in this report, we now know that we are not just able to use the Audit for understanding changes in civic health but that we can also use the Audit itself to improve civic health by playing back the results to the community and allowing them to ‘mull over’ and reflect on their own capabilities, their networks and their social assets – in fact, one of the biggest capabilities is knowing that you actually have the capability and the agency to effect change. This instance may be just one of many projects, areas and initiatives where embedding a reflexive element can really start to add add value and allow people to steer their own lives and shape their own futures.
Notes on narrative: Sennett and the arts
Filed under: Arts and Society, Design and Society, Social Economy
Asking what binds human beings together, Richard Sennett recently offered two ingredients that act as cultural glue: ritual and narrative. Speaking at a great lecture with Dr Rowan Williams just a couple of weeks ago, Sennett argued that, “without shared rituals and narratives society has no purpose. 
The everyday relations between human beings risks falling apart. And yet modern society courts just that risk. The cultural glue of ritual and narrative is weakening.” Williams seemed to strike the same chord – referring to his latest book on Dostoevsky he pointed out that storytelling as ritual allows us to bond with one another as well as with a “realm beyond ourselves” yet it too is being washed away.
Having this shared narrative and this common ritual allows us to reaffirm our collective identity and strengthen our belonging to one another. In the process we are able to develop a strong place-identity; that is, an identity made with a mixture of memories and joint experiences that connects us to people around us and to the places we live in and which in turn acts as a kind of catalyst for participation – it essentially gives us a non-material resource from which we can draw upon to get involved in our communities and the places in which we live.
Shared bonds with others can give us the mutual trust we need in order to commit to another’s benefit; it instils within us loyalty needed to motivate civic action; and, from a more rational perspective, it gives us an actual stake in our environment that we are eager to defend. A few years ago Mary Corcoran undertook some research in European cities which showed that residents were able to draw upon collective memories of the past in order to come together, clean public areas and tackle prolific drug dealers; a sure sign of the power of narrative and the bonds it creates. It might be that any sort of participatory drive set out through the Big Society will need, among other things, an equally Big Narrative. Or to be more precise, each place will need its own defining mini-narrative. Freedom to shape the places you live in is one thing, but if there’s no underlying bond or continuing narrative tying you to an area, there’s not that core incentive or that stake that might otherwise have impelled you to participate.
But as Sennett said in his lecture, the cultural glue that is narrative has weakened over the past few decades. It’s difficult to understand exactly why this has happened and there’s bound to be a huge number of reasons in play – from the transient mobile nature of society which prohibits any large collection of shared experiences to the rapid turnover of our physical and urban environment which erodes our collective memories – something Glenn Albrecht terms as Solastalgia (Geoff Mulgan pointed out at the same lecture event that we’re now living to such an age where we are beginning to have a longer lifespan than many of the buildings we live and work in – something that is pretty detrimental for the build up of memories that our physical environments store).
Having said that, it’s still clear that people seem to have an innate need for a story that they belong to and an inherent desire for a strong binding narrative; so much so that we seem to try and plug this vacuum in a number of other places. A piece a few months back in the Autumn RSA Journal by Ross Deuchar pointed out that gangs were able to offer young people a “surrogate family” with strong social support, bonding and identity. A more recent piece drawn upon in ESRC’s Identities and Social Action programme put heavy drinking binges between friends as a way for young people to be part of a 
community; a kind of ritual act that binds them together through regular bouts of drinking. And then there’s a widespread consumer culture which Amitai Etzioni sees as a fairly empty collective route to self-actualisation.
It has to be said that sometimes these rituals, narratives and acts of belonging do actually deliver some benefits but overall it’s fairly obvious to say that they are pretty unsustainable and damaging to our environment, to others around us and to ourselves. So how do we form a strong narrative that moves us away from this kind of “bad belonging” to a “good belonging”? How do we bring together stories that tie us to a place and instil within us a desire to participate and simply get involved in our communities? There’s probably a fair few ways towards achieving this but I couldn’t help noticing throughout the Sennett/Williams lecture that the main attributes of the arts kept coming back to what Sennett said was required to reinvigorate narrative.
Sennett pointed out that one of the key parts of ritual and narrative is that it has to be theatrical and accessible so that everybody can participate. Participants are giving “expressive performances” that everybody can see and everybody can relate to and which can reaffirm our connection to one another. This is something right at the heart of the arts. Art in all its forms provide a stage upon which narrative can be developed and where the sometimes weak connections between one another can be strengthened and highlighted.
If you take a landmark sculpture like the Angel of the North it’s these kinds of defining symbols that can help make a place distinct from another and give residents a sort of self-esteem about the unique identity of the place in which they live. But one of the most 
important things about art is that it can help develop bridging social capital as well as bonding social capital. Instead of ‘Alamo-identities’ that can come about from initiatives that mean communities disassociate with one another more than they associate within one another, art is something that might just be able to transcend that parochial feeling – without trying to milk a cliché too much, it brings people from different backgrounds together to share a common story, a common narrative. Just look at the way the latest 4th plinth has been able to breathe a bit of narrative and story back into Trafalgar Square.
Photo of Richard Sennett courtesy of Richard Sennett
Photo of Angel of the North by Antony Gormley by Pikaluk
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