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Thursday 26 June 2008
Tuesday 17 June 2008
Julie Brown
Become a market gardener
Julie Brown lives in Hackney, a densely populated area of East London. She walks and cycles everywhere and has all the conveniences of urban living on her doorstep. No wide open fields or quiet rural life here. But Julie’s working life is dedicated to the cultivating of land for food. She is, however, no ordinary farmer.
I met Julie on a showery June morning in Stoke Newington at Allen Gardens. Almost invisible from the busy street, a narrow lane leads into what feels like a forest glade. Next to a small wooden play ground, is the walled garden which is one of Growing Communities’s three urban cultivation sites. As I peered through the gate I could see lettuces and leafy vegetables flourishing in neat raised beds. Jamie Oliver would be proud.
Julie arrived shortly after me, slightly breathless, on her bike and immediately started to enthusiastically explain how they came to be in Allen Gardens for a peppercorn rent. Having gone through a series of incarnations from “middle class commune” to community garden, the site had become neglected when Julie found herself needing to relocate. Their previous plot was being taken over by developers. They were invited to participate with the regeneration of the gardens. “We literally put our soil in wheelbarrows and wheeled it down here! It was the only Soil Association accredited organic land in London and we weren’t about to leave it behind!” This is a woman who clearly has it in her to move mountains.
Growing Communities, the organisation which she founded and directs, began life in the early 1990s when Julie started looking for places to grow food on her doorstep. At that time she was working with some friends to organise one of London’s early organic vegetable box schemes. They were selling produce from a farm in Buckinghamshire but Julie wanted to do more. She had worked for several years as a campaigner for Friends of the Earth. She understood the bigger environmental issues at stake and she wanted to use food as a practical example of how the world could work better. She wanted the food that she was selling to be even more local and she also wanted to use food as a way to strengthen and build communities.
Fifteen years on, Growing Communities has three Soil Association accredited sites in Hackney, giving them a total of 0.5 acres of land to cultivate. They sell their boxes, which combine their own produce with that of farms mainly within a 100 mile radius of London, to 450 individuals and families a week. Their customers come to collect their fruit and vegetables from one of five collection points around the borough. “We want people to be active in the way they get their food. Over ninety percent of our customers walk or cycle to their collection point. The collection point also encourages people to meet others and make connections within their community. We don’t want people to just be passive consumers.”
The third element of Growing Communities’ activities is the weekly organic farmers market which they manage in Stoke Newington. By being active at different points along the food supply chain, from producer to consumer, Julie has achieved something remarkable. Her business is environmentally, socially and financially sustainable. The holy trinity of the green movement is here, in action, in one of the most urban areas on the planet.
It hasn’t been easy getting this far. All three cultivation sites are connected to Hackney Parks and there’s always uncertainty about whether they will be able to remain there. “At one point we were given two weeks notice to move from a site. But what the council underestimated was that my colleague and I both came from campaigning backgrounds. We even got an article in the Guardian about it!” There’s also been a lot of fundraising necessary in order to make something out of the derelict sites that they’ve acquired. But now, a combination of the fees from farmers who have stalls at the weekly market, the mark up on the vegetables they sell in the boxes and the revenue from selling their own produce all add up to make Growing Communities a financially viable business.
Julie was way ahead of the curve when she first started Growing Communities. In recent years food has become a hot topic. People want to know where their food has come from. They are increasingly concerned about the environmental and health implications of intensive farming and global supply chains. There has been a massive growth in organic box schemes and farmers markets. This means much more competition, but Julie is confident that their scheme ticks many of the boxes that others don’t. They’ve already come up with solutions to many potential problems. They don’t air freight anything. Only their bananas come from outside Europe. Most of their vegetables are from the UK. They know that sometimes it’s better to import something from Europe than to heat a poly tunnel in the UK.
The next step is to replicate their model elsewhere. “It’s not about Growing Communities getting bigger, it’s about finding people who we can work with to create other Growing Communities elsewhere in London or in other urban locations. What we have is successful and replicable. This is an actual concrete way in which to make the world a better place.” “We also want to use our campaigning skills to try and influence the broader debate on food. Now we have an example of what is possible, we hope that others can learn from it.”
I found it so inspirational to find out what could be created within this urban space with land that is just there waiting to be cultivated. It made me want to go home and dig up my concrete courtyard and grow vegetables! We’re so dislocated in the cities from the seasons and food production, from this urban garden on a June morning I found myself seeing a glimmer of hope that people in cities can live a life which is truly in tune with nature.
Julie Brown lives in Hackney, a densely populated area of East London. She walks and cycles everywhere and has all the conveniences of urban living on her doorstep. No wide open fields or quiet rural life here. But Julie’s working life is dedicated to the cultivating of land for food. She is, however, no ordinary farmer.
I met Julie on a showery June morning in Stoke Newington at Allen Gardens. Almost invisible from the busy street, a narrow lane leads into what feels like a forest glade. Next to a small wooden play ground, is the walled garden which is one of Growing Communities’s three urban cultivation sites. As I peered through the gate I could see lettuces and leafy vegetables flourishing in neat raised beds. Jamie Oliver would be proud.
Julie arrived shortly after me, slightly breathless, on her bike and immediately started to enthusiastically explain how they came to be in Allen Gardens for a peppercorn rent. Having gone through a series of incarnations from “middle class commune” to community garden, the site had become neglected when Julie found herself needing to relocate. Their previous plot was being taken over by developers. They were invited to participate with the regeneration of the gardens. “We literally put our soil in wheelbarrows and wheeled it down here! It was the only Soil Association accredited organic land in London and we weren’t about to leave it behind!” This is a woman who clearly has it in her to move mountains.
Growing Communities, the organisation which she founded and directs, began life in the early 1990s when Julie started looking for places to grow food on her doorstep. At that time she was working with some friends to organise one of London’s early organic vegetable box schemes. They were selling produce from a farm in Buckinghamshire but Julie wanted to do more. She had worked for several years as a campaigner for Friends of the Earth. She understood the bigger environmental issues at stake and she wanted to use food as a practical example of how the world could work better. She wanted the food that she was selling to be even more local and she also wanted to use food as a way to strengthen and build communities.
Fifteen years on, Growing Communities has three Soil Association accredited sites in Hackney, giving them a total of 0.5 acres of land to cultivate. They sell their boxes, which combine their own produce with that of farms mainly within a 100 mile radius of London, to 450 individuals and families a week. Their customers come to collect their fruit and vegetables from one of five collection points around the borough. “We want people to be active in the way they get their food. Over ninety percent of our customers walk or cycle to their collection point. The collection point also encourages people to meet others and make connections within their community. We don’t want people to just be passive consumers.”
The third element of Growing Communities’ activities is the weekly organic farmers market which they manage in Stoke Newington. By being active at different points along the food supply chain, from producer to consumer, Julie has achieved something remarkable. Her business is environmentally, socially and financially sustainable. The holy trinity of the green movement is here, in action, in one of the most urban areas on the planet.
It hasn’t been easy getting this far. All three cultivation sites are connected to Hackney Parks and there’s always uncertainty about whether they will be able to remain there. “At one point we were given two weeks notice to move from a site. But what the council underestimated was that my colleague and I both came from campaigning backgrounds. We even got an article in the Guardian about it!” There’s also been a lot of fundraising necessary in order to make something out of the derelict sites that they’ve acquired. But now, a combination of the fees from farmers who have stalls at the weekly market, the mark up on the vegetables they sell in the boxes and the revenue from selling their own produce all add up to make Growing Communities a financially viable business.
Julie was way ahead of the curve when she first started Growing Communities. In recent years food has become a hot topic. People want to know where their food has come from. They are increasingly concerned about the environmental and health implications of intensive farming and global supply chains. There has been a massive growth in organic box schemes and farmers markets. This means much more competition, but Julie is confident that their scheme ticks many of the boxes that others don’t. They’ve already come up with solutions to many potential problems. They don’t air freight anything. Only their bananas come from outside Europe. Most of their vegetables are from the UK. They know that sometimes it’s better to import something from Europe than to heat a poly tunnel in the UK.
The next step is to replicate their model elsewhere. “It’s not about Growing Communities getting bigger, it’s about finding people who we can work with to create other Growing Communities elsewhere in London or in other urban locations. What we have is successful and replicable. This is an actual concrete way in which to make the world a better place.” “We also want to use our campaigning skills to try and influence the broader debate on food. Now we have an example of what is possible, we hope that others can learn from it.”
I found it so inspirational to find out what could be created within this urban space with land that is just there waiting to be cultivated. It made me want to go home and dig up my concrete courtyard and grow vegetables! We’re so dislocated in the cities from the seasons and food production, from this urban garden on a June morning I found myself seeing a glimmer of hope that people in cities can live a life which is truly in tune with nature.
Tuesday 3 June 2008
Neil Jameson
Organise people around their broad self-interest
“Go on Father, you’re here to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven, so how’s it going?”. This is the kind of cheerfully awkward direct question that Neil Jameson tells me he likes to put to parish priests around London. He admits, “It’s a bit embarrassing and often we’re thrown out before we get to the cup of tea”. But when he finds priests who are willing to step back and grapple with the question of what influence they’re really having in their communities, they usually end up signing up for Neil’s Citizen Organising Foundation (COF). The COF brings together faith congregations, trade unions, student groups and schools to find issues of common interest and act on them.
I’m thankful that I’m being made a cup of tea before I’ve had a chance to ask any awkward questions. Neil jumped up to greet me and offered me a drink as soon as I arrived at the COF’s smart new offices in Whitechapel – so smart, I was surprised to be met at the door by the boss himself. But then I can imagine that Neil had lots of practice giving tea and biscuit hospitality in his former incarnation as a social worker. He still has the reassuringly unthreatening look of that profession, and after we have installed ourselves in a small meeting room, I ask him why he originally chose that path.
“I trained as a social worker because I used to think that that individual way of helping people would be good for me and good for them. Very quickly I discovered it was quite good for me because it paid my salary but it didn’t really do any good for them. At the worst, people’s problems were actually created by the professionals who try to help them.” Neil started to look deeper. “I got very interested in issues like poor housing, the lack of play space and why certain families always came up as being problems. I got to know the families as friends really, and realised that they wouldn’t have any problems at all if they had a bit more power and certainly a bit more income.”
Social work, he realised, was never going to tackle the root of the problems of the poor: “Throughout history, the only time people with low income and now moderate income got anywhere is when they organised around their broad self-interest.” But in the mid-eighties many such people were drifting away from the very institutions which could have given them a voice. “People were just withdrawing from politics, not voting, leaving the church, and trade unions were collapsing.” Neil became convinced that he had to get into the profession of organising. “By the time I got to forty, I was trying to find a job that would pay the mortgage and would keep my kids happy, and also tackle the two evils of power and poverty in a big way.”
In 1996, Neil brought to life the Citizens Organising Foundation, initially called the East London Communities Organisation. “We teach the ancient Greek approach to politics. If you organise and you’ve got a fair number of people and you’ve got a good argument and you’re democratic and you’re non-violent, then you can get things done. If you don’t organise, you sit and watch things on television, the world begins to fall apart, and the other lot win. Corporations organise, the business community organises, even criminals organise, but most community people don’t organise because they think that not having to negotiate with others makes them free. In fact it makes them weak.”
COF now has chapters in South London, West London and Birmingham as well as the original grouping in East London, which is made up of 35 institutions, through which about 60,000 people are represented. Delegations from each group meet monthly to work on campaigns. As I saw en route to Neil’s office, Whitechapel has a vibrant street scene with an amazing mix of race, age and social class, and the borough of Tower Hamlets is one of the most diverse in the UK. If it’s possible to achieve successful cross-community dialogue here, you would think, it should be possible anywhere.
“We try to get the folk who are in Pentecostal churches to see that it is in their interest to work with the folk in the Catholic church. And to see that it’s in their interest to work with the union branch around the corner. And, even more exciting, with the mosque around the next corner.” If they’re willing to get past the cup-of-tea stage, “People discover how magnificent it is to be in solidarity with others that hitherto they thought were weird, eccentric, off another planet, and you wouldn’t go into their building if somebody paid you. And then you discover they’re worried about their children like you are, they’re mugged by the same muggers and litter is the same problem for them as everyone else.”
Don’t the meetings degenerate into arguments over politics or which religion’s version of the Kingdom of Heaven they should be trying to create? Neil’s ensures they don’t by finding causes they can all rally around: “Once you get them in a room, you don’t talk about the ideology, you don’t talk Labour or Tory. You talk about: Who can help us? Who’s an ally? Where are we going to get the money from? What power have we got? What power have they got? And let’s just do it.” Neil has got the East London Mosque, several Unison branches, Stepney Green School and the Buddhist community in Bethnal Green successfully working together on campaigns including Whitechapel Watch, which aims to clean the streets of litter and drug dealers, and The Living Wage Campaign, which tries to get large companies to pay people a realistic living wage (at the time of our conversation, about £7.20 an hour in London), rather than the legal minimum wage (£5.35).
The Living Wage Campaign has already changed the payscale in four East London hospitals, and shamed numerous big banks in Canary Wharf and the City into paying their cleaners more, too. COF’s latest campaign is “Strangers to Citizens”, which is calling for a pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. Many of these individuals, ignored by the state, look to their religious communities for solace and support. The leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, and the Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford are some of the most prominent supporters of the Strangers to Citizens Campaign.
Neil is passionate about the need for diverse groups to negotiate with others in order to get things done. It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who isn’t seeking to bypass ageing institutions which are losing strength and membership, but to revitalise them. “We think these kind of institutions are primary building blocks of civil society. They’re the next level after family where people learn how to relate to each other. They go to a working mans club or they go to the women’s institute or they go to the unions, or the Methodist Church, and they have to “do” meetings, and they have to learn how to put up with Mrs So-and-So who goes off at a tangent every time. And that’s how you learn about democracy.”
Despite Neil’s best efforts, the decline of some churches and unions seems irreversible. But the kind of engaged citizens trained in leadership skills by the COF are perfectly placed to nurture new forms of grassroots community groups to step into the organisational breach. As Neil says, “there’s no end of campaigns we could do. It’s a great profession to come into.”
“Go on Father, you’re here to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven, so how’s it going?”. This is the kind of cheerfully awkward direct question that Neil Jameson tells me he likes to put to parish priests around London. He admits, “It’s a bit embarrassing and often we’re thrown out before we get to the cup of tea”. But when he finds priests who are willing to step back and grapple with the question of what influence they’re really having in their communities, they usually end up signing up for Neil’s Citizen Organising Foundation (COF). The COF brings together faith congregations, trade unions, student groups and schools to find issues of common interest and act on them.
I’m thankful that I’m being made a cup of tea before I’ve had a chance to ask any awkward questions. Neil jumped up to greet me and offered me a drink as soon as I arrived at the COF’s smart new offices in Whitechapel – so smart, I was surprised to be met at the door by the boss himself. But then I can imagine that Neil had lots of practice giving tea and biscuit hospitality in his former incarnation as a social worker. He still has the reassuringly unthreatening look of that profession, and after we have installed ourselves in a small meeting room, I ask him why he originally chose that path.
“I trained as a social worker because I used to think that that individual way of helping people would be good for me and good for them. Very quickly I discovered it was quite good for me because it paid my salary but it didn’t really do any good for them. At the worst, people’s problems were actually created by the professionals who try to help them.” Neil started to look deeper. “I got very interested in issues like poor housing, the lack of play space and why certain families always came up as being problems. I got to know the families as friends really, and realised that they wouldn’t have any problems at all if they had a bit more power and certainly a bit more income.”
Social work, he realised, was never going to tackle the root of the problems of the poor: “Throughout history, the only time people with low income and now moderate income got anywhere is when they organised around their broad self-interest.” But in the mid-eighties many such people were drifting away from the very institutions which could have given them a voice. “People were just withdrawing from politics, not voting, leaving the church, and trade unions were collapsing.” Neil became convinced that he had to get into the profession of organising. “By the time I got to forty, I was trying to find a job that would pay the mortgage and would keep my kids happy, and also tackle the two evils of power and poverty in a big way.”
In 1996, Neil brought to life the Citizens Organising Foundation, initially called the East London Communities Organisation. “We teach the ancient Greek approach to politics. If you organise and you’ve got a fair number of people and you’ve got a good argument and you’re democratic and you’re non-violent, then you can get things done. If you don’t organise, you sit and watch things on television, the world begins to fall apart, and the other lot win. Corporations organise, the business community organises, even criminals organise, but most community people don’t organise because they think that not having to negotiate with others makes them free. In fact it makes them weak.”
COF now has chapters in South London, West London and Birmingham as well as the original grouping in East London, which is made up of 35 institutions, through which about 60,000 people are represented. Delegations from each group meet monthly to work on campaigns. As I saw en route to Neil’s office, Whitechapel has a vibrant street scene with an amazing mix of race, age and social class, and the borough of Tower Hamlets is one of the most diverse in the UK. If it’s possible to achieve successful cross-community dialogue here, you would think, it should be possible anywhere.
“We try to get the folk who are in Pentecostal churches to see that it is in their interest to work with the folk in the Catholic church. And to see that it’s in their interest to work with the union branch around the corner. And, even more exciting, with the mosque around the next corner.” If they’re willing to get past the cup-of-tea stage, “People discover how magnificent it is to be in solidarity with others that hitherto they thought were weird, eccentric, off another planet, and you wouldn’t go into their building if somebody paid you. And then you discover they’re worried about their children like you are, they’re mugged by the same muggers and litter is the same problem for them as everyone else.”
Don’t the meetings degenerate into arguments over politics or which religion’s version of the Kingdom of Heaven they should be trying to create? Neil’s ensures they don’t by finding causes they can all rally around: “Once you get them in a room, you don’t talk about the ideology, you don’t talk Labour or Tory. You talk about: Who can help us? Who’s an ally? Where are we going to get the money from? What power have we got? What power have they got? And let’s just do it.” Neil has got the East London Mosque, several Unison branches, Stepney Green School and the Buddhist community in Bethnal Green successfully working together on campaigns including Whitechapel Watch, which aims to clean the streets of litter and drug dealers, and The Living Wage Campaign, which tries to get large companies to pay people a realistic living wage (at the time of our conversation, about £7.20 an hour in London), rather than the legal minimum wage (£5.35).
The Living Wage Campaign has already changed the payscale in four East London hospitals, and shamed numerous big banks in Canary Wharf and the City into paying their cleaners more, too. COF’s latest campaign is “Strangers to Citizens”, which is calling for a pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. Many of these individuals, ignored by the state, look to their religious communities for solace and support. The leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, and the Anglican Bishop of Chelmsford are some of the most prominent supporters of the Strangers to Citizens Campaign.
Neil is passionate about the need for diverse groups to negotiate with others in order to get things done. It’s hard not to be impressed by someone who isn’t seeking to bypass ageing institutions which are losing strength and membership, but to revitalise them. “We think these kind of institutions are primary building blocks of civil society. They’re the next level after family where people learn how to relate to each other. They go to a working mans club or they go to the women’s institute or they go to the unions, or the Methodist Church, and they have to “do” meetings, and they have to learn how to put up with Mrs So-and-So who goes off at a tangent every time. And that’s how you learn about democracy.”
Despite Neil’s best efforts, the decline of some churches and unions seems irreversible. But the kind of engaged citizens trained in leadership skills by the COF are perfectly placed to nurture new forms of grassroots community groups to step into the organisational breach. As Neil says, “there’s no end of campaigns we could do. It’s a great profession to come into.”
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