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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.”
Sunday 25 May 2008
Venetia Strangwayes-Booth
Open a cafe
Venetia Strangwayes-Booth runs a café which is transforming a neighbourhood. Before Venetia started business selling delicious coffee, cakes and sandwiches on the Chatsworth Road in Hackney, London, the street was otherwise populated only with betting shops, fried chicken joints and pound shops. Opening such a radically different outlet in an area of social deprivation hasn’t been easy. Firstly, Venetia had trouble convincing a landlord that a smart café was what local residents wanted. Unlike Venetia, they hadn’t been chatting to parents in the local school playground who were crying out for somewhere to get a decent croissant and cappuccino. About a year ago, the determined Venetia cut a deal to rent a tiny shop which she has transformed into a coffee drinkers haven. Venetia’s is now usually bursting at the seams with eager customers.
I visited Venetia to take her photograph on a Sunday morning. By the time we met at about 9.30 the café was already buzzing. Venetia arrived with her two young toddler children and husband all in tow and was immediately organising her staff and readjusting her coffee machine. The grinds must be neither too fine, nor too coarse, she tells me as she times to the second the drips of espresso coming out of the machine. She offers me a second cup of coffee made with the correct sized grinds. Such an eye for detail may betray Venetia’s lawyer past, and is also the reason Venetia’s café is developing such a loyal following.
Venetia is candid about the challenges she faces running such an elegant eatery in a deprived area. Even having found a property to rent, it’s difficult to make a profit. She tries to keep her prices affordable, but clearly has to keep an eye on survival of the business. The hours are long and finding the right staff isn't easy. She needs more space and plans to open the garden to customers in the summer. Venetia says she wishes she’d found financial backing before she started, but she’s learnt a lot on the way.
Her efforts are already having a knock-on effect on the rest of the street. About nine months after she opened shop a French delicatessen opened opposite her, selling high-quality cheeses and meats. The bookshop is moving to bigger premises and a toy shop is about to open. Local residents eagerly await further developments. A restaurant or two might be nice and Venetia herself is keen to capitalise on the recent popularity of farmers’ markets and get the Chatsworth Road street market up and running again.
What has surprised Venetia is how her café has become a focal point for the community. People come here to find out what’s going on in the neighbourhood she tells me. Venetia is clearly an important element here too, always ready with local information and news. She’s an antenatal teacher in her spare time, and much appreciated by the burgeoning population of pregnant women in the area. She’s also trying to set up a traders’ association so that she can save the street’s threatened Post Office. I wonder how she fits it all in, but perhaps a Sunday morning photo shoot with the whole family alongside indicates the answer. An expert multi-tasker who doesn’t take no for an answer, Venetia’s efforts are definitely the start of a fundamental change in this particular Hackney street.
Venetia Strangwayes-Booth runs a café which is transforming a neighbourhood. Before Venetia started business selling delicious coffee, cakes and sandwiches on the Chatsworth Road in Hackney, London, the street was otherwise populated only with betting shops, fried chicken joints and pound shops. Opening such a radically different outlet in an area of social deprivation hasn’t been easy. Firstly, Venetia had trouble convincing a landlord that a smart café was what local residents wanted. Unlike Venetia, they hadn’t been chatting to parents in the local school playground who were crying out for somewhere to get a decent croissant and cappuccino. About a year ago, the determined Venetia cut a deal to rent a tiny shop which she has transformed into a coffee drinkers haven. Venetia’s is now usually bursting at the seams with eager customers.
I visited Venetia to take her photograph on a Sunday morning. By the time we met at about 9.30 the café was already buzzing. Venetia arrived with her two young toddler children and husband all in tow and was immediately organising her staff and readjusting her coffee machine. The grinds must be neither too fine, nor too coarse, she tells me as she times to the second the drips of espresso coming out of the machine. She offers me a second cup of coffee made with the correct sized grinds. Such an eye for detail may betray Venetia’s lawyer past, and is also the reason Venetia’s café is developing such a loyal following.
Venetia is candid about the challenges she faces running such an elegant eatery in a deprived area. Even having found a property to rent, it’s difficult to make a profit. She tries to keep her prices affordable, but clearly has to keep an eye on survival of the business. The hours are long and finding the right staff isn't easy. She needs more space and plans to open the garden to customers in the summer. Venetia says she wishes she’d found financial backing before she started, but she’s learnt a lot on the way.
Her efforts are already having a knock-on effect on the rest of the street. About nine months after she opened shop a French delicatessen opened opposite her, selling high-quality cheeses and meats. The bookshop is moving to bigger premises and a toy shop is about to open. Local residents eagerly await further developments. A restaurant or two might be nice and Venetia herself is keen to capitalise on the recent popularity of farmers’ markets and get the Chatsworth Road street market up and running again.
What has surprised Venetia is how her café has become a focal point for the community. People come here to find out what’s going on in the neighbourhood she tells me. Venetia is clearly an important element here too, always ready with local information and news. She’s an antenatal teacher in her spare time, and much appreciated by the burgeoning population of pregnant women in the area. She’s also trying to set up a traders’ association so that she can save the street’s threatened Post Office. I wonder how she fits it all in, but perhaps a Sunday morning photo shoot with the whole family alongside indicates the answer. An expert multi-tasker who doesn’t take no for an answer, Venetia’s efforts are definitely the start of a fundamental change in this particular Hackney street.
Saturday 10 May 2008
Kimberly Wilson
Create a Tranquil Space
Kimberly Wilson sits comfortably as she talks, legs crossed on a bench decorated with polka dot pink and black cushions. We're upstairs in the Washington DC yoga studio which she founded in 1999 and has been running ever since. “I think people have a desire to improve and change and grow but they have to have the means to be able to do that, and part of that is a creative and peaceful space where they can feel special. That’s what I hope Tranquil Space will always be.” She’s dressed in all black yoga gear, but isn’t short of glamour – appropriately for the author of a book called “Hip Tranquil Chick”.
Like many social entrepreneurs, Kimberly’s business idea arose from an unfulfilled need in her own life. “I wanted a place where people could come and really feel like they are special. I think of Cheers, where ‘everybody knows your name’. I think that’s so important.” In 1999 she couldn’t find such a place in her home town of Washington DC, so she set up Tranquil Space, with the aim of serving people who were also looking for a refuge through yoga. “The whole reason the business was created was to bring people together who I thought would connect and enjoy this type of a setting. We are here to help create a tranquil space within our society.”
She was propelled into social enterprise by dissatisfaction with her existing career. “I remember the Monday I came back to my job as a paralegal after spending two weeks having a fabulous experience learning to teach yoga in Santa Barbara, and crying. ‘This just isn’t me! I can’t do this anymore!’ I decided then that I’d just quit, live off my savings and teach yoga from my front room. It was scary. You go from getting a regular pay check and health insurance, to ‘Can I cover my rent and buy groceries?’” Family and friends were not entirely supportive, either: “‘What the hell?’ ‘Why did I put you through college?’ ‘What are you doing?’ That’s why I’m so proud of the success of the studio, because other people didn’t think this could happen.”
There’s no mark of those early fears on Kimberly’s face now, and she exudes the calm you’d expect from a experienced yogi. The success that enables peace of mind has come, as she puts it, in “baby steps. I’m a risk taker, but a baby risk taker. I’ve never taken out loans.” Her first baby step, when she reached her eighth student and could no longer fit them in her living room, was to rent a church hall. Now, although she insists “I don’t think I’ve got the full entrepreneurial spirit that I’d like to have”, her business occupies a bright and airy two-level commercial premises close to DC’s vibrant Dupont Circle and welcomes over 600 students a week. “You have to be profitable to survive or we wouldn’t be here,” she says, “but that’s not why the studio was created. I had no idea that we would make money, or that we would have this many students. No idea.”
Although evangelical about the benefits of yoga – “I think you walk a little differently when you leave class. People come to me and say that this place has really made a difference in their lives” – Kimberly’s horizons are broader. “ I think what we need so much in this world is to feel like we matter, that somebody cares, and that’s what I want people to feel like when they come here. I encourage the teachers to be as nurturing as possible – to touch every student, and learn their names – but also empowering and challenging. An overall theme of the studio is empowerment,” With that in mind, Tranquil Space runs regular “Trunk Shows”, which give local female creatives a chance to sell their own wares – “empowering women to create, to test the market and see if there’s a possibility for them to do this full-time.” There are also “creativity circles”, which “started in my living room, too. We have a lot of women do crazy things after it.” A fashion boutique and spa treatments presumably don’t harm the bottom line – “it’s really important to be a little indulgent here and there” – but are ancillary to the main purpose of “really helping, I mean honestly helping students to find a creative space. And also for us to translate this creative and tranquil space into society.”
It can’t have been an easy task to take to scale a business which is so firmly rooted in personal contact, but Kimberly appears to be pulling it off – the flask of tea and pile of cookies on a table crammed between brightly-coloured yoga mats continue a tradition that dates back to the home-made chai she served to her students after her first class. Her transparent lack of cynicism must be a major factor in avoiding a creeping corporate feel. This becomes apparent when I comment on the logos of four charities displayed on the wall as being the main beneficiaries of the Tranquil Space Foundation – trees, victims of domestic violence, female artists and animals - and compliment Kimberly on her marketing prowess in choosing a range of charities which will appeal to all her customers. “I never really thought about that,” she replies disarmingly. If it’s not for marketing purposes, then, isn’t it painful for a small and growing business to hand the money over? “There are times when we need more cash flow,” she admits, “but I’ve never thought ‘I wish I hadn’t given that thousand to the Humane Society.’”
As Kimberly slips into some poses for me to photograph, I ask how she finds the time to do enough yoga to maintain her incredible flexibility and strength while managing a staff of sixty. “I’m having tea with a girl tonight, and I think she’s the only friend I have that’s outside the studio,” she says. People who I knew before Tranquil Space, I haven’t seen them in years. I haven’t had time. There’s been many a seventeen-hour day since 1999. It’s been rewarding, but I would never say it’s been easy. Never.”
What keeps her going is the satisfaction of making a positive difference. “Being in business is great. I think a lot of times being in business is looked poorly upon, as if it’s all about money, or power. But I think you can be in business and really doing very, very good work and that’s what I really strive for. And I’m constantly striving to find out how to do that.”
Kimberly Wilson sits comfortably as she talks, legs crossed on a bench decorated with polka dot pink and black cushions. We're upstairs in the Washington DC yoga studio which she founded in 1999 and has been running ever since. “I think people have a desire to improve and change and grow but they have to have the means to be able to do that, and part of that is a creative and peaceful space where they can feel special. That’s what I hope Tranquil Space will always be.” She’s dressed in all black yoga gear, but isn’t short of glamour – appropriately for the author of a book called “Hip Tranquil Chick”.
Like many social entrepreneurs, Kimberly’s business idea arose from an unfulfilled need in her own life. “I wanted a place where people could come and really feel like they are special. I think of Cheers, where ‘everybody knows your name’. I think that’s so important.” In 1999 she couldn’t find such a place in her home town of Washington DC, so she set up Tranquil Space, with the aim of serving people who were also looking for a refuge through yoga. “The whole reason the business was created was to bring people together who I thought would connect and enjoy this type of a setting. We are here to help create a tranquil space within our society.”
She was propelled into social enterprise by dissatisfaction with her existing career. “I remember the Monday I came back to my job as a paralegal after spending two weeks having a fabulous experience learning to teach yoga in Santa Barbara, and crying. ‘This just isn’t me! I can’t do this anymore!’ I decided then that I’d just quit, live off my savings and teach yoga from my front room. It was scary. You go from getting a regular pay check and health insurance, to ‘Can I cover my rent and buy groceries?’” Family and friends were not entirely supportive, either: “‘What the hell?’ ‘Why did I put you through college?’ ‘What are you doing?’ That’s why I’m so proud of the success of the studio, because other people didn’t think this could happen.”
There’s no mark of those early fears on Kimberly’s face now, and she exudes the calm you’d expect from a experienced yogi. The success that enables peace of mind has come, as she puts it, in “baby steps. I’m a risk taker, but a baby risk taker. I’ve never taken out loans.” Her first baby step, when she reached her eighth student and could no longer fit them in her living room, was to rent a church hall. Now, although she insists “I don’t think I’ve got the full entrepreneurial spirit that I’d like to have”, her business occupies a bright and airy two-level commercial premises close to DC’s vibrant Dupont Circle and welcomes over 600 students a week. “You have to be profitable to survive or we wouldn’t be here,” she says, “but that’s not why the studio was created. I had no idea that we would make money, or that we would have this many students. No idea.”
Although evangelical about the benefits of yoga – “I think you walk a little differently when you leave class. People come to me and say that this place has really made a difference in their lives” – Kimberly’s horizons are broader. “ I think what we need so much in this world is to feel like we matter, that somebody cares, and that’s what I want people to feel like when they come here. I encourage the teachers to be as nurturing as possible – to touch every student, and learn their names – but also empowering and challenging. An overall theme of the studio is empowerment,” With that in mind, Tranquil Space runs regular “Trunk Shows”, which give local female creatives a chance to sell their own wares – “empowering women to create, to test the market and see if there’s a possibility for them to do this full-time.” There are also “creativity circles”, which “started in my living room, too. We have a lot of women do crazy things after it.” A fashion boutique and spa treatments presumably don’t harm the bottom line – “it’s really important to be a little indulgent here and there” – but are ancillary to the main purpose of “really helping, I mean honestly helping students to find a creative space. And also for us to translate this creative and tranquil space into society.”
It can’t have been an easy task to take to scale a business which is so firmly rooted in personal contact, but Kimberly appears to be pulling it off – the flask of tea and pile of cookies on a table crammed between brightly-coloured yoga mats continue a tradition that dates back to the home-made chai she served to her students after her first class. Her transparent lack of cynicism must be a major factor in avoiding a creeping corporate feel. This becomes apparent when I comment on the logos of four charities displayed on the wall as being the main beneficiaries of the Tranquil Space Foundation – trees, victims of domestic violence, female artists and animals - and compliment Kimberly on her marketing prowess in choosing a range of charities which will appeal to all her customers. “I never really thought about that,” she replies disarmingly. If it’s not for marketing purposes, then, isn’t it painful for a small and growing business to hand the money over? “There are times when we need more cash flow,” she admits, “but I’ve never thought ‘I wish I hadn’t given that thousand to the Humane Society.’”
As Kimberly slips into some poses for me to photograph, I ask how she finds the time to do enough yoga to maintain her incredible flexibility and strength while managing a staff of sixty. “I’m having tea with a girl tonight, and I think she’s the only friend I have that’s outside the studio,” she says. People who I knew before Tranquil Space, I haven’t seen them in years. I haven’t had time. There’s been many a seventeen-hour day since 1999. It’s been rewarding, but I would never say it’s been easy. Never.”
What keeps her going is the satisfaction of making a positive difference. “Being in business is great. I think a lot of times being in business is looked poorly upon, as if it’s all about money, or power. But I think you can be in business and really doing very, very good work and that’s what I really strive for. And I’m constantly striving to find out how to do that.”
Thursday 17 April 2008
Robert Egger
Make a business out of other people's waste
Robert Egger is founder and CEO of DC Central Kitchen. The Kitchen is located behind one of the largest homeless hostels in the United States, in a run-down neighbourhood of Washington DC. I couldn’t find the entrance and the streetscape around was desolate and threatening. The few pedestrians were black and evidently homeless. As a seven-months pregnant white women, riding a bike and carrying a large and expensive camera, I desperately wanted to look like I knew where I was going. So I headed straight into the main hostel entrance, where the security guard was on the telephone. As I waited for him to finish, I realised he was talking about a homicide that had just taken place on site. Whoever Robert Egger is, I could tell already that he wasn’t someone who liked to change the world from an ivory tower.
Armed with the guard’s directions, I eventually found the loading bay which serves as the entrance to DC Central Kitchen. It was crowded with small vans. One of the men unloading food into the vast store-rooms showed me to Robert’s tiny, windowless office in the centre of the bustling kitchen. DC Central Kitchen, which feeds the homeless using left-over food from local restaurants, was opened in 1989 and now feeds 4000 hungry homeless people a day. It has also given culinary training to 450 unemployed men and women since 1990, to help them back into work. Fresh Start Catering – run from the same location – employs the Kitchen’s trainees to cater for private clients around the city, and its profits are ploughed back into the Kitchen’s charitable activities.
It was immediately clear that Robert was nowhere near as intimidating as his environs. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the United States non-profit sector, and it was easy to see why: he came across as dynamic, enthusiastic, thoughtful and caring. Not to mention talkative. Like a ball at the top of a hill, I found I needed only to give him a nudge and he would run for a very long time.
So, as a former nightclub owner, what had made Robert turn his entrepreneurial flair to satisfying lines of hungry homeless people rather than queues of eager clubbers?
One night Robert went out with a friend feeding homeless people on the streets of DC. “Did not want to go. Got kind of cornered by people. You know. ‘Come on! You’ve got to go. It’ll be great.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. OK, OK.’” Robert was shocked to discover that the organisation he was helping that evening was buying food, even though this was the mid-eighties, when extravagant receptions everywhere were leaving tonnes of left overs. He was also surprised to discover that nothing was being done to help these homeless long term. Robert reluctantly realised that he had the vision and the skills required to do a better job. “It was one of those moments where you get to a crossroads. In other words it was like: ‘If I don’t do it no-one will.’”
That evening made him look with new eyes at his community in DC, and he encourages others who want to make a difference to do the same: “There is not a business person in the world, nor a general that would go into a new business or a battle without a sense of ‘What’s my budget? What is my inventory? What do I have to work with?’ Start adding it up. Look again! Stretch! Think!” Robert could see – where others could not – how to pull together the resources he needed. “America throws away 25% of what it produces every day. Most people see that as trash, we see it as gasoline for this engine. Most people looked at the people standing in line to get food and thought ‘Woah! There but for the grace of God go I’ and we’re like ‘Those are workers’.” Always ready with a snappy sound bite, Robert sums up what’s necessary. “You got to get practical. Say what you’re going to do and do what you say. Nirvana was a great band but it’s a horrible mission statement.”
Drawing on his experience of promoting nightclubs, Robert cannily planned the Kitchen’s opening to coincide with the inauguration of George Bush senior, having persuaded the organisers of his first presidential party to donate the left over food. “I knew there was an urban myth about hotels not being able to donate food, and that was hard to dispel. What better way to shoot down that myth than to get the President of the United States to donate food from the inauguration?” Now the Kitchen has its homeless trainee chefs bake cakes for every presidential inauguration: “No media guy in the world can resist that,” he says with a smile.
Correctly suspecting that I may prefer not to sit still for too long in my heavily pregnant state, Robert offers to take me on a guided tour. The scene is typical of any large and busy catering operation: acres of stainless steel, chefs in whites and clouds of steam as ovens open and close and pans bubble. In between liberally showering his employees with praise – “amazing man”, he says of colleague showing the ropes to a bunch of student volunteers – he tells me how he went one better with George Bush senior’s successor in the White House, by actually persuading Bill Clinton to come to the Kitchen and volunteer.
The volunteers, he explains, are an essential part of the grand plan. “We do not need a single volunteer to get our job done but every year we bring in seven to eight thousand and that is how we fight hunger.” Why? Robert hopes that volunteering will help remove prejudices as it did with some doctors who volunteered alongside a homeless man called Joseph. “Joseph looked at them and I think he saw all the things he could never be, and it reinforced this notion of, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? You fucked up everything in your life, you’re just going to fuck up this.’ And in the doctors’ eyes here was this homeless guy with a knife. And so each side had these stereotypes that were affecting their ability to take the next step. But I came back fifteen minutes later and the big neat was that Joseph knew something they didn’t know. He knew how to julienne and cut a carrot. They didn’t. And when he realised ‘I know something they don’t know’ and vice versa, the walls came down, and that was one of those eureka moments at the kitchen. We call it the ‘calculated epiphany’.”
“My hope,” he continues, “is that these volunteers leave saying, ‘Oh my goodness, why don’t we do that? I didn’t think that was possible’”. Of bringing in President Clinton, he says: “I wanted people to wake up in Des Moines, Iowa saying ‘Hey, honey come and look at this. I didn’t know homeless people could do that.’ I don’t want people to watch and say, ‘Wow the Kitchen’s great. I’ll write them a cheque.’ That would be great if they did, but that’s not the point. It’s more important to liberate them from their old stereotypical mind frames.” Robert hopes that their work will keep sparking people into “calculated epiphanies” and bring them on-side. “I don’t want to tell people what to think. If I go out and say ‘you should la la bla bla’ they won’t hear me.” That’s why, when Fresh Start caters for an event, Robert insists that the organisers don’t mention to the guests that the food is made by formerly homeless people until after they’ve enjoyed it.
Robert’s calculated pursuit of epiphanies has paid spectacular dividends: there are now Campus Kitchens run out of dozens of universities around the United States, and a sister project called Community Kitchens in Schools. Back in Robert’s tiny office, I try to find out what drives the person responsible for these far-reaching achievements. He is charmingly self deprecating, insisting “I’m not smart. I barely graduated from high school. And I’ve always had good management here because I don’t run all this myself – I mean, I can do it, but I’m just not good at the day-to-day stuff. My attention span’s not that long. I’m not disciplined that way.”
When I point out that he nevertheless has an obvious knack for business and ask why he didn’t simply stay in the nightclub trade and make himself richer, it’s clear that he finds this as interesting a question as I do. “Over the years I’ve plumbed my soul on numerous occasions. You know, it’s not like I have some deep love for my fellow man, that I want to help the poor.” Music has had its influence on the way he views the world, judging by how often he reaches for quotes from his favourite bands – notably John Lennon’s acerbic view of mass culture in Working Class Hero: “Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV / And you think you're so clever and classless and free”. And although the catholic nuns who schooled him probably weren’t intending to produce a nightclub-owning Lennon devotee, they too had a deep impact on his psyche. “It’s probably a merger of that kind of weird, missionary, ‘save-pagan-babies’ ethos of catholic school,” he concludes, “with punk music and just rock and roll in general.”
If he’s not so sure about his motivations, one thing that Robert is sure about is how you work with the grain of today’s world to make it a better place. “The power of the last century was all built around people saying ‘don’t buy that’. I’m more interested in saying ‘no, buy that’. That’s the power of this century. How do you open the masses’ eyes today? Not with anger and boycott. No, ‘be happy and buy!’ That’s how you change the world. What we need is a capitalist Ghandi. Someone who will raise the bar.”
Although he’d be far too modest to apply that description to himself, Robert has already proved he has the capitalist part of the equation sorted. And a few months after I met him, Robert was in the newspapers for going on hunger strike to shame the DC government into stumping up for some of the meals his Kitchen delivers to their shelters. Ghandi would have approved.
Robert Egger is founder and CEO of DC Central Kitchen. The Kitchen is located behind one of the largest homeless hostels in the United States, in a run-down neighbourhood of Washington DC. I couldn’t find the entrance and the streetscape around was desolate and threatening. The few pedestrians were black and evidently homeless. As a seven-months pregnant white women, riding a bike and carrying a large and expensive camera, I desperately wanted to look like I knew where I was going. So I headed straight into the main hostel entrance, where the security guard was on the telephone. As I waited for him to finish, I realised he was talking about a homicide that had just taken place on site. Whoever Robert Egger is, I could tell already that he wasn’t someone who liked to change the world from an ivory tower.
Armed with the guard’s directions, I eventually found the loading bay which serves as the entrance to DC Central Kitchen. It was crowded with small vans. One of the men unloading food into the vast store-rooms showed me to Robert’s tiny, windowless office in the centre of the bustling kitchen. DC Central Kitchen, which feeds the homeless using left-over food from local restaurants, was opened in 1989 and now feeds 4000 hungry homeless people a day. It has also given culinary training to 450 unemployed men and women since 1990, to help them back into work. Fresh Start Catering – run from the same location – employs the Kitchen’s trainees to cater for private clients around the city, and its profits are ploughed back into the Kitchen’s charitable activities.
It was immediately clear that Robert was nowhere near as intimidating as his environs. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the United States non-profit sector, and it was easy to see why: he came across as dynamic, enthusiastic, thoughtful and caring. Not to mention talkative. Like a ball at the top of a hill, I found I needed only to give him a nudge and he would run for a very long time.
So, as a former nightclub owner, what had made Robert turn his entrepreneurial flair to satisfying lines of hungry homeless people rather than queues of eager clubbers?
One night Robert went out with a friend feeding homeless people on the streets of DC. “Did not want to go. Got kind of cornered by people. You know. ‘Come on! You’ve got to go. It’ll be great.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. OK, OK.’” Robert was shocked to discover that the organisation he was helping that evening was buying food, even though this was the mid-eighties, when extravagant receptions everywhere were leaving tonnes of left overs. He was also surprised to discover that nothing was being done to help these homeless long term. Robert reluctantly realised that he had the vision and the skills required to do a better job. “It was one of those moments where you get to a crossroads. In other words it was like: ‘If I don’t do it no-one will.’”
That evening made him look with new eyes at his community in DC, and he encourages others who want to make a difference to do the same: “There is not a business person in the world, nor a general that would go into a new business or a battle without a sense of ‘What’s my budget? What is my inventory? What do I have to work with?’ Start adding it up. Look again! Stretch! Think!” Robert could see – where others could not – how to pull together the resources he needed. “America throws away 25% of what it produces every day. Most people see that as trash, we see it as gasoline for this engine. Most people looked at the people standing in line to get food and thought ‘Woah! There but for the grace of God go I’ and we’re like ‘Those are workers’.” Always ready with a snappy sound bite, Robert sums up what’s necessary. “You got to get practical. Say what you’re going to do and do what you say. Nirvana was a great band but it’s a horrible mission statement.”
Drawing on his experience of promoting nightclubs, Robert cannily planned the Kitchen’s opening to coincide with the inauguration of George Bush senior, having persuaded the organisers of his first presidential party to donate the left over food. “I knew there was an urban myth about hotels not being able to donate food, and that was hard to dispel. What better way to shoot down that myth than to get the President of the United States to donate food from the inauguration?” Now the Kitchen has its homeless trainee chefs bake cakes for every presidential inauguration: “No media guy in the world can resist that,” he says with a smile.
Correctly suspecting that I may prefer not to sit still for too long in my heavily pregnant state, Robert offers to take me on a guided tour. The scene is typical of any large and busy catering operation: acres of stainless steel, chefs in whites and clouds of steam as ovens open and close and pans bubble. In between liberally showering his employees with praise – “amazing man”, he says of colleague showing the ropes to a bunch of student volunteers – he tells me how he went one better with George Bush senior’s successor in the White House, by actually persuading Bill Clinton to come to the Kitchen and volunteer.
The volunteers, he explains, are an essential part of the grand plan. “We do not need a single volunteer to get our job done but every year we bring in seven to eight thousand and that is how we fight hunger.” Why? Robert hopes that volunteering will help remove prejudices as it did with some doctors who volunteered alongside a homeless man called Joseph. “Joseph looked at them and I think he saw all the things he could never be, and it reinforced this notion of, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? You fucked up everything in your life, you’re just going to fuck up this.’ And in the doctors’ eyes here was this homeless guy with a knife. And so each side had these stereotypes that were affecting their ability to take the next step. But I came back fifteen minutes later and the big neat was that Joseph knew something they didn’t know. He knew how to julienne and cut a carrot. They didn’t. And when he realised ‘I know something they don’t know’ and vice versa, the walls came down, and that was one of those eureka moments at the kitchen. We call it the ‘calculated epiphany’.”
“My hope,” he continues, “is that these volunteers leave saying, ‘Oh my goodness, why don’t we do that? I didn’t think that was possible’”. Of bringing in President Clinton, he says: “I wanted people to wake up in Des Moines, Iowa saying ‘Hey, honey come and look at this. I didn’t know homeless people could do that.’ I don’t want people to watch and say, ‘Wow the Kitchen’s great. I’ll write them a cheque.’ That would be great if they did, but that’s not the point. It’s more important to liberate them from their old stereotypical mind frames.” Robert hopes that their work will keep sparking people into “calculated epiphanies” and bring them on-side. “I don’t want to tell people what to think. If I go out and say ‘you should la la bla bla’ they won’t hear me.” That’s why, when Fresh Start caters for an event, Robert insists that the organisers don’t mention to the guests that the food is made by formerly homeless people until after they’ve enjoyed it.
Robert’s calculated pursuit of epiphanies has paid spectacular dividends: there are now Campus Kitchens run out of dozens of universities around the United States, and a sister project called Community Kitchens in Schools. Back in Robert’s tiny office, I try to find out what drives the person responsible for these far-reaching achievements. He is charmingly self deprecating, insisting “I’m not smart. I barely graduated from high school. And I’ve always had good management here because I don’t run all this myself – I mean, I can do it, but I’m just not good at the day-to-day stuff. My attention span’s not that long. I’m not disciplined that way.”
When I point out that he nevertheless has an obvious knack for business and ask why he didn’t simply stay in the nightclub trade and make himself richer, it’s clear that he finds this as interesting a question as I do. “Over the years I’ve plumbed my soul on numerous occasions. You know, it’s not like I have some deep love for my fellow man, that I want to help the poor.” Music has had its influence on the way he views the world, judging by how often he reaches for quotes from his favourite bands – notably John Lennon’s acerbic view of mass culture in Working Class Hero: “Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV / And you think you're so clever and classless and free”. And although the catholic nuns who schooled him probably weren’t intending to produce a nightclub-owning Lennon devotee, they too had a deep impact on his psyche. “It’s probably a merger of that kind of weird, missionary, ‘save-pagan-babies’ ethos of catholic school,” he concludes, “with punk music and just rock and roll in general.”
If he’s not so sure about his motivations, one thing that Robert is sure about is how you work with the grain of today’s world to make it a better place. “The power of the last century was all built around people saying ‘don’t buy that’. I’m more interested in saying ‘no, buy that’. That’s the power of this century. How do you open the masses’ eyes today? Not with anger and boycott. No, ‘be happy and buy!’ That’s how you change the world. What we need is a capitalist Ghandi. Someone who will raise the bar.”
Although he’d be far too modest to apply that description to himself, Robert has already proved he has the capitalist part of the equation sorted. And a few months after I met him, Robert was in the newspapers for going on hunger strike to shame the DC government into stumping up for some of the meals his Kitchen delivers to their shelters. Ghandi would have approved.
Saturday 12 April 2008
Jamie Wallace
Build a website
“Don’t underestimate the challenge of making a free to user website stack up financially” That’s the advice Jamie Wallace would like to give anyone who wants to follow his footsteps and use the internet to make the world a better place. Jamie is the founder and director of walkit.com, a route planner for city walkers. The website will draw you a map between two locations, giving you a choice of the most direct or a less busy route. In central London you can even opt for a less polluted route. You are also told how long the journey will take, depending on your speed, how many calories you’ll burn and how much carbon dioxide you’ll prevent from being emitted.
I have known Jamie for a long time. We studied Environmental Technology together at Imperial College in 1996/1997. In about 2000 Jamie started talking about the walkit.com idea as a way to encourage more sustainable lifestyles. In the early days Jamie worked on the site alongside working for a sustainability charity called Forum for the Future. Since April 2007 Jamie has devoted himself to walkit full-time. With no other income to rely on, this has made the financial sustainability of the site even more critical. 50,000 unique visitors come to the site every month and generate 110,000 routes in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Gateshead. Soon the people of Leeds, Glasgow and Aberdeen will also be able to create walkit routes and several other cities are in the pipeline.
By encouraging people to walk like this, Jamie is not only contributing to the reduction of climate change, he’s probably making the commuting lives of thousands of people much more bearable. Not surprising then that the walkit team have won several awards already for their work and that their user numbers keep soaring. For the time being, the focus of Jamie and his team is to get as big as possible. “Everyone says if you’re huge you can make it work financially. But how do you get huge? You can’t get there until you’ve brought in the money.” It’s a Catch 22 but Jamie is not dispirited. He clearly loves the independence of working on his own project and with so much positive feedback on the site, it's hard to believe that they won't succeed. A big injection of cash would help, but for now local governments around the UK are a solid source of income. The site is a wonderfully practical idea so hopefully walkit will continue to help to relieve our streets of traffic for many years to come.
“Don’t underestimate the challenge of making a free to user website stack up financially” That’s the advice Jamie Wallace would like to give anyone who wants to follow his footsteps and use the internet to make the world a better place. Jamie is the founder and director of walkit.com, a route planner for city walkers. The website will draw you a map between two locations, giving you a choice of the most direct or a less busy route. In central London you can even opt for a less polluted route. You are also told how long the journey will take, depending on your speed, how many calories you’ll burn and how much carbon dioxide you’ll prevent from being emitted.
I have known Jamie for a long time. We studied Environmental Technology together at Imperial College in 1996/1997. In about 2000 Jamie started talking about the walkit.com idea as a way to encourage more sustainable lifestyles. In the early days Jamie worked on the site alongside working for a sustainability charity called Forum for the Future. Since April 2007 Jamie has devoted himself to walkit full-time. With no other income to rely on, this has made the financial sustainability of the site even more critical. 50,000 unique visitors come to the site every month and generate 110,000 routes in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Gateshead. Soon the people of Leeds, Glasgow and Aberdeen will also be able to create walkit routes and several other cities are in the pipeline.
By encouraging people to walk like this, Jamie is not only contributing to the reduction of climate change, he’s probably making the commuting lives of thousands of people much more bearable. Not surprising then that the walkit team have won several awards already for their work and that their user numbers keep soaring. For the time being, the focus of Jamie and his team is to get as big as possible. “Everyone says if you’re huge you can make it work financially. But how do you get huge? You can’t get there until you’ve brought in the money.” It’s a Catch 22 but Jamie is not dispirited. He clearly loves the independence of working on his own project and with so much positive feedback on the site, it's hard to believe that they won't succeed. A big injection of cash would help, but for now local governments around the UK are a solid source of income. The site is a wonderfully practical idea so hopefully walkit will continue to help to relieve our streets of traffic for many years to come.
Thursday 10 April 2008
Danny Wallace
Start a cult
I met Danny Wallace, the accidental hero who inspired the social phenomenon "Join Me!" that’s become known as “guerrilla benevolence” and the “Karma Army”, in a busy Covent Garden café. He was fresh from BBC Broadcasting House and had an hour to kill before he was due on Richard and Judy. I had no problem recognising him as he arrived wearing the same T-shirt and parker as on the front cover of the book that describes how he created this curiously inspirational movement.
Danny Wallace, for want of a better label, is a professional prankster. Before “Join Me!”, he’d been around the world with a friend called Dave Gorman, looking for other people called Dave Gorman, which resulted in a humorous book called “Are You Dave Gorman?”. When that project was over, and a jobless Danny was “sitting around in my pants watching daytime TV”, he came up with the random idea of posting an advert in the free London paper, Loot, that said simply “Join Me!” and requested a passport-sized photo. When the first reply dropped through his letterbox, he arranged to meet the sender, “as much intrigued by why he would answer the ad as he was about why I would place it.” After a night of “boozing and curry” with someone who he wouldn’t have otherwise met, Danny decided to set up a “Join Me!” website and print some leaflets. “More and more passport photos arrived and they were all joining someone without knowing who they were joining, or what they were joining or why they were joining and I didn’t know either.”
As the story goes, some initial “Joinees” arranged to meet up and demanded a purpose. But Danny was nervous of meeting them. He thought, “They’re going to imagine this sort of bloke in big long purple robes, making amazing speeches, and women stroking his legs and they’re going to be left with a bloke who looks like one of the Proclaimers.” Instead, he sent some disposable cameras and a Dictaphone with this message: “It is I, the leader – go out and make an old man very happy. Take a picture. Send it back”. They did this and had a brilliant time.
Five years on, Danny spends more time appearing on daytime TV than watching it. Calling himself a “modern day cult leader”, he now commands all Joinees to commit random acts of kindness every Friday. “Thousands of people around the world, every Friday, do my bidding. Friday, is just so that I can call them Good Fridays and so I can make them sign the Good Friday Agreement. I could do Ten Commandments but that would be a bit too much for people. ‘Hit and run kindness’, I call it. You just go up, you do something, you leg it. It’s not going to solve all the world’s problems, but it will improve someone’s day for ten seconds, which might rub off.”
So what sort of things do Joinees do? “If you go up to an old lady whose been looking at a pot plant and then walked away and not bought it. You just think, “Well I should buy it”. You go up and say, “I bought this for you” and you’ve bewildered someone with kindness.” The initial idea of random acts of kindness, Danny explains, came from his love of practical jokes. Presenting an old lady with a pot plant is actually a lot like “sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on her back. You get the same buzz but actually the victim benefits and you feel great..”
Join Me! clearly started as a joke, a humorous idea to sell some books, and stumbled into becoming something altogether more substantial than its creator expected. But although it’s no longer only a joke, the joke ethos remains central. “Doing these acts of kindness is the same mentality as doing a prank, because you need to get over that embarrassment barrier and treat it like a joke. The vast majority of society want to do something nice, but are afraid to. It’s this weird social barrier where you might see someone struggling with some heavy shopping but you won’t go and help them, because they’re going to think you’re mental. Join Me! has become an excuse to do something nice. Everyone always says you shouldn’t need an excuse, but you know, bollocks, sometimes you do.”
Danny is full of stories about the happiness that Join Me! has brought to people’s lives. Like the 83 year old granny in Edinburgh who joined to raise her spirits after the death of both her husband and son within a fortnight. Danny sent her a postcard telling her that he was planning to be in town and would try and pop by. He then gathered together a group of local Joinees and turned up on her doorstep with flowers and chocolates. “It was great because there were all these 18 year olds, and it was the first time they’d done something this weird. We brought her all these gifts, and not one of us left with a dry eye. She was brilliant, a real character.” Even just hearing about Join Me! has helped some people. “One guy wrote to me recently and said he’d read about it just after his marriage had broken down and it had re-instilled his faith in people.”
Even though he got there more by accident than design, there’s a lot Danny can teach someone who wants to motivate large numbers of people to have a positive impact on the world. He came up with a simple idea that can capture people’s imagination. He put the internet to great use by getting people to share their experiences and arrange meetings in their local pubs. And he realised that personal contact is key – a lesson he learned from a vicar in Inverness, who contacted him with this piece of advice, to which Danny responded by hopping straight on a plane to meet him. “I flew up to Inverness and I stayed at his vicarage, and he’s a Joinee for life now.” The more his Joinees get together, Danny says, the more enthusiastic they become. “Suddenly it’s got proper, physical meaning, because there are other people doing it.”
Grown-up people doing good turns, like oversized boy scouts, is certainly a rich vein of humour. But, as Danny philosophises, “I’ve always thought that the most important way of getting a message across is through humour. So whatever you do you should, if you can, make it a bit funny. World peace, stop hunger, stop all wars, all that sort of stuff. I think most of it would be slightly alleviated if you just lighten up a bit. Have a cup of tea, have a sit down.”
I met Danny Wallace, the accidental hero who inspired the social phenomenon "Join Me!" that’s become known as “guerrilla benevolence” and the “Karma Army”, in a busy Covent Garden café. He was fresh from BBC Broadcasting House and had an hour to kill before he was due on Richard and Judy. I had no problem recognising him as he arrived wearing the same T-shirt and parker as on the front cover of the book that describes how he created this curiously inspirational movement.
Danny Wallace, for want of a better label, is a professional prankster. Before “Join Me!”, he’d been around the world with a friend called Dave Gorman, looking for other people called Dave Gorman, which resulted in a humorous book called “Are You Dave Gorman?”. When that project was over, and a jobless Danny was “sitting around in my pants watching daytime TV”, he came up with the random idea of posting an advert in the free London paper, Loot, that said simply “Join Me!” and requested a passport-sized photo. When the first reply dropped through his letterbox, he arranged to meet the sender, “as much intrigued by why he would answer the ad as he was about why I would place it.” After a night of “boozing and curry” with someone who he wouldn’t have otherwise met, Danny decided to set up a “Join Me!” website and print some leaflets. “More and more passport photos arrived and they were all joining someone without knowing who they were joining, or what they were joining or why they were joining and I didn’t know either.”
As the story goes, some initial “Joinees” arranged to meet up and demanded a purpose. But Danny was nervous of meeting them. He thought, “They’re going to imagine this sort of bloke in big long purple robes, making amazing speeches, and women stroking his legs and they’re going to be left with a bloke who looks like one of the Proclaimers.” Instead, he sent some disposable cameras and a Dictaphone with this message: “It is I, the leader – go out and make an old man very happy. Take a picture. Send it back”. They did this and had a brilliant time.
Five years on, Danny spends more time appearing on daytime TV than watching it. Calling himself a “modern day cult leader”, he now commands all Joinees to commit random acts of kindness every Friday. “Thousands of people around the world, every Friday, do my bidding. Friday, is just so that I can call them Good Fridays and so I can make them sign the Good Friday Agreement. I could do Ten Commandments but that would be a bit too much for people. ‘Hit and run kindness’, I call it. You just go up, you do something, you leg it. It’s not going to solve all the world’s problems, but it will improve someone’s day for ten seconds, which might rub off.”
So what sort of things do Joinees do? “If you go up to an old lady whose been looking at a pot plant and then walked away and not bought it. You just think, “Well I should buy it”. You go up and say, “I bought this for you” and you’ve bewildered someone with kindness.” The initial idea of random acts of kindness, Danny explains, came from his love of practical jokes. Presenting an old lady with a pot plant is actually a lot like “sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on her back. You get the same buzz but actually the victim benefits and you feel great..”
Join Me! clearly started as a joke, a humorous idea to sell some books, and stumbled into becoming something altogether more substantial than its creator expected. But although it’s no longer only a joke, the joke ethos remains central. “Doing these acts of kindness is the same mentality as doing a prank, because you need to get over that embarrassment barrier and treat it like a joke. The vast majority of society want to do something nice, but are afraid to. It’s this weird social barrier where you might see someone struggling with some heavy shopping but you won’t go and help them, because they’re going to think you’re mental. Join Me! has become an excuse to do something nice. Everyone always says you shouldn’t need an excuse, but you know, bollocks, sometimes you do.”
Danny is full of stories about the happiness that Join Me! has brought to people’s lives. Like the 83 year old granny in Edinburgh who joined to raise her spirits after the death of both her husband and son within a fortnight. Danny sent her a postcard telling her that he was planning to be in town and would try and pop by. He then gathered together a group of local Joinees and turned up on her doorstep with flowers and chocolates. “It was great because there were all these 18 year olds, and it was the first time they’d done something this weird. We brought her all these gifts, and not one of us left with a dry eye. She was brilliant, a real character.” Even just hearing about Join Me! has helped some people. “One guy wrote to me recently and said he’d read about it just after his marriage had broken down and it had re-instilled his faith in people.”
Even though he got there more by accident than design, there’s a lot Danny can teach someone who wants to motivate large numbers of people to have a positive impact on the world. He came up with a simple idea that can capture people’s imagination. He put the internet to great use by getting people to share their experiences and arrange meetings in their local pubs. And he realised that personal contact is key – a lesson he learned from a vicar in Inverness, who contacted him with this piece of advice, to which Danny responded by hopping straight on a plane to meet him. “I flew up to Inverness and I stayed at his vicarage, and he’s a Joinee for life now.” The more his Joinees get together, Danny says, the more enthusiastic they become. “Suddenly it’s got proper, physical meaning, because there are other people doing it.”
Grown-up people doing good turns, like oversized boy scouts, is certainly a rich vein of humour. But, as Danny philosophises, “I’ve always thought that the most important way of getting a message across is through humour. So whatever you do you should, if you can, make it a bit funny. World peace, stop hunger, stop all wars, all that sort of stuff. I think most of it would be slightly alleviated if you just lighten up a bit. Have a cup of tea, have a sit down.”
Thursday 20 March 2008
Abdullah Solak
Run a shop
Since Organic and Natural opened around the corner from my house about two years ago, it has made a big difference to my life as well as countless others in the neighbourhood. Abdullah Solak is the entrepreneur behind the idea. He spotted a growing appetite for organic goods in Palm 2, the supermarket which he’s been running for 14 years on the Lower Clapton Road. So, when a friend who was running a Turkish men’s club in the site that is now Organic and Natural told him he was struggling, Abdullah saw an opportunity to expand his business and took over the lease.
When it first opened in August 2006 the shop stocked little more than a few dried goods and some cosmetics. On the counter was a box asking for suggestions and Abdullah, and his assistant Miranda, who runs the business day to day, have listened very carefully. Now, the shop is packed with delicious organic goods and fresh vegetables, there's fresh bread daily, you can refill your Ecover goods, buy green nappies and even have an organic cappuccino.
Although the profits aren’t huge, Abdullah believes they will come and is happy to be patient. Palm 2 took a year or so to get going and is now hugely profitable. Organic and Natural is making money slowly but Abdullah is delighted with the other positive effects he is seeing from the business. "All my family eat better since we’ve opened this shop", he tells me. He even connects his brother giving up smoking with his business. "The customers are really friendly" and don't make trouble unlike some of the clientèle of his other shop, which he adds, sells a lot of alcohol.
I love the genuine and unpretentious nature of this business. When I asked Abdullah what the philosophy of his business was and how they decided what to stock, he said that he trusted his customers to tell him what to sell. At the same time, simple touches like using energy saving lightbulbs in the shop, recycling fridges and shop furniture, collecting used carrier bags and offering them to customers rather than new ones, make the whole operation seem to be concerned with protecting the environment. They also do their best to undercut the competition on prices, rather than trying to milk as much as they can out of ethically minded consumers. I really do love this shop!
What's the message for others who want to make a difference like this? It's not a way to make fast money but Organic and Natural is helping many people to live healthier, more environmentally responsible lives and because of this, it's very rewarding for those in charge.
Since Organic and Natural opened around the corner from my house about two years ago, it has made a big difference to my life as well as countless others in the neighbourhood. Abdullah Solak is the entrepreneur behind the idea. He spotted a growing appetite for organic goods in Palm 2, the supermarket which he’s been running for 14 years on the Lower Clapton Road. So, when a friend who was running a Turkish men’s club in the site that is now Organic and Natural told him he was struggling, Abdullah saw an opportunity to expand his business and took over the lease.
When it first opened in August 2006 the shop stocked little more than a few dried goods and some cosmetics. On the counter was a box asking for suggestions and Abdullah, and his assistant Miranda, who runs the business day to day, have listened very carefully. Now, the shop is packed with delicious organic goods and fresh vegetables, there's fresh bread daily, you can refill your Ecover goods, buy green nappies and even have an organic cappuccino.
Although the profits aren’t huge, Abdullah believes they will come and is happy to be patient. Palm 2 took a year or so to get going and is now hugely profitable. Organic and Natural is making money slowly but Abdullah is delighted with the other positive effects he is seeing from the business. "All my family eat better since we’ve opened this shop", he tells me. He even connects his brother giving up smoking with his business. "The customers are really friendly" and don't make trouble unlike some of the clientèle of his other shop, which he adds, sells a lot of alcohol.
I love the genuine and unpretentious nature of this business. When I asked Abdullah what the philosophy of his business was and how they decided what to stock, he said that he trusted his customers to tell him what to sell. At the same time, simple touches like using energy saving lightbulbs in the shop, recycling fridges and shop furniture, collecting used carrier bags and offering them to customers rather than new ones, make the whole operation seem to be concerned with protecting the environment. They also do their best to undercut the competition on prices, rather than trying to milk as much as they can out of ethically minded consumers. I really do love this shop!
What's the message for others who want to make a difference like this? It's not a way to make fast money but Organic and Natural is helping many people to live healthier, more environmentally responsible lives and because of this, it's very rewarding for those in charge.
Wednesday 12 March 2008
Tim Crozier-Cole and Cathy Hough
Save Energy
Tim Crozier-Cole and Cathy Hough are a partnership with no shortage of energy. Their laughter is infectious and their spirits are irrepressible. Maybe this is attributable to the way they spend their work lives. At the office, the couple spend their time saving a different type of energy. The stuff that usually comes down wires. Tim and Cathy both work for Energy for Sustainable Development, a consultancy which advises businesses, architects, property developers, community groups and governments how to save energy and therefore reduce their environmental impact. They've worked for the company where they met for eight years or so, during which time it has grown from 25 people in a "barn in Wiltshire" to about 200 people worldwide.
Tim, who trained as an engineer, works with property developers, helping them to make crucial energy saving decisions, early on in the design of their projects. Cathy is working with non-governmental organisations, business and government to try and stimulate energy saving measures in existing housing stock in the UK. With climate change looking increasingly threatening, their work is in big demand. Growing interest in a low-carbon future has kept their jobs stimulating and challenging.
Like any couple who work together they have to be careful not to let work take over their home life. A bit of seepage is inevitable though. There's a discernibly high awareness of energy use around their house and Tim even admits to having calculated the carbon budget of the home births of their two daughters. Their young children are the main consumers of this couple's energy right now, so it's even more impressive that they are able to contribute to conserving our planet's limited resources through their work lives. These two are definitely an electric combination.
Tim Crozier-Cole and Cathy Hough are a partnership with no shortage of energy. Their laughter is infectious and their spirits are irrepressible. Maybe this is attributable to the way they spend their work lives. At the office, the couple spend their time saving a different type of energy. The stuff that usually comes down wires. Tim and Cathy both work for Energy for Sustainable Development, a consultancy which advises businesses, architects, property developers, community groups and governments how to save energy and therefore reduce their environmental impact. They've worked for the company where they met for eight years or so, during which time it has grown from 25 people in a "barn in Wiltshire" to about 200 people worldwide.
Tim, who trained as an engineer, works with property developers, helping them to make crucial energy saving decisions, early on in the design of their projects. Cathy is working with non-governmental organisations, business and government to try and stimulate energy saving measures in existing housing stock in the UK. With climate change looking increasingly threatening, their work is in big demand. Growing interest in a low-carbon future has kept their jobs stimulating and challenging.
Like any couple who work together they have to be careful not to let work take over their home life. A bit of seepage is inevitable though. There's a discernibly high awareness of energy use around their house and Tim even admits to having calculated the carbon budget of the home births of their two daughters. Their young children are the main consumers of this couple's energy right now, so it's even more impressive that they are able to contribute to conserving our planet's limited resources through their work lives. These two are definitely an electric combination.
Tuesday 4 March 2008
Trewin Restorick
Motivate communities to be greener
When I arranged to meet Trewin Restorick, I did not expect to be interviewing him in an extravagantly teak-panelled room in the heart of Lincoln’s Inn, the home of some of London’s most highly paid lawyers. But this, it turns out, is where Global Action Plan UK – the organisation Trewin founded and directs – rents its offices from the Furnishing Trade Benevolent Association. The lavish hardwood surroundings are especially incongruous given that, GAP exists to tackle environmental destruction. It works by educating individuals and spurring them into action.
Trewin seems equally surprised to be here, not because of the teak panels but because he is self-effacing enough that he can’t quite believe I am interested in what he has to say. But this is a man who’s got thousands of school children, office workers and ordinary citizens to reduce their environmental impact over the past fifteen years. I think it’s worth finding something out about anyone who can achieve that.
GAP works to provide people with the information they need to become civically engaged. They run a variety of structure programmes: “Ecoteams” bring together groups of households to work out what they can do to reduce their domestic environmental impact; “Environmental Champions” help people to set targets and improve workplace environmental performance; and “Action at School” focuses on bringing environmental education into the curriculum.
“We advise the Ghandi philosophy of every long journey starts with a small step,” Trewin says. “Look at your lifestyle and make whatever changes are feasible and practical for you to make. When you start to meet obstacles like lack of public transport or lack of decent labelling, then start voicing those frustrations in a political context.”
Trewin discovered his passion early on. Student activism led him into a first job on recycling schemes in Devon – “I met some really inspiring people who were running practical initiatives and giving local employment” – and he used that experience to get a job at Friends of the Earth. But he found himself and his employer growing apart. “Back then, Friends of the Earth was very much about looking at solutions as well as campaigning - the velvet glove around the iron fist. But they’ve taken the velvet glove away now, they’re very much a campaigning organisation, and that’s not where I come from at all”
In 1993 Trewin decided to leave the security of Friends of the Earth so that he could spend his time motivating people to take personal action on the environment. He accepted the job, for “virtually no money”, of setting up Global Action Plan in the UK following its successful foundation in the US three years earlier. Since 1993 nearly 200 schools, about 100 businesses and 2500 households have been involved in GAP UK’s projects. “We try not to be ‘thou shalt’-ish, because that doesn’t really work.” Instead, they teach people about the issues so that they can work out themselves how to set targets and achieve them.
By its nature, individual action yields incremental results, and Trewin admits to getting frustrated by the slow pace of progress: “I know we achieve change but it’s changes on the margin.” Is campaigning for legislative change not the way forward after all, then? “You have to remember that legislation isn’t enough if you don’t also have education. If you brought in legislation which made everybody’s home fantastically energy efficient, but you don’t educate people, they might still go out and buy a great big SUV. I think we need an engaged and articulate electorate, so that their level of education about the issues can keep pace with legislative change.”
Trewin clearly doesn’t believe in quick fixes. But the frustrations he encounters when contemplating the long journey ahead are outweighed by the immense personal satisfaction of inspiring people to make small steps. “Seeing an organisation grow, and working with a group of really nice people in a very positive and friendly atmosphere is incredibly rewarding. As is meeting people who’ve done something and feel really good about it, and who realise that environmentalism is not that cranky and strange after all.”
When I got home, I searched the internet for the Ghandi quote Trewin had used and discovered he was actually quoting the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. Beneath it happened to be another piece of wisdom from Lao Tzu, which seemed to me to sum up Trewin’s approach perfectly: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
When I arranged to meet Trewin Restorick, I did not expect to be interviewing him in an extravagantly teak-panelled room in the heart of Lincoln’s Inn, the home of some of London’s most highly paid lawyers. But this, it turns out, is where Global Action Plan UK – the organisation Trewin founded and directs – rents its offices from the Furnishing Trade Benevolent Association. The lavish hardwood surroundings are especially incongruous given that, GAP exists to tackle environmental destruction. It works by educating individuals and spurring them into action.
Trewin seems equally surprised to be here, not because of the teak panels but because he is self-effacing enough that he can’t quite believe I am interested in what he has to say. But this is a man who’s got thousands of school children, office workers and ordinary citizens to reduce their environmental impact over the past fifteen years. I think it’s worth finding something out about anyone who can achieve that.
GAP works to provide people with the information they need to become civically engaged. They run a variety of structure programmes: “Ecoteams” bring together groups of households to work out what they can do to reduce their domestic environmental impact; “Environmental Champions” help people to set targets and improve workplace environmental performance; and “Action at School” focuses on bringing environmental education into the curriculum.
“We advise the Ghandi philosophy of every long journey starts with a small step,” Trewin says. “Look at your lifestyle and make whatever changes are feasible and practical for you to make. When you start to meet obstacles like lack of public transport or lack of decent labelling, then start voicing those frustrations in a political context.”
Trewin discovered his passion early on. Student activism led him into a first job on recycling schemes in Devon – “I met some really inspiring people who were running practical initiatives and giving local employment” – and he used that experience to get a job at Friends of the Earth. But he found himself and his employer growing apart. “Back then, Friends of the Earth was very much about looking at solutions as well as campaigning - the velvet glove around the iron fist. But they’ve taken the velvet glove away now, they’re very much a campaigning organisation, and that’s not where I come from at all”
In 1993 Trewin decided to leave the security of Friends of the Earth so that he could spend his time motivating people to take personal action on the environment. He accepted the job, for “virtually no money”, of setting up Global Action Plan in the UK following its successful foundation in the US three years earlier. Since 1993 nearly 200 schools, about 100 businesses and 2500 households have been involved in GAP UK’s projects. “We try not to be ‘thou shalt’-ish, because that doesn’t really work.” Instead, they teach people about the issues so that they can work out themselves how to set targets and achieve them.
By its nature, individual action yields incremental results, and Trewin admits to getting frustrated by the slow pace of progress: “I know we achieve change but it’s changes on the margin.” Is campaigning for legislative change not the way forward after all, then? “You have to remember that legislation isn’t enough if you don’t also have education. If you brought in legislation which made everybody’s home fantastically energy efficient, but you don’t educate people, they might still go out and buy a great big SUV. I think we need an engaged and articulate electorate, so that their level of education about the issues can keep pace with legislative change.”
Trewin clearly doesn’t believe in quick fixes. But the frustrations he encounters when contemplating the long journey ahead are outweighed by the immense personal satisfaction of inspiring people to make small steps. “Seeing an organisation grow, and working with a group of really nice people in a very positive and friendly atmosphere is incredibly rewarding. As is meeting people who’ve done something and feel really good about it, and who realise that environmentalism is not that cranky and strange after all.”
When I got home, I searched the internet for the Ghandi quote Trewin had used and discovered he was actually quoting the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. Beneath it happened to be another piece of wisdom from Lao Tzu, which seemed to me to sum up Trewin’s approach perfectly: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
Friday 15 February 2008
Gene Karpinski
Motivate people to act in the public interest
The first thing that strikes you about Gene Karpinski is how fast he talks; three decades of representing the public interest to the US government must hone your skills in getting your message across as speedily as possible. The next thing that strikes you is that he radiates happiness. “If I ever step back and say ‘What’s the perfect job for me?’”, he explains – though it’s hard to imagine this is someone who spends much time stepping back –, “This is the perfect job for me.”
I met Gene in his cramped office in the shadows of the seat of US government on Capitol Hill, from where he directs the US Public Interest Research Group. US PIRG is an umbrella organisation which works on behalf of many state-based public interest organisations. “There are 15 advocates that work for me and they’re working on everything from saving the Arctic Refuge to trying to fix the health-care system, to trying to fight the banks, to trying to clean up our air pollution from power plants. We want to get involved where we think there’s a clear public interest versus a special interest angle.”
This kind of public interest campaigning is particularly relevant in the US, where large – often corporate – donors with special interests have a significant influence over politics. Gene got into this line of work immediately after law school, when he became an intern for organisations battling corruption and nuclear power. “I definitely sensed, ‘this is great and it’s what I want to do’ and I’ve been working in public interest work ever since.”
Gene became director of US PIRG in 1984. There can’t be many people who retain his obvious levels of enthusiasm after being in the same job for over twenty years. One reason, he says, is there’s always something new cropping up on his very wide agenda: “We should protect our environment, we should protect consumers and we should have a clean, open government. Those are broad principles, big-picture concerns”. Another, no doubt, is the long list of victories; some recent ones include fighting off proposals for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, helping to pass a bill to reduce subsidies to polluting industries, and preventing the Bush Administration’s attempts to remove protections for roadless areas in national forests. “When you’re involved in a set of issues nationally and an even broader set of issues state by state, there’s always some place you can point to where there’s positive change, literally that day or that week”.
How have they managed to achieve such impact without the enormous financial backing that most lobbyists enjoy? Thorough investigative research – “research is our middle name” – enables them to mount well-targeted media exposés and litigation. But the key is educating people and inspiring them to campaign. Gene makes full use of the internet, but he still also swears by more traditional methods. “We do a lot of door-to-door knocking and talking, ‘Hi, we’re here from PIRG. We want to talk about Clean Air issues. Did you know that President Bush is trying to weaken the Clean Air Act? Well here’s what that’s going to mean in your community and we’d like your support.’”
US PIRG devotes much of its energy to knitting together grassroots coalitions formed from diverse sectors of society. “We build the largest group possible of allies. It might be labour unions in one case, it might be the religious community in another case, it might be the fishing community on a particular issue or it might be physicians on a health-care issue.” He’s seen how ordinary people really can make an impact: “Write a letter, come to a meeting, go to a rally, be active, and the more folks are active on these issues the more we’re gonna win!” And he points out that, although special interests have many other advantages, grassroots organising is one battlefield on which they find it hard to engage. “They can’t organise masses of people through the internet by saying ‘We want to keep dumping toxic chemicals. Please tell them not to make us clean up.’”
Gene has a tangible grasp of his impact: he can actually point to numerous bills passed or stopped as a result of US PIRG’s campaigns. But he also has a more precise sense of the scale of the obstacles he faces. “We have the facts on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have the public on our side, so why aren’t we winning more?” It’s a rhetorical question. “Right now if you want to run for office in this country for the House of Representatives you have to raise a million dollars. Where are you going to find a million dollars? You have to go grovelling for it.”
But somehow, remarkably, he shows no sign of being daunted or discouraged. “Public interest advocacy is not for the short-winded. It needs to be a life-time effort to try and change society in positive ways. Any one issue can take years and years and years to resolve.” He’s brimming with optimism about the increasing numbers of people who are being attracted to a career in public interest work. “It’s both the professional side of it, actually seeing progress and making change, and the personal side, you know you’re working with close contacts and colleagues and friends who share your values and experiences and want to change society together.”
Much more than the varied nature of the work or the drip-drip-drip of morale-boosting successes, it’s obviously this fundamental aspect of his career which keeps Gene buzzing. “Whether you’re fighting the oil companies or the timber industry or the banks or insurance companies, you can bring your conscience to work every day on a set of causes that you believe in.” One wonders how many lobbyists employed by oil companies, the timber industry, banks or insurance companies could say the same.
The first thing that strikes you about Gene Karpinski is how fast he talks; three decades of representing the public interest to the US government must hone your skills in getting your message across as speedily as possible. The next thing that strikes you is that he radiates happiness. “If I ever step back and say ‘What’s the perfect job for me?’”, he explains – though it’s hard to imagine this is someone who spends much time stepping back –, “This is the perfect job for me.”
I met Gene in his cramped office in the shadows of the seat of US government on Capitol Hill, from where he directs the US Public Interest Research Group. US PIRG is an umbrella organisation which works on behalf of many state-based public interest organisations. “There are 15 advocates that work for me and they’re working on everything from saving the Arctic Refuge to trying to fix the health-care system, to trying to fight the banks, to trying to clean up our air pollution from power plants. We want to get involved where we think there’s a clear public interest versus a special interest angle.”
This kind of public interest campaigning is particularly relevant in the US, where large – often corporate – donors with special interests have a significant influence over politics. Gene got into this line of work immediately after law school, when he became an intern for organisations battling corruption and nuclear power. “I definitely sensed, ‘this is great and it’s what I want to do’ and I’ve been working in public interest work ever since.”
Gene became director of US PIRG in 1984. There can’t be many people who retain his obvious levels of enthusiasm after being in the same job for over twenty years. One reason, he says, is there’s always something new cropping up on his very wide agenda: “We should protect our environment, we should protect consumers and we should have a clean, open government. Those are broad principles, big-picture concerns”. Another, no doubt, is the long list of victories; some recent ones include fighting off proposals for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, helping to pass a bill to reduce subsidies to polluting industries, and preventing the Bush Administration’s attempts to remove protections for roadless areas in national forests. “When you’re involved in a set of issues nationally and an even broader set of issues state by state, there’s always some place you can point to where there’s positive change, literally that day or that week”.
How have they managed to achieve such impact without the enormous financial backing that most lobbyists enjoy? Thorough investigative research – “research is our middle name” – enables them to mount well-targeted media exposés and litigation. But the key is educating people and inspiring them to campaign. Gene makes full use of the internet, but he still also swears by more traditional methods. “We do a lot of door-to-door knocking and talking, ‘Hi, we’re here from PIRG. We want to talk about Clean Air issues. Did you know that President Bush is trying to weaken the Clean Air Act? Well here’s what that’s going to mean in your community and we’d like your support.’”
US PIRG devotes much of its energy to knitting together grassroots coalitions formed from diverse sectors of society. “We build the largest group possible of allies. It might be labour unions in one case, it might be the religious community in another case, it might be the fishing community on a particular issue or it might be physicians on a health-care issue.” He’s seen how ordinary people really can make an impact: “Write a letter, come to a meeting, go to a rally, be active, and the more folks are active on these issues the more we’re gonna win!” And he points out that, although special interests have many other advantages, grassroots organising is one battlefield on which they find it hard to engage. “They can’t organise masses of people through the internet by saying ‘We want to keep dumping toxic chemicals. Please tell them not to make us clean up.’”
Gene has a tangible grasp of his impact: he can actually point to numerous bills passed or stopped as a result of US PIRG’s campaigns. But he also has a more precise sense of the scale of the obstacles he faces. “We have the facts on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have the public on our side, so why aren’t we winning more?” It’s a rhetorical question. “Right now if you want to run for office in this country for the House of Representatives you have to raise a million dollars. Where are you going to find a million dollars? You have to go grovelling for it.”
But somehow, remarkably, he shows no sign of being daunted or discouraged. “Public interest advocacy is not for the short-winded. It needs to be a life-time effort to try and change society in positive ways. Any one issue can take years and years and years to resolve.” He’s brimming with optimism about the increasing numbers of people who are being attracted to a career in public interest work. “It’s both the professional side of it, actually seeing progress and making change, and the personal side, you know you’re working with close contacts and colleagues and friends who share your values and experiences and want to change society together.”
Much more than the varied nature of the work or the drip-drip-drip of morale-boosting successes, it’s obviously this fundamental aspect of his career which keeps Gene buzzing. “Whether you’re fighting the oil companies or the timber industry or the banks or insurance companies, you can bring your conscience to work every day on a set of causes that you believe in.” One wonders how many lobbyists employed by oil companies, the timber industry, banks or insurance companies could say the same.
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