-The greater potential for our well-being of political, economic & spiritual community drives Paul Crosland to stand in general elections & to write the “Relearning PCECSC trilogy“(or #PeskyTrilogy for short):Volume 1 - The Myth Of The Heartless Tory; Vol 2 - The Pioneering 108 Vagabond Custodians preparing for The Festival Of The New Society 2066; Vol 3 - Politics As A Spiritual Practice. These books will form the shares in “Refuge Tree Woods” where we gather to refine our organic plot…
I've been reminded recently of a controversial aphorism: "Help the Strong". This morning I realised what my working definition of "the strong" is ie those who have been receptive to one of your two-day trainings or to some other formalised structure to support individual growth eg Hastings Buddhist Centre, as supported by a guy called Vidyakaya*.
Rather than give everyone who attended your training here a copy of your book, prompted by my partner", I want to practice freelending (and possibly timebanking at the same time). Buying a stock of just 10 books from you, I'll promote the book to those who came to your last years training, lend the book for a month to anyone who wants to borrow it (including an advert for it in the forthcoing fortnightly newspaper I'm launching at St Leonards Warrior Square Station), and deliver/collect it on my bike using timebanked hours where possible.
Dear X Let me just mark this stage of the "story" by stating that I believe you can achieve great things in St Leonards in the context of a strong team that is deeply committed to working through conflicts. To use Maria's words (paraphrased): "Wherever there is more than one person, there is conflict. Wherever the conflict is expressed there is a dispute. Wherever there is conflict or dispute, an authentic exploration of needs and values enables healing that no other process achieves." The vision that I had for you, Patsy Solanki, Sue C & Ms Z last autumn was of "a sisterhood", providing mutual support that enabled you, amongst other things, to get the best out of me in making my contribution to "a more caring and sharing St Leonards", to which I am deeply committed, though often feel under-resourced. Thus, some difficulties in life I too postpone handling, striving to treat people with respect as I do so. Of course I balance this by asking: Why postpone your integration (& integrity) any longer?
Also http://YouTube.com/toothpaste007 - I've experimented in many ways with filming. I'd really value it if you subscribed and let me know what filming could enhance your connection with others and help develop a "more caring & sharing community" around you?
Here now is my Community Development Portfolio (which helped secure me a close second place out of 5 candidates for the Neighbourhood Enablers Team co-ordinator post (for which I didn't even apply, until I was asked to by those due to do the interviewing).
If you are keener to see a diverse group of people explaining how they got involved with the Community Development work led by Paul Crosland, this film
shows the amazing synergy that began with the launch of "Hastings & St Leonards Action for Happiness". Mark Williamson, the national CEO of Action for Happiness visited us as "a leading local group" in September 2011; the circle process being facilitated by Paul Crosland in what has been hailed as "an exemplary style":
And here's the Hastings Trust Mission, Vision and Strategy that I love and constructively question how it is being put into place:
Our Vision Our vision is for Hastings to be a place of connected, creative and sustainable communities that people are proud to be a part of. Our Mission
Our mission is to identify and create opportunities for people to work together, improving the quality of local lives now and for the future.
We aim to deliver this through the following areas of activity:
A Asset acquisition, protection and development
• To provide a more secure financial future for [our] communities.
• To provide affordable, accessible and appropriate accommodation to enable more socially focussed organisations to operate for the good of the future regeneration of our communities.
• To contribute to the urban regeneration of the area through the improvement and redevelopment of underutilised properties.
B Routes out of poverty and worklessness
• To enable the community economic development of the area through provision of appropriate support and assistance which enables local people to become economically active and less reliant on state assistance, thereby improving quality of community and individual life.
C Community development and quality of life – arts, culture, heritage and environment
• To enable local people to have greater control over the fortunes of their communities, to work together for the common good, and to improve quality of community and individual life.
• To provide the right environment for environmental, cultural, heritage and arts development thereby enhancing the regeneration of the area, improving the local economy and improving quality of individual and community life.
All of which are underpinned by:
D Secure financial position, management team and governance
• To ensure that [we have the structures to] provide long term support to enable the social, economic and environmental regeneration of Hastings, St Leonards.
E Campaigning, lobbying and partnership working
• To ensure that [we] and the wider third sector, locally, regionally and nationally, is better equipped to provide all of the above for the common good, to enhance social, economic, cultural and environmental regeneration and thereby improve quality of individual and community life.
If you can see that your concerns might benefit from some tweaking of the social media you generate, then come to a workshop at the Southwater Area Community Centre or at your place on request. No money payable; I will value your skills equally to mine and trade an hour for an hour through "St Leonards Sharing" timebank.
1) The "Non-exploitation card" scheme -making purchases in Hastings & St Leonards 20% cheaper for those who make a non-property-profiteering agreement:
& Paul has (allegedly) improved on Damian Hirst's Art:
The video on YouTube has a link to the website where Paul would be grateful, warm & fuzzy if you engaged in voting for the St Leonards Love Statue of your choice on http://love-statues.blogspot.co.uk
NB 8 themes (for the vote on the drama you want written about what's going on here -& elsewhere):
Local community (re)generation themes:
The ongoing loss of justice in relation to those known to have been on the pier on the night of the fire & the consequences of not resolving this to the satisfaction of the community?
What difference the Jerwood Gallery is making, or will -in time- make to Hastings, and whether there is harm to be addressed here too?
What "St Leonards Love Statues" could do for "St Leonards" in the way that Anthony Gormley statues eg "The Angel of the North" have done for their local areas?
How to stop developments squeezing out much that we value here?
How we can best address social exclusion and the roots of social unrest?
“Sustainable Local Futures” - in the new world economic order, undertaking the transition to a local economy that is more independent of world shocks?
“The amazing wealth of original, talented young people ,numerous local, high profile events and projects” promoted by The Respond Academy, amongst others?
"Ethical Outings in Hastings & St Leonards" (in relation to Arson etc) & what role we play across all generations in "character building" and taking responsibility, rather than letting things get worse.
There are three activities that I'm most keen to develop further as a contribution towards Community Development:
1) Sharing what we own
2) Developing Mutual Support Systems through Timebank Brokerage (Focussed Networks of Time Exchanges that build Social Justice).
3) Building a comprehensive Community Justice System (so that no grievance is left over; everyone knowing how to get support to process any dispute or conflict.)
A brief film from me on Sharing:
A brief film from someone in America I've never met about Timebanking:
Summary of the 6 types of Vision I've put out for St Leonards (& Hastings):
At the close of this video (from 7 minutes and 53 seconds in), Dominic asks the key questions that promote engagement in vital dialogues as a pro-active considered choice rather than a reaction to what's going on that is taken on the hoof:
How can we create communities which are resilient enough, robust enough, to deal with this [period] of intense transition that we are in on almost every front:
transition in relationships
transition in parenting
transition in education
But also huge coming social transitions
with the way we distribute resources
with the way that we deal with the consequences of massive climate transformation
with the way in which we deal with the increasingly volatile economic situations
WE WILL BE MAKING DECISIONS
WE WILL BE RETURNING TO TOWN SQUARES
WE WILL BE RE-OPENING PUBLIC DIALOGUE ; if not because of the exciting potential that that gives us for democracy, then simply because the kinds of situation that we are increasingly confronting demand that of us.
So I would like us to learn to get more and more skilful about:
How do we create social dialogue?
How do we create procedures which support social dialogue?
How do we create outcomes from that process which (actually) effectively meet fundamental human needs?
Does anyone want to join me in filming more in this series about (Hastings &) St Leonards being the place we know with the highest quality of life at the lowest cost of living & CAMPAIGNING TO PROTECT THAT FROM INITIATIVES WHICH RAISE THE COST OF LIVING AND FALSELY RAISE THE VALUE OF OUR PROPERTIES. ('Funny Money' is unsustainable and taints us with the 'greed' of which we accuse others).
Sadly, there are Council led initiatives which threaten the low cost of living here. This is part of a questionable regeneration strategy risking generating only another Brightonesque "London by the Sea"?
This film is the first in the new CAMPAIGNING series: "The Cost of Living in St Leonards):
To complete this background information by providing the two pages about freelender.org, Edmund Johnson & I in "The Moneyless Man" by Mark Boyle (being published in 16 languages, I'm told:
Here's "The Moneyless Man"; demonstrating that humans don't need money to meet their needs; money is a strategy (not a universal need) & MONEY OFTEN HAS A HIGHER COST THAN FORMS OF TRADING THAT BUILD MORE TRUST, COMMUNITY & GENEROSITY:
And from April 2010, here's Maria talking about the relative importance of my various Community Development projects -crucially www.freelender.org - and how the Centre for Peaceful Solutions is working innovatively in also generating the skills for the well-being of communities, skills to be held by all, rather than put in the hands only of professionals:
I do much of my work on facebook; the stages of my best work being
Dreaming and Visioning
Planning
Networking & Doing,
Reviewing
(Then round this cycle again and again. I even taught the dream-cycle to a year group of students in the central city of India -Nagpur- in 2010: http://nagaloka-dream-cycle.blogspot.com)
One organisation that supports me in doing much of my work is the company I set up after being "Head of Restorative Justice" for 5 years at Mediation UK -the national charity which used to exist to represent and support community mediation services. The company is called Mediation Support Ltd. If you are interested in developing any of the above areas of work, please drop me an email via the Mediation Support contact form which clearly states what you'd like to happen next to further your interests.
Another structure that (alongside co-director Edmund Johnson) is being offered to communities in East Sussex and beyond is the Community Interest Company (a bit like a charity but easier to run) that we set up in 2008 and whose work has been hailed both by the leading UK Sustainability Think Tank, Forum for the Future, and within one of the seminal "transition books" of our era: "The Moneyless Man" by (out-there) Mark Boyle. The Community Interest Company that you are invited to apply to co-direct is currently called Freelending CIC. One of the fun spin-off of this work in developing how communities can share more (eg tools, clothes, cars, beachhuts, DVDs, conversations) and build-trust is the creation of the "Lend-It-All Man" persona:
For “Creative Timebank Brokerage”, example websites are www.timebanking.org www.stleonardssharing.infowww.east-sussex-veg-people.blogspot.comwww.ethicaloutings.blogspot.com
& Here's part of an interview I made with Sarah Bird from Timebanking UK which shows, amongst other things, that Timebank volunteering has been recognised as taking the pressure off the council Home Repair Service:
For “Door-knocking as a Team-Building Occupation”, my inspiration comes from work which I did whilst employed by www.karuna.org The “two-step” fundraising model they use has great potential as I see it to be applied to increasing our connections with our neighbours. (More background on the skills, ethics and integrity required in the kind of door-knocking that opens hearts available on request; this is what in my opinion Community Development Work could benefit from greatly …..)
And now for the Walking Buddhas of Hastings, St Leonards & making this the place of grand sculpture in SE England?
(http://www.youtube.com/v/ZoAURxQK9dw)
And here's the Walking Buddha Statue being replicated as part of the re-positioning of Hastings & St Leonards in the new cultural and economic world order:
There are three activities that I'm most keen to develop further as a contribution towards Community Development:
Though I haven't yet inspired a St Leonards team to knock-on doors for the sake of the development of our community, I sense that this possibility is getting nearer after the 2012 St Leonards Community Planning meetings began. Below I'm with Erica Smith of the Hastings Network and with Jeremy Birch, the leader of Hastings Borough Council:
AGAIN:
If you are interested in developing any (or all) of the above areas of work, please drop me an email via the Mediation Support contact form Please reflect first on what you'd like to happen next to further your interests & your care for the well-being of your local community.
+++++++++++++++++++++
And...,
To say a little more, as a Community Development worker, four things that I'm particularly troubled by in the UK are:
1) "An English man's home is his castle" property protection mentality
2) Mass (individualised) Consumption rather than collective ownership eg How much easier it is for people to purchase stuff than to use the Internet to find the same stuff being shared.
3) That nonviolence is not deeply understood as a life-course.
4) That the vision of community is often so limited by all of the above -AND MORE
THESE ARE SOME OF THE REASONS WHY I WISH TO DRAW ON MY DEEPEST EXPERIENCES OF COMMUNITY which I have found in Indian Ambedkarite Buddhists. The Normans coming out of the sea may be more relevant to Hastings' past. I'm not the person to advance that project. Rather I'm wanting to work on agendas such as the "cities of sanctuary" project to build a healthier approach to immigration. We have so much to learn from my friends in India, particularly "how to live better for less". "how to live better for less" is also St Leonards' unique selling point. This is partly the basis on which I'm inviting Amber Rudd (MP), Jeremy Birch (leader of the council) and Kim Forward (Mayor) to a meeting to discuss how government, local and national, can best support sharing of cars, houses etc and what social policies, cultural links and arts will best position Hastings & St Leonards as a resilient, well-connected place in the face of the coming new world order?
The process said to be necessary to build any community with any depth:
The Stakeholder Analysis in relation to Hastings Pier:
LINKS THAT CAN BE FOLLOWED UP ACCORDING TO WHAT AREA OF COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN DEVELOPING OR MAINTAINING:
Hastings Observer pieces:
June 2011 -"We need to act if we want justice"
June 2011 -"Group aims to get Hastings smiling again"
September 30th 2011 -"Talks to mark the anniversary
AGAIN:
If you are interested in developing any (or all) of the above areas of work, please drop me an email via the Mediation Support contact form Please reflect first on what you'd like to happen next to further your interests & your care for the well-being of your local community.
At the close of this video (from 7 minutes and 53 seconds in), Dominic asks the key questions that promote engagement in vital dialogues as a pro-active considered choice rather than a reaction to what's going on that is taken on the hoof:
How can we create communities which are resilient enough, robust enough, to deal with this [period] of intense transition that we are in on almost every front:
transition in relationships
transition in parenting
transition in education
But also huge coming social transitions
with the way we distribute resources
with the way that we deal with the consequences of massive climate transformation
with the way in which we deal with the increasingly volatile economic situations
WE WILL BE MAKING DECISIONS
WE WILL BE RETURNING TO TOWN SQUARES
WE WILL BE RE-OPENING PUBLIC DIALOGUE ; if not because of the exciting potential that that gives us for democracy, then simply because the kinds of situation that we are increasingly confronting demand that of us.
So I would like us to learn to get more and more skilful about:
How do we create social dialogue?
How do we create procedures which support social dialogue?
How do we create outcomes from that process which (actually) effectively meet fundamental human needs?
“For Happiness we need Collective Action” were the words of the Labour leader of our local council when he first heard of the local Action for Happiness group, which I co-ordinate. I applaud the identification by Suzanne Moore (Guardian, 9th February) of the danger of the privatisation of happiness; seeing well-being in all its dimensions as being entirely a matter of individual responsibility. The politics of the individual pursuit of happiness in the politics of the U.S.A. -which leaves people without the equivalent of our NHS. The pre-cursor of the NHS, which academics (in Social Policy) see as a causal factor, was World War 2. (When a country is called to fight a mass war, the legitimacy of the war is affected by how the nation addresses it's own inequalities in health & political power).
A successful social movement has certain characteristics, and my efforts are directed at supporting “the happiness movement” to develop the necessary organisational and political awareness. The danger for “the Happiness Movement” at this time is rightly identified as our being used as pawns in David Cameron's game, or that of any other political leader.
With my background over 20 years being in “restorative justice” and related work, I recognise the importance of a cause that benefits all being forwarded in a way that is not party political. My monitoring of the progress of Restorative Justice in the UK ever since I became Head of Restorative Justice at Mediation UK (in 2001) and invited by Tony Blair to 10, Downing St to be thanked in 2004 for my work on behalf of victims of crime, is that all three main political parties, and the Greens, can take credit for their support for this communication between victims, offenders and communities that improves public safety.
In the favelas in Brazil, my friend Dominic Barter has been one of the world's top "radical innovators", as lauded by NESTA, the “National Endowment for Science, Technology & The Arts”) [http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features/radical_efficiency] . In Brazil, the challenge has been to unite more polarised state departments (from the left-wing Ministry of Education to the militarised and right-wing Ministry of Justice) behind the “restorative circles” social policy. The left have bought into these restorative processes on the basis that they place attention on the social causes of crimes; the language being that “some people have fewer choices on the menu” when they want money, influence etc & this contributes to violent crime. The right have bought into the development of these restorative processes as alternatives to court processes on the basis that “restorative circles” emphasise personal responsibility. Thus, though “the menu” in the favelas may be experienced by one who lives in a hut sliding down a muddy-hillside as limited, the individual who choses to pick up a gun to address their sense of inequity is still responsible for the choice made, and the wider community can hold that person to account more effectively than courts usually do.
I live & work as a Community Mediator [http://mediationsupport.info]/ Community Development Worker/ Action for Happiness Activist in the 19th most deprived town in the UK; and St Leonards is even worse-off than it's neighbour, Hastings, with whom this figure is compiled. There is a major challenge that the St Leonards Sharing Consortium has taken on in embarking on “truth, reparation and reconciliation work” in the wake of the burning of the local pier. This work is part of restorative justice work that seeks to avert riots like those experienced in more major urban areas of social exclusion. The challenge is “How to build common ground between people across the range of geographic/socio-economic and interest-based communities in a town and it's hinterland?”
In constantly re-asking this question and finding many different ways to work on that agenda, I get much encouragement from Dominic Barter, in Brazil, heralding “Action for Happiness” work as a way for someone as politically reticent as some of his older relatives to actually become part of a mass social movement in these crucial transition times of failing economies. (If it's not failing economies across the globe the dominant alternative appears to be models of economic growth that short-change the chances of survival for much of human kind.)
Kindness, in all senses, matters now, more perhaps than it ever has, and we may have more power than ever before to enact it, and to challenge, as the OCCUPY movement has, the manifestation of it's opposite, Greed.
Kindness and Happiness are closely related in ways perhaps too obvious to spell out. One of the “Action for Happiness” slogans is “If you want to feel good, do good”, and my preference is for people to adopt Action 24 from the list of ways of acting for happiness ie Understand Each Others' Needs.
The OCCUPY movement is a response to a crisis that has opened up a large space for creative new thinking. The new economics required for the greatest happiness are (as evidenced by “The Spirit Level”) are economics of greater income equality, and, I would add, sharing of resources. I campaign also as “Lend-It-All Man”, with a personal strapline “Anything I own, you can borrow”. My hope is that humour and thinking creatively about the best way to use all the resources available (irrespective of who believes they own them) begins to engage people either in the light green “Collaborative Consumption”(Botsman) or the deeper green “Collaborative Conservation”, as I call it. Recycling was only stage one, followed by freecycling. Beyond this comes freelending (AKA streetbank.com etc) for releasing an inventory of our possessions to our neighbours and hence building social capital. (how would it be if every time you went to buy something on line, you had an option to check with one-click whether any of your friends, neighbours or others were willing to lend you that thing instead? Is it use of something we want, or ownership? And what are the costs of ownership compared to the costs of borrowing & lending? Alongside this economics of “either a borrower or a lender be” comes timebanking, which values one person's time equally to another and, with skilled brokerage & development, connects us through what we can do for each other.
Timebanking has a radical edge to it in many ways, generating “an informal an unregulated social work system” according to an academic from Bristol Social Policy unit. What I love most about time brokerage (as an alternative currency) is the power of the relationships that can be built up with commercial organisations to release some of their resources for free to the community, and the collective power of the timebank activists to re-allocate surplus value when many people trade a couple of time credits to come to a performance put on by a few, who only get time-credits for the hours they have put in. These excess time-credits can then go to developing a building that serves as a new community hub or some other collectively chosen activity. In Hastings, on the second anniversary of the pier fire, St Leonards Sharing Timebank is putting on the play “Ethical Outings in Hastings” and the the actors and playwright are being paid in time credits for each hour they put in to preparing to share this vision of “a more caring & sharing Hastings & St Leonards”.
If I now jump back 25 or more years, it was in the campaign for nuclear disarmament that I first began to learn the lesson perhaps most valuable to this age; that my well-being is dependent on my active concern for others well-being. My conscience has remained opposed to the holding over a civilian population, at risk to the survival of our species, the threat of nuclear annihilation. Sadly, in the years of my nonviolent direct action in the 1980s, CND became politically marginalised. Though I managed to recruit and retain members from sections of the population who had not previously been political activists, for all my best efforts within the Youth section of the campaign, CND allied itself to tangential left-wing causes (eg the Miners Strike) that lowered the prospects of recruitment from Tory voters.
Hopefully the local Action for Happiness group of which I'm co-ordinator will be more successful as one of many vanguards of a new local economics, sparked partly by the “localism” vs “globalism” of the film “The Economics of Happiness. I hope we succeed in developing the ethic that values peoples time equally (timebanking). I hope that we recognise the importance of of tuning into the needs of others, especially when triggered by behaviours we don't like, not least of whom are those who start the riots! And of course I hope that we act to produce a society that cares enough to maintain (& develop) the best of the Welfare State.
Can national political commentators please see that this is the scale of what is at stake when they attempt to marginalise campaigns for happiness that, if engaged with, can be broadened and deepened to benefit all through collective action. Don't surrender happiness to the political right!
We need to act if we want happiness just as, to cite writing in my local paper “We need to act if we want justice”; social justice. Social justice and happiness are not separate campaigns -they are deeply interlinked.
Paul Crosland
Co-ordinator, Hastings & St Leonards Action for Happiness,
You do (more of) what you like to do & bank the hours with "St Leonards Sharing" Timebank. (NB The timebank may require these hours to be of clear service to someone else before they allow them to be counted; and please note that some time spent on your allotment -if you have one- can be banked as hours owed to you)
Your credits at the Timebank can be exchanged for veg or for help with errands/chores/cleaning as well as for all the usual therapies or help from Mediation Support Ltd to transform some issue with someone that is giving you grief.
You even earn time credits/veg for coming to the October AGM for the Timebank, and deciding with the rest of us what projects the timebank should most support.
Timebanking is much more than an alternative way to buy/sell food, pay the rent and build community.
It is not just an alternative currency, but opens up a whole new way of working.
Crucial are the skills and creativity of the Timebank Broker & the Timebank Community Development Worker.
Here's me interviewing Sarah Bird from Timebanking UK about an example of the synergy that timebanking can create when money stops working for us (& seems to be working more for bankers elsewhere!)
