Learning Journal
Our first open meeting
Organising our team
Learning Circle 1 reflections
Learning Circle 2 reflections
Learning Circle 3 reflections
Learning Circle 4 reflections
Learning Circles 5 & 6 reflections
Our first open meeting
On 14th September 2022 we held our first open meeting at House of Annetta (HoA), a social centre in East London focussed on Land Justice. A small group of us had already been plotting and planning for over a year to get to this point, researching what was out there already and putting together a draft proposal to share at the meeting.
About 16 people showed up, from gardens and growing projects all over London. We started off by sitting in a big circle, filling HoA’s leafy courtyard and sharing our excitement, curiosities, interests and skills around the topic of soil health.
We invited everyone inside to review the proposal so far, which we had chopped up into bits and stuck around the room on flipcharts. We wanted people to pull it apart and add their own ideas, which they did - producing an improved brief.
Whilst post-it notes flew around the room we discussed loads of different ideas and it felt like the project was starting to come alive….
We talked about the values that underlie the project and how to ensure they are practiced in what we do, how we produce knowledge, get funding and work with institutions. How would this project which stands for environmental and social justice itself be accountable, and hold those responsible for polluting our soils to account?
We talked about the importance of centering Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) in what we do, as western science is just one way of ‘knowing’ soil. How could we make different knowledge practices speak to each other? For example using microbiology to open up our imaginations and help us relate to soil in new ways, reimagining and reframing dominant narratives.
There were ideas around mapping soil pollution, making soil data readily available so that people could find out about their area without having to carry out testing themselves. We discussed the predicament of most gardens who often don’t know the full story of their soil, and so build raised beds or put down membranes to manage the potential risk. Having readily available soil data and testing could change the ways that gardens grow and the kinds of infrastructures needed. At the same time, it was pointed out that for established gardens, finding out their soil is not safe to grow in - could have a detrimental effect on access to land and food production on a local level…
We discussed running a pilot project to demonstrate how the clinic might work and figure things out ourselves, and there seemed to be interest and agreement that this was a good idea.
We finished up with a skill and resource sharing exercise, asking people to share things they needed or wanted to offer the project. This involved a complicated colour coded post-it system, which Elena collated below >>
Organising our team
After our first open meeting we started to form more of a coherent team, meeting online and in person to talk about how we wanted to work together. Kim drafted a decision making process to help get us started.
One of the first decisions we made together was to divide our work into 2 “circles”: an Organising Circle and a Learning Circle. This emerged out of a recognition that a smaller number of us had energy and interest in organising the how, where, what, who, and why of the project, whilst a wider pool of people wanted to learn together and explore methods, resources and tools for soil testing. Some of us were in both camps, but still, it felt useful to define these two kinds of activity that would be fundamental to the clinic.
Those of us who were in the organising circle agreed to meet on the first Wednesday of the month, and were offered a free space to do this at Hackney Herbal gardens and studio. Having this space and regular meeting time enabled us to embark on a deep process together and bring this project into being.
An important starting point for the organising circle was to discuss Why, What and How to create a community soil clinic. ‘Why’ is our values, ‘how’ is our methods and ‘what’ is practices and activities. When discussing ‘why’ we noticed three general themes: justice (addressing oppression/ inequality/ marginalisation, a desire to change / transform these conditions), access (to land/ soil/ knowledge) and love (of soil, land, earthlings etc.). We also talked about the importance of nourishment, and the different ways in which this project might be able to address this question: resourcing communities and ourselves, investigating nutrients in soil and plant matter [nutrient justice], increasing access to land / green space etc.
In the ‘how’ we talked about how the project could be resourced, asking how aligned we would need to be with funders in order to accept money from them? Do they need to ‘share’ our values or ‘respect’ them? Is it transformative? Is it worth compromising sometimes to build something resilient and long term? We knew that this project would rely on partnerships and collaborations with other groups, and that these questions would always be alive. We asked ourselves how we could collaborate and work with others in ways that honour our values, get things done and help to make the wider change we want to see? Thinking about our methods took us back to our values (the ‘why’) and the importance of these values for guiding us through tough decisions. Naomi reflected that, as a small grass-roots group, our ‘values’ were all that we had, our main “asset”. We also acknowledged that, as part of holding shared values as a collective that is made up of individuals, coming and going from the project, we need to make space for disagreement, conflict and difference.
The desire to learn together and develop sound organisational systems emerged as a way we wanted to be able to work together, and which felt in alignment with our values (more on this later!). Though we recognised that this focus on systems and processes isn’t how everyone likes to work.
When we discussed the kinds of activities and practices we’d like to do, some possible roles we’d each like to play started to emerge. There seemed to be a good spread of people wanting to organise, do admin, facilitate, deliver soil testing, do research and fundraise etc. but we needed to return to the nuts and bolts of our organising before we could start planning our activities.
Quite early on we discussed the need to resource ourselves to be able to show up and participate within our varying capacities, this was also connected to our values around justice and equity. Hari, Tito and Kim worked together on an application to the Landscape Research Group, who agreed to fund us for £5k, bringing our overall budget up to £11k, as we already had some funding in place from London National Park City and Necessity.
“People will need different things in order to be able to show up, how do we make the resources we have respond to different needs in a more dynamic way?” (notes from meeting minutes 1st March 2023)
As the resources available to us were finite and limited in various ways, we agreed to create a ‘needs matrix’ to help us understand and map the different financial needs/ desires, capacities, access or support needs of the team. Hari created a questionnaire, based on needs assessments they had done as part of other collectives. We gave ourselves a couple of months to fill it in, and shared our needs as part of an organising circle where we listened to each member’s needs and discussed ways that these could be met collectively. Hari and Naomi took the implementation of this on as an action point, and developed two proposals: For how we could share our financial resources, and how to capture and respond to each other’s access and support needs. The group helped us to refine the proposals, and we developed some new systems as a result that felt supportive, sustainable and nourishing.