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.