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 >>