1000 Better Stories

Torry People’s Assembly putting “just” back into “just transition”

What is deliberative democracy, and can it help your community involve more people in creating a better future for all? SCCAN Story Weaver, Kaska Hempel, explores the idea in this story from the People’s Assembly in Torry, as the community stand up against becoming a sacrificial zone yet again.
The Assembly took place at St Fittick’s Park over the weekend of 28 and 29 of May this year, and it was facilitated by Open Source. It was a part of the multi-partner Just Transition Communities pilot project, coordinated by North-East Climate Action Network (NESCAN) Hub and funded by the Scottish Government from their Just Transition Fund.
Interviews, recording and edits: Kaska Hempel
With special thanks to NESCAN for the use of recording of Alison Stewart’s speech, from the North  East Communities Just Transition project partner Knowledge Exchange event 31 May, 2023.
Resources:
NESCAN https://www.nescan.org/
Grassroots to Global/Open Source https://www.grassroots2global.org/open-source
Assembly Catalyst training with Open Source in Aberdeen, apply by 4th of October https://www.grassroots2global.org/training
Declaration of Torry People’s Assembly May 2023 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LVnCe8YBD4PV1uThl411Ahzfbu1gejtA0LHoro-9eBg/edit
Scottish Government’s Just Transition Fund https://www.gov.scot/publications/just-transition-fund/pages/overview/
Lesley Riddoch’s column on Torry People’s Assembly in The National, May 2023 https://www.thenational.scot/politics/23514047.torry-one-deprived-areas-lose-park-just-transition/
XR Scotland statement on reasons for leaving Scottish Climate Assembly Stewarding Group in 2020 https://xrscotland.org/2020/11/xr-scotland-can-no-longer-endorse-scotlands-climate-citizens-assembly/
First Torry People’s Assembly 2021 report by Scott Herrett and Susan Smith https://www.grassroots2global.org/thinkinghome/torry-assembly
People’s Torry Assembly Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/PeoplesAssemblyTorry
People’s Torry Assembly Twitter https://twitter.com/Torry_PA
Grampian Community Law Centre, Robert Gordon University https://www.rgu.ac.uk/news/news-2022/5411-grampian-community-law-centre-prepares-for-torry-launch-in-scotland-first
A mini-doco by ReelNews "They're killing our kids!" Save St Fitticks Park, including Climate Camp visit to St Fittick’s https://youtu.be/jtvfbc-2GT8,
Friends of St Fittick’s Park https://saintfittickstorry.com/
Greyhope Bay Café in a doco by Sara Stroud https://vimeo.com/639311933
Transcript
[00:00:00] Kaska Hempel: Hello. You look interesting.
Why don't you tell me what you're doing here?
[00:00:09] Speaker 1: What we're doing here, right at this moment in time, is directing people to where the actual assembly really is. But, on the greater scheme of things, I think there's...
[00:00:20] Kaska Hempel: Oh, there's a sign!
[00:00:21] Speaker 1: I think the... how can Torry reclaim the power to make this a healthy community to live and grow up in? That's the main thing that it's all about.
[00:00:31] Liam: Yeah, I'm Liam. I'm just a volunteer for the weekend. So I've not been involved in any organisation. I was like, it's good to help out, but yeah, learning a lot and it's a great community event to meet people that are quite active in activism circles around Aberdeen.
It's a little melting pot. I'm from just south of Aberdeen and I live in the north. I got involved with Friends Of St Fittick's Park, who are one of the main activist groups organising the event today. The green space we're in, St Fittick's. It is earmarked for demolition company called Energy Transition Zone.
My degree was in Conservation Biology, so I'm really interested in the biodiversity here. It's won awards. There was £300, 000 of spending from the council to enhance biodiversity at this site. It's done incredible. Yeah. It's not a very clear cut issue. It involves a lot of discussion around the power that oil and gas has in Aberdeen, who the council is serving.
There's vast amounts of money changing hands. Yeah. It's got a lot of interesting climate and community justice aspects where you go, who is this for? who's it going to benefit? who's suffering?
[00:01:56] Alastair: Sup, my name's Alastair. Well, you can have a badge with it.
[00:02:01] Kaska Hempel: Yeah, unfortunately we can't see it.
[00:02:03] Alastair: Yeah, so I'm just helping out too. I've come up to Aberdeen for a couple of days to do whatever. Put tables up, or move chairs around, or anything like that, just to help the People's Assembly to run as smoothly as possible. It's also, you know, to try and help with... Yeah, if we live in a democracy, then we ought to be able to ensure that what goes on is actually for the best for all people, not for a small minority who are going to make a lot of money.
And, you know, got to exploit the poorest even more, if I've understood correctly. That's what I think is happening. Yeah, if you... basically, if you go over there, it's by the old folks home, by the Balnagask.
[00:02:50] Kaska Hempel: Hello, it's Kaska, one of your Story Weavers. That was me making my way to the day one of Torry People's Assembly at St Fittick's Park in Aberdeen on Saturday 27th of May, earlier this year. We'll hear more from the gathering later, but first let me ask you... do you know what People's Assembly is? Or deliberative democracy?
Well, before I embarked on this journey, I was not quite sure myself. So let me share with you what I've learned as I've dipped my toe into the Nescan's Just Transition Communities project. The project that was conceived last November and with support from the Scottish Government's Just Transition Fund, Nescan, or North East Scotland Climate Action Network, along with several partners, embarked on a pilot year.
Here is Alison Stewart, Nescan's Hub Manager. Explaining the transformative thinking behind it at the Knowledge Exchange Get Together for the Project Partners in June this year.
[00:03:55] Alison Stewart: When we talk about getting to net zero, there is a tendency to limit ourselves and our imaginations. We need to think bigger, we need to think holistically, we need to think collaboratively and inclusively, and we need to think of systems change.
When we discuss what a just transition means, the main barriers to change, to transition, It's that our current decision making processes are flawed. They allow for vested interests to dominate the conversation and create an elite few who determine the process and the pathways to net zero and the changes that we have to make.
The people are not generally represented in this, but if we want a just transition, all sectors of our society, workers and communities need to be involved on an equal basis in our decision making processes. We have an opportunity, while getting to net zero, to create the society that we want. A fair, just, equal, biodiverse, healthy and thriving one.
And we need to seize this opportunity with both hands.
So Nescan Hub is playing our part to ultimately create, over a few years, a toolkit for communities and decision makers. So by the end of this process, we really hope that communities can run these processes themselves. The ideas, plans, and outcomes can then be fed into wider and bigger decision making processes.
[00:05:19] Kaska Hempel: While we wait for the recordings from this gathering to be published by Nescan on their website, along with their reflections on the pilot, let's immerse ourselves in the Assembly process itself. In this episode, I take you along for a visit with People's Assembly in Torry, which was facilitated by Open Source.
Before I headed out to experience the Assembly itself, I spoke to Eva, one of the people who helped facilitate the Assembly with the community. I wanted to get to grips with the concepts and the process in theory. To start, I asked her to introduce herself and share her own journey into this work.
[00:05:59] Eva Schonveld: I'm Eva Schonveld. I live in Portobello in Edinburgh, and I work for an organisation called Heart Politics. Particularly on facilitation of deliberative democratic processes through a group called Open Source. It's been quite a long journey. There are a few key moments. The ecologist did a supplement on climate change, probably at the end of the 90s, that hit me like a ton of bricks.
And I really wanted to do something about it and wasn't sure what. And then I read another article, probably four or five years later, in Permaculture News. That Rob Hopkins had written about the work that he did at Kinsale and suddenly I kind of thought oh, this is great, It's so positive and you know, we can work and make our communities better places as well as doing something about climate change. So I managed to shift my work to be working mostly in that for quite a few years and then burnt out and came back slowly into climate action in different ways, but particularly with Extinction Rebellion, which is where, you know, I first came across this idea that we could use democracy really differently.
I think I'd already started thinking about politics and about how toxic the political system that we have is now and how it doesn't do anybody any good, including the people who are in it. And, you know, we get very bad decisions out of it. And I'm really interested in the kind of emotional and cultural underpinnings of that.
And I think that came together with the Assembly work that the Extinction Rebellion really highlighted. And our group was forming, and via Extinction Rebellion we had two representatives on the stewarding group of the Scottish Climate Assembly that the Scottish Government put together and, you know, had quite a lot of input into that, I think making it quite a lot better than it would have been.
But eventually our two representatives decided to leave because they felt that basically the people who were going to be Assembly members weren't going to be allowed to deliberate properly. The thing was increasingly being skewed towards existing government policy. Which is kind of understandable, but not very democratic.
And so we have set out to explore how Assemblies might be part of a different way of doing democracy. And that's what I'm working on at the moment.
[00:08:38] Kaska Hempel: That's really interesting. I'm already sort of spotting a bit of jargon that I think it will be quite useful to explain to people. So, if you could explain what deliberative democracy means?
[00:08:50] Eva Schonveld: Yeah, it is one of those kind of catch all phrases that sort of means, you know, if you deliberate, you mean you think really deeply and carefully, and I think there is something about slowing down and moving away from the kind of party political Punch and Judy kind of politics, you know, it's the top layer of what we see in government because it's not the only thing that happens in government to something, you know, and here's where it gets a bit vague.
For me, it means much more inclusive, and it means being open to a much wider range of how people understand things and process ideas. So, you know, a lot of what happens in mainstream politics is very verbal, is very written, but that's not necessarily the best way for us to process information, or certainly not all of us.
So for me, deliberative democracy then broadens out into a... really interesting, rich exploration of how can we be really inclusive in the decisions that we make? How can we make sure that we set them up so that people don't get reactive, but actually are listening to one another and to the information they're hearing, and have time and space to really think about and come to shared understandings of what's really going on, and then move towards kind of good better decisions.
So yes, it's a bit of a catch all phrase.
[00:10:15] Kaska Hempel: So you already mentioned the Citizens Assembly on Climate that Scottish Government put together a few years back, a couple of years back now. Can you explain what that involves and how is it different to People's Assemblies or more grassroots driven Assemblies work that you've been involved in?
[00:10:34] Eva Schonveld: Yeah, so Citizens Assemblies are one of the more popular forms of alternatives to mainstream democracy. And they're one of the most sort of clearly... delineated. So with a Citizens Assembly, people turn up because they've been, well, A, invited, and then B, they've been sortitioned. So the sortition process, I don't exactly know how it happens, but the intention is to try to get a representative sample of the population of whoever's being consulted here.
So you'll select for different demographics, for age and education and race and gender. And you'll try and say, ok, so we have got, I don't know, 56 percent of women in Scotland, so we'll want to make sure that 56 out of 100 people in this Citizens Assembly end up being women. So we're trying to sort of build a mini picture of all of us within the group who become members of the Assembly.
And no one else joins. It's a closed group that normally lasts over several weeks. It's normally around a hundred people. And there's a kind of phasing of it where there's input from across a spectrum, which is also really important. So you'll have an input of people with different views, but who have some kind of expertise, some reason to be the people who you'd go and ask about this particular subject that we're looking at.
So that people can compare. And the idea is that, you know, people are presented with these different ideas, and then they deliberate. They talk in small groups and talk in big groups and have different, you know, there's different methods of helping people work through the material that they've got to come to some kind of shared opinion.
And obviously it's rarely 100%, but it can often be quite high. Just because this process of filtering and boiling down and taking time and throwing ideas around together tends to move people towards more common ground, tends to move away from the polarisation that we're used to in politics at the moment.
[00:12:47] Kaska Hempel: So that's the Citizens Assembly and that's usually put on by the government and feeds into government policy in some way.
[00:12:55] Eva Schonveld: That is partly because they're quite expensive to put on, just the sortition process itself can be pretty expensive. So, and it has tended to be governments who've done that or local authorities.
We're very interested in the idea of Citizen led Citizens Assemblies because we felt that the government was not able to put its own agenda to one side when it hosted a Citizens Assembly. And then People's Assemblies are, again, a kind of catch all phrase for like a big meeting. For us to try to bring that together into something that feels like it's a contribution towards something that's really democratic.
The outreach phase is as important as the actual Assembly itself. Letting people know that it's happening. Giving people an opportunity to feed in, to have views on what it is that we should be focusing on. And trying to make the process itself as accessible as we can. It's all part of trying to make this feel like it's legitimate.
And in some ways it can't be. Because there'll always be people who get left out. And so what we see with People's Assemblies is that they're particularly good at generating policy ideas. There may be places where people want to take decisions, and you wouldn't say, well, you know, you guys can't decide to start a community garden even though you found a bunch of other people who really want to do it at the People's Assembly.
Of course, decisions may be made there, and may lead to action in communities. But, in the bigger picture, It may be that, you know, communities can come up with ideas for how their local economies could be transformed. Or what changes of National Policy would be needed in order to make community life be more meaningful and fulfilling, and be less damaging to the environment.
So that's how we're seeing those. So People's Assemblies really good at generating ideas, and if you connect them up across different communities, then become quite a powerful voice which is part of our kind of theory of change. And then you could have potentially Citizen led Citizens Assemblies to make decisions around the kind of policies that have been generated by local People's Assemblies.
So within our movement, we're relatively well practiced in these kind of processes of helping people to think creatively, to listen to one another, to make decisions that lead on to action. But in terms of interacting with democratic systems as they stand, we're... right at the beginning of that. And I think the work that we're doing in Torry is, it's our first step into seeing how this community could get more of a voice that feels like it genuinely comes from an informed position of what people in this community
feel about particular issues and that could potentially lead to change. Torry is just south of the river in Aberdeen and is a community that has been in the news quite a lot recently and it's quite an extraordinary place to go to because it does feel like it has ended up at the sharp end of some very bad decisions over the last 30, 40 years.
[00:16:21] Lynne Restrup: I bought my own two comfy chairs. They're much comfier.
[00:16:26] Kaska Hempel: Oh, yes.
Lynn, who I found at the welcome desk once I got to the Assembly site, filled me in on what it's been like to live in a place treated like a sacrificial zone for decades. Wind was picking up at this point, so there's some noise from the tent flapping around in the background.
[00:16:48] Lynne Restrup: I'm Lynne Restrup. I'm a long time Torry resident.
I've lived in Torry for nearly 50 years. I live in Balnagask Road and my extended family lives in Torry. My mum lives in Torry. My sister lives in Torry. My oldest son still lives in Torry. And I really love the community, but I've seen a huge change in it in the last 50 years. It used to be...
It always had its problems but it's kind of seems to have lost its heart a bit. I think people have got a bit demoralized with having all the good things in Torry taken away from us and having all the rubbish things sort of put in our community, things that other communities really wouldn't want to have.
And It's after a period of time, I think people just get a bit demoralized about the fights. So some of the things that historically have happened in Torry, like we've lost access to the sea on one side of us. Back when they demolished old Torry, the tanks were built for the oil and gas companies down there.
This was a huge part of Torry heritage from being an old fishing village, so we lost that connection with the sea then. In more recent times, we've lost one Primary School, our only Secondary School, we've lost our outdoor Sports Centre, we've lost our indoor Sports Centre.
We used to have more Medical Practices in Torry.
We've lost a lot of our retail in Torry. We've lost a lot of our community in Torry because people have moved out of Torry due to a lot of the changes that have been happening. We had a huge thriving Polish population for a while, but due to Brexit and Covid, a lot of them moved away, so we lost a lot of our new Torry folk, which was a bit of a shame.
And I think once you lose a Primary School and once you lose a Secondary School, it stops young families wanting to move into Torry. And unfortunately, since they've put some of the less desirable things in Torry, like the water treatment plant, the incinerator, and we've lost our access to the sea on the other side of Torry, which with the harbour development which nobody in Torry wanted. We all fought against that but the Harbour Board got its way. So, to lose your part of your history with the connection with the sea, to lose a Primary School and a Secondary School, have an incinerator built right beside one of our two remaining Primary Schools.
Basically, if you were in the school playground and could kick a ball hard enough, you could hit the incinerator. So, Torry's community, we're an aging population. I'm 60 now, so the fight that I'm doing is not necessarily for my benefit. It's for our younger community members. Because it's going to be a dying community, because nobody with young families is going to want to move here.
So, instead of having a thriving population of people who lived for generations in Torry, loved living in Torry, and even when they moved away had really fond memories of being in Torry, we're just going to be seen as a place that people only live in Torry if they have to. And as soon as they get the opportunity to move, that's what they're gonna do, because to be honest, if I was younger, and I'm raising my family now, I don't know if I would want to stay in Torry, and that really breaks my heart to say that.
I personally don't see how you can create anything green, truly green, by destroying the only green space that a community has. So I think the loss of St Fittick's Park is the last straw for a lot of people, and it's galvanized a lot of people. They've thought, well, we've put up with this, we've put up with that, but actually, you know...
It's not, it's not alright. We're not just going to say, okay, well, just lose our park as well, because at some point the community has to say, enough is enough. And I think that's where we are.
[00:21:10] Eva Schonveld: And one of the main things that people say when you go and ask them, shall we do an assembly in Torry? is don't bother, it won't work, and the council never listens to us.
So, that is life in Torry. And basically it's not okay. It's not okay in Torry and it's not okay anywhere else. And so our Assembly is an attempt to encourage people, encourage people who live in Torry to come together and give it another try. And it's not like we're the first thing to come along, but we hope that it may be a way to bring people together across a wide range of different interests and focuses and say, what is it that we can do together?
[00:21:55] Kaska Hempel: Let's just talk about logistics. How does one actually organise an Assembly the way that you're helping people? Is there a set format?
[00:22:07] Eva Schonveld: There's not a set format. It has to be tailor made to the particular community, but that doesn't mean that there aren't phases and areas of work that you can expect to come up.
And the first ones is outreach. I think it's almost impossible to do too much outreach. And we've come up with a completely spurious statistic which is like 90 percent of the work of an Assembly happens before the Assembly. At 10%, well, maybe 5 percent is in the Assembly and then there's a whole bunch of follow up as well which probably is another 90 percent actually.
But I think because we're talking about Assemblies, we can get caught up in thinking about, so what are we actually going to do in that meeting? And obviously that's really important. But finding out where people are in the community, finding out what's important to them, finding out what would make it possible, or even desirable for them to come along to an Assembly.
Speaking to people who are not like me, who are not, you know, who's not like oneself and finding out where they're at and taking all of that information on board to develop something which is going to be as accessible and meaningful to local people as possible is massively important.
[00:23:28] Kaska Hempel: You've been involved in organising this assembly today. Why did you get involved? What
prompted you to spend your precious time, no doubt, because it was a long, long process, wasn't it?
[00:23:46] Speaker 3: It is. I mean, I'm full time work. I have a mum, an elderly mum, who I look after. I have grandchildren as well that I look after.
So I don't have a lot of free time. You know, we've been doing this for months. Every Saturday, all day, Saturday evenings, different events, going and talking to people. It is a big commitment. But I feel it's worth it for me. Because Torry really suffers a lot from social issues.
It's a really poor economic area. It's people with ill health. People rely on food banks. People are really struggling with the cost of living right now. There's a lot of unemployment, people are balancing huge, huge pressures in their personal life and not everybody has the mental strength to actually devote time to this as well because if I was a young single mum struggling to feed my kids, put food on the table, or pay my rent.
You know, I don't know if I really would be that bothered about constantly fighting with the council, getting involved with an assembly in a way to try and bring those voices together. And I feel that I kind of have to do it for maybe people who would like to do it as well.
[00:25:03] Kaska Hempel: How did you find the whole process of going through preparation?
Do you think that in any way helped the community at all?
[00:25:12] Speaker 3: As I said, I've lived in Torry a long time, but even I wasn't aware of all the pockets of really good things that are happening in Torry. I've met some amazing people in the preparation and the running up to this. People who really are community minded, that are really looking at problems in the local area, really trying to improve things.
They're small voices working on small projects, so I would like to think that the Assembly is going to give them a platform for us to find out about more about what they're doing and for them to tap more into the community support. I love the idea of an Assembly because we all feel like what we have to say is not being listened to.
And so maybe it takes folks coming in from the outside to shine a light. And for us to feel that bit more empowered than we were before. So I would like to see this as a jumping off point.
[00:26:15] Kaska Hempel: And you're talking about people coming from the outside to facilitate it. And also to, you know, report on it. How do you feel about that?
[00:26:27] Speaker 3: To be honest, to start with, I was a bit like, hmm, is this somebody else that's coming in and trying to take power away from people in Torry and tell us what should be good for us and what we should be doing and what we shouldn't be doing? And actually it's not been like that at all. It's been the real education.
For folk from the outside to go into a community and actually ask them what they think the issues are and try and sort of say, well, you know, if you did have more help, what could we do? You know, you tell us what we could be doing to help. And actually having anybody coming into a community and offering that level of support is quite unusual, I think.
And I think that they've brought, sort of, expertise as well in terms that we didn't have before. And also just somebody really actually taking an interest in Torry and people from the outside thinking actually it's not okay what's happening, not just in Torry, but in some of our other communities that are under threat.
No, I think it's easy for the council or whatever to dismiss it as just people in Torry just complaining, but when other people are seeing that same thing happening. It almost like validates what we're feeling. We're not just making a fuss over nothing. I met a few people today and talked about some of the issues, and people are actually quite astounded about the really bad things that have happened in Torry, and about the accumulative effect of one thing after the other sort of being placed in Torry.
I think a lot of people came along thinking it was just about the loss of St Fittick's Park, but there's a whole history behind it.
[00:28:18] Kaska Hempel: So that's the work you've been helping with in Torry, is that right?
[00:28:21] Eva Schonveld: Yeah, that's a lot of what we've been doing. So we've got a comms group and a logistics group and a outreach group and we have a programme group.
So the programme is, you know, what you actually do once people, you've got people through the door, what is it we're going to do together? And it's helpful if that focuses around a question. So you use all that information, all those conversations that you've had when you've been listening to people in the community to go, okay, so what are they saying the really important issues in this community are?
And is there a way that we can focus this assembly, so we touch on most of those. I think certainly with Torry, we've tried to create quite a wide question. So our question is, how can people in Torry reclaim the power to make this a good place to grow up and live in? So the question is around reclaiming power, but it's also around health.
It's also around young people. And these were things that came out from the conversations that we had. This is kind of like, there's no point. The council never listens to us. Those are issues of power. So once you have your question, you can focus your assembly. So how are we going to help people to look at that?
How do we reclaim the power? How are we going to help people to look at what is it like to grow up healthy in Torry? What would that vision of a healthy community be? And so you may want to have an input phase. You may want to have people speaking at the beginning about maybe possibly a range of views.
It kind of depends. That's where the Citizens Assembly and the People's Assembly may be most different. You may not need a range of views. You may just want to give people different opportunities to think about different parts and in Torry we've decided to hang the whole of the outputs of the Assembly around a declaration.
The declaration has different parts to it and one of them states the situation in Torry. What has happened and where we are just now. Another part states what do we want to change and who's responsible for that because I think there's a lot, you know, something that as a transition person I'm all about what can the community do together?
And this just has not washed in Torry. I think people do things and they have done things for the community and will continue to. But they're furious with the council and there's a social contract that has been broken and people aren't just going to let that go. So it has to be dealt with. What is it the people in Torry want from the council?
On their own terms, reasonably, you know, with a timeline that has been thought through and is reasonable. So we're not saying you have to change everything tomorrow, but within this reasonable point of view, we want you to have addressed this. So that's the declaration would encompass all of those things.
And then there's another piece of work which is more kind of inward facing, which is what is the community going to do about this? So both what kind of tasks and projects might we want to happen in Torry? But also if the council don't do what we said, what's our next step? You know, are we going to move into petitions or going and standing outside the council?
Or are we going to go and put our bodies on the line and block roads? You know, these are the kinds of things that people in the community might want to think about. And these are ways of reclaiming power. And so it's important that we explore them. And not everybody in the community is going to want to do everything, and that's another, you know, that's another plus, because we can potentially imagine different people doing different things.
[00:31:56] Kaska Hempel: As you might have figured out by now, I turned up on day one of two of the Assembly, which was all about, according to the programme, looking at the issues we face in Torry and creating a declaration of what needs to change, and then celebrating.
By the time I arrived at the assembly tents, the morning session was wrapping up and people already shared thoughts on problems and on things they would like to see in Torry. Each thought carefully written down on a large paper leaf to contribute to the Torry Assembly declaration tree on display. Now, focus was shifting towards the most imminent issue, the situation with St Fittick's Park. I was just in time to catch a walking tour of the place, led by Richard Caie, a member of Friends of St Fittick's Park and the Community Council.
[00:32:50] Speaker 2: Look at these tours, and we haven't lost too many people. Okay. So is this bit staying here, or is it being developed? This bit of stage here. Yeah.
[00:33:00] Speaker 1: And is the proposal then to move the, like they're saying they're gonna move the wetland or something? Yeah, that's the wetlands. Yeah.
[00:33:08] Speaker 2: These are the wetlands.
Swamp reeds look.
[00:33:15] Kaska Hempel: Wow. Yeah.
[00:33:16] Speaker 2: Bone rockes could be in Florida. That one that was up around. Yep. Right. The East Tullos Burn starts its life up in the Tullos Estate. It's all the waste from just water waste. The infrastructure there is 50, 60 years old, so nobody really knows what goes into it. That's a typical colour.
It actually runs alongside the railway in a culvert. And this is where it certainly comes out. And between 2010 and 2014, there was a lot of discussion about this area, a lot of good consultation, and this is the end result. All the wetlands there are artificial. They're all being ploughed out by JCBs.
And there's about 200 yards of reed beds till we get up to the next bridge. And the reed beds filter everything out. And every now and again people come and remove the mud and the excess plants. It does work. If you look at the colour of the water and then our next stop up in the bridge. Compare the colour.
If you want to taste it, carry on, but I would not recommend it.
Right, hurry up at the back there, come on. Right, if you come back here in a couple of years time, unfortunately, this might be fenced off and from here all the way, that big triangle there, that's all going to be an industrial estate. The factory's going to be here, somewhere, and all those trees are going to get zapped.
So it's sort of from here to the white state, it's all going to be industrial, up to the railway. So, this is a very popular area, people come here with barbecues, we've got facilities for children there, baskets, ball, court, nets, that's all going to get zapped as well. So we'll next stop at the bridge.
Next lot of the burn goes under the bridge and we're going to have a look at the quality of the water, see if all this, all the weeds here have improved the quality of the water.
[00:35:39] Kaska Hempel: Hiya, would you mind if I ask you a couple of questions? No, okay. Are you from Torry?
[00:35:44] Annie Munro: Yes, I'm Annie Munro, 1978. I came up from Fife.
No, I like this, I'm down here a lot, with Rosie a lot. I had another dog as well. So quiet and they want to take it away. They took the bay away, they've taken dunnies away. As you could walk up and around. There's a path that comes from here, right up to dunnies.
Kaska Hempel
That's really upsetting, isn't it? Do you think this Assembly today is going to make a difference?
[00:36:15] Annie Munro: Do you know something? I hope so. Community Council, I'm on that. I've been on different ones. But it's apathy. It's because when we didn't have a Community Council when they said about the incinerator. But people go, they're going to build it anyway. And they do. So, what can you do? But I think this is a really good thing.
It's bringing different views, sort of thing. Because before you just sit there in the Community Council and you'll go,
Oh la la, the community councillors are there and you'll say to them, but...
look, see the ducks?
[00:36:53] Kaska Hempel: Oh yes, that's the best thing, it's right in the path. Beautiful, look at all the beautiful flowers in there.
[00:36:58] Annie Munro.: I know, I know, the gorse. They'll come, look. They think they're getting fed. Oh, the water looks so much cleaner here. Yeah, cleaner, doesn't it?
[00:37:08] Kaska Hempel: So you said you're feeling hopeful about this process?
[00:37:12] Annie Munro.: Well, we need to get into people's houses.
Yeah, we need to get people involved.
It's okay saying you're here, but you don't stay here. You know what I mean? We need the people that stays here.
[00:37:26] Kaska Hempel: How do you think you can do that?
[00:37:28] Annie Munro.: I don't know. I stay on the block and not one of them know anything about it and they're not interested.
[00:37:33] Kaska Hempel: Why do you think that is?
[00:37:34] Annie Munro.: Well, they don't come down here. They don't see this. A lot of folk don't even know it exists. My daughter didn't even know this existed until I brought her down.
 I used to come down here most days with her.
[00:37:46] Kaska Hempel: Is it because you've got dogs? You've had dogs that this is a space you can use?
[00:37:50] Annie Munro.: There's a lot of people come down with their kids. I've seen them in here with their push chairs and everything. Yep. Summer holidays it's used a lot more than it is now. This is all going to go.
 Yeah, it's frustrating, isn't it, Richard?
[00:38:04] Richard: Nobody listens. We've got all the lovely consultations.
We've had three master planning sessions. Absolutely everybody there said, no, we don't want it. But, tick in the box, they've held a consultation. I was saying in BBC Scotland a couple of days ago, if they can take this away from a community, then no green space in Scotland is safe. A lot of people live on, sort of, the other side of down nearer to the city so they don't naturally sort of walk this way And, I don't know. We can't really get a lot of engagement going. We've got a wonderful Assembly, been well publicised, but yet, we haven't got all that many people. So, I think it's a universal problem.
[00:38:50] Kaska Hempel: Oh, look at that! That's so amazing!
The flowers over there as well, willow...
[00:38:55] Richard: Marsh, what do you call it, marsh, marigold. And if we look at St Fittick's Church over there, I've got relatives buried there. So it is local to me. Do you have any idea how old it is? Oh, I think 1809 it stopped. But it goes way, way back. I'll tell you the story of St
Fitticks.
Right folks. St Fittick's, Bay St fittick's. He was an Irish French monk that washed ashore. Up to 1906, they used to have a well on the beach and in the preceding hundreds of years it was very, very popular with the locals because it was a holy well and the church clamping down on all this nonsense and there was real trouble, real antipathy towards that because this was our well and they couldn't stop the locals from
drinking the well. As you see, what I'm saying now, even though we're way up, we can't see the sea. So if you're down in the park, you can't see the sea, you're hemmed in. And then, roughly where that big lump of earth is, that's where the new factories are going to go. So that's going to be even more hemmed in.
So far as we know, they haven't done an Environmental Impact assessment, health, Quality of Life Assessment, Health Inequality Assessment. But even if all those are negative, you sort of know we're just going to be ignored. Nobody's going to stop the massive project like this just because you get a few negative reports.
And the bottom half of that community wood, which was planted in 2010, 2014,
is going to get chopped off. And that's where the new wetlands will go. They will abut directly onto the new factories. So it just doesn't make any sense at all. The good news is the rich people who are doing this don't live here, so it won't affect them at all. Oh, we need to be thankful for that . But it's been a great community fight and I think the community will just keep on fighting.
This is our land. Right, lunch onward.
[00:41:13] Kaska Hempel: So what are you guys doing?
[00:41:18] Speaker 1: We're kind of just volunteering to... I think it's general help out. Specifically, we were gonna, if there were kids that were like, 18 to 16, that weren't wanting to sit through that, we were gonna like, take them to do physical activities and stuff.
But, because there's not a huge demand for that at the moment, we're just helping out with whatever odd jobs is available. Which is? Which is soup! We're gonna refill the soup with just the red roll.
[00:41:53] Kaska Hempel: I wanted to go back to the processes of talking to each other. You mentioned emotions and difference, maybe difference of opinion. How do you tackle these? In a meeting that's obviously going to have that kind of diversity of voices and strong emotions in it. Is there techniques or approaches that you use or you recommend people use?
[00:42:16] Eva Schonveld: Well, there's a whole range of different things. And I guess one of the most fundamental ones is having people in the room who've thought about this stuff before. Because cultures... spread a little bit like yogurt cultures. We infect people with how we're feeling. And if there's enough of us who are feeling this is important, we're taking this seriously and we really, really want to listen to one another.
We want this to be the kind of meeting where everybody's voice gets heard. Then that kind of transmits itself in some weird magical way. And so not to say that, well, you use magic, of course. So having enough people who are taking responsibility for and holding the space, who've got a sense of this is how we want to do things.
Creating processes where people get to listen, but not too much, and where they get to speak, but not too much. So using facilitation. So that it's not just the people who are confident, or the loudest voices who get to speak, but where quiet people get space too. And also, creating different ways for people to express themselves.
So again, like I was saying before, you know, some of us are really, really comfortable going on at length with chat. Whereas others might actually prefer to draw, or might prefer to do interpretive dance. And I think we're away, we're away from that. But actually, there is something about using the arts, you know, and that happens loads in other cultures.
When my husband works in Kenya, when they take a break in the meeting, everybody sings. Everybody gets up and sings and dances. That's how you take a break. And the kind of dropping of petty issues and of tiredness. And of distraction and the bringing of everybody into the same space in the same moment feeling like we're together.
That something like that does is like we have so much to learn from other cultures. And again, I think it's a while before that will be the way that we're expecting to do things in our communities. But I bloody well want to work towards it because it's important. It's really important. You know, if you ask somebody, would you change your job next week?
You're going to be an MSP, you know most people were going no way because they know how toxic and stressful that kind of work is, but making our collective decisions should be something that we all feel like being involved in, and obviously sometimes it's going to be boring, but it is something about ways to make these processes feel more approachable, feel more fun, feel more engaging.
[00:44:51] Speaker 3: We are doing some leaf printing to make a big banner for the park. This is a fern. They've all, it's just a bunch of stuff that I've collected up and pressed and dried out. And then if we pop it onto the fabric over here.
[00:45:07] Kaska Hempel: So, how come you're involved in this?
[00:45:10] Speaker 3: I live in Torry.
And, like, the park, we walked around here loads during lockdown and everything so quite familiar with the place and enjoyed spending time here. So I've been sort of involved with the campaign to save the park and I knew somebody who was part of organising this thing and she asked if I want to come down and do like some, I'm also an artist, a textile artist so...
[00:45:32] Kaska Hempel: Oh wonderful, hence the banner.
[00:45:33] Speaker 3: Hence the banner.
Are you coming? Are you coming? Right, I'll show, I'll
show. You can have a go at that.
My hands are
messy. Yeah, I'm not very good at keeping clean with this. There we go. Should we have a look? Oh, that's lovely. You can see all the nice little veins from the
leaf in there. That's very cool.
Did you want to help me?
We carry on colouring in all the letters using the leaves. Does that sound good?
[00:46:10] Speaker 2: If you just arrived in this morning, we were looking at all the problems that Torry faces. And what do we want? On the tree there, you can see the problems.
They came out in small groups. And on the second tree, you've got what we need.
So that's what you miss, young lady. But instead of that, you're gathering all that to just go with it. And we're going to go into a session now.
[00:46:31] Kaska Hempel: After lunch, people gathered again to hear more on St Fittick's Park situation, this time staying in the assembly tent to hear from a number of speakers with relevant experience.
I've selected the most powerful excerpts from their presentations here. Despite being invited, neither the Energy Transition Zone company nor the council representatives turned up to contribute. Instead, Eva kicked off the session on behalf of ETZ, drawing on their contributions elsewhere. She donned a hard hat to better get into the role.
There's a little bit of generator noise in the background, which was used to power the laptop with her presentation.
[00:47:14] Eva Schonveld: Maggie McGinlay, ETZ Chief Executive, said on Radio Scotland yesterday that a small part of St Fittick's Park is needed by ETZ because of its location next to Aberdeen South Harbour. ETZ will work closely with the community to minimise the development of St Fittick's Park But maximize the impact in terms of jobs in a way that ensures ETZ are protecting and enhancing biodiversity and looking at other facilities that will enhance the park overall.
My hat is off, I'm not ETZ anymore.
[00:47:50] Kaska Hempel: Next up was Hannah from Grampian Community Law Centre. A part of Robert Gordon University's Law School.
She's been working with the community on challenging the rezoning of St Fittick's.
[00:48:02] Hannah: So, obviously the planning process, as many people who have become involved with St Fittick's Park have found out, is not particularly user friendly. It is very tricky to use and understand. And it is not made for the lone person. So we have this process, which is designed to be democratic, where we have a new local development plan comes into play every once in a while. And around about 2019, 2020, we had the emerging local development plan for Aberdeen.
But as the new plan emerged, there was very quickly decided amongst decision makers that the park would have a different use. Obviously, things had developed with the port so we had the port taking over the Bay of Nigg and starting to creep, and then the powers that be decided, actually, that park looks just fine for a load of industrial units, so we'll have a bit of that as well. And obviously there's some money behind it.
So, I guess it feels a wee bit like a fait accompli. You know, it must feel like that to the community. It feels that there's no hope. We're done here. It's, you know, the decisions made. But actually, you know, we've been working for months now with the Friends of St Fittick's group to understand what legal avenues there are to challenge this.
And we have got avenues that we're investigating. So, this is not the end. This is very much the beginning. And it's going to be a long road ahead. That's a big process. I've just been through it with another community campaign and it's stressful. And it's time consuming. But if we don't stand up to these things, then no land in Scotland is safe, as Richard very wisely said on Radio Scotland yesterday.
[00:50:04] Speaker 1: Do you want to just turn to the person next to you, just because you've heard two quite different presentations. Just take a moment to think, to share what that feels like, having listened to the person with the hat, and then to Hannah, yeah? What did you get out of that? What were the differences in what was being said?
What were the different feelings with that? Just turn to the person next to you, just for a moment. Yeah.
[00:50:27] Scott Herritt: So my name is Scott Herritt. So I'm here representing Defence Sympathetics, which is this sort of campaign group, what got set up to protect the park. So, I moved to Torry about two and a half years ago, and I can remember going down into the park, and it was just before the, obviously the harbour's been getting built.
But I can remember going down into the park one day, a bit like today, walking down, and it's a really sunny day, walking down the hill, and there's just this natural amphitheater bowl looking out to the bayonet, and I just thought this is amazing. Like, this is an amazing place. And I basically ended up living here.
And so now, if you go down there, that is gone. That is all gone. Even though it's in the water, it's affected the park. And that's what's gonna happen if they take a third of that park and stick a long, big factory in which no one knows what it's for. So, I'm really, really, really angry. And I'm really angry because of obviously what's happening.
But I'm also angry because ETZ Limited decided not to come and look people in the eye. So I actually helped put another Assembly on which was more focused on basically looking at this idea of a community asset transfer of the park. And two years ago we asked them to come and present their plans.
And they said that the plans weren't ready so they didn't want to come. Since that time, it's been two years, and they've said exactly the same thing. So, I'm going to leave that up to your own conclusions, like what that actually means. It's not about any transition, it's about a private land grab of our land, of public land.
We all own this land, collectively, in common. That is what it's about. And that happens, not just in Aberdeen, that happens across the world. And we need to stop that, and the only people who are going to stop that is people like you. And I appreciate there's people, there's a mixture of people in from Torry and from outside of Torry.
This is happening in your communities as well. But the only way to change that is... likes of you getting together, wherever your communities are, and trying to sort of do something about it, and not relying on people in suits, in big offices to try and do something about it. It's only going to change if we do something about it.
As you probably can recognise from my voice, I'm not from Aberdeen, I'm from Grimsby. And so Grimsby's a place where it's like transitioned, and it's transitioned from fishing to basically nothing. And so it's had a big impact on parts of town which I grew up in. And so I think I just wanted to sort of highlight is that the Friends of St Fitticks support the real need for an energy transition and this idea of a just transition. And Aberdeen itself has gone through lots of different transitions. So, you've had like, obviously you had the granite industries, the ship building industries, the mills, the fishing, and then obviously you went into oil.
And so all those transitions have been imposed on the people, and the people have been in control of those transitions, essentially the same people who want to control this transition now. We have to find a way to control that and direct it so it's actually to the benefits and to the needs of people.
So whatever comes next, we need to try to find a way that we're sort of part and parcel of what happens. And I think, why not start that in here, in Torry? This, what we're doing today. That's what should happen. It should happen everywhere. So that's what I'm going to say.
I'm just wondering, do you want to say anything?
[00:54:18] Speaker 1: It really angers me that we've been selected yet again to sacrifice our space and our heritage and our nature for money, and I'm really pissed off about it. Sorry, I get a bit emotional.
If you all know me, you know I do cry a bit. So to say we are now responsible for Aberdeen's thriving economy if this zone goes ahead, and that's a hell of a responsibility to put on the community. If you don't give us this, Aberdeen won't fall. That is the message that we've been getting.
[00:54:57] Adrian Croft: My name is Adrian Croft and I'm a GP. I am the Clinical Lead at Torry Medical Practice. I'm the director of the Ribbidy Medical Group, which owns the practice. So, a couple of years ago, me and my colleagues decided we needed to write an open letter. Addressed essentially to the council and to the Scottish Government.
To explain why we were astounded and shocked at the decision to change the planning regulations and to plan for industrialization of the park. We have, sadly a life expectancy that's like 13 years less than the West End in this area of Banagas. You have a healthy life expectancy, more than 20, 25 years even, compared with the rest of the city, second to the West End. I mean, those are massive, massive differences.
But the evidence internationally shows that the benefits of green space are most marked in communities that have the worst health. The Scottish Government has polished hugely on green space, on the benefits of green space.
We urgently need massive investment for the energy and industrial transition. But this is not the technology to do it. This is not the place to do it. And this is definitely not the way to do it. I mean, we'd love to see our money going into technologies that are proven. Things that can deliver immediate, tangible benefits to our local communities. Like insulating our houses. The houses here are frequently very small, very cold, very damp.
So... they could quickly do something there that would massively improve insulation, for instance, in the community. And how cheap compared to the money they're pouring into this.
[00:56:50] Kaska Hempel: This is, of course, just a very short snapshot of the process, and only some of the issues that we're focused on. The afternoon continued to explore questions about why these problems keep happening, and how can Torry reclaim the power to make this a healthy community to grow up in?
Amongst all of the presentations, there was a lot of conversation and contribution from the audience. The format was varied across the day, and many voices were heard and recorded, just like Eva promised. The proceedings were also beautifully summarised in visual notes by Graphic Artist Rosie Bailuzzi.
You can see some of that record on the Torry People's Assembly social media channels which I linked in the show notes. At the end of the day, I asked a couple of others what they thought about the process.
[00:57:45] David McCubbin: My name is David McCubbin. I work for Third Sector Interface. Moray. Just started last month. I'm a Project Coordinator with a Just Transition project in Moray, which is part of the wider Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen City. A project that's been coordinated by Nescan.
I've come here today to volunteer just to help set up and man the welcome desk but also just to see how an Assembly works and learn because although we're not doing Assemblies, we are doing deliberative events with the different communities in Moray that want to engage and have those conversations about whatever it might be and it isn't this top down, you know, whether it's government or councils or an organisation, so it's trying to get people involved so that they feel part of the process and the decision making.
It's very easy for people to not want to engage or say, well there's no point in being involved because I'm not going to make a difference but if we can show that you can make a difference it will inspire people and I think communities are looking at other communities to see what are they doing and then that spurs them on it's that kind of snowball effect.
[00:58:52] Kaska Hempel: What's the most useful thing you saw today and during the day?
[00:58:55] David McCubbin: What I really like about it is it feels very friendly and informal. There's no barriers. It's open to all. There's the entertainment for the children. There's nobody suited and booted. It just feels accessible to everybody. And you could see some people were coming on their own and people would go up and speak to them.
So you were given the opportunity to mingle. But nothing's forced and nobody's being made to say or do anything they don't want to. I know sometimes when I go to things and you think I just want to listen. I don't necessarily want the spotlight shining down on me or to be, you know, given a mic to go up in front of everybody because there's the opportunity to write stuff down, you know, the trees they're doing and the leaves and it's sort of open to all because this isn't everybody's cup of tea.
And this is really nice as well, outdoors. And, you know, they're in the place that one of the biggest challenges being faced at the minute and it's not just sort of in a community hall somewhere, it's here and the fact they did the tour earlier and that was really well attended so you could see this is where the proposals are.
I like the fact as well it's drop in and out so you can come for the whole day and I know ideally that's what you want. Actually some people might come and think oh I'll just, I'll drop in briefly and then oh this is all right actually and I'm gonna stay and then they stay and then they might come back tomorrow.
[01:00:10] Sarah Stroud: My name is Sarah Stroud and I'm a filmmaker. Yeah, so my feeling was like sometimes it felt like I was in group therapy. So it was really interesting like I loved when the chap speaking about psychotherapy and like for me I was really aware of the layers of the connections we have with the past and how we relive the cycles of things. I was just really aware of it being quite a therapeutic space. And how, you know, you're being given time so that you can speak and then people listen. Like that's something that you do quite often in 12 step programmes. It felt like really quite safe and a really nice nurturing space.
[01:00:47] Fiona McIntyre: Yeah, and you were allowed to be angry you know, I was saying that I felt like I was picking up on people's emotions and feeling things that I didn't think I expected to feel but through that process probably have healed a little bit as well, like kind of, or at least there's a sense that there's people to share with. Kind of thing, like, yeah.
My name's Fiona McIntyre. I run Greyhawk Bay, which is a local charity in Torry that aims to connect communities with our coast and heritage. We have a cafe up in Torry Battery, which has the best view of bottlenose dolphins. Because this is the community we serve, it's really important to us that maybe we can share what we have been able to do, but also just to kind of really get to know what are the issues and really...
Yeah, I kind of support the community in that, and even just in listening. And again, seeing the children and the old men, like, seeing the cross section of, like, so many different people, and also people that have travelled up for the event.
[01:01:49] Kaska Hempel: Right, we're interfering with serving of dinner, so we probably should back out.
But thank you for chatting.
That was the Assembly gathering. Lots and lots of going on in it. The second day was... It's equally busy with its focus on hearing input on how from local experience and then discussing strategies, next steps, and drafting an action plan. According to Rosie's graphic record, by the end of the assembly, a few ideas for practical action started emerging.
From community litter picks, basketball tournaments and nature activities at the park to raise awareness and make it an irresistible place for all in Torry, to door knocking campaigns to reach people in their own homes, discussing heating costs and time banking ideas, to a vision for a community led Torry Retrofit Project, creating local jobs alongside warmer homes.
Of course, the Assembly was just one point in the journey for this community. As someone said on the day, it's a long journey, and this is only the beginning, and there's been many beginnings. But it'd be interesting to see how this beginning may go forward. I asked Eva to comment on what needs to happen next for such people led Assemblies to turn into productive beginnings.
[01:03:15] Eva Schonveld: We talk about there being three main pathways. So, pathway one is what the community could do for itself. Pathway two is like stuff that we want to happen that needs to interact with current power holders. That might be the council, that might be national government, that might be funders. But these are things that are going to take more work and more preparation.
Pathway three is a really interesting pathway that's sort of imaginary at the moment, which is to do with the kind of things that I've been saying is like, what could communities achieve? If they decided to step into responsibility for decision making. What could we achieve together if we connected our Assemblies and used deliberation to have really, really juicy, generative conversations about how we could do things really differently.
How we could change our communities and change our way of life in a way that means everybody gets their basic needs met. Which they currently don't, and also where we're not polluting the planet that we rely on to survive. These are kind of absolutely crucial questions of the moment, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be us in the places that we live who come up with the responses to that.
Because fundamentally... that's what humans are for. Humans are for living in a place, having families and friends, and cooperating and collaborating with the natural world. We've given our power away to this kind of system, which feels impenetrable, and it also feels inevitable, because it's all we've ever known.
But it's not how humans have always lived. We cannot continue to live like this. And we all know that. There's got to be changes. And to be kind of creative and collaborative and cooperative in how we make those changes so that people don't get hurt in the process. Feels like, well, this is the window that we've got to do it that way.
And it's much better than the alternatives.
[01:05:19] Kaska Hempel: Great. Yes, great call to action. So, organising something like this, it sounds really involved as a process. Is there help available, or funding?
[01:05:31] Eva Schonveld: I think this is one of the really big stumbling blocks with this whole thing, is that it takes a lot to organise and there isn't currently money around for people to do Assemblies.
It may be that as a result of this... Scottish Government will extend, because this is coming from Just Transition funding, which is being piloted in the North East and may be rolled out across the whole country. They may decide that Assemblies are a good thing, community run Assemblies, are a good thing, so there may be money coming from that.
And there may be money coming through the climate hubs. If communities are saying, we want to have Assemblies, and this is what we're applying for grants to do, if the hubs think that those are important, then they would be able to put funds that way. And the last thing I would say is that we've got a training and we're planning to run a training up in the North East.
Basically, it's an assembly catalysts training. It's for people who might then go off and set up a steering group and do all this kind of outreach. And we're going to develop, hopefully, if we get the funding, next year, a facilitators training, which we would work with Go Deep, who's another one of the partners in the NESCAN process.
[01:06:41] Kaska Hempel: How do you take... the ideas forward. Do you have any feeling for that and what would be the most powerful thing that people can do or an outcome from an Assembly that can happen?
[01:06:53] Eva Schonveld: Well, this Assembly in Torry will have this declaration that will include a plan. Or at least the beginnings of a plan for how we're going to move forward.
And that might include small local initiatives that local people have, you know, discovered that there's other people who are keen on whatever it is. And also requests or slash demands to the council of things that need to be taken up in Torry. And all of that requires following up. And so for a big chunk of the money that we're putting forward for years two and three is for somebody to work in Torry basically to drive forward the outcomes of the Assembly.
Because before we went to Torry, we just had no sense of how little capacity there is in some communities who just had the stuffing knocked out of them. And while there might be, there might be a group of people who could just carry on, just kind of integrate this with the work that they're already doing for nothing on behalf of the community.
And I expect that is what will happen to begin with. There's a real need to have resource for individuals or small groups who can take things forward on behalf of their communities. Being fed into by these broad community led processes.
[01:08:14] Kaska Hempel: This is by no means an exhaustive guide in deliberative democracy.
So if you're interested in learning more about how this kind of work can help your own community, NESCAN will be shortly publishing a set of resources relating to the first round of deliberative democratic process pilots across the communities in the North East, including... the community led Assemblies like the one in Torry.
You can also join assembly catalyst training in Aberdeen starting on the 6th of October. SCCAN has invited Open Source to additionally deliver such training across Scotland in January, so look out for registration details coming out on our channels later this year. I've put the relevant links in the episode notes for you, including more information about the ongoing fight to save St Fittick's Park. I'm fascinated to find out how this story unfolds in the future. I'll leave the last words today to Torry Bears, knitted by Lynne for her table at the welcoming tent.
[01:09:18] Lynne Restrup: So, there's just a bit of a play on the word Torry. We are the Torry Bears. It is our territory and we love its history. Please share your own story at Torry People's Assembly.
Together we can be victorious. It's just a bit of fun to show that it's not all serious and doom and gloom. We can have a laugh for ourselves.
[01:10:01] Kaska Hempel: Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a like and share it with others. It'll really help us reach a wider audience. If something exciting is happening in your own community, be sure to let us know so that we can help you tell your own story. You can drop our Story Weavers a line at stories at SCCAN.scot.
It's SCCAN, S C C A N. scot S C O T
We also offer training and mini grant support to community storytellers. To keep up to date with our offerings and everything SCCAN, check out our website at SCCAN. scot or find us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Or simply sign up to the newsletter.

Everyday Changemakers: Peter Moffatt, Transition Black Isle

Today’s Everyday Changemaker is Peter Moffatt, Transition Black Isle trustee and a man behind its website. Our Story Weaver, Kaska Hempel, caught up with him at SCCAN’s Northern Gathering in Inverness on the 16th of September.
Credits:
Interview and audio production: Kaska Hempel
Resources:
Transition Black Isle https://www.transitionblackisle.org/
Transition Network (worldwide) https://transitionnetwork.org/
Transition Together (Britain) https://transitiontogether.org.uk/ (SCCAN is part of this project/network)
Transition Black Isle Million Miles Project 2012-15 https://www.transitionblackisle.org/million-miles-project.asp
Million Miles Project in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/23/carbon-cutting-transport-scheme-helping-black-isle-go-green-scottish-highlands
21 Stories of Transition (book produced for COP21), including a story about the Million Miles Project https://transitionnetwork.org/resources/21-stories-of-transition-pdf-to-download/
Highland Good Food Partnership https://highlandgoodfood.scot/
Highland Community Waste Partnership https://www.keepscotlandbeautiful.org/highland-community-waste-partnership/
James Rebanks English Pastoral https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/03/english-pastoral-by-james-rebanks-review-how-to-look-after-the-land
Gorge Monbiot Regenesis https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/05/regenesis-by-george-monbiot-review-hungry-for-real-change
Transcript
[00:00:00] Kaska Hempel: It's Kaska, your Story Weaver. What a weekend it's been. Still buzzing after our members Northern Gathering on the 16th of September. I met some amazing people on the day and workshopped all sorts of ways in which stories and storytelling can help us all think about a better future for our communities.
As always, there was simply not enough time to chat to everyone about everything. But since I already travelled all the way to the north, I also took time to visit several amazing community groups around Inverness for Everyday Changemakers interviews. And honestly, I can't wait to share those soon in the podcast as well as a wee place based audio tour I'm going to put together for you.
I road tested the tour by cycling around the project locations and I think the stories will make for a fantastic way to explore Inverness on a bike, either in person or online. But today I wanted to share my chat with Peter Moffat from Transition Black Isle, which is based on Black Isle, just north of Inverness.
As usual, you can find out more about the stories and resources behind this community group from links I popped into the show notes for you. I met Peter at the gathering itself, where he was holding an information stall for his group. And at lunchtime, we stepped outside the Merkinch Community Centre to record our conversation.
[00:01:26] Peter Moffatt: I'm Peter Moffatt. I'm one of the trustees of Transition Black Isle.
I have been since 2015. I live at the eastern end of the Black Isle, not far from Muir of Ord, two fields away from the Black Isle Dairy, which is a very, it's one of the few dairy farms in the north of Scotland. It has an enterprising young owner who runs a farm shop.
[00:01:51] Kaska Hempel: Tell me about a favourite place where you live.
[00:01:55] Peter Moffatt: There's a walk we do just round the fields from the back of the house, which goes along at one stage, an avenue of beach trees looking over the fields towards the Beauly Firth. And it's a wonderful view. And it's just walking around the fields, and it's great.
The other way we sometimes go is down over the fields to Conon Bridge, and then along the River Conon. There's a lovely old graveyard a mile or two along there, which not many people know about. But it's a wonderful place to go and think about the people who've gone before you basically, and a very pleasant, enjoyable walk.
[00:02:32] Kaska Hempel: How come you got involved in community climate action? What's been your journey?
[00:02:37] Peter Moffatt: I can't think of anything particular that sort of started me off.
I joined Transition Black Isle as a result of talking to somebody at a stall they were running at an event in Muir of Ord, which I think was something to do with a transport proposal and went on from there really. I admitted to the fact that I had worked with computers and I promptly got captured as it were because the person that currently ran the website lived in Aberdeen and wasn't very active.
So first thing I did was become responsible for editing the Transition Black Isle website, which i've been doing ever since. I'm not sure how many people actually look at it regularly, but I do try and keep it updated with information about climate change and climate activities and government policy and the council, what the council's doing.
I quite enjoy it, but I can't go on doing it forever, obviously. But there's nobody looking... To come and take over.
[00:03:31] Kaska Hempel: What about before you joined Transition? Were you interested in climate issues or environmental issues before then?
[00:03:38] Peter Moffatt: I can't remember. I've always been interested in the sort of countryside issues. My father was a farm manager, so I grew up interested in farming and used to go and work on a cousin's farm during the summer holidays when I was a student and on the farm at home as well.
So I suppose that's interest in nature and the outdoors and I've also been interested in mountaineering all my life. Where there's concern with climate change, I suppose it grew up, as it grew up generally, not very long ago. Despite the fact that people have been warning about it for the last 50 years, people only generally started to take notice relatively recently.
I remember being particularly struck by Greta Thunberg's initial school strike for climate as it was when she sat down outside the Swedish parliament. And she was on the website as soon as she did that, and I've been supporting her as strongly as I can ever since. So setting a fine example.
I don't know honestly where my personal concern with climate change as such began. Possibly as a result of joining Transition Black Isle.
[00:04:50] Kaska Hempel: When I say transition movement, what's the first thing that comes to your mind?
[00:04:55] Peter Moffatt: The idea of trying to move from the status quo business as usual consumerist society to a more sustainable way of life basically. And that was the founding idea of the transition movement. When it began in Totnes, how much transition is actually taking place. Some of the ideas that they had aren't really being applied, I don't think.
There were transition groups were supposed to have energy reduction plans which would progressively reduce the amount of energy consumed in the local area and change its nature. So it was more from renewables. That's not really happening, which is not to say that Transition Black Isle and other groups, whether they're transition groups formally or not, aren't doing a lot of good work.
They are and there's an amazing number of them, but I can't help feeling that for all the good they're doing, you know, merely scratching the surface of what actually needs to be done.
[00:05:53] Kaska Hempel: What makes you the proudest in terms of achievements? of Transition Black Isle.
[00:05:59] Peter Moffatt: Major achievement was something they called the Million Miles Project which was a project aimed at reducing car use on the Black Isle by a million miles over a period of two years I think the project ran and it was amazingly successful, a lot of support.
It actually became the number one story in a book of 20 stories published by the transition movement, I think for one of the COP climate conferences. And we were quite proud of that. Apart from that, recently we are involved as partners in two very important co operative ventures. One is the Highland Good Food Partnership, which grew out of a series of online discussions which were held about two years ago I think.
The other more recent initiative is something called the Highland Community Waste Partnership, which involves eight groups throughout the Highlands. Which is led by Keep Scotland Beautiful and is aiming to raise awareness of waste and reduce waste, particularly food waste, in local communities.
A lot of good work being done. How widely it's being recognised, I'm not sure.
I mean, if you ask your average person on the Black Isle about the Highland Community Waste Partnership, I'm not sure they'd have heard of it. But perhaps that's because we're not publicising it well enough. But there is a lot of hard work being done.
[00:07:35] Kaska Hempel: Who or what inspires you personally?
[00:07:39] Peter Moffatt: That's difficult. Greta Thunberg for one. Talking about food and farming. James Rebanks. Excellent, fascinating book. English Pastoral I think it was called.
He is trying to recognise the sort of traditional values in farming as it ought to be practiced. Involved in the landscape and the countryside, he's in the Lake District, so it's obviously a certain type of land, sheep farming, which some people would say we should do away with, but if it's there, then he seems to set a fine example of how to do it in the right sort of attitude to the land and so on.
Somebody else I would mention is George Monbiot, writer and journalist and activist. Everything he says is pretty sensible. Some people are a bit dubious about his idea that we should replace all beef and dairy farming with industrially fermented protein generated from microbes, fed on carbon dioxide and hydrogen, which apparently you can eat.
 It doesn't sound, it would be very appetizing, shall we say. But the chances of doing away with the entire meat and dairy industry, which people say we need to do in order if we're going to reduce environmental damage and feed people adequately, is well, it's a big ask and, it's difficult to see how it could ever come about.
I was just reading Tim Spector saying the same thing, basically, about the need to drastically reduce the amount of land devoted to producing crops to feed cattle for beef.
And we should all be eating more plant food instead. Which is undoubtedly true and unlikely to come about, unfortunately, which is one of my reasons for not being a climate optimist.
[00:09:31] Kaska Hempel: Since we're talking about meat and not eating meat, do you have a favourite vegetarian or vegan dish?
[00:09:36] Peter Moffatt: I make something which is called by the uninviting name of Veggie Grot. Which is in fact a vegetable it's a sort of... vegetable crumble, really with a sort of cheese and breadcrumbs topping. And it contains whatever vegetables come to hand, lightly cooked in the oven. It's popular with our friends.
I take it to mountaineering club meets and they all eat it eagerly enough. I'm not completely vegetarian, i'm certainly not vegan, but the idea of a vegan cheese or vegan sausages, I find difficult to accept. I know they exist. All our sandwiches today were vegan, I'm told. But we don't eat a lot of meat.
My wife and I are largely sort of 75 percent vegetarian, I would say, at least. And I like vegetables. I grow vegetables in the garden. And it's very satisfying to eat your own produce.
[00:10:25] Kaska Hempel: Where in the world are you happiest?
[00:10:28] Peter Moffatt: Where am I happiest? In a sunlit wood, preferably with a burn flowing by, or on the top of a Scottish mountain.
[00:10:42] Kaska Hempel: Now the final question, I always ask people to imagine the place they live in, ten years from now.
Imagine that we've done everything possible to limit the impact of climate change and create a better and fairer world.
And share one memory from that future with our listeners.
[00:11:02] Peter Moffatt: Quite honestly, I think it will be very little different from what it is now. If, some of the ideas that have been proposed in the local place plan that is currently being prepared for the Black Isle and will be presented to the council at the end of this month. If some of them were to come to fruition, then the Black Isle would have a better transport system.
It would have lots of affordable housing available for local people. It would have more local food production. Better care for old people. And safer cycle routes and so on. Transition Black Isle has been working for years on an active travel route, cycle path basically, between Avoch and Munlochy, and we have been frustrated.
It's a question of getting a hold of the land, and there has been reluctance in some quarters to make land available.
[00:12:03] Kaska Hempel: And if you can share one sound or smell or taste of that future, what would it be?
[00:12:08] Peter Moffatt: I would like to think it was the sound of Curlews and we used to hear them over the fields outside the house. We were in Shetland a little while ago looking out over the pasture which should have been busy with Curlews and Lapwings and there was nothing there at all. Whether anything is likely to change to the extent that these birds become more numerous than they are at the moment, I don't know.
It's unlikely, but it would be nice. I would love to hear Lapwings calling over the fields outside our house on a regular basis.
[00:12:38] Kaska Hempel: I'm going to ask you if there's anything else that you wanted to add for our listeners.
[00:12:44] Peter Moffatt: If you're interested and concerned about climate change and so on, just think whether you could make that little bit extra effort and volunteer for organisations like Transition Black Isle. There are plenty of other organisations on the Black Isle and elsewhere. Offer to volunteer, offer to become a trustee maybe and take a bit of responsibility.
It's not very much. Put your good intentions into practice. Transition Black Isle has an online newsletter with a subscriber list of about 480 people. It has a membership of about 150. It has six trustees, needs more, and it is sometimes difficult to get people, especially young people, to volunteer to help with activities.
There's a serious lack of young people coming forward, whether it's because they think it's an old fogey's group. I don't know. But we need more involvement by people who are obviously concerned, but just need to take a step forward and put that concern into voluntary action and actually help the climate movement on its way.

Everyday Changemakers: Tom Nockolds from Loco Home Retrofit

Kaska Hempel, our Story Weaver, interviews Tom Nockolds, who is one of the people behind the community-driven retrofit project, Loco Home Retrofit, based in Glasgow.
This episode complements video recordings of presentations from the "SCCAN Member Networking and Skillshare Meet up: Talking about Retrofitting", which took place on 25 August 2023. You can find them on SCCAN YouTube channel.
Credits:
Interview and audio production: Kaska Hempel.
Resources:
SCCAN YouTube channel with the recording from the members skillshare on community-led retrofitting, 25th August 2023: https://www.youtube.com/@scottishcommunitiesclimate6914/videos
Loco Home Retrofit https://locohome.coop/
SEDA Retrofit conference, 15-16 September 2023 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/seda-conference-2023-progressing-retrofit-comfort-health-affordability-tickets-692329465067 
Transcript
[00:00:00] Kaska Hempel: Hello, it's Kaska, one of your Story Weavers. Last Friday I attended one of SCCAN's Member Skillshares. Focused on a truly wicked problem of retrofitting our very energy inefficient Scottish homes.
[00:00:16] Kaska Hempel: Our housing stock seems to be one of the worst in Europe for energy efficiency, which makes it unhealthy, uncomfortable, and expensive to heat. Yet there's not been nearly enough progress made on this so far by our governments.
[00:00:32] Kaska Hempel: Very frustrating indeed. So, I was impressed how a couple of Scottish grassroots organisations are taking matters in their own hands. By treating this as a community problem or rather a community driven solution, and this way
[00:00:48] Kaska Hempel: Moving things ahead locally.
[00:00:50] Kaska Hempel: This inspired me to interview one of the presenters, Tom Nockolds, who's behind one of the community driven projects, Loco Home Retrofit in Glasgow. For more details on the retrofit projects themselves, you can watch recordings of the Skillshare on SCCAN's YouTube channel as soon as they're processed. And as usual, we put all the other relevant links in the episode notes for you.
[00:01:15] Kaska Hempel: And if you'd like to delve into the nitty gritty of holistic approach to retrofitting, have a look at the Scottish Ecological Design Association Conference on the subject, which is taking place in Glasgow and on Zoom on the 15th and 16th of September.
[00:01:32] Kaska Hempel: But for now, let's go back to our Everyday Changemakers story and find out what makes Tom tick.
[00:01:41] Tom Nockolds: I'm Tom Nockolds. I live in Glasgow and I'm the co-founder and co-executive Officer of Loco Home Retrofit. Loco Home Retrofit is a cooperative, as well as a community interest company whose mission is to decarbonise homes in Glasgow. And we're very focused on privately owned households. We operate in the space of retrofit, which is a bit of a technical jargonistic term. Simply means refitting, energy efficiency, and low carbon heating into existing buildings. And our mission is to make better retrofit more accessible for more people in Glasgow.
[00:02:29] Kaska Hempel: Great. That sounds amazing. why Loco?
[00:02:33] Tom Nockolds: We struggled with a name for a little while. I was saying to Chris, co-founder, I was saying to Chris, you know, let's not give ourselves a boring name like Glasgow, Retrofit Co-op.
[00:02:47] Tom Nockolds: And he was really on board with that idea. And we eventually settled on Loco because it's a bit of a play on low carbon 'cause we are a climate change action organisation, but it's also about local community. And thirdly, and very much last and least, we did acknowledge that Loco does have a meaning in some other languages. And we wanted to acknowledge that what we were doing was a little bit crazy, you know?
[00:03:18] Kaska Hempel: Because
[00:03:18] Kaska Hempel: Loco is Spanish for a bit mad, isn't it?
[00:03:22] Tom Nockolds: It might be a mild way of putting it, so I'm a bit hesitant to focus too much on the Loco with that definition. Mostly it's a play on low carbon, local community.
[00:03:33] Kaska Hempel: Yeah, it reminds me of Locomotive.
[00:03:35] Kaska Hempel: So it's like putting something in motion as well.
[00:03:37] Tom Nockolds: That's right. Exactly. We're all about getting people moving on their retrofit journey.
[00:03:42] Tom Nockolds: We also grappled whether or not we would lean into the jargonistic term retrofit or try and avoid it. And obviously we decided to lean into it. So it is a bit of a challenge to get out there and start talking to people about retrofit, and we need to approach that carefully, but it's in our name, and that for us is a bit of an icebreaker.
[00:04:03] Kaska Hempel: Great way to start a conversation.
[00:04:06] Kaska Hempel: Tell me maybe about a favourite place where you live, or part of the project that you are involved with. That's your favourite part.
[00:04:15] Tom Nockolds: So I've been living in Glasgow for three years. You hear from my voice that I'm Australian. And I've only been living in Scotland for four years. I live in the south side of Glasgow. I live in a suburb called Strathbungo, which is actually a very small suburb. Many people have heard of it. It's got a very high profile. But it's very small and the way that I like to describe it is that particularly my part of Strathbungo, 'cause I live in a tenement building, is sandwiched between two of the largest tenement areas in Glasgow, Pollokshields and Govan Hill. And I live on a road that is one of the main thoroughfares between these two neighbourhoods.
[00:04:59] Tom Nockolds: And I myself live in a tenement area. It's a very diverse, vibrant neighbourhood. Probably the most ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Scotland. There's a huge amount going on. So when I walk out my door, there's a lot on offer. A lot of really interesting shops, lots of cool bars and cafes and things like that. But just a lot of people who bring a lot of different things to the local area. And in particular, I live very close to Queens Park, and Queens Park is one of the best parks in Glasgow in my opinion.
[00:05:38] Tom Nockolds: It's not just a Victorian era park, we're sort of parading formal gardens, but it's got a wooded area and you can just lose yourself and escape the really urban environment that exists when there's tenements. And the thing that I relearn every time I go into Queens Park is that you've got to never forget to regularly go in and be amongst the trees 'cause they have this incredible ability to de-stress you. And then, you know, later that day or the next day, I've completely forgotten.
[00:06:10] Kaska Hempel: Yes, regular detox, so important. It's so fortunate that you've got that on your doorstep.
[00:06:14] Tom Nockolds: Yeah. But a really built up urban environment with a lot of vibrancy, and very close to this amazing outdoor area of Queens Park with views over the city trees and yeah, just beautiful, beautiful location.
[00:06:31] Kaska Hempel: That sounds pretty amazing. Now, if you could briefly tell us about why you got involved in community action or climate action in this project that you set up here.
[00:06:44] Tom Nockolds: Well, for me it's always been there, this sort of voice inside of me about making a positive contribution and in particular an environmental bent. I grew up in a suburb of Sydney in Australia, suburb I grew up in, Balmain was traditionally a very working class suburb and was one of the places where the Australian Labor Party emerged. So really, I grew up immersed in an environment where labour struggles and class struggles were a feature.
My parents were very aware of this, even if they weren't themselves from that background. My dad was an academic, for example. But I didn't move into that space. I got on with life and struggling as a young adult to find my way. But it was when I was in my late thirties. I found myself working for multinational law firm in the Sydney office. Law firms are interesting. They occupy the top floors of the nicest buildings. It's a really nice working environment, and you get to work with some really amazing, intelligent people.
[00:08:00] Tom Nockolds: But it became increasingly apparent to me that I was working for the bad guys. This particular event took place where a memo went round to all staff and it said something like, you've heard about fracking and coal, steam gas extraction from the media, come along and find out what it's all about. And it was sent to all staff. There were separate mailing lists for just the legal staff. 'cause I wasn't a lawyer, I was just helping with IT and sustainability projects. So it seemed like, it was a genuine, let's explore this issue.
But when I went along, to my horror, it was actually a session for lawyers on how they could successfully navigate their client's coal and steam gas exploration license through the regulatory regime to maximize chance of success. And that for me was the big moment where it was brought up right up into my face. You're doing the right work for the wrong organisation. And I was in a fairly comfortable position at the time. I'd never been a wealthy person, but my wife had just finished a year of study and we knew that we could survive on one income and she'd got her job back. And I quit my job. Gave them the minimum amount of notice and walked out the door, and I didn't have anywhere I was going to.
[00:09:24] Tom Nockolds: I just threw myself headlong into volunteering. Lots of volunteering in my local community and for initiatives across the city. And very quickly I realised that the thing for me was community energy. And within less than a year, I was part of the team at a small workers co-op, co-founded by two amazing women. And that organisation is called Community Power Agency. And to date, they remain Australia's only dedicated support organisation, helping communities develop energy projects. I did a lot of volunteering, for one group in particular, Pingala. And, we put solar panels on the roof of craft breweries across the city, among other things. And that was lots of fun. And, yeah, I basically consider that ever since 2013, my career has been working in the field of community energy. It's just that in 2020 thereabouts, I shifted my focus from installing new energy generation to decarbonising projects. So my work with Loco Home Retrofit is still community energy, but it's about decarbonising. And reducing energy consumption.
[00:10:39] Kaska Hempel: The flip side of our energy problem, isn't it? Thank you for sharing that.That's pretty drastic journey, but, it feels like you're in a much better space right now.
[00:10:44] Tom Nockolds: I mean, it was the best decision I've ever made in my life, career wise. And I rapidly found myself working with the most amazing people, doing the most rewarding work. Feeling like I was making a big contribution, never earning less money. It's been wonderful.
[00:11:11] Kaska Hempel: Brilliant. Hey, sales pitch for community work. Great. Now you've already defined retrofit for us when you're introducing your project. But what does it mean to you?
[00:11:23] Kaska Hempel: Yeah, I think for me, the main thing that I think about and feel when I hear the word retrofit, it's about making our existing buildings fit for the future. We're gonna need to make our homes a lot more resilient because of increasingly you know, violent weather. And before that, we need to make sure that they're first of all well maintained, but also in the future we're gonna need to make sure that our houses are not causing damage to the environment, such as contributing to climate change through carbon emissions, and healthy spaces for the occupants. So when I hear the word retrofit, I think of homes that are fit for the future, that are well maintained and resilient, that are healthy, comfortable and zero carbon.
[00:12:27] Kaska Hempel: What advice would you give to people who want to learn more about retrofit and how communities can get involved in this?
[00:12:36] Tom Nockolds: First of all, one thing that I don't think I've explained is that we are a particular type of retrofit organisation. We're a local community intermediary. And let me just sort of unpack that a little bit.
[00:12:47] Tom Nockolds: We firmly believe that because retrofit of homes is going to be difficult for any given homeowner, disruptive and expensive, that it's vital that people are hearing from people in their own community about what the benefits of retrofit will be, how to go about it. It's also relevant that buildings are subtly different in different areas.
So in Scotland, for example, in Glasgow, we've got traditional buildings built out of sandstone using particular techniques. Whereas in Aberdeen, they've got traditional buildings built out of granite using specific techniques. So that local context really does matter. And we also know that from looking at previous programmes such as the Green Deal, the Ill-Fated Westminster programme. Top down, centralised government approaches to energy efficiency and environmental behaviour change generally don't work.
[00:13:59] Tom Nockolds: I mean, they're necessary. They're a necessary ingredient and piece in the puzzle, but they don't actually work in terms of delivering the outcomes, achieving their goals, and recognising the needs of local people, motivating the local people to take action. So that's a local and community piece. And intermediary refers to the fact that there's simultaneously a lack of demand, a lack of households who are wanting to retrofit their homes. And there's also a lack of supply. There's lack of installers, tradespeople that have that specific knowledge about taking a whole house approach to go much deeper and get a home onto zero carbon heating. And so we think the best type of organisation to bridge the gap between homeowners and the supply chain is a locally based organisation who's rooted in the community.
[00:14:57] Tom Nockolds: So your question was, what advice would we have to someone starting out on this journey? First piece of advice is understand that need to find a way of embedding yourself in the community. I'm kind of thinking you are from the local community, and that gives you the greatest strength to be able to connect with all of the diverse aspects of what makes up that local community. And you need to do that in order to be successful. You don't necessarily need to have the technical skills, 'cause those technical skills are transferable. But it's the more difficult work is building the community connections between yourself and your organisation and all the different groups and all the individual householders. That's actually the difficult work. That'd be very difficult for an external organisation to get into focus on the community organising aspect without being blind to the technical skills that you need that you can potentially bring in from elsewhere.
[00:15:59] Kaska Hempel: Where in the world are you happiest?
[00:16:04] Tom Nockolds: it's funny, there's two places where that's the case. The one which is most obvious to me, is I grew up in a house which had a fairly open door policy, and we weren't a big family by any stretch. My parents were effectively migrants to Sydney and I'm the youngest of three, but nothing makes me happier than being in my home that's full of people, family and friends.
[00:16:36] Tom Nockolds: We had the great privilege of hosting Christmas a couple of years ago in our house, and the place was insanely full of people. It was stressful and noisy and hectic, but it confirmed something I really definitely already knew is that I'm happiest when my house is full of people. The second place I'm happiest is when I'm out in nature and in particular amongst trees.
[00:16:58] Kaska Hempel: For this last question, I ask everybody this, is for you to imagine the place you live in now, 10 years from now, and imagine that we have all done everything possible to limit the effects of climate change and make it a fairer and better place to be.
[00:17:17] Kaska Hempel: Here in Scotland, and you look around you 10 years from now,
[00:17:22] Kaska Hempel: share one impression or memory from that future with us.
[00:17:27] Tom Nockolds: The first thing is that the neighbourhood is a lot greener than it currently is. There's a lot more trees right in the heart of the urban environment, and that's because space has been made for them. The second thing is that it's a lot quieter. That's because trees have a dampening effect on sound.
[00:17:49] Tom Nockolds: But also because one of the main ways that space has been found for them is by replacing many journeys that are made by car with quieter, lower carbon, more sustainable forms of active travel. There's a lot more people walking and riding bicycles around. There's probably a lot more of those electric scooters too.
[00:18:10] Tom Nockolds: But the point is it's a lot quieter. And then the third thing is, I wouldn't say there's more people on the street, but there's more vibrancy around that. There's more people speaking to each other, saying hello to each other. So I consider that one of the main reasons why I'm doing the work is to build community. I'm not saying community doesn't exist in any given place. It does. I'm just saying I think our communities need to have stronger links, stronger connections. People need to know each other. That's one of the most important aspects of resilience as we step into a really uncertain future. So that's my vision. People know each other, well connected. It's quieter and it's definitely a lot greener.
[00:18:50] Kaska Hempel: Is there anything else you would like to share with the listeners that we haven't covered?
[00:18:55] Tom Nockolds: I think it's essential that we reduce carbon coming from our homes and I'm definitely very sceptical about any message around decarbonisation that it's all about individual choice. It's not all about individual choice. This has got to be about systemic change and about individual choice. One of the most important things we can do as individuals, whether we're renters or homeowners, is to be aware of just how much carbon is coming from heating our homes, homes in this cold climate of Scotland, and to demand that something be done about that.
Now, if you're a renter, the best thing you can do is to join a tenants union and speak to your landlord about them making your home more energy efficient and moving towards zero carbon heating. If you're a homeowner, the best thing you can do is to get yourself onto a having a whole house plan for retrofit. And that's the sort of thing our organisation can deliver. Now, if you're not in Glasgow, it's really worth considering whether or not you and some other local people should be establishing a local retrofit intermediary. Ideally structured as a co-op so that you can ensure that it's democratic, locally owned and the benefits are staying local so that you can start moving all of the homes in your area forwards on a journey towards zero carbon, getting those homes fit for the future.
[00:20:19] Kaska Hempel: Yes lets do it. Thank you so much.
[00:20:26] Tom Nockolds: Thanks Kaska for having me and yeah, it's been a real pleasure to chat.

Fittie – Past, Present and Future. A Story.

Listen to an inspiring example of work by a tranditional storyteller in residence, helping community of Fittie in Aberdeen come together and face the past, present and future of the place where they live and love. Story was developed and perfomed by Cara Silversmith, with an introduction from our Story Weaver Lesley Anne.
Resources
Cara Silversmith's website: https://www.carasilversmith.com/
Cara's reflection on developing this story on her own podcast, "What of the Ground we’re standing on”: https://whatoftheground.podbean.com/e/commissioned-stories-honouring-truth-and-telling-stories-with-love/
1000 Better Stories Member of the Month: Fittie Community Development Trust https://sccan.scot/blog/member-of-the-month-the-fittie-community-development-trust/
Safe Harbour, Open Sea project https://www.openroadltd.com/projects/culture-collective/

Long Live Lenny - a story from Edinburgh Remakery

Today Roz Littwin reads "Long Live Lenny", her short story creatively exploring the good work of the Edinburgh Remakery.
Roz’s story was originally published on the 1000 Better Stories blog and funded by one of our storytelling mini-grants. The grants fund contributions to 1000 Better Stories Blog and Podcast. They are open for applications now with a deadline at the end of July and another one at the end of October. Get in touch on stories@sccan.scot to find out more.
Credits:
Roz Littwin - text, recording and narrationKaska Hempel - production
Resources: 
Edinburgh Remakery https://www.edinburghremakery.org.uk/
1000 Better Stories blog https://sccan.scot/1000-better-stories/1000-better-stories-blog/ 
Storytelling mini-grants https://sccan.scot/1000-better-stories/ 

Everyday Changemakers - Ruth McLaren from Arran EcoSavvy

Our Everyday Changemaker today is Ruth McLaren, Arran EcoSavvy's project and communications development officer.
Credits: Interview, recording and edit by Madeleine Scobie, Sound production by Kaska Hempel
Resources:
Arran Eco Savvy website: https://arranecosavvy.org.uk/
Green Islands Net Zero project: https://arranecosavvy.org.uk/green-islands-plans/
Project Videos
Zero Waste Cafe: https://vimeo.com/796376962/ce499f02e2
Active Travel Hub: https://vimeo.com/799647519/663c6e3da1
Community Shop: https://vimeo.com/826523465/3f3863284a?share=copy
Transcript
[00:00:00] Madeleine: Hello, I'm Madeleine Scobie and I'm SCCAN's media intern. I interviewed Ruth McLaren, who is the Project and Communications Development Officer at Arran Eco Savvy. Since 2014, Arran Eco Savvy has been working towards making Arran a greener and more sustainable island. Some other recent projects include the Green Islands Net Zero,
[00:00:24] Madeleine: the Active Travel Hub, Community Shop, and Zero Waste Cafe. I asked her to describe her favourite place to visit in Arran.
[00:00:34] Ruth: Ooh, that's a bit of a tricky question actually, because there's so many amazing places.
[00:00:39] Ruth: I'd have to say my favourite place is Glen Sannox in the north of the island.
[00:00:43] Ruth: And it's just this absolutely beautiful, kind of dramatic glen. Not too far from where I stay. And it's kind of really peaceful.
[00:00:51] Ruth: You often, you'll go from the beach, which will maybe have lots of people on it, and if you go up into the glen, it's kind of empty and don't see as many folk around, but you'll see, you know, deer. And I've seen a golden eagle in there once.
[00:01:04] Ruth: and it's just really just absolutely beautiful.
[00:01:07] Madeleine: So how did you get involved in Community Action? What's your climate journey?
[00:01:12] Ruth: I've always been very kind of interested and aware of climate change ever since I was at school, really. And it's just always been something that I've been very passionate about, but also very worried about.
[00:01:23] Ruth: And my career. I used to work, I've worked in the government, I've worked in the private sector, but I've also worked for several charities.
[00:01:31] Ruth: But I really wanted to get involved in climate action. And when I moved to Arran, I found out about Arran Eco Savvy, which is a local organisation. At the time, they were looking for a Shop Manager for their charity shop pre loved goods shop.
[00:01:45] Ruth: I applied for that job. I didn't get it, but then I subsequently applied for another job that they had advertised. And I've worked for Eco Savvy for almost five years now,
[00:01:54] Ruth: working across several different projects.
[00:01:56] Ruth: So yeah, I feel really lucky to have been involved to such a degree within the community and within such an impactful organisation within a community that is interested in climate change matters.
[00:02:07] Madeleine: So what's the biggest challenge that your community group or you had to overcome in taking action, and what do you think you learned from it?
[00:02:16] Ruth: I would say that the biggest challenge, just in general with both the community and the issue of climate change in general.
[00:02:25] Ruth: It's just such an overwhelming topic. It's something that affects all parts of life. You know, it's not just about, you know, the environment and you can be an environmental activist. It also connects with people's lives in terms of
[00:02:38] Ruth: the economy and their finances. You know, social issues and social justice. You know, lots of local issues, land use. You know, it really is, it really does connect with so many other issues that it's not just about, you know, climate change or the environment.
[00:02:54] Ruth: And I think that that's really the crux of the issue with the kind of slowness of change. In that, on these higher levels is that it's just people become so overwhelmed with talking about it. And it can be quite a negative thing also, you know, it's quite scary.
[00:03:07] Ruth: And that's not always easy conversations to have with folk.
[00:03:10] Ruth: And it's also not an easy thing for people to kinda think about.
[00:03:13] Ruth: And that's why at Eco Savvy, I think we kind of try to focus a lot of the time on the small things that people can do.
[00:03:20] Ruth: But also acknowledging that it's not just about individual change, it's about the wider community level changes, but also government levels and just acknowledging that it's something that intersects in all parts of everybody's life.
[00:03:32] Madeleine: What's something that you're most proud of?
[00:03:35] Ruth: I'm really proud of the work that the organisation does in terms of just seeing the everyday impacts that it has.
[00:03:42] Ruth: So for example, we were at an event at the high school in Arran a few weekends ago. And
[00:03:48] Ruth: we had our e-bike trials going on so people could come along and try an e-bike which are always super popular.
[00:03:53] Ruth: But we also had some kiddies bikes that have been donated. So, somebody wasn't using these bikes anymore, just handed them into us. And the mechanics had done them up and made sure they were roadworthy.
[00:04:04] Ruth: And then this wee girl came along and she couldn't ride a bike, but she really wanted to be able to ride a bike.
[00:04:09] Ruth: So our e-bike guy just spent 10 minutes with her and showed her how to ride a bike and then she could ride a bike. She was allowed to just take that bike home. So, you know, things like that on a community level that can have such a big impact for those individuals. And then a long lasting, you know, who knows what she might do, you know, once she's learned to ride a bike, that could make such a big change for her.
[00:04:30] Ruth: So these kinds of things, and it's the same with the food work that we do and the little pop-up cafes that we have. And within the shop, whenever you go in the shop, there's people coming in for a chat. People coming in to try eco products, to donate stuff because they don't wanna see these things wasted.
[00:04:44] Ruth: So really, yeah, I think the thing I'm proudest about the most is really kind of integrating into the community and the work that's been done there.
[00:04:50] Madeleine: Who or what inspires you?
[00:04:53] Ruth: So I think climate activists really, really inspire me. Nobody wants to be doing that stuff. You know, nobody wants to be taping themselves to bridges and gluing themselves to roads and things like that. Particularly the youth activists really, really inspire me because I just feel like, why should they have to think about these things?
[00:05:13] Ruth: It's so unfair, you know? It makes me quite bitter that they're having to think about these things, and not just think about these things but having to spend their time, you know, acting on these issues that shouldn't be a problem for them.
[00:05:25] Ruth: But having said that, it's so inspiring that they care so much and that they're really the ones leading the charge to kind of address the climate emergency. And yeah, I find that super inspiring.
[00:05:38] Madeleine: What do you think is the most powerful thing that the Arran community can do right now to help create a better and fairer future for all?
[00:05:47] Ruth: I would say coming together, the Arran community does generally come together really well, but coming together and just kind of doing more of what they're doing already, you know, and acknowledging that small actions can have a big, big impact. So, you know,
[00:06:02] Ruth: there's the stuff that we're doing with Eco Savvy with active travel and sustainable food, but it's kind of, people can do whatever they're good at. So if you're good at gardening, go along to your community garden and volunteer there.
[00:06:16] Ruth: You know, if you're passionate about the sea, there's an amazing marine conservation organisation here, so you can get involved with beach cleans or volunteer at the Visitor Centre at Coast.
[00:06:26] Ruth: You know, there's really so much on Arran that folk can do, and I think that people on Arran have a really special relationship with the place and the land and the landscape,
[00:06:37] Ruth: being an island that we are. Because we have all these issues with the ferries and things like that. But also it is a very amazing geographical place to be because you're on an island.
[00:06:47] Ruth: And when the weather's bad, you feel the weather and you feel the impact of the seasons. And you notice your environment a lot more than you perhaps might if you were living in the city. And I think that people in Arran are very aware of that and really passionate about preserving that and taking care of the environment and taking care of Arran and all these things. And I think that's really powerful.
[00:07:07] Madeleine: When I say Green Islands Net Zero. What's the first thing that pops into your mind?
[00:07:13] Ruth: Well, we have a Green Islands Net Zero project.
[00:07:16] Ruth: It has lots of levels to it. So on the biggest level, it aims to map
[00:07:20] Ruth: emissions of Arran to get an understanding of where our emissions can be improved.
[00:07:26] Ruth: And then on a
[00:07:27] Ruth: smaller level than that, it's also about making people's homes more efficient so that they are warmer and their bills are less. Especially during this cost of living crisis, I think everybody's certainly feeling the pain and the pressure of increased energy bills. So, I get that net zero can be a bit of a jargon term for folk and can be a bit off-putting.
[00:07:49] Ruth: But really on a basic level, it's about reducing waste and trying to make things more efficient so that yes, it's good for the environment, but it's also good for your pocket and that you save money in the process.
[00:08:03] Madeleine: What do you think is the most useful resource in terms of community climate action that you would point people to?
[00:08:10] Ruth: I'm gonna kinda cheat and say two. I think the best resource that you can have is having conversations with folk and learning about what's happening, having conversations about your opinions and what people that your friends and family have heard and their thoughts. But also I'm a massive fan of the internet and doing your own research, being on social media, just kind of being aware of what's happening around the climate change movement.
[00:08:39] Ruth: Because, you know, the mainstream media does report on it, but I think that there's a lot to be learned from smaller news outlets and blog posts and community organisations that are on the ground who are trying to deal with the climate emergency.
[00:08:54] Ruth: Who might have a lot more kind of progressive opinions and ideas and also have had experience and successes that are relevant to you wherever you are.
[00:09:05] Madeleine: What is your most treasured possession?
[00:09:07] Ruth: Well, I wouldn't really say it's a possession? but my most treasured
[00:09:11] Ruth: things would be my memories. So I would say all my life, basically, I've taken lots of photos ever since I was very young. So I would say all my photos that were physical photos that I have in photo albums. But then also now, the ones that I have that are digital pictures. I must have tens of thousands of them stored. So yeah, they would definitely be my most treasured possession.
[00:09:33] Madeleine: So if you could imagine Arran 10 or 30 years from now and imagine that we've all done everything possible to limit the effects of climate change and now Arran is a fairer and better place to be. Could you close your eyes and share one memory from that future with us?
[00:09:52] Ruth: The dream for Arran would be the community all living peacefully and happily together. But having much better local processes. So you know, we're able to grow our own food here. We're able to produce all the food that we need, or the majority of the food that we need here. Amazing transport systems where you don't need to have a car. Better off-road systems where the possibility of cycle lanes to link up villages. Just being much more resilient as well. And being able to function much more as a community with all the resources that we need as much as possible on our island.
[00:10:32] Ruth: I think that would be pretty ideal. And preserving the natural beauty of the island and keeping the air clean and the beaches litter free and plastic free.
[00:10:42] Ruth: All these fantastic things that we will have in 10 years time.
[00:10:47] Madeleine:  Thank you for speaking to me about Arran Eco Savvy and also your own climate journey.
[00:10:51] Ruth: Thank you for having me.
[00:10:53] Madeleine: Check out Arran Eco Savvy's website to learn more about their different projects and the great work they're doing to create a planet friendly future for their island home. They've just published some short videos about their Zero Waste Cafe, Active Travel Hub and Community Shop, which are worth a look. The links for these are in the show notes.
[00:11:14] Madeleine: This is a little teaser for the upcoming Arran audio tour that we are hoping to put together as part of Everyday Changemakers. We will be recording some more interviews with other people from Arran Eco Savvy soon, so watch this space for more.
 

Everyday Changemakers - Carolyn Powell, Huntly Development Trust

In the first episode of our Everyday Changemakers shorts series we meet Carolyn Powell from Huntly Development Trust who's working on community-led town centre regeneration.
Credits: Produced by Kaska Hempel
Resources
Trust Website: https://www.huntlydt.org/
Number 30/Town Centre development: https://www.huntlydt.org/what-we-do/town-centre
Carolyn’s bio https://www.huntlydt.org/about-us/people
New Economics Foundation https://neweconomics.org/
Climate Action Towns (Architecture and Design Scotland): https://www.ads.org.uk/resource/climate-action-towns
Climate Action Towns film: https://youtu.be/ZMj9PMrUwjs
Transcript:
[00:00:27] Kaska Hempel: Welcome to our Everyday Changemakers series. Wee blethers with everyday people taking climate action in their communities.
 [00:00:38] Kaska Hempel: Hello, it's Kaska, one of your Story Weavers. Today's guest is Carolyn Powell from the Huntley Development Trust. She's been involved in a redevelopment of an iconic listed building in Huntley's main square. The Number 30, as it's affectionately known, is being transformed into a multipurpose community space with green credentials.
[00:01:01] Kaska Hempel: This project is a cornerstone of the trust's investment into community driven regeneration of the town centre. I caught up with Carolyn at Stirling at the May gathering for the Climate Action Towns project supported by Architecture And Design Scotland. She was one of the presenters in an aspirational showcase of towns taking a place-based approach to issues facing communities locally, including the climate emergency.
[00:01:30] Kaska Hempel: I started by asking her to describe the building she's been working on. 
[00:01:37] Carolyn Powell: The building is in the middle of the town square, and what's wonderful about it is it's slightly magical. It has a tower at one end, and albeit that tower is not hollow, there's something about it that's reminiscent of a castle.
[00:01:54] Carolyn Powell: And you can imagine children making up stories about it, and it's on the corner overlooking, you know, right overlooking the square. So, as you come into the town, that's what you see. So, it makes the setting for something that magical that's going to happen. And hopefully with its renovation, something magical will happen.
[00:02:17] Carolyn Powell: I'm Carolyn Powell. I work for Huntley Development Trust and I'm Town Centre Development Manager. I work in Huntley, but I live on the coast just 20 miles away, half an hour from Huntley. 
[00:02:28] Kaska Hempel: How did you get involved in Community Action? What's your journey?
[00:02:32] Carolyn Powell: I come from a semi-commercial background, but around about 2006 I began working for the New Economics Foundation and the interest that I'd had in regeneration was fuelled and I started working on different projects for them. One in particular was really a ground up approach to entrepreneurship. So, people in places actually turning their interests and their passions into work, into a job, and supporting them to do that.
[00:03:04] Carolyn Powell: So that's really where the drive comes from and the understanding that in any community there are people who can change not only their own future, but the collective future as well. And that is primarily driven by the desire and the passion to do something. 
[00:03:20] Kaska Hempel: When I say place-based approach. What's your first reaction to it?
[00:03:26] Carolyn Powell: People. It's all about people. It must be. 
[00:03:31] Kaska Hempel: And if you were to explain that concept to somebody that doesn't know anything about it, how would you explain it? 
[00:03:37] Carolyn Powell: So, we have had periods in our history where we've designed around transport and roads and how things might look rather than people. People came second, they were put into that picture.
[00:03:51] Carolyn Powell: People are the picture, how they use the space. I mean, you wouldn't want a designer coming in to design your kitchen to come up with something that you, in practical terms, just simply couldn't use. And that's been what's happened in the past in some cases. So, places have not been fit for the purpose and the needs of the people that actually want and need them, whereas that's now being reversed.
[00:04:17] Carolyn Powell: So, we look at people first and we also look at what might happen. How might we want to do this? How would we want in the future, things to be different? You know, we might think that, okay, so we change this to make it more useful to people, to be more purposeful, but then we also build into that how we would like to build green space in the future.
[00:04:43] Carolyn Powell: We might not be able to do that right now, but if we change the traffic flow, if we have more people using sustainable transport rather than individual transport, we might then be able to create more green spaces. So, we need to think ahead with those things as well. 
[00:04:58] Kaska Hempel: What was the biggest challenge that your community group or your project had to overcome, and what lessons you've learned from that that you can share with people?
[00:05:08] Carolyn Powell: Probably the communication of it because there are so many strands to it. There's no single sound bite that will, you know, answer the question as to how it's been designed, how it can be used in the future. And the way that so far, and this will continue because it's obviously it's not quite finished, to get around that has been actually bringing people into it.
[00:05:32] Carolyn Powell: Even during the building process so they can start to see. Well, it's taking so long because the thing is falling down, and they could see that for themselves. And then later on they can see the spaces, oh gosh, you know, we can use that space and that space and oh, there's a staircase there, and oh, there's a lift over there, you know, and suddenly it's a real thing.
[00:05:51] Carolyn Powell: But communication's quite a tricky one because small pieces of information invite criticism and yet you can have too much information where it's changing, so it's very hard to keep that momentum going with it. 
[00:06:06] Kaska Hempel: Who or what inspires you? 
[00:06:10] Carolyn Powell: Actually, this is going to maybe sound a little strange. Change inspires me.
[00:06:16] Carolyn Powell: Everything is in a constant state of change and change is a good thing because you can't renew without change. Without change, things die. And that kind of resistance to it is, you know, it's so complex. But we need to embrace change. Now that's assuming all change is good, but of course, some change isn't necessarily.
[00:06:43] Carolyn Powell: But change inspires me because it can make things happen. It can stir things up, it can, you know, it can activate and inspire and really trigger something. 
[00:06:56] Kaska Hempel: What is your most cherished possession? 
[00:06:59] Carolyn Powell: His name's Angus. He has four legs and a tail. And in order to come here today for the very first time last night, he went to kennels and tomorrow morning I pick him up.
[00:07:10] Carolyn Powell: So yes, he is without doubt my most treasured possession. I shouldn't say a dog's a possession. If it was an actual physical thing, I dunno what it would be. But certainly there's a couple of things, handmade items from, you know, children's collection I probably would grab. It's just a demonstration of where they were at at that point and how you felt at that point.
[00:07:33] Carolyn Powell: And sometimes physical items encapsulate that. It's about like any memory that's connected with something tangible. It just evokes the memories of that period of time. 
[00:07:45] Kaska Hempel: If you could imagine Huntley or the project or descend of town in 10 years time or 30 years time. And if you could just close your eyes. You can spend a second thinking about that, and I'll ask you for one single memory from the future that you could share with us about this place. 
[00:08:04] Carolyn Powell: So, I live half an hour away, so I've just gone there. And the first thing that I'm struck by is the number of people that are actually walking through the middle of town.
[00:08:18] Carolyn Powell: That's because they can, because the traffic's now been diverted and it suddenly looks green, so it doesn't look all grey because the building's obviously there, greyish in colour. But it looks quite green because there are these trees in the centre and there's places to sit and people are chatting and there's tables and chairs outside Number 30, and there's tables and chairs outside the bookshop and people are sitting and they're chatting.
[00:08:43] Carolyn Powell: Older people are chatting to young people. The youngsters are coming through from school, but instead of heading straight down to get, you know, different types of hot food. They're stopping to say hello to people in the town, not just in their groups, and they're going into different places and they look cheerful.
[00:09:03] Carolyn Powell: And there's a feeling of excitement. It sounds chattery busy. But not bus driving through the middle busy. So, it's quite a different feel. There are some rather lovely smells because there's the smell coming from the lovely Bank Restaurant, which now exists. And there's different smells coming out of Number 30.
[00:09:27] Carolyn Powell: And in the corner, there's somebody baking bread somewhere. And there's notices about things that are happening, that people are being invited to. So, yeah, I don't need to shut my eyes for that one. That's real. 
[00:09:38] Kaska Hempel: Is there anything else that you'd like to share with 1000 Better Stories podcast listeners?
[00:09:44] Carolyn Powell: It's not an easy thing. And people can give up because it is tough and, you know, make no bones about it. But I think the most important thing is don't lose sight of these dreams. And, you know, if there was a criticism of the way we've all been in the past, it's not that we've been over ambitious and failed, we haven't been ambitious enough.
[00:10:07] Carolyn Powell: Be really, really, really ambitious. What have you got to lose? Just do it.
[00:10:16] Kaska Hempel: Check out an excellent blog on Huntley Development Trust's website for more stories about Number 30 and other wonderful work they're doing to make their town better for everyone. And if you are interested in finding out more about the nine towns involved in Climate Action Towns Project, I highly recommend the short film by Bircan Birol, which is available on ADS YouTube channel. I've put the links in the show notes for you. 
[00:10:42] Kaska Hempel: As you might have noticed, Everyday Changemakers is a new format we've introduced for 1000 Better Stories podcast to help us showcase more of the amazing work done by communities across Scotland and show that everyone can make a difference. Let us know if you'd like to share a story of a changemaker in your own community, and we'll arrange for an interview with one of our field reporters, or maybe you would like to interview someone yourself.
[00:11:08] Kaska Hempel: We are planning training in audio recording and editing soon. If you're interested, get in touch with me on stories at SCCAN dot Scot. Until next time, keep making a difference out there. 
 

Overcoming challenges for community car clubs (CoMoUK)

We share an episode from Collaborative Mobility UK podcast channel. CoMoUK is the national charity dedicated to the social, economic and environmental benefits of shared transport. Among many other things they provide excellent support and resources for community groups wanting to set up shared car or bike clubs.
The story explores some of the opportunities and challenges faced by community car clubs, and features three guests speaking about their experiences running a car club and navigating challenges including insurance, pricing, and sustainability:
Malcolm McFarlane from Kinross-shire Movegreener in Kinross, Scotland
Mike Callaghan from Local Energy Action Plan (LEAP) in Lochwinnoch, Scotland
Andrew Capel from Llani Car Club in Llanidloes, Wales
For more stories from CoMoUK, see their Shared Transport Podcast on podbean: https://comouk.podbean.com/. You can also find it on all main podcasting apps. 
Credits: Produced by Paul Bristow for CoMoUK
Resources
CoMoUK website: https://www.como.org.uk/ 
CoMoUK Shared Transport Podcast: https://comouk.podbean.com/
1000 Better Stories episode: An honest look at one community’s car and bike clubs about the Porty Community Energy project https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-bz9wn-1387976  
Car-shares
Movegreener: https://www.movegreener.org/
Local Energy Action Plan (LEAP): https://www.myleapproject.org/
Llani Car Club: https://www.llanicarclub.co.uk/
Porty Community Energy: https://portycommunityenergy.wordpress.com/ 

Gaelic tradition bearing and reconnecting our communities

What can we learn from the multigenerational wisdom of Gaelic tradition bearers about reconnecting our communities to places where we live, to our past and to our future in the changing climate?
To explore these questions, Our Story Weaver, Lesley Anne, talked to Gaelic Officer for CHARTS, Àdhamh Ó Broin, about his journey into Gaelic tradition-bearing and activism, the role of land-based ritual in modern world and seven-generation thinking.
The interview was inspired by the Spring equinox event, “Dùthchas Beò revitalising reciprocity with the Gaelic landscape”. This took place at ancient sacred sites of Kilmartin and Knapdale in Argyle and was a collaboration between Àdhamh and SCCAN’s network coordinator for Argyle and Bute, Marie Stonehouse.
Resources:
CHARTS https://www.chartsargyllandisles.org/
Dùthchas Beò event https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/556630325287
Gaelic pronunciation https://learngaelic.net/dictionary/index.jsp
“The Good Ancestor – How to think long term in short-term world” by Roman Krznaric https://www.romankrznaric.com/good-ancestor
“Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18693771
Transcript:
[00:00:36] Kaska Hempel: Hello, it's Kaska, one of your Story Weavers. I'd like to take you to one of my favourite places in Scotland, Kill Martin Glen in Argyll. Imagine it's an early spring afternoon and you're standing at the wide bottom of a shallow glen surrounded by gentle hills. Dotted with trees on the verge of bursting into leaf.
[00:01:01] Kaska Hempel: Birds fleet around in their branches and chatter with the spring excitement. You listen for the trademark territorial cuckoo calls, but they've not made it back from Africa yet. They'll be along in May, together with the blue bells. The sound of cars passing through the village breaks through the nature's spring soundscape, but it comes back even stronger after every wave of traffic.
[00:01:26] Kaska Hempel: You look down the wide grassy glen and the skies moving medley of blue and the gray cloud. The sun hits your face with a fleeting kiss as the shapes shift above your head. In front of you is a circle of standing stones manmade, but they've somehow become part of the landscape covered in colourful mosaic of lichens.
[00:01:50] Kaska Hempel: The more than 350 similar ancient monuments within a six mile radius of this village, with 150 of them prehistoric standing witness to more than 5,000 years of human history of this place. Your bare feet sink into cold, wet grass, and it feels like this place along with all the generations who'd passed through it is embracing you like a long lost friend.
[00:02:18] Kaska Hempel: This is how I imagined the setting of Dùthchas Beò, a Spring Equinox event, which took place at ancient sacred sites of Kilmartin and Knapdale. It explored a revitalizing reciprocity with a Gaelic landscape. It was a collaboration between the Gaelic Officer Àdhamh Ó Broin from Argyll and Isles Culture, Heritage and Arts organisation, and SCCAN's Network Coordinator for Argyll and Bute, Marie Stonehouse.
[00:02:46] Kaska Hempel: So what can we learn from the multi-generational wisdom of Gaelic tradition bearers about reconnecting our communities to places where we live, to our past and to our future in this changing climate? To answer these questions, our Story Weaver Lesley Anne talked to Àdhamh about his journey into Gaelic tradition bearing and activism, the role of land-based ritual in modern world and seven generation thinking.
[00:03:14] Kaska Hempel: But before we go any further, I would like to profusely apologize for my Gaelic pronunciation in this introduction. I'm a complete novice at this. Now, to start us off, Àdhamh introduces two concepts at the core of Gaelic identity and culture.
[00:03:32] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Dùthchas, which is the name of the event. Dùthchas Beò. Dùthchas, coming from the concept of dùth, which is an old word for people, and dùthaich, which is country. Land that is inhabited by people and therefore dùthchas is that inimitable connection with the place where your people have sprung. Now, for me though, this is quite difficult to articulate fully. Because I don't have a great sense of dùthchas with the place that my people came from because they're all gone.
[00:04:07] Àdhamh Ó Broin: They're all either cleared or forced to leave through economic circumstance. And I've been getting back up to my mother's area in, in Latheron Parish, in Caithness and getting my bare seat in the ground and trying to encourage the dùthchas to return to me there. And I've been doing the same in Ireland as well. But Argyll, the area that I grew up in, in the area that I'm probably most well known for being a tradition bear in, I don't have any ancestor connection to, so I've been adopted by the land there.
[00:04:36] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I feel very, very welcome there and I feel respected and appreciated by the land, by some people in the area. But for people who perhaps let's just see, you know, your from the Isle of Barra. And you know, you can trace back several generations on all sides. And so you and your people have always been from Barra. Then that sense of dùthchas is incredibly strong because you not only still inhabit the land of your ancestors, but you can trace the movements of your ancestors, you know, right across the landscape.
[00:05:05] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So that's the dùthchas thing. It's ancestral relationship with land and feeling of connection with it. So if dùthchas is the land and your relationship with it and your right to remain on that land and being in relationship with that land, then dualchas is the manner in which you described that relationship. So dualchas is you know, your stories, your songs, your Proverbs, your local history, all that side of things.
[00:05:27] Àdhamh Ó Broin: But it's specifically that which is inherited from generations before you. You know, so dùthchas is the land and your relationship to that and dualchais is the stories of the consistent relationship with that land as told by your ancestors. So they're utterly crucial to the, well, my name's if I was to introduce myself in sort of Ancestral styles you might put it in Is mise Àdhamh, mac Sheumais bhig, 'ic Sheumais mhóir, 'ic Diarmuid, 'ic Sheumais, 'ic Mhurchaidh, 'ic Sheumais.
[00:05:58] Àdhamh Ó Broin: That's referencing seven generations of my father's line and all the way back to Wicklow in Ireland. And so I suppose that if you're referencing seven generations back and honouring your ancestors, that far back then you're kinda making a commitment to be a good seventh generation. If we're lucky enough to get to that stage with the state things are in, but you know, so, that's who I am in the Gaelic sense in terms of professional end of things.
[00:06:28] Àdhamh Ó Broin: My work goes from very organic tradition bearing, picking up things that are about to get lost and keeping them and hopefully passing them on. So that's culture, songs, stories, Proverbs, anecdotes, words, idioms. It goes from that right across to consulting on films. At the moment, is mise Oifigear Cultair Ghàidhlig, i'm Gaelic Culture officer at CHARTS Argyll and the Isles, so we're a member led arts organisation and in that I have remit for Gaelic culture.
[00:07:07] Lesley Anne Rose: I mean, that sounds like one of the best jobs in the world, but you've also got the role of a tradition bearer. I'd love it if you could share a little bit more about what that role actually involves, and how, if anything, your journey to becoming a tradition bearer is in any way linked to your climate change journey.
[00:07:24] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Yeah. I'd always been environmentally focused since I was a child. You know, I think like anybody else with their head on straight, you know, they have spent a reasonable amount of time watching David Attenborough as a child, you know? So, you know, it came from that. And I remember there was a programme called Fragile Earth.
[00:07:41] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I used to watch that every time it was on, and I was sort of ethically vegetarian, you know, was brought up that way with my father, in fact. Growing up and I just always had one eye on that. Grew up in the country and just felt intrinsically connected to nature and it was bonkers that they were mistreating it. I mean, it just didn't make any sense whatsoever.
[00:07:59] Àdhamh Ó Broin: My father's people are all Irish, my mother's folk are predominantly from Highland Caithness, although I grew up in Argyll so a wee bit of a kind of Gaelic mix there. Highlanders and Irish folk are essentially one people, the Gaelic people, and folk from the Isle of Man as well. So it's really, it's an ethnicity, you know, and it happens to now be
[00:08:14] Àdhamh Ó Broin: quite divided by geopolitical boundaries, but the vast majority of people on the ground in the Highlands and Islands saw themselves as Gaels you know. But I never got that immediate everyday sense of who I was. I'm not a first language Gaelic speaker. As a child growing up in Cowal, I didn't have the language or culture passed down by my parents, but was very strongly encouraged by my only grandmother to pick the language of our people back up.
[00:08:44] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I came home to there after 10 years in Glasgow, and found that the language is on its very, very last legs, local dialect in central Argyll. And so I began to, as I said before, collect all these things that were getting lost and interviewing old people, some of whom couldn't speak the language fluently, but had loads of memories of it being spoken in words and praises and all sorts of things.
[00:09:11] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And then I brought up my children, with myself, my wife and three kids, all of them are fluent Gaelic speakers. And myself, my wife. Our three. Our first language speakers. I've never spoken any English in the house to them, so that means that the dialect of central Argyll is a living language once again, even though all the native speakers have unfortunately now passed away.
[00:09:33] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I suppose what happened was that. Because I had to struggle so hard to get the language back. I mean, not that it was difficult learning it, it felt like just placing bits of the jigsaw puzzle back into my brain, you know where they belong. Back into my soul. But you know, it's still challenging to do that with a young family and working and all the rest of it.
[00:09:51] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So as the years rolled on, that momentum of learning the language never left me. Once I had the language fluently, then I started going around the Highlands and, and recording, you know, tradition bearers and recording the dialects that were dying, you know, and many of my friends, my old friends and in different glens and islands and what have you have now passed on.
[00:10:16] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I'm very thankful to them for holding onto the language long enough for me to be able to learn it from them. But, I don't have that sense of intergenerational transmission. And so it's been a sense of rather than just what's normal and, you know, been happening for generations, it's been a sense of urgency and necessity that's caused me to tradition bear.
[00:10:35] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I saw a lot of things that were being lost, as I said, and I didn't see anybody else holding onto them, and I saw they were about to go, you know, and you're talking about spruilleachd, it's like, you know, almost like the crumbs that are left after you've touched yourself a slice of bread. You know, the breads actually long gone, but these crumbs are still there.
[00:10:54] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And if you pick them up, you can more or less sort of, you know, get a chewable bite out them, you know. And that's I suppose what tradition bearing is all about in a minoritized culture that is, you know, lost sort of 95% of its richness and speakership. So, tradition bearing for me is something that I've stumbled into backwards in an accidental fashion and now realize that I'm a tradition bearer and now realise that there aren't that many people like me, especially in the mainland, and it's almost like you're gathering up all the family photographs as you run outta the burning house, and then you're standing outside them all and suddenly you're the keeper of the photographs. But actually, you know, you hadn't even looked at them in 20 years, you know, and suddenly it's like, well, these are really important because everything else is gone.
[00:11:40] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Ultimately, if they're valuable things, somebody needs to pick them up and safeguard them.
[00:11:46] Lesley Anne Rose: That's lovely. There's so much sort of vivid imagery that you've shared with us. Thank you. That phrase you used about, I came to it backwards. I would just like to pick that a little bit more in relation to climate change.
[00:11:56] Lesley Anne Rose: Partly from interviewing someone up in Skye who is also a tradition bearer and they used the really beautiful metaphor or analogy that tradition bearing is the same as rowing a boat. Although you are, you are going forwards, but all the time you are looking backwards. And they were very keen to impress that tradition bearing isn't something that's about sort of stuck in the past about old sepia photos. It is very much a role that has a responsibility to look forwards as well. And just again, in terms of that sort of, onus around climate and looking after the land and tradition and people, how do you see that role of a tradition bearer in safeguarding the future, if you like, as well as the past?
[00:12:37] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Yeah, it's a great question. And I would agree strongly with the person that you'd spoken to there. I would just add that I'm not scared to look back to the past. I think in the modern world, people, they almost feel like they need to virtual signal about technology to say we are okay with technology.
[00:12:52] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Yes, we are grasping it all. Yes, we want it all, we're not against it. But you see, as anybody who's aware of environmental degradation, we know that technology in and of itself is not necessarily a good thing unless it is weighed up with the potential consequences and ramifications of its overuse.
[00:13:07] Àdhamh Ó Broin: We know that from the industrial revolution. You don't have to constantly convince people that Gails aren't old quarry people in sweaters, you know, stuck on crofts who never ever go anywhere else. We, you know, we know that's not true, but that comes from a long, long period of internalized colonialism. And you know, people were told it was holding back and told that, you know, if you were from the Highlands and Islands, you're just a daft Teuchter and all the rest of it.
[00:13:31] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, it's inbuilt in people so I understand it, but I think we need to get away from it. It's actually ok to value old things and it's okay to think for some people to feel much more comfortable with old things and older people and older traditions than they do with a lot of the traps in the modern world.
[00:13:49] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I'm certainly one of them, you know. So in terms of the environmental connection though, I don't believe climate change is happening or there's nasty things going on with the environment in the world. Because if anything that I've been told in a top down fashion by, you know, academic institutions or governments or organisations, I believe that there's something fundamentally wrong with the natural patterns in the world because our lore doesn't fit the weather anymore.
[00:14:19] Àdhamh Ó Broin: That's why I believe it. You look at phrases and things used to describe the weather that have been in place for decades, if not centuries, if not longer than that, and they don't fit anymore. There's one, for instance, you know,
[00:14:34] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I'm paraphrasing that, I can't remember the exact phrases, but if there's snow in the ditches in early February, then you know that the worst of the winter's actually over. But if it's really dry and warm and sunny at that point, then you know that you're gonna get a right, nasty, flurry of snow still.
[00:14:51] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And of course, every year you don't necessarily get that sort of thing. You don't get these signs, you don't get these things happening where you can just set your watch by it practically. And so that for me is where tradition bearing and keeping this language used, allows us to map out what's going on with the weather and what changes are happening because these phrases are a set of orienteering points that you can map the wheel of the year through.
[00:15:16] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And if things are out of place then you've got that ability to explain quite explicitly how by reference to these things that have been in place for centuries.
[00:15:25] Lesley Anne Rose: I mean I love that idea. That sort of local knowledge is just as important and should be taken just as seriously as any sort of top-down information and just how empowering that is and how respectful that is to both our ancestors, but also our own knowledge as well.
[00:15:40] Lesley Anne Rose: I'd just like to expand upon in what you've just explained. The first phrase that you said, which I made my ears prick up. Tradition bearers aren't afraid of the past. And certainly what I found with a lot of the climate change work that I've done within communities and on a wider scale as well, there's been a real push to heal the past. To tell untold stories of the past, if you like.
[00:16:03] Lesley Anne Rose: Before any planning for any more sustainable, just future. And I just wondered, is there a role there or do you see a role within the tradition bearers that is actually healing the past, respecting the past, telling the story of the past, understanding the past as a natural first step before we can even begin to think about a just transition or a more sustainable future?
[00:16:30] Àdhamh Ó Broin: In terms of the past and healing. Things that have happened. I mean, we carry it all in our dna. We carry it all in our bodies, you know, keeps the score. It's about your life experiences. And I can't remember the author there, but it's about how your body essentially is a carrier for all the trauma you experience through your life. Well, all the good things and the bad things. But we're also carriers of all that our ancestors have experienced because, well, where else can it go?
[00:16:56] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, depending on people's religious beliefs, maybe some of it does dissipate when the soul leaves the body. But who knows? Who knows? It's all speculation. But I don't think there's any doubt that ancestral trauma is a real thing, and I feel it implicitly whenever I go over to Ireland and I visit mass grave sites from the genocide there are otherwise known as the famine, you know, all the rest of it. I find myself having to go through very, very heavy leaving phases for all these things.
[00:17:26] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I've got one cousin still left in the place my mother's people belong to. Otherwise, I have to walk through the ruins of the houses of my people who are forced to leave as economic migrants. The idea is that you're having to walk through all these shadows of past brutalities and you're having to somehow through all that hurt and pain.
[00:17:50] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Extract from the cold ashes of the hearths of your ancestors, the embers that are worth taking with you, and carry them carefully out of these ruins and find somewhere appropriate to start a new fire with them. And that's really hard. You know, nobody gives you a guide book for these things.
[00:18:07] Àdhamh Ó Broin: It's ancestral work. Well, it's both ancestral cultural imperative. And as when I'm communicating with a lot of my indigenous friends, you know, they'll talk about their elders. And I think, yeah, lucky sods, whatever, because they've still got elders. I mean, you think of the hellish grief that so many indigenous people have been through, and you think of that, and yet they still have so many people around the world.
[00:18:30] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So many indigenous people have still retained that intergenerational connection where their elders are still important to them. And in so many Western societies, they're just getting packed into old folks homes. And I mean, these are the gold of the human race. You know, the golden generation. You've got knowledge that is, it's irrevocable because it only comes from life experience.
[00:18:50] Àdhamh Ó Broin: My elders are people that i've bumped into, because I was looking for people like them and ended up forming really close friendships. And so when I talk about my elders, you know, I'll talk about. Somebody up in Melness in the far north of Sutherland, even though my people don't come from there.
[00:19:09] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I talk about a friend of mine who just passed away at the new year. There was a fisherman from Applecross. You know, I'll talk about, the fellow who was the last speaker of my dialect in mid Argyll, who passed away heading for three years ago now. And yet none of these people are blood related to me.
[00:19:27] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So you're having to sort of cradle these last embers and you're having to try and support people who are already old and knackered and used to their knowledge being sidelined. You're having to hold them and hold space for them to give them the chance, and breathe that last bit of life in so that they can bestow something to you as a legacy that you can pass on your children and start the intergenerational transmission again.
[00:19:54] Àdhamh Ó Broin: That's the one thing that's different for myself and other people who have lost the intergenerational structure to folk who have managed to maintain right relationship with their elders, is that there's no guidebook. And when you're seeking these things out and you're wondering how to take them into the future, there is no hard and fast rules and you're having to fly by the seat of your pants with nothing but your instinct and your intuition.
[00:20:18] Lesley Anne Rose: You've described that just so very beautifully, that connection that you have with land and how that influences your role. Within that, do you feel that a tradition bearer is very much a sort of role for rural setting? Can people live in that urban setting and have that same sense of tradition and tradition bearing?
[00:20:35] Lesley Anne Rose: As you can clearly, if you've got that much sort of wider daily, deeper connection to the natural landscape,
[00:20:41] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I think you can, and the manner in which they can is to lean perhaps slightly more than you might in a rural setting with a thinner population to lean on people more in an urban setting. When you think about, for instance, Glasgow, I went school in Glasgow and here I would say that tenement life was an incredible setting where traditions came and went.
[00:21:11] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Were upheld and let go of, you know, where there was a sense of etiquette. You know, even it was just about who was cleaning the landing, you know, and people looked after one another's kids and the kids all ran about the dunnys out the back and you know, there was a absolute sense of community.
[00:21:28] Àdhamh Ó Broin: There's a sense of everybody looking after one another. Yeah. Terrible problems with drink, domestic violence, unemployment, poverty. Absolutely. It was all there. But the fact of the matter is people dealt with it undoubtedly as a community, you know, working Glaswegian people undoubtedly had a sense of identity that was pretty unique and it's still there.
[00:21:48] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And that the lovely thing is that if you get out and about in Glasgow, you stand and talk to somebody at a bus stop or on a bus or in a pub, you'll still get that richness of expression and humor and story. An anecdote in history. And there's no doubt that in terms of richness of expression and sense of place, there are people in Glasgow that are just as capable of carrying that forward as there would be in a rural setting.
[00:22:15] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And, you know, a crofting community in Lewis or wherever, it's a different flavour, but it's the process of tradition bearing. The idea of holding onto things that are valuable and passing them forward intentionally. Because they helped to express a sense of place and a sense of history and a sense of what it means to be a person within that space.
[00:22:36] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And that's really what tradition bearing's all about. I'm trying to get back to this idea at the moment and, you know, the event with yourselves was part of that. I would love it if people could accept this idea that actually there's not a single person on planet Earth that isn't a tradition bearer because all of our history and all of the way that we as individuals have experienced things are all unique perspectives.
[00:23:00] Àdhamh Ó Broin: The difference between not being a tradition bearer and being a tradition bearer is activating the tradition bearing mechanism within you to appreciate and be aware in a daily sense that what you know and what you've experienced and the perspective you've built through that is actually, it's a form of tradition bearing, and you don't have to be a great talker, a great storyteller.
[00:23:28] Àdhamh Ó Broin: A great singer. You simply have to be willing to pass it on and pass it on in as digestible a format as possible. So tell people the fascinating things. Tell people the exciting things. Tell people the difficult things. Don't shy away. From, you know, the fact that there could be a big story under seemingly incidental details.
[00:23:50] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I've said in the urban sense, you lean on people because they're all around you, you know, and maintaining community and being able to actually struggle against malign influences, you know, such as climate change. It is about staying in communication with people. So you need to lean on people in an urban setting because it's too easy to just sit in your box and stare at screens, you know?
[00:24:11] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And before screens came into things, there was a verve and an intensity to urban life, which has since died off because people are stuck with the latest opiate of the masses, which is no longer religion. It's now social media. Now, rural communities would maybe say that they relied on each other more, but that's simply because of a different type of infrastructure.
[00:24:32] Àdhamh Ó Broin: There's a less recognisable infrastructure, and so people relied on one another in a practical sense, perhaps more, but there's no doubt that you're more socially isolated in a rural setting when houses are further apart. So you rely on the the land there, you have the opportunity to sit quietly and listen to the rhythms of the land.
[00:24:52] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So that could be the wind, that could be the larks singing above your head, you know, it could be bees flying past your ears, could be seagulls, could be whatever. And exposing yourself to these rhythms dictates the manner in which you tradition bear. So if you are somebody who has long held exposure to a rural setting and either generations of it or just something you've done yourself to try and return to that tradition, then you'll find your tradition in the manner which you do it.
[00:25:19] Àdhamh Ó Broin: If it's not set by ancestral accumulation of expression, then it's set by natural rhythms. Because technology does provide artificial rhythms. It provides hums and buzzes and things that are imperceptible, we don't even know are happening. And glares and things that interrupt the bio clock. Our sleeping patterns. So getting out and paying close attention to the rhythms of nature and allowing that to start to reprogram you again, learning your own ancestral language, whatever.
[00:25:49] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And if you're English, you already speak your ancestral language which is a fantastic advantage. Even looking into local dialect that's been lost, whatever, learning these things and exposing yourself to the natural rhythms. So traditional rhythms and natural rhythms. Then programs the manner in which you tradition bear.
[00:26:04] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So the urban thing is there's a more intense mix of people and it's possibly more immediately social and it's noisier and it's more active, and the rural ones quieter, but they're both still perfectly valid forms of tradition bearing. You just need to lay yourself open to it and believe that the things that you feel are beautiful and worthwhile and necessary to tell are gonna be equally so for others.
[00:26:27] Lesley Anne Rose: I mean, that's just a lovely lesson for anyone to take into life about our story being beautiful and to believe in it and to tell it. And I suppose on a wider level, and this isn't me, I hope, putting words into your mouth, what you seem to have articulated about tradition bearing is it's about holding, telling and holding that story of the community.
[00:26:46] Lesley Anne Rose: And honouring and respecting it and making sure everyone has voice within that, and whatever setting that is. The story is, I suppose, the glue that holds communities and people together. And we all know that strong, resilient communities are gonna be essential in terms of a changing climate and a just transition, which makes that role of that story holding, that tradition bearer, just even more important as we move into changing times.
[00:27:11] Lesley Anne Rose: I think what would be really nice now if you just give us some examples or just talk through actually some of the work that you've done. Now, you mentioned that you've collaborated with Marie Stonehouse, who's the SCCAN Regional Climate Action Network Coordinator for Argyll and Bute, and that you recently did a celebration of the Equinox.
[00:27:28] Lesley Anne Rose: I wondered if you could just talk us through that event, what you did, the thinking behind it.
[00:27:34] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Marie was great craic and we got on a call similar to this one and before we'd gone even 20 minutes I think we'd already come up with this idea. And i've been stepping into ceremony with different indigenous nations, you know, consistently over the last.
[00:27:56] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So six, seven years. And initially, of course, people would probably say, well, how could you possibly know how to hold ceremony with indigenous people on a land that's lost all that ceremony? That's been entirely Christianized. And since then, secularized. How would you know how to hold natural ceremony and well, I didn't have a clue what to do to bring people into ceremonies, the first clue.
[00:28:27] Àdhamh Ó Broin: But I knew that I had to bring my kids through some kind of coming of age because we've lost coming of age ceremonies. And it's strange though, that perhaps people are so questioning of the idea of ritual and ceremony when they're perfectly happy to get married. Perfectly happy to go through that whole rig ma role, which really speaking for many folk is completely bizarre and unnecessary.
[00:28:49] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I mean, I'm married myself, but you know, a lot of other people won't be, and when they find that it's perfectly adequate and they just love the person they're with, and that's great. Don't need to go through the rig ma role. But for some people the rig ma role is very Important. It's like, again to use this analogy, a set of orienteering posts. That you can work through so you can disengage your creative mind for a moment and just be brought through different stages in order for your brain and your soul and your heart to turn through the rotations of the wheel and move through the experience, without having to necessarily guide yourself through it.
[00:29:20] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And that's what ritual's all about. So let's take this concept back a few notches and let's think about, I think I was saying to the folk when we were out the other day for the event with Marie, Dùthchas Beò. I said to the folk at the beginning about this idea of ritual and it's like, well, let's say you haven't seen very elderly, very knowledgeable, very beautiful soul, a relative for 30, 40 years because you've been overseas working and you only just return.
[00:29:50] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And I said to them, well, you know what would you do? What was the first thing you would do? And they're like, well, we'd go and visit. Right. Okay. And what do you think you would do when you visited? Well, I'd definitely take something with me like, you know, a nice, you know, packet of shortbread or, you know, I'd bake some scones or something.
[00:30:07] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Right. Nice. I like your thinking there. Great. And then what would you do once you got there? Well, you know, we'd have the kettle on. Have a cup of tea, maybe have a wee dram. Right, exactly. And then what would you do? Oh, well, I think we would just, we'd just talk. We'd just chat. Right. Okay. So you've pretty much set out the steps that are necessary to get back into good right relationship with somebody.
[00:30:33] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So I said, well, why would it be any different with the land?
[00:30:39] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know? And everyone's like, ah, the man's got a point. Now you think about it, right? You visit the land, you get back in familiarity and you say, look, I'm back. I know I've been away so long and I'm really sorry, but look. Quite frankly us is a species in the Western world. We've been away quite a long time.
[00:30:57] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So just letting you know I'm back. I wonder if I could come and visit you again sometime. And when you come and visit, well, you bring an offering, you know, and you make that offering to the land because the lands your host, you know the land's giving you beauty. It's giving you fresh water to drink sometimes.
[00:31:16] Àdhamh Ó Broin: It's giving you bird song. It's entertaining you. It feels beautiful, and you get fresh water to drink out of aruns and rivers and bogs, and it's giving you everything you could possibly need. You've got berries to pick and eat. It's feeding you. It's giving you a libation. And what, you show up and don't offer anything. I mean, what? What? It's just rude, but for me it's incredibly verging on pragmatic.
[00:31:37] Àdhamh Ó Broin: The idea of ritual and ceremony in the land. It's what I do. I return to the land and I make some small offerings, and I offer a wee dram and I have a wee dram myself and I have a conversation with the land. And I go to places where people have been having conversations for centuries. So I'm not the first one showing up here and going, oh, I'm, I'm gonna have some mad new age ritual happening. No, quite the opposite. I'm showing up in a place, say the place we went to for Dùthchas Beò. For the event. Where there's a frustration cross. So Christian Pilgrims have come off the road for hundreds of years and said their prayers and there's a well there.
[00:32:13] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And they've done their absolutions and then carried on along the way. The Christians, let's be honest, could be crafted back in those early days, they picked sites that were already in use and went, right, you know, we'll have it, you know, and we've continued to accept it would be Christianized. So before that place we went to. Kilmory Oib it's called. Ób Chille Mhoire. That place would've had a pagan past.
[00:32:35] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I say Pagan, that's what we call it now. It would've had a land-based religious practice. And so for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, people have been coming and making offerings and doing their absolutions and saying their prayers at that point. So me going back there and doing that and making these offerings and spending that time and getting back into conversation with the land and reestablishing a working relationship and perhaps even after time, it becomes a friendship.
[00:33:00] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And I certainly found it out. When I went to these places to start with. I mean, I was just stotting about. Not really sure what to do because, you know, it takes time, it takes consistency and it's the same when you go into somebody's house and especially an old person, they kinda go, this person's all about.
[00:33:15] Àdhamh Ó Broin: The intentions are. I mean, the land's the same, the land does the same thing. And eventually you realize that you're incredibly comfortable there and you go through the same ritual every time, and you just feel held by the land. You feel supported in what you're doing and you can confess all your fears and doubts and it just hears you and it holds you.
[00:33:32] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Now, some people might do that, if they're a Christian, they might do it in a Christian way. They might make their players to Jesus, to God, that's absolutely grand. That works just fine as well. You know, if they're Muslim, they might decide to roll out their prayer mat and say their prayers in that spot.
[00:33:45] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, brillant. That doesn't make a blind bit of difference to me because ultimately it's, you know, it's about reestablishing regular, meaningful relationship with the land, whatever the flavour of that may be, and doing that with other indigenous people who still have that practice and have had that practice handed down to them.
[00:34:06] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Remarkable the amount of things that they recognize in my practice. Go, that's exactly what we do. How'd you know how to do that? And I go, I dunno, the land just kept me right. I dunno how to do that. No, I don't. I dunno. I couldn't even answer that. They, they're like, you're on the right path because that's how we do things and you know, we've got thousands of years tradition on our site, you know.
[00:34:28] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So stepping into ceremony and offering indigenous people when they visited, the chance to take their socks and shoes off and to get into relationship and to come and visit our great elder who is the land, you know, to come and visit mother earth. And so folk from the Maori nation, Mohawk from the, uh, Wet’suwet’en and Co-Salish and Tlingit and Gumbaynggirr people from Australia and Karajá people from the Amazon rainforest you know, Mapuche from Chile and people from the Andes and you know, and also Basque folk you know and Welsh folk, and Irish folk, you know.
[00:34:49] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So we've had all kinds of people that belong to indigenous nations and have an ongoing relationship with the land. Come to Argyll and get into a relationship with our land and leave their blessings and bring their energy. And every single time I've had someone visit, I've learned something. All of these indigenous people, which has then fed back into my practice.
[00:35:11] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Now remember my friend Clark Webb, a fantastic language revitaliser of Gumbaynggirr people in Australia. And he says to me, how do you introduce yourself to the land? And I was like, well, I sometimes take a little saliva and I rub it on a rock. If I come to a sacred place that has a longstanding, you know, standing stone, I find myself rubbing my saliva.
[00:35:27] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And he was like, ah. He said, because when our people come to the land, we take sweat off our brow and rub it on the land to introduce ourselves to land. So how did you know how to do that? I'm like, well, I don't know, maybe I saw something about you doing that or like your other indigenous peoples doing that.
[00:35:42] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I dunno where it came from, but it was intuitive and it stuck and then it turned out other people did similar things and then it got the stage where i was like, well this is all very well, you know, with having fantastic guests from all around the world. But ultimately if we're going to. We're gonna turn this situation around and get people paying attention to their environment and investing in the environment and thinking of it is something that is crucially important because otherwise they're held by nothing.
[00:36:10] Àdhamh Ó Broin: They exist in a vacuum, you know, then we need to start sharing this stuff. And so that's how we got to the point where when I started talking with Marie, then it seemed natural. You use the partnership between CHARTS and SCCAN. As the point to begin to share this with folk that belong to these islands and not just special guest appearances as it were. You know, so more like an open mic, rather a touring act.
[00:36:38] Lesley Anne Rose: That's lovely. I mean, what you've just explained really has made it very accessible for people who are confused. Don't know how to begin that to reconnect with our landscape, wherever that is, whether that's an urban park or the coast or a forest.
[00:36:55] Lesley Anne Rose: I would really love to return to what you mentioned at the start about seven generations and seven generation thinking. Which is a concept that really chimes with me because I live in a community that's seven generations old. So it's a really nice hook for the residents here to think about what we need to do now.
[00:37:13] Lesley Anne Rose: To be good ancestors and think in terms of the coming seven generations and what they'll need from us. So in terms of that sort of seven generation thinking, if you want to unpack that a bit more, but also this might be a bit of a cheesy question, but if you could go back seven generations, what would you thank your elders for?
[00:37:33] Lesley Anne Rose: And then I suppose equally because, you know, the kind of subject we're talking about is a changing climate. If you could imagine your children's, children's, children's seven generations coming back in time to you now, what do you think they would ask you for?
[00:37:48] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Yeah, quite challenging. I think they'll articulate this because I suppose if I had carried on, in the vein that was set for me, then I would've just carried on into more isolation and you know, more of a socially fragmented state. I have a half brother, but I'm an only child from my parents, and by the time it got to me, they were sort of an accidental couple. I'm an accidental baby, you know, my parents split up very quickly after that. So there's a lot of accidentality to my situation and my people being quite distinct.
[00:38:25] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, highland, lot of them, part of the free church, and then Irish Catholics, which is a classic Glasgow story in fact. But, everything had fragmented to the most incredible degree. The time it got to meet my Irish people. The Irishness had been completely jettisoned by the time it came to my father. Absolutely jettisoned.
[00:38:41] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Anything Irish had been thrown in the bin, you know, to save further generations from the trauma of, I mean, you know, 1920s Glasgow and the anti-Catholic, anti Irish racism is absolutely horrific. The Razor gangs flying about and all rest of it. So the time it came down to me, there really couldn't have been much more lost.
[00:39:02] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So when I look back through those seven generations, you know, if I go from myself, I go to my father who was a World War II vet, I go to his father who was a World War I vet, and my father had PTSD. My grandfather died of his wounds. He was machine gun gas kicked by a horse, my father's PTSD that affected his entire life.
[00:39:25] Àdhamh Ó Broin: He campaigned lifelong for nuclear disarmament. You know, he used to debate with Jimmy Reid down at the Clyde side. You know, my father is right in the thick of it all. Hung around with Roy McLellan, the publisher, and Alasdair Gray, you know, and Tom Lennon, all these people in Glasgow authors at the time. All the rest of it. And a lot of the Glasgow artists as well.
[00:39:42] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And that was because of the experiences in the war. And then his father, my father sat at his bedside, you know, he was 12 and so his father died of his first World War wounds, you know, and then his father died after a pulmonary embolism, after being assaulted in a police cell. He was a policeman.
[00:39:59] Àdhamh Ó Broin: An Irishman come over to Glasgow who was a police inspector ultimately, and then, you know, his father before that then is the genocide survivor, you know, survivor of the famine in Ireland. And when I'm looking back through all these, you know, the amount of trauma that's come down to me and I'm the first generation to turn back round and face it all.
[00:40:17] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So looking back to those seven generations thinking what would I thank them for, what would I ask them for, I would thank them for their forbearance. I would thank them for the fact that I've even had the chance to be here. It is absolute fluke that I'm here and that my ancestors are not lying, you know, skeletal in a mass grave in Ireland.
[00:40:39] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, it is absolute fluke that my grandfather was not shot or gassed to death in the first World War, that he survived long enough for him and my grandmother to have my father. It's incredible that my father's tank wasn't the one that was blown up on the first day of action, but it was his best friend's tank next to him that was blown up and that he made it through and got back here and happened to completely randomly bump into my mother.
[00:41:05] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, and then I look at my mother's side, and I think of her father, you know, walking miles to school on his bare feet in the Highlands. And then a generation back and terrible alcoholism and domestic abuse. I look through all these things and they're still unremarkable, my situation. I mean, it's just the same as anybody else's
[00:41:22] Àdhamh Ó Broin: when we look back and see all the trauma and all the horror and all the brutality, you know. And what I would just want to say to those generations, you know, back there, is just, as I said, thank you for your forbearance and thank you for whatever you've put into me that has ultimately got to the point where I'm now able to turn around and look at this and deal with it because I don't want my kids having to deal with it.
[00:41:44] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I mean, they will have to, because I didn't start doing it until they were already on the scene. I probably passed negative things to them as well. But you know, as a parent, you know, you're always just trying to filter. You can't block out all the bad stuff. You just try and sieve as much of the crap out as you can, you know, and only pass on the joy.
[00:42:02] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I mean, that doesn't work, but that's what you're trying to do. So seven generations back. I'm saying thank you. I would love to ask questions about the language, about the dialect, about words. That's the geeky bit coming through. Seven generations into the future. How do I think i'll stand up as a seventh generation ancestor, as somebody sort of what is great, great, great, great grandfather.
[00:42:25] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I simply just hope that i'll be remembered as the generation that turned around started sorting the trauma out. You know, I mean, I'm just a vessel. I have no interest in self-aggrandizement of any kind. I had a minor celebrity when I was working at Outlander. It just didn't suit me at all. I went out of my way to deconstruct that.
[00:42:44] Àdhamh Ó Broin: I just sort of took it to bits, and started ignoring all the opportunities to put myself in the limelight, and I just wanted to push the story in the limelight, when I pushed the lower into the limelight, the language, the culture. I wanted to be an advocate for my people, the Gaelic people. We are an ethnic group.
[00:42:58] Àdhamh Ó Broin: We've been absolutely marginalized and brutalized and thrown onto the front line of every flaming British conflict over the last 250 years. And I hope seven generations on, that the people are looking back on me as an ancestor will hopefully find something of value that I did to try and struggle against all this and try and turn it around and hopefully I wouldn't have been too esoteric in what I've left behind. They will make some sort of sense of it.
[00:43:25] Lesley Anne Rose: Thank you for sharing that. I mean, you shared quite a bit of personal trauma within your family and that's a precious thing to share, so thank you. It strikes me as well, you've mentioned there about that we're the generation that turns things around and of course we've all got a lot of intergenerational trauma.
[00:43:40] Lesley Anne Rose: But also the land itself, the earth itself has got a lot of trauma. So I think kind of our healing is inexplicably intertwined with the healing of the planet as well. And certainly, I mean, I won't even start talking about a wellbeing economy or an economy that puts wellbeing at its heart, but it's clear really that wellbeing for us and for the planet has to be at the heart of, you know, all of our decisions moving forward.
[00:44:04] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Yes. And it also has to not just become one or more commodity. You know, the language is commodified, wellbeings commodified. I mean, you know, we've got to actually value it for its own sake, you know, as for what it actually is and what it potentially provides.
[00:44:18] Lesley Anne Rose: Yeah. No, that's a valuable thing to add. Thank you. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you would like to share or talk about?
[00:44:25] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Just the situation as a tradition bearer with language and culture is absolutely identical to the situation of, you know, an environmental protection worker, a campaigner, whatever.
[00:44:39] Àdhamh Ó Broin: You know, anyone listening who doesn't have much of a connection, but is very, very committed to looking after the land, looking after the sea, looking after the air.
[00:44:48] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Your work you're doing is actually literally identical. You honestly couldn't squeeze a horse hair in between it, it's absolutely identical. And you think, oh, maybe I'm working with more things that are bit more technical, more scientific or more, you know, maybe more sort of physical, practical, you know, ultimately these are all facets of the one thing.
[00:45:07] Àdhamh Ó Broin: There is a living earth, you know, there is a great father creative spirit and there's a receptive mother earth spirit. You know, in whatever faith you have there is probably something similar to that. Everything that exists naturally has come to exist naturally on earth has done so of its own volition.
[00:45:27] Àdhamh Ó Broin: The self-perpetuating, beautiful life force of this world fills up spaces without any rationale or preconception of what it does, but itself perpetuates. And humans, indigenous culture and language came to be in just that same manner. So when the people first came upon the earth, that we know regard as Gaelic, came upon it with a different language, the earth was mute.
[00:45:58] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Other than the sounds of the wind and the birds, the way the earth felt on the feet, the type of rocks that were there, you know, the kind of rain, be it heavy or misty. And through these experiences that the land there gave to the gail, the gail's language changed to reflect that set of experiences.
[00:46:21] Àdhamh Ó Broin: And so the land gifted language to the gail. And so in turn, the gail came to gift language back to the land by describing our experiences and naming the land. And so when you look at the place names, you can see how the land gave language to the gail and how the gail gifted it back to the land. And so the land, environmental protection, we are so dedicated to is a land that has been named and interacted with by indigenous peoples since the beginning of human history.
[00:46:54] Àdhamh Ó Broin: By protecting that land and not having it overrun by forestry or affluent running out the rivers or over fishing. Or you know, no apex predators to deal with deer issues, what all these things that people wanna try and fix, they are returning the natural rhythms in the natural state to the land, and they're therefore making it all the more appropriate ones, more to be described by the language that has been birthed by it.
[00:47:22] Àdhamh Ó Broin: So it's all part of the one living pastiche and we're all working on our little corner. Because sometimes people go, oh you're not really doing all that much with the environmental stuff. You don't do that much practical. I don't see you in marches, I don't see you hanging off boats. Ah. I'm taking care of my little corner of this struggle that most people don't realize is connected, but I hope I have illustrated how it is.
[00:47:45] Lesley Anne Rose: That's a really beautiful last image to take away. You're a natural storyteller. I can hear that. Absolute authentic resonance with people and place in your voice and in the language. It's just beautiful to listen to you. Thank you. I just want to say a huge thank you for your time today. We've touched on so much and I suppose a standout for me about trusting in the wisdom of our bodies and equally trusting in
[00:48:08] Lesley Anne Rose: the knowledge of our ancestors and also the knowledge within the earth itself. And it's as simple as just striking up a conversation and listening and speaking, and spending time with each other. But also the importance of tradition bearers in holding, healing, documenting, and then passing on the stories of communities and how that is the glue that holds communities together and builds community cohesion.
[00:48:34] Lesley Anne Rose: And that's a massive gift that we can leave for future generations. So yeah. Thank you for taking the time for speaking to us and you certainly are one of our brilliant 1000 better stories.
[00:48:46] Àdhamh Ó Broin: Oh yeah, you're most welcome. Ultimately, if in doubt, just get your socks and shoes off. You can't do the hard intensive work if you don't sit quietly and gather the energy and the land will help with that. Gu robh móran math agaibh. It's been a great pleasure. Cheers for now.

Community, Plan, Action! (Part 2) - Camelon and Tamfourhill

In today’s episode we continue our story on ins and outs of creating a Community Climate Action Plan, based on Keep Scotland Beautiful’s work over the last couple of years.
Kaska chats to the most recent participant in KSB’s community planning project, a community of Camelon and Tamfourhill, near Falkirk. We hear from John Hosie, Community Safety Engager who brought together the core planning group, and Falkirk High students, Olivia and Maya, with their teacher Lilly who took part in the planning sessions.
Their planning group was a partnership between Our Place Camelon and Tamfourhill, Tamfourhill Community Hub, Tidy Clean and Green Group, Forth Valley Sensory Centre, Go Forth and Clyde and Falkirk High School.
We end the story with a few tips and KSB’s future plans from Heather.
Listen to the previous episode for PART 1 of the story with the overview from the KSB’s Heather Ashworth and a conversation with Kate and Christine from Sustainable Kirriemuir, about their experience as one of the communities involved in the project pilot.
Credits
Interview, recording and edit: Kaska Hempel
Resources
Keep Scotland Beautiful. Community Climate Action Plan project: https://www.keepscotlandbeautiful.org/climate-change/climate-change/community-climate-action-plans/
Our Place Camelon and Tamfourhill  https://opcamelontamfourhill.co.uk/
Camelon and Tamfourfill climate action plan https://opcamelontamfourhill.co.uk/community-climate-action-plan-camelon-and-tamfourhill/
The Place Standard Tool (with climate lens) https://www.ourplace.scot/About-Place-Standard
Transcript
[00:00:35] Kaska Hempel: Hello, I'm Kaska Hempel, your Story Weaver for today. And in this episode, we continue with the story on community climate action plans based on the work done with communities by Keep Scotland Beautiful over the last couple of years. Listen to part one to hear the overview from the KSB's Heather Ashworth, and a conversation I had with Kate and Christine from Sustainable Kirriemuir about their experience as one of the communities involved in the project pilot.
[00:01:06] Kaska Hempel: Today, we hear from the community of Camelon and Tamfourhill, near Falkirk, who have just freshly emerged from their planning process. Last autumn, I was joined on Zoom by John Hosie, who brought together the planning group and Falkirk High students, Olivia and Maya and their teacher Lily, who took part in the planning sessions. To start, I ask them to paint us a picture of the area and their community.
[00:01:34] John Hosie: Tamfourhill is an interesting community. It's post-industrial central Scotland. Canal network goes through our area and the Falkirk wheel and the hinter land of that is forest and wooded. But on either side of it, there is areas, significant areas of multiple deprivation. I'm John Hosie, I'm the Community Safety Engager, and I'm employed by the Our Place Camelon And Tamfourhill Project, which is managed by the Tamfourhill Tenants Residence Organisation.
[00:02:09] John Hosie: One of the positive parts of the area is a very strong sense of identity. So somebody from Camelons a Mariner and a Mariner is because of the historic relationship of Camelon to the river and the water. And in more recent history that possibly would be the canal. So, it has a strong sense of place and a strong sense of who it is and what it was.
[00:02:35] John Hosie: The populations around about 7,000, and there's maybe about four distinct neighborhoods within that community making up Camelon and Tamfourhill. The area's quite fortunate in that, although it's urban and generally post-war council, housing stock, there's a lot of green species within the area. And there's the two major canals go through it and where they interchange at the Falkirk wheel.
[00:03:03] John Hosie: So there's significant areas of green open spaces and potentially leisure recreation and environmental potential at all of these locations.
[00:03:16] Olivia McDonald: Yeah. I quite like Dollar Calendar Park. I'm Olivia McDonald and I am a prefect here at Falkirk High School. I feel like Calendar Park is actually quite good because compared to some other places that I go, they're quite good with clearing up the area.
[00:03:32] Olivia McDonald: It's such a nice space for children and people to go on walks and just, you know, enjoy themselves.
[00:03:38] Maya Rankin: I really like the Falkirk wheel. I live quite close to the Falkirk wheel, so I'm about like a 10 minute walk away, so I quite like going there. My name's Maya Rankin. I'm a student here at Falkirk High School with Olivia and I'm 15 years old.
[00:03:52] Maya Rankin: They have bins everywhere. That's one thing I do realise. They've got bins everywhere, especially because the amount of people are tourists that come with picnics and stuff. But it's also like a really good educational area, I would say. It's got a lot of history to it. So it's a really good place for families to go and it's very inclusive.
[00:04:10] Maya Rankin: It's got stuff for everyone. It's got play parks, it's got the water, activities. It's got everything. I really like it there.
[00:04:16] John Hosie: I think that probably the greatest challenge of community needs it is fairly typical of Central Scotland post-industrial. And it faces, there's I think, three data zones within the top 5% in the social index of multiple deprivation.
[00:04:30] John Hosie: Poverty's a real issue. Fuel poverty, food poverty. And you know, that is fairly obvious or blatant in a sense. So these are the challenges the community faces. It's from my perspective, a really vibrant and good place to work. A welcoming community. And I live in a foreign country called Alloa and I was always made to feel absolutely welcome and part of the community since the day I first worked there.
[00:04:57] John Hosie: So that is a strength that has informal support networks. But a lot of work is still required around what I would call community development work. So there isn't a lot of people prepared to form themselves into structured committees or development trusts or vehicles for community action and community change.
[00:05:17] John Hosie: But there's a very positive informal network there. I think the climate crisis underpins a lot of these challenges, and they are exasperated by the existing economic and social challenges within the area.
[00:05:31] Kaska Hempel: How come you got involved in the development of a climate action planning? Where did that come out of?
[00:05:36] John Hosie: Two reasons.
[00:05:37] John Hosie: The community had identified environmental concerns as a priority for community safety. And acknowledgement that the climate emergency is a community safety concern. My argument post in 2020, May 2020 in full lockdown, tasked with having to consult and engage with the community around their priorities for community safety.
[00:06:01] John Hosie: The biggest issue that was identified of greatest concern to the community at that time, and by far the biggest concern by a long way was littering. Fly tipping. The state of open green spaces, the amount of detritus that was lying around the community. Although there were other concerns there related to drug use and addiction, and there were concerns around things that won't surprise you around antisocial behaviour.
[00:06:30] John Hosie: The environmental concerns outshone everything else. So a response was needed to that. A community-based response. And we did a number of things. We launched a campaign to keep Camelon and Tamfourhill tidy clean and green. We were able to mobilize some volunteers and we got about the whole process of tidying up, cleaning up, and greening our community.
[00:06:51] John Hosie: Young people in particular were getting involved in canal clear up work, clearing the water, clearing the tow path. There was a lot that was about community cohesion, but also reconnecting the community with the canal. So it was connected to the community's industrial past, but it had become an area that was more perceived to be a bit antisocial behaviour of risk taking and unsafe.
[00:07:16] John Hosie: So the clearing up of that canal reconnected the community with the canal. So there was that strand that was going on. The other issues, the whole cost of living crisis and energy crisis was impacting on a community that was already facing economic and social challenges. So one particular very strong strand was the Tamfourhill Community Hub who sat on the core group to develop this plan.
[00:07:46] John Hosie: They were going through asset transfer of their building from the council into community ownership. And the gas and electric bills are absolutely not sustainable. The bills are going through the roof. You know, we're looking at 30,000 pounds a year to heat and light a building. That's a salary of a worker.
[00:08:06] John Hosie: That's a lot of provision in terms of youth work or adult work or community development work. It's a massive amount of money to a small charity and you know, we can talk about community safety in any kind of context, but if you don't have a community hub for the community to come together, then it's going to be to the detriment of community safety and community cohesion.
[00:08:28] John Hosie: That building's existence has become existential. If we don't find ways of being more efficient with energy, if we don't find alternative energy sources. The building's future is very unclear. Other groups there were piecemeal and disjointed. We were involved with community growing activities and there was some litter picking going on and there was other pockets of activities.
[00:08:52] John Hosie: So bringing these priority issues together and bringing the different groups engaged with these activities together to form a coherent community climate action plan seemed a very logical thing to do, a necessary thing to do. So my role was really kind of as an enabler and facilitator of that initial core group and setting that agenda.
[00:09:12] Lilly: My name is Lilly and I'm a high school music teacher at Falkirk High School. But I'm also doing an acting PT job in wider community and parental engagement. So as part of that, I make quite a lot of contact with John and have kind of been involved in things like taking the pupils out on litter picks and canal clear ups with them.
[00:09:30] Lilly: And as part of that, it's kind of continued on into being part of the community climate action plan. And then I went to a group of pupils in our school. So we have what we call pupil junior management team, which Olivia and Maya are a part of, or were a part of, should I say. Last year. They're in S4 now. But last year I took groups of children with me along to meetings with John and the rest of the team, and Olivia and Maya were at quite a lot of those.
[00:09:53] Olivia McDonald: We started to go on litter picks with Changemakers, which is another team here that, you know, do a lot of things for the environment. And basically, seeing all rubbish everywhere. It sort of made me feel, you know, disappointed and realised how important it is.
[00:10:11] Lilly: As a school we're in the process of kind of working towards our green award.
[00:10:16] Lilly: And so Olivia was talking about the Changemakers group there, and that is, that's our kind of eco group in school. I think just taking the pupils out and actually seeing what damage littering particularly is doing to the community is just quite eye-opening and is an area as a school that we are really focusing on is our litter strategy.
[00:10:35] Lilly: Because we are aware that, you know, littering happens and it's not always just our school pupils. We do know that. But they, you know, they can be a focus sometimes, which is unfortunate. We've also, as a school, we've been trying to put together or we have put together to say...
[00:10:49] Olivia McDonald: The community charter.
[00:10:51] Lilly: Community charter, yeah. Do you want to maybe talk a bit about what that is, Olivia?
[00:10:54] Olivia McDonald: So it's our charter and it's basically about how we can help the environment and what the school could do and what the pupils could do when they're going out for lunch or just how they could be respectful towards local businesses and the environment.
[00:11:10] Olivia McDonald: And we went around during our litter picks actually. To ask some shop owners or local businesses around the area to put up the charter, the posters for it. And, you know, they were very open to doing it and it was good.
[00:11:26] Lilly: So I think our litter strategy at Falkirk High is a big focus this year.
[00:11:29] Lilly: And being part of the Community Climate Action plan is helping us to make an improvement in the community.
[00:11:35] John Hosie: I mean the core group that have taken the plan forward, it's absolutely essential that the young people were involved. And I can only thank the school so much for giving so much commitment to this
[00:11:46] John Hosie: And the school. It doesn't just serve Camelon and Tamfourhill. Falkirk High is what it says, it's Falkirk. But they are a really important part of our community. But the other groups that took part in the core group, the Forth Valley Sensory Centre. They too, by their name. They have a remit that covers more than just our local community.
[00:12:05] John Hosie: And they were another organisation that are an asset to our community, but haven't always been integrated with neighborhood-based work. And they came on board with us and that was really important as well. And working closely in partnership with our Tidy Clean And Green Community Group, which is a resident led group along with the two Tamfourhill organisations.
[00:12:25] John Hosie: So the bringing together of these groups was an important part of this process as well.
[00:12:31] Kaska Hempel: So what was the actual process and when did it happen, and what did it involve for you as a community?
[00:12:38] John Hosie: I can't remember when we actually sat down and started the process. It must have been around about May last year.
[00:12:46] John Hosie: So I put in an initial proposal to Keep Scotland Beautiful, to ask them for support, to facilitate the process. And that came about at a good time because there were some resources available through the Community Renewal fund and a consortium of organisations of which I was also involved in had some resources at the time.
[00:13:08] John Hosie: So that married up quite nicely. The proposal to do the plan and there being some resources to make it happen. So that's where Heather became involved.
[00:13:18] Lilly: One of the main starting points was thinking about what we already do. So, you know, we play a part as a school in the community, and it was kind of thinking about what do we actually do already to give back to the community.
[00:13:30] Lilly: You know, we do food bank donation appeal around about Christmas time. As I was speaking about, the Changemakers group that we already have. And then, you know, the other kinda of involvement with litter picks and things. And then coming along to those meetings was about talking to all the other groups, what they're doing and then seeing, you know, are there any links?
[00:13:49] Lilly: What are priorities as a whole group? What are your individual priorities? And it kinda came together through that way I would say.
[00:13:55] Kaska Hempel: So truly collaborative process. It's wonderful to see. How was it working with adults?
[00:14:00] Olivia McDonald: It's actually really good. They've been really helpful and very inspiring.
[00:14:05] Maya Rankin: They have more knowledge than we do. I'll say that. We're, you know, coming into this. I'm gonna be honest, we were a bit clueless about it. But having John and his team working with us, it's been a real game changer for us.
[00:14:16] Kaska Hempel: So I just wanted to ask you, how did it feel being involved in this as a young person?
[00:14:21] Kaska Hempel: Community action can be seen as sort of adults realm and tackling really big issues.
[00:14:26] Olivia McDonald: It felt well, very achieving. Like we've achieved a lot.
[00:14:32] Maya Rankin: And especially, you know, we've came up with new ideas that we had in the back of our heads and we thought would never be able to be, you know, kind of made by us, if you would. But the fact that we have makes us not only as in ourselves but as pupils and prefects and members of Falkirk High and members of our own community.
[00:14:51] Maya Rankin: It makes us feel very grateful that we're able to do this.
[00:14:53] Olivia McDonald: Very proud as well. I mean, it's all going towards, you know, well, our future, everybody's future.
[00:15:00] Kaska Hempel: How was it working with young people on this project?
[00:15:03] Lilly: I think it's great to have a kind of different outlook on things. There's lots of things that the pupils would say or suggest that I wouldn't have particularly thought of.
[00:15:13] Lilly: You know, all the pupils that we had along, they enjoy speaking about things and their confident skills were kind of growing as each meeting happened. So yeah, I found it great working with them.
[00:15:22] John Hosie: My background is youth work, so I didn't need any convincing that young people were the key to this in many ways, I don't want to sound over dramatic, but this is an existential issue.
[00:15:37] John Hosie: If the planet is to continue and we're to enjoy quality of life, then action is required. The time the full impact of this is realised, I probably won't be here, but the generation behind me will. So they need to be empowered to take control of this in as much way as they can without our guidance. And I think, you know, young people have demonstrated their willingness and ability to do that.
[00:16:05] John Hosie: So I don't think it's an option. I think it's necessary. I mean, I use the strap line often young people have the solution, not the problem. And we need to invest in that. And Maya and Olivia are excellent examples of that young people will really require and need their enthusiasm and insight. You've got to remember when you get to my age and people become quite cynical about things and things can't change and that still frustrates me because things can change. Things must change. And young people have the energy, enthusiasm, and just the ability to do that.
[00:16:42] Kaska Hempel: I was going to ask you about any community actions that you identified as something that might go ahead or is going ahead.
[00:16:52] Olivia McDonald: During meetings, we've talked about food education and how to cook well seasonally and how, you know, it's important for young people to learn more about how to, you know, make decent meals on a budget. Just really realistic things. But also how to do it with helping the environment, recycling, eating seasonally, and also eating maybe your own homegrown veg.
[00:17:19] Maya Rankin: One of our old captains for P G M T was really passionate about starting up a gardening club or something to do with gardening within our school community.
[00:17:28] Maya Rankin: Which we have done. We're currently growing potatoes, I think, and our garden out the back. But we've got some teachers also putting in extra time and work and helping out with that. And we've got loads of pupils who are very passionate about seeing what they eat. I'm sure we've used a few of the potatoes that are growing now in home ec.
[00:17:45] Maya Rankin: So it is a really good garden. Obviously we're not growing much right now because of the weather, but we're hoping to start growing a lot more come the season next year. And use a lot of it, not only in our home ec kitchens, but hopefully also in our canteen kitchens as well.
[00:18:00] John Hosie: The big priority at Tamfourhill is energy efficiency. We now have a more detailed plan of action to look at our energy efficiency audit of the Tamfourhill Community Hub. So that will partly be to look at alternative energy sources like solar heat pumps and so on. But it'll also look at how within the existing structures, as are things that we can do. Better insulation, windows, heating systems. Do we need the whole heating system on all of the time in all of the rooms?
[00:18:36] John Hosie: So we have a process now in place that will start with an energy efficiency audit of the building. From that, we will come up with proposals about what needs to happen to improve that situation, and I think that will probably involve some kind of grant submission to one of the funds. Scottish Government funds.
[00:18:57] John Hosie: It was maybe a medium term action. It's now a short term action. We need to see results and we'd hope to come back at this time next year and say we're in the process of installing heat pumps. We're in the process of putting solar panels on the roof. Going back to the community growing. We've got five new planters created beside the community hub in the woods to go with the existing four planters. Tidy Clean And Green have just taken on a piece of waste ground in the middle of Camelon and they've put planters and seating in there and some artwork.
[00:19:31] John Hosie: And we have things potentially happening up at Easter Carmuirs Public Park. So there's already been an increase in using green areas for growing projects. And there's another old disused park in Camelon that we're looking to develop as possible allotments.
[00:19:52] John Hosie: So I would hope to be, again, come back in the spring and say the tatties are in. We've got some fruit bushes in, we've got some fruit trees in. There's areas in our community that are perceived to be problematic in terms of antisocial behaviour. At least two of those locations are on our sights to be transformed into some kind of community spaces, and that would include seating planters, trees, fruit bushes, and possibly play facilities.
[00:20:26] John Hosie: I don't think the solution is to put barbed wire around these areas and have turrets with machine guns. I think the idea is much more practical and useful as to transform them into green assets and community facilities. That's maybe a longer term aspiration, but work has already started on that.
[00:20:48] John Hosie: We agreed that the core group who developed a plan would act as a steering group, and we had our first steering group meeting last week. So we will monitor the plan. So each meeting would start with an update, what's happened against the actions in the plan, and that would be shared by everybody who makes up the core group. But I think it would also be a forum for what needs to happen, who needs additional help? Is there funding required or are there resources that we could deploy? Or is it just a case of somebody spending some time to offer some support so they will act as a steering group to drive that plan forward.
[00:21:28] John Hosie: I think maybe it'll meet quarterly. It might be that subgroups could meet, you know, if it's just to look at a specific project. Two or three of the partners could get together rather than the full core group.
[00:21:39] John Hosie: It's an organic plan, and I think it's never a finished plan. There's got to be scope to bring more community groups on board. I think one of the challenges is to bring in the bigger players and the bigger stakeholders. Although the plan took cog niceness of this whilst it was being developed and an awareness that some things were the responsibility of government, both local and national.
[00:22:04] John Hosie: There's other agencies that need to come on board to help us make things happen. And that, I think falls on the local authority, Falkirk Council and Scottish Canals who are a massive player in this area. And I mean, our neighbourhood and the area of climate change, we need to mobilize them in a meaningful way and bring them into that plan so that they can enable things to happen in a way that the community on its own can't. And that is going to be a challenge.
[00:22:38] Kaska Hempel: Maya and Olivia, what would be your message to other young people about getting involved in community climate action?
[00:22:45] Maya Rankin: Just get involved with it. You know, some of the ideas that we've put forward we thought were absolutely crazy, you know, never gonna happen.
[00:22:54] Maya Rankin: And here we are. They have happened. Get involved.
[00:22:56] Olivia McDonald: Definitely. Yeah, just go for it. You know, put forward your ideas. One of our meetings that we went to, we suggested about a toy library, and now there is one for the community to use.
[00:23:09] Kaska Hempel: Find yourself somebody like John.
[00:23:11] Olivia and Maya: Yes, that's true. A good mentor.
[00:23:13] Kaska Hempel: John, when can you clone yourself? What would you say to other communities out there to encourage such planning? Any sort of key tips?
[00:23:23] John Hosie: I think it has to be made relevant. And I think it has become in the last six months, even more relevant. You might even go back to Covid. We did a survey before the Community Climate Action Plan started.
[00:23:38] John Hosie: One of the things that was concerning was that a lot of people didn't see it as a big issue. It didn't affect them, it wasn't relevant to them. It was what middle class hippies got involved in and how is it relevant to us? So I think that was a point of realization that actually this has an immense immediate impact, but people aren't aware of it.
[00:24:00] John Hosie: So we have to make this relevant. We need to make it connected to people's everyday experiences. So, you know, your increased insurance in your house, the increased bad weather and what's happening is a consequence to you and your personal economy. We need to make that connection.
[00:24:19] Kaska Hempel: And one last question. Why do you think communities will make the real difference in making sure that we act on climate change in time?
[00:24:27] Maya Rankin: The more communities that get involved with this journey, we think the more other communities will go, maybe we should do that in our area and maybe we should get involved in something similar to that to help our area as well.
[00:24:42] John Hosie: No, I think it's a belief in bottom up change will come from ordinary people in ordinary situations, but there's no getting away from the fact that others need to buy into this. Communities on their own will not find solutions. Communities are very resilient. They'll find ways of surviving and getting by and putting mitigations into place.
[00:25:05] John Hosie: But to move forward and thrive, there needs to be social structural changes, and we need support to do that. The big players need to come on board. There's a willingness in communities to take things forward. We need that support. We need partnerships, meaningful partnerships. You know, we need to all come to the table without agendas.
[00:25:26] John Hosie: The only agenda should be to work together to bring about lasting positive change.
[00:25:31] Kaska Hempel: So, thank you everybody for joining me for this conversation.
[00:25:34] Olivia and Maya: Yes, thank you for having us.
[00:25:37] Kaska Hempel: I can't help but imagine Camelon and Tamfourhill's green spaces and School gardens bursting into life this spring. And I hope the community centre's energy efficiency is getting sorted as well, along with the multitude of other projects they had in mind.
[00:25:53] Kaska Hempel: I wanted to finish with a couple of more questions for Heather about her tips for community groups, starting with her reflection on what makes for a successful community climate action planning exercise.
[00:26:05] Heather Ashworth: So I would say that our combination of online and in-person planning sessions has helped to make a successful planning exercise for different reasons.
[00:26:15] Heather Ashworth: I should mention that for Camelon and Tamfourhill, we were able to go and be with them in person to run their session. So that was really great. But the online sessions were really good too. Because, like I said, some of those sessions were all the communities were together in them and they said that they got so much out of being able to talk to each other.
[00:26:32] Heather Ashworth: And that was really great to see. I'd also say having an open invite to anyone in the community to join really helps because then everyone feels like they've got a voice. Having a couple of people in the community to lead the process is really important. It's really important to have somebody there who's happy to be taking charge at that point.
[00:26:50] Heather Ashworth: Having meetings with structure, feeding back what they've agreed and checking in with them to see how they're progressing and also what they might need help with. I would also say that we help support a process which groups may have otherwise struggled to resource by themselves in terms of knowing where to start. Gaining buy-in and having a tried and tested methodology as well, that kind of thing. I would say that sort of makes a successful planning exercise.
[00:27:15] Kaska Hempel: You mentioned tools and resources. Do you have any recommendations if a group wanted to do something for themselves? Is there some go-to resource they can just take off the shelf and go with it?
[00:27:31] Heather Ashworth: Then we would definitely recommend the Place Standard Tool as a good starting point. And that's openly available at our place dot Scot. And they've also recently released a new version with a climate lens. I think it would be really useful for communities. The Place Standard Tool is really great for gauging what people want in their communities and what they want to see improved and also what they already like about their communities. I think it's a really great process.
[00:27:53] Heather Ashworth: And I would also just recommend Adaptation Scotland's resources when you're looking at how to make your community more resilient to the impact of climate change. They've got some really great scenarios which suggest ideas that your community could take forward. So yeah, they've got some really interesting resources too. I would recommend those two.
[00:28:09] Kaska Hempel: So, what's next for KSB's work on this?
[00:28:13] Heather Ashworth: So I've already mentioned I think that we've received funding in April this year from the Scottish Government to continue to support our communities that we have already for another year. We have set up a peer-to-peer network for the communities that we work with for the Community Climate Action Plan programme, so then they can support each other and their plans.
[00:28:31] Heather Ashworth: We also set up Q&As with experts in the sector, again to support communities with their climate action. We recently had one on green participatory budgeting, and that was really interesting from personal standpoint, obviously what that was all about. As well as the communities were able to engage and ask questions and just find out a bit more about that process.
[00:28:50] Heather Ashworth: And we also organise one-to-ones with communities, so then they can discuss with us about how we can continue to support them and their ideas and their concerns as well. Just to sort of be there for them and to support them as much as we can.
[00:29:02] Heather Ashworth: Just working through this process the last couple of years, we've become more aware of the need and demand across Scotland's communities for structured support to help local people that understand the local impact and implications of climate change. And identify feasible, but also ambitious climate action they can take.
[00:29:18] Heather Ashworth: Many more communities have been approaching us to run this programme. As I said, we had loads of applications, but also throughout the last year or so, people reach out and ask us more about the process. So at Keep Scotland Beautiful, our aspiration is to continue supporting Scotland's communities to learn and understand their role in combating climate change and protecting the places that they care for.
[00:29:38] Heather Ashworth: So that's what we want to do.