Link Loving 08.01.12

• Finding meaning at work. Nicholas Ind.
• How doctors die. Fascinating read. Ken Murray. h/t Rich Hawkins.
• How cities are building social capital. Thomas Sander.
• What a social media fail looks like: VW crash and burn. James S.
• Cute cats and the Arab Spring – when social media meets social change. Ethan Zuckerman.
• This makes for fascinating reading – the US right picking itself apart. Red State.
• Delicious to read – Owen Jones takes down Liam Byrne.
• Sometimes I wish I was Tyler Brûlé.

You Can’t Learn That On Google

Wonderful work by the Open Society Foundation. Also fascinating to see the ‘Pride’ frame, most often used by the gay community, be adopted by other oppressed minority groups.

Link Loving 07.01.12

• ASDA finds that for it’s customers, Green Is Normal. Paul Kelly.
• My piece for Campaign Central on values and campaigning.
• Where have all the working class leaders gone? David Skelton.
• Do campaigns predict how a president will govern? Conor Friedersdorf.
• Occupy cinema: can you help make Occupy Wall Street’s collaborative documentary? Jared Keller.
• The Daily Mail prints its third correction on energy prices. Christian Hunt.
• Interactivism: Young People’s Hack Weekend. Apply here.

Learning From Them: Life Reports From The Over-70’s

In October last year, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks asked readers over the age of 70 to write in with a life report – what had they learned, what they wish they had done differently, what advice they had for young people. He wrote,

Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.

The reports make for fascinating and emotive reading. David identifies a couple of patterns in this follow-up piece, which are:

• Divide your life into chapters
• Beware rumination
• You can’t control other people
• Lean toward risk
• Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents
• Be aware of the generational bias
• Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them
• People get better at the art of living

It made me think of this beautiful open letter from Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Naomi Klein and many other older environmentalists as they called for volunteers to step-up and risk arrest in the successful No Keystone XL campaign last year. They wrote,

And one more thing: we don’t want college kids to be the only cannon fodder in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change–10,000 came to DC for the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest.  Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere (and whose careers won’t be as damaged by an arrest record) to step up too. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders.

h/t Ben Margetts

Link Loving 06.01.12

• Beyond elections: people power. Mark Bittman.
• The state of Georgia decided that these posters would be a good idea to prevent child obesity. Sarah Kliff.
• If you want to, you can follow WWII as it happens. A history student is live-tweeting events as they unfolded 62 years ago.
• How the revolution went viral. Paul Mason.
• Hu Jintao on China losing the culture wars. Isaac Stone Fish.
• How schoolgirls and older women mixing is breaking down age barriers and bringing the local community closer. Homa Khaleeli.

Situations Matter

How often do we really think about the situation a person is in when we’re asking them to change?

An Interview With Matthieu Ricard – The Happiest Man Alive

“You cannot, in the same moment of thought, wish to do something good to someone or harm that person. So those are mutually incompatible like hot and cold water. So the more you will bring benevolence in your mind, at every of those moments there’s no space for hatred. It’s just very simple, but we don’t do that. We do exercise every morning 20 minutes to be fit. We don’t sit for 20 minutes to cultivate compassion. If we want to do so, our mind will change, our brain will change. What we are will change. So those are skills. They need to be, first, identified, then cultivated. What is good to learn chess, well, you have to practice and all that. In the same way, we all have thoughts of altruistic love. Who didn’t have that? But the common goal, we don’t cultivate them.”

Matthieu Ricard

h/t Charlotte Millar

Link Loving 05.01.12

• Where now for the climate justice movement? Guppi Bola, Quincy Saul, Ro Randall, Yash Tandon, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro.
• Decentralized people power: what OWS can learn from South Africa’s United Democratic Front. Grace Davie.
• The 12 most hopeful trends to build on in 2012. Sarah van Gelder.
• Don’t ask ‘what should I do?’, but rather ‘how can I serve?’ Robin Cangie.
• Stop calling the oil industry ‘Big Oil’. Natalya Sverjensky.
• Even Tory policy wonks know that change comes from the bottom-up. Guido Fawkes.
• Ed Miliband is not the leader of the Opposition. Andrew Simms.

Campaigning With Common Cause – Wednesday 11th January

Second Wednesday of the month = time to get together to talk campaign strategy and values!

This time we’ll be going into greater depth – looking at successful case studies and what the latest research is telling us.

• When: 6.30-8pm on Wednesday 11th January
  
• Where: Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4LT
• Bring: Something tasty to share

Thanks to Tim and Morgan for hosting us.

Campaign Case Study – Waste Watch

This post is cross-posted from the Values and Frames website, where this was initially published. Thanks to Tim and Morgan for making it happen.

This third Campaign Case Study is part of a series of stories sharing the experience of organisations that grasp the importance of cultural values in third sector campaigning. We hope that these real-life examples of transformation inspire and empower you to push organisational boundaries and improve how we campaign together.

If you’d like to discuss these stories, or find out more about them, come along to the Campaigning with Common Cause get-together every second Wednesday of the month.

“How do we actually know what’s working?”

Waste Watch inspires and helps people to live more whilst wasting less.  Set up 24 years ago, it put recycling on the national agenda and led the country towards today’s improved waste policies. With 40 staff, it recently merged with Keep Britain Tidy. The team at Waste Watch have put values-thinking into the heart of the work they do, moving the idea of sustainability from windmills and recycling to a wider question of collective wellbeing and social justice. The video below gives a good sense of how they work with schools, businesses and communities.

I spoke to Tim Burns, Head of Waste Watch, and Morgan Phillips, who works on the Our Common Place project, about how redefining their work has allowed them to break free from a constraining focus, and how measuring broader impacts has improved the way they work.

What did they set out to do differently?

The team used to spend a lot of time making interventions, delivering a project and then walking away. Short-term funding projects meant that they’d run a campaign to share best practice, monitor the outputs and immediate environmental impacts without getting a good idea of what was really changing at a deeper level within the community.

Now, Waste Watch is measuring outcomes, rather than just outputs. This means monitoring the impact on the beneficiaries engaged in their projects as well as the wider community by looking at the;

• Confidence and skills of the participants
• Sense of connection between volunteers and their community
• What cross-barrier relationships have been built

Practically speaking, by collecting this data, Waste Watch now has an evidence base from which to apply for new sources of funding. They’re connecting the dots between the environment, mental health and community development – and widening their scope to have maximum impact.

What does that look like in practice?

The Our Common Place project is bringing this values-thinking into the heart of Waste Watch’s work. Engaging with residents living in large blocks of flats across 23 communities in London, Morgan and his team are following the enthusiasm of the residents in deciding what projects they work on. In one case, sewing classes have been set up, in another, a ‘help your neighbour recycle’ scheme. One of the most surprising projects is working with a youth club to look at how sustainability flows through everyday life, in one session young people analysed their favourite song lyrics to see what values they espouse. Morgan explains,

“We found that the best way to start talking about what’s important to people, their values, is to start where people’s interests lie. We’re trying to allow for self-direction in how we work with local communities.”

Nobody in the sector has cracked how to create successful recycling schemes in deprived housing estates, so there is a need for innovative approaches. Morgan will be sharing the results in the summer later this year. A key ingredient to the success so far has been working with local authority partners, in some cases leading workshops on the thinking that the Common Cause report puts forward.

What have they learned?

Leadership on this new approach has come from every corner of the organisation. They’ve found that in order to start to articulate values-thinking in their external work, the Waste Watch team had to first start to transform the way they work internally. This started with a much more inclusive approach to leadership where ideas and contributions came from everyone, as Tim explains,

“At Waste Watch now, everyone has been contributing to our new strategic direction, for example through our business plan or our approach towards change – and as a result there’s a much more inclusive culture. Its not just formally but informally too – there’s a lot of sharing lunchtimes, baking cakes for each other – we’re actually building a community within the office as well as within our projects based upon the values we all live and work by.”

What does this mean for us as change-makers?

There is much to be learnt from how Waste Watch are applying an understanding of values in their work. Other case studies have picked up on the important implications for the culture of an organisation, and this is clearly something to which Waste Watch are responding. What is most exciting perhaps, is how values-thinking is infusing their project work, and opening up possibilities for new alliances with different sectors and organisations.

Importantly, the team understands that intrinsic values are already important in the lives of their audience – the question is how to engage with them, not to tell people how to live. Discussions about ‘sustainability’ aren’t likely to be the best starting point.

Contact

Tim Burns

tim.burns@wastewatch.org.uk

020 7549 0300