Earlier this month Green Vision headed over to Southstoke for our ‘Vision Day’. We were joined by our newly recruited mentor-directors: Gavin, Janine and Steve.
We spend the day in the beautiful yurt pictured above, designing our strategy for the next year. We developed a plan of action for our bike-powered cinema project (now dubbed ‘Wheels for Change’) and mapped out the various groups of people that Green Vision had to engage with. Hopefully it will allow us to think a lot more strategically about our plans for the future!
Keep an eye on our website for updates about Wheels for Change - we’ll be launching it very shortly!
Green Vision will have a stall at Penny Farthing Festival, taking place in Bath on 5th May, a fully bicycle-powered festival! Lots of top bands will be playing at the event, which is put on by students from Bath Spa University and supported by several local businesses.
Green Vision will be talking to attendees about everything we do, but especially our new cycle-powered cinema project. The new project, details of which will soon be announced, will see a team of young people trained to build a bicycle generator which will be used to put on events in and around Bath. This project will involve raising £12000 to fund training and equipment, and we’ll see if Penny Farthing Festival can provide our first few donations!
For more information on Penny Farthing Festival, click here. It takes place between 3pm and 11pm on Saturday 5th May at Bath Pavilion. Tickets cost £3 for those under 13, £8 for students and those aged 14 - 18 and £10 for those over 18.
Join Green Vision at Bath People’s Assembly’s ‘Visions for Change’ event this Saturday, bringing together forward-thinking groups and organisations to discuss “their visions for a better world, locally, nationally and globally”.
Green Vision will be joined by a wide variety of groups from the Bath area, including Oxfam Bath and Transition Bath, with who we have collaborated before, as well as many other wonderful organisations.
Anyone is welcome - we look forward to seeing you there! It takes place 12 - 3pm, 28th April at the Friends’ Meeting House on York Street.
Yet another successful People’s Kitchen for Green Vision!
Our excellent chefs CJ and Taryn cooked a dahl, some tasty pasta as well as some bread rolls, serving for free (or a donation) to people of all ages. We even used the opportunity for a little networking, with the local MP, several councillors, and our friend the Mayor of Bath coming along.
There was great discussion around reducing food waste and our squash-planting competition went down a treat! Attendees planted seeds in pots, which will be replanted at Dry Arch Growers in Bathampton, and a prize will go to the person whose squash is the best in a few months time.
Thank you to all who came!
People’s Kitchen, round 3: Thursday 5th April 2012
Come along to Green Vision’s third ‘People’s Kitchen’ event, where we’ll be cooking food that would otherwise have been wasted and serving it for free or a donation. The food cooked will depend on what we receive in the immediate days, but you can be assured it’ll be tasty under the watchful eye of our chefs, CJ, Shane and Taryn.
Our freshly-cooked food will be accompanied by fresh discussion, with our theme: How can we feed our growing population? Join us for discussion on alternative agriculture, local food, reducing food waste, genetically-modified food and vegetarianism.
We’ll also be planting pumpkins! Plant your pumpkin at the People’s Kitchen, we’ll replant it at Bathampton’s Community Support Agriculture project and award a prize to the best in a few months time!
Join us at Bath’s Green Park Station, between midday and 3pm on Thursday 5th April 2012. Whether enjoying the school/university holidays or on your lunch break, everyone is welcome!
Click here to hit ‘attending’ and share on Facebook.
By Rachael Hayman
At the end of November we co-organised our second People’s Kitchen event with Oxfam Bath. This time we focused on our ‘global’ community in Africa in light of the UN climate talks in Durban. Rachael and Shane cooked some tasty African-themed food using entirely surplus goods acquired through Fareshare Bath, part of the wider Fareshare South-West group and Janine Woodward of Oxfam South West gave an insightful talk on how climate change is affecting Africa. Were even able to link up with Tom, a Green Vision member who was lucky enough to be at the UN climate talks in Durban, for a video conference to find out in real time how the climate talks were progressing.
It was a great afternoon spent learning about our ‘global’ community, sharing ideas on how we can support and empower them to take action and of course eating! Check out Tom’s post as he reflects on his time spent at the climate talks.
Photo: Shane (far left) and Rachael (far right) chat to the Mayor of Bath and the Mayoress with a member of Oxfam Bath.
Green Vision has had a great year, with a whole plethora of successful projects including guerilla gardening across Bath, which won Bath an award for outstanding youth contribution from the judges of ‘Britain in Bloom’, two ‘People’s Kitchen’ events, serving soup made from donated food that would otherwise have been thrown away for free and co-organising the 2011 Bath Youth Climate Summit, attended by students from ten schools across the city.
Green Vision is now looking to expand and become self-sufficient. So far our journey has been kindly supported by Resource Futures with funding from Think Global (DFID), B&NES council and various individuals and local businesses. We are a self organising youth movement which means that we focus on delivering projects that inspire us as individuals and as a group. As part of our development, we are now looking to set up as an independent not-for-profit organisation.
As such we are looking to recruit trustees of all ages who can support our growth and self-organisation. The roles we are looking for are volunteer roles for individuals over the age of 18. These individuals will join a trustee board consisting of members of Green Vision and fellow adult trustees.
Our aims for the future include:
- Continuing to organise an annual Youth Summit for schools across B&NES
- Creating a dedicated space for young people to explore, create, organise and act within Bath
- Running a monthly cycle powered cinema
- Creating more projects that inspire sustainable lifestyles and communities
- Creating small green enterprises for young people to manage with support (one idea is selling smoothies produced using bicycle power)
- Providing training and workshops for young people, adults and schools
The names roles we need to fill are Chair, Treasurer and Fundraiser. The people filling these roles would be facilitating young people to lead the group through mentoring and technical guidance.
We would like a serious commitment of three to five years from people who live locally. Applicants can be as involved as they wish with a minimum commitment of eight meetings per year alongside support and mentoring when requested. Young communities can be transient and face various pressures from exams and life. These roles are needed to ensure that the vision of the organisation is maintained. They will support the group to discover what they are passionate about and design and deliver projects that help them explore this. Applicants should be aware that this would remain a youth led arrangement with the Trustee roles essentially being roles of advice, guidance and support.
Green Vision is in the process of writing a constitution to better outline the vision, purpose and structure of the group. This document is a working draft, but may help you understand our vision for Green Vision in the future. If you wish to have a read, click here (pdf).
If you are at all interested in getting involved and would like more detailed role descriptions please contact us on becky@greenvisionmovement.org or jamie@greenvisionmovement.org.
Green Vision member Tom Youngman recently returned from the United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa. Tom was in South Africa for three weeks, working with other young people from across the globe to push governments for a fair, ambitious and binding deal on climate change.
He’s recently written a blog post about his time at the United Nations conference. From Tom’s blog:
Three weeks ago, I made this video. I was exhausted, husky and, if I’m honest, disheartened. I’d just spent two weeks at the United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa. They were the best weeks of my life, but that it has taken me until now to write something about it says it all.
Click here to read on.
Green Vision, along with our newest friend Oxfam Bath, will be hosting another People’s Kitchen event from 12 pm - 3 pm on the 27th November in the Bath Society Meeting Room (entrance in the lobby to Green Park Station, Bath).
This time we are focusing on our ‘global’ community in Africa, with African-themed food, a live video conference with Tom, a Green Vision member who will be at the UN climate talks in Durban and a talk on how climate change is affecting Africa by Janine Woodward of Oxfam South West. This is tying in with the Stop Climate Chaos coalition’s ‘African Climate Connection’ taking place alongside the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
There will be an opportunity to discuss these ideas and your own as we explore how we can create and support an empowered global community. We all had so much fun at the last People’s Kitchen event in August and hope that this one will be even more exciting! See you there!
Check out the Facebook event and the flyer we’ve produced.
Green Vision met at Ben’s Cafe on 13th October. Becky’s minutes from the meeting follow.
The Future
We discussed what the best way forward was from here having had a couple of meetings which were not very well attended. It was pointed out that we have lots of support still but everyone meeting on a specific day is difficult with so many different schedules. Also noted that people come out in force for project events so we need to focus on what projects we are doing next.
Read More
News has broken recently about proposals for ‘Fracking’, a highly damaging and carbon intensive process to extract natural gas, to take place near to the city of Bath. The proposals are particularly worrying given they are for sites in the Mendips, where the Bath spring water is thought to originate - fracking (short for Hydraulic Fracturing) has a reputation for contaminating water sources.
The world-famous hot springs of the city of Bath may be threatened by fracking, the controversial technique for exploiting underground supplies of shale gas, the Government was told yesterday.
Bath and North East Somerset Council sounded the alarm to ministers about licences to use the technique, which involves fracturing rock formations by pumping in liquids at high pressure, that have been granted to two companies prospecting for gas in the Mendip Hills to the south of the city.
read more
The above article from The Independent explains the situation. What do you think? Green Vision will hold a meeting on it in the near future so local young people can discuss what the proposal will mean and whether we want to campaign together against it.
At the Bath Youth Climate Summit in June, Guy Shrubsole ran a workshop on fracking. This was very well received and many of the attendees left feeling concerned about the issue and keen to do something against it. Little did we expect we would soon be needing the expertise and experience Guy shared with us.
