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.

Come along to our African-themed People’s Kitchen, from 12 - 3 on Sunday 27th November. Talks, conversation and free food - what more could you want?

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.

Last week Green Vision held a ‘People’s Kitchen’ event at Green Park Station in Bath. Inspired by our friends at Foodcycle Bristol and The People’s Kitchen, we cooked up beetroot soup, mushroom soup and plum chutney from food that would otherwise have gone to landfill.

Local bakery Thoughtful Bread provided tasty loafs and local MP Don Foster put in an appearance (later commending us on his website). The event was even featured in last week’s edition of the Bath Chronicle.

On Wednesday Green Vision are co-hosting a special screening of ‘Just Do It’ at the Little Theatre Cinema, Bath. The documentary, which describes itself as ‘a tale of modern day outlaws’, follows several groups of UK climate change activists using civil disobedience as a means of protest. Even if you find the methods used by some of the groups controversial, you won’t fail to be amazed, fascinated and inspired.

The special screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the film’s director, Emily James, Deputy Leader of Bath & North East Somerset Council, Nathan Hartley and a representative of Green Vision.

To view more information about the film, visit its website. You might want to hit ‘attending’ on the Facebook event. Tickets can be booked on this page on the Little Theatre’s website.

Holloway harvest! Today Fin, Sid, Katy and Tom popped over to the guerrilla garden we created on Holloway and at Calton Gardens to see what had grown. There were a few carrots and loads of lettuce, as well as a massive crop of lemon-balm and fennel. We haven’t been particularly good at maintaining this site so it was great to see that some things had grown.

Trees had prevented half of the planter getting much light so next time we’ll plant some hardier plants there. The herbs in particular did well so we might plant some more of them. We heard from a local resident that some boys had used the patch on Holloway ‘as a long jump’ so that might explain why it hadn’t grown that well! Next time we’ll garden somewhere a little more obviously separated from a footpath.

Mimi, Fin, Tom, Sid, Jamie and Katy of Green Vision met in Jika Jika Café today to discuss taking forwards the projects we still have on the go.

Vision Space

We have decided to pursue the idea of creating a community space designed for young people, and having looked at property prices, decided trying it in a house would be much more practical than in a shop. The purpose agreed last time resonated with us all: “young people sharing ideas, affecting positive change and bringing people together”. The word indicates towards this and as such the term ‘Vision Space’ or ‘Vision House’ is a possibility for what we come up with.

The potential of the proposed vision space to play host to the community food project is also exciting to us. A house would have a kitchen, making it easy to cook in, and would be a space we could develop creatively for our own purposes and to be of use to young people.

Rachael is to begin writing a proposal for this project and we will meet up to agree further elements of it soon.

Community Food

To initiate this project properly we have agreed to run an event at the end of August, proposed dates being Saturday 27th August and Sunday 28th August. This event would see us using a city centre kitchen - Jamie is to investigate using the Age Concern centre - and serving hot food both on site and off site in the city centre.

At the weekend Tom spent time working with The People’s Kitchen at a festival, a very similar project that usually runs in Hackney. He learned from the experience that having someone that knows how to cook in charge of the kitchen was key. Subsequently we are going to contact Ben of Ben’s Café, Walcot St, who cooked at the Youth Climate Summit.

This event may have a few legal limitations in Health & Safety and in serving food in public. We will have to investigate this in the next week.

We are also going to investigate small grants available to get the project going on a regular basis. The grant money would pay for equipment, a small fee to pay to the head chef and a small donation to the venue playing host to us.

Organisational Structure

We’ve decided to aim to make our meetings more exciting, having less ‘talking shop’ meetings and making activities part of our regular meetings. The proposal is that we have a talking meeting the first Thursday of each month then ensure to be active at each other meeting. The activities could include guerrilla gardening, cooking a meal or showing a film. This does not mean these activities could not take place at another time.

We also furthered discussions as to whether Green Vision should be formalised as an organisation. Jamie advised us to become a charity - it makes getting funding much easier, you can have trustees under 18 and simply being registered inspires trust and respect. It also makes holding property easier, if and when we are to further the ‘vision space’ project. Those present thought it was a good recommendation.

Our next meeting is due to take place on Thursday 18th August. We are planning to meet by our guerrilla garden at Calton Gardens and make lemon-balm tea with the crop that has appeared there!

by Mimi Trevelyan-Davis

Green Vision met today to discuss the possibility of the ownership of a space to use as not only a meeting area (rather than relying on filling our beloved Jika-Jika or venues such as the Manvers Street Baptist Church) for Green Vision its self, but also for other groups of young people looking to meet and discuss ideas with like minded individuals.

We finalised our purpose: “Young people sharing ideas, affecting positive change and bringing people together, under the name Vision.” We decided that it should be multi-purpose, not only for Green Vision, but for other societies and groups looking to meet outside of Schools, Colleges and other establishments and to utilise the space.

We discussed various different spaces, including shops, houses, flats and offices, and decided that although a shop may be the most practical, it would not be the most cost effective (being very expensive) and it would be easier to run a house or a flat for these purposes.

Finally, we discussed various ways to fundraise such a venture, including charitable donations, trusts/foundations and utilising PTFA (Parent Teacher Friends Associations) or their equivalents in Schools.

Rachael will be writing a proposal shortly to outline all of the discussed ideas and more in more depth.