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.
by Rachael Hayman
Green Vision met today at Manvers Street Baptist Church. We were very grateful that the generous Lucia, from Manvers Street Baptist Church was able to offer us a room free-of-charge. The venue was great; a spacious room with plenty of chairs to facilitate our growing team. We are now looking into the possibility of using this venue for our forthcoming meetings, or at least until we are able to obtain a space of our own.
We chose to postpone the planned ‘Open Space’ discussion, as holidays and other commitments meant that many of the group were unable to make it. Instead, we discussed our mission and future projects.
Mission
As Green Vision continues to expand, we are becoming involved in more and more exciting projects, especially various campaigns such as our recent Guerrilla Gardening stunt. Our current mission declares that we aim to be a ‘positive movement, raising awareness and taking action against climate change.’ We also felt that a general theme to our actions was to ‘provide the alternative, rather than complain about it.’ Whilst recent discussions of our possible campaigns on bus and train fares in Bath do not exactly fit this mold, that does not mean we don’t want to get involved, we just feel that it may damage respectful relationships between Green Vision and the Bath Community. Therefore, we discussed the option of only using the Green Vision name when we are providing the alternative, and perhaps using an alternative symbol for our other slightly more rebellious forms of activism!
Projects
The Climate Summit has taken place (and what a success it was!) and we now have two ongoing projects:
Business Survey
Tom has had his business survey ready for months, but we’ve been so busy arranging the Climate Summit that we haven’t given it to local businesses yet. Jamie has a list of all the independent businesses in Bath, so all we need to do is take around 10 businesses each to email, and hopefully meet in person to conduct the business survey.
Action needed:
Community Food Project
Over recent months we’ve been looking into the possibility of a Food Project; distributing surplus food in the form of a free, tasty meal in the city centre. We have spoken to groups such as Fareshare and Foodcycle, as well as Simon who was looking to start a similar project at Bath Spa University. Whilst we have decided that it is slightly outside the objectives of Green Vision we hope to arrange arrange a meeting to network all these subgroups that we have found to have a similar aim to enable them to work together to create this project.
NEW! Community Space
As much as Green Vision are Jika Jika loyalists, we really feel that it would be great to have a space of our own; it’s about time we had a Green Vision ‘home!’ Having seen so many empty shops around Bath, we think that it is a great opportunity to create our own space in the town centre. We would use this space to hold our weekly meetings, but also to address an important issue important issue raised at the Climate Summit; the lack of space for young people to hang around in town. Therefore, it would be utilised as a Green Vision meeting location on a Thursday evening, and as a general Community Space at the weekends, allow young people to discuss and share ideas with like minded people. In the long term, we hope to have the Space open every day, allowing other Community groups to use the venue free-of-charge.
Action needed:
Communication
Times/Dates of Meetings
We felt that there was often some uncertainty about the dates of Green Vision Meetings due to the alternating Tuesday/Thursday system and decided that we would always have meetings on a Thursday to avoid conclusion.
As this can be a big time commitment, we discussed giving each week an objective, ie: meeting as a whole group on the first Thursday of the month, and allocating the other weeks to particular projects to allow members to attend the meetings that interested them the most. We would then regroup on the first Thursday of the next month so that we could catch up on developments across all projects. We will discuss this again following the Open Space when we have gauged levels of interest across particular projects.
We recognised the issue of some members being unable to leave school in time for the meetings, and decided on a drop in session between 4 and 7 once the School year recommences. As this spans over meal times for most families, we have decided that food will be included (at a particular time?)
Flyers/Posters
We also discussed the possibility that the parents and guardians of some of our younger members may be wary of allowing their children out in the evenings on a school night. We hope this will not be a problem, but will make sure that our flyers are available for Green Vision members to show their parents (so that they know we are a legitimate meeting!)
We would also like to produce posters to raise awareness of our meetings, and intend to do this before term restarts so that prospective Green Vision members don’t sign up to other activities that would clash with the meetings.
Next Meetings:
Thursday 4th August 2.30-5.30
Thursday 11th August 2.30-5.30
Thursday 18th August 2.30-5.30
Thursday 25th August 2.30-5.30
Thursday 1st September 2.30-5.30
Thursday 8th September 4.00-7.00
You may remember a couple of weeks ago we ‘ambushed’ the judges of South West in Bloom as they came to judge one of Transition Bath’s guerrilla gardens. You may have even seen the massive picture of Becky and Rachael dressed as guerrilla warriors in the article in which the stunt was featured in the Bath Chronicle. Well the video of our stunt is now online! Check it out above.
Green Vision were last night featured on ITV West news! Yesterday we performed a little stunt for the national judges of Britain in Bloom, who were judging one of Bath’s (many!) guerrilla gardens. Finlay dressed as a news reporter, reporting on the ‘guerrilla conflict’ between Green Vision and neglected land in the city. Rachael, Becky and Tom dressed as guerrilla fighters, tending the plot in the background while the news report was ongoing.
ITV West news turned up to film us doing this, shots from which were used when our friend Iva, of Transition Bath, was interviewed about guerrilla gardening in the city live later that evening. See the feature above!
This morning Iva of Transition Bath was interviewed on BBC Radio Somerset about the work of Transition Bath and about guerrilla gardening. She mentioned Green Vision several times, talking about our stunts for the judges of Britain in Bloom and our guerrilla gardening in the city. Thanks, Iva!
Katy, Camille and Tom of Green Vision arrived at Bath Spa Station early this morning to collect signatures for the ‘Fair Fares Now’ petition overseen by the Campaign for Better Transport.
The petition calls on the government to use its regulatory powers to restrict planned increases in rail fares. Rail fares in the UK are already the highest in Europe and are set to rise by another 28% in the next four years. At a time when we need to see people getting out of cars and onto public transport, pricing even more people out of public transport seems a poorly thought out move.
For the first hour or so we went round passengers waiting on the platform to an overwhelmingly positive response. After an hour or so we were asked to leave the station and had to attempt to attracts people’s attention on the street outside. Although much less successful, people being in a hurry and unwilling to stop, we still got a fair few more signatures. The postcards that we could hand to people supplied by Campaign for Better Transport came in handy here!
On 23rd July Green Vision will be hosting an ‘Open Space’ event at Manvers Street Baptist Church, Bath. This is an opportunity to discuss Bath’s future, the problems and opportunities it faces, and what we would like to do to improve it. It is both an opportunity for reflection after the Youth Climate Summit and an opportunity to start new conversations on any topic.
The event will use the ‘open space’ format, allowing attendees to choose the topic of conversation for themselves, setting their own agenda and pursuing what they are passionate about. Although there is no obligation to commit to action after the event, the hope is that you find others interested in areas similar to you that you can start a project with as part of Green Vision.
Anyone is welcome to come along between 11am and 3pm to join the discussion. You don’t have to come along for the whole thing - just come along when you’re available.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Our stunt for the judges of Southwest In Bloom was covered extensively in the Bath Chronicle this week. Page 8 of the Chron featured a huge picture of Becky and Rachael of Green Vision dressed as guerrillas, hiding among the vegetables on Gravel Walk. An extract of the article follows:
So is Bath the blooming best?
Green-fingered young people impressed the judges of a regional gardening competition – by ambushing them and performing a mock news broadcast.
Members of Transition Bath, a charity run by volunteers who aim to make Bath a more sustainable city, and Green Vision, a youth gardening group, put on the display for South West in Bloom judges this week.
Two of the Green Vision members dressed as guerrilla gardeners, while Transition member Iva Carrdus, who has been helping to develop community vegetable patches and gardens throughout Bath, played the role of a news broadcaster, talking about the work the two groups were doing together.
Although Green Vision aren’t exactly a ‘youth gardening group’ and it wasn’t Iva that played the role of the news broadcaster, it’s still nice to be featured! Read the full article about the Bath In Bloom judging here.
