Green Vision: The Bath Youth Climate Movement

Earlier this month Green Vision headed over to Southstoke for...

tomyoungman — Thu, 31 May 2012 23:15:23 +0100

GV and our new mentor-directors!

The beautiful setting in Southstoke

GV and our adopted yurt home!

GV's new favourite game - Ninja!

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!

Join GV at Penny Farthing Festival!

tomyoungman — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:55:00 +0100

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...

tomyoungman — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:45:59 +0100

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...

tomyoungman — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 22:42:22 +0100

Green Vision with the Mayor and Mayoress

A little more for GV's project fund!

Rachael was very pleased with donations!

Our 'People's Kitchen' banner

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...

tomyoungman — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:58:00 +0100

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.

Our second 'People's Kitchen' event!

tomyoungman — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:36:00 +0000

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 look to recruit Adult Trustees

tomyoungman — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:23:49 +0000

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.

GV Member Returns from UN climate talks

tomyoungman — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:33:52 +0000

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...

tomyoungman — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:15:25 +0000

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?

GV People's Kitchen: The African Connection

tomyoungman — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

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.

Minutes: 13th October

tomyoungman — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:03:00 +0100

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.

We talked about whether to incorporate Green Vision officially. We talked about whether another organisation would be able to hold what we do (like Woodcraft folk which Emily is part of) but it was felt that we have a very clear vision of what we want to achieve therefore it would be best to look at setting up our own organisation. We felt it would be difficult to maintain the longevity of the project unless we recruited some adults who will be resident in Bath for a longer time than us who would be willing to maintain the vision of Green Vision as director. Our aim over the next three months is to find and recruit three adults willing to hold director positions of Vice Chair, Treasurer and Secretary alongside a number of Green Vision members. We considered that a Peer Mentoring structure with the right adults involved would be a very effective model to run the organisation with.

We discussed the level of commitment needed to run the organisation. Everyone agreed that they were committed to doing this. Time varies between individuals and is dependent on Exam timetables. This reinforced the belief that supporting adults were essential to the success of the organisation.

Each GV member is to find a couple of suitable candidates for directors of Green Visionwho would be prepared to commit to the project for five years. We have drafted an article for school newsletters to find people interested. We intend to interview over dinner with Green Vision members. The aim would be to be ready to set up as a formal organisation at the beginning of next year.

Ralph Allen Eco Group

Sid explained that Ralph Allen School were looking to set up an Eco group and we could look at ways to support them. Jamie is going to RA on Weds 19^th October so will discuss further when there.

Practical projects

Fracking event took place the following Monday. Tom needed to find a venue. (he did!)

Idea to have a Peoples Kitchen cooking Kenyan food (as Becky has some contacts of people who could give us some recipes) highlighting various food and climate related issues in different countries in Africa. Also link up with Oxfam group in Bath Spa.

Idea of doing a video link event from the COP 17 talks with Tom and various youth delegates from around the world. This could be done at a large venue inviting students and adults. Would be an evening event at the beginning of December

Communications

Tom needs some support by people writing copy for the website. Becky volunteered to support with this. Anyone else who is also willing to contribute please contact Tom.

Youth Climate Summit

Discussed the possibility of how Green Vision could run this next year and whether it would be better to run the event at the beginning of 2012-2013 school year so that the summer break does not cause loss of momentum. We thought different schools in B&NES would be able to host it each year. Becky will be contacting Mary Patterson at Kingswood to see if Kingswood would be willing to hold the 2012/2013 event.

The next Green Vision meeting is taking place on Friday 28th October at 3pm. Send an e-mail to tom@greenvisionmovement.org for more information.

What the Frack, in Bath!?

tomyoungman — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:50:00 +0100

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...

tomyoungman — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 14:53:59 +0100

Donation box

The set-up

Cooks and customers

Green Vision, Delicious Taste

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...

tomyoungman — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 21:47:19 +0100

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...

tomyoungman — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:06:31 +0100

A lot of effort goes into picking veg!

Curious veg picking...

Tasty fennel!

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.

Minutes: 11th August 2011

tomyoungman — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:51:00 +0100

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!

Minutes: 4th August

tomyoungman — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:32:56 +0100

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.

(Late) Minutes: 23rd July

tomyoungman — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:30:12 +0100

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
Community Food Project

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:

Email businesses and conduct the business survey.

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:

Jamie is going to look into Lottery funding.
Rachael and Becky are going to formalise the proposal to send to the council.
Speak to prospective shareholders.

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’...

tomyoungman — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 22:48:32 +0100

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!...

tomyoungman — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:54:00 +0100

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!