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.

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.

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.

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 by Rachael Hayman

Green Vision met again on the 9th to discuss the Community Food Project. Since the previous meeting on the 12th April, Foodcycle have expressed an interest in starting a hub in Bath, and were looking towards working with us. We have decided that this is a good opportunity; offering the tools and experience to allow us to take this project forwards.

We have revised a few aspects of the project. We are now considering Saturday in place of Sunday, as Genesis offer a £1 roast on a Sunday. The volunteers who run the kitchen and provide table service will be over 16, to overcome problems regarding handling of food and employment. We are also looking to include some more mature members to form part of the ‘core team’ required by Foodcycle, as we feel that students may not be able to commit the full 10 hours per week all year round.

However, whilst this may take some time to forge this partnership with Foodcycle and as we are very keen to give as much time as possible whilst we do not have a lot of school work, we decided that we would like to run a ‘trial’ event without the support of Foodcycle, to be held during July to grasp how the project will work. It would start at 12pm and last around 4-5 hours. Volunteers would be needed 2 hours before to prepare the food, as well as adult assistance in collecting the food the previous day.

From this, we drew up a list of action points which were as follows:

• Check the premises, and see what equipment we will need. 
• Book the kitchen. 
• Source equipment, where necessary. 
• Visit local shops to find possible donations for the one off event, whilst also gaining support for the future of the scheme. 
• Create posters to raise awareness of the event. 
• Network: speaking at events such as the Transition Bath meeting to find more people who would be interested. Also, to place posters to gather volunteers on places such as the notice boards in Green Park, and contacting volunteering schemes such as V-Involved.

On Wednesday members of Green Vision met Tory of Foodcycle, a national charity facilitating the development of ‘community cafés’, using surplus produce from local businesses to cook nutritious meals. This is both a social project, dealing with food povery and building community, and an environmental project, aiming to reclaim some of the 400 000 tonnes of edible food that goes to landfill every year.

We visited the Bristol Foodcycle ‘Hub’ in February, which really impressed us. Although at first Foodcycle said they weren’t able to set up a hub in Bath, now, after interest from us, the universities and other local groups, Bath has appeared on their expansion plans!

Above you can see Jamie, our facilitator, obscuring Katy, one of those leading on this project. Luci, Henry and Tom from Green Vision also attended. Alexa (second from right) and Sarah from Bath-based organisation ‘Our Future Planet’ also attended and are very interested in getting involved. Tory is pictured on the right. Earlier that day she visited the volunteering co-ordinators at both of Bath’s universities.

This is a very exciting new venture and we look forward to working with Foodcycle in the future!

Today was Green Vision’s best attended meeting to date, with 15 young citizens packing out Jika Jika. This was a sign of our schools visits paying off - six attendees (from 3 different schools) had met us at one of the visits.

Top agenda item was the Youth Climate Summit, which is now only a month away. There are now 14 confirmed speakers on the first day, including the two keynote speakers: Mark Lynas and Rob Hopkins. The workshops on the second day are diverse and creative, the latest confirmation being from a company leading a workshop creative improvised climate change musical! The summit is now full, with 120 young people from 10 schools attending.

We also discussed facilitation training for existing members of Green Vision. This will be used on the first day of the summit. Although each speaker has a 50-minute slot, only 30 minutes of that will be occupied with speaking. The remainder will be ‘open space’ discussion time, designed to enable reflection on and brainstorming around the issues raised in the talk. Forty young people will be trained professionally in facilitation for this purpose. 

We also discussed guerrilla gardening. Transition Bath have gained permission from the council to guerrilla garden a large, prominent plot in Hedgemead Park and Green Vision is going to help them out. The first event is tomorrow closely followed by one on Sunday. Everyone is welcome!

Three members of Green Vision are together applying to appear on Channel 4’s documentary series on youth campaigning, Battlefront. Camille, Mimi and Rachael made this awesome video as part of the application. Their proposed campaign is about guerrilla gardening and springs from the work Green Vision has been doing locally.

We’ve been trying to get our food-waste reuse project off the ground for a while now and we’re now making rapid progress! Tomorrow (1st June) we are meeting with Foodcycle, a national organisation that co-ordinates hubs around the country (such as the one we visited in Bristol) to discuss setting one up in Bath. Their expertise, financing streams and insurance would make the whole process a lot easier!

Although on hold due to exams, the pop-up cinema idea is still on the table. Just Do It is a soon-to-be-released film about the more rebellious side of the climate movement, following groups involved in civil disobedience; it’s one of our top choices of films to show. We’re going to investigate whether we could borrow solar panels and a large battery so we can power the showing from 100% renewable energy.

Phew, that’s a long update! I haven’t even mentioned our talk of a pop-up shop/arts centre and considering formalising Green Vision into a limited (not-for-profit) company. This is very exciting stuff but all still in early stages - expect more news soon.

If you’d like to get involved in anything mentioned here, or want more information, please contact tom@greenvisionmovement.org.uk or jamie@greenvisionmovement.org.uk. We look forward to hearing from you!