Thriving too

Social Dining: Big tables + New Behaviours

I had the pleasure of have having lunch at Hub Islington last week. Laura and I popped over there to meet Amy Smith the new editor for The Community Lover's Guide to Islington and to talk to the Hub team about their clever use of The Civic Crowd website to map and connect with projects in the local community.  I really enjoyed the friendly and fun lunch – and the delicious food which magically appeared through everyone bringing and making a range of salads, soups etc. 

Food sharing in a community setting is much more than sharing big tables. There is a whole range of new ideas and behaviours springing up  - but overall from our work and study there are lots of signs that people want to spend time together in a way that goes beyond arranged social lunches and dinners – and moves towards a more inclusive, community feel, using food as a way for getting to know people in an informal setting.

And people are so clever - especially with a small amount of inspiration from what other communities are doing. In two of the workshops we did with Neighbourhood Challenge groups, one in Lower Green and the other in Boothtown, people came up with some fantastically imaginative ideas on how they could possibly use food and cooking to build relationships and using their existing resources, without waiting for big events, lots of funding... or permissions.

The Lower Green group had the idea that although they didn’t have a big enough kitchen for shared cooking on the scale they would like, they did have a big hall.  So their idea was to come together, prepare the food together, and then take it home to their own kitchens to cook it…. And then come back together to eat it.  The Boothtown group thought that rather than trying to engage everyone in a big street party straight away, that they would hold weekly suppers in the street, moving from one house to the other, growing the number of people taking part each week.

Sharing food is as old as the hills. But below are some examples of how social dining looks and feels different to a regular restaurant’s consumer-based offering (as lovely as that is too)... or indeed a lunch or dinner at a friends house.

Update: If you are interested in encouraging more social dining, where you live, or work for a local authority, here's the brilliantly easy way that the Hackney Chief Exec and team have decided to do it.

Bring Your Own Restaurant

Do it yourself fine dining on the streets of Holyoke. A plein air potluck held every other Friday.

Outdoor Community Kitchen - Copenhagen

I visited this last summer.  Every week up to 80 people in the local neighbourhood bring dishes and share a meal together.

School Kitchen in Rotterdam

Maurice Specht (right) in the kitchen of a [very inspiring] school in Rotterdam - made completely available for the community to use.

Kitchain 

Modular furniture designed for social dining in a public space.

Collaboration O 

Communal dining area at their collaborative workspace.

Sunday Soup - Meal-based micro-granting events (below pics from Bologne and New York's FEAST)

Streetfeast  A day of local lunches across Ireland - as an excuse to share good food, meet new people who live near you, celebrate our streets and show what is possible when a group of people come together to do something special. Organised by Community Lover's Guide to Dublin editor Sam Bishop, and crew. 

Social Brain Lab: Introduction to Social Cognition

Last week I introduced the Social Brain Lab, and our intention to work with others to create some helpful tools based on selective, condensed knowledge about how people function.

The key points from the learning models I described from my research is that firstly, when knowledge is applied well it can make our interpretations of situations more accurate and interpersonal exchanges more positive … and secondly, that the knowledge itself can trigger an ongoing learning process of self-observation and self-direction.

In a series of posts I wanted to focus on some aspects of social brain research, which might help a person working in a community achieve more positive results. 

What is social cognition?

Today I am going to introduce social cognition, a term used in a few different ways.  The social cognition I am referring to here is the ability to understand another person’s mental states and thought processes.  From the age of 5 children start to understand that other people may think differently from them… this natural phenomena is labelled Theory of Mind.  This whole area of study has become very intricate and over recent years a number of extremely detailed and interconnected disciplines have emerged, many resulting from the application of new research from neuroscience. An example of this is 'social neuroscience' which is a relatively new field first developed by John Cacioppo at Chicago University.

Although I am personally fascinated with the academic research, what I am most interested in is the key pieces of knowledge that a regular person might find helpful in managing themselves and navigating interpersonal relationships. In the Social Brain Lab we are intent on focusing on how key pieces of knowledge might be helpful in community/social settings.

The community scenario

The scenario you could imagine is that you are regular person who is interested in making your community a nicer place to live.  You know that this will require a great deal of collaboration and co-operation, with groups of people working together to make positive things happen.  Your motivation for getting involved in such community building activity is that you would like to see divisions between age or culture bridged… and believe that a genuine opportunity now exists among residents to make and shape their social and physical environment of the neighbourhood.  You are realistic however, and understand that this can be difficult. New community activity often challenges existing social and professional structures and hierarchies and even the most positive activities can create controversy – in turn possibly leading to difficult conversations.  

In these complex situations you want to be able to communicate well.  You want people to understand what you are saying in substance, but also clearly understand your intentions and motivations.  You also want to be able to understand other people well, not misinterpreting what people say, or making negative assumptions about their intentions. As well as the diplomattic communication burdens you recognise that communicating ideas, stimulating ideas in other people and helping groups work together productively is very important in achieving your aims. 

In his important the new book Together, sociolist Richard Sennett is very persuasive in his argument that co-operation requires skill as well as goodwill - particularly when trying to work with people who aren't of the same mindset or background as ourselves - the type of co-operation that puts a much higher burdern on social cognition. You can listen to his recent RSA talk here.

Understanding what is going on in your own head is difficult.  Monitoring a conversation in a live situation to ensure that what you say is an accurate reflection of what you mean, is even more difficult.  Then when you add ‘social cognition’  - trying to understanding what is happening in the other person’s head as they process what you are saying… is very challenging indeed … but not impossible.

Communicating well in every single situation we find ourselves in is too much to ask of any undividual in my opinion, there are simply too many stresses in daily life to demand that degree of concentration of ourselves.  But we can learn to communicate well regularly with some practice, improving our social cognition abilities over time, but not without understanding how our minds work - particularly many minds together.

Applying social cognition to workshop activities

We use this understanding of social cognition thinking and Theory of Mind in some of the activities we have designed for workshops already.  We call them ‘talking tools’, but basically they are activities to help a group of individuals surface and share their mindsets.  We used these activities in public workshops with Reading Council, and are about to test a similar new health related activity later this month.  Our experience is that these tools perform an interesting function – people are genuinely surprised to discover that people think differently from them, that they have differing attitudes to the role of the council vs the potential role of local residents., and the way the conversation is structured through the activity leads people to be intrigued to find these differences.

What to learn more?

There are two ways you can explore social cognition in more detail if this topic interests you.

Firstly, you can start to delve into the academic research.  A good place to start would be to listen to some of the free lectures from Berkeley that you can get from iTunes U – I would recommend as a good starting point lectures 19, 20 and 21 from this series of lectures by John Kihlstrom. 

Secondly, you can look at the more practical literature on communication. The two best books I have read on communication are Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations. 

In summary

High level communications are incredibly valuable. They can be learned, with knowledge and practice, but the type of good communication that I am promoting here is not the same as masterful manipulation - smooth talking attempts are often designed to get people to do what others want them to do - and thankfully they regularly and predictably get exposed for what they are. 

In my experience, important collaborative relationships, creating genuine mutual understanding and dialogue, can only be developed with completely ruthless self-honestly. We need to challenge ourselves constantly to avoid getting stuck in our own group mindsets, defensive, inaccurate or unhelpful narratives. Genuine dialogue also requires generosity of thought - ingredients for understanding the frames and perspectives of other people.

Which leads me neatly onto the next post on the Social Brain Lab .... where I will talk about trust building. 

Innovations in Consultation, Engagement ... and possibly Democracy

I wanted to write to share some reports on two fascinating events I recently attended focusing on community engagement, consultation and democracy.

The first was two weeks ago hosted by Involve and NCVO at an event focused on Local Engagement and Democracy, based on their superb qualitative research paper produced on Pathways to Participation.

Some of the key findings from the Pathways to Participation report was that from the 100 in-depth interviews conducted for the report there wasn’t a single report of a person being happy with a local consultation:

Interviewees’ experiences of formal public consultations were almost entirely negative. Concerns included:

• Consultation processes feeling tokenistic or repetitious, with lots of consultations on similar issues and no sense that anyone was bringing together the results.

• Decisions already having been made prior to the consultation, which was only carried out to meet a legal obligation or as a public relations exercise.

For many interviewees, these negative experiences reinforced an existing ambivalence and lack of trust in political processes in general. As a result of this lack of faith in the system, people often stopped attending consultations and public meetings and sought to express themselves in different ways; one interviewee’s experience of a consultation concerning the closure of a local hospital was that:

‘. . . it was so poorly done that you could say that’s why I went on the march in the end because I felt your voice wasn’t being heard as part of that [consultation] thing.’

This point was further re-enforced by Rhion Jones from the Consultation Institute at the LGinsight event on Tuesday ‘Improving Community Engagement’.  Rhion Jones argued that government was moving away from ‘evidence-based’ decision-making – to ‘permission-based’ decision making, where the rise in campaigning and activism was altering these dynamics in a purposeful way.

Personally I consider the poor consultation and permission-based decision-making described a very unsatisfactory scenario going forward – and as I commented at the Pathways to Participation event – it isn’t a status quo that we should be prepared to accept as the way to improve things in the future … that we need is to be more radical and self-critical about ensuring both democracy and good-decision making – which should go completely hand-in-hand. 

My comment on this included:

“Good decisions come out of everybody’s knowledge being pooled together. The citizens don’t know everything and the local authorities don’t know everything, but I think that good decisions come out of blending those two together. That it is quite a difficult thing to do. Poor decision-making can lead to unnecessary levels of local activism; there are necessary levels of activism and then there are unnecessary levels of activism, and those normally come about through bad decisions. Not only that, I think bad consultation actually wastes the very genuine opportunity to collaborate and design projects and services that draw on the intrinsic strengths of both citizens and government. That isn’t just about skills or knowledge or time. I think that we need to start to think much more about pulling on the imagination of citizens and local authorities alike. And that I think is why consultation is so important.”

.... But things are changing for the better - most exciting of all we are seeing Local Authorities that are taking a much more collaborative approach – moving forward the practice of consultation and engagement into the creative/collaborative space it needs to take if the full potential of citizens and government and professionals are to be utilized for social good over the long term.

Lambeth Council

Rebecca Eligon, Head of Strategies and Equalities, spoke on Tuesday about the ‘Co-operative council’s’ very practical and strategic efforts to engage in a new relationship with citizens, arguing that LAs need to expand their repertoire of research strategies and methodologies to really understand and surface citizen knowledge and capacities. This was exemplified by their swift actions following the riots – where the Town Hall became a vibrant and engaging space for residents to share their concerns and offer the ideas and talents to improving the places where they live.  Lambeth Co-operative Council is leading a much larger group of councils who are developing this new approach which looks to co-produce both services and communities.

Reading Council

In September Reading Council conducted 30 ward-based 2-hour workshops with local residents.  Using innovative, rich-research ‘talking tools’ and methods the workshops aimed to genuinely understand the concerns and desires of local residents, to paint a collective picture of what sort of communities people wanted to live in, but also aimed to change the conversation between residents and council staff to one less about linear services… and more about what transformations might be achieved by working together. The workshops were delivered by 30 council staff ranging across all departments trained specifically for the project. Resident feedback on the workshops ranged very positively from between 4 and 5 out of 5.

Norfolk County Council

Presented by Anne Tansley Thomas, Senior Consultation & Involvement Officer and Matt Dobin from Discovery, the work of  the council again looks to change the conversation significantly. Taking a workshop approach, using innovative activities, the council presented the work of the council to residents in a new way – resulting in a long-term piece of work that has gone a long way to effectively engage residents in knowledge sharing and decision-making.

Harrow Council

Harrow Council have been taking a very novel approach to consultation.  As described by Lindsay Coulson, Head of Communications, the council have taken to the high street with pop-up living rooms and gardens where local councillors have been invited to talk to residents in a very new-style of surgery.  Their Let’s Talk campaign has been integrated into much of their work and has received a great deal of praise from residents.

Perceptions of Place Report

If you get a chance please do have a read of the research report Perceptions of Place report by Keep Britain Tidy, presented on Tuesday by Joanne Butcher.  Of particular interest was the data on complaints from deprived communities being ‘the tip of the iceberg’… while in less deprived communities the level of complaints is more likely to be representative.

Are there other Local Authorities that are engaging with citizens in ways that genuinely attempt to change the relationship to a more creative and collaborative one - let us know - everyone is interested ....

How do you think consultation adds or harms real democracy and good-decision making?

I will end this by quoting Rhion Jones from Tuesday “"wanted: more candid consultation - tell the truth"

Big thanks to Rebecca Eligon and Neil Wholey, from Westminster Council and Chair of LGinsight for their invitation to ‘speed workshop’ on Tuesday – phew! ... and to Tim Hughes and Simon Burall at Involve for inviting me to comment on Pathways to Participation –  even suffering the odd joke! 

Social Spaces: First Community Kitchen in Lambeth Tomorrow Night

Lambeth Council, better known as the first Co-operative Council, is hosting a 'Volunteering Speed Dating' event tomorrow night 17th August between 6pm - 8pm.  The idea of the event has come out of the many offers of support the council has received over the last week following the civic disturbances.

As Lambeth have described, the evening will be an opportunity to:

• Meet people like you from across the borough
• Talk to community organisations and groups needing further support
• Get advice on how your skills can be used in Lambeth
• Commit to volunteer or just talk to experts about the sort of thing you want to do
• Get involved or be a wallflower, you can just listen to what's being discussed
• Celebrate what they have here in Lambeth.

Social Spaces will be running a Community Kitchen workshop in the Canteen between 7pm - 8pm for all residents who would like to start conversations about how the community can build further in the wonderful spirit in the area.

In planning for months now, the Community Kitchen is a new project planned to launch in the next few weeks, but we are bringing the project out early for this event.  Community Kitchen has evolved out of the Travelling Pantry project, and aims to give communities a new tool around which to hold positive conversations for stronger communities.  Community Kitchen will take on different guises and formats, but we hope that they will become, with the help of some accessible tools, regular self-arranged get-togethers for communities.  

Unlike traditional committee meetings and forums, Community Kitchens will encourage informal and creative conversations around developing new community projects with an asset-based focus rather than a problem solving or deficit-focused one.  The full launch of Community Kitchen will officially begin in September, and will see a large number of workshops being rolled out by a Local Authority as part of their innovative Community Engagement Strategy. 

Please join us on Wednesday 17th August between 7pm - 8pm in the Canteen (appropriately) at the Assembly Hall, Lambeth Town Hall, Town Hall, London SW2 1RW

We will be re-opening the free Travelling Pantry project in the next few weeks  - offering workshops to community groups in response to requests following the riots -  in Lambeth and Peckham... and other areas .... so please register your interest here.

Lewisham Muse

So y'all could be forgiven for thinking all I do is eat my way round London, but here we go again... This evening was a civilised affair at the Deptford Muse - a series of simple meals designed to foster conversations between people who might otherwise never cross paths. Informed by the work of Theodore Zeldin,(founder of the Oxford Muse) and produced along with the Lewisham Young Mayor and advisors, it was designed to support young people in developing their creative and personal potential. The conversations were themed around "Inventing new kinds of work".

To help things along, there was a menu of questions for diners to pick from as conversation starters. I was on a table with Reece (18) and Rochelle (16), and Jono (of indeterminate age) who paints and teaches. We had a great debate about how the world of work generally doesn't currently allow you to be very creative, or flexible, and that it's too based around money rather than what makes you happy. And that the education system isn't really geared for helping young people get ready for the world - just for exam results.

On a positive note, the young people there were bright, articulate, compassionate and all round very impressive! I asked if their generation were the ones that would turn it around. It was 50/50 tipping point whether they'd all be living The Good Life, or turn into blobs with robots doing everything from us like WallE. Hmm... I know which one I'm rooting for!

The Muse makes a come back on 9 July as part of Lewisham People's Day

Social Spaces: The Sharrow Pie Experiment

Last October Sheffield was the first Travelling Pantry workshop and I was delighted to hear that some of the particpants connected to St Mary's church had been so inspired by Pie Lab in Alabama that they have opened The Sharrow Pie Experiment, which will run until September.  The point of the first PieLab was that it was designed to create a space for conversation, with no commercial ambitions at all.  You can read their full story in the Chapter of Hand Made below.

What they are doing in Sheffield is equally marvellous... as Supervisor Amanda Ganley said to the BBC a couple of days ago:

"Hopefully people will get a bit of inspiration to think about what they would like to change or see in their community and maybe make connections with other people who want the same thing. And then could set a spark going and it could spread."

A couple of weeks ago The Star described the project

"Locals are encouraged to come to this small shop/cafe/grandma’s front room for free pie and tea. Once there, they are invited to sit down with their slice and chat to the person next to them. Through talking, networks are established, ideas are generated, projects are born and people are inspired to improve the area in which they live. Through that empowerment and relationship-building, social cohesion is increased, vibrancy created and local knowledge boosted, thus creating the perfect conditions for happiness, health and safety." 

They even got onto Radio Sheffield yesterday! 

It isn't just about pie, these projects are examples of new creative activism... something which is emerging around the world.  And it is certainly part of the bigger discussion about how to effect positive change - through power dynamics or creative human-centred means?

 Congratulations to all the team from St Mary's involved in the project - I hope that some great ideas and relationships emerge!

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More community

 

Social Spaces: Barbershops and Salons

British photographer Simon Weller captured some amazing images for his lates book “South African Township Barbershops & Salons” South African barbershops and salons are more than just places where you would get your hair cut. They are places which serve as community hubs and therefore are also called “informal barbershops”.  

Via: Creative Roots

Questions Are The Start of Everything

 
 
 

Design Academy Eindhoven - 3 word questions on their *great* website ... and above their installation at Milan Design Week.

Via: David Report

Rethink

 An installation by Anna Garforth Rethink was located in front of two main resources we heavily depend upon, gas and water. The word communicates a need to rethink about what we consume and how we consume it. 
 

The Sputnik Observatory For The Study of Contemporary Culture

 

Interesting new site in Beta

'A democratic space where people can listen and engage with ideas that inform contemporary history. Ideas that we believe will empower everyone to be a part of today’s cultural conversation.'

Via: George Siemens