Sticking a flag in it - seeding the future

One of the big things we learned when we blew up £1.2m of debt was that you have to stop waiting for other people or authorities to take action.

They won’t - at least not yet.

And this conversation was borne out when we visited Civic Square in Birmingham last week. Civic Square are this amazing organisation who are "demonstrating neighbourhood scale civic infrastructure for social, ecological, economic and climate transition."

Leonie - who works for Power Station and I headed up to Birmingham, as it was the last gasp of the summer holidays, and the children were still off, and had Hilary come they would have been fending for themselves from 8am to probably 11.30pm.

Immy, who is one of the founders of Civic Square talked passionately with us about the concept of "demonstrators" - projects which embody ideas that set an example and which can be picked up and then upscaled when the public are ready, and there's a government who want to create policies which actually implement the solutions, rather than treading water, or pursuing policies which actively contribute to the destruction of our world.

Immy and her colleague Khadijah told us that we have to lead them there, and they gave the example of how the NHS was only created thanks to demonstrators which were outliers expressing the ideas which were later embodied in its charter.

When it comes to social change it has always taken a huge crisis to trigger the change we need. We saw this with the building of the welfare system back in the 20th century - and we are witnessing it again now.

There’s a void and the only answer is that you act now and start to be the resistance and to start building the demonstrators.

This is why we’re doing Power

Stand up and stick a flag in it - small steps in microcosm can lead to huge changes. This is pretty much our central belief.

Before our long conversation came to an end, Immy asked us when we thought our story of Power Stations might reach its conclusion, when might the film be ready and come out?

She sees the power of the story, the need for it to be disseminated - to be a story people can latch onto when the next general election comes, power and energy are on peoples' minds - people are looking for projects which are bold and brave and which unleash the imagination -

We are taking a leaf out of Ann Pettifor's book - when she wrote "The Case for The Green New Deal" she said that every building should become a "Power Station"...

We are going with this idea, seeing just how viable it is in reality. Cajoling -

Well it took us over a year to turn just 16 buildings into mini Power Stations - but now we're getting the momentum, we have found excellent systems and partners - and we're working on turning the next 5 streets into mini Power Stations, helping to bring other communities around the country into the project - and ultimately into their own power.

We want to show the "authorities" what's important and that we demand change. We are thinking about this as "seeding the change"

"Time for gathering plans together and seeding new action. Back on the street and excited about next steps for the POWER STATION here and further afield."

Stay tuned for exciting developments.

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