Rural Community Gateway

For the last year, many of my colleagues and I have been participating in the Falkland Centre for Stewardship’s ‘Rural Leadership Programme’, ‘a one-year action-enquiry journey for rural people who, building on their passion for their places, are leading the way to resilient and sustainable rural community futures’. If you’re interested, you can read our final report here.

The breadth and depth of what we covered throughout the programme was immense, but for me, there are one or two key things which I vividly remember:

The first thing is about trust. As participants, we were given the responsibility to shape what the programme became. As rural people, emergent rural leaders, we were trusted to shape an agenda, which would be as informative, challenging and relevant as we wanted it to be. How refreshing! When was the last time you attended a course, which gave you such free-reign, offering you choice and affording you respect?

In my work as a community animator, trust is something which is pretty central to what we do. We believe that local people, the local experts, know about the place where they live in a sophisticated and deeply intellectual way. And so who better to shape the agenda than local people themselves? What are the priorities of local people? What is their passion? And how can I help them realise their potential?

But trusting people isn’t something they’re used to, and to be honest, people aren’t too trusting about people who are prepared to trust them! Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the culture we live in – a culture of being done to, a culture which insists that an academic or a consultant knows what’s best for a place rather than the person who has a lifetime of experience of that same place. And so, to some extent at least, my work is about challenging our existing culture.

Which brings me to the second thing which the Rural Leadership Programme introduced me to. In particular, it was actually one individual, but it was also an entirely new concept. The individual is the eco-philosopher and ecologist, Joanna Macy, and the concept is the thing she calls ‘The Great Turning: the essential adventure of our time, the shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization’. It’s about a reaction to the knowledge that we’re currently meeting our needs by destroying our world’s resources, facing up to the threat of peak oil and recognising ‘the vast interconnectedness of all phenomena’.

Now before you all turn off and go to sleep, I want to suggest what all that fluff might actually mean. At its simplest, it’s about a shift from our current culture, which measures itself in terms of economic wealth to a culture which is truly sustainable, balancing the economic, environmental and social costs of our actions. It means localisation, not globalisation. It means local food, traditional skills, renewable energy. It means life values over financial values. It means healthy children, families, communities and natural systems.

It means prosperity – and sustainable rural communities, local people, are right at the heart.

Copyright John Gold 2008

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John has also started a blog, featuring his articles for the Rural Gateway and more. Read his blog here.

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