At Grizedale … MP Tim Farron, Chair of lib dem party supports #saveourforests
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Author Archives: martin brown
The Great Transition: How it all turned out OK in 2050. (nef Report)
“This report, by the new economics foundation, sketches out how, in the light of the challenges we face both nationally and globally – consuming beyond our planetary limits, untenable inequality, growing economic instability, and a breakdown in the relationship between ‘more’ and ‘better – things could ‘turn out right’ by 2050 through the process of a ‘Great Transition’.
Initially presenting the case for change, the report goes on to discuss some of the steps required for such a transition, including a Great Revaluing, Redistribution, Rebalancing, Localisation, Reskilling, Economic Irrigation, and Great Interdependence.
It concludes with a discussion of two big challenges that need to be addressed before such a transition can be achieved, but also sets out steps that can be taken straight away to start the journey”
And the built environment features throughout the report in respect of how we recovered our lack of traditional skills, succeeded in addressing the localism issue and turned energy ineffective buildings into models of zero carbon.
Removing the hoardings – Making education projects learning projects
I have visited many school construction projects of late, for a number of contracting organisations across the UK, and have notice they all have one thing in common, a hoarding or barrier between them and the school. Most have received credit (from considerate constructor scheme, health and safety, ISO14001 auditors etc) for the effectiveness of the barrier.
These hoardings represent a barrier between school and project, removing the children and teaching staff from what should be viewed as a unique learning opportunity. If the school is lucky they will have a chained section or peep hole to look through or perhaps a PR’d site tour, all badged by the contractors as evidence of engagement with schools.
Further, in the current risk adverse environment, advice from consultants is Complete segregation of site from the school wherever possible.
Should we not be looking to remove barriers, not create more?
All education projects should be learning projects.
Construction projects in schools and other educational establishments present learning opportunity on a wide range of themes, from project management to crafts and skills, from technology and science to sustainability. They also present a fantastic opportunity for designers and contracts to harness student environmental and sustainability thinking on future school facilities. And yet we isolate them.
Real Engagement
There are win-wins for both. Those in the construction or maintenance sector can really engage with school users, improving their own and the industry image, developing relationships for future work and future recruitment, whilst the educational sector can benefit from real time learning of curriculum subjects.
Safeguarding
There obviously has to be a considered approach to such sharing. CRB checks are not seen as enough, token even. Safeguarding awareness must become a mandatory induction aspect for all working on educational construction/refurb/maintenance/fm projects.
Through Classofyourown projects we have been working to remove these barriers for a few years now, and in association with The Athena Programme have started to roll out a certified safeguarding awareness programme for those in the built environment
Be2camp: be2awards BE2’s and construcTALKS
It is well over 2 years ago that a small like minded group of us* (in the UK, USA and Australia) started be2camp as a means of exploring the use of social media, web 2 applications and virtual worlds within the built environment sector. Since then we have grown to a community of over 500 members and received recognition as the Best Social Media Community in the Sustainability Now social media awards 2010
Hence it is with a real sense of pride and achievement that we can now organise, promote and host the worlds first social media awards, the BE2’s aimed specifically at the built environment.
Those of us who read and write blogs, use twitter, facebook and other ‘tools’ regularly come across the wow site, the wow application and occasionally the wow individual. Our be2camp awards will enable these ‘wows’ to be recognised, by nomination and ultimately by award winning.
Be2camp started out with a view to improving collaboration and sustainability through social media, so it is only fitting that the award categories reflect these themes.
Our site be2awards is now open for nomination, so please pay it a visit, register and nominate your favourite. Or indeed if your favourite has been nominated then endorse that nomination. From 18th Jan the nominations will close and voting commences.
Our awards event is on the 9th February at the Building Centre in London (and as with all be2camp events streamed live). Not only will we be announcing the award winners we will also hold ConstrucTALKS, a TEDx style set of presentations from high profile thought leaders. not to be missed.
- Built environment blogger of the Year
- Best sustainability blog
- Best AEC social media blog
- Best use of Twitter
- Best AEC collaboration platform
- Best AEC community, network or community application
- Best use of Web 2.0 for construction products
- Best location-based AEC application
- Best ‘internet of things’ application
- Best mobile application
- Best virtual or hybrid event
- ‘Old media/new media’ award
- Best AEC PR campaign
- Best AEC marketing campaign
- Best education and learning award
*Be2camp Founders:
Jodie Miners Australia @jodiem
Pam Broviak USA @pbroviak
Paul Wilkinson UK @EEPaul
Martin Brown UK @fairsnape
Three reasons to give your PQQ and Bids an independent Health Check
One: Many PQQ’s and Bids ‘deselect’ themselves through errors and omissions. It is obviously far better for errors, omissions, questions not (fully) answered or formatting issues to be picked up by independent review rather than your client. Don’t throw away valuable points…
Two: Make your bid content the best it can be. Make sure your PQQ response is a killer, with compelling evidence, sparkling innovation and best practice awareness.
Three: Learning gained with one independent health check can be transferred to future bids, ensuring increased success potential
Independent reviews of your PQQ and Bids can be conducted through Fairsnape
Simply forward your responses prior to submitting to your client, giving enough time for review and your updating of the bid. In addition to Health Checks, other bid services are available, for example reviews of failed bids, PQQ training and coaching, bid writing and support, along with interview and presentation skills support. Get in touch to discuss more.
Ingredients of Transition: Engaging Young People » Transition Culture
20 Dec 2010
Ingredients of Transition: Engaging Young People
Gathering young people’s visions of the future at the Great Unleashing of Transition Malvern Hills
Context
Part of any Transition initiative practicing INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY (2.2) is the successful engagement of young people in the process. Given that Transition is about the creation of a more resilient future, then it is obvious that the people who will inhabit that world are central to the STRATEGIC THINKING (5.10) that goes into designing it. Young people can also contribute a great deal to PRACTICAL MANIFESTATIONS (3.9) of Transition.
(We are collecting and discussing these Transition ingredients on Transition Network’s website to keep all comments in one place. Please leave feedback and comments, suggestions for alternative pictures, anecdotes, stories and projects for this ingredient here).
The Challenge
Engaging young people in community activities and in environmental campaigning is a challenge, and not just for Transition. Yet if young people fail to engage or to see a role for themselves, Transition, in effect, has to do without the engagement of a significant sector of the community, and will also be without the energy that young people can bring.
Core Text
Transition is a process of intentionally designing a more localised and resilient future for the whole community. Given that it is today’s young people who will be coming of age, starting families and building livelihoods in that world, it is vital that they are as integrated into the Transition process from an early stage as possible. There is a tension here though, as for many teenagers, these larger issues aren’t so much on the radar. I remember talking to a 17 year old girl at my local sixth form college during an exercise where students were asked for their visions of Totnes in the future as part of the creation of the Totnes and District Energy Descent Action Plan. She told me “I don’t think years into the future… only three months ahead… learn to drive, go to college, learn to drive go to college”. As one 21 year-old who wrote a comment on Transition Culture about this subject put it:
“…there is still a very natural inclination to cling to the oil-driven lifestyle. Our generation grew up with it, it’s all we ever knew. If you don’t go and read through history books, you’ll think that oil is a necessary part of human life”….
He, however, went on to initiate a Transition initiative in his community. Transition initiatives have been using a range of ways to engage and involve young people. For Joanne Porouyow at Transition Los Angeles, it is not a case of organising specific events for young people, rather “we have simply folded the young people right in as full participants in whatever the Transition groups are doing”. In practice, this includes:
- not making having children a barrier to parents participating in event, and making it OK to bring children to meetings
- getting young people to run events, for example Transition Mar Vista (in LA) offered a workshop called ‘Repurposing old clothes’ which was run by the 16 year-old grand-daughter of a member of the group, and Transition LA’s ‘Cluck Trek’, a visit to several families who keep chickens, was led by the children of several chicken-owning families.
Picking up on this idea that the young people can be the teachers, blogs can be a great way to communicate insights and experience from getting involved with aspects of Transition. During the research for this book, Gerri Smyth pointed out her granddaughter’s website, ‘My Chickens’, which she has set up to document her experiences keeping chickens. Here’s how she describes the site in her ‘About’ section: “I am Loolahs, I am 8 years old. This blog is about my chickens and what we get up to. I hope you like it”. Blogging for kids is very easy to do these days and can offer a unique perspective on Transition, as can running workshops to teach them how to film and edit their own short videos, which again offer a particular angle on Transition.
Transition Belsize in London are setting up something called ‘Transition Kids NW3’ which will offer a range of workshops and activities to be decided by the kids themselves. Initial ideas include foraging workshops, wildlife survival skills, cob building and dawn bird spotting. Also in London, Transition Finsbury Park, also in London, is working with the local primary school. They found the best time to try to engage parents and children is immediately at the end of school, especially when they are doing hands-on events. They set up an after-school food growing club, which became so popular with the kids that Jo Homan, the organiser, said that kids could only come to the group if they brought their parents as well. Running Transition events after school was also done by Transition Tynedale set up an organic vegetable stall in the school grounds, sourcing produce from a local MENCAP college, with some of the kids running the stall.
At Transition Scotland Support’s ‘Diverse Routes to Belonging’ conference in Edinburgh in November 2010, participants were invited to bring their kids, and a parallel programme of activities was run for them, organised by Sussex-based Moving Sounds. The kids organised and presented the morning’s warm-up activity, and then prepared a performance piece to show that evening. At the Transition North conference in 2009, a group of local teenagers, Ruby, Hayley, Eugene, Paddy, Adrian and Linda, through the Two Valleys Radio, spent the day of the event interviewing lots of the delegates and members of the local Transition initiatives, and then edited a voxpop piece which was presented to everyone at the end of the day.
Transition Ottawa in Canada worked with local media studies students at the local University who were set a project to make short films (under 5 minutes) to convey a powerful and practical message in order to inspire their fellow students to live more simply. They were given six topics to choose from, food, water, energy, transport, waste and simple living, and members of Transition Ottawa went in and were available to the students if they wanted to ask questions. The resultant films will be shown at Transition Ottawa events.
Even the youngest of young people can get involved in Transition! Transition Town Letchworth run ‘Transition Tots’, which meets once a month, and where parents of children between 0 and 3 get together to discuss the “trials and tribulations of sustainable parenting” and to work on TTL projects[4].
One of my favourite examples of engaging young people in Transition comes from Transition Newent in the Forest of Dean. Students there made the ‘Oil Memorial’, a project which featured in the Transition Network’s wiki-film ‘In Transition 1.0’. A tower was built from blue plastic barrels, onto which were fixed many items, brought in by the children, which were made from oil. The project emerged from the desire to, as Michael Dunwell of Transition Forest of Dean put it, “get people to understand all the things oil does for us. I asked the children “what’s plastic made of”, and they replied “plastic””. Looking back on the completed project, Michael said “it’s just fun, getting people involved in making something with a message … just to celebrate the incredible achievements that oil has brought for us, then to turn it into a memorial to say goodbye to it”….
In many settings you will need to make sure that anyone from your Transition initiative working in any direct way with young people will need to be CRB checked, and any institutions you work with will no doubt have child protection policies in place which will need to be observed.
The Solution
Giving children a voice is an important part of the process, as is helping them to express what they already know (which is sometimes far more than adults!) This can take people who work in schools by surprise and can be strikingly accurate. Design into the activities of your initiative events and projects that engage local schools and youth clubs, and use media more accessible to them, Facebook, YouTube and so on. Try to ensure that the voice of young people is represented in the Core Group.
Connections to other ingredients
For many young people, practical activities is one good way to engage them, so ARTS AND CREATIVITY (2.8) and THE GREAT RESKILLING (3.11) are very helpful. MEANINGFUL MAPS (4.10) can also be very good for drawing out practical ideas for the future, as well as for mapping how young people see the world and what is of value to them. Teaching young people the necessary skills for RUNNING PRODUCTIVE MEETINGS (2.4) and for RESPECTFUL COMMUNICATION (1.7) are skills that will last them a lifetime. You should always be mindful though of the dangers of POST PETROLEUM STRESS DISORDER (1.1) when talking with young people about peak oil and climate change, and ensure a good balance between information and practical responses (a balance one should strive to achieve with adults too!).
Please leave any comments here.
Its not often I repost a blog item, but this one is so right on many levels
Can we really address carbon reduction with same thinking that created carbon problem in first place?
New thinking on CO2 reduction required?
A twitter comment from @imogenhumphris this morning stating that carbon reduction can only come from innovation made me think of the classic but overused Einstein quote used as title for this post. This was followed this afternoon by an inspiring blog piece by Gaian Economics – Rethinking Resilience
Maybe we are approaching the problem of carbon reduction from the wrong direction.
We need to stand in the future of a post carbon economy and start to focus on doing more of what we need to get us there
In classic sustainable thinking we focus on what less we can do with(less carbon, use less energy, fuel, resources etc) whilst still doing the same 'stuff'. But maybe we should think of what more can we do – more local resources, more 'harmless' materials, more renewables …
In the built environment we need more focus on building local resilient systems and communities, rather than trying to do what we have always done with less.
Low Carbon business plan for construction companies (extract from #IGT report)
#IGT Report Wordle – Low Carbon Construction
… on developing a plan to reduce CO2 emissions from Construction activities
Through constructco2 we can now start to get an understanding for the level of CO2 emissions that arise solely from the construction activity, ie those within the control of the construction team. Overall this is currently looking like 98kg per £100,000 contract value, or 1tonne for £1m. There are of course variances in this, and as soon as we have more projects completing a better picture will emerge.
This figure is arrived at through measuring the carbons arising from personnel travel, the material and waste transport emissions along with the fuels and energy used on a project. The front page of constructco2 shows a real time breakdown across these areas for projects using the tool.
But what does a tonne of CO2 look like? Borrowing an idea and concept from Carbon Coach Dave Hampton, I often use balloons in my sustainability workshops, with each delegate blowing up a party balloon. Each one of which represents about 10g of CO2. Imagine a medium sized workshop room / classroom filled with balloons and we starts to get a feeling for what a tonne can look like.
Now a very useful visual measure has been developed by University of Leicester, sponsored by Willmott Dixon, where a tonne of carbon is represented as a cube larger than the average house at 560m3 (Although not new as a CO2 Cube created from 12 shipping containers to form the equivalent of a three-story building, was used to demonstrate what a tonne can look like at Copenhagen in 2009)
So for every £1 million of contract value we are emitting the equivalent of a large family house. The SfC Strategic Forum for Construction calculates the turnover of the UK Industry to be in excess of £100billion. Therefore if my maths with big numbers is good we fill the equivalent of one hundred thousand homes with CO2 per annum through construction activities alone
What then are the areas we should address in developing a low carb plan to reduce levels and impacts of construction CO2?
passive – getting the foundations right , for example through ensuring all vehicles, plant, cabins and small tools used on site are as energy efficient as is possible, that we start to use renewable energy, eg solar power for small tools where possible and seek to use mains power as early as possible in the contract to avoid use of generators. And of course ensuring all project planning is optimised for minimum energy use.
active – addressing everyday activities to reduce energy and fuels used and hence emissions, through, for example, focus on local procurement to minimise travel and transport, encouraging car sharing, using lean construction to minimise time, reduce energy usage in site accommodation and plant, reduce waste and improve storage.
positive – we can attempt to balance those carbons still arising from construction through education and awareness of people and organisations on projects (so learning can be shared and taken to other projects and offices, also what goes around will come around; your staff and operatives for the next project will be better informed and more likely to save energy.) We can also look at carbon capture via planting of (additional) trees and landscapings
And of course using constructco2 to measure understand and reduce construction carbon.
Fairsnape 