 Hi, I'm Peter Verity and I'm the co-ordinator of the Sheffield Group of Positive Money Supporters. First thing to say is that we were not the first. Does this work? Yes. Our first meet-up was in October 2011 but we weren't the first. Meet-ups started sporadically during 2011 and I remember going to a meet-up in Bradford in the summer of 2011 and in fact I've met some people today that I met at that meeting. Ben Dyson was talking and I was thinking yeah if there was a meet-up group in Sheffield I would go along to that and I waited and I waited and I thought well someone's got to do it. I'll book a room and see what happens. Mira sent out invites to everybody on the mailing list which of course was very much smaller then. I think the positive money mailing list was probably only about four or five thousand. Twenty-one people came to the first meeting and we watched the DVD all about the money which I don't think is still on the website but that was the one available at the time. Two important things we set up at that first meeting. First is a mailing list and if you're going to set up a local group that is surely one of the first things you need to do to stay in contact with people. At the first meeting we had 17 names and since then it's grown to over 150 names on our mailing list. We also set up a wiki. That's probably not essential although it was very very valuable to us. That's the address there. If you have a look at it we put all of our minutes of meetings, events, future events and there's also a huge media library where people have posted video clips, book reviews and things like that and also letters to our MPs. Everything goes on to the wiki. Later on to other things we did after about six months someone came to a meeting and offered us unlimited free photocopying and that has been absolutely invaluable to us. We've produced not only flyers and leaflets but the positive money booklets which are on the website. We've done over 500 copies of the booklet fixing our broken economy and over 100 copies of banking versus democracy and that last one especially is very popular now. We also set up a forum that is less useful. It's less used. There's only two or three of us that ever post on that and if you post something new it probably only gets a dozen or so views. Although we were asked by one of our members to set up a forum actually it's not been that useful to us. I mentioned the mailing list. That's the sheet that we use at everything we do. Every meet-up and every public event and so on there's a place for email and a column for tick for the Sheffield email list or the national email list. I look after the Sheffield email system and I send out emails probably a couple of times a month and if people tick in the national column as well then I send the the names to Mira and they get added to the national list. I'm going to talk about the the meet-ups we've had. We've had 22 meetings. We have monthly meetings last Monday of every month unless it's a bank holiday which really means about nine meetings a year and we've been going two and a half years and I thought it would be useful to talk about some of the ups and downs that we've had. The first and I've divided it into three phases. The first phase is those first five points which takes us up to March 2012. In those meetings we were trying to get a speaker or a topic either somebody from within the group or somebody from outside the group to come and give us a talk and that that's very demanding. Not only is it demanding, I was the only one that was doing it and you have to constantly be thinking a month, two months ahead even more if you're after an external speaker you might speak to someone and they say no can't do it. Someone else might say yes I can do it but in two months time and it was a lot of effort. We weren't really advertising our events very well and the attendance was dropping and you'll see that in March 2012 the fifth point along we had eight people turn up and we had an invited speaker who was an ex-MP and it was very embarrassing to invite this MP along to talk about lobbying and so on and only eight people turned up. So that was really our first crisis point and it may be that if you go down the same road you will hit something like that in a few a few months time. What really saved us then is we had a big influx of interest from Occupy. There had been a very big Occupy camp in Sheffield which had to be disbanded and round about that time a lot of people were looking for some some other outlet and they happened to come to positive money and so for over a year we shared meetings with Occupy. We booked a room they had the first hour and a half for their general assembly we had the second hour and a half for our positive money meeting and half a dozen or so people would stay on into our meeting as well. We tended to take up the Occupy idea of open forums which basically means you have everybody sitting around in a circle a facilitator and everybody can just say what they want to do which is great you get to know people people come up with lots of ideas but actually you don't have much focus you don't have really much activity. So eventually that also lost focus those people gradually drifted away and I think one of the features that we found is that there is quite a big turnover of people people come into the group they'll come to a few meetings they've probably found out what they want to know but they don't want to become activists so they drift away and then some more people come in but we came to a second crisis point that the very lowest point actually is an anomaly that one on July the 2012 it so happens that the the Olympic torch relay was in Sheffield that same evening and there were thousands and thousands of people in Sheffield outside the hall where we were meeting and we only had six people turn up so ignoring that anomaly you'll see that there is gradually a drift down to June 2013 summer of last year eventually we lost focus and we thought we really need to relaunch we have a group of probably half a dozen core members who are really active and really keen on taking this forward so I said look we've got to do something about these meetups I can't think about every meter what we're going to do let's have a rotor so we've got six people now who take responsibility on a rotor basis for deciding what's going to happen at the meter maybe they give a talk themselves maybe they invite a speaker but they take full responsibility I still do the room bookings I still do the email list but they take responsibility for what happens at that meeting and what we're trying to do is to put on a series of talks which are loosely related to economics banking monetary reform with the idea of getting the public in and then using that as a platform to sell the idea of positive money we're also much better at advertising to the public there are a couple of free forums that we use in Sheffield and we advertise in the in the local paper other events that we do we've done a number of talks over two and a half years mainly to the the soft left liberal left people like occupied transition the green party and a few other groups we've put on a number of public events Ben Dyson came and we did a question time format with Ben Dyson we've we've put on the screening of 97% owned twice and those big events tend to attract an audience of probably around about 40 we have had an attempt to approach our MPs Paul Blomfield most of the people in our group are in Sheffield Central and many of them have approached Paul Blomfield his Labour who's been very good at understanding positive money but he has reservations we've also had two people spent time with Nick Clegg Steve at the back is was one of them and in every case we've had rather a lukewarm response from our MPs so that's something that we're not planning to take forward at the moment the other thing we do is street stalls the annual green fare we've done twice there's peace in the park is it there's a huge jamboree that happens with maybe 10 000 people turning up like a big rock concert and stalls and so on we've done four in the city centre when we do it in the city centre we don't use the gazebo but we also but we have lots of placards and things like that you'll see we've got a table with loads of leaflets we've got the mailing list and we usually find if we do probably a three hour spot in the city centre in the space of an hour we might have maybe three or four people or sometimes groups or couples come to speak to us and are really interested and there'll be perhaps people that take leaflets and take them away and look at them and and then maybe put them in the bin I don't know but but everything is everything helps and I was talking earlier about how I first heard about positive money and it was on the radio something like any questions or any answers and somebody mentioned positive money and I thought what's that and I went to the website I don't know who it was it might be somebody here even that said that but every little incident like that can be a trigger for somebody to go and find out about find out more about it we have a team of nine people that that run these street stalls and we're going to carry on monthly from this month to run a street stall to run a street stall you don't need necessary permission to do it you can you can run a street stall on any public space providing you're not obstructing the the pavement there may be local bylaws that you are worth checking but generally you can do it without any problem where we're going in the future we're going to continue with meetups we're still concerned about attendance we'd like to get perhaps 20 we're going to continue with street stalls and we're beginning to make approaches to the universities there are two universities in Sheffield Hallam we've already got a foothold in there we did a press conference to the first year media students the media students were completely unresponsive to what we were saying but the staff were quite interested um professor of economic history uh at Hallam University uh we're beginning to get him interested he's coming to come give us a talk um and the Sheffield University the other one there is like the Manchester group there's an alternative thinking for economic society which we're attempting to get get into I think that's my last slide all right now we're also trying to approach the unions through the people's assembly that is my last slide