 start recording now. Okay, so just quickly, if you just came in and there's still some people coming in, you're very welcome to a question of scale. This project is really exploring the potential of a community-led cooperative approach to regional resilience. We have some great speakers today that I'll be introducing, but just a sense that we have Stanka Biceva from Friends of the Earth Europe. We have Dirk Homans from he's currently the president, co-president of the Green European Foundation. We have Sean McCabe from TASC. We have Dr Oliver Moore, my colleague here. We're called today in ARC 2020. Liam McGinley from Glen Colum Pill on the relevance of Entire's work from the 50s. We have Sinead Mercier, a researcher really exploring the just transition. So we're going to be moving to an introduction from Tommy Simpson, my colleague Green Foundation Ireland, and Jonathan Essex, who's from the Green House Think Tank, who are also doing an event in this bigger series on Friday that we would be participating in as well. So without any further ado, there's still people coming in. I'm going to hand over to Tommy to introduce our event here. So Tommy, over to you. Oh, thanks very much, Davey. Can you hear me okay? Can you hear me? Hello? Yeah, yeah. No, just this is, I find this idea of working with yourself a very exciting project because the history of it comes from basically from Dirk Homans, who's going to be talking later, when he ran a workshop for the Green European Foundation and the project he entitled reindustrialization, sociological eco reindustrialization, which was the start of all of this idea of showing what's possible that you can do possible things that you can do at a local level that you couldn't do before. And all of this comes about and that was followed on by Jonathan Essex, who will also be talking about the idea that sustainability is much further advanced at a local level rather than at city or industrial city level. So this is the whole basis of it and ever since the invention of the consumers put by black and deca drills to now we have 3D printers, it is possible to do things at the local level that were not possible say 20 years ago. And I always remember very briefly, Dirk talking about parts for motorbikes that he was had to wait a long time to get. And he was nowadays you can download the drawings and print out the parts with your 3D printer. That was impossible even 10 years ago. So with all sorts of possibilities now to show at the local level the question of scale. And scale, of course, as David has mentioned, stands for supply chains and local economies. And that's where the idea came from. We want to show that in rural Ireland and rural everywhere that small towns and villages can do things now and be more sustainable than ever before and not have the energy requirements that are in cities. So and also we will be demonstrating today some practical possibilities and historical possibilities such as Glenn Cullum kill this amazing priest which Lee McGinley will introduce where it showed even in the 60s and 70s that these ideas of cooperation and community and worker co-operatives to where possible. So I leave it at that for now and contribute. Our partners in this are the lead partner is Greenhouse, which is a UK, the Greenhouse tank tank in UK led by Jonathan Essex and Peter Sims. Also our other partners that are in the Netherlands is Everett, I can't pronounce his name, Neven Hoes, and their foundation is called Wettenshaft like part of GroenLinks. So they're the three partners all funded by the Green European Foundation and all with a similar theme and I think Jonathan will probably explain the overall theme of this. Thank you. Okay thank you David and thank you Tommy and so just to follow on from that and say that this is indeed part of a multi-country Green European Foundation led project which is titled a climate emergency economy. So while climate motions have been passed by councils across numerous countries, the question this project looks to answer is what about the hard-to-reach sectors that need to be looked at at the national level with international linkages? What do we do about those if we are to you know have change programmes in these areas to make sure we reach zero carbon for our economies as a whole? Well the three country teams they've explored three different aspects of this, transition to zero carbon. Firstly the Dutch team have looked at industry, an oft-forgotten sector and looked at how you shift the economy to deal with that. Secondly this team here in Ireland is looking at how we shift from an economy directed at maximising its export potential to maybe firstly prioritising livelihoods and well-being locally aptly titled a question of scale. And finally greenhouse think tank have spent the first six months of this project literally dissecting the trade transport carbon footprint to the UK to see what needs to change in terms of our physical global linkages around the world. So it kicked off with the Dutch and and growing links they conducted an industry round table to engage industry leaders and politicians in Holland to see you know what would a zero carbon industry look like? And the thing that fascinated me was the the combination of the technical challenge which they set out as combining a circular economy with zero carbon and then what the political challenges are responding to it might look like and I think you know to create a circular economy that is a climate emergency economy at the same time that very much points to what is happening here today the need to relocalise or shorten supply chains to make sure that consumption and production are much more joined up and in doing so you know we create a local circular economy not a continuation of the global business as usual which brings us on I think just to briefly introduce what we're doing on Friday in the greenhouse session and I'll put a link to that in the chat shortly. Well what we did is we said well how does this all link together? So firstly we spent some time drawing together the the findings and the discussions in Ireland and in the UK and and in the Netherlands to produce what we've called a trade and investment toolkit to say well let's think hard and deep about what we need to enable and what we need to see as blockages if we want to really transform what underpins business as usual that we want to shift otherwise we may all focus on climate emergency low motions at our local councils without seeing the big picture economics change too and just one snippet from this we've shown that the average ton of goods traded that's imports and exports with all the countries that link the UK outside of the EU with our trade are on average five times more carbon intensive than the transport emissions of our trade within the European Union including with Ireland. So please join us on Friday we're going to discuss the findings of this report and summarize the overall project without bringing before bringing together a panel mainly of MEPs and a trade campaign activist to see you know what should we do and what are the wider political findings of this project so without further ado I'll hand you back to David and to find a little bit more about a question of scale. Brilliant Jonathan thanks for that thanks everyone for being here we're really going to use the chat today so we want to capture insights anything we can add to the longer paper other sections and anything that we capture today especially around the enablers and lockers which we're going to move into now. So in our oh sorry one slide too far in our events we really want to make them a participative and engaging obviously that is difficult with the current pandemic but we're going to do just a quick breakout to groups of pairs and with just one objective to speak and listen so when we're speaking we're sharing who we are concisely and something you observe that blocks or enables shorter supply chains or stronger local economies so this is something we really want to capture in the chat from your little harvest here in pairs and so it's three minutes each the person with the shortest hair when you come into the room just to make it quick can start so you'll have three minutes switch around and listen for three minutes sharing who you are and something you observe the blocks or enables shorter supply chains or local economies so hopefully that's clear enough from the the slide now I'm just going to put you into breakout rooms and in six minutes I'll bring you back so have a good conversation but please if we could capture out in the chat anything that could help us see what might enable or block this idea of shorter supply chains and local economies so I'm sending you to the breakout rooms now hopefully they're even enough if you get lost don't panic and you may have to have a conversation with some of you have not met before but that will be good enjoy your conversations now and we'll see you back here in about six minutes baby can you hear me no I the thing went off the screen too quickly oh here it is just anything that enables your long supply anything that enables or blocks a move to shorter supply chains so don't panic have a good conversation whatever happens if you've just arrived you're getting put into a breakout room to look at what you observed my block or enable shorter supply chains or local economies you should go into a room automatically if you don't like I can see Joan isn't assigned let's see if we can help but don't panic you need to help you're on your own Roshi let me let me see if I can get you into another breakout room but don't panic and just consider what might block or enable on your own there and I'll see if I can get you into another group there oh I think I got sent to a room with just me self and I came back yeah yeah that happened to me too I found I was in the room on my own nice yes these are the only ones there nothing happened so I came back yeah but we're all here now how many of us are there that's me Sean Ollie Sean Janis who else Roshane and we can see now okay yeah um any more any is this four of us is it there seems to be a few more but maybe they're muted yeah debut is here um should we cannot do people want to say hello um and unmute if they realize where they are we can just start anyway because I'm going to be talking twice later I feel like I shouldn't really talk much now at all and another thing I'll say before I stop saying anything is that the um the enablers and blockers aren't really in this paper yet so it would be interesting to hear what people can come up with and if somebody's using a computer it would be great if they could um they could throw it into the chat maybe because I'm using a phone so that's but yeah we could spend a few minutes talking about enablers and a few minutes talking about blockers um if anyone's kicked the ball off did was that audible yeah I'm happy to jump in but I'm conscious Ollie that I'm also going to be talking so um but I'd say uh supermarkets are a major blocker of local supply chains okay yeah um what about super value I think I think it all depends on the proliferation of of the um the multiples that seek and you know the the um minimizing local impact and maximizing profit what I describe as an extraction supermarket rather than you know I suppose super value does have some advantages yeah I mean they are the one who have tried to position themselves as being supporting smaller scale local producers developing they also have they tend to let them have their own brands as well rather than say the Marks and Spencer's model is completely vertical integration so that there's no identity for a producer outside of the Marks and Spencer's kind of labeling system um and look and so on so it's interesting as to where they're like you know and in places like cork um there's a lot of food business incubation done via some of the super values you know um like Middleton Clonicality you know a lot of food businesses go from Middleton farmers markets into Middleton Super Value and then onto the regional and then national scale so I guess what you're seeing in in somewhere like Clondo is a very strong cooperative system as well that supports that I guess yeah yeah and probably a stronger food production kind of culture maybe as well then some markets of Ireland have anybody else have an idea on that um supermarkets as and as constrainers of resilient local communities a lot of people on mute who might not even know they're in this room I'm worried we'll be in a second dolly so just whatever we can capture is okay one one blockage supermarkets you anymore yeah Sean this is Tescos that's what we just put I'm I'm perfectly okay with that yeah okay I'm gonna so hi I'm Roshin I'm based down in north waxford and I've been really looking at food systems I've done a bit of future scoping and worked as a thinking partner with um big industrial food producers and policymakers so um on a regional level I I have think one of the one of the blockers is not knowing where to go to find out information about local food producers and in this age of digital we think it's easy but it's actually still quite hard to find local food producers local good quality food producers so like a year ago I went on this mission to find a veg box supplier and I live rorally um I live near a very small village and even to find people growing food within our community that might have gluts or might be willing to share or barter has been a bit of a challenge so even talking about like I tried to this year I was hoping to start a seed saver or a seed swap concept and obviously COVID has like made things even more tricky so in terms of of local um supply chains I think we we think in that one of the enablers is technology but it actually might be a blocker as well so it's finding the food producers finding you know a way to like in shortening the food chains I think you you shorten things like packaging and processing as well and it's finding a way to tap in at that earlier stage in in the food system so that you can make a link to to the value earlier on in the food chain okay so do you want to um type something into the um chat about um accessing information on local and regional uh food producers in the chat because this conversation is going to finish in about 20 seconds so if you can stick that in the chat and Sean if you need to summarize your supermarket points with a super value nuance uh feel free I'll leave this now so do use the chat please um people will be joining us back in the main room where we currently are in a few minutes uh and our hope is that we would have in the chat now a huge list of blockers and enablers that we can bring into this uh longer illustrated paper that we're going to be looking at yeah well I'm afraid I paid it wrong because I went into the breakout room and nobody else turned up so I came back and I thought when I came back that I couldn't go back to the breakout room so I've just I just haven't done anything I'm afraid don't you panic Janice just relax and any thoughts of enablers or blockers of a local economy and shorter supply chains put in the chat everyone can do that now okay so we are we all back I think we're might all be back from the rooms okay my apologies if you got stuck on your own uh my apologies if uh there was a little confusion there what we were doing I'm hoping that we would have a list in the chat now of blockers and enablers that we could bring in now to this longer article that we're going to be doing so the opportunity was just to be able to speak and there's a lot of people in this room that are holding some amazing perspectives and contributions that could be here so please introduce yourself in the chat as well I know a lot of you've been working in this area for a long time our objective is to and from these conversations bring in more inputs to this article that we're reading or doing but I might just hand over to Ollie now just to give you a sense of what's just in the article quickly and what we're doing building up into something longer illustrated and palatable we really want to make this information about how we might build this resilience in our regions make this just transition but we really want to make that accessible not an academic paper so our illustrated larger paper that will come out of this event along with a podcast in November will be the end of this project so I'm going to pass to Ollie now Ollie you're on just give us a sense of the paper and our process yeah hi everybody so yeah the paper we've started which has been circulated and we can drop a link into the chat as well the paper is just really an introduction to some ideas that might help us with this notion of building regional resilience um so what we do is really we start with a very brief outlining of the current crises so COVID-19 plus the biodiversity climate change and other multiple interlocked and interlocking crises and then we make a tentative suggestion that the social and solidarity economy and our ecological economics could be two ways to frame or house some of these kind of regional responses so then within those kind of theoretical ideas then we have specifics and people who are on this call and others who aren't on this call have made contributions to those sections and they'll be talking later but just to give you a brief and quick outline uh Noreen uh Byrne and Carol Power from UCC from the Center for Cooperative Studies they described co-ops in the more traditional and straightforward sense uh cooperatives have a long and interesting history you know the dairy co-ops are instrumental in getting Ireland's established in a sense economically because they came about after the land wars and you know we're very instrumental in developing the power of production and distribution controlled by Irish farmers so they they talk a little bit about that but primarily about the benefits of federated co-ops of co-ops working together and the example we use in the paper is of the five co-ops in the Carberry network in West Cork who pay farmers better than anyone else even though they're five quite small co-ops in terms of the milk price so as well as the the traditional kind of co-ops we also then Sean who's here in the call today Sean McCabe has a small section on community wealth building which is about integrating institutional players into these regional resilience approaches uh so he refers to the Cleveland model and the Preston model and hopefully we could develop something similar here um I then write about some new approaches to co-op co-ops and cooperation and collaboration I tried to stick to agri food primarily um I won't talk too much about this bit because this bit is the bit I'm doing later but it's about things like the open food network and about machinery co-ops about csa's about land sharing initiatives and so on so we we've really just given kind of a taster or a pointer towards look here's here's a here's a problem area here's a solution area here's some theoretical frames and here's how some practical examples of things that we've seen around the place that seem to be contributing to the potential for regional resilience but it's just a taster it leaves out lots of things we talk about what's left out to some extent at the end of the paper like I'm hoping if he was on the call today could add a section on just transition for example but things that are happening in the chat right now are actually the things that will start to come into the paper as well and it'll be a longer more detailed more comprehensive paper with some illustrations as well um so it'll be a more interesting thing in the end more collaborative as it should be and we'll have the multimedia dimension in terms of aesthetics and the podcast and so on as well really nolly so you get a sense of what the bigger project is it's not just this event we're trying to build a case for this cooperative community-led approach thank you so much for the blockers and enablers in the chat let's use chat as much as we can to share insights for the next we're going to have five very short presentations to open this up the scope of this up a little any insights or if there is questions also put them in the the chat so our first presenter is um from the from Europe he has been a local politician he's the co-president of the Green Europe Foundation and is the coordinator of OICOS a think tank that strives for social ecological change by feeding the social debate with inspiring publications information and lectures and conferences so uh dirk is going to just make uh give us a small piece i have his slides here so dirk you don't have to uh have your your slides but i'll just spoil like your video so hand it over to dirk resilience under shock time for a paradigm change dirk where are you there okay so now you can hear me any thanks for the invitation i think it's a great project i think local economies are the future um and so what i will do in these eight minutes is highlight a few points from an article i wrote for the green European journal which is also accessible on the side of the journal resilience on the shop on the shock i wrote it in the first months of the covid crisis but i think that for developing an alternative progressive narrative the concept of resilience is very uh crucial um because of course uh corona is only one shock but we know they will come other shocks or maybe with climate crisis you can already say uh we will have a kind of cascade of different shocks so we have to make our system resilience which means that it continues to function when there are shocks and also very important a resilient system is proactive it's able to avert shocks and we're not talking here about persons we are talking about systems social ecological systems that we have to reorganize and you could say that now our global society is one big social ecological system what we do influences natural systems and nature also reacts so we are in a constant complex situation of interactions i will now shortly present four components of resilience the first is the importance of short feedback loops in a resilient system we get information on the consequences of our actions very fast now the interesting the interesting point was that at the beginning of the corona crisis many people said now look how far society is reacting to the corona crisis why don't we react as fast related to the climate crisis but i think it's more complex because i think the cause for the two crises is the same it's a neoliberal economy that is destroying our ecosystems it is because of the destruction of the forests and our economy we get climate crisis but also the destruction of the forest led to the emergence of viruses that are that come through animals to us so i think there are we to tackle both crises we need system thinking we need shorter feedback loops and so my proposal here is that we have to adapt the weather forecast we see every day on the news with a chapter on climate news every day so we informed every day that's very short on the first component the importance of short feedback the second component is modularity and you see here three systems and so the system to the left with green dots and one central hub is how we organize our economy for instance more than half of the mold masks we now really need are produced in china so you can understand this is a very vulnerable system if the central nodes doesn't function anymore or doesn't deliver the total system is in danger on the other hand if you move to the right to the blue system where everything is connected with everything this is also not a resilient system because and covid is of course a good example if there's something wrong in one part of the system it will move very fast through all the system so what we need is a kind of modular system which you see in the center where you have subsystems that are not too much linked with each other and so if you think about our economy we are now in the system to the left with china in the center and so what we have to do we have to move to regional circular circular economies which will make our system much more resilient because if there's something wrong in one part of the system it will not affect the overall system i think this is really an essential point i move to the third component of resilience which is diversity and it's actually very very easy to explain but still with the our global economy is really organized in the wrong way and if you think about a farm if you only have one crop on your fields then is your your yield your harvest is very vulnerable to diseases and actually how we have organized our economy with only one dominant approach the neoliberal market moment culture is also a kind of very stupid way of organizing it's not resilient if there's go something's wrong your whole economy your global supply chains they go wrong so what we need is just as on a farm we need diversity economic diversity which means also public services which means corporate cooperatives and and diverse regional economies so this means that we are much more able to resist certain crises maybe one year a part of our economy will be hit by crisis but then another part will still be functioning and a year later it can be the other way around but to build diversity also institutional diversity in our economy you have market players you have more citizen led initiative scopes you have the state public authorities organizing things and with this diversity we will much we will be much more resilient then the last component of resilience which for some people is a bit strange it's social capital and what we are told in the news every day what people learn at school is that we are a home of economists you have to work hard you shouldn't care about other people you are rational and just work hard and get rich but now with the corona crisis we saw a totally different picture of of society we saw people willing to help other people people being lonely at home when the global economy was not able to provide us masks all of the world people were producing masks for their neighbors and so i'm really convinced that this social capital has allowed that societies are still standing now and without the social capital even more people would have suffered from the corona crisis and so we really have to invest in this social capital which is not only about the practical help it's also about what kind of resources network can generate it's about emphasis on values such as solidarity social involvement and so forget about the home of economists i think we in the future we have to talk about the home of cooperants and i think if we put emphasis on these four components of resilience we can move we can develop another more localized with sustainable economy and the good news is that already for the last 15 years citizens are taking a lot of initiatives developing establishing new comments so i think the building blocks for a new regionalized resilient economy is already here we just have to connect the dots so i hope this was a short introduction and please if you want to read more you can find my article on the website of the green european journal thanks brilliant derek that was a really important framing i think and this resonates well because we use the framing of resilience as well in a lot of our work and please keep any reflections or insights from each of these speakers in the chat especially things that we might develop more in the longer illustrated article next up we have from ireland schenade mercier schenade's been a researcher on climate change law and policy with a special focus on the just transition and human right approaches and so schenade's got eight minutes to sort of introduce the maybe a broader perception or definition of the the just transition so schenade are you ready to unmute and share your screen or you're not sharing a screen but just unmute i'm trying to find you so i can spotlight you there you are and so schenade great and i can't seem to screen share no uh that's okay okay that's all right and yeah so thank you very much and and thank you derek as well that was very interesting especially about the the move from homo economicus to co-operativeism definitely would agree and unfortunately i did have a series of nice slides which i can't share with you and but just quickly to i'll just give a very quick overview so just transition as i suppose the the diamond language that we're hearing at the moment we're hearing that because in 2015 in the paris agreement it was mentioned in the preamble alongside human rights and climate justice as well and the phrase that was used there that taking to account the imperatives of a just transition the workforce and creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development opportunity priorities so basically when when countries are reducing their emissions to keep global warring between 1.5 to 2 degrees they should ensure that nobody is left behind and can keep them with the sustainable development goals no one loses their jobs and where this language comes from and is actually a long line of work by trade unionists across the world but particularly in western countries and particularly in the in the anti-nuclear movement and so again kind of green politics and trade union politics around just transition are very much linked and there's a brain person called tony mizaki who campaigned as party oil chemical and atomic atomic workers union in the u.s. and he campaigned as part of the band the bomb peace movement in the u.s. and he proposed that atomic workers would not be left behind that they would gain access to skills and to basically a new gi bill so the gi bill after second world war where he himself benefited from free university education after coming back from world war two so he proposed a super fund for dirt and workers in in a language of transition so the phrase in comes from that long history of environmental health and safety scientists and trade union groups working together to stop black lung disease and so on and however you also have a wider context which is again kind of the language of a just transition from one age of man's history to the next which was a phrase mentioned by the president of mexico lopez fortillo at the 34th united nation general assembly in 1979 and the importance of the language of just transition in this context was a country such as mexico who were resource dependent on on exporting fossil fuels from their countries to wealthier ones they became heavily indebted and they became they suffered from the decade the decade perdita the the last decade in latin america where they're they went into massive debt because they were reliant on exporting their goods and they then had to be subject to structural adjustment and neoliberal kind of austerity policies and this is very important in our current context because that language of energy as a right as a public good that developing nations should not simply be extracted from and is very important for us today as we face into continued liberalization and privatizing privatization of energy around the world and what has actually happened with privatization which started under the pinotchet dictatorship in the 90 in 1982 in chili that privatization and liberalization that was then exported from that american structural adjustment was then exported around the world and that's actually where the call for just transition comes from because that privatization and liberalization in europe in south of africa in other countries it actually resulted in a very very unjust transition which we know of from say the miners in wales it also happened in poland as well the privatization of many parts of the economy with the fall of the bernand wall has led to a concentration of trade union membership in very very few sectors of the economy such and such as coal and was one of the last bastions of it and also in germany as well and in arden too and in australia as well a 90 drop in australia in jobs and due to privatization of the energy system and what has also happened alongside that not only job losses occurred but you also had a rise in energy prices in many parts of the world so many people thought that privatization would lower energy prices in some context it did and it also was argued for on the basis of liberalization allowing for more effects of renewable energy but energy prices in ireland for example rose quite dramatically after the 1990s when privatization of the esp and breaking itself started to occur now we still have the esp but it's now shared amongst a few other companies and and this is kind of a very interesting situation because what i'm trying to discuss here with this group is is community ownership enough in this context is community ownership of energy what does it mean what is its current context in us in scotland for example the orkney islands they have the highest amount of community energy i believe in scotland in europe so much that they're able to break hydrogen to run buses off however they also have the highest rate of energy poverty in scotland and one of the highest rates in europe and we are similar here in ireland with the highest rate of energy poverty in europe and we are now looking at an increasing community ownership of the energy system however what is community ownership is it allowing a few people with resources to be able to invest in the community owned wind farm and have that on their property are they just participating in a system which has been neoliberalized and privatized in many parts as well or is it truly um about resilience about the entire community's resilience are we ensuring that our community energy ownership and discussions of energy is alongside a plan for those who are in dire energy poverty for example irish travelers who live in culturally appropriate accommodation which is low quality accommodation because of racism and other factors 77 percent of them are in dire energy are in severe energy poverty which means they spend far more than 10 percent of their income on few on running generators and so on and and i have to ask what is our plan as kind of greens or environmentalists because energy efficiency again um i know kiran kov has worked on it and has introduced um work at a european level which is brilliant but the european green deal is in a context of cost efficiency first and social pillar of um of rights second and this opens up questions for us from a strategic point of view are we prepared do we have plans for that kind of more revolutionary for that more kind of um it's sustainable development goals approach of looking after the most vulnerable in communities and bringing them alongside our action and do we have a plan to to tackle energy poverty besides kind of ad hoc uh energy efficiency schemes energy efficiency there's a written book called burning up by simon prani and he charts the development or lack of development of energy efficiency precisely because of this kind of very growth based energy system no matter whether it's renewables or whether it's fossil fuels if you have a growth based renewable energy and energy system uh energy efficiency which is the first few deprives companies of income and he kind of charts how energy efficiency has never quite developed precisely for that reason so this is a challenge i suppose there are communities to develop this community focus but it's also a larger focus about what our energy systems are for what is a right to energy is it a right for those with resources to build wind farms or is it a right to everyone to free energy um that's clean that benefits them that benefits the environment around them and that's a conversation i would like to kind of open up and discuss and a bit more uh for me i feel that uh we need to kind of be careful that we are not being co-opted as as environmentalists as kind of green thinkers we need to be careful that we are looking for forward in an international manner and in a manner that kind of has the most vulnerable at heart and has their concerns at heart so i would be interested in discussing that and if anyone i'm going to contribute to paper as well on the origins and definitions of just transition and i know i've reached eight minutes now but i will just quickly say that um there's also a wider context of kind of inequality too so um we do realize that affluence is is a greater contributor to climate change and then perhaps kind of consumer-based taxes or consumer based focus and also the kind of language of rights is very important uh increasingly after climate case as well uh the united states for example is partly the reason why the coyote protocol and has flexible mechanisms market-based mechanisms to tap into climate change and that kind of more rights-based approach such as the loss and damage mechanism being based on compensation not just charity that's the UNFCCC loss and damage mechanism i think this is an important conversation for us to have to move away from emissions trading into kind of rights so thanks very much thanks shanaid and that was really interesting and please as people have been doing add any insights from the speakers or questions into the chat we're going to have time and to hear some of those insights or go a bit deeper but our objective here is to pull out things that we can bring into this a bigger illustrated paper let's keep going with our speakers next up we have Sean McCabe Sean's been working with task before that he worked with the mary robinson foundation and climate justice for five years and and he's led the foundation's work on intergenerational quality he's been working Sean's developing a work stream on just transition with task which is an independent think tank if you're from outside ireland you might not have heard them an independent think tank whose mission is to address inequality and sustained democracy by translating analysis into action they do fantastic work Sean's been working on a new report for task on community wealth building we see community wealth building in places like Cleveland and Preston and we see a huge opportunity for a regional approach to community wealth building and Sean you're going to give us a bit of an introduction into what that might mean and how it might play a part in strengthening our regional resilience so over to you Sean thanks Davie I'll just share a screen here if that's all right can everybody see that let me start this by Joe you guys got that there so um it's a pleasure to follow Sinead on this actually because um Sinead has really laid out all of all of the challenges that are facing and they're so complex and interrelated that it's easy sometimes to get overwhelmed by it this did start as a piece of research between task and and thefts the foundation for european progressive studies into community wealth building what it's really changed into is looking at how do we create the enabling environment for a just transition as Sinead has laid it out and just to give you a little bit of background on this Sinead has mentioned the paris agreement that's it in the bottom left hand corner and task brought out a report this time last year on inequality in Ireland and it found that the agricultural sector was the most unequal in Ireland in terms of income and on the back of that I set off on a journey around the country and and met as many communities and and and people involved in the productive in production of our transforming our natural resources into and products as I could and listening to their point of view and I also had the good fortune of running in an election campaign and listening to people's concerns on doors and that that really did have a big shaping on on how I taught about this project itself as well and so this is the IPCC's 1.5 report and we're all familiar with the curves and that the science has produced in terms of the mitigation pathways necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change what I guess we don't think of often when we look at curves is what's what's happening behind them so so the transforming of the employment landscape which is what Sinead spoke so well about in terms of the trade union involvement in conceptualizing a just transition and then the subsequent consequences for local communities the impact on regional development and underlying social and cultural challenges which are so so significant in Ireland and then the underlying inequality as well which really to my mind is is the most important element of all this and so so will we create a positive story or a story of hardship through the transformation I think one place to start and this is quite important is the perception of public trust in governments and as an element of of enabling a just transition so here here is a plot of the perceptions of corruption index on on the y-axis against the climate climate action essentially on the x-axis and we see that countries with the most to do in terms of climate action actually suffer from from the most significant lack of trust in government processes and so this leads me to what I would consider a complacency paradox we've got two kind of dominant narratives around how we take climate action and one is that we will wait until public opinion is sufficient the supportive of climate action to to move and the second is that we will implement climate action from the top down and the first actually is an incorrect assumption I would argue because people's awareness of climate action doesn't necessarily mean that they support the measures required and then on the right hand side you see here that implementing top down climate action we saw it with the L of S we saw it with the farmers in in the Netherlands it will stymie it will stall if you want climate action to be fast it has to be fair so we'll run out of time through both of those processes and so I guess this is where we come to the community wealth building dimension and to garner social approval climate action must drive local development that's based on and five assumptions the first is that social approval is absolutely essential for climate action on the scale necessary to avoid the catastrophe we're facing and bottom up policy formation is key to building that social approval and communities just don't care about climate action they never will I don't think in in a time frame necessary to do what we need to do so I'd almost be in favor of stopping talking about climate change and start talking about local development and local development that's compatible with a 1.5 degree and pathway and communities do really want to participate and do want to have their voices heard and and we have to make sure that that happens and so this work that and cultivator doing on on community-led local development is very welcome and and echoes a lot of what and this this report that we're working on the task is pointing to so just quickly and the conceptual framework that I'm I'm using for the model that we're developing a task is is based quite heavily on a Marta sends development as freedom and if we're to talk about what needs to be done and we have to in order to create an enabling environment we have to expand choices and opportunities for individuals and for communities and and that has to be meaningful that comes back to what Sinead is saying about and you know what is what is ownership of of renewable energy services and what good is that if people are still still living in poverty and and do we really intend to reach the furthest behind first as we're committed to through the SDGs so so all all decision-making on climate action should embed social inclusion should enhance the sense of belonging and should democratize natural social and economic resources and in doing that you will genuinely enhance the capacity of individuals to co-design the climate action with you and and to be your implementing partner and you also will foster the social networks and that will enhance communities agency really what we're talking about here is addressing power asymmetries it's as simple as that now unless we're doing that in everything then we're not going to succeed so that brings us to the local wealth building I genuinely think local well-building or community well-building as this referred to in the US is a revolutionary concept it's quite straightforward it's that you take public expenditure and rather than handing it over to large corporations to fulfill orders for your hospitals or for your schools or what have you you give it to communities and you could take a very simple example of the new TUD campus here in Dublin which is taking buying all of its veg from Aramark it would be very simple for for TUD to buy its veg from North Dublin vegetable producers and this would have a very significant impact on the lives of small producers and so it's a very basic concept the challenge that it is where it's been implemented in Cincinnati and Preston and Barcelona and it has to happen in communities where there is a large number of what are called anchor institutions these municipally rural institutions that can channel public investment and now there's a paucity of those in rural communities and so how do we overcome this well what I would argue is that we have an opportunity with climate action to create a type of temporary institution a temporary anchor institution and that can accelerate rural development so if you look at the entire rural development program for Ireland from 2014 to 2020 it was 4.15 billion that includes all the spending on leader and we're talking about a minimum and this is an absolute minimum because it was in the national development plan in 2020 of or in 2017 of around 30 billion over the next 10 years to be spent on climate action I really think this is a low ball number because you know you could estimate about 90 billion of the spend is necessary just to retrofit our housing stock so we're talking massive massive public spending and if that was diverted in the right way into genuine community empowerment it would be transformative but not only that it would build communities capacity to act for themselves it would create a virtuous cycle of public interest in climate action that would potentially allow us to take that action at the speed necessary to avoid absolute catastrophe and just looking at briefly I threw these slides in Ali after our chat earlier just just because you know I think it is important to consider the extractive nature of our current system so on the bottom left and bottom right here you have a farmer and you have a family and now the current system that links the farmer and the family is an extractive one it basically passes cheap produce up to abattoirs or large plc owned creameries and or indeed just directly to the large multiples and then then the families that are forced to shop there can be time poor can be cash poor the edge of town supermarkets have proliferated at the same time as the gig economy and at the same time as the housing crisis so basically this is a process of extraction that ultimately ends with a shareholder and the system that we'd like to move towards is something that looks more like this where you have both the consumers and the producers cooperatively engaged in the transfer of produce where you have at the bottom here and the type of policy frameworks that you know let's take the family for example where you have a four-day work week where you have a living wage where you have a right to housing where these things inform the lives or shape the lives of the families so that they are not completely reliant on the large-scale multiples that offer bargain prices and push it all back on the farmer there's more to this diagram but I'll just run that time finally and really quickly this is the model that I think we require to get us to where we need to go so this is and what I'm kind of temporarily calling a community led sustainable development I see this as the central pillar here genuine community empowerment participatory budgeting local participative for it that genuinely shape local development plans none of this send off your submission into a black hole and hope that it informs something where you have context appropriate education which is genuine the emancipatory which teaches people about their rights and their responsibilities and then you have community owned action and there's a variety of other things to play into that but that's that's that's it essentially so thank you thanks Sean there's a there's a lot there and then there's a lot more depth to this as well so there's a larger task report that's coming out and Sean's already got some piece in the initial shorter article that we're expanding through this event and through the insights that we're gathering today so any insights or signposts to other work that we might incorporate into this community led cooperative approach to our regional resilience and we're capturing those and we're going to weave it in next up we have a good colleague of mine he's a resident of clock jordan eco village he is the chief communications officer with art 2020 at european level he lectures in ucc in the cooperative studies unit and then he is very active in our work with cultivate that we're doing around a climate action framed in community led development so ollie mur we have your slides if you want to just get started yeah thanks debbie so on your yeah so yeah i'm just going to introduce a few of the things that are in the paper that you already have access to uh they're just new approaches to co-ops and cooperatives just ideas to get ourselves thinking so yep so these are those areas so i'm going to talk about digital platforms um and real life platforms uh one from belgium i'm going to introduce called smart or smart i'm going to talk about machinery co-ops for farmers digital farmers markets under aggregation through the open food network the technological sovereignty movement which is you know farmhack and well-terrier peasant in france and then land sharing initiatives and calling them broadly which is which are things like land trusts land care and csa's so we'll have a look now at um smart or smart uh it's a platform co-op in belgium so really what it's about is um you know it's just about efficient um aggregating of needs and services by people who work in the freelance sector so they started quite early for um a platform they started in 1998 for cultural and creative workers so basically they assist freelancers to develop their own activity through a secure system and services services include things like a co-working space legal advice and invoicing so you can see here's a little quote from from the organization so you get to negotiate your your all your typical client work um but and then you kind of declare the project through the the smart website um to validate the job you have to return your contract to smart as those declines and then they take it this is the interesting bit i suppose now um so the the co-op itself takes care of the social declaration um pays the different social contributions and taxes and pays your salary um seven days after the assignment is finished so even if the client hasn't invoiced uh you still get paid because it's a co-op so it's big enough to handle a few delays and a few early payments and so on and it costs third equity year and six point five percent of the overall costs of the thing it's just a of the of the work itself so just an example of a of a freelancer platform so yeah and this is just a slide which you can have a look at later which just explains in the graphic form what they do but it's about management support guidance and career opportunities so just an interesting way that producers have managed to aggregate value uh so the next four i'm going to talk about are agri food examples um the first one is more mainstream and then the next three are more for agroecological more resilience uh regenerative type farming approaches but what's nice about this first one this machinery co-op approach is that machinery co-ops exist in some countries and it's very efficient because having you know 40 of everything for 40 farmers is inefficient so in france through this initiative called kuma and most regions have kumas especially in britain and places like that which is very comparable to ireland in terms of dairy and climate and so on um so the example here i've given uh is a kuma in western france they have they've been up for 37 years they have there's 37 farmers with 45 pieces of machinery between them and i've listed the machinery they have it's very much the standard stuff of mainstream large-scale tillage and livestock production which you can see that it's just very efficient to have all of that stuff and the shed itself then sells electricity back into the national grid where all the machinery is housed members contribute to investments and running costs in proportion to the use to get from each machine so you can see how it's um a very efficient way to manage resources because the production of resources um in itself is is wasteful so do you want to move on there baby um unless it's aggregated like that so then the what a very exciting new one um is this sort of aggregated for aggregation for producers through these digital farmers markets so they've really come into their own with covid but they made sense anyway especially for regions that were too small to manage a farmers market and but farmers markets are great as a social hub it costs producers a lot to staff each of the stalls there are more efficient ways to do it um you know you can sketch your orders together on the phone um and pick up on one day and while there's fewer people employed in that it makes it more viable for small scale producers especially in very small rural areas like where we are here in clout jordan so the open food network is the example that we're we're highlighting in the paper because of the fact that it's a social enterprise um the code is owned by a charity um and it's not uh sort of an extractivist platform likely to be sold onto venture capitalists um so yeah you can move on there um so that's just and it's coming to ireland as well which is nice um so you know it's already in belfast and it's starting to come into the rest of ireland and we're involved in trying to make that happen so another example of collective or collaborative approaches to um to agri food and this example and other ones are more from the agroecological end of the farming spectrum so this is what i'm calling which i've called in a paper for arc 2020 a technological sovereignty so this is a movement of farmers deciding to make kits that's appropriate to their agroecological farming setups so rather than just buying expensive high embodied energy devices uh it's about making appropriate machinery for mixed agroecological farming and so in france it's l'altérieur pays en and this is a quote from them a global movement is emerging of farmers rejecting lot to make technology sharing and tweaking their plans for building and modifying appropriate machinery for their ecological farming practices mixed agroecological farming records new tools for seeding and weeding for washing and winnowing farm hackers are making them collectively that's actually a quote from me sorry enough from uh l'altérieur pays en but the next um slide will introduce the organization uh we they this is a one of their gatherings so as well um as well as having um the idea to make this appropriate machinery and they share the plans then for how to design and tweak and develop and improve the appropriate machinery they also hold events where they gather and teach each other how to make this equipment and machinery and buildings and so on um better so do you want to go on to the next slide there you can see um they have five trucks um encrypted machinery materials needed to run 80 or so courses and workshops around the year so it's self-built farmer-led machinery is their specialty so it's it's affordable replicable equipment that they're um specializing in helping farmers develop for themselves so julian um wrote an article for arc 2020 on this um and he explains we identify and document inventions and adaptations of tools created by farmers who have not waited for readymade solutions from experts or the industry but have invented or tweaked their own machinery we seek to promote these farmer driven innovations our internet forum which acts like a collective sketchbook is designed to make these contributions visible and accessible we believe we can make technological technology we believe we can make technical choices and invent sophisticated load tech solutions we don't want to be overwhelmed by trendy plug-and-play and miraculous high-tech tools that will only make us more dependent will be more intrusive and less controllable there are some examples there as well in the slides and on the um in the paper of examples of what i'm calling land sharing initiatives so these are all hyperlinkable but they're also in the paper anyway so you've got initiatives like the um land care movements land trusts peasants for nature in france csa's and to an extent you can even define um high nature value farming in this context so it's about land sharing in some way that's not just purely production based irrespective of consequence so the next slide then will introduce um some nice pictures from claud jordan um of farming so one third of our land is in these green manure cover crops um at any one time because we're sharing the land with nature um so this builds soil and helps with biodiversity um our csa is community-owned and operated csa or community supported agriculture is about sharing risks responsibilities and rewards of farming so you can click through some of these images there because it's just um towards the end so we also share save seeds and work with the seed savers on open pollinated seeds that are specifically adapted to the microclimate we have here in claud jordan um so again that's an example of sharing and collaboration um so you know those seeds end up producing plants that are super adapted to our specific soil types and the climates in our sort of micro region but it's a community farm there's dozens of us involved at any one time in doing the things of the farm we have you know a dozen or so volunteers helping at any one time from all around europe and it was really interesting in the covid context as well seeing how the farm pulled itself together and dealt collectively with very fast very awkward decision-making but that's what happened to me mistake in a community initiative so these are just some examples um to quite the appetites of community and collaborative approaches to building sort of resilience in a regional context brinn olly uh that was an interesting approach to cooperatives especially cooperatives in the 21st century so we are um we are now going to have a quick look back in time and and we've got leon mcginley from glenn column kill who wrote the brilliantly titled a revolution in their hands about the the work and celebrating the work of father james mcdiar up in and dunny gall so hopefully this is his first time now presenting in zoom so leon can you unmute yourself are you okay to come in i'm going to spotlight your video now so um hope you hope you can hear me i wrote a book in 19 uh in 2007 on father mcdiar uh looking back at his life and there wasn't anybody else uh seemingly ready to write the book at the time so i took it on my as i knew probably more than many that uh what what an extraordinary story was uh in the mcdiar story and how how it was almost a legendary folk tale in one sense about a priest who arrived at glenn column kill in 1950-51 on a bicycle and uh he he uh eventually found the parochial house and uh when he had to look around the place after a few weeks he made the uh he made the famous statement that this comprises the title of my book little did to think what they had a revolution on their hands because here he was a priest who was spent the early part of his ministry in london during the blitz it was a time of great trial for for all londoners and indeed everybody and britain and irith and pan mcdiar spent a long time in london during the blitz cycling around from place to place for the irish where he he knew house people and given them help and support and he learned a lot from the blitz and that's why i'm mentioning it he he learned about resilience and about determination and dovet determination of that sometimes with the bombs flying about and uh when he came to glenn column kill in 1951 he realized that glenn column kill was a very quiet backward region of danegal it was probably the remotest part of danegal and that the place needed some revitalization big time and uh so he he had a think about it and it is uh he realized that what he called the five courses of glenn column kill at the time and one of them was emigration that the place was being drained of its vital population of the younger people and they were going to britain and they had already met many emigrants in britain during the war and he wasn't too pleased about the state in which they had to live because of course quite often very difficult there were not educated people they had very little resources and they were trying to make their way in a foreign country a big problem and uh when he began his work in glenn column kill he he looked about and he understood that the mail uh the mail example that was traditional in the irish and irish history going back hundreds and up not thousands of years where people gather together to bring in the hay the harvest occasionally they would help each other uh so that they after came a good day several of them could gather together and get one farmer's work completed in one day maybe get this all his hay in or whatever and that and then when the next good day would come they would go to the next door neighbor to another farmer and they would do the same as well as that they used the same system in the fishing industry when the herring would come in maybe the boats that would go out occasionally of the boats that would fish herring and that was the way partly how they met at that time uh but father mcdair had he realized because he was a man of the cloth and he was preaching Catholicism at the time uh though people some people said he was a better businessman than he was a priest which is probably through as well he was both out with him but uh then he happened upon as a priest as a clergyman businessman at the time which was very unusual and he wasn't very well appreciated by the church or by government because the church that he was stepping outside the comfort zone and he was showing other people maybe that they weren't doing enough for their country name and mcdair always said uh at the sermons he said that religion was both uh horizontal and vertical the vertical was the prayer the prayer mass and the prayers and but the the the horizontal was reaching out to other people and making the community a better place to live and that was what really became his great motivation and uh he began then the first thing he did when he looked around he realized that there that there was no industry there was no water nobody had piped water and uh there there was nothing to keep really keep people generated and come for the people on the land so he he the first thing he did was to build a community hall and uh the hall was built in 10 weeks he gathered a load of people and they put them on a row so many each day and everybody decided to throw in and help out and they had quite a big parish hall built in 10 weeks mostly built with a lot of there was a lot of stone used it wasn't at all people in blocks but they had a block machine and they used that as well and they finished the hall in 10 weeks and at the end of it uh after mass that evening they took them on uh the the the the lifting them shoulder high on the chair and carried them all the way through the village to the hall and uh as a mark of uh probably respect but uh that's how they showed their appreciation for Father McDayer once said most of he said we are the the only people's hall from here to Beijing which was a humorous he was he had quite a good sense of humor and that was just a humorous thing about uh the people burning the hall and uh that was that was that um then uh he began agriculture shows uh he realized that to get people interested in and have pride in the production of vegetables and their own goods and their network and their handicrafts and this making that they should hold a very a big good big show every year and have all this work put on display and that he did as well and he did that very effectively but in 1954 before even some of this stuff began he there was no electricity in Glen Cullen Hill and the ESB had no intention of bringing any electricity from the carriage the others have of the the parish to the Glen Cullen Hill because it was going to require 900 poles in Bogland because Glen Cullen Hill the valley of Glen County was surrounded by five miles of bone and it's a kind of an island actually so he by persuasion of all sorts he managed to get people to uh BSB to agree of he could get two hard names of people willing to take the electricity and that he got he went door to door and found the people to to uh to sign the uh to sign the petition to the ESB to have the electricity brought from the carriage into Glen Cullen Hill and that was the beginning one of the great uh greatest thing he did because when the switched on the light uh and his uh has poetic way he he said it was almost like switching on the new age the new world of electricity that we have now computerization that was just beginning then and uh if he had not been as pushy as he was uh and determined the electricity may have taken a lot longer to get to Glen Cullen Hill but be that as it may then he attempted one of his great games with uh the during has saved the west campaign was to um develop a model farm model farm he realized that all the small farms weren't viable as as five most farmers had five acres or six but he managed to persuade 114 small farmers to a commune uh to come together and to have a large one large industrial farm so that they could have economies on machinery and economies on labor and they would have uh to back up the farming they would have industry they would introduce industries for the surplus workers but they would employ as many workers as they needed on the the farm uh on the commune reform now the commune reform didn't get government approval it wouldn't give it granted and the banks wouldn't give family there enough money to launch it on on their own because the banks were at that time didn't own much money it was very difficult to get money at that time uh then he had uh he had a weaving mart which implied about 26 people he got that started in 1955 and uh he went he wrote to devil era for permission to uh to get an industry and to get support for an industry a weaving industry in blaine column kill so devil era to a great interest in thalamid era and thalamid era was very lucky to have a devil era take such a great interest but in order to ensure that the devil era got the message thalamid era wrote to chelay the band devil era devil era's wife as well and uh devil era invited him up to dublin and uh jack lynch was devil era's uh private secretary at the time and jack lynch uh dev said to jack lynch give them whatever they want and that was the start of the weaving mart and through the persistence of father mcdayer he brought that was another very important 26 jobs into the area and uh that was uh you know it was a good uh a good start good solid jobs with a steady income every week now then the the farms and blaine column kill the common farm didn't succeed but other father mcdayer decided uh on an experimental situation they managed one farmer on on an acre of land managed to produce 800 pounds money pounds uh with a vegetables of one acre and this gave great courage to thalamid era that even with fairly average land that land quality wasn't that great somewhat was good but that maybe they could grow vegetables to supply the hotels and the the catering houses of ireland so he he he began to think in terms of vegetables but then he struck an idea well why not a canning factory for to have canned vegetables and create another 40 50 jobs well he did that and that factory is still going today and it's it's carrying fascia and it's producing fascia at the moment but it is and implies 200 people are present up and up to 200 in the winter time so uh a lot of good work was done by father mcdayer i can't go in to do it in too much detail obviously i don't i'm not too sure in much time i have left yet but uh uh yeah that'd be great huh to sum up sorry i can't hear you you are at a time Liam so if you could okay all right i'll leave it i'll say well pan mcdayer has died in 1987 but uh his ideas and his hope village and many of his approaches are still still in place and the idea of self-help and community self-help was his priority and and today on the seven that obviously is the key uh the key topic and i'm glad to be able to tie it to that a little bit thank you rinnie leon thank you for that i'm really inspiring it was like a story from the future not a story from the past it sounds like that would make a great film like uh what was that film called dolly that we jimmy's hall like jimmy's hall yeah so um leon thanks for that insight into mcdayer's work how important that is and a lot of the ideas around community ownership that sort of mutual aid the the metal the coming together and the looking especially at our essentials like food and energy in a different way and there is now a huge opportunity to really localize around those two food and energy and that would make a huge difference in our actual resilience and ability to cope so we're going to take a little comfort break in in about 15 minutes but there's an opportunity now for us to weave together these different insights to sort of explore if we can identify some patterns that we could bring in and to this longer paper uh and and and release get a sense of how do we make a just recovery a just transition in the context of an ecological and climate emergency how do we do more ourselves how do we create local wealth local value how do we ensure that we can cope with the changes that are coming so i don't know if anyone in chat if you could put each or hand up because i i can't see everyone on the screens there's too many of us but if anyone would like to to start the conversation i might just and ask ollie now ollie here we are and do you identify any patterns there so obviously i saw a huge patterns from what leon was talking about dunningall in the 50s to the sort of things that we're doing in community supported agriculture or you're seeing called jordan or even now using digital tools like the open food network to to aggregate the value or to ensure that we get local food to market so you identify any patterns yeah i suppose looking at the the chat as well there's there's a great wealth of resources in there already i suppose people are starting to pull connections with some you know bigger bigger kind of ideas that organizations like faster would have been you know developing over the years on like land tax just a reference to jesson higgl's new book and the sort of jobs guarantee idea in a sort of degrowth kind of perspective i think there's a lot of thinking kind of coming together after shades presentation as well about you know combining degrowth and reparations as one kind of package that the two together make sense and either on their own wouldn't be enough um yeah and i suppose what's nice as well as people are picking up on things they hadn't seen before but also then uh finding connections with stuff that some of us might not have seen either like about um appropriate technology there's a long history of that um an appropriate digitalization is probably what we need now open food network is an open source community own platform it's not proprietary it's not owned by venture capitalist it's not extracting wealth uh from us sharing our stuff or or or engaging with each other to shareholder so the appropriateness is is is interesting from that sort of appropriate technology yeah even the fact that already other digital farmers markets were sold to venture capitalists and co-opted and you know pulled out of duk in the case of food assembly so like it's a real fear um so that's why we have to get it right because digitization is coming on a different level now partly because of covid so we have to kind of get the open food network type approach in early because otherwise you know other ones will take over like the more proprietary brilliant so we are asking you to come in now so h in the chat h for hand i'd like to come in if it'd be great to hear some other voices and we're trying to weave together see big impartions weave together these different aspects of our seeing so anyone would you like to come in and join us just let uh indicate and i can spotlight you okay well maybe you're not going to maybe we're just gonna maybe it'll just be me and ollie having a conversation here on her own um oh janice has raised her hands uh janice can you unmute yourself and come in i'm not sure that what i'm going to say is all that helpful um i'm i'm probably the eldest person here i'm in my early 80s but um i came originally from wales and in the 60s i was sort of hopping between i had jobs in ireland in wales and i remember the uh the experiment about the father mcdyer thing and i first heard about it on a bbc program when i was in wales and it was later that it sort of hit the headlines more in ireland um and um i'm wondering did that contribute directly to the founding of the co-ops in the aran islands and other places communities around ireland i think they came later thanks for that thanks for that i mean we're yes you're making a good point was mcdyer's work uh before the flourishing of co-ops i think we went further back to the to the roach roach tail pioneers in the uk um we had plunkett and a russle going around the country uh before mcdyer so there's quite a lot there let's uh let's see if we can just keep weaving that together david summerville uh who i know and is coming in from scotland i was at an event on sunday with david summerville uh so david i'm just going to spot like you if you unmute yourself thank you so much for joining us with the scottish at the general assembly of the scottish community climate action network the other day great inspiring contribution thank you um like many networks and and um local movements for change we do struggle with these platforms and and so on in one charity i'm involved in we're using the g-suite the google's whole panoply of stuff that uh we can use free because they're charging lots of people lots of money and registered charities convert now i understand david and it maybe through your work with ecoles um that there is some work going on in europe to try and explore such a way of holding information is it slack you know and so i'd be grateful if you could share just picking up on that last point um that was being made about i'm trying to establish an independent um open source maybe a mechanism for holding in a reasonably secure way um our conversations our our collective memory our history our decisions that would be helpful thanks thanks david yeah i think um the work we're doing at the european level so david refers to them part of a meta network of community-led initiatives right across europe i think there's 48 members now national networks leader networks transition towns and ecovillage networks one of the things that we're highlighting there is obviously we're now very familiar and doing our conferences our meetings in these environments we're hoping to open up to blended and distributed events where we can still meet in smaller groups but just the point i think david's making is worth highlighting is we are currently using a very proprietary uh digital tools that are owned by the the most powerful and richest people in the world and we really need a bit like mc dyer in the fifties we need to be making sure that we have ownership of those tools and and assets and there's ways we can do that by looking at open source which are developed by the communities and owned by the communities and can't be taken away by us so i think there's just something to highlight there that we need to in a sense de-google we need to move away from these proprietary platforms into something that we've got much more control of that can actually be of assistance in the the sense of a tool for kind of reality or a human scale tool and that can aggregate value and help us distribute in a different way so we are taking a comfort break some people were going where's the comfort break gone we are right on time the comfort breaks coming in five minutes but with a bit more time and i think who else someone else at their hand up deirdre lane deirdre do you want to unmute yourself and come in with your insight or reflection hi so i was on a fantastical recently with the tele v foundation and essentially they've got a local um financial mechanism whereby if you shop local you get 30 back yourself and the money is only within the local communities they've actually advanced it so the local authority benefit system can be paid via the card as well and if you take the bus for example you get sustainability points too so it's in your interest to support local shop local and the money stays hyper locally as well i thought it was a really interesting model if the community could open it open and illness i just want to share it here in this platform yeah thanks for that deirdre i do think that that sort of community control community ownership uh could be interesting that's okay sorry so we're up to something like so yes and actually deirdre could you put that could you stick that in the chat as well deirdre just the name of the actual initiative it's a really good initiative but my fear then was the government could own it and then they would only select the people that they would allow to go into the shops so for example if a shop in flock jordan was in favor by the government they wouldn't have them in the loop which is why it's very interesting to take that model and ensure that the community that who goes in and where the money can be spent yeah i definitely think we can move our scale up in community ownership or moving the scale up from shop local and i think the community supported agriculture movements where you're joining the csa and you're an owner subscriber you're supporting that that farm those producers we we've taken that model here a subscription model where our award-winning baker right right has a bread club so we're supporting that business by subscribing not just to remember to buy that local bread but actually subscribing to that business so that when joe's baking and on monday morning he knows he's sold a number of lofts he's got that guaranteed cash flow from the community so we've got an egg club a milk club a buyers club for whole foods as well as our csa and i just think that model is probably tying us a bit more into community ownership what do you think golly yeah and what's nice about it as well is that there's enough to be doing with that stuff to actually avoid going into the supermarket certainly you might go to the supermarket once a month rather than once a week which ties back into the very initial points with sean there sean mccabe about the supermarket power like if you have five or six clubs that you're a member of supplying your food you can kind of get away with the local shop in town to supplement which actually also builds the local economy so then you're at a point for it by it's quite rare then to go into to do the big shop which used to be a weekly thing for a lot of people so that's what's nice about that aggregation it's it actually can benefit local retailers as well like so i do think golly there's definitely something important there again it's like uh we're we're missing a sort of uh capacity to imagine a different way of meeting our needs and when we talk about say csa or these subscription things people are all that's a brilliant idea how come i've not heard of these things in the media and so i think we need there's about work there almost like plonk at knee russell a hundred years ago you know showing that there's different approaches that actually could make our regions much more resilient and the sort of approach we take here is an ecosystem approach which is underpinning the new solidarity or or multi-stakeholder co-ops or what we saw in what we see in montregrin or in the past up in dunning all but the idea that we can come together to meet our needs the multi-stakeholder solidarity is we can have different types of membership we don't all have to be consumers or workers we could have co-ops now there'd be multi-stakeholder and the open food network of ireland is with icos trying to show a 21st century approach to cooperism and register oafn ireland as a multi-stakeholder solidarity co-ops okay i we are unless anybody wants to come in there's no h's in the chat or anyone's got their hand up so i'm going to suggest we take a five-minute comfort break and in that comfort break i'd like you just to consider because that's what we're going to explore when we come back what would be the the the jobs the livelihoods the services that would would emerge when we shorten supply chains and think about our regions in a different way so that's our objective and and we're going to explore that together when we we come back from this comfort break and we can look at that in and break out so i will break out into smaller groups just have a good chat so thank you all so far and we've another 40 minutes to go so if you can stay with us and take a little bit of a comfort break right now we're back in let's say 10 minutes give ourselves 10 minutes okay 10 minutes we'll come back but we're exploring then what are the livelihoods the jobs the services that would result of this community led cooperative approach to our regional resilience so we'll see you in five minutes thank you five or ten i think david meant 10 minutes he did david thank you 10 minutes take your time look after yourself sound on we'll change the overall so we are going to come back soon so thanks for um interesting with us and we're still at 30 people which is okay we're going to have a good conversation i think so as people are arriving let's see who's in the room rachel good to see you it's been a long time it's good to see quite a few people from fastad and which has been doing amazing work for the last 20 years since 1998 and work of richard douthway carline mentioned short circuit in the chat it was a quite pivotal boot for me looking at how we think about our regional resilience way back then so a few of you are visible that's great to see well done leon you did really well for your first zoom call i do think you should make the feature film of that that story it's it's more complete than what was the one the one the uh jimmy's hall it's more complete than jimmy's hall david kaur which good to see you david was very active in fasta wrote an amazing paper that i still uh it gives me nightmares called the kaur rich crunch for that's what we ended up calling it david i can't remember that was the paper and i think you revised it recently thanks for joining us here do come in david if you want to say some of those no no i um come in later okay for you okay so people are waking up now they're coming back thanks everyone um we're going to move on so i think we're going to finish a little earlier so don't think we'll be staying here till 4 30 we don't need to but we've two big pieces to do we're going to explore now especially for the paper that we're doing we really want to tease out what are the jobs and likelihoods and i say likelihoods more than jobs because we know what we're thinking work uh we need to probably more the charles handy portfolio of of of jobs now and but not the insecurity of the gig economy so we're rethinking work we know that but livelihood is important how do we create livelihood in our regions how do we um ensure that our regions are healthy and resilient so these are the things that we're looking at so what we want to do in this breakout is trying to list and get into the chat so that we can harvest it the jobs livelihoods services that will emerge from a just recovery just transition in the context of climate change focused on our regions and we say regions more than we might have said communities in the past that we'd be very involved in the transition time process thinking about how our neighborhoods our streets and our communities can be more resilient but really it's the relationships with the producers of energy and food and other vital services across our regions that will really give us we think the sense of resilience and be able to cope with the vulnerabilities of long supply chains and the vulnerability of the global economy so there's there's a lot to think about here but that's what our objective is to look at the um trying to list as many things that we can go into a bit more detail so we're going to go into the breakouts for um let's give a good bit of time this is a small group it's random we don't know who will be in your group but we'll probably have about 25 30 minutes to really get into a bit of a conversation and please use the chats if you can because that's where we harvest that's where we can pull together the insights generated from your chat so when we go into the chat room there's no facilitators no moderators it'd be good to just say hello and who you are but not going to do much detail and stay focused on the mission and objective our mission in this little breakout is to explore the jobs the livelihoods the services and local services that will emerge and adjust our local um transition so before we go into the breakout rooms is anyone sitting with on any uncertainty that we can resolve now Oli can you watch and make sure yeah I'm just making sure you can be heard as well Davy because there's a message wondering um so is there a are we yeah we're all we're audible fully audible yeah we are we're on yeah if someone is visible who's got the camera on just give us a thumbs up if you can hear us you know we might be talking to ourselves here great thank you regime okay and is anyone sitting with any uncertainty not doing oh there's a few people stuck in the waiting room sorry if you could type in the in the chat now and what we're doing in this time that would be very helpful thanks David so let's see if I can do that multitask very simple though we're having a conversation around the sort of jobs and livelihoods that we can imagine in a just recovery or a just transition in the context of sharpening supply chains and strengthening local economies David I'll I'll find that and I'll put it in the chat for you anyone else before we go back a bit later and I missed the invitation chat room Liz Cullen here hi Liz I came back a bit later from the break and I think I missed the invitation okay so the invitation is in small groups oh I didn't get oh yeah I didn't get the invitation now here's the invitation I'm giving you this the invitation in small groups is to have a conversation around the sort of jobs livelihoods and services that we can see or imagine in the just transition thank you okay so remember to not to go down too many rabbit holes too many tangents stay focused on that issue but introduce yourself when we go into the rooms now so I'll pull you out in about 25 minutes we'll have a bit of time to look at and weaving together those insights before we have our European reflection from Stanka from friends of earth Europe okay so are we okay I'm going to put you into rooms you may get in a room and people are sleeping or knocking back from the break just work with it and hopefully it'll all go well so you're being invited to the breakout rooms now one thing people are wondering about is you know the rural and midlands and stuff that scale has a bit of going on there we can just talk about everything but it's like it is better if it's a little bit focused you want to join that group well that was that was a general chat I'm happy in any group you're in a group so yeah um I'm going to go for you've not joined so you have to go and join okay I'll do that out here don't panic it is slow to get into the rooms you should be maybe this is a room here that's a room yeah you hear me okay it looks like this is a breakout room and um unless I can dear drach are you are you still at your computer and can you hear me just nod your head I can just to see if I can get you in a room and and can you hear me you hear me and can you hear me just check in and if you hear me now I think you've got your sound down I can still see you but you're not joining the group ah Rachel can you hear me Tommy can you hear me yes I can maybe just back in sorry about that you can go to your room there should be a button that you can go to your room that you're assigned to uh where's that now oh yeah sorry yeah okay Rachel did you get lost you're muted I was insulted by Judy Osburn and I'm not going back they could just keep her her opinions to herself about whatever she think is she made remarks she doesn't approve of what I do with my life and she can fuck off and I you know I don't deserve to be treated like this I'm making a documentary which is going to help a lot of people with a very well-known publishing company who are I'm very upset by what Judy Osburn said to me I think she's wrong I think she's a bigot and bitch and I'm not going back and I'm sorry I'm not going back inside for that get room and I'm not going to spend 25 minutes giving her a fucking ideas because she doesn't have the right to take my dignity like that okay Rachel goodbye sorry that you had that experience um so you just want to stay here you don't you're leaving you've left okay and can you hear us no okay you're not tied into the bad housing bad housing stock in a lot of cases so this can can bring that down so that that would be one area that we I would um I would focus on in terms of local local employment you know obviously there is gonna be a lot of food and what I think you know the cost of of transporting from and can you hear me can you hear me now by any chance yeah yeah oh god I had to click a lot of buttons hello can hear you do you want to feed in Oilo because we obviously weren't able to get anything from you so uh up until now um yeah I'll just just keep going I was listening but I'll add in something when when I feel I need to um just out of curiosity where I live and it will be quite different from you know a rural town or um a large I was thinking when they were talking about the farm machinery where you know the kind of common ownership of farm machinery um I mean Ireland has gone directly in the other direction I mean when I was growing up on a farm we did have the neighbours bring in their harvest and we always had the barn dance at the end of the harvest and it was more of a community affair but over the years um all of that stopped and then you had these big contractors who bought enormous machinery at extraordinary sums of money and then they went um those big contractors then went around cutting the corn doing all the harvesting and I kind of got rid of the community effort you know so we've moved away from whatever it is they're doing in France um I don't know why that is um and then the the guys um I mean have you ever been in one of those machines they're extraordinary they're air conditioned they're you know fantastic music systems it's something further away from farming you can get some of them you know and how they kind of for them I don't know it's amazing yeah anyway so the new jobs yeah I don't know whether it is um I mean we have to think what they're trying to what they're trying to get at today is that we shorten the supply chains because that's what makes us resilient that we're not relying on Tesco getting a lorry in from a port in England to stock up our supermarkets well again talking about food in particular I did try and do a 50 mile diet at one point um but I got now I was going to allow myself coffee but other than that um I got stuck because um I find it very difficult eating very heavy wheat and bread and things like that and the only wheat that we can grow in Ireland um isn't suitable for soft bread um or even did you get thrown out of the room Ben? It told us it told us we had zero time left so we left oh the timer ran down okay so then yeah it said zero time left and so then we clicked on leave room okay well who was in your room just and Ben and Liam or Sean and me Abby oh there's more of you there sorry about that uh I didn't time it properly no one else is coming out the rooms perhaps you can continue your conversation in this room for another five minutes and then we'll break up the rooms I can't put you back that's my problem you can't do that Liam I can't see how to put you back you know now that you've came out I'd have to create another breakout room anyway there's no one else here and's not here Sean are you still there? Yeah I'm here sorry okay so I think just continue the conversation here I mean I suppose going through the rooms I went to the different rooms um people are having good conversations but they're probably not going to harvest that so maybe in the last 10 minutes we could maybe just think about what are we bringing back from our small group conversation if you want to continue here I'm going to just jump into the other rooms and let them know and that they're we've got 10 minutes left so I think we didn't actually talk about what we're supposed to talk about what do we which was jobs um yeah don't know how economics is interesting the old plugging the leaks kind of ideas um how do you keep money circulating in local economies and that's really a personal choice to you know not not spend as much outside of your community and see it see money actually circulating in the local area