 Hello everyone, I'm Jim Garrison and I want to welcome you to this fourth and final segment of our Foundations and Donut Economics course that we're having with Kate Rayworth. We deeply appreciate the involvement of all of you over the past month as week by week our numbers have grown. We're well past 350 students now in over 50 countries and it's really been a testament to our partners that have been working with us from around the world. We have over 40 different organizations now that have come together through humanity rising to develop and now establish a complete reinvention of the traditional MBA. We are no longer in a world where just business administration is going to do what we need. We need a master's in regenerative action. We need to be linking knowledge about the world with action to save the world. We need to train students and organizations globally, not just simply to be sustainable because sustainability is no longer possible with a seriously eroded ecosystem. We've got to train people and empower people all over the world to act to regenerate the ecology and regenerate human community. Scientists as you all know are saying that this next decade, the decade of the 2020s may well turn out to be the most consequential in the entire history of the human race because we have so despoiled our environment. We've so neglected our basic accountabilities principally around climate change so that we have a situation where in the last 50 years we've degraded 69% of the entire biodiversity of our planet. Climate change is spinning out of control. We're experiencing extreme weather events worldwide. I'm in California for example and there's what they call a heat dome now over the North American continent in the West Central Western part and there hasn't been these kinds of temperatures in the last 1200 years. At the same time the pandemic continues to be with us. Sydney, Australia just shut down and another lockdown because of this new Delta variant which is spreading in Europe and around the United States and Central America. Lockdowns persist. Brazil is a devastation zone so as you look anywhere in the world, either locally in your community or globally worldwide, we need to seriously rethink our basic economic orientation and that's what Kate Rayworth has provided for us in her masterful book Donut Economics. So we're very privileged to have her with us to teach our inaugural course for this Master's in Regenerative Action on the foundations of Donut Economics. We believe this is the foundational economic principle upon which we need to build a new world. So Kate, welcome to Ubiquity and to our MRA and I turn the program over to you. Thanks Jim and it's fantastic to be here for this fourth and final session of this module. So welcome back everybody. I'm in a new place today as you can see and I will say a little bit more about that later. It's fantastic to be joined by some brilliant change makers today who are really going to help make sense of what it means to take Donut Economics off the page and put it into action in place. But I want to start by just recapping what we've covered in the three modules, in the three courses leading up to this, to this final session. So let's just pull right back. In the first week that we got together, we explored the core concept of the Donut, the Donut of social and planetary boundaries where we aim to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. And as Jim just described in this week's very intense global realities, we know we are very, very far from that situation, massively overshooting Earth's life support systems and falling far short on the essential needs of billions of people. We therefore need, we know, to transform the underlying dynamics of our economy. We've inherited economy that's deeply divisive and it must become profoundly distributive by design. We've inherited global economies that are deeply degenerative running down the living systems and they need to become regenerative by design. We know we need a new big picture of the economy. Here's one of my pop outs. We know we need to think that the economy exists within society. It is a social construct and that means we can reinvent it and redesign it. And we're going to be hearing examples of people bringing that into reality today. And society exists within the living world. We draw on Earth's materials and matter. We put out waste and pollution. We are bathed in a river of solar energy. How do we create economies local to global that actually respect and serve this reality and are embedded within it? How do we find new ways to engage market-based relationships with state-based relationships and the household of unpaid care and the commons of co-creative collaboration? How do we make space for all of these? And how do we ensure that finance is in service to this activity in service to a thriving planet? So in the first week, we explored these core concepts in this overview of donut economics. In the second session together, we then said, what does it mean to downscale it to place? And I showed us through talking through the four lenses of how can your city or town or region or country or village or nation become a home to thriving people in a thriving place while respecting the well-being of all people and the health of the whole planet? What does it mean to bring it down to a specific place? Last week in our third session together, we looked at what happens when business meets the donut. When we bring the world of enterprise and business into this space, what is business going to do? Is it going to do nothing, do its fair share? Is it going to do mission zero or indeed aim to do the donut itself? And we looked into the deep design of enterprise, the design in fact that's relevant to all organizations. What is your purpose? Why does your organization even exist? How are you networked in relation to others, your customers, your community, your suppliers, your neighbors? How are you governed? Who has voice and decision making? And what are the metrics of which you measure your success? But crucially, how is it owned? How are the underlying assets from the land to the buildings to the ideas and the intellectual property and the technology and the data and the enterprises? How are they owned? Because how their own profoundly shapes how they're financed and whether finance is in service and aligned with all of these. So we looked into the deep design of enterprise, but of course these ideas can be applied to any kind of organization. So this week, we're going to pull back away from all those ideas but hear things that actually cross across all of them. And we're going to learn with and from change makers. As I said at the very beginning, donut economics began as a book and it had far more traction in the world than I ever imagined because every time I presented the ideas of the book, people would come up to me and say, no, but we actually are doing this. I'm a teacher. I'm a community activist. I'm a town counselor. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm putting this into practice where I am. And it's those change makers who see ideas on the page and say, yes, but I'm actually going to do this. Those are the ones that certainly to my mind are the most inspiring of creating practice. But I see how much they inspire others. It's that power of peer to peer inspiration. Their action in place makes others realize that person over there is doing the thing that I thought was impossible. But look, they're starting to do it. Maybe we can begin to do it here too. So I've invited today to share and give all of us that peer to peer inspiration. Three people who are from three initiatives. And I want to recognize that everyone here is part of a much bigger team of which they are a collaborator and a co-creator. Three initiatives about bringing the thinking of donut economics to a particular place. We're going to start with a city, a city capital region. We're going to go to an island nation. And then we're going to come right down to the scale of a neighborhood, which I happen to be sitting in today. So I'm going to hand over to each of them, invite each one of them to present for around 15 minutes and really draw us into the specificity of their work, sharing the examples as they emerge. And they're at very different stages of that work. Some of it is completed and published. Some of it is literally just getting started. And that also, I think, is a richness to share. They're going to share for around 10, 15 minutes. And then I'm inviting all of you to put questions to them in the chat box. I will capture those questions and harvest them and then feed them back. So I'll put your questions to each of the three in turn. And then I'll put time at the end to just listen across and what are we learning from all of them and to see what comes out of that collaboration between the three. So without further ado, I would like to invite Lord Malcher, who is the Director of the Nonprofit Association Confluence in the Capital Region of Brussels in Belgium, and Confluence, a company co-creative processes, especially around sustainable transition. And I just want to start this by saying we at Donut Economics Action Lab were contacted by Barbara Tracht, who is the Secretary of State in the Brussels Capital Region for Economic Transition. She contacted us and said, I'm excited about the Donut. We want to do this here. And we said, that's fantastic. It's not us who would come and do this. We don't do that. We believe you need to find an organization in your Capital Region, in your city, who are profoundly connected to people there who are enmeshed in that web of community, who are change makers who can carry this analysis. And Barbara said, I know who, I know who I'm going to bring. And she brought Laure and the Confluence team. So I'm going to hand over to Laure to tell us the story of the work that they've been doing in the Brussels Capital Region. Please, Laure. Thank you very much, Kate, for the invitation to speak today and for the introduction. It's really a great honor for us to have the opportunity to share the main lines of the work done here in Brussels during the last 10 months. And based, of course, on the model you all know now. But please, since it will be very short, feel free to contact me after the presentation today for any question. So I will share my screen. I hope you can all see the presentation here. Okay, so the Brussels Region has decided to place the theme of economic transition at the heart of its political objectives. They want to rely on the donut model to put it into practice. So the actors, which are in charge of this economic transition, have set the objective of redirecting public resources toward economic activities that are part of this transition. The donut tool could, therefore, offer an opportunity to have a compass. That was something to be seen. So the idea was to downscale the donut from the global level you all know, and the national one, which does not say a lot about our local specificities, to the regional level with specific indicators which could allow the donut to really be used as a compass for us in the region. You see here the small, this is our logo we developed for the project. So in this context, our non-profit organization conferences led this project supported by the deal and Ishek. Ishek is a management school in Brussels. We received the grants to establish a portrait of the Brussels Region. And to answer the question, how could the donut be used in Brussels in order to accelerate the transition? So what have... Okay, so significant collaboration has been established with some administrations in Brussels, but also with many actors already working on more sustainability for Brussels. Because we wanted to include them in the project in order to see who could benefit from this model and how we were, and still are, convinced that the donut has to be appropriated by as many different actors as possible in the city if we want to impulse a real transformation. So one of our specificities has been to really co-create our results and methodologies. It means not only just asking citizens for their opinion, but really working with different kind of actors along the way. I will show that how. So what was our goal? Globally to explore, as I already said, how to adapt the donut model to the Brussels Region and make it really operational. Because as Kate explained, reminded, it was at the beginning for us, it was just a book. And it was a good inspiration, but we had to see how to really make it concrete. So this has been done through, first, a participatory portrait of key Brussels issues. Then a guide for analysis and action, both for administrations, but also for all stakeholders in the Region. Thirdly, by building a community, a network of actors sharing the donut approach and implementing it in its actions. Not a new community, but we wanted to build on existing networks. So how did we do? We did it through a four levels approach, four levels of appropriation. The regional level with the portrait, then the level of the municipality, with the analysis of political strategies and public administrations action plans. Then the level of organizations, both non-profit and for profit, when they want to take a step back from their work and see the global picture of the action. And then the level of individuals with an object. We really wanted to show that the donut can be put into action for different scales and by different types of actors. But yeah, unfortunately, or maybe I don't know, fortunately for you, I don't have time to develop the four levels in detail, but I would like to explain the key issues for each of them. Maybe it can inspire you. So the first point is the macro level. We developed the donut portrait of the region trying to situate it in relation to the social flow and the ecological sailing. And I have to admit that the task has been highly difficult because it raises many ethical issues. Who has the legitimacy to choose the targets? Which indicators do we select? Where do we gather the data? And so on. I can explain all the difficulties we had. So what we did is that we started by researching and compiling statistics for the four lenses of the portraits. And for this, we decided to collaborate with several regional administrations, the one in charge of statistics, for example. But since the choice of the indicators is so political, the very first sense of the term and affect the way we consider what counts for us, we decided to organize several workshops and we involved different stakeholders, mainly around 100 people from civil society, but also from public administrations. We also collected proposals which we received via an online form we had created for this purpose. And here is the results. The first visualization of the portrait. Sorry, it is in French because we don't have any English version so far. There is, of course, you can see the recognition of how far the region still has to go to achieve a really balanced prosperity. According to the actors, we have worked with, because of course, if we had worked with other people, we would have completely different results maybe. And in communicating these portraits, we had to insist on the fact that it was only a visualization based on a very limited number of indicators and targets and chosen by a very limited number of people. It's only a basis for discussion for an open dialogue between actors. The information we gathered was not new per se. I mean, we knew the statistics and so on. But the portrait shows the complementarity, shows the links between data that are usually considered separately. And that's why it's so strong. This is another way of reading the portrait, organized around the four lenses. So they are the same data, but organized in a different way because we really wanted to illustrate some of the main data, let's say, in order to give a global overview. I won't go into detail, but I will give you then the link for you to watch a bit more precisely. Here it is. You can visit our website, donut.brussels, and you will find all the data we use and the database with all information. It's in French and in Dutch. But yeah, I hope very soon we will have an English version of it. So now there is still a lot to be done with this portrait, because as I said, it's just a starting point. The workshop's participants have identified more than 100 indicators that should be, could be, developed in order to really measure the evolution of our region according to them. The targets should also be discussed widely and not only chosen by politicians. So we have started something, we have shown that there is an interest for it, that it can really bring a new information, a new way, a new vision. But now, of course, we have to keep on working on that. So this is for the first level, the macro level. Then we quickly became convinced that the donuts could guide the policy action in another way than through the regional portrait. How can the donut help actors in public administrations when they have to, for example, implement a policy strategy? Or if they want to diagnose a situation before doing up an action plan. So those were really important questions for us and for the people we were working with. And so we organized workshops again with several administrations in order to start the reflection. Just by the way, we have worked in the middle of the COVID crisis. So everything was done online, which you can imagine for a participatory project was not so easy. But it was okay. So we started the reflection with some of the public administration in Brussels. And the questions we asked were, for example, we want to rethink the renovation of buildings by making them more energy efficient. How can we ensure that we think about the well-being of the people of Brussels, as well as those who produce the materials? Or if we think about urban planning, in terms of giving back public space to the people of Brussels, what should we do to respect both the well-being of people here and elsewhere and the planet? So there are only a few examples. Many things were underlined by the actors. For example, the main one was, okay, that's a very interesting tool. They really see the added value. But there is a need for a large political support. One public administration will not move if the others do not. And especially if the political impulse is not clear and shared. So it may seem absolutely obvious. I agree. But it's great when public actors themselves arrive to this conclusion and put pressure on their politicians. So yeah, and you can see here the kind of material we used. So you see the four lenses, then post-its, red and green, and then the blue one for the future orientation, the things we have to work on and so on. And in the middle, we put the name of the strategy or the action plan we wanted to analyze. Then we arrived at the micro level, where we didn't look at figures or policies, but really at the actions of concrete field actors. We started from the question, how could the doughnut be useful for a company or for an NGO and association? We worked with three groups of actors who are implementing concrete project intervention and are really already in their way to transition. They are aware of it. They want to act. They want to have a positive impact, but they don't have this global picture. And so they were really interested in knowing what the doughnut could add to what they already do and what they already have in mind and use as tools. And those three, what we call situations, have accepted to be our best situation. So we've spent between three and five sessions of three hours in order to analyze the, we have used all the tools Kate just showed, so the signboard, we have developed also a doughnut express in order to make it very quick. And then of course, the four lenses. So we have one project which is called Masui, which is an association trying to renovate a very big building with reuse, the principle of reusing the material. This is for social and artistic production. Then Arcanciel is completely in different field, but they're working on housing in order to allow people with very little means to acquire the building and not the land. Maybe you know this community land trust model. And then the profit for profit organization was this company Democo and one of the construction sites, Delva, they have circular ambitions and they wanted to know how they could go further and to do more. The fact that we have integrated this level in our project is one of the more original approach which is, I think, in Brussels. This is an example of what we used again. So this is a compass instead of using really the four lenses at the beginning, we developed a compass to show you a few things. Okay, then the object level. This is the smaller scale to which it seems relevant to apply the doughnut approach for us. The analysis shares many points in common with the other doughnut approaches that I presented before, in particular the use of the four lenses. But it is also a very specific methodological feature. It links the doughnut philosophy and its four lenses to the life cycle stages that I guess many of you already know. These are derived from life cycle assessment, which is a practice that consists of tracing the impacts of goods or services from the extraction of the raw material to the end of the life of the object. And so you can see this here on the left, the life cycle. And then we integrated this life cycle into the four lenses. And again, it's not the form of the four lenses. We put it in a really big circle. It's the same idea. This is the result of one of our analysis, which is the smartphone. We decided to put the smartphone in the middle of the doughnut, of the four lenses, and to see what were the positive and negative impacts of it. Yeah, for the people in Brussels, the people abroad, then the ecological aspect in Brussels, and also the global footprint. And we have, of course, no lines, because there are many links between the four lenses. And that's, of course, one of the objectives of this work, to show how everything is linked, and how when we try to have an impact on one thing, we also have to be sure that we do not have a negative impact on another part of the doughnut. So in parallel, we tried to lay the foundations for a coalition in forming and planting as many small seeds as possible through the newsletter, the website we have, but also many conferences, classes, and so on. So since, as I said at the beginning, we think that the doughnut will work with, will really help us in Brussels only if there are a very large consensus about the use of it. So we had to work with the politicians, but also with people in the field. And we learned, of course, many from other experiences. So what about now? And I will just finish with this. Of course, you can get inspired by our work. We have published three reports. The first one, the green one up is the synthesis of the results. Then we have one with the lesson learned, and another one about methodological tools. We really wanted other people to be able to go further and so to start from where we are now and develop new things. You can also get inspired by all the videos and interviews we've done. This was done in the logic of peer-to-peer inspiration. So we have asked people from administration to explain to other people in other administration why they found it could be interesting for them, what they've done, what were the results, the positive negative aspects. We have done the same for association. Then here you see Barbara Tracht, our secretary of state. So yeah, it's the logic of peer-to-peer. So you can have a look, but again, in French and in Dutch. And they were also enthusiastic, but saying we cannot do that alone. We have to be accompanied and we have to have a very global view also. Okay, we are part of something bigger and we accept to do our best, but we want to be integrated in something bigger. Oh, sorry, something... Anyway, it doesn't matter. For us now, we heard that there is a regional strategy on economic transition now in work and they decided, it's very new, that they wanted to orient it on the donut model. So we will really mix this regional strategy and the donut model and try to see how we can use the donut model in order to really drive the economic transition. This is the first thing. Then for us as conferences, just for you to know, we will receive probably a new grant that we still have to design and then other options, of course, and other projects will grow. Many people in Brussels are already working now, trying to continue to develop, but I mean, it's still the very beginning. That's it. Fantastic, Claude, thank you. And I think everything you just shared speaks for itself as to why we asked you to come and present this, because this wonderful four ways that you explored the donut in context, that macro, miso, micro and nano, for me personally, it was lovely and exciting to see you taking it in directions that nobody had seen before and thought of before. So thank you. Now, it's prompted lots of questions in the chat box. So first of all, Natasha says she wants to take her hat off to you and the team. She's an awe that you've got so many political actors all engaging and talking together on this. She says, I used to live in Brussels and Belgium. I know how complex it can be. So hats off for getting so many people involved and connected to that. John was saying, was there already a momentum for change underway? I mentioned that the Secretary of State, Barbara Tracht had said, I would like to start to make this happen. But does this require a really significant momentum? And if so, did you manage to connect that? So I imagine many people on this call would really like to do something where they are, but might think, I don't know how to connect or how can we make this happen? And your organization has been working in the city region for a long, long time. So can you just speak to how to engage and how to make it connect to existing movement and energy for change? Yeah, thank you for those very interesting questions. Because indeed, as I said, it's only the very beginning. And Barbara Tracht has announced its will to go into that way. But she's not alone in the government. And so now I think the next step is really to convince other political actors. Because we have tried to do our best to be in touch with different parties and trying to make it, you know, with a larger consensus. But it's a very long way. And we only had 10 months and 10 months to discover the tool, 10 months to understand with the room to work and then to do something. And then now we are, yeah, let's go. And so yeah, there is a long way ahead to involve really globally the political class and to say, okay, it's not something from the Green Party because I mean, Barbara Tracht is from the Green Party. And what we've done, which could be useful maybe for people here in the room, is that we, since we are an association, we were not directly linked to administration or to politicians. And we did really our best not to be considered as part of the Green Party. We really said, okay, we are association, we have the mandate just to explore and to see, is it useful or not? And we were completely ready to say, after 10 months of exploration, okay, the done is very nice. It's great. Thank you, Kate, but it doesn't work. But it was not the case. I mean, everyone said, yeah, it's complementary with what we do. There is a real added value with the SDGs and so on. So yeah, I think this is this non-public aspect from our part was really useful. But in the same time, and I will answer the other question, this significant moment was very useful. Because I don't know if, I mean, it's impossible to rewrite the story, but I'm not sure we would have been so far if we were just alone conferences with the very good idea of trying to see the use, I mean, the necessity of using this model and the possibility of it if we were not supported by something more official. Because of course, in the same time that we started, there was the political announcement with the UK to remember and Barbara just saying, okay, Brussels just want to enter into this way. And then we decided to give money to this association and so on. So yeah, you have to create something in order to be supported. But it's not, I mean, this is our experience. But I'm sure that it can be done in a completely different way with very local initiatives. And it's, I mean, it's perfectly fine. We have discussed with many associations saying, okay, I would like just to use it for me. I mean, for me, for us and to see where could we be in five years. And we would like to use the doughnut, for example. But if you want to have an impact at the level of the municipality, of course, you need the municipality. That's for sure. Great. Yes. And as you say, it can be done in many different ways. And we're going to hear two other ways of different kinds of organizations with a different mandate. Doing that exactly to show that it could be done in different ways. So a couple of other questions that came. Could you give some from Alessia, examples of people who were at first resistant or thought, what is this doughnut thing? Why do we need this? Why does this bring something new? We've already got the SDGs or just an example of how the way you introduced it or something about it that people who may have initially resisted it said, oh, actually, I see that this brings something different. I see there's a value here. Honestly, we had very little resistance. It doesn't mean that there is no, not, but we encounter very little resistance. Maybe for two reasons. One is because we, when we approached someone, we said, okay, we don't know. We have to build something with you. So we just, do you agree to sit at the table and just to do something with us? And maybe after two or three workshops, we will say, okay, let's just leave it. But are you okay to just to try? So this is, I think this is a very nice way to, I don't know how to say, to just relieve the resistance. Then second thing, at the beginning of the project, since we knew we only had 10 months, we had to decide with whom we wanted to work. And there were plenty of possibilities. And some people said, okay, but how do you do you choose people? Do you want to have kind of a presentability of the population and so on? But we have decided not to go into this logic. First, because what does it mean to be representative of a population, but this is another debate. Then second, because we had, we had to try to start. And if we started with people saying at the beginning, yeah, but you're done at model, I mean, it makes no sense. And no, no, no. I mean, we wanted to build something. And no, no, I can say that I feel comfortable enough to go and meet people, those people, and to discuss and maybe to destroy some of the things or to start from scratch. I don't know. But at the beginning, it was impossible. We wanted to believe in it, to give it a chance. And to give it a chance, we had to do it with people already thinking transition, transition positive. And so they, I mean, everyone is doing the transition in a different way. But the donut can really gather all those people. And so, yeah, and for the complementarity for SDGs, this is, for example, the main argument we use is that for us, the SDGs allows a kind of cherry picking. And which is really a problem. The donut makes it impossible just to say, I take the, you know, the objective 17 or the three, or, and I work on it and I'm very, it's great because I'm on that way. Yeah, okay. But I mean, if you work on the SDG three, and then you don't look at the other ones, okay, so that's one of the, the added value we think of the donut model. Fantastic. And I have to say that your answer and your openness of spirit is inspiring so many people in the chat book. So just the approach that you've taken to it, this openness, let's see what happens is incredibly inspiring. So thank you so much. So we're going to come back to you later, but let's now jump to another level. So we've heard this wonderful example from the Brussels Capital Region, a major city in the heart of Europe. We're going to now jump to a very different place to hear about the island nation of Curaçao in the Caribbean. And to learn about this story, I'm so delighted to introduce my colleague and friend, Juan Carlos Goyo, who I first met actually when I was working with the city of Amsterdam who were doing the downscaling, the donut the first place, and Juan Carlos, also known as JC, was the data guru. This is the data guru in Amsterdam. And I very quickly realized, yes, he is the data guru. He's also a spoken word artist, a theater maker, a dad who loves his kids, and part of the innovation team in the city of Amsterdam. And as part of his work in the innovation team and innovation officer, it's about innovating with others overseas. And as he said, he's been innovating with the island of his birth, Curaçao, in finding ways to build back better after this pandemic using the donut model as a guide. So we're now going to hear what it means to take the donut and bring it into practice in Curaçao. So Juan Carlos, really delighted to have you join us and tell the story. Yeah, so wonderful to be here, Kate, and happy to see all the exciting reactions from other people. It gives great joy and hope that there are many more people out there that are doing the same work that we're doing. I'm going to share my slide real quick. I hope it's so just let me just put it on full screen. Yeah, yeah, so this is my presentation. I've already been introduced. But like Kate said, I helped with the development of the city donut of the city of Amsterdam. And as an innovation officer working for the city of Amsterdam, we also have the task to export concepts that have been so innovative for the city, to other places in the world to see how it resonates and if it can be adopted, to accelerate certain ambitions that the city takes as a strategic ambition. And well, circular economy as a topic has been one of the topics that has been very important for the city of Amsterdam for the Netherlands as a whole. But using the donut has kind of brought a circular economy, the whole idea of it to another level, and which is thinking about values next to just material efficiencies and cascading energy effects. So, well, just to give you a view of what I'm going to be presenting about, I'm going to give you a short overview of the governmental context. I think it's important because it will give you an idea about how Curacao is working. It came into contact with the donut, how that first application went and where we're at at this moment and how in which way is it different from my experience in Amsterdam. So, just to give you an idea, I don't know how many of you know Curacao. They call it, I think in the US they call it the ABC Islands. That's the popular name for it because it's next to Aruba and Bonaire. I think Aruba is more popular in the US. But in any case, it's part of the Dutch kingdom and it is the biggest of the six islands that are Caribbean islands that form part of the Dutch kingdom. And it has an economy that, well, it has 158. They say now this new census will come out next year. I expect an increase of about 20,000, but we will see. But an economy that drives mostly on, well, the old oil economy. It has a oil refinery at the center at the heart of the city, Willemstad of the island. And it also has, of course, like most Caribbean islands, a very touristic economy. And finance and logistics, because of the harbor, logistics has also a very big part of the economy. So, as you can see, having the refinery just come back to the question about momentum and accessibility to new ideas. In the case of Curacao, the mere fact that the refinery is present there as a big creator of jobs is definitely a challenge. But I'll get to why that is now being seen as an opportunity. Just a brief kind of comparison here. As you can see, Curacao and Amsterdam, the sizes are, well, Curacao is a bit bigger if you take into account the, what we call inland, which is not really inland because it's an island and it's all surrounded by sea pretty much, but the more rural areas of the island. But it's kind of like a similar size, you could say. If you take a bit bigger part of the metropolitan region of Amsterdam, you easily surpass Curacao's side, but it's somewhere kind of the same. But still, Amsterdam has about 800, 1,000 citizens and the island of Curacao only has 150,000, which is comparable to a district in Amsterdam. Okay, so before COVID, before COVID, the oil refinery closed on the island due to tensions between the US and Venezuela. Most of the oil processed on the island came from Venezuela. And due to the tensions, the contract with the oil company in a bit of visa from Venezuela was closed, which was stopped, I mean, and which brought a lot of instabilities because people suddenly were thinking, oh, wow, what are we going to do? It had a term, the contract's term was up until the end of 2019 and was prolonged in 2020, but at this moment in time, in 2021, it is closed. So thinking ahead of this, the government of Curacao and the Dutch government started to think together, so how can we transition this place? How can we bring it to another economic development? And as it usually goes, so the island approaches the Dutch government, but the Dutch government then says, okay, we're glad to help. Of course, we're in the same kingdom, but if you really want the application of certain things, then you have to go to the cities of the country. So they approached Amsterdam and Rotterdam because the port and the partnership with the ports on the island, and Amsterdam mostly for the social innovation and the innovation ecosystem, which Amsterdam cultivates very well. So that's kind of like a context for you to see how the linkages with the city of Amsterdam have been set up. And well, they approached us prior to Donut Economics, at least prior to when we, as the city of Amsterdam, applied Donut Economics just when we got started in 2019. And we had conversations with Curacao saying, okay, we're developing our circular economy strategy now. And it's, we've had a lot of successes in the previous years. And we're thinking about working with this very interesting person called Kate Reworth. We didn't know yet how this will all impact, but then it became very wonderful in Amsterdam. And the conversations with Curacao continued. And I explained to them how the Donut, next to the whole material efficiency part, develops kind of like a certain guidelines for you to develop your economy based on principles that are more sustainable than just working on material efficiency. And then COVID happened. COVID happened. And the, well, the island was completely shut down. I think when the first case came, because it's such a tidy island, the Prime Minister said, okay, shut the borders, no planes come in. And all the companies in the tourist sector were, of course, out of work. Everybody had to stay home. So a lot of the other companies also came in a lot of trouble. And they didn't know what to do anymore. A local entrepreneur posted on a Facebook page. He's a quite popular creative entrepreneur, but also just doing business in agriculture said, so what is going on right now? He saw the article of Amsterdam that Amsterdam announced in April 2020. Saying, look what Amsterdam did. They used this model called the Donut. And they applied it to their city. And they're going to also use it to steer this, their city out of the pandemic in a more sustainable way. Why don't we do this? And this gained a lot of traction on Facebook. So much that the government of Curacao picked it up. And they said, they send a message to me. I was still living in Amsterdam at the moment. And at that time, and they said, okay, so look what happened. And I said, okay, this is a great synchronicity. I think we should make use of it. Curacao does not have a lot of experience combining collaboration between local, let's say bottom up movements with a formal national government. So but I said, no, this is this is the right way to go. We have to involve if they are talking about it. We've been talking about it. We have to engage right now because that's the momentum that we would like to make use of. We have to collaborate on this. This led to a formal ministerial order. So we drafted a proposal within a few months. And we set up this ministerial order that that's stated that we have to set up a project office for circular economy. And that we would like to realize a vision and approach for the application of circular economy in Curacao. And we did this. So I, from the city of Amsterdam, a colleagues from the government of Curacao, and the local entrepreneurs that have gathered around Yuri, which is one of the initiators of this and the university. So we're all in this project office right now. And soon the, well, the momentum, a lot of people had attracted attention. I mean, also, donut economics is not unknown on Curacao. So the people that knew it immediately had caught their eye, their attention. They wanted to join. And so these are people from all walks of life on the island, but even also from the diaspora. So because of Curacao, it's a small island with a large or comparable sized diaspora outside of the island. People from the diaspora also started to approach the initiative. What we did then is similar to what Brussels explained, what Lars explained before me, is we went to the central Bureau of Statistics and we started gathering as much information as we can find. And we couldn't find information. I went to Google Scholar and approached local research institutes to see if I can find additional insights that can help populate the donut. But at the same time, we started organizing sessions in neighborhoods. So we validate these insights. So the government and research institutes might have insights, but how do people in different neighborhoods feel about these insights? So somebody has about how that all went. We have right about now about 50 and counting members that joined the Curacao Donut Economy Platform. We're setting up a formal foundation as we speak. It should be up somewhere this month. And we held so 10 workshops in the neighborhoods, but we also did not only do, let's say, wealthy neighborhoods or neighborhoods where people already kind of active, but we engaged also with neighborhoods where people were not accustomed to thinking about these things at all or poor neighborhoods. And well, some of them were harder to reach. Others turned out to be very very interesting experience. We've also did a scan. So because of the application of the local donut and the methodology provided by Kate, which applies the local global social ecological quadrant, applying it on the island turned out to be something else. It resulted in people just mentioning randomly over 95 projects that we identified that are aligned to the principles of the donut. And because we've noticed during the conversations in preparation also that people really needed a local kind of contextualization of what is needed is we used the donut model to kind of design business concepts that can then in the future be developed. For example, there was a group of people that designed an agricultural school that is really focused on the climate of the island, which is a very dry island. So this adaptation, this local adaptation, we said, okay, we're gonna really work with this local adaptation because this is what people here on the island needed. Okay, so this is the result of the donut based on the statistics and based on all the policy documents that we've gathered. And it is, as you can see quite read, both on the social foundation as well as this ecological ceiling. I've been thinking for a while why that is. I'm not going to go over all these indicators and the policy that have been forminated for these indicators or related to these indicators. But what I think has made it so different from, let's say, other parts in the world, developing countries in the world, where you see the ecological ceiling being a bit more sustainable and the social foundation was mostly lacking. In Kyrgyzstan, that's not the case because the Kyrgyzstan had the oil refinery. And also the oil refinery did not just bring oil and CO2 emissions that then also led to the degradation of coral reefs, etc., etc., so the cascading effects of the oil refinery. But also the modernization that came with the oil refinery also made that people have a different relationship with the nature that they're around. So this is what I'm picking up as I go along and learn about the local context. And so like I said before, the tool that I found very handy was to develop business concepts kind of similar to the object, the nano level approach that Brussels applied, but we did it based on specific themes. So like Kyrgyzstan said that, okay, agriculture is important. Okay, so let's look at agriculture. What does it provide? What does it impact positively or negatively? And how can we see it from a more holistic perspective? And that's when we use the donut again. So the donut framework, the donut shape with the social foundation and the environmental ceiling really kind of captured every aspect of society. I'm realizing now that I used an older version of the donut, but anyways, this framework just putting dots on the donut and then linking these dots together is an activity that we also did in Amsterdam. It was very inspiring in Amsterdam. It also worked on Kyrgyzstan. So it's a very applicable methodology I think that can be applied in multiple places because just by doing the pointing on, let's say the map of the donut and then linking these points with each other allows people to see interlinkages and to imagine how these interlinkages then can take form in their local context. Okay, so these are some of the recommendations that we gave the government after we've done this process with the society and with civil servants, with private institutions. The first recommendation is what we've noticed is that the island works in silos. This is not unknown for governments. Governments tend to silo themselves to reduce complexity for their policy making, but this results in that people do not know how to set up policy or a project that touches upon different fields. So we really advise this as a very important and maybe the first recommendation. Another is to keep doing these knowledge sharing activities. So we want to do more workshops in neighborhoods. The information that we've gathered, we want to build a monitoring system around it. We also want to develop a platform so that can give matchmaking so people can find each other quicker. We want to develop more jobs and skills that are aligned with the idea of a circular economy guided by the principles of the doughnut. We want to develop investment instruments so that we can find more finance for the local context. And we want to take certain spaces on the island to really make them kind of like doughnut spaces, spaces in which we are really going to try out this doughnut concept. Again, comparable to what Brussels did on a neighborhood level or on a, let's say, a strategic part on the island. We've seen that while we were developing the doughnut that it gained a lot of attention abroad. So we are open to share information. So again, also for anybody here who wants a presentation, who wants to hear about this process in more depth or wants to learn about the application of it, we're very willing to share. And because Kurosawa is a tiny island that can barely be seen on a global map, the island wants to develop their own narrative. So it's also about kind of like really adopting the doughnut in our own way, let's say. So that's going to be an interesting experience. The initiators are talking about using a lot more art and performance in realizing this final goal. Some similarities and differences. I've mentioned a few already, but now summed up. I'll go through them quickly. One big difference with Amsterdam is Kurosawa has less of an integration of bottom up societal movements with the government in Amsterdam. That's very common. Water, of course, is a very important theme for Kurosawa because Kurosawa, of course, is surrounded by it. I'm not going to explain that too much. So waste separation, Kurosawa knows only a landfill and separates waste only for industrial purposes. So industrial waste is separated, but all other waste from households is sent to a landfill. So this has become a big topic, but it's also a difference with Amsterdam. Amsterdam already has a history in waste separation and waste processing. So this has been a very big difference also in the gathering of insights. We're actually now setting up a research to gain more insights on this aspect of the island. So information. The information on Kurosawa is structured and developed on a less regular basis and access. So again, being a tiny island gives an island such as Kurosawa less access to global institutions. Of course, Kurosawa has a quite healthy relationship with the UN, but let's say other front runners in the field of sustainability, the distance is a bit further, which, well, I will try to shorten the gap, but that's a fact that it's definitely a difference. The similarities. So adopting the doughnut takes time. In Kurosawa, it took about 10 months. In Amsterdam, it took about a year. So it takes time to develop. It's not something you can just say, okay, we're going to do it. We're going to develop. We're going to collect all the data. We're going to present it to the government or to society at large, and they're going to understand it. No, you have to engage with them. You have to use, apply it. It's a tool. It's a tool for practice. Another similarity is the paradigm battle. We already talked about the SDGs. You have the circular economy model. You have climate neutrality models. You have the blue, orange, or let's just keep doing what we always did economy. So all these paradigms for how to set up an economy, it's a constant. So I think it's about finding your way to navigate through these different paradigms. A big plus similarity is that both the Dutch government and Kurosawa worked with a statistical bureau that used the same standards. So this has been very handy. COVID, just like in Brussels, provided a great opportunity to develop sustainable ideas. And another similarity is that the topic of food, so food security and food safety, have become a very important topic. I think also partially related to the pandemic, but now has become something that, well, still stays as an important topic. So as a final slide, what's up right now? Again, like I mentioned before, we're going to be doing more workshops in neighborhoods. We're going to develop the donut model so we can update it annually. And we're going to do it in a way that it can be presented digitally. We're going to help promote the business concepts that we developed during the workshops. And we're developing a pitch for a donut innovation village on the island. Yeah, so this is very excited. There's something new, but if it pans out, then I'll be super happy to realize a donut innovation village. But this is something that we're working on at the moment. We're making a website for the donut economy task force of the local initiators. And so we're promoting donut economics on the island. So this is, well, I think my presentation. Yes, this is my presentation. Thank you. Wow, that was your presentation. That was absolutely fantastic. Juan Carlos, thank you so much. I have to say, there's just been huge appreciation for what you've been sharing going through the chat box. People saying it's great to hear that the donut can be used to pivot during crisis. It's a privilege to hear these really gritty real step by step of how you co-created it. It's great to see change being led by small island nations that aren't apparently so stuck in the neoliberal ideologies that many of the bigger, more dominant nations are. And again, I think that's an example of why cities, why nations, why islands are leading that leadership. Caroline's saying it's great to see the involvement of the diaspora. And what a brilliant opportunity for many, many places where there is a diaspora who have so many skills and perspectives that they can bring home in this kind of project. So a lot of appreciation. I'm going to bring just one question. Talal said, how did the local customs and wisdom of Curacao contribute or shape? So how would you say that the particular cultural way of doing things or the local culture shaped what's emerging and what continues to emerge? Yeah. So the interesting thing is, again, the topic of agriculture and how it became popular on the island during the pandemic. People went back to customs that existed prior to, let's say, the oil refinery even. So people came, started talking more about possibilities of using the cactus, which is very present on the island as a source for developing either products or food. They were talking about using other plants for medicinal purposes or for as ointments and stuff. So new ways to envision what has been an economy that really imports mostly and does not export much to really rethink that and to think more from inwards and work with the means that there are locally. So one, for example, a plant that has now become popular is a plant that reduces, so has a lot of antioxidants and reduces also a hair loss. And apparently a chemist is working now on this plant to create a product to put it on the market. So it's very amazing to see all of this come to life. And then one last question, several people asking, what has been the involvement of the oil refinery? Have they been part of the conversation, part of the workshop? How is it seen in this light? Yeah, so that's a very, very hard point. So we have tried to engage with them, invited them. So there is an energy transition on the island. There's an energy transition policy in the making by the local government. And they're looking into hydrogen as an energy source on the island at the moment. But they're so industrially focused that it's really hard to talk to them. And oftentimes, you might end up being called a hippie or just excluded for your radical, which are actually not even all the time that radical ideas. But what I hope works is the donut innovation village that we are developing, because that is just going to be taking over a part of the harbor where the oil refinery was at. So it's really about developing a concept. And we're doing it with various local parties, also real estate investors that have seen that the real estate is losing value in the harbor. And they're open for this conversation. So we're taking this opportunity to move in that space and really take over a piece of that space and hopefully engage and create more feedback loops with this part of the island. So they see that things can be done differently. And once they see it, it's like see it to believe it. So I hope that creates the change for more action. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I'm just going to end this little section with a message that Marilyn wrote, which I think expresses what a lot of people say. She says, J.C. Kudasau is blessed to have your depth of experience, talents and perspectives. And I know there's many other people working on this project with you. So but it's really incredible and such a lovely serendipity that we connected in Amsterdam. You were hard to that work and suddenly you're able to inspire it and take it to your island of your birth. And I think again, this is how change happens. Somebody was involved with something and they take that idea and the inspiration travels with you. So thank you so much. So you shared such rich conclusions there as well. So that was brilliant. I want to ask everyone to hold that and hold it all with what Lord shared earlier as well. Because we're now going to move to our third case study. Yes, we have another one. And it's connected to where I'm sitting today. So I got training actually today for the first time I think in about a year and a half. I took a train about an hour and a half right away from where I live in Oxford in the UK to the city of Birmingham. And I've spent the day with an amazing organization called Civic Square, who are based in a very specific neighborhood within this very big city in the UK. So they are bringing, sometimes people say to me, what's the smallest scale that you know that the doughnut is being really brought to life on? And I say it's here. So I've spent the day with the team in Civic Square and I'm just thrilled that it's coincidentally the same day that we're doing this webinar. I'm thrilled to introduce Amy Korr, who is the co-founder and co-director of Civic Square, who's become a great friend. We met on Twitter. I know for all the bad things that Twitter can do, it can also be an amazing place as I'm sure many people here know to connect with like-minded change makers. And Amy and I met on Twitter and she said, would you come over? We're really interested in putting the doughnut to practice and it's been great. So I'm just very, very inspired about the incredible neighborhood level work they're doing. And I know for many people here this is also going to be equally inspiring as a capital region, a nation island and now to a neighborhood. So Amy, take it away, tell us the story. Oh, thank you so much, Kate. I'm so inspired by the last two talks and pretty bored over by JC that I've almost forgotten what I'm going to talk about. So just let me warm up a second. Thank you so much for those speakers. I feel like they've answered so many questions for me that were in my head about what was next and what was missing and how to approach certain things. So it's just beautiful to see the collaboration just happening live in the call and all the sharing. So I'll be delighted to share a little bit. So I'm just going to talk about the neighborhood scale. Can everybody see this? Okay. I think it's keynote's a little bit funny, isn't it? Let me just try. How about that? Is that okay? Can everyone see that? Just give me a nod. Yeah, that's good. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Okay. So I just want to say that we were an organization called Impact of Birmingham before we were Civic Square and I'm not going to give a long history of that. I'm just saying that, say that this work has been in many ways, building and building over many, many years and isn't just a sort of flash in the pan that kind of came up in the last year or two and builds on many years of thinking about social and civic infrastructure led by people, people of their place, the most diverse mix of people and experiences and skills coming together to have real agency over the places in which they live and over the years that has developed further and further into quite a big vision. And to tell you, to just picture you in that, this has been made 10 years of all sorts of things. You can call it community building, you can call it movement building, you can call it bringing like-minded people together, but from a coffee shop in 2010 where a couple of us met and were young people in the city feeling pretty disenfranchised and very unseen in the leadership and where the decisions were being made and feeling pretty dejected about the direction of many, many things. I'll be really honest, at that time we didn't know what we meant was we were dejected about what the economy valued or who it valued and what our agency of young people and other things looked like. We didn't have that language but we just knew and we came together and started to organize TEDxBrum which led to then a physical space which then led to years of incredible work with citizens all across Birmingham. And in 2018 one of my co-founders Andy picked up the book and introduced it at a lunch and wow I could never have imagined what would have happened after that day of 10 people coming together and just listening to one person talk about donuts and economics over a cup of tea and trying to make sense of it all. And we since the beginning have been a crowdsourced ground-up community of people from all different backgrounds and this is the day that the Impact Hub back in 2014 reached its crowdfunding target after having pretty much been laughed out of the city for even trying to raise as much as we were. And you know we've had that long history of organizing in that way and I think that's just some of the initial conditions that have kind of led us to here. So what are we doing now? After figuring out that it's five years in this space there were so many things that we refer to as the dark matter, so many things around ownership, governance, all the things Kate's talked about, how things are financed, who gets to own them, what the landlord economy does to places like Digbuth where we were based, we knew it was time to move on. I'm not going to give the long story about this but in short we're trying to turn this a disused, empty kind of site in the heart of Ladywood where we're based, B16 in Birmingham, a beautiful asset-rich city full of some of the most incredible talent both artistic and so many other things. It's a beautiful green heart of the city but it's been I'd say quite intentionally run down and is being sold off left, right and centre to developers. And when we saw this picture and we saw this site we knew this was a chance and so exciting to hear Juan Carlos talk about this sort of Dana Innovation District. They haven't really thought about it like that but perhaps this is absolutely what we're trying to build. And we got right in there and I'm not going to talk too much about the relationships and started to put together a proposal of what it could look like to build the soft and hard infrastructures that we're going to need as neighbourhoods to transition through all of the challenges which were so eloquently put together at the beginning of this talk and many of us in many ways and have been for many years in the Global South feeling really, really acutely the impact of what will be happening. And so we've started from this idea of what is the soft and hard infrastructures from maker spaces to retrofitting to coming together in ways big and small to transition through that time really well. And then Covid happened. Before Covid happened we ran this event in the top left corner where we invited neighbours to come and dream up through the medium of play and what could happen at this site. The street and the park were absolutely full more than a thousand people came off an invite that we'd only done two days before two weeks before and we were mind blown. Yet again like TEDx back in 2010 and 11 we just knew the appetite and the energy was there and it was even more sort of bursting at the seam. And so we started to make plans and we wanted to centre the donor at the heart of how we organised in the neighbourhood and then the pandemic hit. And we quickly pivoted obviously had a lot of like many of you many different intersecting things from from grief to repivoting our organisation but we set up a coffee shop from a canal boat and used a park to start talking to people all year. And we've had a year now of conversations big, small, organising starting from the book, lifting the ideas off the page through play, through conversations about all sorts of different things about what it would mean. Essentially even if people yet didn't know it to bring the principles of the donor right to the heart of how we organise and to get to the heart of a new economic possibility for this place led by the people of a neighbourhood experiencing many, many different things, deep, deep, quite well organised, running down of buildings, deprivation, huge assets, new homes coming in, lots of hope, lots of anger, lots of fear and how do we come together to really build a new story for this place that we call home and that we have grown up in for many years. And this started through us meeting Kate and the Deal team back in 2018-19 and even then that first book, that first thing being shared, the momentum was just always there. We started in lots of different ways collaborating across our partners, people like Dark Matter Labs and Wiki House who were thinking about systems and governance and power and all the things that Kate talks about so wonderfully when she talks about what needs to change and to housing, to land, to new social contract and we're just interweaving different narratives and seeing what happened and every time we did something as you all know it just grew and grew and grew. And so a bunch of different things sort of happened to me at the same time. I always have kept this book in the back of my pocket since I first came across it around what are the different conditions required for change in a place and then the constant unbelievable insatiable energy every single time anyone in 2018-19 came across to donate and what it meant for them. It took us longer than we thought but this is essentially what I can sum up about what's happened so far. Kate often has said this to us that when you ask about people, about economics, maybe she doesn't quite say it like this but they feel scared about that but there's nothing you can be scared about when it comes to donuts and we just use that principle over and over again to open up conversations. And these are the slides from way back when in 2018 I think when Kate first presented to us in Birmingham and we started to understand these interplays between nature and people and how we could think about the local wildland. We've just been sitting for our workshop around the reservoir which is the real green heart of our neighborhood but this diagram also the one on the bottom right always stayed in my head always stayed in my head I was like how if we're asking the question what's needed to unleash our local transformation and Kate was talking about how it would be sort of this this small 3d and if it came off the paper and it'd be like that beautiful that 3d donut that stayed in my head for quite a long time. We started to think about you know how would we build this out together with our neighbors. I'm going to be honest it took us a couple years longer than I thought and we had a lot of work to do to really make sure that we had deep legitimacy we were settled in we were welcomed in the neighborhood we were not even though you know all of us or many of us have grown up in the city and have strong connections that it was something that people felt really excited to be part of and not forced upon them and again you know we heard a lot from donut economics that you shouldn't close knock on closed doors and we wanted to build that momentum legitimately listening to people from the ground up so we use lots of things that were nothing like I said to do with the donut that were in these pictures before and just to engage to talk to build trust to find different ways and every single time I mean you can just see on the top left we put some pictures in of this because I was just like every time I was always like make it circular make it circular in any way so if there's a moment you can bring up a conversation but you don't force this idea onto people we're there to build trust deep thick networks that will go through you know hopefully the next 10 or 20 years that will create something incredible and we knew that designing for that long term was super important so taking this idea that thing stayed in my head so for so long and I was like how do we now COVID the restriction started to ease how do we now start bringing the conversation to life in ways that people can touch see feel experience and so we've been doing that just over the last few months now since things have got a bit safer and we we know that we're not putting people at risk just because we want to come together but there's a certain level of this work that is not possible for us to do online no matter how much we work to create inclusive digital environments and things that we had done and digital access over lockdown so this was a couple of weeks ago in a school playground where we used a number of playful tools and just tried them out working with children with chalk with images with you know the donut dreams activity which was meant to be all sorts of things but the kids just took the papers and and ran with them and wanted clean air and longboards and and trees and you know really started to just see what landed what worked who came by and we had a steel band playing and it was on street that is in a just a couple of weeks ago really sadly a young person was murdered on that street that had so much beautiful stuff and so much under investment and so many things being purposely run down and we just popped up and having built deep trust over last year in with with this neighborhood at this part of the neighborhood and community and we started to bring that diagram to life so we used we've long used this idea of if you make something together if you talk about the ideas as you're making and people start to think about what it means to to build to make to create together to think about ideas and the reality as well as talk about big concepts through metaphors like this and and it also really from our experience of the hub that was all co-built of lots of open source furniture locally cut and made but this really brings a new idea to this to this the way people can engage and in this part of the neighborhood where most people just like don't know what you're talking about don't want to talk about these things we wanted to go in make do play create and then listen what other conversations that people bring up what makes them think about how do you respect the rights of other people at the same time as of other places whilst also wanting to thrive and and and build the the community and social and economic wealth and all those things of the place that you're in and you know the community full of diaspora from all around the world this conversation was of course and really natural but we needed to listen we need to experience we need to play we need to use all sorts of tools to figure that out and to build trust and then we needed to turn up and we've been going back every week adding to it making things happen bringing it to life and the aim is to create a a bunch of these together with stewards across the neighborhood it's like monuments not static monuments that people just look at and ones that are active and talk about growing and composting and many many other ideas that can lead in to bigger the bigger ideas can lead into the conversations that we need to to hopefully you know i'm so mind-blowing inspired inspired by Juan Carlos that hopefully can lead to this really grounded collaborative downscaling of the donor in lots and lots of different ways across this across the neighborhood that then can also influence the city the city region the country inspire connect etc etc but really starting from where we are and so this is just some of it in the weeks afterwards we've been doing plant swaps we've been continuing to build out the grow room and we've literally got it's all the the principles are etched in and the social foundation is on the bottom and the ecological ceiling is at the top so we can talk in this like animated way when the time is right you can literally sit inside and we're using growing as a metaphor as well as a very practical example of how you share and many of the seven ways to think like a 21st century economist in practice and then we're doing lots more so events and this is a couple of weeks ago when we did the first thing that we could do more publicly and throughout the day like you know a lot of people came to listen to connect and some people just came to listen to music and then popped along to this and others were playing and popped along to this and others came particularly from this but we're looking at the moment for the spread of the ideas the inspiration the excitement the genuine ground up to find those first 50 to 100 people who are going to be those incredible neighborhood renegade renegade economists and particularly without using language at plays into too many stereotypes and tropes particularly the people that would not feel like this is the space that they want to engage with or would feel comfortable in and so what does it mean to create the trust and the conditions to to nourish what is needed for really transformative work together or what we've heard over the years particularly in building this work and just really practically I'm just going to tell you a couple of things to kind of expect from us I'm just going to say something like we need to take this into a neighborhood wide movement where we are playing with the seven ways where we are starting to downscale the donor we are going to be doing citizen science workshops to help get some of the the data to downscale the donor as well as building a team around that we've just hired a wonderful person who's bizarrely leaving Tata Steel to come and join and be the data lead on this project for us and to really start to be inspired by so much of what Amsterdam and Brussels and Juan Carlos presented these just incredible we want to go to that scale and at the same time we want to do a number of different things and just to finish we were just in the space today talking together about how we can turn this into a pop-up reality of 2040 perhaps what if if many of you watched the film what if everything turned out okay what would it look see feel like and how can we create a pop-up maybe it's a donor innovation district maybe it's a space that brings a donut to life but that was just the start of the conversation today but I also just want to say I think it's really important in our team and in our neighborhood we really talk about just starting where you are and so yeah sorry I was just about to say to reconfirm that actually it's really true people aren't scared about donuts but they are scared about economics so we're just starting at that point starting where people are but also I really encourage our wider team that isn't only just focusing on the donut in their everyday work to start where they are and they think about this in lots of ways we look at all the different parts of our dynamic theory of change of like where are we working what principles are there we're working in the dark matter of systems from lands and other things to the dream matter of radical reimagination and what we call the ordinary matter just the everyday how that actually plays out in reality if you're walking down the street and we're thinking about the process of this what is the life cycle of a project the seasons of a project what types of things are we going to need to do to to take this work forward so we're thinking about the neighborhood methodology quite significantly and these are all just works in progress to say the type of work we'll be sharing over the coming year on the platform we're doing work with our partners at wiki house and open systems land around lab around and dark matter labs around retrofit and how it's a really important route to decarbonisation but we need to do it from the ground up or our community housing project hopefully on that patch of land next to the next to the canal where we're going to be using small sites to co-create a community led housing in clt's and how do we put the donut principles right at the heart of all of this and really when you zoom into different parts of what it means to thrive what are the practical ways that we and the whole neighborhood is going to be doing work to move us in that direction we're doing things like reframing our HR policies to from HR to HF which is about human flourishing and really thinking about all the policies about how you exist in our organization and this works for some of our team because they're much more focused in this way or they're operational and so they can take the donor and start to move towards those sorts of ideas it doesn't all have to be with people it doesn't all have to be through one lens and we're really trying to encourage that and the same is true with lots of things whether you're looking at our tech policy or our job contracts we're really trying to work on the team encouraging them to take the principles from wherever in the system they feel comfortable and confident and excited to make change happen and that's the one like bit of advice I would also say that anyone anywhere doesn't have to be just this like charismatic person who can bring loads of different leaders together or people together there's all sorts of entry points of what someone might pick up and say oh gosh yeah like yeah that's so true and I'm going to try and just make this one process more generative more regenerative more distributive by design I'm going to change the goal on this one project and then bring people back into principles of the donor and I'm not saying that's the only way not all but I'm just saying I think there's so many inspiring incredible ways in that we can all share with each other and we can create an influence and create that ripple effect of change and things like this we're going to be open sourcing the design onto the platform and talking about all the different ways that they become these not static but really incredible community spots where we start to come and talk about the ideas that are going to change our neighborhoods and our world and then plan together the action and of what that's going to look like so this this one story on the on the thing or on the sorry not the thing on the platform already and we'll be hoping to and really working on sharing lots lots more because we're not here to create a black swan a great project in Birmingham that everyone points out and applauds but in fact really rapidly spread the ideas the resource the inspiration the peer to peer learning and support and that's our ambition and I'm one of those people that really wants to keep saying that because I need to manifest it and I need to make sure that this is something we really really hold ourselves and and each other to account on an account too so yeah this is just the quote that I'll just end on you know I feel really strongly that whilst it needs to spread and whilst we need to do all those things and that when a system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system and I am really interested in when you step on to the land when you come and meet us when you come and see us you start to feel the future embodied whether you're having a coffee or you're literally coming to help us like persuade city leaders or to include them in a global 500 person workshop or whatever's going to come but really really that actually when you step into um Civic Square interlady would you start to feel feel bits of what the future could be like so you feel inspired connected and believe that really um that this regenerative renaissance is possible and not only is it possible it's right here it's right in our fingertips and it's irresistible and there's no other way that we should want to live um so on that note I just want to say huge thank you to everyone for for listening to me and to Kate and the others for just creating such a beautiful inspiring platform this evening thank you thank you Amy that's amazing uh the chat box is exploding with appreciation of your listening and building trust and as Shakhtari says that that reveals our own perceptual filters when we listen and we realize that none of us holds the whole view and you could learn so much from listening within community the play and do and kids and older kids and just the fun that just oozes out of all those photographs that you shared and people saying that you're role modeling how to create open playful invitations and it's exploding with inspiration um I'm going to ask one question that she somebody says can you tell us about some of the partner communities where you draw inspiration from from in the global south and just other places because I know you've got a lot of connections with organizations just do you want to just share too that you would say oh that's been an inspiration for us yeah so I would say um in the global south it's less about organizations and it's about the fact that most of us are in the diaspora from uh like the West Indies Caribbean and African countries um India Punjab like across us we're like one generation down so our connections are really like back to our roots and our families and we really try and manifest that here we have some particular relationships with indigenous peoples organizing like the Winnipeg bonus project or Angie Tangari in a small village in New Zealand that I've forgotten the name of right now um but Angie and Penny who we work with there are our incredible sources of inspiration so I'd say from the global south it's from literally having descended from there and being pretty much the first generation here and um more broadly we have some really intentional relationships across um you know indigenous organizing in yeah Winnipeg bonus project big up they are so incredible such an incredible Diane Reeson is just a is just a force of nature brilliant okay so I'm going to just pull us back and I'm actually going to invite Laude and Juan Carlos to bring on their cameras again and just bring the three of you here together you've never met before you've never heard each other stories before but I know there's going to be so much inspiration there because you've been taking on board the same ideas but applying them in such different levels in such different ways so actually I'm just going to invite Laude first just to if you wanted to give a reflection on what you've heard whether it's a question just to enjoy the the opportunity for the three of you to listen and learn and between each other oh thanks um really it's it's not easy just to react like this because I mean I need to to die just a bit what what I've heard and there was so many information and I had no clue about was what was what's going on in Croissau and in Birmingham and it's great thank you very much I learned so much I I took a lot of notes um because yeah it's it's not only that we worked on different levels we also took the the model from completely different perspective and with other questions and whether other inspirations and and that's great to I mean maybe that's really the sense of having this deal platform in order also to just not only to get inspired but just to open our minds and then yeah because sometimes I have to say I don't know for you Ron Carlos and Amy but here we sometimes we we're just stuck and we feel oh yeah but is it right do we really respect the the spirit of the donut um how should we go further and with whom and and we are a bit oh yeah but maybe we are alone on our island and really it's it's not easy uh and so yeah sometimes just maybe to to say oh yeah I need uh I need you know positive energy from you because I know maybe you're living something similar uh could be could be good so yeah thank you very much Ron Carlos some reactions and thoughts yeah no I couldn't agree more that I mean to see that other people also apply and to see similarities I like that I that I see many things that keep coming back and that is that we have to instead of going faster going slower and really think about what it is that we're doing and how all the connections between the things that we're doing are shaping the world around us and and we're right now three places well Amsterdam included is maybe four but I mean this is something that is growing I mean Kate is doing this in more places and we've had conversations also with the global south group which has also been super super interesting so this is something that is quite big and and and to see that there are like very specific so we need insights we need statistics we need trust we need these conversations these are things that um well they keep coming back they're they're they're necessary for for adopting new these new insights and these new inter linkages that the framework of the donor is providing on a specific note I think so what Amy made the the I don't know you call it a mill the globe I would love to do like a mill world tour of all the donut places and we do it maybe that you can sit in it for like more people and then you can have a conversation in there and maybe we can attach all the donut limits and foundations in it so people can actually like play with it in a 3d space I like that idea so if you can open source that design I don't know if you can find the the materials we can maybe even build it or something you know Amy if if you want to just reflect on anything that you heard or saw in what Laura was presenting or JC that you think aha could could bring this here oh my goodness I had so many aha moments I'm pretty like I'm not that emotional but I am quite an emotional person I'm definitely like trying to like not get super emotional right now because that was just incredible I was like oh my gosh JC I really need to like talk to you about this bit and and yeah and I can help with anything in terms of open source designs and things like that and then I'm listening to Laura talk about all the different scales and and the types of city leaders and how and what that looks like which is of course in our longer term plan and of what we want to want to do so I feel real gratitude for this I've been very very lucky to be part of open source communities for a long time and see the power of them particularly Lentness from wiki house where one design went out to the whole world people started building them improving them and putting them back on the platform and I just feel we were lucky to be part of the community design team that did some of the just some of the very early ideas we did none of the actual work of building it I'm just so delighted to see this so coming together and what I like is that it feels like in each of ours there was a different thing that was the superpower so like I could really sense what what we could learn from Brussels and I could really sense what we could learn from you JC and Curacao and and maybe there's something you could could learn from us and I just feel like when we put those together we start to like have just these these things and these cycles of momentum that I can't figure out how anyone's gonna like really push them down the next time unfortunately we're in a crisis that's a bit more serious and we need to grab the ideas and the people and the global connections and solidarity so I feel over the moon I just want to say thank you for bringing this together and I'm literally beaming because this is just the power of of of what happens when you connect like this across the world and so yeah wonderful and thank you so much for for making it happen and for all your work brilliant we have about 10 minutes and so I want to invite each one of you just to conclude with one thought and I'm going to ask I'm just thinking of everybody else who I can see the chat box and so excited and motivated and people want to do this where they are on their scale and because you've just gone from you know nation island to massive capital city region to a very specific maybe we've really ranged across the possibilities here and of course there's always many many more but in terms of inspiring those who are also on this conversation I'm going to ask each of you to share either one thing that now that you've done as much work as you've done that you think aha if I if I was beginning this all over again I would do that differently so what have you learned that you a top tip for something you'd have done differently if you if you could go back and start it again or if you'd rather share an encouragement someone saying I I want to get going and I just how where should I start that inspiration of how to start a really smart first step so either something you would do differently or a really smart first step and I'm going to go actually get in the same order that you three presented so Lord um yeah maybe I will I will explain something I would advise to do in a different way uh because I think at the beginning of our project we we lost a bit of time just trying to understand so I mean so much to we spent a lot of time just trying to to be sure that yeah we understood the concept and so on and the what I if I had to start again I would love to experiment um earlier to to go directly into into action uh and maybe that's what you in me you you did just starting from what is there uh and not spending time just to yeah what is what does it mean how could we do and if we work with this and with this one so yeah just go and experiment take a few people around the table and just put the four lenses or the dollars in the middle and just put anything in the middle and then that's from there that you will learn many things okay let's fabulous JC I'm muted I'm sorry um so uh yeah Lord kind of took away uh the words out of my mouth kind of thing so I would say action um so if um so I wouldn't have a tip or a top I would have I would just say so if you're doubting thinking uh on how to apply this I think the best way is just to do it um I really think that the um so Kate writes wonderfully and a very insightful book but I think when you apply it you will see um it's uh yeah it's capacity to really resonate to really bring people to a bigger perspective a more integral kind of view of of the world of themselves positioned in the world so I really think um go to the deal website so action right now action steps would be go to the deal website find the tools that you need translate them to your local context and see what happens you know um I would really and and then adapt to the situation and find a way that uh flows better with with the way that people locally might organize themselves so yeah I definitely yeah would say that plastic any um my button popped off earlier off my dungaree so the thing I would do differently is not eat as many donuts um along the way because actually turned out those aren't the ones that are good for you like I ate a lot of them along the way um but what I would uh what I would um say is yeah absolutely start where you are and you know like I know it sounds we talk a lot about the boring revolution with some of our partners um at dark matter like you know if that's in the in the in a process or in a tiny reframe or in a little contract and you're like oh look I've changed the the purpose of this and then you use that to bring people back great if it's sitting in the park with boards with paintings and just see what happens if it's um you know just getting involved in somebody else's work uh if it's just turning up and showing uh support and reinforcing the ideas start where you are like um it can become quickly overwhelming I think the possibility people are really attracted to the donut so I would say and that's wonderful right but like it's not possible for everyone to organize in in these like in these ways so go to the platform find other people and build hyper local local city level national global solidarities ask for what you need and I think there's a real sense that people want to come together I mean I am just like if you want to come down to Ladywood be 16 in Birmingham and get involved there is no shortage of things that we can do so try not to be overwhelmed by how much you think you might need to know and and just start where you are and get involved and get going and and I really feel like the the community the global community um and and the momentum will draw the right people to you and and start something we probably could never have imagined when you first open the pages of the book such such wise advice from all three of you so to just wrap this up first of all I would just hugely want to thank the three of you Lord and JC and Emmy for your leadership actually and your pioneering vision to start putting these ideas into practice in a way that's so clearly inspiring to so many people on this call but also through sharing it on deals platform you are making that peer-to-peer inspiration ripple very far and wide I've seen people in the chat box here saying right I'm going to go and do this in my neighborhood in this in Bogota I'm going to go and do this in my university community in New Zealand and I'm sure there's many many more popping up people have also been writing and dropping messages to me saying how can we find out how we're applying the model where we are please join the deal community join the deal community because that makes you remember in connection with all of these people here you can use all the tools on the platform and then we ask for reciprocity please share back your adaptations please share back your learning because that's exactly what these three folks have done today it's the reciprocity of sharing back which is just mind-blowingly inspiring and also I want to say that the tools that I shared especially the ones in week two of those four lenses of downscaling the doughnuts at the level of the city we at deal are currently finalizing that as a tool that we're then going to release within the next couple of months so that's going to be a tool that you can absolutely take into your community into your nation into your city and start to use that apply it to a sector whether it's food or transport or housing or youth use those lenses so I just want to I want to keep these three friends and folks on the screen Lord and JC and in me while I wrap up because it's very symbolic to me that again we began this course with the doughnut as a concept on a stick a picture in a book and we've been on a journey that has ended up with us here hearing from incredible changemakers and there are many many more amazing changemakers who are putting their ideas into practice this is what it means to make an idea come to life it means to take it off the page and start actually bringing it to life and as somebody said at the beginning it's gritty and it's step by step and the the the gold dust is never quite where you might have thought it was it turns out it's somewhere else and follow it and pursue it and take huge inspiration from everything you've seen today please share back and please keep joining the community and I'm so delighted this has been the first course that I've offered in the principles of doughnut economics here embedded in the masters of regenerative action at Uubicaty University but it's just been a brilliant experience we will of course share the presentations on the course website so that you can go back over them and read and see those images and really learn from the wisdom that's been shared here today so thank you so much to all three of you thank you to everybody who joined this course and who's been here throughout and gone on this ride with us because it's been brilliant fun so I'm going to hand back over now to Jim Garrison to help close this wonderful module of this course thank you so much everybody thank you Kate, Lore, MND, JC this has been brilliant this has been just brilliant and two things come to mind from everything that's been said one is that you just start as you've all indicated and you just move with the current and with the opportunity and it gets more and more wonderful and I think one of you said you know there's it's very easy and there are no side effects you know it's just what what is obvious and common sensical to the entire human race and the supreme irony of human consciousness right now is it's still a minority point of view and that leads to the second point that I think MND you mentioned in your last comment the next crisis is going to be deeper than the one we're in now and the deeper the crises that confront us the more obvious doughnut economics will become to more and more people so those of you and I include everybody on the call because I've been tracking the chats and there's stuff happening all over the world and you've been inspiring activity all over the more we do this as the cascade of crises that we surely know are coming fall upon us it's our immersion in doughnut economics and regenerative action that is actually our survival pathway through what's coming and I think that's just a very important point for us to take in it is not only that it's the right thing to do it is the thing that is going to give us the greatest both comfort community and survivability as we all navigate through the challenges that are escalating all around us and that's why we've come together with Kate and the doughnut Experimental Action Lab and the University of International Cooperation and Green Project Management and Capital Institute and scores of organizations around the world linking to bio regions linking to integral cities so that as we move into the future there's a growing community of practitioners that are developing content together developing practice together and developing community together as we move forward with what we know needs to be done and that's was the impulse for this entire masters in regenerative action and we want to thank you Kate for launching us into the program over the summer in the fall we're going to have more courses we'll have surveys on regeneration with Ed Muller we'll have a course from Vandana Shiva on regenerative farming and agriculture we're going to have the the development of an incubator accelerator and investment fund because the whole point of the MRA is not to produce a master's thesis to show how much you know but to develop impact projects to show how much what you know can make a regenerative difference where you are and in order for that to happen we need to have incubators we need to have accelerators we need to have an investment fund because the projects that will come out of this MRA aren't going to end with the end of the course the MRA will be simply a launch into the future that may become your vocation certainly your application in a badly fractured world so we're designing the MRA in a comprehensive way so that it's not only linking knowledge with action but is really supporting the action in a way that will ensure your success way beyond what you've learned here let me close by saying that next week even though Kate's course is now over next week we want to have an open house because we want all the students that have signed up and those of you who are contemplating registering for the master's in regenerative action to have an opportunity to meet some of the other faculty to talk about the course and to you know be introduced to to one another so we'll be sending out in the next day or two an invitation to all of you who've signed up for this open house uh ubiquity university has oriented its entire institutional framework around regenerative action because we believe that this next decade the decade of the 2020s is going to be in all probability the most consequential decade in the history of the human species because the accumulated behavior of our species has brought our species to the brink of self-destruction that's what's true and so every choice we make every act we commit at this time is reverberating out through the entire global system with effects and we need to be conscious about that we need to be aware of that and we need to understand that all that we think and say and do needs to somehow support the regeneration of community and planet and there's no more simple and compelling and practical way to do that to then to embrace the doughnut so Kate as we close this course I want to honor you for the genius of your simplicity because you've given us both a symbol and a way forward that no matter where you are who you are or what you're doing doughnut economics works and it's not just in economics it's in every sphere of human society so to be able to launch our MRA with with your course has been a deep honor and privilege and we thank you uh and we thank uh Imandeep uh Lore and uh Juan Carlos for uh supporting this as we come to a close it's been marvelous uh and it's given us now the foundation uh for moving into the future so thank you everyone uh we'll see you in our next course and and uh we'll be in touch shortly about the open house uh next week bye for now