How do we engage children in meaningful and participative learning experiences?

For over 20 years, Waste Watch has been delivering schools programmes up and down the country.  Our aim has always been to help provide children and young people with the knowledge, skills and values that enable them to participate in building a just, fair and green society.

Traditionally, this has been approached through programmes which focus on delivering fun, hands on quality learning activities; mainly assemblies and workshops linked to the national curriculum.  While we strongly believe in the importance of interactive, engaging learning we have come to realise that simply focusing on the content of the activities alone rather than the way in which they delivered and link together will not fully achieve these aims.

Reflecting on this as an education team, and an organisation as a whole, has led us to rethink and develop the way we approach our projects. We now favour an action learning approach.
Lessons are designed to take children and young people on a journey from being initially enthused about the topic at hand, through to exploring and connecting their knowledge and experiences. This approach provides young people and children with the opportunity to not only develop their own understanding around an issue but the ability to reflect and develop their own strategies that can take forward.
This is not to say that we should cease to deliver or recognise the importance of standalone workshops that take sustainability issues to children and young people, but instead we need to rethink our approach when the aim is to create real changes in attitudes and behaviour.

The Waste Watch conference this year is structured around an agenda based on the action learning cycle and The Otesha Project UK, a youth-led charity that helps young people become agents of change, will present their approach at our conference.

Create Change with Communities

One of the estates involved with Our Common Place is Ethelburga, it is just off Battersea Park in the north end of Wandsworth borough. When we arrived there back in August 2011 we were introduced to one of the Residents Associations (RA). We attended a couple of their meetings, held one of our own and listened to the key issues affecting the estate. The meetings were held in a small room, with bare white walls, adjacent to the community hall, no more than ten people attended but we could sense a desire to create change.

We listened carefully, wanting to get to know what life is like at Ethelburga, what people were concerned about, what they wanted to change and what fun activities they might have in mind for the future. One of our guiding principles at Waste Watch is to create change with communities; with this in mind we brainstormed what we might be able to do together over the course of the next six months.

Starting with waste as an issue, the first initiative chosen was a consultation with fellow residents. With permission from Wandsworth council already granted, the task was to engage with residents of the 26 level Ethelburga tower on turning the refuse chute into a recycling chute. We stood back as the RA set themselves up in the lobby of the tower to talk to passing residents about the advantages of converting the chute. They took the chance to also promote recycling and sign up new members to the RA. They met lots of new faces and updated existing members on the new projects that were starting up.

A Give and Take Day for the estate and surrounding streets was next on the list. The group hired the local community centre and invited residents to come and swap items they no longer wanted with their neighbours. Swap shops, Give and Takes and Swishing are growing in popularity; they divert waste from landfill and create an opportunity for wider discussion on the benefits of re-use and recycling. Attendees were incredibly generous in donating and sharing items and the RA were inspired to hold these more regularly.

Enthused by both the lobbying activity and the Give and Take day, the RA committee have made a really interesting step. No longer are they holding their meetings behind closed doors where they struggle to attract new people to join in the conversations. The two initiatives have blended together so that RA meetings are now held in the lobby of the tower at busy times, they are free for anyone to come along to and residents are encouraged to bring items as well as ideas to share with their neighbours. We had an email from the RA this morning telling us that they held a meeting in the lobby last week, 28 people dropped by!

Learning from the future as it emerges

On the ‘next practice’ page of our website we admit that, when it comes to designing approaches that create positive social and environmental change ‘we don’t have all the answers’ and that ‘we need like-minded individuals and organisations to join us in a collective call for change.’ Dr. Otto Scharmer, a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), encourages us to learn from the future as it emerges; rather than seeking to learn and download patterns from the past. In his work on the Theory U, Scharmer explains how the most successful creators of change are those with an open mind, open heart and open will. They are able to innovate by being brave enough to overcome three enemies: the voice of judgement (shutting down the mind), the voice of cynicism (shutting down the heart) and the voice of fear (shutting down the will). Once they have overcome these, they are also able to ask themselves what is my Self and what is my Work? He uses a capital ‘S’ to emphasise the difference between the small s ‘self’ of ego and the capital S ‘Self’ of the highest possible future, similar to what Maslow referred to as Self-Actualisation.  The small w ‘work’ is a job, something that keeps us occupied from nine till five. Whereas, asking what my capital W ‘Work’ is, is to ask what is my purpose, or calling, what am I on this Earth to do?

Asking oneself as an individual or an organisation how they would like to be defined and what their purpose is allows them to look forward, rather than back. It allows them to imagine future scenarios and how they will not only operate within them, but also be instrumental in bringing them about. They are open to change happening and ready to let the future in. This state, when we have let go of the past and are waiting for the future to emerge, is a state Scharmer and colleagues call ‘presencing’. In it we are pre-‘sensing’ the future. Schramer reports how an economist, Brian Arthur, told him of a three step process that goes on while we are in this state.

The first step is to observe, observe, observe. This involves letting go of the baggage of history and trends, it is about being absolutely present in the here and now. There is a need here to recognise exactly the potential of what is in front of you and to de-construct the cognitive frames which simplify – but possibly distort – the true picture. The second step is to retreat and reflect and to ask ‘what wants to emerge here?’ Once something comes into view, we must take the third step: Act quickly to explore the future by doing.

This resembles very closely Waste Watch’s own approach towards change. Where we recognise that in an ever changing world what is usually referred to ‘best practice’ can never be a constant and needs to shift and evolve. Instead we need to stop and observe the bigger picture. Waste Watch underwent a retreat in 2009 to reflect on what we had achieved as a charity over the last 22 years and where short-comings were present. We re-emerged with a new strategic direction and our soon to be published ‘Next Practice Framework’, a guide to applying what we believe needs to emerge if we are to rise to the social, environmental and economic challenges of today.

Finally we need to put this into practice through applying ‘next practice’ to our own and our partners work. Stints of doing go on all the time as we make the practical innovations that help to create the gradual transition from Best Practice to Next Practice across our programmes. To use Scharmer’s terminology, we ‘crystallise’ a vision and intent and ‘prototype’ new ways of working. These ‘Next practice’ prototypes will hopefully create a positive evidence base which we will advocate internally and externally to create change. The result being a modification of Best Practice, so that, in a cycle, Next Practice shapes Best Practice, which is modified again by more Next Practice and so on. This graphic nicely explains how to put Theory U into practice; it links very closely to Action Research. Perhaps we can call it participatory learning for sustainability?

 

Give and Take Day

Since September, I have been volunteering at a series of Give and Take Days organised by the charity Waste Watch. The aim of the three month campaign, which ran across seven North London boroughs, was to encourage the reuse of unwanted items within the local community, divert reusable items from landfill and improve community cohesion.

The events, which were held at schools, churches and community halls, the focus was on local issues, but for me the idea represents a very global issue. It occurred to me while volunteering that the Give and Take Days highlight one of the biggest problems we have in the world today relating to resources. When people talk about resources they often refer to the concerns we have regarding the shortage of materials left in the world. However, in my opinion, the problem lies within the spread and distribution of resources. This was shown through many examples of people attending the Give and Take days. To generalise, there were those who came purely to give large amounts of good quality items they no longer needed (perhaps because they could afford to upgrade to a newer model) and there were others who came in search of second hand items that they may not have been able to buy new from the shops. It was a refreshing experience to see resources in a positive light and to celebrate what people do have and what they can give to others who have less than themselves. Totting up the weights of items at the end of the day showed us how many tonnes had not only been saved from a landfill site, but also how much had been redistributed within the local community.

As you would expect from any free-for-all event there was quite often a bit of hustle and bustle at the beginning of the Take session. For example, at busier events we used decorative bunting to create a starting line to hold back eager attendees who with their eyes peeled for prize items were chomping on the bit as they waited whilst the minutes ticked away until the Take session began. This gentle ruckus helped to keep us volunteers on our toes and also developed our crowd control skills. Although all the argy-bargy behaviour was resolved with the greatest professionalism, we couldn’t help but be amused by some of the mild disputes that occasionally broke out. Thankfully, the few ‘but I saw it first’ misunderstandings were calmly negotiated and settled amicably for all parties.

As a volunteer it was very rewarding to see large volumes of items being redistributed and passed on to new homes. On one occasion, deciding to make the most of a quiet moment at the donations table, I went see what had been left after the initial rush of taking. While leafing through a couple of old books a young girl came up me and asked if she could take a book. I replied enthusiastically that she could take a handful, if she wanted.  She informed me that she only needed one. When I asked her about the book she had chosen – a Jacqueline Wilson classic that I remember pouring over excitedly as a teenager – she remarked:

 ‘I am taking it for my little sister because they are her favourite books and I didn’t have enough pocket money to buy her one for her birthday.’

For me, this sum up the whole aim of the Give and Take days, giving all that you can, taking only what you need and being grateful for what you have received.

Glutney

As community engagement volunteers, the North Yorkshire Rotters promote home composting and the Love Food Hate Waste programme to communities and residents of North Yorkshire. At roadshows the volunteers provide advice along with handing out leaflets, recipe books and packs in droves, and we always receive very positive feedback from this. This static type of stall serves a purpose and is easy to set up; and paired with branded banners and signs, it always draws attention.
But we wanted to do more than this! In order to inspire the public to use up that glut of veg, and conjure up a delicious meal from leftovers from our recipe cards, what better way is there than to let them taste the delights first?

So to encourage and inspire the people of North Yorkshire, The North Yorkshire Rotters and Volunteer Coordinator have started to take “tasters” with matching recipe cards to events. Recipes include Glutney chutney (see step by step guide below), Chocolate Fridge Cake and a Seasonal Toffee Apple Crumble.
The first event was a festive food market in the North Yorkshire town of Thirsk…
And who knew the power of free tasters? Despite being a cool Thursday night in October, people came in their droves and they not only tasted our delights, they wanted to buy our offerings and snapped up the recipe cards! We gave away over 150 copies of each recipe and ran out of tasters!

We plan on continuing this engagement tactic and are already planning a spiced pumpkin soup with sweet and savoury pumpkin seed snacks for a big fair in November, turkey and cranberry parcels and Christmas pudding strudel for Christmas events! Watch out for the culinary take over happening in North Yorkshire!

Glutney recipe

Are you bored of the same old vegetable dishes this autumn? Follow our step by step guide and make some Glutney, a great recipe for chutney, using whatever’s in season, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Ingredients

Makes 5 jars

• Spice bag – 1/2 teaspoon each of cloves, black peppercorns Black peppercorns
• 675g courgettes and marrow OR pumpkin, peeled and diced into 1cm pieces
• 675g over-ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped OR
• 675g over-ripe plums, stoned and chopped
• 675g bruised or shrivelled apples
• 250g onions, peeled and roughly chopped
• 375ml white wine or cider vinegar
• 200ml water
• 1-2 teaspoons dried chilli flakes
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 250g raisins .
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 250g light brown sugar

Method

1. Make up a spice bag by tying the spices into a square of muslin.
2. Place all other ingredients into a large, heavy pan. Add the spice bag to the pan, pushing it to the middle.
3. Heat gently, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Bring to the boil slowly then simmer on a low heat for about 1 hour, stirring regularly to stop it burning on the bottom of the pan.
4. The chutney’s ready when rich, thick and reduced, and parts to reveal the base of the pan when a wooden spoon is dragged through it. If it starts to dry out before this stage, add a little boiling water.
5. Place in sterilised jars with plastic coated screwtop lids while still warm but not boiling hot

Enjoy with cheese, cold meat or simply on crackers!

Recipe available: http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/recipes/show/85-glutney

Incentivizing recycling

There are many different ways to promote recycling and to encourage people to recycle more. This article explores whether we should provide incentives in the form of coupons and vouchers to motivate people to recycle. It is an interesting debate and one that often pops up in our community engagement work. The case for is that incentives can work, the case against is that consumerist values are reinforced. Would be interested to know how people feel about this one?

Locking out contamination AND recyclables?

A repetitive saga emerging as we progress with the Our Common Place project is the ongoing question: to lock or not to lock our recycling bins?

The most common recycling bin provided to flats in London look like this:

These serve approximately 40 flats each and are positioned as strategically as possible around an estate. To prevent the bins becoming contaminated with black bin bags, builders waste, etc the orange lid is meant to be kept locked. Recyclables are supposed to enter the bin through a smaller opening in the lid itself, just about big enough for a standard carrier bag: 

Residents are provided with reusable bags (you can see one in someone’s hand above) which, once full, are supposed to be emptied out into the bin. If you’ve got a lot of people in your household you could be doing this almost every day. Resident’s understandably find this a bit too much of a chore. Instead they collect bin bag size orange sacks (intended for kerbside collections) from local libraries and fill these up at home before dumping the entire sack in the recycling bin (if it is left unlocked).

On the estates we’ve been working on, we’ve found that around 90% of bins are unlocked; there are several reasons why. Firstly, the collection crews recognize that although contamination levels are certainly lower when bin lids are locked, the amount of recycling is significantly lower than in unlocked bins. They therefore leave them unlocked. A second reason for doing this is that locked bins tend to attract all sorts of fly-tipping. Residents who have brought an orange sack to the bin only to find it locked tend to just leave the orange sack on top of the bin or next to it instead of opening it up and emptying it piece by piece through the smaller slot. The orange sacks are quickly joined by all sorts of other things:

Thirdly, disgruntled residents occasionally take matters into their own hands and break off padlocks to allow them to fully open lid.

This is a real dilemma for the waste and recycling teams, do they leave the lids open to increase tonnages or keep them locked to lower contamination rates? The use of the large orange sacks is coming to be perceived by many residents to be standard practice despite efforts to encourage use of the smaller reusable bags. The physical effort needed to lug an orange sack down a few flights of stairs before holding a heavy bin lid open with one hand and hurling the sack in with the other is a clear deterrent.

On the Our Common Place project we are trying to improve performance with the service that currently exists. It’s a ‘hearts and minds’ project. At the moment, this means working with an imperfect system and mostly unlocked bins. We’re trying to help residents face this reality and encourage them to recycle more and better inspite of it. One of the campaigns we’re going to try is help a neighour where we get two households together to see if they can work together to overcome the barriers and recycle better.

So, part of what we’re doing is highlighting how good recycling performance is just one indicator of a strong community. We’re working alongside those already trying to strengthen community hoping that improved recycling performance will be one of the outcomes. As the campaign in East London says Recycle For Your Community

To the MRF!

Morgan Phillips Our Common Place Team Leader

Tracey (our lovely new Comms manager) and I had a tour of the Recycle Western Riverside MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) last week. It was a real eye-opener about how big a problem the contamination of recycling is. Special mention here for Shredded Paper and bottle tops, it is really hard for the MRF to separate them from the broken up glass they collect. The pile of glass that comes out the end of the process is quite literally littered with plastic bottle tops and tiny strips of paper!

Through Our Common Place, we’re working from values to encourage people living on estates to recycle more and better. People putting the wrong things in their recycling bin, is not just an issue of a lack of information, it is also sadly because people just don’t seem that bothered about it. During our pre-project recycle bin monitoring we’ve found all sorts of the wrong things in the bins from broken kitchen tiles and food waste to old clothes and toys. Yesterday, I even found a large cuddly turtle teddy bear!

Whenever you recycle, please spare a thought for the people who have to work at the MRF, although the machines do most of the separation, there are also about 20 people working 8 hour shifts sorting waste by hand. If you improve your recycling habits for no other reason, improve them to make the work of these people a little easier.

If you’d like to find out more about the Our Common Place project, or more details about going on a tour of the MRF, please contact me by email to: morgan.phillips@wastewatch.org.uk

Mushroom for manoeuvre

Olly Wright, Environmental Consultant

If your household is anything like mine, as spring’s welcoming warmth filters into the air all manner of hopeful plans are bandied about. These range from the wildly fanciful (“I’m gonna, like, buy an old camper van and do it up…”) to the merely optimistic (“I’m going to cycle/walk/insert appropriate exercise here more this summer. I mean it this time”).

One common theme, to which the community volunteers on our Love Food Hate Waste and Home Composting programmes will attest, is getting out in the garden. At Waste Watch Towers, we thoroughly approve of gardening: it has health, social and environmental benefits and, best of all, if you play your cards right you can grow your own food. Thanks to a little bit of hard work for which I can claim virtually no credit, the tiny strips of soil in my back yard – once home only to cat faeces and a perplexing number of monkey nuts – now house potatoes, onions, lettuces and a variety of herbs. And, regrettably, still cat faeces. But hey, baby steps and all that.

My contribution to this burgeoning feast-in-waiting was to open a hitherto unused Christmas present: a Grow-Your-Own-Mushroom kit.

They were looking for a present for a fun guy.

Whilst it may be a little bit of a stretch to call this gardening, the progress of the mushrooms over the next couple of weeks will be fascinating, and for this reason, and in the name of sustainable food, I have decided to document their progress in blog form. I’ll be taking photos at key stages and inserting them, along with mushroomy nuggets such as recipes, fun facts, and possibly some screenshots of Super Mario games – I haven’t decided yet.

Day 1: Sunday 3 April

Today’s job was to decant the mycelium-filled compost into the cardboard tray and spread it evenly:

Composting 101: always wear gloves.

It will now sit in a warm place, kept moist, for a couple of days prior to the addition of the bag of mushroom peat. That “warm place” happens to be my bedroom – I am expecting fungi-filled dreams for the next couple of nights.

Today’s mushroomy nugget comes courtesy of our Education Programme Manager, Nicola: “whether mushrooms are wild or cultivated they continue to grow after they are picked. People sometimes mistake a thin white material called mycelium for mould, but rest assured it probably is the mycelium growing”. This and other facts can be found at http://www.forestmushrooms.com/facts.html.

Day 5: Thursday 7 April

With the mushroom compost having ripened like a fine wine for a few days, today’s task was to deposit the peat on top of it.

The use of peat is in itself, of course, potentially controversial. No details are provided on the source of Unwins’ peat; however, for expert stances on the use of peat you can read what Defra and the RHS have to say, here and here respectively. In the meantime, the peat was tipped in as planned:

Under the watchful gaze of next door’s kitten:

Not at all distracting, this one.

Once covered, the peat and compost was sprayed with water. Research has shown that whilst mushroom boxes thrive on being sprayed with water, cats definitely do not; the kitten wisely steered clear at this stage.

The mixture will now live in a cool place indoors for a couple of weeks – AKA my kitchen, a place much more accustomed to housing mushrooms (and mercifully reducing the risk of putting my foot into a bucket of compost). In celebration of the union of mushrooms-in-waiting and the kitchen, why not try this recipe provided by our Sustainability Coordinator, Rebecca (though technically invented by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall):

http://www.channel4.com/food/recipes/chefs/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall/mushroom-and-milk-soup-with-brown-sauce-sausage-meatballs-and-bacon-rind-croutons-recipe_p_1.html

Day 7: Saturday 9 April

Two days later, there was not too much visible progress on the mushroom front. This relative lack of fungal development didn’t deter the seemingly ever-present kitten.

Returning to the subject of peat: B&Q is setting targets to eliminate the use of peat in its products (from bagged media by 2020, and from professional horticulture by 2030). To this end, the Zero Peat Challenge – a brief and discussion forum – has been set up on eco-networking site 2degrees to discuss sustainable alternatives. If you are a member, log in to contribute to the discussion or (if you are a relative ignoramus like me) just lurk and read what people have to say.

 All that remained was to give the mushrooms another spray…

… And ponder, as promised, the mushrooms in Super Mario games. Cast your mind back to the glory days of the NES, possibly the first-generation Game Boy… how many different types of mushroom were there? I think I can remember three, at a push. Prepare to marvel, then, both at Nintendo’s prolificacy and the amount of time people have on their hands…. and click here.

Will putting a value on nature’s services for society serve nature’s best interest?

Tim Burns, Head of Community Engagement

We have just seen a flurry of policy activity released aiming to protect nature by placing an economic value on the critical services it provides humans. Last week DEFRA released three papers from the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and it was a hotly debated topic at last week’s UN Biodiversity Summit in Japan. This is part of a global movement initiated in 2007 and lead by the G8+5 countries, the World Bank and the UN Environmental Programme. The original goal was to initiate the:

“process of analysing the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the cost of effective conservation”

At its heart it aims to restructure the economy through putting a value on ecosystem services that we currently take for granted as being free. For example because of overfishing we are reducing the potential income from fish stocks by $50bn annually, or halving deforestation rates by 2030 would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and therefore avoid climate change damages estimated at $3.7 trillion.

This could shift our economy to price in the environment costs of goods and services that are currently excluded, for example the associated climate change, land, water and energy costs into our food consumption for high impact foods such as coffee, meat and air freighted vegetables.
Whilst Waste Watch broadly supports activities that shift the world towards a greener economy, we have key unanswered questions and concerns about this approach:

1. It stipulates that for nature to be valued it must provide a service for humans rather than having inherently value in itself
2. How do we make sure the costs of nature truly reflect their worth to society (now and in the future, rich and poor societies)
3. What about social capital – how do we cost this into the equation?
4. Whilst valuing nature’s services will price in environmental externalities into our economy, the economy is still built upon increasing production and growth. For growth to occur something has to give – this will inevitably be social or environmental capital.

The findings of DEFRAs National Ecosystem Assessment are feeding into DEFRAs Natural Environment White Paper. This is currently out for public consultation until the 30 October 2010. This is a key document from which much of UK environmental thinking and policy will stem from so make sure you get your views, concerns and viewpoints across quickly.