18: Local heroes: spotlighting Glasgow's local climate activists
We meet people taking action in their communities to tackle climate change. We hear about their important work fighting locally against the climate emergency, and the wider impacts this work is having. Fraser records at the home of the Pollokshields Community Trust, with Bill Fraser, and South Seeds manager Lucy Gillie. Also in this episode, our first interactive Future or Fiction - listen to find out how to play along!
Episode Transcript
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.
Fraser: And I’m Fraser Stewart and welcome to Local Zero.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: This week, Matt is off on his holidays, so Fraser and I have decided to run things a little bit differently. While the cat’s away, the mice will play, eh, Fraser?
Fraser: That’s right. We’re going to be shaking things up as I get out and about to talk to actual people in person about how they’re working in their communities to create real social and environmental change.
Rebecca: We’ll hear stories from Lucy Gillie and Bill Fraser about how they’re working to support their communities heat their homes, grow local food and support the environment and each other all at the local level. We’ll explore how this is putting their communities on a pathway to a more sustainable but also a healthier, happier and more enjoyable future.
Fraser: And that’s not all. We’ll also be running our first ever interactive Future or Fiction? So stay tuned to find out how to get involved.
[Music flourish]
As always, you can reach out to us on our dedicated Twitter handle if you haven’t already. Go and find and follow us @LocalZeroPod to get involved with the discussions there. Also, you can email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you need more than 280 characters to share your thoughts.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So, Fraser, it’s just the two of us this week then. Matt is galavanting about in the sunshine.
Fraser: I know. Doesn’t it feel like the teacher has just had enough, gone away and left the classroom to get on with it?
Rebecca: I know and he’s left us no notes for this week [laughter]. Where are Matt’s reams and reams of yellow pages?
Fraser: I know [laughter]. We actually had to do our own background for this episode [laughter]. It was torture. Never again.
Rebecca: I know. Matt, come back. We’re sure you’re having a wonderful time in the sunshine with your family but we miss you, so please come back. But whilst you are not here, we decided to do things a bit differently, didn’t we, Fraser? So let’s talk about that and how today is going to be different from our usual episodes. One thing that really excites me is that today, we’re going to be talking about real action that’s actually happening in our local community. So most of these pods have focused so far on some of the really critical topics that we’re all going to be facing as we try and deliver local climate action and address climate change and so on but we usually delve into the challenges and how we can overcome these. Today, we’re putting that on its head and we’re actually talking about what’s being done already.
Fraser: That’s it. It’s a different way of doing an episode; whereas, like you say, we can often focus quite a lot not just on the barriers and challenges but at a high-level conversation which is important, which has its place and which has led to some really, really amazing conversations with amazing people. But what we’ve seen a little bit less of is the action that’s actually happening within communities. The people that we’ve talked to today, which we’ll get into in a little bit... some place like the Southside of Glasgow where so much action is happening holistically to combat the climate emergency locally but also real embedded community work that’s going on as well. It’s the type of stuff really that Local Zero is all about I think.
Rebecca: I mean even more importantly, we’re talking about community action, you actually got to go out and be in the community with this which is so exciting in and of itself, right?
Fraser: I got to talk to human people face-to-face...
Rebecca: Wow!
Fraser: ...without having to worry too much, I guess. It was amazing which is another reason why I think this episode is a little bit different and it is quite exciting because it’s a different kind of conversation. It’s happening in the community and in the spaces where the community action is also taking place. Also, it’s an episode that is pretty much just me which I think, if I’m not mistaken, the fans have been crying out for this whole time [laughter].
Rebecca: I see your head getting bigger and bigger [laughter].
Fraser: ‘More Fraser.’ [Laughter] You’re right, it’s being able to be in the space with people like Lucy and Bill who are stalwarts in this community around this type of action. I’ve known both of them for the last little while. Bill, I work closely with on Glasgow Community Energy and so it was also as much as shining a light on the work that they do and the enormous amount of different kinds of benefits that that work has, it’s a very warm and a very practical conversation that I hope the listeners can take a lot from.
Rebecca: So let’s talk a little bit more about our guests. Lucy is a returner to Local Zero. We’ve heard a little bit about some of the work that she’s been leading with South Seeds but share with us a bit more. What’s their focus? What really drives South Seeds?
Fraser: South Seeds is a local community project in Glasgow that covers a range of different environmentally-focused issues. They do a lot of work around energy efficiency in fuel-poor households. They do a lot of community gardening, growing and sharing. They run the local tool library, for instance. They do a lot of outreach events with the community. Their main driving motivation, when they began, with the big work that they do, is around affordable energy and efficient energy within the local tenement stock in Glasgow. As most people know, it’s a huge built-up place with old tenement buildings. So they work at improving efficiency and reducing energy bills for people who are at the furthest and narrowest margins in society.
Rebecca: Bill Fraser is working in a slightly different but related area. Tell us a little bit more about the work he’s doing.
Fraser: Bill is the OG in local community activism in the Southside of Glasgow. He really is. Bill runs the Pollokshields Trust which is a local community organisation that operates out of The Bowling Green. Bill tells us a little bit about this in the interview but The Bowling Green began a few years ago as a little bit of local green space in the area of Pollokshields which is the area that Bill lives in. They realised that they had next to no green space and really limited access to that. The parks and the larger green spaces were far away for people to travel to, especially for locals with disabilities, mothers with kids and things like that. They wanted to build green space that would reflect community needs and it’s built very much on the network that Bill and countless others in that community put together, including local anti-poverty campaigners and people in the Asian community that run food networks around there as well. A real melting pot of people came together to create this space that is now used for things ranging from community gardening to cycle-to-work schemes, to different climate outreach events and all kinds of stuff in between. So it’s a much more community-based operation but very much motivated by that desire to reach out to the local community and to bring people along as they start to take climate and environmental action locally.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So, Fraser, I think we’d better jump into your interview. I can’t wait to hear what Bill and Lucy had to say about the work they’re leading in their communities.
[Music flourish]
Lucy: Hi, I’m Lucy Gillie from South Seeds.
Bill: Hi, I’m Bill Fraser from the Pollokshields Trust.
Fraser: We’re down at The Bowling Green today doing an interview in person, would you believe, in these trying times? I think it’s only fair, since we’re at The Bowling Green, Bill, which is quite a hub for the work that you do at the Pollokshields Trust, if you can give us a little bit of background to The Bowling Green and to the work that you guys do down here.
Bill: Yeah, sure. About six years ago now, we actually did a charrette which is a sort of fancy word for a big and really intense enquiry about this area which is East Pollokshields. It’s quite a small area but it is a very challenged area in the sense that there is a lot of poverty here and there’s a lot of unemployment. We tried to find out what people really wanted from this and we had a long consultation session and produced a huge, great report. What happened was that we found people had very definite ideas about how they could make things better here, both socially and also business-wise. The first thing that we found out was that there was hardly any green space in the area. All the council maps showed differently but then they were looking at the wrong area. We worked out that there was the equivalent of one sheet of A4 paper per inhabitant of this area of free green space. Obviously, the first thing to do was to try and rectify that. This particular property was lying fallow for about eight years and we negotiated a deal with the landowner to take a lease on it and then develop a series of activities. Basically, how this works is that the community decides what they want to do. We have a small staff who administer it and make sure nothing falls off. We’ve targeted various groups who perhaps felt they didn’t have a voice and so we have groups ranging from school kids, who have outside classes here, and we do a lot of work with them on growing. We have Muslim women’s groups who want privacy to do their thing. We’ve got a community garden now which is just beginning to take off because the community garden is a very good place as it’s very universal. Whatever your religion or your background, nobody has bad things to say about gardens, so we’re going to be using it a lot now for growing food. Also, we’re working with the NHS on green prescribing which means that if you have got one of the first-world diseases like you’re too big, you’re drinking too much or eating too much, you go to the doctor, you get some pills for your cholesterol and your weight and then he’ll prescribe you three-days digging in the garden or words to that effect. That’s one of the things we’re very happy to do. Also, we provide spaces here and most of it, we provide to community units at no cost. We charge a little bit for people who’ve got money and need to get a fairly complicated space. We’re developing that as time goes on. We’ve been running this now in this format for about a year.
Fraser: Brilliant, brilliant. So there’s a clear green element to this along with a community element but also, interestingly, a health element that we’ll try and return to in a bit. Also, it’s worth saying that Bill and I work together on Glasgow Community Energy which we’ll definitely come back to but what I just found out, before we started recording, is that actually Bill and Lucy go back years and years as local community activists around here. So Lucy, talk us a bit through about what you do with South Seeds as well.
Lucy: South Seeds was set up by local community people who wanted to change the look and feel of the area and make it more sustainable. South Seeds is based in a different neighbourhood on Victoria Road. We’ve got a high-street premises but we also have community gardens. People come along to our community garden sessions but we have an energy service, so we can support people to reduce the energy in their homes and decarbonise their homes. We have a tool library and we’ve lent out over a thousand tools. We run short-life projects as well. Some of them are strategic about how we could bring low-carbon heat to the area and others are short-life projects about electric bikes or active travel, so quite a wide variety of stuff.
Fraser: For sure and, of course, it’s not just the only work that goes on in the area. This area of Southside, generally speaking, is bustling with other work. What I’ve noticed recently are more and more community gardens. It seems like something that we really enjoy around here. What do you think are the main benefits of that way of doing things? Why do you think there are so many community gardens on the Southside these days?
Lucy: I think it’s something that people can just get on with and make happen. It’s within their agency to transform a small piece of land into something that’s better through their effort. Often, creating a community garden is the first stage to finding a bit of ownership within that neighbourhood if that makes any sense.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah. Obviously, we know the big green side to a lot of the work that we’re doing but what’s the climate, or the environmental, or the green aspect of this? Was this your main motivation in the first instance or is it something more than that?
Bill: It started out as a place for people to congregate and get a community spirit going because there was nowhere. Technically, you could go to one of the huge, great parks we’ve got around here but only if you haven’t got a buggy and two small kids because you have to cross main roads to get there. Within the area, we’re working very much now and in the future on ‘20-minute neighbourhoods’ or ‘liveable neighbourhoods.’ That’s a theme we’re developing. You couldn’t just walk unimpeded and get to an area where you could let your kids run around or you could actually do something with your neighbours and get to know people but when we started here, we took a deliberate decision that we wouldn’t clear the land and make it back into a bowling green again with nicely clipped lawns. If you look around, you’ll see that we stick to the council's recommendations about rewilding. We don’t cut the hedges unless they have to be. We don’t cut the grass unless we have to. We’ve got plenty of those things that were deliberate policy because people do appreciate that. I don’t think most people say, ‘Oh, I want green,’ but they want to have the conditions in which they can do it.
Fraser: Do you find then that when people come and they get into the green space, whether that’s in a South Seeds garden or down here at The Bowling Green, they then start to warm towards more green ideas and green activities?
Lucy: Definitely. It’s sort of like a first step I think and people realise what they can do and what they can achieve. I think then often, people want more and they can see the value in it. Once they can see the value and they want more, then they’re much more minded to get involved in local campaigns or have an opinion on climate change or sustainability. It’s about showing people a practical way that they can start getting involved and then, later on, introducing some of the ideas and the concepts behind that.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah and, of course, like we said before, there’s no one thing that either the Pollokshields Trust or South Seeds do and something that I’ve always been really interested in, for you, especially Lucy, is the work around energy that you do at South Seeds as well. Despite the name, it’s not just about gardening and it’s not just about those local green spaces but there’s some direct advocacy work going on too. I was wondering if you could maybe talk us through that a little bit.
Lucy: With the energy, we’re sort of the opposite of what happened with the Pollokshields Trust. We’re ten years old, so we started off a while ago. We started off to enable people to live more sustainable lives and it’s still our aim at the moment but in doing that, we realised that you can’t just enable people to save carbon immediately. You are taking people on a journey and you have to engage people as the first point of that journey. So if you ask people, ‘Can I help you with energy in your home?’ people are going to come to you with issues about billing and all sorts of understanding of their meter, gas cards and keys, etcetera. We can do all that now. We’ve taught ourselves how to do that and that’s the same with the community gardens. It’s the first stage in understanding and getting engaged with energy efficiency in your home. It’s getting to grips with your bills, working out how much you actually consume, what you’re actually paying and then how you can change that. You can’t change something you don’t know what it is in the first place. Often, we find that there are so many cases of erroneous billing by energy companies. I think that’s even been noted by the BBC News lately and we see it all the time. If people are getting bills that are inaccurate, it’s very hard for them to get a grip on their energy anyway. Once we’ve engaged people on that, we introduce the idea of energy efficiency and where they can save money. Could they hang their clothes on a clothes pulley instead of drying them in a clothes dryer? Do they need curtains? Do they need new windows? What can they accomplish within their means and within the tenure that they live in? The service is bespoke really. We’re taking people from where they are and giving them the solutions that fit their lives.
Fraser: I think that’s really interesting and I guess, swapping into Local Zero hat and to maybe the Glasgow Community Energy hat, I’ve always been of the opinion that you can’t be overly prescriptive with these things, especially when you’re working at a local level and you’re trying to bring people in, whether that’s bringing people around to your way of thinking or if you just want to help people in their homes and in their lives, you can’t foist that onto someone and you can’t force onto someone. You have to listen and be empathetic and create space where, I guess, listening in solidarity can happen. I guess this is something that The Bowling Green does especially well as that collaborative space and that coming together space but there’s also the other side of it as well that we talked about before which is the health benefits to it and that’s physical or mental health presumably.
Bill: A lot of this goes back to that wonderful phrase ‘community empowerment.’ The government is always talking about community empowerment and how things must be built from the bottom but as a concept, it’s valuable to people like Lucy and I, who have been in this for a long time, but the average guy or the average woman doesn’t know or understand what community empowerment is. They’re just raging at The Man and wanting to get something done. A lot of the work we do here is with volunteers. We have a very small staff. We have a core of maybe about 10-20 volunteers who come along regularly. We can get about up to 100 if we really want them because they’ve learned that because they can have a beginning, a middle and an end to a task, they feel satisfied and they feel empowered. Once they start to feel empowered, they suddenly stop raging at The Man and think, ‘I think I can do something about this.’ So volunteers are really at the base of what we do.
Fraser: How much of your work, Lucy, relies on volunteers? I know you do have paid staff there and there’s funding behind it but do you have volunteers that come out for events and things like that as well?
Lucy: We do have some volunteers. We’ve got some apprentices that help us run the tool library and we offer training for their time but really, we see everyone who participates in our service as a volunteer. So whether people are community gardening or even if we are helping them with their energy, we consider that their time is really, really precious and for us to work on decarbonising the Southside in terms of domestic heat, we need people’s time. We need people to volunteer their time and to come to us and engage with us and we really, really value people’s time. We make sure that our service is useful, it works, it gives people outcomes and people come back to us for more and more. We can take them on that energy journey and take them as far as we can on the decarbonisation journey.
Fraser: Yeah, so there’s an element of building trust with the organisation.
Lucy: Yeah, definitely.
Fraser: For sure. Something that you touched on, Bill, and I think it connects with this really well is that you mentioned earlier that at the Pollokshields Trust and The Bowling Green, you go out of your way to try and put on events for people who might typically be excluded, whether that’s people on the very lowest incomes at the very, very edge of the poverty line or below the poverty line or other marginalised people within the community. How do you find those types of people around here respond to what it is that you’re doing here and do you think that you can engage them more, or better, or in different ways? How do you make that happen?
Bill: We’re just a conduit for all this because what we’re always looking for is to cooperate with other organisations. In fact, for us, we can say that Covid has been almost a blessing because it turned out that during the Covid period that there were a lot of things exposed like, for instance, shortage of food and money, bad treatment of refugees and that sort of thing and a wonderful operation started around the corner. It’s called the Food Point. It’s not a foodbank in the conventional sense. It exposed the difficulties that people had even just feeding themselves. We were obviously in support of it because they do a great job but we would tie in with them and other groups around here and we not only just provided food parcels but we’d have places you could come along and actually eat and enjoy yourselves around festivals, like Eid, Christmas or Divali and that sort of thing. Once you get people’s attention, you can actually keep it and we try to be very reactive to that.
Fraser: Amazing and this is something that, I think, when we talk about community organising, we can often look at it very romantically and assume that it is all-inclusive and it is on the ground. It’s not always the case but I guess there has to be some deliberate process behind that to try and bring people in. That must be especially pressing for South Seeds, Lucy, when you’re trying to help people in fuel poverty and help people reduce energy bills. Have you found that you’ve struggled to reach out or have you found successful ways that work well to engage those on the margins?
Lucy: We have loads and loads of vulnerable people coming to us with energy issues in their homes and that is because the most vulnerable people in society are often treated very poorly by energy companies and they need additional support. Once we started helping some people effectively, they were telling other people and our service grows by word of mouth now, so people know we’re there and they come along. We put notices in the window and we also put stuff on social media. They know that we can fix things for them and so they come to us.
Fraser: I can speak as someone who lives literally a stone’s throw from the high-street office that South Seeds is known. It’s an institution in that area of the Southside as well and people know it there, so people do seek it out. I think that’s really important work and important things to cover to not just accept that people who are already engaged or want to get engaged will come too. You have to think of different means but there are different ways of going about it too.
Lucy: Some organisations consider some people to be difficult to work with but at South Seeds, we consider people to be in difficult circumstances and we work with everyone. We try to engage effectively with everyone and give everyone the opportunity of working with us and achieving good outcomes. I think that’s really, really important. We have a culture in South Seeds where we don’t talk about difficult people. There aren’t difficult people. People can be having a difficult time. Sometimes, I’m having a difficult time and I might be perceived as a difficult person [laughter]. We all have moments that are troublesome and if people are having a crisis with their energy, they are going to be in very difficult circumstances and that’s something that we’ve worked hard to recognise.
Fraser: Hear, hear! Excellent.
Bill: I think there was one good example that we could give you for this. When we were building this place, and it took us about two years to build it for various reasons which were mostly funding, we were working here away and the gate was open. Every day, without exception, somebody would come in and just say something like, ‘Oh, it’s so nice to see this place open again. I’ve lived here for this long.’ They always got a cup of tea. If you drilled down, you found that a lot of these people were lonely people because there are a lot of people living around here and maybe they’re older and their family has gone. Maybe they don’t speak English very well and because we have Tab, who is bilingual and can speak most of the South Asian languages, we got people to come in and talk to us. We then discovered this wasn’t actually about a cup of tea. This was them saying, ‘I’ve got problems,’ and so we would go out of our way to help them, even if that just meant saying, ‘Look, we’ll come to an appointment with you,’ if, say, it was something like DSS. In one case, there was a woman who was threatening suicide but we were there to help. That’s not what we’re about. In fact, we have to train ourselves a bit better to deal with those situations in the future but the fact that we were there and we were accessible was really all that people needed. A lot of people that started off as lonely people or maybe a little bit depressed have become fast friends and have become volunteers. They’ll come back and say, ‘Oh, what can I do to help?’ ‘Well, that hole needs digging over there, so get on with it.’
Fraser: Of course, through the pandemic, everything has been heightened and I imagine places like The Bowling Green and South Seeds have been a real lifeline for people during the pandemic. Would that be fair to say?
Lucy: Definitely. We’ve got an adopt-a-raised bed at the Croft which is a community garden we built. We’ve had record applications and, sadly, not everyone has been able to get a raised bed. Loads and loads of people want support with energy as well. Keeping children at home during the winter and off school has meant that bills have skyrocketed and people are really, really struggling out there.
Fraser: There are obviously massive, massive benefits of these places, not just for the local environment, energy or however we want to measure it, but there’s a deep community aspect here and a deep personal benefit for people who are struggling with mental health and for social connection. Something else that I wanted to touch on before we start to move into the bigger picture and the final questions was specifically around the health side of things. We covered mental health a little bit there but, Bill, you mentioned that the gardens here are prescribed now as something by the doctor.
Bill: Yes, they’re multifunctional. Some people just like to do gardening. I’m the only person around here who is not very keen on it [laughter] but everybody else seems to think it’s a great idea. That garden there was designed for us by another group who specialises in that called Urban Roots. We’ve got parts where people just simply want to plant flowers and where people want to plant food to actually harvest for themselves or to give to the community. Some people want to have herbs and reflective smelly bits and they just feel that that’s what they’re doing. That’s great and we welcome everybody who wants to do that. We have a community garden. There’s a small one that’s maybe about 20 metres away from us. There’s a huge, great allotment part. We’re actually in the middle of a somewhat calculated green zone because when we look at the way this is working out, there’s a green heart to Pollokshields and I think it’s really beginning to take off. I thought that your scheme for offering plants for people’s gardens was great. That wasn’t South Seeds but that was...
Lucy: It was Ready Steady Grow which is something I’m involved in on a voluntary basis but we did offer tomato plants on street corners and kitchen herbs as well.
Fraser: I saw there was mint going.
Lucy: That was South Seeds.
Fraser: That was South Seeds, right.
Lucy: It’s so confusing.
Fraser: I missed out. They were gone.
Lucy: They were gone [laughter].
Fraser: I couldn’t get any. I eat mint with everything [laughter].
Lucy: They were fantastic as well because you can do so much with mint. It’s the taste of the summer.
Fraser: It is [laughter], absolutely. So here’s a bit of a curveball question for you. I didn’t include this in the list that I sent but from where we’re sitting... we’re sitting at The Bowling Green and we can see all the work that’s going on here. Across that wall, I believe, is SoulRiders. The building over there is Glasgow Community Energy. We’re on Kenmure Street where the neighbours all came out to resist an immigration raid. From my flat just ten minutes up the road, I can see your shop, Lucy, South Seeds. I can see a guerrilla garden over my back wall. What is it about this area that there’s so much activism and environmental, green work and community-based work going on all in such a close space?
Lucy: There’s something quite unique about this area. Firstly, it’s one of the most densely populated areas in Scotland and that is unique in itself. The other unique thing is that the tenure of the properties tends to be a third, a third, a third and what I mean by that is a third is socially rented, a third is privately rented and a third is owner occupier. That brings together a real mix of people that you don’t necessarily get in other areas that might be a bit more one or the other. It also means that you’ve got a flow of people who are coming through but you’ve also got some people who are always there as well. I think that helps. You’ve got new ideas coming in but you’ve got people who can take those ideas and work with them over time. So there’s that combination of people, plus throwing in the whole ethnic mix... this area of South Glasgow, because it’s so near the train stations, you can walk here from Central Station and Central Station is the train line that comes up from down South which means that it’s where immigrant populations have congregated. I’m from down South as well and so for me, it’s very attractive to live here rather than the West End or other areas of Glasgow. Therefore, there’s a whole mix of people and it keeps it fresh, ideas come in and people can work with those ideas and I think that’s really important.
Bill: Absolutely. I mean if you look at the history of this particular area where we are here, this was an immigration area going back to when it was first built. This area was first built in the mid-19th century. Since its inception, it’s been a progressive mix of immigrants and by immigrants, I can mean people from the Highlands because they were the first people to come here. Irish people came here. The next big population was Jewish people and they gave way to Muslim people. Now, we’ve got this glorious mix here. What we’ve been trying to do with this area is to ask what we have in common. Well, we’re all from Pollokshields and despite several pretty horrendous attempts to make us hate each other over the years, they’ve all failed because the people who were trying to turn brown people against white people or Black people were sent away because we weren’t interested in that idea because we all like living here. We’re all a little fed up sometimes with the state of the place and the recent fires in our main high street haven’t helped but we can see that this is an area that’s continually regenerating itself. What we’re trying to do is to say to people, ‘You can be part of that.’ People are actually proud of living here. You actually live in this area, Lucy, as well.
Lucy: I do live in this area. Fraser, I know that you live in a tenement close and I live in a tenement close too. I was going to say that living in a tenement close over time teaches you how to share effectively. I think it’s a skill and I think if you can share effectively, you know how to participate in projects that involve sharing, like a tool library or a community garden, and you can become an effective participant in those projects as well. I think where people have their own front door, that’s great for them [laughter] but they’re not learning or maintaining that sort of sharing skill. I think because we all are sharing parts of our lives throughout the day, we are much more mindful when we participate in projects as a whole. I don’t know. It’s just a personal opinion.
Fraser: Do you think that means you have to live in these perfect conditions to be successful in community enterprises like this or can these happen anywhere with the right motivation?
Lucy: I think a mix always helps because a mix means that people have to be accepting of new ideas. That means that it gives a project the opportunity to develop and evolve and I think all projects need that. They might start off with one good idea but they need further ideas to progress and develop over time. For example, South Seeds is ten years old and we are a mix of so many different people’s ideas. Our board meets every month, etcetera. I think all communities need new people to come into them.
Bill: I know what you’re getting at, Fraser. I mean I’ve talked to communities all over Scotland about various things. If you have, for instance, a new community where a new area has been built of two and three-bedroom houses and people go there because they want more space for their kids or because it’s a cheaper site in Glasgow, that’s a little more difficult but I’ve talked to a couple of people and all it takes are some community leaders in this. It doesn’t just happen. They’ll find an issue that they all care about. Classically, it’s traffic, or it’s rubbish collection, or it’s planning decisions and so on. Those are easy to get people to coalesce around. If I want to fill a hall any night, I just need to say it’s all about rubbish and refuse collection [laughter]. It’s easy. The other thing that will get people going is school provision in this area. People do respond to that and I think would respond in most communities. I think it would take a little more than we have to actually get things going but we’ve been at it for 150 years.
Fraser: Brilliant. I think that’s useful as well to tell people it’s about the bins and they’ll come to your meeting. I think that’s a very useful piece of information for our listeners.
Lucy: Tackle the issues people want to tackle.
Fraser: Yeah, yeah, that’s it. The three of us have had conversations before and we talk in our communities all the time and when you’re talking especially about climate or environmental issues, which can feel quite abstract, I think it’s important to wrap that up in people’s lives and make it relevant to them...
Lucy: Yes, definitely.
Fraser: ...but first and foremost, it’s going in with open ears and an open mind, isn’t it? That’s the way to do it. Okay, I think we’ll wrap up with one last question. Answer it however you want to but on Local Zero, we always try and leave with something positive and something practical. If someone is listening to this and they’re saying, ‘I want to set a Bowling Green. I want to set up a South Seeds in my area,’ what’s your one golden nugget of advice for them? What do you say to our listeners there?
Lucy: I would say start talking to other people about your idea and see if other people feel the same because you need a whole load of people to get these projects off the ground. None of these projects is about one person. South Seeds isn’t about me. South Seeds is about everyone who participates in it and the board that run it and you need to get people together. That’s really important. That’s the first step.
Fraser: Brilliant. Bill, what’s your one golden nugget?
Lucy: I agree with all of that. I think the only thing I would say is it will take twice as long as you thought and cost about five times what you actually budgeted for in order for this to happen. It’s a tough road to follow but it’s very well worthwhile when you get to it. We get quite a lot of people who come into this and say, ‘How did you do it?’ Well, there wasn’t anything magic and we didn’t have a book anywhere. We just got at it and, as Lucy said, we involved local people. People respond to what they want to do here. For instance, I think that renewable energy is going to be another big one because we’ll be talking to schools about that and developing the whole idea of community-led businesses.
Fraser: I think that rounds us off nicely. Thank you very much, both of you, for your time.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Wow! Fraser, what a conversation and what inspirational stuff happening just on our doorstep.
Fraser: It really was amazing and it was very natural and very enjoyable but it felt like you were getting both the insights into the work that’s going on but also a little bit of history of the area and a bit of the context of it as well. It was really, really great stuff.
Rebecca: I mean that’s the key, isn’t it? It’s not just an energy project. It’s not just an energy group. It’s embedded in the communities. It captures that history, that culture and the social structures. For me, that’s what is really powerful. It’s not about coming to a community and trying to offer something and solve their problems. It’s about hearing what people are saying, having those conversations over the years and trying to create things by building up from that community to really support them in doing what they want and creating that better lifestyle.
Fraser: Absolutely and this is something that came out of what Bill and Lucy both had to say which was that when they were beginning these projects, it was never about saying, ‘We have this awesome thing we want to do,’ and then prescribing that on to people. It was always about saying, ‘We’re going to build connections. We’re going to talk to as many different people as we can who live here and see what they want to see, see what might work for them, see what needs they have, how they want their community to operate, and look whose interests and what it might do. So it’s absolutely built not just on the community project up but the community project is built very much on building solidarity in those fundamental social connections among people who live locally.
Rebecca: That’s it. It’s the social connections as well. The other thing that I think is really quite exciting is that they’re engaging with such a diversity of people.
Fraser: For sure and there’s no way to get around that, especially in this area. It’s such a diverse population that you have to consider that as you’re putting these projects together and bringing these networks together but also, it’s so refreshing to hear that they’re paying very special mind to doing that. When Bill was talking about bringing in, specficially, women from the Asian community who don’t often have a safe space or a voice in local environmental action... bringing them into the fold and making them feel part of it and also people who are lonely and isolated, especially throughout Covid. Lucy’s work at South Seeds is about reaching people at the narrowest economic margins as well and helping them with fuel poverty and energy bills which, certainly, people like Bill and Lucy are finding tends to serve as the foundation once they get that support or feel included there. It’s a foundation and it’s a springboard for other types of action and getting involved in other sorts of ways as well. So it’s very holistic but as we know too often from climate projects and energy projects, they can be quite exclusive to certain groups or certain people, so to hear that at that level shows they’re really making the effort to bring everyone along with them. It’s an amazing thing.
Rebecca: Yeah, they’re bringing everyone along with them, for me, in two ways. Obviously, fuel poverty is a massive issue and the fact that South Seeds is doing such exciting work to really reach out and support people who might be at risk of being left behind in the energy transition. I mean that takes a lot of work. They are people that are probably much harder to reach and it’s really great that they’re tackling that but, as you say, it’s not just about making sure that people don’t get left behind. It’s also about bringing them into that network and bringing them into that community and then allowing them to have a voice and a say in the future of their area with that network building and those social connections. Actually, I think this kind of ties back to... we talk about energy and we talk about climate but it’s so deeply intertwined with our health and our wellbeing.
Fraser: Yes, absolutely. This is the final point that I wanted to touch on that seemed so critical, so crucial and central to all of the work that both Bill and Lucy do... bear in mind, it’s not just them. They’ve got whole teams of volunteers and organisations behind them but all of the work that’s going on in these spaces has such significant mental health and wellbeing impacts and also physical health impacts as well. What I thought was one of the most interesting things was Bill was saying that the NHS doctors locally prescribe time at The Bowling Green for people who are struggling, whether that’s cardiovascular health, stress, loneliness or with mental health issues which is a really beautiful thing. Of course, the other side of that is with South Seeds who do the community gardening which helps to bring people into the fold but also doing that fuel poverty work, relieving stress for people and making homes warmer over the winter as well. It’s not just about bringing people into the community, although that’s an amazing thing that they do. It’s not even just about the climate, the environment or the wider impacts that they have. It’s having a direct impact for people that’s relevant to their lives but very real, very physical and very immediate to them as well in a way that’s noticeable and in a way that I think a lot of other stuff that we do doesn’t really reach people in that way. When you have that really nice social space with the environmental side of things and with that ambition to bring as many people into the fold as you can, the benefits, the co-benefits and the wider impacts are incredible. They really, really are.
Rebecca: Yeah, and I think I want to take that spirit of social connections and bringing people into the community into our Local Zero community and are new, very exciting, interactive Future or Fiction? So what have you got in store for us this week, Fraser?
Fraser: What an amazing segue. Very well done [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Yeah, so a slightly different episode this week, Becky, because we don’t have Matt around to dunk on and to take the mick out of in Future or Fiction? we’re going to play it interactively with the listeners. For the uninitiated, Future or Fiction? is a game where I present, usually, our hosts and panellists but today, I present our audience with a brand new technological innovation and you have to decide whether you think it’s real, i.e. it’s the future, or if you think I have just completely made it up. So the technology today is called Power Tip. That is Power Tip.
[Music flourish and low, steady beat]
We know that the human body uses and generates energy, obviously, but how about this? Researchers have devised a technology that can harness the power in your sweat to charge small devices like your mobile phone. Simply wrap the flexible technology around your fingertip before you go to sleep and you can wake up to a full battery ready to tweet and listen to your favourite local climate podcast for the rest of the day. Becky, what’s your initial feeling about Power Tip, bearing in mind that you’re not to answer this? This one is for the audience.
Rebecca: No, I won’t. I absolutely won’t. I’m actually very pleased that I am not on the chopping block this week [laughter]. I mean I’m not sure if I’m grossed out or not by the fact that my sweat could be used to power my phone [laughter]. I have all sorts of bizarre images going around in my head. Bearing in mind, this week in Glasgow, it has been ridiculously hot but it’s probably the only week in the year that I would really ever sweat that much living here. So I’m thinking that this might be a great technology if you live, perhaps, in Spain or the Caribbean or Central America but for us up in Scotland, I’m not so sure. Having said that, I have been very wrong before by basing my judgement on the practical realities of this technology as opposed to whether it can be done [laughter].
Fraser: Yeah, you need to learn your lesson eventually.
Rebecca: Yeah, I do [laughter].
Fraser: That’s the key for all guests and for everyone who has ever participated in this segment of the show. They always think they can logic their way out of it and you can’t.
Rebecca: We can’t at all.
Fraser: You can’t.
Rebecca: Now, we will be returning to this in our next episode and do you know what, Fraser? I think we should make Matt answer it at the beginning of the next episode.
Fraser: I think we absolutely should, right at the beginning and then...
Rebecca: Right at the beginning.
Fraser: ...we’ll do another one with him at the end and just double-down completely on the torture for him [laughter]. Yes, we will reveal the answer in the next show once we have Matt happily back with us. In the meantime, we’re relying on you and trusting you all, as the lovely people that you are, not to go away and google this please and thank you. If you think you have a hunch about whether it’s the future or fiction, you can head over to Twitter @LocalZeroPod where we’ve got a live poll pinned at the top of our Twitter profile and you can cast your vote there.
Rebecca: I guess all that’s left for us to say is thank you so much to Bill and Lucy for such great insights and, of course, Fraser to you for going out and having a great in-person conversation with them. Remember, reach out to us via Twitter @LocalZeroPod or email us on LocalZeroPod@gmail.com. We’re always happy to hear from you with suggestions for future episodes or comments about what you’ve heard so far but for now, thanks for listening. Bye.
[Music flourish]
Transcribed by
PODTRANSCRIBE