Edible Eastbourne - ethos, values, principles

I do agree with you Sunny that Permaculture ethics should form a key part of the principles that EE presents to the world

Sunny, you shouldn't feel hurt as the ideas you discussed with Town Team were probably instrumental in making the Town Team start thinking seriously in moving forward and setting up a proper team to put such ideas into practice, and it's probable that they will choose to plant lavender amongst other things. No doubt they will consult you again amongst other people, both inside and outside Transition. Town Team are running their own show with their own people, and Spencer and Fiona are not on their committee, but just happen to have been invited to talk about their ideas, just as you were invited to talk about yours. It often happens that whatever ideas we float might not take effect immediately but have a subtle, often unacknowledged influence over time. Pioneers such as ourselves often do not get the recognition we sometimes think we deserve. I remember that Eastbourne FoE was instrumental in getting the Renee White garden off the ground through the meetings it set up with town councillors and residents, but that bit of history gets usually ignored now because we have EE flying the banner, yet it doesn't matter because as long as the ideas of community growing get established and implemented, then the greater community resilience that Transition believes is necessary will manifest.

You quite rightly mention Karen's experience and knowledge about community gardens. Perhaps she could talk for a couple of minutes at the event? She deserves to be heard about her work, which Fiona quite rightly nominated for an environment award some time ago.

Your visioning idea to get more people involved with tehir ideas is a great one. Perhaps pasrt of teh event could be set aside for this visioning, as we did at the last Transition event we put on at the Town Hall.

As far as preparing for the event is concerned, we all agreed to use Loomio as a way of getting some degree of consensus about it as we go along. We are getting somewhere with this as some concrete proposals are being voted upon, but of course you and your fellow EE co-ordinators are free to accept or reject ideas that have been voted upon on loomio. But beware that if you reject most, or all, of the ideas that show a consensus on loomio, or at our meetings, there is possibly a risk that some people may lose interest in being part of EE, or TTE in general.