BORO Doughnut: DE in Middlesbrough

Time for ACTION!
The online course on Doughnut Economics with Kate @Ubiquity University has inspired me to take action to downscale the doughnut in the town I live in, Middlesbrough.  Middlesbrough is an industrial town in the North East of England.  Post industrial decline (steel) made this place one of the most deprived area, and once it was voted the worst place to live in the UK.  Most DE Social Foundation indicators show below national average, except for Social Support.  There are over 800 voluntary sector organisations so there is a huge potential to make Middlesbrough a thriving town if we organise and collaborate with all the key agencies.  Our DE vision is aligned, but there are vertical and horizontal silos,  and we know that what we need is a systems change.  However, knowledge is not meaningful if not applied and taken action.  I decided to make contribution to this community by organising integration, even small step at a time.
First Step
Contact as many people as possible and start a conversation about the Doughnut vision.  I moved to Middlesbrough August 2018, so didn't know many people.  I wrote many letters, personalising the template to match the organisation/person I was writing to, started chatting to anyone I met (shop assistant, someone at dance social/bus stop/park etc), and I still do.  One of the first people I met was Andy McDonald MP.  I presented my case using Powerpoint slides.  As with the letters, I have amended the content to suit the meetings with university, museum, councillors etc.  Every time I met people, they have pointed me to more people to contact, and they themselves spread the word about Boro Doughnut. 
Listen to Advice
I cannot thank all the people who gave me numerous advice and encouragement to keep going.   One advice from Amjid Khazir (Media Cultured CIC) was to create a brochure to explain what BoroDoughnut want to achieve so that people can understand and want to join.  I am giving you a link here for you to edit on Canva, so you can create your own to localise for your town, but please use your own Canva account to edit. Leonora and Rob from DEAL have been so supportive and they have given us many practical points to follow.  A media lecturer I met advised we need simple consistent messaging in various social media platforms to get on top of searches.  KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is the key.

Start Boro Doughnut Meetings

We meet once a month and so far we had 5 official meetings.  Members come and go, some structured activities and some organic discussions.   Meeting minutes example is added here. 

BoroDoughnut email account and WhatsApp Group chat are set up and many meetings in between to develop constitution so that BoroDoughnut can be an official charitable entity.
We are still compiling City Portraits but we have a visual:

Challenges
Grassroots organisations and individuals are very keen and numbers of allies are developing.  However, a volunteer group member left stating 'we're the grassroots and don't want to be dealing with strategies.  City portraits: there's no need for it, they can just walk around the street, you can see poverty.  I don't have time for this, what we do is look after people on the ground, doing the actual helping.'  Of course, Boro Doughnut will be doing the practical ground work activities in the future after getting established with funding. They are just too busy with containment and don't have the headspace or time to be dealing with root cause analysis etc.  Motivating members to take actions in between meetings also has been difficult.  We have tried creating shared specific action plans, etc. but as this is all voluntary, nobody can hold anyone to account for the progress of projects.  Many are reserved and do not want to be proactive/assertive and approach strangers etc. It is very different from private business sector, so I would like to learn more about this.  The worst group were the key agencies including policy makers; they are very unreliable.  They show interest but do not take action.  Many empty promises, some rude and ignore you all of the sudden.  They have One Planet Living and Green Strategy so our goals are aligned but they only cherry pick some initiatives for photo ops and implementation is not managed.  We need networking with other DEAL members to learn how to engage these people with power, how to challenge their mindset to be regenerative and distributive etc.
What's next?
We plan to collaborate with LocalMotion project teams who are working on community wellbeing and wealth building.  We will be listening to diverse voices, co-learn systems change and urge policy makers put this to reality.  We will be organising Climate Urgency Doughnut Event.  We will be creating a case study narrative of successful solutions (e.g. increasing biodiversity, promoting intergenerational/cultural mingling space) so that policy makers can make evidence-based decision making to horizontally deploy the solution across the area.  Once we are officially established, we can start fund raising and increase public engagement and promote DE living.  Small incremental steps but all towards the vision of Thriving Middlesbrough.  We welcome advice from you all, so please get in touch!