On April 6th, the London Doughnut Economics coalition met up for its 5th session.
Slack update and tour - Blanca Gomez
We have set up a Slack Workspace for keeping in touch. It is an application that many other doughnuts have been using and is quite useful to connect people and share documents. There are open channels for anyone to join, and also private channels for dedicated workstreams. The “Global City Doughnut Network” channel will be used to relay info from the slack channel used by DEAL and other global doughnuts
If you have previously attended a London Doughnut Coalition meeting and would like to request access please email londondoughnut@gmail.com. If you have not yet attended a session in person, please request access after you have attended a session.
Once you have access please start with the “Welcome protocols” channel which gives information about channels within the application and how to access them.
Data team update on City Portrait Methodology - Chris Paddock
The data team has built a detailed work plan for what data and indicators to track down to build the city portrait - Local social and local ecological is the focus, and there are roughly 60 indicators identified. The ambition to create a picture not only for London as a whole, but for each of the 33 boroughs as well Anna, Sam, Rosa and Lina are downloading various data sets one by one. Goal is to give visuals for each indicator and show for each one how all 30 boroughs shape up as well as the London average.
The main challenge is sifting through and finding the relevant data in the large amounts of available data. There is also an opportunity to explore intersectional aspects of the data, and an opportunity to do visual GIS mapping. If anyone wants to volunteer to further assist the data team, please contact Kathy Gibbs who can give you access to the channel on Slack. The overall goal is to be able to use this to show the doughnut to the new London Mayor after May’s elections, and use that to drive an introduction and wider discussion.
Example was shared of how Cambridge are building a more narrative style city portrait and using their contacts through the food bank to engage residents from all levels in society to build with diverse perspectives.
Ideas for real world activities - Claire Callan
We opened the meeting with a brief exercise asking everyone to share their postcodes. The results show we are highly distributed with 6x E, 5x N, 7x S - the only postcode to appear twice was E17, and notable we are missing any W postcodes! This is helpful to understand if we have critical mass in any one borough for activity, I’ll continue to track and update this list via the “Intros” channel on slack.
Everyone was invited to post ideas for action to a mural board:
Book club - Inspired by attending the book club hosted by the Cambridge doughnut Claire is going to set up a reading group. The idea is to discuss one chapter of Doughnut Economics each week, and then focus on the “so what” and what action we could drive to bring the principles to life. Claire has also created a facilitators guide for running sessions with a list of questions to provoke discussion and will be looking for volunteers to help deliver future sessions. Look for an invite to be posted next week and the first session to be held on April 27th.
The board has a number of great ideas for further action - engaging the business community, working to integrate DE into the academic curriculum, engaging politicians to educate them on the concept, hosting pecha kucha nights to further socialise the concepts
From this point, the main group update meetings will take place on the first Tuesday of the month at 7pm. Azi Arman volunteered to host the next meeting on May 4th. Blanca will support Azi with the setup and co-delivery the session, and Azi will then support the following host in a similar manner.
Jenni Brooks
Leeds, England, United Kingdom
I'd like to connect, learn from and share with others doing similar things nationally and globally.