How to make a Doughnut Portrait

About this tool

The purpose of this tool is to give you the confidence to start a process of organising and making a Doughnut Portrait for your place, whether for your civic organisation, neighbourhood, city, bioregion, or nation.

You can pick and choose from the elements in this tool, and we welcome you to adapt anything to suit your needs and your plan.

Feel free to make a copy of any of these slides (File > Make a copy) and make your own adaptations.

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Things you'll need

1. Someone or a small group of people to work through the elements of the tool with, before planning anything.
2. Time to digest the elements of the tool, including the slides to introduce the idea, the case studies and the Doughnut Portrait Tool Library. It's a lot, so take your time.
3. For any support, please contact DEAL Communities & Art Lead, Rob Shorter at rob@doughnuteconomics.org.

Community engagement planning

This element helps you think about who you want to reach in your community, in what settings, in what order, and the roles people might play. It helps you engage your community and build capacity for the work.

It includes how you might frame your work, so that it is engaging, welcoming, inviting and accessible. And how you design your engagements with an understanding of people’s different interests, capacities and needs.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
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Things you'll need

1. Print a Community Engagement Canvas to to ideate and plan with your core group of community organisers.
2. Time to research who you might like to engage first.
3. Time to reflect on a framing question for the work - you might like to test this out with people.

Choose your case studies

There are 28 case studies of Doughnut Portraits that people have made at different scales, created by a mixture of communities, universities, local governments and other organisations.

Read through the case studies and choose those that inspire you and those that are most relevant to what you’re planning. Then add them to the workshop element ‘Introducing the idea’ where it says [add your chosen case studies slides here].

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. Time to read through the case studies and identify those which are most relevant to what you’re planning.
2. You might want to contact the people who made specific portraits to learn more or ask specific quesitons. If you can't find contact details via the slides and links, feel free to contact DEAL Communities & Art Lead, Rob Shorter at rob@doughnuteconomics.org.

Practical preparations

This element helps you prepare for a workshop, and includes considerations for where to meet, how to design brave and accessible spaces, setting up your space to facilitate a good workshop flow, and how to start and end well.

It also contains a check-list of materials to prepare, depending on which elements you are using.
Note that this element doesn’t contain detailed timings. Instead we invite you to plan your own workshop timings using the times offered as a guide.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. Time to research available spaces. This could come after engaging with more community organisers locally.
2. Access to a printer.
3. A space with a screen for your presentations, and a space that has plenty of wall space for activities that require it.

Doughnut Portrait Tool Library

We’ve created a Doughnut Portrait Tool Library to help you with Exploring our ‘how’.

The library is organised into sections for each possible layer of a portrait, as well as other useful tools to introduce the ideas of the Doughnut and useful tools for community engagement.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. Time to go through the library and explore the tools available.
2. Time to revisit the library to add new tools that you've used that aren't already there.

Warm-up activity

This element is a fun and energising warm-up activity that gets people talking and thinking insightfully about the idea of what a portrait is.

It starts with an activity (done in pairs) where you sketch a portrait of each other in just ten seconds! Then you have ten minutes to make a more complete portrait.

It concludes with a collective reflection process that raises questions and insights that apply to your process of creating your Doughnut Portrait for your place.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. One piece of paper per participant, size A4.
2. One pen per participant.
3. Tables and chairs (or clipboards) for people to write on.

Introducing the idea

A Doughnut Portrait is looking through these four lenses, at our place and community, and making visible what we find, in a wide diversity of ways, so that we can take action towards the future we want. A future with everyone living well within planetary boundaries.

This element has a 16-minute video that introduces the idea and some examples of Doughnut Portraits so that you don’t have to worry about presenting it yourself.

And it includes showing the most relevant and inspiring case studies to your community.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. Print all the slides from this element (one set) and print your chosen case studies, size A4.
2. A screen to present the slides.
3. The script (that you can adapt) for you to talk through the slides.
4. A wall space for you to post the slides and case studies.

Finding our 'why'

This element invites us to find our collective reason for this work by asking ‘Why do we want to create a Doughnut Portrait for our place?’

As organisers, you might already have an idea what your reason is. But whether you do or you don’t, this element will bring together diverse perspectives and will form a solid foundation for your collective work and help guide you when things get difficult.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. One piece of paper per participant, size A5.
2. One pen per participant.
3. A wall space for participants to post their pieces of paper with their 'why' statement.

Exploring our 'how'

No two Doughnut Portraits are the same, and no two processes to create a Doughnut Portrait are the same. There are, however, common things between them.

This element introduces some possible ‘layers’ of a Doughnut Portrait, along with some examples, to enable your community to explore what they want to create and how they might do that.

There is a Doughnut Portrait Tool Library for people to explore and workshop canvases for people to write down their thoughts and ideas.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. Print all Layer Canvases (7 in total), size A2, and any pages you like from the Doughnut Portrait Tool Library, size A4.
2. A screen to present the slides.
3. The script (that you can adapt) for you to talk through the slides.
4. Clusters of tables and chairs for people to discuss each layer in small groups.

Caring for our 'who'

Part of the strength of this work is the connections we make in the process: the connections with our place, with the world, and with each other, as a community.

Doing this work together as a community gives us the opportunity to practice and role-model the care we want to see more of in our community.

This element is an invitation for you to share and discuss your needs - individual and collective - so that you can identify the things that will support your work and your collective purpose.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. Print enough Care Canvases for 1 between every 3 people, size A3.
2. Space for people to break out into groups of 3 (ideally some outdoor space as well).
3. A wall space for people to post their care canvases.

Sharing our portrait

As you start your process to create your Doughnut Portrait there will be lots of unknowns ahead of you. And that’s fine. A healthy project will be able to dance with unknowns and embrace emergence and complexity.

This element is to plant the seed of the question: ‘how will we share our portrait?’ so that the question can be alive throughout your collective process and eventually come to fruition when you’re ready to share your work with the world.

View the slides in Google Slides (right-click, open in new tab or window)
View the slides here in the browser (below)

Things you'll need

1. One piece of paper per participant, size A4.

2. One pen per participant.
3. A wall space for participants to post their framed ideas.