Green shoots

Strike waves; student protests; youth radicalisations. These are the sorts of things that you hope are likely to help build an organisation. Unless I’ve missed it gardening has not been one of the typical methods found in the Marxist canon to galvanise new leaderships. Maybe it’s time for a rethink. The tenants and residents association…

Liam

June 2, 2009

1–2 minutes

The tenants and residents association (TRA) on my estate re-emerged a few years ago in a struggle against the council’s plans to transfer its housing stock to housing associations. Last year we didn’t manage to elect new officers or a committee when I wanted to stand down as chair and the secretary had other business to attend to. And so it became moribund.

Suddenly out of nowhere a group of long term residents got together with an ambitious plan to covert a disused, overgrown garden beside the community centre into a vegetable and herb garden. The idea is that you sign up, agree to put in a bit of work and get a share of the vegetables that are grown. A diverse, ethnically mixed bunch are now digging, sowing, weeding and whatever else you do in gardens. There are compost bins, raised beds and sprouting seeds where once there was a patch of overgrown grass and there’s generally someone pottering around a space that a few months ago was never walked on.

The impact has been incredibly positive. Last night we had our first ever contested elections for the TRA and now have a committee of six plus three officers. My insistence that meetings have to finish by 8pm is as popular as ever and I’m back in the chair.

As a model this is probably not too transferable. It requires people who have a passion for gardening combined with a strong community spirit and some time on their hands. Yet it’s encouraging that almost spontaneously communities can feel a need for organisation as the way to improve the patch of land where they live.

5 responses to “Green shoots”

Lobby Ludd

June 2, 2009 at 10:12 pm

I think this kind of thing is ‘prefigurative’.

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charliemarks

June 3, 2009 at 1:35 am

Ah, i love that word.

Say Liam, I suppose this makes you one of the community spirited people that might stand in an open primary for the Tories 😉

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Renegade Eye

June 3, 2009 at 8:18 am

A victory is a victory. Strong principles and flexible tactics is what it’s about.

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jane kelly

June 3, 2009 at 9:51 am

And the Southwark Asylum Day Centre has just been offered an allotment (plus beehive) and the help of a dozen or so volunteers to clear the site so the users of the day centre can grow some of their own food. Can’t be bad

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Sarah

June 5, 2009 at 7:58 pm

Your TA gardening model not transferable?

Actually I think it’s probably going on everywhere in Britain , I think it’s probably becoming more and more of a mass phenomenon – glad you picked up on it. I know there’s a lot of increasingly communal organic gardening going on in Tottenham, where I live, and I looked at an email today from an organization called Garden Organic that I recently joined – and as well as their food in schools campaign, they were highlighting something called The Airplot – various luminaries such as Emma Thompson and Monty Don (and 43,000 other people) have bought a plot of land at Sipson and are busy gardening on it along with the local inhabitants (evidently the area used to be important in market gardening) – as part of the protest against the 3rd runway. More useful guerrilla gardening than digging up Parliament Square .

And elsewhere in the world of ecological activists and writers, I have been reading Richard Mabey; and I went to a Resurgence event with Satish Kumar and Fritjof Capra on Saturday) – they all clearly see promoting this sort of activity as encouraging / enabling more people to reconsider their relationship with nature overall, as well as make changes in their own lives and inspire others to – not dissimilar in some ways (though not necessarily in all of course) to John B Foster.

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