Challenges - A note to our early supporters...
Developing the Community Harvest Project has been and continues to be a wonderful experience, and a great challenge too. We are all living in extraordinary times, with environmental, social and economic pressures all around us - many of these are unprecedented. How each of us, in our personal lives and our communities, deals with hurdles and difficulties, defines our success or our failure. We have decided to share some of our challenges with you, and our responses to them. We feel that acknowledgement and acceptance of mistakes and challenges, is critically important to all of us as we strive to bring positive change. It's easy to be held back by the things we get wrong, or which don't work, or the fear of these things whether they have happened or not. To bring something new into the world however, we have to be prepared to carefully take the hard steps, and work with the risks, and the consequences. Hurdles are often our greatest teachers...
So what are some of the challenges we have faced?
Working with local groups under the Community Harvest banner
While the Project has a number of key areas and goals, much of our work to date has centred around developing and supporting local community harvest groups under the Community Harvest banner. We saw this as a key step to get the project started and put the effort we could into inspiring people in various communities to start community harvest groups, and a number of these have been quite successful. Groups started in our own areas, as well as others further afield, continue to provide us with an opportunity to learn about what from our experience at least, works, what doesn't, factors that impact on these things and so on. Here are some of the issues we or others have faced or are facing, and our responses:
Believing Community Harvest should drive individual groups
This has been a big issue for us, mostly because of inexperience and probably a lack of awareness of the full extent of what we were taking on - a common problem when people take on new and unfamiliar projects! We began with a great deal of energy and zest, in my case with lot of passion but also admittedly with a kind of wide-eyed, half-acknowledged anxiety lurking in the background, about the magnitude of what we'd taken on and could realistically do. We were both so enthusiastic and determined to see the project take hold, that in some cases we took on too much responsibility for local groups, something that was clearly unsustainable. Not only could we not spread ourselves that thin, it's not that hard to see that just as individuals need to be driven from within, to be able to define and pursue their dreams effectively, so groups need a core fire which even if lit from some outside source, is fuelled from within the group, to feed their aims and acheive their goals. A fire fuelled from outside will go out as soon as that fuel source is gone.
Being afraid to fail
Sometimes you have to let things fall over - or at least let them stand on their own two feet and see if they can manage it. One of the reasons why we fell into supporting some of the groups a little too much early on, is that we were afraid of failure - the project was young and we wanted it to succeed, and be seen to succeed. So it was really hard for us to step aside and accept what happened, even though we knew we had to - distances were too great and resources too thin, to do otherwise. For me this has probably brought one of the greatest learnings however - that our job was not to drive things at the micro or individual group level, but to focus on developing and supporting the bigger vision - supporting people who were willing and able to take action in their own communities, fuelled from within. With this realisation, I understood that small failures don't necessarily threaten the bigger vision - rather, they are often crucial factors in shaping overall success.
Insurance for community groups
Insurance is a common problem for those community groups in Australia, whose members regularly participate in activities for which the risk is difficult to quantify and manage. While it's usually possible to be covered for clearly defined events held in public places with manageable and predictable environments, insurance cover when running working bees, workshops aand other events at private houses under the banner of an organisation like Community Harvest, is more tricky. We realised quickly, that while the Project could manage risk associated with local groups in which Michelle or myself were actually involved, a big problem emerged in relation to other Community Harvest groups if they were operating under our auspices, but we had no actual control over their activities. Since we want people we've never met, in places we've never been to, to find benefit in our work, and use our ideas and models if they find them helpful, in their own positive community work, we certainly do not want the issue of insurance to get in the way.
Our response to the challenges
We decided not to actively try to initiate any further local groups under the Community Harvest banner. Instead, for the Access to Local Food aspect of our work, in addition to identifying and mapping local food resources, we are turning our attention to drawing on our experience and that of others, to provide information and networking that support and promote local action and community building from inside individual communities. We want to help individuals who wish to start local food groups under their own steam, and encourage existing groups to include local food initiatives in their activities. This website is our key vehicle to enable us to achieve this, but as time and resources allow, we may also engage in organising workshops, talks and other means to help groups realise their goals.
Reflections
In retrospect it seems strange that we really believed that Community Harvest could actively drive and auspice groups under its own banner. Or that we thought that we thought this was a good idea. We certainly encourage others to take up the initiative in their own areas, as some have already done. Since we started, similar initiatives around food, climate change, peak oil and community building, have been popping up at an exciting rate. As permaculturists, we understand clearly as many do, that diversity is key to sustainability in our communities, just as it is in our environment. We look forward to continuing to develop and fill our piece of the puzzle in a manner that compliments the great work others are doing, and hope that our contribution and learning, mistakes and all, will be of assistance in this Great Work of building a better world.
Stay tuned for more Community Harvest challenges, and our responses...
