Belville Community Garden - Future Conversations

Surefoot Director, Pam Candea’s experience as facilitator at Belville Community Garden Trust gives insight into the guided Future Conversations sessions and what this workshop can bring to people and organisations.

The group at Belville ranged in age from people in their early 20’s through to people in their 60’s. It was mainly women but the group, 6-10 people each session, usually had 2-3 men as well. The group met 8 times over 3 months.

A Wednesday afternoon in March was the first session, where Pam met with Geri Sinclair, Volunteer Coordinator at Belville, and volunteer Trisha Orr who took part in the facilitating, before the other participations arrived. The take off for the session was the dining area of Belville’s large catering kitchen where the project’s chef creates tasty and nutritious meals using food from Fareshare.

The group spent time outdoors in almost every subsequent session, taking advantage of the space at Belville to:

• have a slow silent walk at least twice
• visit the raised beds and butterfly gardens
• just stop and look at the amazing view to the hills across the Clyde
• reflect on how a tree’s structure can be used to investigate our own well-being
• see some fox cubs playing in the sunshine!

Next Steps with Future Conversations
The group have expressed a desire to keep going and are looking at continuing to meet Wednesday afternoons to keep their soup veg plot going and to explore new concepts and to take on new actions.

Geri and Trisha hope to run some permaculture sessions and to bring other practices to the group as well. One thing added to each session was poem reading from Looby McNamara, a permaculture teacher who writes about cultural emergence.

Here is an excerpt from her poem Gratitude as an Attitude,
We arrive in the presence of now,
The gift of the present.
When we choose to view with an appreciative gaze
Our mind chatter stills
We are here and now and we are timeless.
We are uniquely ourselves
And undeniably connected

Your next step with Future Conversations

Future Conversations is a series of facilitated workshops, designed to help communities raise their resilience to adapt to climate change and other challenges. Find out more >>