Next Steps: How Create Change became focused on the Climate Emergency

After the first Create Change event I was encouraged to do more.

On the day there was a real mood of positivity in the room. I was approached by many people who'd enjoyed and felt energised by the event. They spoke about whether there could be the opportunity to have more of these types of experiences in our town.

Here's a confession, (in the spirit of honesty and openness!) I find the written feedback aspect of holding an event challenging. I'm sensitive to any perceived criticism as organising the event was such a personal journey for me. Of course it's hugely valuable and I put listening and responding to others at the core of this project, so I took a deep breath and read the responses. 

There were some, we'll call them 'points for improvement' based around a need for clarity of what the event would be like beforehand and encouragement towards more focus on taking forward plans for social action. There was a lot to learn from these comments and other conversations I had on the day and after. I'm certainly on a learning journey with this!

The feedback questionnaire asked, ' What was the most inspiring part of the event?' Many of the responses to this question referenced the Talkshop session on deliberative democracy. The other thing that was mentioned was the valuable experience of meeting people and discussing ideas. As a point of direction it was suggested that it would be good to have a more local focus.

With all this and more floating around my head I had a follow up chat with Martin Yarnit from Talkshop. Encouraged by the experience of the event I was keen to do it again. I thought the easiest thing to do, and where I saw a possibility to expand on what we'd already done, was to run a longer version of the Talkshop session. The topic of the Talkshop session had been 'How should Britain be governed?' We had compacted an activity that would usually take between 90mins-2hrs into about 40mins. There was certainly an opportunity to get more from it! When chatting with Martin he suggested it would be even better to use the deliberative techniques to tackle an issue that was important locally. This really resonated with me.

The topic of the climate emergency presented itself to me. It had come up in discussions at the Create Change event and I had MANY conversations about it in the following weeks as people began to contemplate where they'd like to create change themselves. Team that with the energy that I could see in my town from the various community groups addressing the climate challenge and it seemed clear that this topic was high on the agenda of the people of Chesterfield. This was my first step in listening to and responding to the needs of the community here in Chesterfield.