I and some others co-founded an organisation which aims to support ethnic minorities in the UK to get appropriate and quicker psychological support when they are struggling. This is because they tend to be seen for support when their difficulties have become quite complex and services can struggle to be culturally competent with the support they provide. We are doing this by co-creating knowledge and language with the communities we originate from and engaging other people who want the same in their communities, using and building from the knowledge and processes we have started.
I stumbled across SEEDS 7 months ago and I was not sure how, but it really seemed to resonate with what we were trying to achieve; creating and supporting resource development for community good, as well as for the environment. This does resonate with me in two ways; first of all climate change is already negatively impacting those most vulnerable, including people of the global majority. Second of all, providing a mechanism to share knowledge and resources is crucial for hope and progress to tackle the social problems we face. I didn't know it then, but the reason why it connected was because we are both working in the space of the commons.
Thankfully in some ways, we are both at our early stages, where we can learn and develop and make mistakes and grow. I spent time over the last few months understanding SEEDS, slowly, because at first the concept blew my mind. I also had a full time job and caring responsibilities to juggle, and there was a lot of information and videos; I decided early on to prioritise and look at key documents mostly as that was easier for me. I also wanted to understand culture of SEEDS and the pros and cons of getting involved before I put it forward for the organisation. I liked what I saw, and realised that the people in my organisation would have the same problems I had in absorbing it all. Some tools were developed to help (e.g. a flow of how people evolve from Visitor to Citizen using pictures was a great resource) and I realised I needed to do a few things too:
- Test out the idea of getting involved with the other co-founders and talk to the current members, with a short explanation and demo of what SEEDS is
- Involve someone willing through my contacts (I have connected with people in my field who care for the environment) to help others to get into the system and get set up, after teaching them
- Encourage those taught to disperse that knowledge in their little groups (fractals)
- Create a video for those actively involved (and perhaps for later) explaining why we are investing time in SEEDS and how it connects with our organisation and values
- Reminding people in the video of the importance of doing what we do because it connects with our values rather than to earn tokens. It can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and we need to remember why we do this
- Work with the ecosystem as is. Recruit volunteers to help us to meet our goals and use the online marketplace to involve people already 'bought into' SEEDS as a concept, rather than aiming to pay new people with it as it is still in its early stages. This way we can also involve more people in the system
- Look at how we can post what we do on HIVE (likely as a collective rather than many individual accounts to begin with) to involve people in activities, build knowledge and build regenerative norms :)
It's exciting to evolve with new systems that can give us hope and I am excited to share this journey with you all on here :)