Thursday, 20 December 2007

Eat local stuff and meet people

The beeb covers an experiment with eating locally-produced food in Scotland, including a week's worth of the Fife Diet.

The most difficult thing has been preparation time when cooking from raw ingredients. The most rewarding has been meeting people, and discovering what's available from your region.

One implication that I particularly like, when this becomes more commonplace, is that we'll all recover a stronger sense of the changing seasons. For people whose only experience of the outdoors is the few metres between front door and car, and whose diet comes out of supermarket bags, that could be a shock worth watching.

20 Dec 2007 16:02:28 | Mobility and change

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Refugees and libraries The Welcome to Your Library project, which worked on connecting public libraries and refugee communities in five areas around England, has come to an end. The evaluation is primarily oriented towards library services, although it also points to some interesting case study material. Most strikingly, it suggests that, even in this outstanding project, the libraries' contribution to community cohesion cannot be described as embedded practice. The researchers note: a pattern of delivery where services predominantly continue to be delivered “to” refugees rather than “with” them conclusions from the refugee environmental testing exercise, which reported there were no visible signs of refugees being an integrated part of the overall library user group rare examples of the project advocating on behalf of refugees and raising awareness in the wider community of refugees’ contribution to the community. This comes across as negative but I think it's a clear indication of just how long some of this stuff takes. As we'd expect from the library sector, achievements in more 'internally focussed' themes, such as reading and learning, were more consistently embedded into practice. One hopes the momentum from practical initiatives such as conversation clubs, when extended from refugee communities to the general public, will cause a significant benefit spillover. As usual, the message is 'we're not done yet.'
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From private to civic to 'community' The government has published a vision for 'a new generation of open, accessible, inviting and environmentally friendly fire stations where communities can come together socially and crucially hear key fire safety advice.' Since I'm doing quite a bit of work with public libraries as local resources, I found myself reading the press release substituting 'library' for 'fire station'. The parallels are curious. The design of many fire stations - often intimidating and closed-looking Victorian buildings - does not make them naturally inviting places for the public. Stations can also play a greater role in promoting good community relations by opening up to them... The guide also suggests new uses for fire stations that would encourage the local community to visit their local fire station and thus help in engaging with the community to spread fire safety messages. The suggestions are: hosting community events and services; on site cash points; providing car parks in rural areas; and providing space for art displays. Some years ago I ran a workshop for the Library Association London branch, before which I put images on the wall and asked participants to identify the theme. The pictures included a doctor, a 19th century fire engine, a lifeboat, and a community-based online centre (I can't recall the others). This was about perceptions of public ownership. People forget that until my parents' generation, medical care was not publicly funded in the UK. The lifeboat service has never been publicly funded, and the fire service developed as a private initiative of insurance companies. So it's interesting to think about the transformation of fire stations from private through civic to 'community' buildings. Is this pattern comparable to that of libraries? If so, what comes after 'community'? Personal?

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