An exciting year ahead! Brief report from PEDAL’s AGM

We had an excel­lent turn out for PEDAL’s AGM on 25^th March. Kitchen Canny gave a great out­line of their work, the Chair (Justin) and Treasurer (Stephen) reviewed the year, Diana told the story of the Orchard using Jane’s and Mary Jane’s excel­lent slides, and our new Project Manager — Tom Black — out­lined an excit­ing year ahead as he, Charlotte (Energy pro­ject work­er) and Peter and Polly (Food pro­ject work­ers) embark on an ambi­tious work pro­gramme to engage the com­munity in real car­bon reduc­tion and com­munity resi­li­ence build­ing measures:

-       from an ima­gin­at­ive com­munity orch­ard that spreads from the Donkey Field site at Brunstane through people’s gar­dens and pub­lic spaces to re-skilling and garden sharing;

-       from a nov­el approach to tene­ment insu­la­tion (let us know if you’d like to involve your tene­ment in this) to test­ing wheth­er we can pro­duce com­munity owned elec­tri­city and funds for Portobello through wind power.

A great 12-minute clip from the film ‘In Transition’ was shown, out­lining how the Transition mod­el helps com­munit­ies pos­it­ively tackle cli­mate change and peak oil through rebuild­ing com­munity resi­li­ence.  It took a few attempts before we could get the film to run with sound, at the right speed, and without stop­ping – a good meta­phor for com­munity action: it takes patience, per­sist­ence, going back over the same ground, and finally suc­ceed­ing. After the film, we shared a meal — the whole event had been mar­velously organ­ised by Mary Jane and Charlotte, and it was great to see so many new faces — some­thing which augers very well for the year ahead.

We wish our new pro­ject work­ers all the best of luck with their efforts over the com­ing year, and want to restate OUT LOUD the fact that this is a shared com­munity endeav­our which relies entirely on vol­un­tary effort for it’s suc­cess and future.

If you have an idea or pro­ject you want to pro­pose and help pur­sue, or if you want to offer time and help (how­ever little or great) with exist­ing pro­jects, then please get in touch, get involved, and help us con­tin­ue work­ing to get Portobello on the road to com­munity resi­li­ence, a road that the whole world is going to be pur­su­ing, and the soon­er com­munit­ies start the bet­ter placed they will be to bene­fit and to weath­er the eco­nom­ic and envir­on­ment­al storms.