Hello! I’m Maud. When my colleague, Pam Lunn retired at the end of 2012, I was tasked
with continuing this blog that she created and nurtured. I thought my
first post had better be an introductory one. So here goes.
If you have
been to Woodbrooke in the last couple of years you may have met me, as I began
working as the Faith in Action tutor 2 years ago. I came to Woodbrooke
from Birmingham Friends of the Earth (BFoE), a fantastic organisation, where I
learnt a vast amount about grassroots campaigning, and experienced many a cold
day trying to engage the public - asking people to sign up for campaigns and to
play a more proactive role in their neighbourhood.
I learnt at
Birmingham Friends of the Earth that if we are going to create change we need
to listen to one another, and really listen without trying to provide a generic
answer. One size doesn't fit all
especially in the areas of Climate Change, Peak Oil, Sustainability, and
Environmental Justice. With friends and colleagues I established Faith
and Climate Change. This project lived
within BFoE and was designed to forge relationships with faith communities, -
to listen to their needs, concerns and ideas, and then to design a package to
help them move forward. I wanted to work with faith communities because
when I asked myself why I felt called to work in this sector, it always came
back to being a Quaker and my Quakerism. I wanted to spend my days
talking to people of faith about these issues. I discovered for some,
that the financial rewards of running a sustainable community centre attached
to their place of worship was their motivator, for others it was Scripture, for
some it was the chance for interfaith dialogue around a particular issue.
For almost everyone, the reason was different and the project was small
enough to be as responsive as we needed it to be.
Eventually I
wanted to spend more time exploring these issues within my faith community and
so I ended up at Woodbrooke, looking not just at Sustainability but at a range
of issues that Quakers are concerned with. My first experience of Good
Lives was the course, ‘Because we’re worth it’. I loved the course, it took me to a place
where I could name the values that underpinned my life choices: it also made for great marriage preparation
as I came with my now husband, but that was a happy coincidence! I then went on to meet with the Good Lives
on-going group, a group of Good Lives participants who had attended all or
almost all of the courses and wanted to explore these issues further and
together. It was great to be part of a group where we prioritised sharing our stories
with one another.
What next?
One question
for Woodbrooke is how to continue the work begun by the Good Lives project. In
2011 Quakers made a corporate commitment to become a low carbon sustainable
community. To realise this as a community, not as a collection of
individuals, but as a community – what does this mean for us? Are our
communities resilient enough for the task, and when the task might be different
for us all, how can we do it and how can we measure it to know we are being
effective?
These are only some of the
questions I have… I would be really interested to hear from you, and hope this
blog can serve as way to keep the conversation going.
Some of the courses we offer at Woodbrooke may answer
a few of your questions – in 2013 we have the following courses that may speak
to you
