Jessica |
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Andy Ross’s post today saying that Patrick Whitefield in Permaculture Magazine says he and some friends have started a CRAG in their town which we’ve never heard of reminded me that I want to appeal to you all to let us know about your CRAG and what you are doing. This would be great generally of course, but if you could do it urgently it would help us with our funding application to the Big Green Challenge, which is being submitted on 29 February!
We know there are lots of CRAGs out there, but we don’t have evidence collected together on this, our central website, about what some of you are doing. When the Big Green Challenge judges look at our application, it would be amazing if every CRAG had posted information about their CRAG on their sub-home pages. Please please could you? This would help us all coordinate our efforts and ideas better too – something we hope to get funding to do in a bigger way. If you know of Craggers who don’t check this site regularly, perhaps you could email them this post so that as many people as possible get this message?
What I’m asking for is:
1. If you already have a CRAGs sub-home page listed under ‘Groups’ on this website, please could you post up some info about yourselves, your rules, your agenda, minutes, your settlements, photos, your footprints? Have a look a long-established group like Islington if you’d like some tips.
2. Even if you have your own website, as many of the non-UK CRAGs do, please explain this on your sub-homepage here and provide the link. We would love you even more if you could also provide a little ‘taster’ info about your CRAG to encourage people to look at your own website.
3. If you have a CRAG and don’t yet have your own sub-homepage here, it’s because we don’t know about you. And we would really like to! We’re excited to see what other CRAGs are doing, and we might be able to help you. Don’t be shy! Please post here or email us by clicking on ‘contact’ on the top menu bar, and ask us to set up a sub-homepage for your CRAG.
4. And a final appeal, to every Cragger out there. When you register with this site, you are listed in our ‘people’ list and have the chance to set up a profile page for yourself. You don’t need to give your real name, and you can give as much or as little info as you like, but it would be great if many more of you could fill out their profiles so that we can see what kind of people are in our community and hear their stories about what they’re doing to reduce their footprints and help the CRAG network. Have a look at some examples under ‘people’ for ideas. You can also give links to your other eco-projects and community networks.
the network needs to empower groups
david
Anyone can add a page for their CRAG right now, by going to the start new CRAG link on the main groups page. You don’t need to ask us!
There was a good quote in the Permaculture magazine article, something like “just as the group empowers the individual, so the network empowers the group”. I think we need to give groups good reasons to join the network, just as we appeal to individuals to join a group.
For me, it’s all about scaling up our impact, being part of a wider community, and widening our collective experience of the challenge of carbon reduction in different communities.