learasmussen | September 29, 2009

Monday, Monday…

I am in a campaigning mood! At the Global Change course we have now entered a more campaign focused phase, and I like that. We have had many interesting discussions since we started (almost 4 weeks ago – time is running!) and I feel that I have learnt al lot and got many new inputs, but it is nice that we now enter a more concrete phase. Until now many of our discussions on the campaign have been a bit diffuse too, we have talked a lot about it, but without having a clear aim and focus in how we want to move on with it. It is good to get started with that now. But as we move forward new difficulties also show up I saw yesterday, when we made a group work exercise with an Action Planning Model. It is a tool where you in 60 minutes have to make an overall action plan for your campaign. It contains everything from vision to concrete actions. The first thing the model showed was that everybody have many visions and ideas about how they would like the campaign to be, even though we almost have agreed on the overall goal. I guess that is good to have many ambitions and ideas, the difficult thing is to agree on some specific ones. But I really see that as a positive thing, the more individual ambitions the more ambitious campaign.
Another more annoying thing the model showed is that we do not have the same understanding of words as “objective”, “task” “strategy” and so on. I think that it is crucial that we try to build up a common understanding of these key words, because otherwise it gets really difficult to agree on anything.
Uhh, Monday was an educational day. Another very important thing I learned was how important the facilitator’s role can be, and how important it is that we become good at facilitating each other, so that we together can to push our campaign process forward.

Climate change – change of mind?

learasmussen | September 22, 2009

The climate changes are no laughing matter, that is for sure – Not that I have ever thought that, but today’s first lecture certainty underlined it. We might not have a north pole in 2013 and in Africa people are starving because of drought while the people of India are suffering from more floods every year. It is terrible, and worst of all, it is our own fault!
On of the messages of our lecture and also a main reason to why we attend this course is that there are solutions to the problem. The existent of civil movements was lined out as a very important factor in the struggle for defeating or at least reduce climate change.
In the group discussion afterwards we talked about how a general change of mind is necessary if we want to stop the climate change. Everybody can agree on that the consequences of climate change are terrible and that something must be done. But how willing are we actually to change anything on a more personal level?
I started to write this blog five days ago, and since then lot of things has happened at the course and in my mind, so I am not sure whether this will be weird, but I will try to just continue. When I started to write I wanted to discuss the importance of a change of mind among for example the Danes in relation to the climate changes. A change of mind that would create changes in our daily lives; that we would actually remember to turn off the light, ride our bike instead of car and use our mind more when we invested in new stuff. We had a discussion in our group one day about how annoying it is all the time to be told how we should change our lifestyle to make it more climate friendly. Afterwards I got to think about it, and even though I also think it is annoying and have a feeling of “what does it matter?” then I think that it is important that this change of mind happens. If we not even want to change anything in our own lives, how should we then be able to make change on a big scale? I think that this personal change is important, because it will make us feel that we are part of the climate issue in general that it is also our concern and that we can actually do something about it. That participating more in the climate change issue would make us feel that climate change is not only a concern to the people that is directly affected from it, but that is a matter important to everybody. Being part of something often makes you more engaged in it, that just looking at it from the side line, so in the end a change of mind might lead to changes on a bigger scale too, because more people would participate more and send stronger signals to people in power. This is some of what I thought about the other day. And then I thought about where the focus of our campaign would end up being; on changing peoples mind or on trying to affect the politicians more directly? What would be the most reasonable thing to do? And what are our resources to actually make a change.
Then somebody afterwards said something about that a change of mind to a more sustainable way of consuming would not change anything and that it was not the way to solve the problem, because change almost always come from the top, that it is only people with power and money that can actually create a change. Is that the way it is? And if, how should our focus in the campaign be in relation to create wide participation?
Right now I really like the direction our campaign is taking, and I am looking forward to discuss our objectives more, and to discuss how to reach the people and how to create attention and action towards climate change and climate justice.

learasmussen | September 13, 2009

Hello

Welcome to my new and very first blog! I have set it up in connection with a four months course at the new Global Change education. In four months I will hopefully be a good “New Organizer” and be able to use blogging as a good way of communicate and get and share knowledge with others on different subjects.

Climate Justice and Social Change will be the headlines for the next four months. The course focuses on action learning as a crucial way to create social change, and therefore the pivotal point for the course will be to create and carry out a campaign in connection with the COP15. We are a group of 31 people + teachers who, during education and discussions about subjects related to climate change and the way that it especially affects some of the human inhabitants on our planet, will find a focus and a ground for our campaign. Through the whole course we will work with new Medias as a way to reach larger, create debate and communication and get new ideas. This is where my little blog comes into the picture.

Like I wrote I am new in blogging, but over the next time I will use this blog to reflect over some of the subjects and discussions from the course. As the field work and the campaign moves closer I guess that the blog will also be used to share the more concrete ideas and campaign. I hope to get new inputs on the relevant subjects or on new aspects of Climate Justice and Social Change.