Kitchen Table Sustainability

Practical Recipes for Community Engagement with Sustainability

Wendy Sarkissian, Nancy Hofer, Yollana Shore, Steph Vajda, Cathy Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136562525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Kitchen Table Sustainability offers a unique view of sustainability through the lens of community engagement. It takes sustainability out of the ivory towers of universities, government departments and planners to the kitchen tables of the world.

This practical guide distils decades of wisdom from community planning, engagement and sustainability practice internationally into a user-friendly and engaging book that is both inspirational and packed with hands-on tools. The core of the book is a bottom-up approach to participatory community engagement and development, referred to as EATING, that consists of six components: Education, Action, Trust, Inclusion, Nourishment and Governance.

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other’s stories once again.

Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom¹

Introduction

When Wendy visited Minneapolis in early November 2006, she attended the launch of worldchanging.com, a solutions-based online magazine that works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. The editors explain their credo this way:

That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.²

This was a life-changing experience for Wendy. In the Minneapolis audience were hundreds of local people from all walks of life and from small, local organizations, who spoke up – one by one – after the formal presentations, explaining what they individually or their organizations were doing, affirming their commitment to both sustainability and to taking action. To putting the pieces together.

Wendy bought Worldchanging (the book) that day and read it on the long flight back to Australia. What a story it told! She described it to the rest of us as ‘a Whole Earth Catalogue for the New Millennium’. Worldchanging presents us all with an invitation to be part of creating a better future, declaring:

1 We need better tools, models and ideas for changing the world. Luckily, more are being created every day.

2 The more people know about these tools, models and ideas, the better their own ideas will get, and the more ideas will become available.

3 Anyone can join the conversation, and the more people do join, the better it gets.

4 The better the conversation gets, and the more people use the tools, the more exciting the adventure becomes, and the more likely its success.³

We couldn’t agree more. And we consider ourselves privileged to be a part of this adventure. Privileged to be contributing to this conversation together with a global community of dedicated and courageous people – like the people at Worldchanging. And you.

This book is one volume in the ‘Community Planning’ suite of books published by Earthscan in 2008 and 2009. The first book is The Community Planning Event Manual: How to use Collaborative Planning and Urban Design Events to Improve your Environment (Wates, 2008). Other books authored by Wendy Sarkissian and colleagues include Creative Approaches to Community Planning: Nurturing Inclusion with Insight and Method (2009b) and SpeakOut!: The Step-by-Step Guide to SpeakOuts and Community Workshops (2009a). Nick Wates’s second book is the second edition of The Community Planning Handbook: How People Can Shape their Cities, Town and Villages in any Part of the World. All five books are backed up by Communityplanning.net, the Community Planning website, an online version of The Community Planning Handbook with current information and listings.

In this book, we seek to expand community engagement beyond the realm of manuals for practitioners so that anyone can be confident that there’s a place for them to influence community decisions about sustainability. The challenges that all life on Earth now faces are unique; they have never been faced on such a global scale. We have never been in the position where humans, and humans alone, can determine the future of all species. Everyone has skills, experience and expertise to offer on the journey toward sustainability. Now is the time to share them.

Everyone has skills, experience and expertise to offer on the journey toward sustainability. Now is the time to share them

Our experience and research have convinced us that collaborative processes are the key to achieving sustainable transformations, particularly in today’s increasingly complex world. We need people with specific and relevant skills to facilitate these collaborative processes in ways that acknowledge both nonhuman Nature and the voices of our diverse communities. Today, in so many ways, change and uncertainty are the dominant constants. Navigating more sustainable pathways within this context is challenging, requiring collaborative processes, experimentation and learning – among communities, government and industry. The eminent systems ecologist Buzz Holling advised Cathy at a recent international resilience conference in Stockholm that we must first establish an impossible vision, then take the first possible step, learn from that experience and then take the next step, together.⁴

Community engagement with sustainability is transformed by people like Maisie and Steph’s mum, whom you’ll meet in this book. People like us. We are community members first and practitioners second. And as professionals with experience in community engagement, we are eager to share what we know. Ultimately, community engagement with sustainability is transformed by people like you.

Ultimately, community engagement with sustainability is transformed by people like you

What this book is about

This book explores the relationship between community engagement and sustainability. We aim to empower individuals to come together in community, to envisage, shape strategies, make decisions and take action for a more sustainable world. Sustainability is not only an important focus of community engagement; it is also essential for the transition to local and global sustainability. Communities are the heart and hands of the sustainability movement. Engagement helps communities articulate, develop and achieve their goals. However, we cannot design or specify one set of sustainability goals for every community. Ongoing processes of deliberation, questioning, refinement, agreement-making, experimentation, review and adjustment must underpin how each community defines its own quest for local and global sustainability.

Communities are the heart and hands of the sustainability movement

In Kitchen Table Sustainability, we do not focus much on ecological sustainability in a technical sense. Many other books do that.⁵ While we have conducted research for this book, basically, it comes from the heart. Further, we do not offer comprehensive, step-bystep solutions to sustainability challenges. We are not sure that they exist. Instead, we offer a values-based approach for helping individuals and communities to engage with the wide range of issues that sustainability presents and to develop localized solutions.

Who this book is for

Kitchen Table Sustainability is for people who want to play an active role in developing sustainable communities. It’s for social innovators and ‘cultural creatives’, communities and community groups seeking to organize around environmental and sustainability issues.⁶ It’s also for people in government – at all levels – ready to embrace an approach that embodies facilitation and empowerment. It’s for educators and people everywhere who believe we need to share and communicate knowledge to uncover, develop and implement sustainable solutions. It’s for professionals, sustainability consultants, environmental practitioners and natural resource managers who need to understand sustainability within a more holistic context. And it’s for people in government, business and industry who want to engage with communities and their stakeholders about sustainability issues.

Kitchen Table Sustainability is for people who want to play an active role in developing sustainable communities

As planners, we hope that this book will be of particular interest to practitioners and clients in the land professions: planners, engineers, landscape architects, architects, urban designers and developers. It will also appeal to anyone organizing community engagement processes – from government to non-government organizations to facilitators, community development workers – and those working in Community Cultural Development (CCD). Finally, our book is for activists, environmentalists, social justice advocates and people in non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Why kitchen tables?

Months after Kitchen Table Sustainability had been accepted for publication, Wendy was browsing in her favourite bookshop in Vancouver when she was drawn to a book. It was Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen.⁷ Wendy was delighted to find that the two books have more in common than their titles. While Remen’s work focuses on individual healing from life-threatening diseases, our book is about reconciling our relationships with nonhuman Nature and with each other to support sustainability. Through the metaphor of the kitchen table, we build on Remen’s work to expand this process of healing and reconciliation beyond the territory of experts with technical knowledge. We seek to put the power into the hands of individuals and communities who will exercise their common sense. We want to encourage conversations about sustainability at tables everywhere – in classrooms, workshops and meetings, offices and community centres. We take the metaphor of the kitchen table to mean all tables, everywhere.

We seek to put the power into the hands of individuals and communities who will exercise their common sense

For us, the kitchen table represents the place where we have casual but important conversations, we share meals and where people, even in a busy world, frequently come together. The hearth is the heart of the local, the family and the familiar – a place where many feel comfortable to speak openly about their real perspectives, ideas and concerns.

The hearth is the heart of the local, the family and the familiar – a place where many feel comfortable to speak openly about their real perspectives, ideas and concerns

We are aware that not everyone has happy memories of their kitchen tables, and many don’t even have a kitchen table, or even a kitchen. In 2005, approximately three-quarters of the urban population of the world’s least developed nations lived in slums.⁸ More people in the developed world live alone so traditional notions of family mealtime and kitchen tables are challenged, In Melbourne, for example, 90 per cent of the growth in new households between 1996 and 2030 will be in single-person households.⁹ The kitchen ‘table’ assumes many diverse forms in many different environments. Yet the ‘hearth’ that it represents is universal. Remen exclaims, ‘I have glimpsed the true size of the kitchen table at which we sit and that we all have our places at it’.¹⁰ Even people struggling to meet their basic needs have an important place at this table. Their stories are testament to the suffering that unsustainable practices have created, and inspiration for us to support transitions to a more sustainable world.¹¹

‘I have glimpsed the true size of the kitchen table at which we sit and that we all have our places at it’

As the beautiful poem by Joy Harjo explains, the kitchen table is a powerful place where we form our beliefs. It’s the place where we all – from executives to activists to children – meet with thos...