Infrastructures of care

Using regenerative principles to shape CoLab Dudley

We’ve been invited by our long-time fellow travellers, MAIA, to contribute to a team learning day exploring how they grow MAIA as an infrastructure of care. MAIA is a constellation of people and projects, creating spaces, resources and cultural programmes in which they reimagine the systems and structures of our world for liberatory futures, rooted in the Black imagination. The explorations on 8 January kick off two weeks of team learning days as MAIA welcome four new team members, seeing their organisation expand to a team of 10.

Amahra Spence (Founding Director and CEO of MAIA) and I have known each other for around ten years. As members of Impact Hub Birmingham we regularly came into contact with each other’s work. Looking back I see that this gave us each the opportunity to gently observe and interact with the approaches we were each using in building new forms of infrastructure in the different places and spaces our activism is rooted in.

Amahra and I at Impact Hub Birmingham, exploring rest as resistance. October 2019

Thanks to Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures work, CoLab Dudley team members been getting to know Laura Holmes (Finance & HR Lead at MAIA) more over the last year. We had some great conversations about our work, what shapes it, and how we understand it at the Emerging Futures Pathfinders Gathering in November.

Holly from the CoLab Dudley team, Laura and Amahra from MAIA at Pathfinders Gathering. November 2023.

Laura and Amahra asked us to share ways that we have used regenerative principles and biomimicry to grow our infrastructure of care. This framing caused me pause for thought. I hadn’t really considered CoLab Dudley as being an infrastructure of care. We’ve tended to emphasise the social (varied experiences and knowledges) and networked nature of our infrastructure, albeit within that care is critical and baked in. And more recently, since we invited local people to join us as Time Rebels in 2020, we’ve also reflected on our work as Imagination Infrastructuring:

An introduction to CoLab Dudley’s approach to Imagination Infrastructuring

In preparation for the session with MAIA’s team, below I have written about some of the ways in which regenerative principles shape CoLab Dudley as an infrastructure of care, and some challenges we face around this. These are preceded by a brief introduction to some key ideas (permaculture design, ecological design, biomimicry and regenerative design) and a canter through their introduction to our work, starting 5 years ago.

Key ideas

In 2018 I started a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) with the Permaculture Women’s Guild. This is an introduction to permaculture by course convenor Heather Jo Flores:

What is permaculture?

The short answer:
It’s ecological design, and throughout this course we will use the terms “permaculture” and “ecological design” interchangeably.

The long answer:
“Permaculture” as a practice, simply means observing nature, researching tools and techniques used by indigenous people in your bioregion, and engaging in a diligent, daily practice of balancing the needs of yourself and your family with those of the other species all around you.

… The ecological design process emphasizes observation, careful planning, sharing of resources, and working with nature, rather than against it. Meeting our own needs without exploiting others is the secondary goal; regenerating the Earth so that it can continue to sustain life is the first.

… Ecological design helps us figure out where in the cycle of life we fit in, and how we can help make things better for future generations, of every species.

Biomimicry is described by the Biomimicry Institute as “a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges — and find hope. Biomimicry offers an empathetic, interconnected understanding of how life works and ultimately where we fit in. It is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by species alive today.”

Permaculture Women’s Guild faculty member Maddy Harland explains that “Ecological designers also want to mimic natural patterns to design more productive, resilient systems… By exploring and understanding patterns in nature, we can develop our designs so that they are more productive, biodiverse and resilient. We are actively trying to mimic nature as closely as possible. Patterns enable us to read the landscape at a meta level and understand how all the elements affect each other and are interrelated.”

In this 4 minute video from the permaculture course Maddy speaks to filmmaker Nicola Peel about biomimicry and some examples of it in practice.

Permaculture design is sometimes also referred to as a regenerative design approach. To illumate what we mean by regenerative I turn to CoLab Dudley team member Holly Doron’s succinct explainer from a post about her PhD:

Sustainability is viewed as not enough to counteract the damage that has already been done to the planet. A regenerative and restorative approach goes beyond sustainability and seeks to create a two-way relationship between humans and the planet, with humans seeing themselves as part of nature as opposed to doing things to nature. Regenerative approaches move away from short-term thinking and decision-making to taking responsibility for future generations and prioritising actions for the future collective good.

SPHERA | Diagram of impact: from conventional design to regenerative design

So permaculture design, ecological design, biomimicry and regenerative design share many of the same features, and are in part western responses to crises arising from problems we have created through, for example, concentration of power, extractive economic systems, colonialism and separation from the rest of nature. These design approaches draw on some of the wisdom, knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples around the planet… they are not new.

Introducing these ideas to CoLab Dudley

In documentation I prepared for my permaculture certification in 2021 (yes, I spent 3 years on the course!) I noted ways I was weaving the learning into my work between autumn 2018 and autumn 2020.

In my first three months of this course I introduced my team to permaculture ethics and worked with them to develop holistic goals for our work. A month later I found the courage to offer a Trade School class on Getting into Permaculture. This was a way to share some of my new knowledge further into the social networks I steward through my work, and to connect further with curious or like-minded people who had related knowledge to share. I also brought conversations around capitals and currencies into our work.

Six months into this course I published a post titled Permaculture: a whole design philosophy for sustainable living. I wrote: “One of my ongoing intentions over a number of years has been to introduce people in Dudley to design mindsets and methods through CoLab Dudley, and help to increase their creative confidence. Over the last year I’ve discovered that permaculture design embraces the design mindsets we’ve been introducing and cultivating, and uses them in tandem with a set of ethics, some really useful strategies and principles and a range of methods drawn from observations and understandings of how nature works.”

A year into this PDC I had connected to seasonal cycles, started to align work planning with seasonal changes, and begun explicitly observing seasonal celebrations in the work. This is not how the community and voluntary sector or the public sector in Dudley work or think, and as I have continued and deepened this practice, people coming into the social ecosystems we steward have commented on how unusual it is and how much they like it.

During the first year of the pandemic I found myself exploring more around Indigenous Wisdom, Deep Time, Dreaming and Imagination, which led to me calling on Joanna Macy’s three stories of our time, and working with my social lab team to convene a collective of creative people who we are calling Time Rebels, after Roman Krznaric’s naming of people dedicated to intergenerational justice and long-term thinking.

Application and challenges today

So how are we now practically applying regenerative principles and biomimicry to grow an infrastructure of care in Dudley? And what are challenges we face around it? Two examples I share below are our seasonally rooted work and convening and our ecological approach to culture. Then I dive deep into detail around three of our GUIDEing Principles. This is for anyone who curious to peek under the bonnet of our Principles-Focused Evaluation work, which taps deep into the values at the heart of our infrastructure. I’ve even popped in part of our database! We’re happy to share more with anyone who wants to geek out 🤓

Meaning and metaphor

From The Nature Connection Handbook by Miles Richardson and Carly W Butler

In The Nature Connection Handbook five pathways to nature connection are invited. One of these is around meaning; celebrating and sharing nature’s events and stories:

Activating the meaning pathway involves exploring our personal and cultural stories and what nature means to us. This includes sharing myths and folklore about certain plants or animals, celebrating natural events such as the summer equinox or the first swallows returning, or reflecting on your personal nature stories and experiences. Meaning also features in our use of language and metaphor about the natural world, and is often explored in literature, poetry, songs, and art.

Seasonally rooted work and convening

One of the ways we activate the meaning pathway is through seasonally rooted work… and people love it! Here’s what it looks like for us.

• Winter ~ Roots: for CoLab Dudley winter is a time for resting, rooting and dreaming in the dark. It’s when we begin annual cycles of connection, bringing people into relationship through gentle convening. In winter 2020 we brought local creatives together as Time Rebels to get to know each and develop ways to rebuild and release the imaginative capacity of people through experiments on Dudley High Street. In winter 2021, we invited more people to join our Time Rebel collective as we embarked on work to develop a cultural strategy for Dudley borough. In winter 2022 our collective of Time Rebels once again welcomed new members, through relationships developed during activities in the spring and summer. That winter we focused on deepening our awareness of the future, using tools such as Three Horizons and the Futures Cone which we discovered through bridgetmck’s work. In winter 2022 we also initiated open convening through Cultural Collaborators Seasonal Gatherings, as a way for more people to interact with our seasonal cycles throughout the year.
• Spring ~ Shoots: spring is when we start testing out ideas we’ve been developing, within our network and out on the streets, in neighbourhoods and green and blue spaces.
• Summer ~ Flowers: summer sees abundance in our programmes of cultural activity, for example Do Fest Dudley in 2021, a Summer of Creativity across Dudley borough in 2022, and Time Rebel collaborations boosted through Arts Council funding in 2023.
• Autumn ~ Fruits: autumn is harvest time. We harvest learning together. Autumn 2021 saw us drawing together learning on emerging Time Rebel practices and insights from Do Fest Dudley experiments. In autumn 2022 we focused on learning from the Summer of Creativity, shared in our report Dudley Creates: lessons in place based social practice programming and the emergence of an ecological approach. Autumn 2023 saw our Time Rebels coming together for some data foraging and then data harvesting. One of Jo Orchard-Webb’s prototype tools used for this, a Time Rebel Reflection Record (below), demonstrates use of nature metaphors in our context of experimentation.

A prototype tools for Time Rebels developed by CoLab Dudley team member Jo

An obvious challenge to a seasonally rooted way of working is that funding doesn’t start and end in neatly bundled seasonally responsive ways. So in 2023 as autumn approached we found ourselves reaching out beyond our Time Rebel collective to local creatives interested in developing small nature inspired projects with local people. These micro commissions were fantastic, but we were very aware of how challenging it was for creatives to do this work in late autumn and into winter.

Images from Two Days in Autumn, a Dudley Creates micro commission led by local artists Helen, Jackie and Jo

Cultural ecosystem

We have been inspired and encouraged by voices in the cultural field bring nature based metaphors which help us to consider the cultural landscape through an ecological lens. The first of these we came across was John Holden’s work on The Ecology of Culture.

Front cover of Making the Case, our publication bringing together evidence, key ideas and intentions behind Dudley Creates: a 100 year cultural strategy in action for Dudley Borough

In our Dudley Creates report, Making The Case, we write:

An ecological approach sees culture as a collective and interconnected endeavour, with multiple values. This is about paying attention to the ever changing, evolving and entangled nature of relationships which can help or hinder cultural possibilities in Dudley borough.It also embraces an understanding of place; ways that our local places shape us and our cultures.

Dudley Creates: A 100 Year Strategy in Action emerged through weaving together multiple strands of learning to form a collective enquiry. The enquiry is ongoing, multi-layered, invites many voices and knowledge types, and takes the approach of creative experimentation approach. It is intentionally designed as a demonstration of ecological governance in support of a flourishing cultural ecosystem. We know from Arts Council England commissioned research that a flourishing cultural ecosystem:

“works in the spirit of action research … undertakes ongoing process of always unfinished mapping of the cultural ecosystem … collectively co-producing knowledge of the cultural life of the area including tangible and intangible cultural resources … create democratic spaces for ongoing discussion of cultural value, ambitions and experience” (Creating the Environment: The cultural eco-systems of Creative People and Places, Gross and Wilson, 2019)

We have taken these considerations for a flourishing ecosystem seriously by collectively sensing and sense-making an ecosystem portrait (current and potential) to inform this strategy in action.

“[C]ultural opportunity needs to be understood not as located within single organizations or spaces, but through the interconnections and interdependencies between cultural resources of many kinds” (Cultural Democracy: an Ecological and Capabilities approach, Gross and Wilson, 2018).

A flourishing cultural ecosystem has the potential to support the conditions for cultural democracy and so wider cultural capabilities (Creating the Environment: The cultural eco-systems of Creative People and Places, Gross and Wilson, 2019). These three concepts and ways of understanding culture are interlinked.

While specific responsibilities will differ with roles, ecological leadership and governance will require a more diverse collection of voices, distribution of power in co-creation and decision making, and shared action towards a flourishing cultural ecosystem. Dudley Creates: A 100 Year Strategy in Action lifts our collective knowledge of the plurality of existing and potential cultural value in the borough off the page and pours it into creative action. While ensuring that we continue to hold open spaces for anyone to share in shaping their cultural landscape. This ecological governance practice supports cultural democracy in the borough.

A tool from our Dudley Creates Navigation Guide inviting reflections on our cultural ecosystem through a cultural lens.

A challenge we face in taking an ecological approach to culture in a place is that people accustomed to hierarchical ways of working don’t recognise this as a valid way of working. They don’t have experience of behaving in ways which distribute power.

Our GUIDEing Principles

We’ve documented our journey using Principles-Focused Evaluation and associated iterations of our GUIDEing Principles. Below I detail descriptions and adherence prompts and recent evidence in relation to three of our five current GUIDEing Principles which readily illustrate regenerative approaches in action. Care appears explicitly in articulations developed through our Principles-Focused Evaluation work and evidence collection, for example:

• Care for our planet and future generations.
• Creative pathways to understand and care for our more-than human kin.
• Animating multiple diverse peer networks shaped by reciprocity, creativity, care and interdependence.
• Building new relationships with place that are centred upon care/ healing and stewardship

CoLab Dudley’s GUIDEing Principles (images by Holly Doron)

Be Good Ancestors

This is our ‘North Star’ principle. It speaks to the prime directive of permaculture, as outlined in Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual: “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children’s.”

Our little explainer for ourselves in relation to Be Good Ancestors is:

We champion and act with care for our planet and future generations.
We make responsible use of existing resources and lifesources, and help to release overlooked potential.
We embrace and share regenerative practice; always thinking long-term, strategically and systemically.

We’ve also articulated what the opposite, or absence of working in this way would look like:

Short-termism.
Seeking quick & single solutions to complex issues.
Power over/ separation from nature via extractive, capitalist, scarcity and imperialistic practices.
A-contexual and a-historical practice — failing to honour and learn from the knowledge within places and communities.
Seeking to scale and replicate solutions by cutting and pasting.
Mindless use of resources and single use plastics.
Absence of care for nature.

The adherence questions we’ve developed for this GUIDEing Principle, which we gather evidence and observations in relation to, from time to time are:

• Is there evidence of use of sustainable materials/resources in projects, or keeping resources in circulation?
• Is there evidence of encouragement to think about whole product/ material lifecycles and more regenerative design?
• Is there evidence of an intentional focus/bringing attention to the intersectional nature of climate and ecological and racial justice emergencies?
• Is there evidence of long term thinking and care for future generations (including challenging short-term fixes)?

Some of the evidence drawn together by CoLab Dudley team member Jo Orchard-Webb which demonstrates adherence to this principle in 2023 includes:

• Reuse of materials for lab displays/exhibitions. (We have been constantly cycling some items and artefacts for an over year in various arrangements.)
• Dudley Creates: a 100 year cultural strategy in action which we crafted, and shared in spring 2022 is a significant example of strategic long term thinking.
• Projects we’ve supported led by Time Rebels, such as Getting into Hot Water (led by Workshop 24) and Reclaiming our Roots (led by Ekho Collective CIC) offer creative pathways to understand and care for our more-than human kin (water and land/ flora) while understanding the disconnect and destruction inflicted via extractive capitalism and commodification of kin (water and land).

Jo has flagged that through 2023 a gap in our work was a focus upon the intersectional nature of the climate crisis (i.e. ecological and social crises remain largely explored separately). Our team have discussed this and can see ways that our work on Dudley People’s School for Climate Justice starting this year will help to address this gap.

Nurture Connections

One ecological design principle is: it is not the number of diverse components in a design that leads to stability, it is the number of beneficial connections between these components. While the development of our GUIDEing Principles hasn’t been rooted in ecological design, rather the values of our teams over time, a constant has been a CoLab Dudley GUIDEing principle initially named Relationships Matter and now Nurture Connections. By this we mean that

We create conditions for meaningful connections (between people, between people and place, and between people and the more-than-human) that animate multiple diverse peer networks shaped by reciprocity, creativity, care and interdependence.

The opposite, or an absence of this would result in:

Transactional/ passive interactions.
Neglecting to meaningfully connect people.
Isolation.
Extracting from an interaction rather than entering into mutual sharing and reciprocity.
Interactions which close down new frames of possibility.
Absence of care or attention invested in the quality of convening or relationships.

The adherence questions we’ve developed for this GUIDEing Principle are:

• Is there evidence of active weaving of peoples, projects and ideas to support reciprocity/ being in good relation/ maximum potential across the ecosystem?
• Is there evidence of intentional practice of building new relationships with place that are centered upon care/ healing and stewardship?
• Is there evidence of intentional practice of nurturing nature connectedness and mutual kinship with the more-than-human?

Some of the evidence which demonstrates adherence to this principle through our work in 2023 includes:

• Our convening of Time Rebels catalysing new relationships between local artists/creatives and a growing/ deepening of longer relationships.
• Our ongoing collective enquiry which informs Dudley Creates: a 100 year cultural strategy in action lifted up practices and examples of being in good relationship. These now inform the vital signs of our local cultural ecosystem, as shared in our Dudley Creates Navigation Guide.

A tool from our Dudley Creates Navigation Guide inviting reflections on some of the vital signs of a flourishing cultural ecosystem.

Challenges we face in trying to work with this regenerative principles include:

• University researchers who we don’t know us or understand our work making approaches to use us as case study. We hold boundaries against extractive behaviours like this as politely as possible!
• An unwillingness among some people in local institutions to invest time, care and curiosity in open and transparent relationships of trust. We have experienced some of them actively disconnecting and disregarding our work and learning.

Seek Living Systems Health

Another ecological design principle is to work with nature, rather than against it. We previously had a GUIDEing Principle which we called Use Nature’s Guidebook which was about learning from patterns and system flows in nature. We evolved this 2 years later to a principle which we still don’t have a snappy name for, so for now we call Seek Living Systems Health.

We seek living systems health through collective sensemaking and collaborative design. We connect issues and reveal patterns by joining the dots across and within systems so that we reveal, understand, and design mindfully for this interdependency.

The opposite, or an absence of this might look like:

Siloed, individualised and separate discipline learning that ignores (eco)system relationships.
Assuming linear cause and effect, predictability.
Mechanistic worldview and reductionist thinking which breaks things down into components.
Metric-led ways of working.
Thinking and decision making that lacks concern for wider system impact or for longer-term consequences.
Focused on (observable) symptoms, rather than root causes.
Anthropocentric decision-making / design with no account of the interconnection of human and planetary health/ flourishing.
Eco-facist decision-making / design with no account of the interconnection of human and planetary health/ flourishing.

The adherence questions we’ve developed for this GUIDEing Principle are:

• Is there evidence of designing for greater nature connection / restoring our relationship with nature e.g. through using the five pathways to nature connection or using ecological/ nature based metaphors and language to build understanding of whole system health?
• Is there evidence of zooming in and out to make the links between the local and global context?
• Is there evidence of bringing together of different parts of the system to inform collective sense-making/ co-design?
• Is there evidence of more and more people thinking about whole systems (including more-than-human) health when designing cultural action?

We’ve reflected that in 2023 only a few of the Time Rebel experiments we’ve supported are explicit in this principle regarding reconnection and whole system health (Getting into Hot Water, Doughnut Economics Learning Journey, Stories of Place and Reclaiming our Roots). However from a CoLab Dudley process perspective our Time Rebel convening has been designed to lift this up, and our successful proposal to the Lottery’s Climate Action Fund is focused upon this principle, with the five pathways to nature being core to evaluation of the work.

Development of CoLab Dudley’s learning infrastructure in 2023 helps with zooming in and out and sensing patterns and connections across projects. For example we have set up a simple database (we call it a Learning Composter) which reminds us of the range of valuable data sources in our ecosystem. It then encourages us as team members to tag data/evidence in ways which support analysis and pattern spotting across demonstrators and experiments, funder outcomes, and in relation to our GUIDEing Principles, regenerative practices regenerative design patterns.

Data sources in our Learning Composter

Our team have acknowledged that going forward the relationship between ecological and planetary health, and community health must be more central to our demonstrators and experiments. This has been a critical consideration in work I’ve been supporting with colleagues and leaders in Dudley CVS (I am employed by Dudley CVS). Poverty and health inequalities are key priorities which Dudley CVS organise work around with local partner organisations, so the development of a climate justice policy and action plan with staff in 2023 needed to be explicit about these interrelated challenges. I’ve found it hugely helpful to read work by the Urban Health Council, for example this report on Health as Ecological (h/t CIVIC SQUARE).

Extract from Dudley CVS’s Climate Action Plan (to be published soon).

There is so much more I could share from the ever evolving work of CoLab Dudley team members and Time Rebels, but that can come in future lab notes. If anything in this lab note sparked your curiosity, inspired you, encouraged you or provoked you in any other ways, please do respond here or drop me an email: Lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk