Shaping Shared Spaces: Reflections from the Fossil Free Convergence (1/3)
saturday, 11 March
I’ve had the pleasure of spending the past 24 hours in a space I have found particularly positive and vibrant. I’ll expand on that soon, but first, I’ll get you in the picture.
I sacrificed some sleep yesterday morning to fly from Auckland to Sydney for this thing called a Fossil Free Convergence. I had surmised over the past few weeks that this was a gathering designed to help build and empower a movement of university campus divestment campaigners and campaigns, not to mention a chance to have a good time with similarly-minded university students. Happily, over the past week, more specifics, including a blow-by-blow programme, materialised in my inbox. As such, many aspects of the event were not left entirely to speculation — but equally, there are some factors which you cannot really pinpoint until you actually arrive there in the flesh and check out the vibes in real time. The below, and my future posts on the Convergence, are my personal reflections as I try to make sense of the new perspectives I gain here, within the framework of the knowledge and experiences I already happen to carry with me.
Today, I want to zone into two of the vibes which are characterizing the space for me so far. I’ll call the first one “shared understanding”, where two elements went a long way towards creating this sense for me. Firstly, both a written participant agreement we signed onto and welfare team were established. The agreement, and the team, challenged us to go beyond simply respecting diversity to proactively aiming to create an inclusive space. The team modeled this well by establishing a system for resolving grievances, by encouraging anyone to join their team if they wanted to, and by making an effort to respect gender-diverse identities by being upfront with stating the pronouns they themselves identify with. Also, as a general rule, this team, as well as almost every other speaker in the plenary sessions, begun their presentations by acknowledging that we are on the land of the Gundungurra and Darug people, and that sovereignty was never ceded. I don’t believe we take the time to acknowledge our presence on the land of iwi in New Zealand nearly as often. Secondly, a sizeable chunk of our first few hours in plenary focused on listening to personal stories from Aboriginal and Pacific people, as well as Australian students whose lives or lives of friends have already been adversely impacted by climate change or attitudes towards it. I cannot understate their significance of their striking ability to frame a collective identity that clarified why we had come together, and reinforce within us the imperative of our movement.
The other vibe that has come through strongly for me is a collective and collaborative hunger for new perspectives. We are here to spend quality time learning from each other, and the Convergence is taking shared learning to the next level by creating a set-up called Open Spaces, where we can facilitate a session on a topic we propose. I listened to campaigner after campaigner propose a rich variety of discussion topics, and soaked up, with gratitude, the abundance of passion and support for the topics emanating from us all in our finger-clicking and enthusiastic applause. The facilitators of the pitching session allocated our topics a time-slot and a room, and even provided us with prompts to make sure we could get the most out of the sessions we were leading.
In all, I am genuinely moved by the fact that, in 24 hours of coming together, we have been able to create a community that champions our desire to understand and learn from each others’ perspectives. I’m already confident enough to say that if another Fossil Free Convergence is organised, you’ll be doing heaps of good to yourself and the wider community of campaigners by putting any energy or resource you can into supporting or promoting it in any way — or preferably, by being there yourself if your circumstances allow. Bring on the next 48 hours!
