Yearly Archives: 2010

We had an excel­lent turn out for PEDAL’s AGM on 25^th March. Kitchen Canny gave a great out­line of their work, the Chair (Justin) and Treasurer (Stephen) reviewed the year, Diana told the story of the Orchard using Jane’s and Mary Jane’s excel­lent slides, and our new Project Manager — Tom Black — out­lined an excit­ing year ahead as he, Charlotte (Energy pro­ject work­er) and Peter and Polly (Food pro­ject work­ers) embark on an ambi­tious work pro­gramme to engage the com­munity in real car­bon reduc­tion and com­munity resi­li­ence build­ing measures:

-       from an ima­gin­at­ive com­munity orch­ard that spreads from the Donkey Field site at Brunstane through people’s gar­dens and pub­lic spaces to re-skilling and garden sharing;

-       from a nov­el approach to tene­ment insu­la­tion (let us know if you’d like to involve your tene­ment in this) to test­ing wheth­er we can pro­duce com­munity owned elec­tri­city and funds for Portobello through wind power.

A great 12-minute clip from the film ‘In Transition’ was shown, out­lining how the Transition mod­el helps com­munit­ies pos­it­ively tackle cli­mate change and peak oil through rebuild­ing com­munity resi­li­ence.  It took a few attempts before we could get the film to run with sound, at the right speed, and without stop­ping – a good meta­phor for com­munity action: it takes patience, per­sist­ence, going back over the same ground, and finally suc­ceed­ing. After the film, we shared a meal — the whole event had been mar­velously organ­ised by Mary Jane and Charlotte, and it was great to see so many new faces — some­thing which augers very well for the year ahead.

We wish our new pro­ject work­ers all the best of luck with their efforts over the com­ing year, and want to restate OUT LOUD the fact that this is a shared com­munity endeav­our which relies entirely on vol­un­tary effort for it’s suc­cess and future.

If you have an idea or pro­ject you want to pro­pose and help pur­sue, or if you want to offer time and help (how­ever little or great) with exist­ing pro­jects, then please get in touch, get involved, and help us con­tin­ue work­ing to get Portobello on the road to com­munity resi­li­ence, a road that the whole world is going to be pur­su­ing, and the soon­er com­munit­ies start the bet­ter placed they will be to bene­fit and to weath­er the eco­nom­ic and envir­on­ment­al storms.

PEDAL -> Portobello Transition Town has recruited 4 work­ers to run a new pro­ject aim­ing to reduce the col­lect­ive car­bon foot­print of Portobello and to devel­op loc­al resources to meet the needs of our community.

Project Manager:
We have employed an exper­i­enced man­ager to man­age our pro­jects and fin­ances, fund raise, com­mu­nic­ate our vis­ion, and devel­op our Transition response to Climate Change and Peak Oil.

Two Food Workers:
One Energy Worker: 
We have employed 3 devel­op­ment work­ers: two spe­cial­ising in food and one in energy. In devel­op­ing their par­tic­u­lar area of work, they will be organ­ising a range of events, pro­du­cing pub­li­city mater­i­als and — we hope — work­ing with you to gal­van­ise a high level of com­munity involve­ment, meet­ing the chal­lenges of Climate Change and Peak Oil through facil­it­at­ing mean­ing­ful social change.

These posts cur­rently run until the end of March 2011.

PEDAL has a sup­ply of Powerdown Switches and Energy effi­cient 15w Bayonet light bulbs. Any Portobello res­id­ent can apply for them. Both will help save you money and help stop cli­mate chaos.

The Powerdown Switches allow you to switch off all your com­puter peri­pher­als (print­er, scan­ner etc) with one switch.

Energy effi­cient light bulbs can save you over £10 a year for every light you change. They come on instantly and are now flick­er free.

If you’d like either of these email admin (at) pedal-porty.org.uk and we can arrange for you to get them.

Richard Heinberg sums up what happened in Copenhagen and bril­liantly por­trays the lar­ger con­text and why loc­al action is the best way forward.