PEDAL AGM and Creating our Future Now! event

Over 50 loc­al people crammed into the Baptist Church Hall on Thursday 18^th June for the PEDAL AGM and Creating our Future Now! event. Many left proudly wear­ing their new hot off the press PEDAL t‑shirts (avail­able from the PEDAL stall at Portobello Organic Market – get yours quick before they sell out!) and abuzz with the infec­tious energy that filled the hall.

PEDAL has had a busy and chal­len­ging year. Looking back to our March 2010 AGM we were intro­du­cing our newly appoin­ted CCF pro­ject work­ers, launch­ing the food and energy pro­jects and frantic­ally look­ing for anoth­er office. And now, only 15 months later we have said good bye to all the work­ers, moved into and out of the Baileyfield office and have just launched the joint com­munity wind tur­bine pro­ject with Greener Leith on the energy­share web­site. Not much time for stand­ing still!

The AGM provided a for­um for reflect­ing back on our work dur­ing the past year. We have con­tin­ued to devel­op pro­jects to make Portobello more sus­tain­able, and in the pro­cess (accord­ing to some obscure math­em­at­ic­al for­mula the Government uses) we are estim­ated to have helped Portobello to save 175 tonnes of CO₂. We also con­sidered some of the key ques­tions and chal­lenges facing PEDAL over the months and years ahead including:

• the unsus­tain­ab­il­ity of grant fund­ing and the need for income gen­er­at­ing com­munity enterprise
• the ten­sion between being tar­get led and being a com­munity led organisation 
• the need to be both vis­ion­ary and realistic
• the need to engage with all sec­tors of the loc­al community

PEDAL was the first Transition Town in Scotland and watch­ing the film In Transition enabled us both to wit­ness the work that we and oth­ers had inspired else­where, and to place PEDAL with­in the wider con­text of an inspir­ing and expand­ing move­ment for sus­tain­able change.

Watch this space for a new Edinburgh loc­al cur­rency! Andy Maybury from A Greener Hawick told us about their exper­i­ence with the Hawick pound and how they went about launch­ing it. 

The even­ing then fin­ished with a speedy and inspir­ing update on PEDAL’s many and var­ied cur­rent pro­jects. PEDAL does­n’t have any paid staff at the moment so it’s up to all to all of us to make our vis­ions hap­pen. If you are inter­ested in help­ing move the pro­jects in any of the fol­low­ing areas for­ward please do con­tact the rel­ev­ant people:

• Portobello Organic Market – Tom Black market@pedal-porty.org.uk
• Local cur­rency – Justin Kenrick currency@pedal-porty.org.uk
• Community food grow­ing spaces – Eva Schonveld growing-spaces@pedal-porty.org.uk
• Community Orchard – Diana Cairns orchard@pedal-porty.org.uk
• Community Wind Turbine – Tom Black turbine@pedal-porty.org.uk
• Community Bakery – Katie Alexander bakery@pedal-porty.org.uk
• Car Free Day – Eva Schonveld and Justin Kenrick transport@pedal-porty.org.uk

And finally a call for any­one inter­ested in being PEDAL’s social media guru? This would involve help­ing us get our mes­sage out through face­book, twit­ter etc Please con­tact Chris Booth if this grabs you.