The ChangeMaking Manifesto

The Change-Making ManifestoThe Change-Making ManifestoOur way of changing the worldOur way of changing the world

Joanne Poyourow Joanne Poyourow ·· www.Change-Making.com www.Change-Making.com

The Change-Making Manifesto

Joanne PoyourowChange-Making.com

What is Change-Making?

Change-Making is about passionately creating positive change. It’s not change-for-change’s sake; rather it has a very specific direction. It means taking a look at the problems the world is facing and trying to put in place solutions that will make things better.

Change-Making is D-I-Y and grassroots. Rather than foisting the problems off onto future generations, or waiting for government to fix it, Change-Making means taking matters into our own hands. Sometimes that means urban homesteading and transforming our personal lifestyles. Other times it means banding together with our local neighbors and “just doing stuff” as a group. At its best it is community-rallying and joyful and infectious.

Change-Making is about creating tangible, physical changes – like transforming a garden or installing rainwater harvesting features, the tools and infrastructure of the new future. And it's about creating intangible, philosophic, world-view shifts – such as divesting from fossil fuels, investing in the new future, and the related economic and lifestyle repercussions. Change-Making might mean learning new skills, sharing with each other, and creating more art and beauty. Changing minds is perhaps the hardest work of all.

Change-Making is courageous. It means digging deep and finding the strength to learn about the problems, so that we know what we are solving, so that we have the knowledge to judge whether a particular proposal really will help or whether it’s just treading water. It means having the audacity to do things differently than other people.

Change-Making is creating positive change.



Change-Making at times does include a healthy dose of intolerance for the broken status quo. Yet we balance that with the understanding that each person has his or her own journey to go through, to get to a new-future perspective, and that journey takes time. Change-Making can mean taking the deep breath and plunging forward, even when the path runs contrary to some of our social tendencies.

Change-Making in general is far too big to do on our own. Thus it is predicated on trust. Trust that if you take a deep-breath leap, others will see you and follow. Trust that there are millions and millions of other change-makers out there, most of whom we will never know or hear about, who also are passionately creating positive change.

Change-Making is an ongoing and forever project, because there is simply so much that needs repair and nurturing. That means there’s an element of long-term commitment. But then, what else better to do with our lifetimes?

We Change-Makers believe that change is possible.

We Change-Makers believe that change is possible, that society really does have some volition about its general direction – and that direction can be shifted. As such, being a Change-Maker means actively cultivating that forefront, the cutting edge of forward progress. In real time you may get labeled a “weirdo,” but decades later in the history books, maybe just maybe, you might be referred to among the leaders.

Culture change often begins by getting your hands into the soil.



Solutions to the Zombie Apocalypse

There are a lot of things we Change-Makers are trying to fix: Global warming/climate change. Peak oil. Biocapacity/ecological footprint. Economic contraction. Social injustice.

Those big umbrella categories encompass lots of other issues, like species extinction, depleted fisheries, pollution, the great Pacific garbage patch, water resources, renewable energy, topsoil depletion, fighting fracking, stopping GMOs, income inequality, overpopulation, campaign financing, food distribution, the Industrial Growth Complex, the extractive paradigm, prejudice, the concept of “throwaway” people, the loss of The Commons, fractured local communities, world peace. The detailed list is endless.

For want of a good name, some writers have turned to sarcasm: The Zombie Apocalypse. It basically means “all of the above.” Choose your issue.

Then let’s march forward, join forces, and help fix it. We’re Change-Makers.

When you start analyzing the causes of The Zombie Apocalypse, there are only a limited set of solutions: Use far less. Reuse. Be wise about what you use. Put even your “waste” to use. Be respectful. Be kind. Do things together.

Sometimes the solutions are packaged in a single term too. Richard Heinberg refers to powerdown – decreasing the energy inputs into everything we do – which works to solve both global warming emissions and peak oil issues. Bill Mollison and David Holmgren teach Permaculture, a system for designing for sustainability, for a permanent human culture. Rob Hopkins takes Permaculture a giant leap forward by applying the concepts to everything from communities to economics; he calls it the Transition Movement. We call our version of it Change-Making.

We march forward, join forces, and help fix it.

http://permacultureprinciples.com/



The Change-Makers

There are a lot of us now. But it wasn't always that way.

Back in 2004, I felt very alone, worrying about the state of the environment and what we were leaving to future generations. So I wrote a book – a novel, Legacy: A Story of Hope – that imagined positive, transformative change unfolding around the world.

In that book, there was a fictional small group of people who gave each other emotional support as they each worked, in their own way, to create positive change. Early readers of the book said “hey, we want to be a part of a group

We're actively creating a better world.like that!” And so a few of us here in Los

Angeles created the Environmental Change-Makers.

Our real, live group now stretches across Southern California. And over the past 10 years we've done a lot of great stuff. We created the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, which teaches urban food production and grows fresh organic vegetables for the needy. Then we built the Emerson Avenue Community Garden, which opened school district land to use by the wider community. More recently, we built the Westchester Community Oven, a wood-fired cob bread oven for public use.

Tree planting as we built the Emerson Avenue Community Garden



We became a local representative for the international Transition Movement – grassroots groups around the world who are putting in place community-centric responses to humanity's most pressing problems. We brought Transition ideas to Southern California. We've hosted major speakers, like Vandana Shiva, Charles Eisenstein, Andy Lipkis, and Rob Hopkins, and we brought Seed School to Los Angeles.

We championed the motion to make L.A. a “GMO-free zone” to protect seedsaving and local urban agriculture. Biotech lobbyists crushed us on that one, so we aren't always successful, but we do try a lot of stuff.

If you're in Los Angeles and you'd like to gather with like-minded people for purposeful projects, see our group's calendar of events at www.EnviroChangeMakers.org

Peter Rood, co-founder of the Environmental Change-Makers, teaching a bread-baking workshop.

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/

http://www.EnviroChangeMakers.org/



The Scale of Change

The magnitude of change going on around us is spectacular and staggeringly huge.

Joanna Macy and others describe this entire era we’re living in with a beautiful term: The Great Turning. Macy says we’re currently undergoing the third great Revolution in the history of mankind. That kind of puts it in perspective!

The first great Revolution, Macy reminds us, was the Agricultural Revolution, where people shifted from being hunter-gatherers to settle down in a more permanent place. People learned new skills, but there were also massive shifts in society. No longer were people in small tribes; now cities began to form, which meant people had to figure out new things like government and how to hand much broader types of knowledge from one generation to the next. The stories people told each other in their myths and legends shifted too.

The second great Revolution, according to Macy, was the Industrial Revolution, where people began leaving the land in great numbers to flock to the cities. Commerce changed, massively. New forms of government arose. Again, there were massive shifts in social structures, and world views.

Today we are experiencing what some people call the Sustainability Revolution, or Macy calls The Great Turning. We are having to reexamine humanity’s relationship with the planet. We’re having to rethink consumption, rethink commerce, rethink economics, and yes, we’ll have to rethink politics and the way we govern ourselves. It’s all changing.

Humanity is having to reexamine our relationship with the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwlXTAT8rLk



The Scope of Change

As humanity shifts toward a more-sustainable presence on the planet, nearly every aspect of our lives will change – especially here in North America.

David Holmgren created a diagram called the Permaculture Flower, which in my opinion describes many realms of human existence. Holmgren has now updated it for contemporary aesthetics, but I like his older version because the words around the edges help us visualize what more-sustainable practices might look like.

As Change-Makers, we understand theBig Picture, that significant and transformative change will come to every single petal of the Flower.

We're excited about it.

And we're among thosewho are helping createit.

http://permacultureprinciples.com/



How Do We Solve It?

Joanna Macy sees three ways we can help further The Great Turning:

1. Stopping actions, to prevent further destruction

2. Creating new structures, that will replace the old ways

3. Shifts in consciousness -- changing our relationships, our stories, our societal fabric

It’s like a 3-legged stool. Macy is quick to point out that we need all three roles, and that we must remember these roles are interdependent.

At different times and through different projects, our group's Change-Making has been about each of these. But for the most part, we tend to focus mostly on “creating new structures.” It's simply our way.

For me personally, it's meant teaching new skills, coordinating events as other teachers come to visit my hometown, and organizing physical projects that help put in place a post-peak infrastructure.

Installing rainwater harvesting at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwlXTAT8rLk



Change-Making ideas and inspiration

Ultimately, I'm a writer. Here on my Change-Making.com blog, my topics hop around the Permaculture Flower. I write about

● growing food

● saving water

● resilient small businesses

● divesting from fossil fuels

● the gift economy

● heirloom vegetable seeds I'm saving from extinction

● organizing people

● powerdown solutions I've discovered from around the world

● people who inspire me

● the activities of our local group in our Los Angeles neighborhood

● and much, much more.

It might seem like this is many topics. You could say that my blog is about the emerging new economy, or urban food production, or social change and community-building. Yet all these things are really one topic: Change-Making. Actively engaging in creating a better world.

Through it all, I hope that I bring you stimulating ideas. I hope that I offer you the inspiration and/or education that supports you in your own personal journey.

I bring you stimulating ideas about Change-Making.

http://www.Change-Making.com/



What you can do

Repairing the world is a huge job. But within that huge job, there's a place for everybody, and there are plenty of specific things to be done.

Your Change-Making will look quite different than mine, because your choice of actions will be based on your skill set, your interests, your experience, your knowledge base, and your connections. But here's your chance: Pick the role that calls to you right now, roll up your sleeves and get to work.

I've got a little secret for you: it's lots of fun.

Yes, Change-Making can be hard work. But it's the kind of hard work that leaves you at the end of the day with a smile on your face and warmth in your heart. It's the rich, fulfilling feeling that you've given your best to a really important cause.

If you like this stuff – if you'd like to believe that we can change the world, and you want to help with the work of doing so – you can get started by helping in two important, simple ways ...

Adobe brick-building, as part of the Westchester Community Oven project



SPREAD NEWS OF THIS MANIFESTO.

Consider posting a link to this Manifesto on your website (use www.change-making.com/the-change-making-manifesto/) Link to it on your Facebook page, or simply send it out to people you know who could benefit from it.

Perhaps share your own change-making story, to help others from a different perspective.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, GET OUT THERE AND START CHANGE-MAKING!

If you're a veggie gardener, local-foods cook, or homesteading do-it-yourselfer, you've already started. You've dipped your toe into new-future ways. If you lead a community group and you're intent on making it “greener,” the world needs your contribution. If you run a small business and you want your business to be part of solving the world's problems, the world needs more people like you. Please: keep going.

If you haven't started yet, please do! Come join the fun, discover new ideas, and help create positive change.

– Joanne P

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The ChangeMaking Manifesto