What is the Green Changemakers Programme?
Edited from a presentation to Fircroft College's Governing Body 14.6.24
Thank you for inviting me to talk about the Green Changemakers programme. Before I begin, I want to say to you that it has been - it continues to be - the work of my lifetime. It has been completely joyful and, again speaking personally, it has enabled me to bring together so many strands of my work and my thinking over the past decade or so, into a programme which the world needs. So a big personal thank you to Mel Lenehan for her vision and for inviting me to be part of it.
Secondly, a word about language. We deliberately chose to use the language of ‘Green Skills’, instead of the more commonly used ‘sustainability’. There are three reasons for this.
First and foremost, why would we not want to capitalise on our unique selling point? FE is all about skills. We are the only sector that is all about skills. So we need to shout from the rooftops about Green Skills for a sustainable future.
And that’s point two. By using ‘sustainability’ synonymously with ‘Green Skills’, we are preventing ourselves from making the most of this really useful word.
And finally - though this is a harder sell - using ‘sustainability’ leaves an uneasy impression that we still - after everything - see this Earth as a bunch of resources to be exploited. That is not working out well. Humans need to get on a different, and more reciprocal, footing with the planet.
The Education and Training Foundation recently published research that they’ve been doing over the past couple of years about FE as a self-improving system and I was part of a think tank which contributed to that. The research took a systems thinking approach, which we have adopted for our Green Changemakers programme. There were two key takeaways from it:
FE has a split purpose. Are we about social justice, improving lives and communities or are we about qualification outcomes, inspection and audit? Of course we have to balance both and that’s the tension that every member of staff carries to work with them each day. It’s exhausting, but we are where we are.
Looking at FE as a system, there is a key feedback loop which is not currently functioning. We are doing all we can to improve effectiveness, yet FE is not perceived within the wider education and social policy systems as successful. We could use all our time today debating the reasons for that. But I would prefer to explore with you how the Green Changemakers approach can begin to close that loop.
And of course, that’s not the biggest picture. When Mel bid for the funding for Green Changemakers from the Local Skills Improvement Fund, Fircroft’s mission was around transforming FE’s Green Skills practice in the West Midlands, to ultimately protect and serve the environment
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This question was created by Juliet Atuguba, a Green Changemaker from Coventry College:
What could FE look like, if every action was taken in the spirit of protecting the environment?
Juliet’s brilliant question - designed as part of a Thinking Environment possibility questions session - has become our mantra. We are attempting a paradigm shift. We are attempting to fundamentally change FE, drawing together that split purpose of social justice and accountability. Will we pull it off? As another Green Changemaker, Tom Gidlow, said during one of our Research Circles, we have never had an advanced civilisation facing what we face before. So we don’t know. But we are having a good try, and if we fall short we will still have done some excellent work.
What makes the programme different from anything that has gone before rests on three central pivots. We initially planned to teach Green Skills to teachers, with a companion ‘bootcamp’ course to train trainers in this. We soon realised how futile this was. Teachers in FE are subject specialists, with a dual professionalism. They are experts - through AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills, which provided one framing for our programme, we learned the term ‘maven’ - someone who is deeply enmeshed in the knowledge, skills and behaviours of their specialism. It would be both patronising and pointless for me to try and generically teach mavens about their own area. I’m not a plumber, a childcare expert or a graphic designer! We have to trust teachers to update their own knowledges and pedagogies. I know it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of infantilisation in FE and that makes people stick in the mud. We have to empower teachers to want to update their practice. But who was going to do that? The concept of the Green Changemakers was born.
The first pivot was shifting from teaching ‘Green Skills’ to teaching changemaker skills. The skills, knowledges and behaviours to move organisations from good intentions to long-term sustainable change. And that change needs to be systemic. We don’t have time to play around. We need to make a dent in systems, as well as the strategy and mindset of organisations.
The second pivot was shifting from planning to energy. This is a hard one to articulate, but a standard ‘leadership’ programme (shall we say) would get people identifying an ‘improvement project’ on day one, teach participants some generic stuff and then mentor them to produce a report based on the intervention, which would ultimately sit on a website somewhere. Back to Tom’s earlier comment - how can we know what we need the outcome to be, when none of us have ever faced these challenges before? We could see the limitations of this approach. The real work of the Green Changemakers - taking their changemaking energy back into their workplaces - would only begin once the course was over.
The third pivot was shifting from the individual to community. Again, the Green Changemakers course was not enough on its own. We quickly brought Changemakers together in a WhatsApp group, to strengthen the community across the four cohorts. In class, as part of the curriculum, Changemakers were co-designing the future of the programme. We contributed to the Green Skills Summit in January, planned staff development input, gathered resources to share with other educators and designed a architecture for the Virtual Green Skills Hub, which is part of phase two of our project. With the help of Colleges West Midlands, that same WhatsApp group enabled us to design and host a Green Skills Conference for nearly 100 people at Solihull College in March this year. Qt the end of this presentation you will see the ‘systems map’ of the Green Changemakers programme, in the form of a gorgeous graphic illustration by Laura Brodrick which accurately and beautifully captured our work.
In total, across four cohorts, we trained 40 Green Changemakers between November 2023 and March 2024. We also ran a number of Green Skills courses for teachers, which introduced the concept of ‘green skills’ vs ‘sustainability’, led teachers to resources and introduced the Changemaking concepts. We hope that many of these teachers will return to do the full programme next year.
I mentioned ‘energy’ before, as a pivot from the standard format of ‘planning for improvement’ - the role of the Green Changemakers is to bring a changemaking energy which we call potentia to their organisations. This concept of potentia is at the very heart of our programme. It comes from an unexpected place - the work of a long-dead Dutch Jewish philosopher called Baruch Spinoza. Writing in Latin four centuries ago, Spinoza had two words for power at his disposal:
Potestas is what we mean in English by power - power-as-usual, hierarchy, chains of command and control.
Potentia is a different kind of energy, it’s our will to live, our desire to be joyful. It’s a changemaking power and it works best when we share our potentia with others and are energised in return.
We need both. We need the clout of potestas to shift stubborn systems. But we need the influence of potentia to bring about change. Those two words - clout and influence - are helpful for distinguishing those two definitions of power.
A good career in a traditional sense is two-thirds potestas and one third potentia. A good changemaking career is one-third potestas and two thirds potentia. And that’s the Green Changemakers.
Potentia is a powerful concept which is resonating deeply in FE. A month from now, with my colleague Joss Kang I am going to be training all the Education and Training Foundation’s staff in the practice and principles of potentia changemaking. And I believe that’s because there is a shift in the public mood. Globally, people are waking up to the problems in the world. Nationally, we are about to have a general election which will change things, even if we don’t know how. And in our organisations we’re tuning in again to that social purpose. Many organisations are making decisions and changes which are genuinely based on values.
The Green Changemakers programme had three framings:
1 AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills
There are other framings for Green Skills work. It doesn’t matter which of those organisations choose to drive the work forward. We chose the 15 Green Skills because they are expansive. The work of changemaking is to influence the people - and ultimately the systems and strategy - around you, so the job of Green Changemakers is to convince everyone (and themselves) that they embody some aspect of green skills already, whether that’s around technical, nature, systems or people thinking. Knowing that you already have the skills to serve and protect our planet is empowering.
2 The Thinking Environment
The second framing is the Thinking Environment, a set of processes that enable us to think more independently, and think better together. The energy of potentia brings an incredible momentum, when we are an ‘Adventure Ready Squad’ working on changemaking initiatives together (this is a Green Skill). But we can’t ride that wave of energy without taking time to pause. Building Thinking Environments into our systems releases potentia, and it also compels us to take pause. When we pause, we notice more and we reach deeper into our thinking. We get beyond assumptions and move together into new ideas.
3 Four Seasons of Changemaking
This is my own work, with Joss Kang, as part of our social enterprise FE Constellations.
The Four Seasons implement those concepts of potentia and pause which are so essential to keep momentum, to prevent things fizzling out. We begin by getting unstuck, taking a clear look at where we’re at, identifying the values in our practice, the things we have to do and the things we do for the sake of it. We move into releasing potentia throughout the organisation. Changemakers figure out their patterns of influence and use this to wake up the potentia in others, leaning on the clout of potestas where they need it.
The third season is gaining clarity and this is the work that Green Changemakers have to influence their organisations to do, with the ongoing support of the changemaker community. Together, they will co-created hitherto unimagined futures for FE. We can’t know what this will be, until we clear a path to collectively imagine it. And that’s where we come back to impact.
At the end of the first phase of the Green Changemakers programme, in March this year, we had to send in an impact report to the DfE, who funded us. Fair dos, we could tell them what we’d done and how many people we’d trained. But the deadline was five weeks after the end of our time together, two of which had been (the important reflection time of) Easter. It was an impossible ask. Luckily, we had stuff to tell them, but the real work is only just beginning to happen now, in pockets, as Green Changemakers begin to work their magic in staff development, curriculum planning, strategic working groups. We were not prepared to leave it there. Together, we are co-researching the programme and its impact, over a year. Research that nobody has asked for, or is paying for. We’ve found capacity within the programme because it’s important work to do. But there’s that tension again. Is FE about social purpose or is it about meeting the requirements of the funding? We are where we are and we have found a way to do both.
Imandeep Kaur of Civic Square, fellow travellers in this work, has been raising awareness of the limitations of impact, as we understand it. Impact is important, of course it is. There’s no point in keeping doing the same things in the hope that they’ll work. But it’s definitely more complex than we are led to believe.
Immy led us to the work of the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation. Their work is around viewing impact as long term social, economic and environmental change - as they say here, ‘the long now’. Green Changemakers have centred themselves in the long now.
So what next for the Green Changemakers?
Supported by their community as an Adventure Ready Squad (one of the 15 Green Skills), they continue to make inroads into the systems, structures and mindsets of their organisations; tough work. They are invested in potentia and the need to regularly pause and rest. We continue to gather impact evidence and we are always happy to share.
We have co-designed a storyboard for a Virtual Green Skills Hub, which will provide a single point of access for Green Skills resources, training and connection. That’s currently with the designers; Green Changemakers are collecting the material and we will launch at the end of March 2025.
Green Changemakers are writing for the FE media, contributing to a book chapter, pulling a podcast together, submitting conference abstracts.
We will continue to co-research the process and impact of the Green Changemakers programme via our regular research circles which bring us together to reignite our potentia. You will see so much evidence coming out of these in the months to come.
West Midlands Combined Authority have supported our business case for growth in this area, enabling us to mainstream the Green Changemakers programme into the Fircroft offer. All new Changemakers will join our Adventure Ready Squad.
And we intend that the Green Changemakers paradigm shift will spread outwards from the West Midlands to the rest of the UK. Watch this space on that one.
I’m always happy to chat more, to people interested in the process and particularly to people who would like to bring this paradigm shift to their own region or organisation. Below you will see our beautiful ‘systems map’.