Green Changemakers
The Green Changemakers project is funded by the Department for Education, as part of the West Midlands and Warwickshire Local Skills Improvement Fund. Find us on social media via #GreenChangemakers
Towards the end of 2023, I began working with Green Changemakers in the beautiful surroundings of Fircroft College of Adult Education in Selly Oak, Birmingham - not only teachers, but staff drawn from every area of West Midlands and Warwickshire colleges. Our work together has been organic and co-created. No-one has ever done this before. So much learning will continue to emerge, as we work together to evaluate the programme next year.
Freedom needs boundaries and the architecture of the programme was carefully designed, to provide a compassionate, accountable space. We used three frameworks:
AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills, Clearly Explained enabled everyone to recognise their own role and their own power. Everyone has some of those wider green skills.
FE Constellations’ Four Seasons of Changemaking provided structured and iterative progression through a series of changemaking concepts and activities.
The Thinking Environment provided a framework for our conversations, enabling diverse, independent thinking,
We made good use of Fircroft’s beautiful grounds - our ‘outdoor classroom’ - to connect with nature. All in all, a non-neurotypical design to emphasise diverse thinking (Green Skill #14).
There were two pathways through the programme: the longer Green Changemakers course and the one-day Green Skills course. The latter was originally envisaged as supporting tutors to integrate green skills into their subject specialist teaching, but from the very first cohort it underwent a sea-change, emerging as an introduction to Green Changemaking. The reason for this? Our re-framing of teachers as Mavens, a concept unlocked by AimHi’s 15 Green Skills. With the advance of AI, our profession is undergoing a paradigm shift. Our subject specialisms have never been more important. Our new skills set is to keep ahead of the curve in terms of subject-specialist green skills development; curating a huge amount of information and sharing our insights in community with others. Exploring that word, ‘Maven’ has led us to reclaim educators’ subject specialist power. We really hope that those changemakers who joined us for the one-day course will top up as Green Changemakers soon.
We talk a lot in FE leadership about strategic alignment - setting the organisation’s values-driven purpose and rippling it through the organisation so that everyone knows their role and every process smooths the way. This is the work of the Green Changemakers. Their role is to keep momentum around the green skills agenda, helping the organisation shift from good intentions to sustainable change and preventing progress around this most existential issue of all from fizzling out. Our institutions are often huge, so to do this, they are learning ways of getting together an intersectional network, an ‘adventure-ready squad’ (another Green Skill!)
It’s a paradigm shift. Not just for FE, but if we can pull off the transformational change we all believe in, for the world. And if we don’t? We’ll still have done some really good work.
Our FE colleagues can be trusted to get on with it, once they understand that they can make a difference. Eco-anxiety is petrifying, it freezes us. Recognising that we all have something to contribute in terms of wider green skills is incredibly powerful. And imagine the modelling we do for students, if we move beyond green washing and writing things down endlessly because we don’t know what to do.
I’ve talked a lot about power here, but it’s a certain kind of power, a changemaking power. One of the shifts that many Green Changemakers experienced was that of stepping into their own potentia. Understanding it climate justice can’t just be left to the people at the top.
Potentia is a word that has become precious to us in Green Changemaking. It’s a word you may not have encountered, because it’s been pretty much locked up in Latin for the last 400 years, the preserve of a few academics. It comes from the work of Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza who was such a green skills guy. He’s our poster boy! There’s a statue of him in Amsterdam and he’s wearing a cloak covered in birds, bees, animals and plants. He believed that humans and the natural world shared a life-force (to him, this was god, not some bloke on a cloud). When we connect joyfully, with nature or each other, we release a powerful survival energy which he called potentia. He defined this power differently to potestas, which we’d recognise as power-over, power-as-usual. You’ll not be surprised to hear that Spinoza was very unpopular in his lifetime, and the concept of potentia got locked up in his Latin writings for the past 400 years. Imagine what we could have done with it in all that time!
But we have it now and we recognise it as what energises changemakers. Changemakers’ potentia is what enables us to have momentum with the big issues that so often fizzle out in the face of the day job. Address the climate emergency or prepare for Ofsted? The work of the Green Changemakers is to get the message across that the former is just as much our business as the latter.
Momentum also needs pause. We need new language and we need new thinking if we are to shift mindset, culture and systems - and we won’t get to that if we’re going at 100mph all the time. The gravitational pull of the old is strong; I’ve had many conversations over the past months where I’ve said ‘apple’ and someone has genuinely heard ‘banana’, because they are so stuck in old ways of thinking. A great example of why language needs to change is the phrase ‘global warming’. Actually, it sounds quite nice and gives us hope for a good summer! But the thinker Daniel Wildcat, who comes from an indigenous tradition so much closer to the land than we are now, refers to it more honestly as ‘global burning’. It’s a shock, isn’t it? But we need those shocks and we need time to think and to rest, if we are to write a new script for FE in the world.
Changemaking - releasing potentia - it’s the work of a community. We are gathering a critical mass of Green Changemakers who are not here to scare or shame you, but to afford you the respect of self-empowerment by creating accountable spaces to think, learn and work together. We’ve got the heat pumps and the EV charging points covered - or at least, we know how to proceed. The Green Changemaking approach will transform the landscape for that work - and the wider work of green skills development - to accelerate.
Join us to step into your own potentia.