In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I am Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and I am really delighted to speak at long last to this week’s guest. I met James Lock and other members of Opus, which you are going to hear about, in Sheffield last summer when we were all part of the Sheffield Social Enterprise network summer conference, which in itself was a remarkable thing. Thank you, Terry, for the invitation. I went out for dinner afterwards with James and Johnny and Debs that you are going to meet in a few weeks time, and I was absolutely blown away by the breadth and depth of their understanding of systemic thinking, by their absolute commitment to total systemic change, to equity, to bringing genuine social justice to the people of their area and by the flexibility of their thinking. Here were people who were taking the concepts that we talk about in this podcast all the time and making them real amongst real people in a real place.

Manda: So we agreed that we’d talk first to James for an overview of what opus is and does, how it came into being, how they bring all of the thinking together, giving us an overview of everything that they’re doing. And then we’ll talk to Johnny about the River Don project, and Deb’s about all of the media interactions and the stories that they’re telling further down the line. Then we’ll probably come back to James, although there is a possibility of recording some of the conversations at the Sheffield Festival of Ideas, and we might slip that in too. So just before we kick off, to give you a flavour of all the things James does: he is co-founder and director at opus, co-founder of the Now Then magazine, co-founder of the UBI lab network (and UBI stands for Universal Basic Income), co-founder of the Festival of Debate, co-founder of Foundations Earth, co-founder of the River Don project. Voluntary roles, where he is social entrepreneur in Residence at Sheffield Hallam. He’s an advisory board member on the Sheffield YMCA Local Nature Recovery Strategy. He is general secretary of the Independent Media Association. He’s a steering group member on South Yorkshire social enterprise Place, and he’s on the advisory board of the Yorkshire and Humber Office for Data Analytics. Which is quite a lot for one person with one life.

Manda: And the last time he and I talked, which was about a week ago, was his son’s sixth birthday. I am really quite in awe of James and the depth and breadth of his understanding, the ways he is able to pull things together, to make connections, to create so many layers of complexity and complex thinking, and then strategise between them. This feels like the real stuff that I talk about a lot. And somebody’s actually doing it in real life. And what seems to me is whatever is happening in Sheffield could be happening anywhere, and it needs to be happening everywhere. So wherever you live, please listen to this with a view to replicating what James is doing in your local environment, in your neighbourhood, in your village or town or city, anywhere in the world. We need to begin the movement of local democracy in a way that works and that empowers people. That gives them motivation, agency, direction, and the empowerment to keep making things happen. This is getting urgent now, people. So here we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome James Lock of Opus in Sheffield.

Manda: Welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this sunny spring day?

James: I am in Sheffield. I’m at my home. The sun is shining.

Manda: It’s grand.

James: It is lovely. Yeah. I’ve just got back, actually, from a run, so I might be a bit red faced for this, which is an amusement we can hold.

Manda: Good.

James: It’s the first one I’ve had since I broke my ankle last year. Well, not the first run, but the longest one I’ve done. So I’m kind of feeling quietly pleased with myself.

Manda: I met you at the Sheffield Social Enterprise Network summer conference, and I was absolutely in awe of all that you do. Not just opus, but so many things. Social entrepreneur in residence at the Sheffield Hallam University. You’re on the advisory board of the s YMCA Local Nature Recovery Strategy. You’re the general secretary of the Independent Media Association, which is really important now, I would think. We’ll we’ll segue onto where the media is going later on. And you’re on the steering group of the South Yorkshire Social Enterprise Place, as well as being co-founder and director at Opus. And I am wondering, when do you sleep? But that’s a separate question. I’m wondering how a person grew up to be so socially aware and so socially committed. Tell us a little bit about younger James and how he got to be all of these things.

James: I think I’ve always been fortunate in the people that I’ve met, I suppose, in my life. And also never really been hugely connected to an idea of James as the individual. I’ve always been kind of connected to the idea of James as becoming, James as understood in the relationships that James was in. Referring to myself in the third person like this feels totally weird, but I think you kind of get the direction I’m travelling in. So I’ve always been influenced hugely by the people that I meet and and the places that I’ve been and all those things have been a real kind of sponge for me. So I wouldn’t claim any unique qualities.

Manda: You’re quite unique, james, though. I want you to know that. Not many people grow up and do all of these really socially aware things. Most of us end up taking careers in other stuff, and it takes decades to work out that the world is not quite as it could be, and that we could take agency and make it different and help other people have agency to make it different.

James: I mean, I worked a lot of jobs when I was younger, where I grew up, which was in a very rural area in the Home Counties. So, you know, a really privileged area. My parents made me do lots of temp jobs. So I was doing labouring and working in factories and all this sort of stuff, and working in small offices.

Manda: That’s quite switched on also then.

James: I think so. I think they’re switched on in a really human way, I suppose, rather than a kind of meta crisis transitions kind of way. But I think that teaches you a little bit about, what’s that phrase? Bullshit jobs, isn’t it?

Manda: David Graeber. Right. So many jobs are just there to keep you so occupied you can’t think.

James: Exactly. But it also teaches you the value of being in a workspace with people and learning different things. And then I went away for a little bit and travelled around the world for a bit. I remember actually the 911 disaster, I remember sitting in a company that was called Area 51. My job was to take staples out of paper so that it could be scanned. I mean, we’re in the late 90s here, well, in the early 2000’s, right? But I remember watching that disaster happened.

Manda: Taking staples out of paper.

James: While taking staples out, I’m thinking, oh my God, the world is changing in front of me and I’m taking staples out.

Manda: Yeah.

James: And then when I went to university, I got really deeply into this idea of this question really about what makes meaning, what is meaningful? When I was studying sociology and I was studying history and a lot of history and sociology is really orientated around the idea of us socially constructing our past or our present. And so that became quite a mobilising enquiry for me as a young person. And I was also very much into my music and my arts and philosophy and all this sort of stuff. I was doing lots of performance poetry at the time. Not very good performance poetry as well, I might add. But I was doing all this stuff and meeting people in Sheffield who were also doing some of this stuff, and we kind of clubbed together just to think about how we might create these moments of meaning, really, was the kind of motivating factor.

Manda: So university, meaning, performance poetry (yay!) and then you began Opus around 2005. So tell us how that arose and what its purpose was from the start and how it’s evolving.

James: Yeah. So in its beginnings, Opus was just simply a group of people that wanted to create some experiences, some events, some music, some philosophy, some art, some gatherings and convenings to rejoice in the fact that when people come together and they experience something that is truly brilliant, and some of the acts and the artists and people we engaged with were truly gut wrenchingly beautiful. So we just clubbed together and we were all volunteering, all working second jobs I think at that point. Maybe I was temping as a kind of, what’s it called, a teacher that comes in when…

Manda: Supply teaching or something like that?

James: I was very bad at that, yeah. I’d got massive hair at the time as well, so I was mocked for looking like Bilbo Baggins by a 14 year old child, which I never quite recovered from. So we were doing that sort of stuff, which was great fun. And then I started work at the Big Issue in the North as well, so I was working in homelessness. And it was great. And then we met some more people and it’s all about relationships and what’s possible. We met this wonderful designer, a guy called Matt Jones, who worked with us for many years. His capability, his skill, enabled us to start thinking practically about, okay, well, why couldn’t we create a magazine? And the motivation really was around a recognition that all the events that we were running were these wonderful moments of connection, but they were also quite transient, and they were also gone the next day. And we wanted to create something that had a bit more longevity, something that could create a bit more of a moment of reflection for people, something that was a bit more internal, I suppose. But we also wanted it to be free, and we also wanted it to be incredibly good quality paper and really beautiful with a different artist every month. I’ve got a few old copies here. They both seem to have some sort of weird horse theme.

Manda: They have horses on them, we looked earlier. Yes, yes that’s gorgeous.

James: And this one came out around Nicola Sturgeon time.

Manda: Hence the tartan and the rainbow. Fantastic.

James: And they were just really beautiful. And we were thinking oh well let’s only work with independent traders. Let’s only worked with charities.  Let’s not work with any of the big corporations, because we recognise how much of the impact of these corporations in cultural terms is creating monoculture. It’s creating these kind of corporate bands and corporate arts that really kind of flatten us as humans and flatten our possibilities. And so we began this journey and started printing a magazine every month. We were printing 8 to 10,000 copies. And prior to that, I probably shouldn’t say this on a recording, but we’d been flyposting for all our events.

Manda: You’re out of the statute of limitations, nobody will notice it’ll be okay.

James: Yeah. Come on. It’s 20 years ago, don’t worry about it. And so promoters in the city started coming up to us and saying, hey, who does your postering? And we’re like, well, we just do it voluntarily in the evenings. They’re like, oh, would you do ours as well while you’re out there? And we were like, oh, okay. So we started doing a bit of that for a few people, very small amounts, but we were broke right? So we were working at temp jobs and doing this in the evening.

Manda: How many of you were there.

James: At that time it was probably about 5 or 6 of us.

Manda: Okay.

James: So we realised, oh, hold on, actually, we’ve got this capability now to distribute print around the city. And actually that’s quite a helpful thing to have with a magazine, because then suddenly you know where all the doctors and the dentists and the bars and the restaurants and the shops are. So we began to create this kind of ecosystem of capabilities that we could do. And then takes you really into the early part of our journey, which is really around social enterprise and really trying to think about what was our role in social benefit? And how do we do that in a hostile capitalist environment? And how do you make money when money isn’t really the thing that’s motivating you? And how do you release value and get to value in it and all this sort of stuff.

Manda: All right. Let’s stop there a bit, because that is one of the big questions of our time, I would say. We want to replace the death cult of predatory capitalism and yet we have to pay the rent. You know, how do we step outside? It seems to me we’re watching chainsaws being taken to the entirety of the American system and very soon, if they don’t do something more intelligent, money will cease to be flowing in the US. Next to the UK, our biggest listeners are in the US, So hello people over there. We are heartbroken what is happening in your country, but if there’s anything we can do to help, we will. And one of the things is what ideas are already circulating, about how we can construct an entire system that does not depend on whatever is the hegemonic currency. And it sounds like you were already having these thoughts way back in 2005, like 20 years ago. Where did you go with that?

James: No, I would qualify this by saying we were younger versions of ourselves, of course and so our intentionality in this is to be questioned. But I guess you could say one of the ways that we thought about it was, how is one thing that you’re making enhanced or changed by something else that you can make? And then what’s the value that you’re creating between the things? Which is quite an abstract way of thinking about it. But if you think about the distribution service, for example, which is still going to this day, it’s great. Again, we only work with local traders and voluntary and arts and that sort of community. But it enables you to do something which otherwise would be really costly, which is to distribute a free magazine all over the city to different people and different communities. And so we began to just think about, okay, well what have we learned that we could then do something else with. So that kind of triggered, I suppose, the Festival of Debate in 2015, we’re moving through time here but, um.

Manda: But we need to, that’s good. Tell us about the Festival of Debate.

James: Well, the festival oh, God. Well, I don’t know if you can, we probably all deleted it from our memories, but do you remember the 2015 general election cycle?

Manda: Yes. That was the Ed Miliband general election. For those outside the UK, it was horrible. We some of us thought Ed Miliband might stand a chance. But no. I think they were practising for Brexit, because Brexit came not far on the heels of that. And they were polishing up their capacity to destroy people and create a limbic level response to things. So your head might go, yeah, that’s a really good idea, these policies, but inside you’re going, no, we can’t do that.

James: Yeah. Well, I mean, at a very kind of human body level we were just infuriated. It just felt like everything being discussed was inadequate. It felt like all the assumptions that were based on this status quo of operating, were just…it just felt like so many things that we were seeing…because by that point, we’d been in Sheffield for nearly ten years, a little bit less. And so much amazing things. Even then, communities were doing these really innovative practices, the universities and academics were learning great stuff. So much amazing stuff that is beyond the pale of what was orientated around that election.

Manda: Right. It doesn’t hit the mainstream media and so it doesn’t get discussed on Question Time or anything like that. But at the same time, I noticed, let me check my notes, Fairness on the 83. And that was, to be fair 2016, but I looked at that website and so tell us a little bit about Fairness at 83 and we’ll come back to what we were talking about. Because I had no idea there was that level of deprivation in Sheffield.

James: Sure, yeah. So the fairness on the 83 project is a reference to the 83 bus route.

Manda: The number 83 bus. Yeah.

James: That’s right. And the number 83 bus runs from a very wealthy part of Sheffield called Millhouses, right through to the northeast of the city. And over the course of that bus route, which is about 45 minutes or so, you see life expectancy change by around ten years. Which is absolutely…

Manda: Horrible. So a child born in the deprived area is very likely to live at least ten years less than a child born in the wealthy area. And they’re not that far apart.

James: No. And on top of that, it’s not just that people die earlier, it’s that they also get ill earlier and they experience all these different cascading problems earlier and earlier.

Manda: Yeah. They can’t afford proper food. They’re they’re going to eat ultra processed food-like substances that are going to kill them. And they’re probably doing jobs that are the equivalent of taking staples out of bits of paper. They’re completely meaningless and demeaning and designed to be so.

James: Yes. Yeah. So we thought that was probably something that was worth talking about. So there was a really great festival that the university ran that was called Festival of Mind, I think. I think they still run it. And they offer little grants to work with academics to create something new. And we pitched that, and I think it was about five grand or so. So we pitched to work on that and we built this lovely website, and we did lots of interviews with people along the route and tried to sort of surface this. And actually that that led to the council getting in touch with us and asking us if we would like to take part in the Fairness Commission. And if we would like to take part in sort of ongoing work around fairness and equality in Sheffield, which was really the first moment, or one of the first moments where Opus had been approached by an institution, to say, hey, actually we kind of recognise the value of the thing that you’re doing. Which was kind of nice and interesting. Because before that, really, we’d been working much closer to the ground with communities and arts and culture, and we still do all of that work today. But it was a moment.

Manda: And it’s nice to be recognised by people whose job it is to see what’s what’s bubbling up from underneath, I guess.

James: Well, yeah. And I guess for me I’m always thinking like Nora Bateson, what we were talking about earlier, the wonderful quote that she has, which is what is made possible by this relationship? So it’s a beginning of a relationship that opens up a set of pathways. And when all you’re interested in really is how do we address some of these entangled crises that we’re facing? And our understanding of that was much lower resolution than it is now. You know, we were worried about poverty. We were worried about fairness and inequality and all these things are still true. And we were worried about monoculture and corporate influence. And we were worried about local economic multiplier effects and how do we think about supporting the things that make Sheffield, Sheffield.

Manda: Tell us what a local economic multiplier effect is before we come back to that. Because that’s going to trip people’s heads up.

James: So a good way of thinking about this. And there’s actually some really good research that the University of Sheffield did recently on the sort of economic work or plans that Manchester have been through. And it’s all centred around this idea of inward investment. And when we think about inward investment, the narrative of that in our kind of current world is that that’s really great, actually. Loads of money is coming into our place, and then magically, what’s going to happen is it’s going to kind of trickle down to everyone, right? But actually, as you and I both know, what tends to happen is all that money goes into place, it builds some properties, it rents those things and it extracts it straight back out again. And so local multiplier effects are, I think this is initially some work done by the New Economics Foundation. And it basically kind of points to this idea that if you shop local, if you support independent traders, if you support local voluntary sector and communities, actually that money tends to stay in place, miraculously.

Manda: Yes. Which is one of the big arguments for having a local currency, because it’s not worth anything outside the local area, so they can’t suck it back out. Is that something that you’ve explored?

James: I think it’s fair to say I’m an expert of nothing, Manda, but I know a little bit about quite a few things. So I can share a bit of what I know. I think we’ve had a few local currencies recently, Brixton did one, are still doing one maybe, Bristol did one. And I think there’s some challenges and I think they’re a great idea, for all the reasons you just named, which is that they encourage people to do local spending. And I think there were some experiments during the pandemic actually as well, which were interesting. But I think they have some requirements to work well and one of those is tie it to the pound in this case. And often what we do if we create a currency that’s not tied to anything, it’s quite hard to have confidence in it, especially if you’re a small trader and making ends meet and it’s difficult.

Manda: It’s basically monopoly money.

James: But there’s been some fascinating work in Brazil over the last few years. A friend of mine, Patrick Brown his name is, a really interesting guy based in Northern Ireland and he’s a basic income researcher. And he spent some time in Brazil. And what they’re doing in towns in Brazil is they’re creating this local currency, they’re backing it, so the council is backing it. And then they’re effectively creating the demand for this by saying to local traders, if you use this, and you can transact on a card with it, so it’s digital, there’ll be less of a transaction tax on the purchase than there would be from visa or Mastercard or anything.

Manda: So it costs the local traders less to use this card and the machine that you’ve given them.

James: Exactly. And so the traders are like, okay, well it’s tied to something, it’s tied to a currency, I trust it, it’s saving me money. And then what they’re doing, which is I think the best bit, is that not only are you getting the local multiplier effects from that currency, because you can only spend it in local traders. But what they’re doing is the transaction tax, as I understand it, that they are charging, is being funnelled into a basic income for the 20% most economically deprived in the town or in the city. So you’re kind of blending some of these things around economic distribution that we know are absolutely critical. Because how do you mobilise and participate if you can’t make ends meet, if you can’t put a roof over your head and so forth? So yeah, I’m really excited about the possibility.

Manda: If you have that and participatory budgeting, then you’re heading towards a distributed democracy.

James: Well, yeah. And without going on a massive rabbit hole, I know you’ve spoken to some of the DM folk, Dark Matter Labs folk in the past, and we’re doing some work with them on the River Don, of course. But I I think it was Emily you were speaking to once, and she was talking about the river as a bank, as a possibility.

Manda: Yes!

James: So again, when you think about digital currencies and local currencies, the issuance from natural systems, another really interesting thing that is made possible by the use of them. So yeah pretty fascinating.

Manda: Yeah. We’re going to talk about the River Don with Johnny. I’m really looking forward to the idea of river coin. I think it’s a brilliant, brilliant idea. But we’ll do that in a few weeks time, people. Let’s, having had that little segue down the rabbit hole of local currencies, let’s go back to the Festival of Debate. So it was 2015. They were all basically one shade of neoliberals talking to another shade of neoliberals. Ginny Servantes Miklos says this, that basically we were offered the ones who waved the pride flag and the ones who didn’t. And watching what the Labour Party is doing just now, it’s like Starmer is channelling his inner Liz Truss. It’s horrible. Honestly, how these people dare to call themselves a Labour Party is beyond me. But it’s just neoliberalism gone rogue, frankly. And the day they wake up to modern Monetary theory will not be too soon. But leaving that, back in 2015, you were watching one shade of neoliberal arguing with another shade of neoliberal and thinking, this is not clever. What did you do?

James: Yeah. So we set up the Festival of Debate, I guess, in response to a lot of those things. We’d had the 2008 banking crisis, it was a few years after that, the change that we were seeing in the world wasn’t proportionate to what happened. It just felt ludicrous.

Manda: No change.

James: Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah.

Manda: Governments produced 650 billion and gave it straight to the banks who went, oh thank you and started paying themselves bonuses again. And people didn’t riot. Doesn’t leave me a lot of hope with what’s happening in the States, because if you don’t write about that, what are you going to riot about? But anyway, Go on.

James: So yes, we were a little cross and angry and frustrated by that. But we thought, hey, well, you know, we’ve been putting on events for years. We’ve got a magazine, we’ve got a leaflet distribution service. Surely we could put on a festival of grassroots politics in Sheffield. And, like much of our work, we kind of just went for it without knowing really what it might entail. Which is quite helpful sometimes because it doesn’t stop you doing it.

Manda: Yeah, yeah. You’re not as scared as you should be. I know that feeling. Are you being paid by now? So opus has been going for ten years. You’ve managed to get a funding stream so that you are actually all not having to do second jobs.

James: Yeah. So I volunteered I think until about 2010, 2011. And we have an equal pay policy at Opus as well. So everybody gets paid the same hourly rate irrespective of role.

Manda: Brilliant.

James: And we have about 20 members in our group. So if you work for the company you become a member. So worker owned worker led organisation.

Manda: Right. Fantastic.

James: So yeah we are getting paid. We’re not quite at the median UK wage, but we’re holding on tight for the possibility.

Manda: Right. And actually rents in Sheffield are such that you can survive on being not quite on the median wage.

James: I mean it’s a lower cost of living here, that is definitely true. And one of the reasons I think that we’ve been able to do this work alongside all the things that just make Sheffield absolutely amazing.

Manda: Yeah. Starting with you’ve got some amazing climbing just outside the city. God’s own rock.

James: I have a desperate fear of heights, Manda, so it’s not my thing.

Manda: I assume everyone who goes to Sheffield goes to the climbing. I have a desperate fear of heights, too. But that’s why climbing is an amazing thing, because you discover your own limits.

James: Well, yeah. I mean, I tried to conquer my fear of heights by jumping out of a plane in New Zealand once. Thinking, oh, if I do this, because that’s the worst possible version of fear of heights, then definitely I’ll be free of this thing.

Manda: And if I’m not, then I’m not.

James: Didn’t do it for me. So yeah.

Manda: Okay, I’m going to take you climbing next time I come and we’ll go up heaven crack. I promise you, heaven crack is the nicest climb in the world. And it’s got a walk down right beside it. This is a deal.

James: All right. I’m up for it. Yeah. Why not give it another go?

Manda: We’ll get lots of ropes so that you cannot fall off. It’ll be fine. So Festival of Debate.

James: So yeah, it kind of spiralled really. By that point we’d made lots of relationships with different community organisations, because we were using Now Then magazine to spotlight those community organisations and develop those relationships and all that sort of stuff. So we were able to send this massive call out basically and say, hey, who wants to talk about the thing that they care about in their community? And we’ll do the legwork trying to find the venue and pull it all together and whatnot. And so we did that, and we ran about 50 events over six weeks, which was mad.

Manda: Yes.

James: And the next year we tried to do two festivals in a year, which we’ll never do again, because that was even madder. Something like 120 politics events in a year, which was a bit deadly. And then ever since we’ve done it every year between late April and the end of May. So this year is our ten year anniversary. I’m very excited about it. I’ve done very little on any of it, so the team behind that were Nat, Joe, Phia,  and Tchiyiwe.

Manda: They have got together some truly amazing people.

James: I know.

Manda: So I noticed you’ve got Indy Johar talking to Kate Raworth, which is the kind of thing, if I can possibly get there, I will be there. And who else have we got? Oh Jason Hickel.

James: Yeah. And Jocelyn Longdon as well and Shon Faye, Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram speaking to each other, which I think will be a really interesting opportunity to ask lots of interesting questions.

Manda: Oh, I so need to come and live in Sheffield.

James: Yeah. So it’s going to be really good. So it’s about about 60 odd events. The team will be working about 30 or 40 different venues across the city.

Manda: And does it make any money, something like that, or is it purely funded by other people because they want this level of conversation happening?

James: We’re really grateful because we get some support from the city council now, the public health department, who recognise the value of people coming together to talk about the things that they care about. Which is, again, a really great thing about Sheffield, is that I think it’s beginning to recognise as a city; obviously all humans recognise those values, but the systems in them are beginning to recognise the value of well-being and health and care that come almost intangibly from other activities. So they’re really supportive. And Learn Sheffield as well, the education infrastructure organisation, are really supportive as well. And there’s a couple of funders that are really helpful; JRF, Esmee Fairbairn.

Manda: That’s Joseph Rowntree Foundation for those who aren’t in this space.

James: But does it make no money? No, no, it doesn’t make money. It loses about £8000-£9000 a year.

Manda: Oh, that’s so sad. There’s so much else that I want to talk about, but I’m really interested in this idea of intangible indices of wellbeing. I listened to somebody recently, I think it was Indy Johar, saying that in Sweden they were beginning to measure various indices that they thought would reflect mental health. And I think one of them was how many blokes buy flowers on a Friday night or something like that, on the assumption that you’re buying flowers for a good reason, not because you’re saying sorry because you just, I don’t know, ran over the cat or something. But all the other indices that they could pick and they would look at them all as a basket and if some were going up and one was just falling away, if the flower one is going the opposite direction to whatever else you pick then you drop it. And in the end, you get a basket of things that are actually quite indicative of the mental health of the city, which sounds like a really useful thing to do. And it’s got nothing to do with GDP. We’re getting away from the concept that somehow gross domestic product was ever a useful indicator, and we all know it isn’t. Even David Cameron actually back in 2015 said that it wasn’t. And yet, ten years on, we’re still using it as if it were. So how are you or the people around you, the people you’re working with at the uni or anybody else, how are you beginning to assess the value of the intangibles? That might be a question that can’t be answered, but it just seems it’s something you’re thinking about at least.

James: Yeah, we are thinking about that. I think there are a couple of things I’d say about that. I’ll just say what they are and then I’ll maybe offer a bit more. And again, as I said before, I’m an expert of nothing, so I know a little bit about a little bit of things.

Manda: You join a lot of dots, James, so it’s fine. Go for it.

James: So one way that we’re thinking about measuring is through storying, because stories hold lots of complex data together in narrative and actually that’s really helpful. There are some problems that we need to overcome if we’re going to trust stories, which are epistemic justice problems, like who is telling the story and who gets to interpret the story.

Manda: Right.

James: So that’s one way. And then there’s another piece of work that we’re doing at the moment for the city, which is called the city goals work, which I’m  really excited by because of the possibilities that it unlocks. And it’s basically the story of, no pun intended, the story of in 2022, Opus and a few other organisations, including Dark Matter Labs (you mentioned Indi earlier) came together, got a commission through the council tender, to go through a participatory process with people in the city to understand what the goals of the city should be for the next ten years. And we came up with, after that, there were 18 goals and six stories that those goals were linked to.

Manda: Can you give us a flavour of what a story might be? I’m not getting a picture in my head. What counts as a story?

James: Yeah. One of those stories: a green and resilient Sheffield where we all act urgently on the climate and environmental crisis, prepare for a changing future and prioritise the health and wellbeing of our city’s people.

Manda: That’s a heck of a title.

James: Well, that’s just one of the stories. Yeah.

Manda: Right. And is that a story that is being told, or is that a story that you would like to be told?

James: The goals are set over ten years. So the thing that attracted us to go for this tender was that it referenced Kate Raworth economics in the tender. And I was like, oh, right, okay, now we’re talking. So it’s worth having a go for.

Manda: So the council was referencing doughnut economics! Is Sheffield particularly switched on because opus is there? Or is this happening more broadly and we just don’t get to hear about it because the media is all, you know, leaning heavily to the right and doesn’t like it?

James: There’s one part of my brain wanting to answer that in one way, Manda and another part of my brain…

Manda: Okay, we’ll do it both. This is the value of podcasts. Let’s go for both. Tell me one part of your brain then tell me the other part of your brain.

James: Sheffield is a fantastic place. It has a radical history. It has a lot of different community organisations, a lot of different innovators. It was Jamie Bristow you were talking to recently, wasn’t it? He was talking about epistemic humility. There’s a lot of that. So I think that is part of the story there. So we created these goals for people around the city and institutions and communities and so on. And really they speak to, okay, what would the capabilities be, that a city might need in order to respond well to transitions? That’s how I internalise them. So as we came out of that process, there was a conversation about, hey, you know, there are probably going to need to be some changes to the way that the city does governance and choice making, how it senses into its population and nature and so on and so forth. City institutions, are you prepared to have a think about this? And the answer was yes, which is fantastic. So the next phase of this work, which again we went through a public tender for, and again with dark Matter Labs and Citizen Network, which is another organisation we work really closely with. And Voluntary Action Sheffield as well, which is an infrastructure organisation for community organisations in the city, who do fantastic work. We went for this tender and we were successful, which was great, to design through a participatory process these four different infrastructures. And we think, we hope that they unlock the capability to do transitions a bit easier. Because I don’t know about you, but it feels like our progress towards transitions is always facing quite a lot of barriers at different points.

Manda: Yeah. Starting with the narrative that basically we don’t need it and and net zero is a waste of time and we’re not actually facing total collapse, guys. But parentheses, yes we are.

James: So to answer your question, one of those infrastructure builders is called Metrics that Matter.

Manda: Okay.

James: And using some of the technologies, and I mean that in the widest possible sense, like human technology.

Manda: Social technologies as well as physical technologies.

James: Social technologies. Dark Matter have developed, in a place called Leuven called Cornerstone Indicators and this is part of the picture that we’re developing here. And it’s again being led by Debs Grayson, who you’re going to be interviewing in a few months or a few weeks, whatever it is. So she’ll have a lot more detail on this. But it’s to, as you say, bring these compound metrics together where you have an indicator that is something like do people feel safe cycling home at night? Or the buying of flowers is the example that you gave. So they’re ways of Recognising that we live in a really complex world. You’re probably familiar with this narrative of it’s not complicated, it’s complex.

Manda: I’m hoping listeners are very familiar with that. But if you would like to give the edited highlight of the difference, that would be good, just in case. It’s always somebody’s first podcast. So actually go for it. Complex versus complicated, briefly.

James: I hope I get this right. So complicated is when you’re building something in a linear way. So if you’re building an engine, for example, that’s a complicated problem. I have absolutely no practical skills, so I couldn’t do it. But you’re following a set of instructions essentially to an outcome that is predeterminable if you follow those instructions. It’s a complicated problem. A complex problem is where every interaction or intervention that you make into a system changes the nature of the system as you do it, which means it’s really hard to work out how you get from A to B, because every time you do A, something else changes in the system.

Manda: B moves. It’s not where it used to be. Yes yes yes.

James: So compound metrics, where you’re bringing lots of different metrics together to create an indicator that itself has movement, is a really helpful way of thinking about how you measure against complexity.

Manda: Right.

James: The other really helpful way and we’re really excited about this, is around storying. So not just the kind of classic, telling the story of a place or a person or an experience, not just the classic of inviting somebody to tell their own story. All of these things are great, but also, we’ve been working with the Cynefin Institute, and I think you did an interview with Dave Snowden some while ago.

Manda: Ages ago, yeah.

James: We’ve been working with them and this organisation Learn Sheffield, who are the infrastructure organisation for schools. And again they showed this huge bravery which is to try a new technology. And this technology is amazing I love it. Basically it gives you the ability to ask somebody to tell a story, it could be about anything. And you can do that in audio or you can do it in text or you can do it in picture, so it works for all sorts of different people. And then it asks you to interpret your own story using these kind of triads, they’re called.  And you basically move a marker towards a different point of the triangle. So a good example of this might be, tell the story of your school to your younger sibling who has yet to join the school. And then the triangle might say, oh, is your story about the classroom? Is the story about your friends that you made? Is it about something you learned? And you would move your cursor to sort of indicate roughly where your story was. And it won’t be a binary if it was just about the class. And you do a few of these that are designed for the story. And then it converts it to quantitative data. So you go from qualititative to quantitative and then it groups the stories on contour maps semantically. So it says hey these stories are quite similar, so we’ll group them. These stories are different and they’re similar over here, so I’m going to group them there. And then as Dave says you get the opportunity to ask how do I get more of these stories and less of these stories. And so again, that’s another really good way of kind of measuring into complexity, measuring into well-being, measuring into all these kind of nuanced, different, bespoke but shared experiences that we should be valuing more.

Manda: And when do you do that in schools, first of all, have you done it? And second, what kinds of stories are you wanting more of? Can you tell us that? And then what impact does it have on the kids? Because that’s the end result, is how how are we helping these children move towards transition?

James: Well, like so much of some of the really exciting demonstration work we’re at at the moment, we’re in the design stages. So Learn Sheffield, are finalising what these stories are they’re going to learn about.

Manda: Okay. All right. We’ll come back to that in about a year’s time because that sounds so exciting. I remember Dave Snowden saying, if you really wanted to spread a story in a community, certainly in Wales, you got the girls rugby club. Because they talk to each other all the time and they talk to all layers of their younger siblings and their grandparents and their parents and their aunties and their uncles and their friends and the people at school. Girls rugby club and you’ve got your story. And I thought that was genius social technology actually.

James: Well, yeah. And it opens up this possibility in a city as well, where you can start thinking about, well, if that’s doing real time data collection around storying and you can find the right kind of incentives, I suppose, for people to want to do that, because that is a challenge in that piece. Then you suddenly get these civic data capabilities that are so incredibly helpful, and they’re not civic data that’s top down. They’re not necessarily civic data that’s out of date.

Manda: No, it’s contemporaneous and it’s arisen from the people whose stories it is, rather than somebody who came in with a clipboard and tried to gather stuff. And given all of this, how do you feel about the possibility of Sheffield therefore being a model for other places, moving into a post-capitalist space? Because I’m guessing that’s where you’re headed. It sounds to me like you are. And I don’t know how explicit that would be with the various other actors in your field, but that seems to me where we need to be heading.

James: Yeah. I can’t remember who I was having this conversation with, it might have been Indi, but we were talking about how there’s certain things you just can’t unsee anymore. So whether we’re talking about Post-capitalist or however we’re kind of naming it, there is no viable way which we can carry on doing what we’re doing. So you just get to, sorry I’m getting emotional again, but you just get to that, right? We’ve got to figure it out. And we’ve got to do that in a way that doesn’t replicate all the things that we’re currently doing. I mean, that kind of implies that there aren’t great things that we’re already doing, which isn’t true, there are loads of great things.

Manda: But isn’t replicating the crap.

James: Exactly.

Manda: And the hierarchies and the top down and the trauma and the dark triad and all the really bad stuff that’s got us into the problems that we’re in.

James: So that’s the lens I hold. And I think, Kate Raworth, I was listening to her on Plum Village podcast. I don’t know if you’ve come across those? They’re so magic.

Manda: Yes.

James: So healing. It’s an aside, but I listened to the Joanna Macy one recently, actually, and she was reciting this German poet Rilke, who I’d never heard before.

Manda: You hadn’t heard Rilke? Oh, so much good stuff.

James: I’m in now. Don’t worry, I’m in, yeah. But anyway, I listened to this Kate Raworth feature on the Plum Village podcast, and she described doughnut economics as ‘it doesn’t get you to transition. It gets you halfway across the valley so that you can look to the other side’. So I think when we’re thinking about Opus, we generally categorise things by saying we’re telling stories, we’re bringing people together, or we’re demonstrating alternatives. And there’s lots of connections between all of those things. But when we’re demonstrating alternatives, I don’t know about you, but I just feel so complicit in the current system that it’s very difficult for me to, with any confidence, tell anyone what we should be aiming at. But what I could imagine is getting to an intermediate point where we could see across the valley. So that’s how I kind of think about it.

Manda: Okay. You’ve talked a lot about local currencies and horizontal pay within any grouping, and people talking to each other and connecting the communities, but is there anything else that you think is kind of part of the secret sauce to getting there, I suppose?

James: Yeah. So I tend to use technical or abstract framing for this. So I try not to do that, but when I do, just call me up. So when I think about Sheffield, I think we have a pretty good understanding of what the city is, in the sense of its boundaries. You know if you’re in Sheffield or you’re not in Sheffield, more or less. There’s some infrastructure there, there’s some politics there, there’s some governance there, there’s some economics there. There’s some ability to sense into its population there. We kind of get it. And I think basically if you imagine what transitions or intermediate moves would be in transition, it would be like how do you enhance all of those things to be mindful of the actual genuine challenges that we’re facing. But I think especially in the fifth biggest city in the UK, which Sheffield is, there’s other layers to place that we just tend to kind of ignore a bit. And we don’t put any choice making or governance in and we don’t put any economics in and we don’t enable those things to have any agency in that. And so one of those I think is neighbourhoods. So we’ve been doing some work with Tom French at Data for Action and Simon Duffy at Citizen Network to try and map neighbourhoods through a participatory process. So we found this wonderful piece of software that was invited people to draw on a map where their neighbourhoods began and end, which was really helpful. And we had about five or six hundred people take part in this across the city. And from that we’ve been able to sort of roughly generate a map that shows that there are 147 neighbourhoods in Sheffield.

Manda: That people broadly agree on.

James: That people broadly agree on. So we’ve then begun to ask the question, okay, well, what would governance look like there? Because part of the problem I think we’ve got in mobilising towards transitions is people can’t economically participate. There’s no infrastructure for people making decisions about things they care about, and so there’s no participatory and deliberative democracy essentially. So how do we get to that? And ideally you’d want to get down to street level, because that’s when you’re getting real connections. But a neighbourhood has got a population of about 4 or 5000 people on average. And we think there’s a way of thinking about neighbourhood governance and thinking about neighbourhood economics. So we’re trying to work out well, could you have a neighbourhood bank accounts? Could you involve the credit union to develop neighbourhood bank accounts? Could neighbourhoods then make decisions about the money in those bank accounts to do the things that they care about?

James: So something about place and the layers of place that I think is really important. But then going back up or down, depending on how you think about it, the bioregion is another part of our place that again has no economics, really. It has no governance or participation. I mean, we’ve got South Yorkshire Combined Authority and they’re doing some good work, but it’s a political boundary. It’s not a boundary that’s informed by nature. It’s not informed by the natural ecosystems that sustain us.  And this is the River Don project. How do you create the ability to do bioregional sensing in real time, using stories, using sensors and data, using research, using community knowledge and expertise. Then how do you change governance to respond to that? So how do you distribute stewardship? Not distributed stewardship of the river as a person, because the river isn’t a person; the river is a set of complex relationships. So how do we do commitment making? Another way of thinking about it; commitment making to the relationships that we have with nature, with the natural systems. And is that a form of governance? A commons based form of governance. And we think it could be.

James: So we’re trying to think about okay, well how would you develop the capability to do that? And then it gets even more frustratingly complicated because you’ve got to start thinking about how do all these different layers connect? Because there are certain things that the neighbourhood could do really, really well. It could steward a community building, it could do neighbourhood care. It’s not that great at doing Bioregional soil health or water catchments, right?

Manda: Because you’ve got the whole of the catchment area of one big river. The neighbourhood is only a tiny little bit of it, but probably it cares about the quality of the water that gets to it and would like to talk to the communities further upstream.

James: Right. So there’s all sorts of relationships that are really critical to aligning and tethering and whatever word we might want to use, to bring action together across those different layers. Our kind of general sense is that if you look at an intermediate future for transitions, what it really means is how do we kind of enhance and change the foundational economies that prop up everything else? So health, education, energy, retrofit, land, water quality, soil health, these are the things that actually prop everything else up.

Manda: Food systems.

James: These are the things that are under threat. These are the things that we need to change the way that we think about them with. And our sense is that if you could unlock some of those capabilities in the different layers, you might be able to do more work more effectively and at scale in enhancing the foundational economies.

Manda: Wow.

James: So that’s the way that we’re kind of thinking about it.

Manda: This is big. And how does the local council take it? If you want to create a distributed democracy, at some point it has to devolve power lower down the tree to the people in the local area. Is that a thing, or are we talking hypothetically so far? Or are we just going to create another governance set and the council can do whatever the heck it likes? Which seems to me quite a plausible option.

James: I mean, I’m not here to speak on behalf of the city council, but what I would say is that there are a load of really great people that work there, and there are a load of really harsh operating constraints.

Manda: And getting worse by the day.

James: And they’re getting worse. And everybody who is working in Sheffield City Council, certainly people I have met, are really deeply aware of the fact that something needs to change to address this stuff. The people I speak to there, there’s a willingness to hold new ideas. And I and I think sometimes when we use the word power, sometimes we mean power power, but sometimes we mean the optionality to do something, the agency to do something.

Manda: Yeah Ok. You want to change the route of a bus because you want to be able to pick up the kids and take them to school or something like that. Who’s got the capacity to make that happen?

James: And again, it takes you back down to, okay, where is the right type of governance or the right type of decision making to the problem that people are trying to solve for? I think it’s generally accepted that people who are most affected by the problem should be part of the decision making process. And I don’t think that’s a harebrained idea.

Manda: Should not be controversial. Yeah. Yeah.

James: Yeah. Whether you work in the council or not. And it’s not just the council. The council is one body in a whole city, and everyone’s clubbing together, I think, which is lovely.

Manda: I am remembering the fact that the the current American administration very recently held a women’s health caucus or something, I can’t remember the right noun, and not a single woman was present. And wouldn’t it have been interesting if they thought that the people implicated might have some say in what was going on? Anyway, let’s leave that, because I think what’s interesting here is that Sheffield, possibly not alone but definitely pioneering, a lot of concepts that apply worldwide. As the government money dries up, because governments seem to not understand that they actually make the money and they can distribute it how they feel like. How do we empower local people to make the decisions that matter to them locally? And so a question that always arises for me with these is, we’re back to David Graeber and his notion of bullshit jobs, and Rob Hopkins’ concept that capitalism is a disimagination machine, that so much of the predatory capital model is to keep people exhausted and busy, desperately trying to earn enough money to just keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. And they don’t have time to to think laterally to participate in local democracy. How are you getting around that in Sheffield? Or are you getting around it?

James: I can tell you some of the ways we think about it.

Manda: Sure. Please do.

James: I think what we’re more and more aware of, is that the kind of quality of the information and the quality of the way in which the decision making space is held is really really important. And sometimes what happens is that we privilege particular types of information, in particular decision making settings. And sometimes that’s a good choice. And sometimes that’s not a good choice. And so how we think about what is the informational landscape that’s going into decision making. And I mean that internally, in terms of opus. Our journey through this work as an organisation has changed dramatically in the last few years, and is a whole nother podcast, but really interesting as well. And for us it’s how do you make participation free? You know, 80% of the Festival of Debate is free to attend. Maybe that’s why we lose so much money.

Manda: One of the reasons you lose eight to nine grand. But that’s okay because it’s point is to make it accessible.

James: Exactly. Now Then has always been free and will always be free. So some of this is about trying to reduce the barriers to economic participation. I think it’s hard to imagine how you easily overcome the experience of trauma that comes from inequality of all kinds. It’s hard to imagine how you overcome the kind of race to the bottom, what you’re kind of saying around that; I have to work ten hours a day to get through and then I’m knackered and then, of course, I’m not going to participate. Without radical structural change. And I think hopefully there is a way of thinking about those problems differently. If you solve for some of where these spaces are located, you know, in terms of governance. So if we’re bringing governance closer to where people live.

Manda: Okay, if they’ve only got to go three doors down the street, then they’re more likely to go than if they got to get on a bus and go to the middle of town.

James: And if we’re cascading capital down to those places, so it’s a meaningful decision, it’s not just a talking shop. No, we’ve got some money, we want to make a decision. Let’s do this. But I think it’s also like, how do you create information sources that don’t just rob people of all hope? Because I don’t know about you, but my newsfeed at the moment it’s just doom.

Manda: It’s hard not to doomscroll because there’s only doom in the scroll.

James: So there’s something really desperately important about how do we come together and how do we respond to information that helps us be stronger together.

Manda: Especially given all the latest stuff about the balance of the general global media is something like three quarters of it is right leaning. And if you haven’t got access to things that are giving you the ideas because they’re being deliberately suppressed, then how are you supposed to know?

James: I think that’s a big problem. I think, though, that we tend to underestimate. I was having this conversation earlier today with a community activist, and we were talking about this problem of how do you disperse information? I felt really uncertain and my uncertainty was held by this notion of when have I ever changed my mind? A lot of the time I’ve changed my mind, not every time, but a lot of the time has been because I’ve valued the relationship with the person telling it to me more than I have the information. And so there’s something about how do you bring information and convening in trusted spaces, in trusted relationships together. And the combination of those things. So I think this idea that we just need to tell people what the right answer is, which I know is not what you’re saying, but you’ll be shocked to hear, it’s more complex.

Manda: It’s about community again. This has just occurred to me and I don’t know the answer: if you’re trying to get people who are still working ten hours a day to participate, it’s a lot easier just to sign in on zoom. First of all, is that a thing? And second, it seems to me that one of the factors that I noticed when I go to meetings locally is that there are the people who stand up and give their opinion, usually quite loudly and stridently, and there are people who sit in a corner and you’re amazed they even turned up but they never say a word. And they probably have got really valuable stuff to say, but it’s not accessed because the facilitation basically doesn’t exist. How do you go about facilitating, and is zoom a useful way of giving people greater access to local democracy, or is it just another flattening agent?

James: Um, I mean, I’m not a trained facilitator of any kind, so, you know, take everything I say with a pinch of salt. But I don’t think it’s a binary, is the kind of first response I have to that. There are some things that I’ve been involved in on zoom, where I feel genuinely connected to the people in that zoom room, and that’s been wonderful and amazing. We’ve made some great decisions and had some great experiences together. Fantastic. I’ve also been in physical spaces and felt like a level of connection that’s more embodied, that just feels high resolution. But I’ve also been in physical spaces where I’ve been having a bad day, and I’ve just felt like I want to run away.

Manda: And zoom rooms that were completely disconnected, I’m sure. Yes, yes. Okay.

James: So I think that it’s going to be a mix, isn’t it? And I guess the only thing I’d add is if you start in person and then go digital, it’s sometimes a bit better because you get that connection.

Manda: Yeah, you get the coffee break effect. The whole of the open source technology built around the fact that the most important decisions are made in the coffee breaks always. And there is that thing of we’re not in a formal setting, we could just talk to each other. And that’s what human beings do. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves and each other. Alrighty, so bizarrely and amazingly, we’re running out of time. I could talk to you for so long. There seems to be so much richness and so many layers in everything that you’re doing. But we are going to have another conversation after we’ve talked to Johnny about the river Don and Deb’s about getting stories out. So we’ll save some for there. But for now, is there anything in terms of the context of what we’ve been talking about, with the founding of Opus and where it’s gone, what it is and how cities can flourish? Is there anything else that you’d like to mention now?

James: Yeah, so you mentioned at the beginning of our call that I do some voluntary work for the Independent Media Association. I’m their general secretary, which is a much posher term than I deserve, but I think there’s a leverage point, actually, that I’d like to just share more broadly with people which I think could be helpful. I think it was last year, I’m going to get some of the details wrong on this, but the theming is right. Last year, the government passed some legislation that requires big tech companies to come to the table to negotiate for the use of people’s content in search engine optimisation and AI. Now, this has happened a couple of times around the world, because all the countries are obviously doing this. Because everybody recognises that big tech has benefited hugely from everybody’s content. And in Canada they’ve just done this and I think it was a fair few million pay out essentially from big tech.

Manda: Which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the value that they’ve got. But anyway.

James: Yeah, I mean, I don’t hold any strong beliefs that this will be a fair recompense.

Manda: Okay. But it’s better than nothing.

James: But it’s an interesting thing. And as we mentioned, I do a bit of work for the Independent Media Association for 80 publishers across the UK, all of whom are really, really struggling, all of whom are doing fantastic work. They’re bringing nuance and insight into our democratic processes, and they’re often doing that under really challenging economic conditions and other conditions. And so, yeah, part of the IMA’s work at the moment is to try and think about, could we bring a coalition of some of these organisations that represent independent media? So the ICNN is another one, which is the community news network. And Impress, the independent regulator who also absolutely fantastic. Could we bring some of these groups together to enter into collective bargaining with, I think it’s going to be Google first. Now what’s really interesting about this is it doesn’t just have to be a monetary settlement. Anything is on the table. So there could be arguments around could we get more transparency over the algorithms and how you’re targeting things like that? So it just opens up a really interesting space. And the other thing I’d just finally say on this is my sense is that Google and big tech companies are likely to move away from search engines altogether. And what you’re going to get is essentially an AI interface. And I think that changes the nature of the conversation around collective bargaining with media. And if you imagine how these large language models work, they’re essentially drawing in lots of data from lots of different sources across the internet, and if you imagine how most mainstream corporate media works, it’s all essentially drawing the same story from Reuters or from wherever and then just slightly repurposing it a bit. That’s a lot of what news is effectively. And so the value of that content for an AI model is actually diminished.

Manda: And it’s got the original source, it could tweak it any way it likes.

James: And so the value of independent media that is often written from the ground…

Ah! It’s new data.

James: It’s effectively really valuable to large language models. So broadly speaking, to our general audience, if you are working in independent media or in blogging or in video or podcasts, do have a look at the infrastructure organisations that might might support your work. So the Independent Media Association is just one, there’s the ICNN. Impress is another and Public Interest News Foundation are worth looking at as well. There’s a whole bunch; Media Reform Coalition and so on and so on. You can find all this on the Independent Media Association website.

Manda: Thank you. Because otherwise I was going to struggle.

James: Okay. Have a look at it. And if you want to get involved or it attracts you or you’re interested or you’ve got some insight.

Manda: That’s fascinating. Okay.

James: It’s very interesting, isn’t it? Yeah.

Manda: Yes, yes. And at what point is it going to just take all our novels and just suck them in, whether we like it or not?

James: Well, yeah. And the process is you go to Google or whoever, and you’d say, this is what I think you owe me effectively. And this is what I want you to change. They can choose to engage with you or not, but then the government will step in on your behalf and force Google to the table. So it’s a really interesting bit of legislation actually.

Manda: Yes, yes. Well we’ll find out if it’s got teeth. Because I’m guessing that the American government, which now seems to be a wholly owned subset of tech, isn’t going to enforce that.

James: Yes. I mean, it’s not going to answer all problems, but it’s an interesting point. Yeah.

Manda: Wow. Right. James, this has been totally fantastic. Thank you so much. I have learned so much, and I hope people listening are able to apply. Because if it’s happening in Sheffield, it can happen in any town or city anywhere in the world. None of these is particularly privileged just to Sheffield, it’s just that you’re in Sheffield and you’re really switched on. But there are switched on people in every town and city. We just need to find them and bring them together, get them talking to each other and get them understanding the layers and layers and layers of complexity in the way that you do. But you’re here as a resource. Thank you. It’s been fantastic. And anyone, I will put a link to the Festival of Debate and we’ll get this out before it starts. Because honestly, there’s some stunning stuff going to be on. So, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast and we look forward to talking to you again. Thank you.

Manda: And that’s it for another week. With huge, huge thanks to James for all that he is and does, for having the breadth and the depth to take on board all of the often quite academic concepts of complexity thinking and actually making them happen on the ground. Finding out what real people really need in real places. And please, as I said at the top, if there’s any way you can begin to replicate this in your local areas, we need this, now. The only way we are going to get through is if we can all come together to build the communities of place and passion and purpose that empower ordinary people. That arouse the huge creative capacity of humanity and bring it to focus not just on how we all live better together, but how we heal the connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, and between ourselves and the web of life. And getting to a point where we are proud of the places in which we live, where we feel safe, where we feel confident, where we feel connected, where we feel held and supported is absolutely central to everything else that we do. So there we go. Listen to this. Listen again. Keep listening. Follow the links until you know what it takes to begin to make these changes happen where you live. We’ll talk to Johnny and then to Debs in a few weeks time; Johnny first, then Debs. And I have put links to the Festival of Debate in the show notes. If you’re anywhere near Sheffield, do get along.

Manda: And then before that starts up, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, and for this week’s production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for wrangling with all the tech behind the scenes and for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to begin to get to grips with how we can create agency and empowerment, motivation and direction within the places that we live, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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