Regional Gathering
Next Regional Gathering
The next South Coast Regional gathering will be in Lewes on Sat 27th March:
Event: South Coast Regional Gathering
Date: Sat 27th March
Time: 12pm-late afternoon/evening?
Location: upstairs at the Snowdrop Inn, South Street, Lewes
This is likely to be a fairly practical and low key event. Probably upstairs in a pub (but still children friendly) without any frills. However it may provide an opportunity to get some important stuff done.
Pressing issues that will need to be addressed include:
- Organisation for the national gathering we are hosting (17/18th April)
- Our opinions on the climate camp political statement
- Planning for actions in April (of which hopefully there will be a lot)
Do e-mail any suggestions for issues that need addressing or if you can't make it but want to feed in your opinion on something please let us know. Also do get in touch if you can help out with organising the national gathering.
More details to follow.
Last Regional Gathering
The South Coast regional gathering took place on Sat 23rd and Sun 24th Jan in Lewes, seven miles north-east of Brighton, and was similar in most respects to a typical national gathering, in terms of timings, facilities etc. It was attended by over 60 people from Kent, Sussex and Hampshire but this turn out was heavily biased towards Brighton with small contingents from Lewes and through the Vestas campaign (Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton). One major difference from a national gathering was that various practical workshops were run in parallel to the meetings. These proved very popular but that did have the draw back of depleting the numbers in the meeting at various points. Getting the balance and timing of workshops and meetings right probably needs greater thought.
There was a great deal of energy post Copenhagen, with a large number of people having become involved through coming on the South Coast bus(es) to the Great Climate Swoop or Copenhagen, and there was a lot of support for building capacity in the region and doing lots of regional actions. The discussions at the gathering mainly focused on regional issues with a lot of focus on defining what the neighbourhood is and what it should be doing. Saturday began with a review of the last four years of Climate Camp and proceeded through a examination of potential issues/campaigns to a discussion of "big questions" that needed addressing leading to the creation of a list of important topics. After lunch a load of ideas were generated in these topic area which were then honed down, eventually leading to formation of groups of interested people focusing on particular topics. These then worked through the rest of the gathering periodically feeding back to the larger group.
At the end of the gathering a number of working groups were setup with plans to push forward with various projects, in the areas of direct action, outreach and the arts. The neighbourhood is fairly inward looking et the moment with almost all activity focused on targets etc. in our own region. However there was a great deal of support at the gathering for staying engauged with the with the national process. Due to the regional focus of the gathering there was very little discussion of national proposals but a number of people from the neighbourhood will be attending the national gathering to feed in their own views. It was decided that our regional gatherings should be quarterly for the moment, with the next one likely to be in April.