Thanks to everyone who took part in the second session of ‘Anti-Austerity but Pro What?’ yesterday.
In part 1 last week, we’d started the conversation about our ideas on alternatives to austerity and neoliberalism, found plenty of common ground and generated lots of words. This week things got a bit more focussed – if we’re hoping to develop a concise way of communicating our alternative (something to rival neoliberalisms’ ‘big 5’), we need a way of boiling down all these words and ideas. We considered some of the criteria that could be used to judge our potential ‘pro what’ statements by, and found agreement that (amongst other things) they should help: reframe the debate; promote human fulfilment; inspire us and others; and be sustainable.
Now we needed something to judge against these criteria. Using what we’d learnt so far about our shared ideas, we searched for ‘headings’ that we would want some of our Pro What statements to fall under. As you can see from the photo above, we wrote down a list of around 25 – but were able to spot patterns where many of these can be grouped together. Given that last week we generated around 1000 words and 50 post-its of common themes, we’re certainly heading in the right direction to zero-in on an alternative ‘big 5’. And the conversations and connections that have happened across the two events have been extremely valuable.
That conversation continues – and you can be part of it!
If you’d like to be part of a group that meets on a semi-regular basis to keep working on these ideas, please contact michaelorton100@gmail.com . And watch this space – once we have a draft statement, we’ll be taking it out to the community to get your feedback and see how we can use this tool to help communicate our positive vision to world. Use #ProWhat to join the conversation.