A Greener Hawick

A Greener Hawick 13 June 2003

at the Hawick Rugby Club

10.10am Big circle go-round: name, project, why I'm here/what I want from the day. 10.30 – 11.30    Workshop with Graham Bell and Nancy Woodhead

11.45 – 12.45 Open space 1: what are our resources for us working in our communities and what are the obstacles? 12.45-1.45 Locally grown organic lunch

1.45 Speakers: Jane Grey Let's Live Local, Moffat, Pete Ritchie Whitmuir Organics, Lamancha and Dr Lindsay Neil Selkirk Community Windfarm

2.30 -2.45 Questions 2.45 – 3 Break leading into... 3pm – 4.15 Open space 2: what work can we do together? 4.15 – 5pm Feedback to whole group and close

Graham Bell

Lives in Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, with his wife Dr Nancy Woodhead and is visited from time to time by daughter Ruby and son Sandy who are both at university. He has spent twenty one years getting the garden and the house right and isn’t quite there yet. He runs his own company with a team of other self-employed people helping bridge the gap between the private sector (businesses) and the public sector (local national and international government). His passion is community development, and his past career (as in careering about all over the place) includes being a salesman, a sales manager, a trainer, a trainer of trainers, an electrician, a horticulturalist, a fruit propagationist, an environmental consultant, a business advisor, and running businesses in construction, transport, design, education, and public relations. He has written two books on Permaculture and taught in eight different countries. He is a board member of SBCC (Scottish Borders Chamber of Commerce) and SEStran (South East of Scotland Transport Partnership) and hopes one day to find out what he’s going to do with his life.

Dr. Lindsay Neil

Lindsay Neil was educated at Gordonstoun and Edinburgh University. He became an anaesthetist and later GP in Selkirk. He has been interested in renewable energy since 1975. Former chair of Selkirk Community Council he is now the convener of Selkirk Regeneration group.

Pete Ritchie

Pete runs Whitmuir Organics a small organic farm south of Penicuik together with Heather Anderson. They grow 31 varieties of vegetables and soft fruit and butcher their own beef, lamb, mutton, pork, chicken and turkey in addition to running a lively farm shop. Pete is a passionate campaigner for sustainable farming and reconnecting communities with their food.

Jane Gray

Jane was on her way to being a fully paid up product of the Eighties before the birth of her first child in 1986, when she started to care about the kind of world that was handed over to future generations.

Moving from Manchester to Moffat in 1992 in search of The Good Life, she was surprised to find herself working in local government and even more surprised to find herself first in community development and later a policy officer, where she persuaded the Council to adopt Agenda 21 as their central policy platform. In 1998/9 she introduced a future search/visioning process across a number of communities in Dumfries and Galloway, many of which are still engaged in taking those visions forward.

Three children and a symbolic, millennial resignation from the world of salaried security later, she now works with her partner, David Major, as Consultancy Director in their business White Hill Design Studio LLP, an architectural and development practice that uses Permaculture as a central design principle.

Jane and David have a 45 acre smallholding in the beautiful Annan Water Valley, near Moffat, where they have planted over 4000 trees and cultivated a lifetime’s supply of weeds (or Plants for a Future as we prefer to call them).

Jane founded Lets Live Local in late 2007, drawing inspiration (and much needed resilience) from The Permaculture Design Manual, Graham Bell, The Post Carbon Institute, Transition Towns and the New Economics Foundation.