Barry Winter talks to Ed Carlisle about Leeds Summat

Summat’s going on in Leeds Jan 11th, 2012 By Barry Winter

Ed Carlisle is a project manager with Leeds-based charity Together for Peace and one of the organisers of the Leeds Summat Gathering which took place in November last year – strapline ‘Get Connected, Be Inspired, Join in Action for Change’. BARRY WINTER interviewed him for the ILP and Leeds Taking Soundings.

Barry: The Leeds Summat Gathering on 26th November attracted over 1,300 participants and included a myriad of activities. I thought it was a great success and would like to congratulate you. What were the highlights for you as the one of the key organisers?

Ed: I think the process of organising what was a fairly complex and challenging event was, in many ways, full of highlights.
We set out to make the gathering as participatory and contributory as possible, to involve diverse people in its development and delivery. That meant our core partners and others co-delivering it with us. Seeing how those efforts and resources flowed together was really positive. It meant the event really did embody, with some integrity, what we were seeking.
Within that, we also managed to organise it on a reasonably low budget primarily by blagging and borrowing equipment and resources. We delivered the first Summat for £12,000 or £13,000, and this one we did for £7,500. So we really were learning from our earlier experience which itself is positive. At no point did I feel that we were pushing against closed doors.
Two things about the event itself. First, it met our expectations in terms of our overarching themes, and probably met our best expectations. We wanted it to be a day that was serious and meaty but also fun and socially warm.
Secondly, we aimed to attract up to 1,300 people which we managed. What was interesting in looking through the list of the 800 or so people who pre-registered online, as well as the 500 who came on the day, was that I knew fewer than 10 per cent of them. It was not only the ‘paid-up activists’ who came, who we already know, people I see every week. It was not just my mates who rocked up. It drew in a whole bunch of new people and it’s partly a mystery just who they all were. So it will be interesting to use the feedback to find out more about them.
From the written evaluations and from people telling us about their experiences, people met and encountered other people. They also felt energised. These are summed up in two of the strap lines for the Gathering: ‘Get Connected’ and ‘Be Inspired’.
The third strap line is the interesting one: ‘Join in Action for Change’. We are going to try tracking and evaluating whether this is taking place. Will what was a fun and successful event lead to enduring change? It’s too early to say.

BW: What were the original ideas behind the Summat initiative? How did it come about and in what ways have these ideas developed?

EC: The story of the Summat goes back to the formation of Together For Peace (T4P) in 2003. T4P was created to arrange a 10-day festival of events across Leeds. Initially it was to encourage people to engage in peace and justice issues but this broadened out to looking at the big issues of our time. And it was very much about using creative means also used in later Summats – film, theatre, food, music and drama.
Because T4P has always been a low budget affair, we did not have the capacity to deliver the festival ourselves. So we sought collaboration with about 30 organisations. People enjoyed the festival, although some of it was a bit shambolic behind the schemes. We also held festivals in 2005 and 2007.
The reason we stopped was that people told us, very legitimately, that, while they liked what we were doing, they did not have the time to attend every day. Instead they looked for parts of the programme that already interested them. This meant we weren’t really enabling a general fusion of different people and ideas.
Some fusions did follow: for example, individual refugees began to volunteer for Oxfam which itself began working with the Catholic diocese. The most meaty and meaningful actions were being undertaken through such collaborations and we wanted to find ways to develop this further.
At the same time, from 2006 onwards, we were particularly inspired by the work of north American writer, John Paul Lederach. He has written some great books, including The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Social Peace. In it he calls for “web weaving”, enabling diverse people to connect and collaborate in their social spaces, be it a community, a city or a nation. This means making those spaces more resilient, more able to deal creatively with difficult things.
So we stopped doing festivals and condensed them into one-day events. These could then be more about enabling people to connect and collaborate and about integration and action.

BW: Is if fair to say that Together for Peace and the events you organised come from faith-based initiatives, and I don’t mean that pejoratively?

EC: Yes and no. The three original founders of T4P, who were amazing activists, were Christians. But as they handed over the organising, it became increasingly apparent that it was not appropriate to make it overly faith-based because it does not resonate with lots of people. We feel slightly misconstrued as an organisation in this respect but it happens less and less.
That does not mean that we don’t do such work. One member of the team who is Christian has been active for many years in facilitating a Jewish-Muslim dialogue and this is now gathering momentum.

BW: What is it that you are hoping people take with them when they leave, given that the day’s activities begin with breakfast at 9am and continue into the evening with social events?

EC: Our strap line ‘Get Connected, Be Inspired & Join in Action for Change’ encapsulates it. We hope people will take away with them a sense of the need for a better connected yet diverse Leeds, a better connected Yorkshire and a better connected north of England. This amounts to having a healthier place where ideas can flow between different interest groups, across different generations, ethnicities and movements.
For the more engaged activists, we wanted them to feel re-energised by participating, because many go through phases of being tired and fed up, feeling that nobody else seems to be bothering. To be in a space with a whole bunch of other people getting involved really helps.
And finally, while there is nothing wrong with talking shops, projects like Summat do need to hold a mirror up to ourselves. Are we just putting on interesting events or can our activities lead to different forms of action? Sometimes these might be short term, like joining an organisation such as Amnesty International or Greenpeace. But others will hopefully encourage medium or long term change engendered by a stronger community spirit.
As someone else put it, we hope to try to raise the temperature around issues of social change, perhaps even by half a degree, so that progressive social movements become possible.

BW: When you talk about seeking change, what is the change you envisage?

EC: As Lederach argues, you can’t force change, you can only develop the potential for change.
There is very much a resonance, or oneness, between personal change and macro-change or structural change. We want to enable people to make micro changes in their lives all the way to engaging in more significant activities and issues.
If they begin to wrestle with the idea that environmental, social, political and economic issues are inter-connected then that’s progress. We want people to almost intuitively start to grasp that sense of what a huge job is needed; to begin to be able to re-imagine our world. It’s fairly big stuff.

BW: When I hear you speak, I hear echoes of what I would call ethical socialism, and what you do at one level helps to prefigure how you achieve your wider ambitions.

EC: But how would you respond to the kind of criticism that says all this touchy-feely stuff is fine but what about fighting the system, opposing the cuts, tackling the hard issues, and not just sitting round feeling good about ourselves?
That question has to be asked. It’s far too easy for us to construct cosy spaces for ourselves, which we all do to a certain extent.
First, the Summat creates space for groups who want to tackle the big issues. We provide platforms for people to run their own workshops or stalls. This gives them the opportunity to engage with a whole bunch of new people. While Summat is designed to be mainstream and to have a broad appeal, we also want to create space for those wider ideas to be heard.
However, that cannot be the whole response. If that’s all we focus on we are hugely disempowering ourselves. We would be accepting the terms of the struggle defined by pre-established centres of power, by the economic and political system as it is.
Valerie Fournier, who talks a lot about social movements, argues that really crucial steps for developing social change are cultivating outrage. We need to be shining a torch on the centres of power and injustice but this has to be accompanied by creative alternatives.
That’s why the BBC reporter, Justin Rowlett, gave a deliberately provocative talk on the green movement, which he says should be a success but is failing. This, he says, is partly because it is too concerned with being negative (“anti-nuclear, anti-GM, anti-capitalist”) instead of offering creative alternatives. Cultural creativity has to be at the heart of social movements.

BW: What plans do you have for the future?

EC: Over the next few months, I want to research the participants’ responses to the Summat. In particular, it will be interesting to see whether we have encouraged any changes, whether individually or organisationally. If not, it will be useful to consider what the barriers to change are.
In this respect, we were particularly heartened by the comments of two of our leading participants, Maurice Glasman and Peter Tatchell, who were both very positive about the day.
We also have to weigh things up, look at whether the outcomes justify the all-consuming effort of putting on such an event. It will probably take us another six months to decide when and whether to hold it again.
If we go for it, then it will probably be during the summer so more of it can be outdoors. I’m intrigued by the idea of a 36-hour Summat, possibly over a summer bank holiday. We tried a little tester in May with a couple of hundred people, and it was good little event. We are also keen to have even stronger partnerships so we can take our messages to wider audiences.
–
More information from the Summat website: www.summat.orgYou can also download the programme: www.t4p.org.uk/summat2011brochure
More about Together for Peace here.
Information about Paul Lederach’s book, The Moral Imagination, is here.

Max Farrar in the news: remember the flames of police racism (1975)

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/111565

Remember, remember the flames of police racism
Friday 04 November 2011
by Ann Czernik

Professor Max Farrar says that he rarely speaks of the bonfire night riot in 1975.
But it was then he narrowly missed a lengthy jail term when he was tried and acquitted for incitement to riot, affray and assaulting a police officer while the Leeds Chapeltown district descended into disorder.
"They said I led a mob of black youth into an attack on the police," he says. "It was 100 per cent fabrication."
The situation with the Leeds police reflected what was going on nationally, Farrar claims, where anyone perceived as a threat was attacked.
A white, middle-class college lecturer who worked with Chapeltown News, which continually criticised poilice racism and unjust behaviour, he was "a thorn in their flesh and they found this opportunity to teach me a lesson."
Farrar was taking a photo of the bonfire night celebrations when "a kid beside me suddenly stoned this passing car. I had no idea what he was doing. He said: 'It's a copper.' I remember thinking: 'I understand why you're stoning the car'."
Police piled into Chapeltown to make arrests and as a policeman ran past he bashed Farrar in the face.
"Being a completely naive middle-class uppity fool, I went to the next policeman and said: 'I want to make a complaint. I've been assaulted by an officer.' He grabbed me round the neck, banged my head against his panda car doors and took me up to the police station and arrested me for threatening behaviour. Some time later, when they realised who I was - part of the Chapeltown News Group - they said to themselves: 'We'll show this guy who's boss.'"
The prosecution "case" was to read Chapeltown News to Farrar, including everything it said which was "pretty radical and hostile towards the police" and Farrar had to say what he thought about each of these statements.
He stood by the paper's political line on race, class and police oppression. When the jury was asked why he'd been acquitted, the response was: "We thought you were the kind of person who could incite a riot but we didn't believe you did on this occasion."
Chapeltown News reported the experiences of the migrant working-class black communities that had settled in Chapetown, a run-down area of Leeds during the 1960s and 1970s. The paper was produced by a group of academics who wanted to challenge and engage with racism.
Farrar moved into Chapeltown in 1970. "I thought it was very exotic," he explains. "I thought that sociologists were supposed to identify with outsiders."
But he was told he was "just another missionary" and should "fuck off" as soon as possible. "I don't think people realise how deep this enmity or division goes," he says.
Farrar says during the 1970s the "orthodox" left thought that what he and others were doing in Chapeltown was "kind of barmy." But real black politics was not so much black youth being arrested, although that was part of it. It was a response to "the endemic racism in everyday life and every institution."
Farrar remembers when black parents in Chapeltown took their children out on strike because the education their kids was receiving was so inferior. They'd been arguing with the authorities for more than six months about how poor it was. They refused to listen and the parents set up a supplementary school with their own self-organised, self-educative work.
Within a week the authority had agreed to a new head and new programme of work, "so black direct action had more effect on the Leeds education system than anything on the left had ever done," Farrar asserts.
He emphasises the role that representation has in reducing violent urban protest. "Democratic participation for me is the key. It's the fundamental for creating a better, socially just society," he says.
He cites the politically astute and experienced trade unionist George Mudie as the turning point for representation. His union background meant he was genuinely committed to the view that there needs to be a consultation in which the aggrieved get their voices heard.
"I think he began to realise that there was a long history of political organising but the riots were a symptom of the failure of those legitimate modes of protest to be properly listened to," Farrar says.
Mudie set up the Harehill and Chapeltown Liaison Committee and dragged all the relevant council officers to monthly meetings where they would line up in front of anyone who wanted to say their piece.
These were "interesting experiments in democratic responsibility," Farrer says, because it was the first time they had been forced to come, the meetings were minuted and there was a "certain level of accountability."
But Farrar is at pains to point out that social inequality, which affects young people and particularly black youth disproportionately, is still a burning issue today. Unemployment among black 16 to 24-year-olds is 50 per cent, more than double the rate of their white counterparts. Poverty and poor housing is the default condition of black communities.
He considers that it takes years for violent urban protest to gain momentum and says that research into the cause of the riots support this assertion.
In a recent, moving newspaper interview following this year's nationwide riots, an unknown black youth says: "Why were people confronting the police if it was all about thievery? It wasn't all about thievery but there was thievery going on. It was about giving the police a taste of their own medicine."
Today young black men "have no communities, we don't have many businesses, we got nothing in this country. It's not that we're not part of society. It's that we're not part of the same culture that most people are living."
Black people are "big business" in Britain and "we need to build something for ourselves so that we don't need to keep our hands out swinging. We've been working in the UK for a long time driving the buses and stuff like that. We should have something by now."
Why is that so difficult to understand?

For further information about Professor Farrar, visit: www.maxfarrar.org.uk

Leeds Taking Soundings meting

The next meeting is on Wednesday October 26th at 6PM. The speaker is Jeremy Gilbert from the University of East London on the topic of 'Reclaiming Modernity: Why the Future isn't Conservative'. The location is Broadcasting Place A101.

Barry Winter on Tony Judt

Barry Winter recently did an excellent talk to the Leeds Taking Soundings group on the subject of Tony Judt and his book Ill Fares the Land. Barry has written up the talk and it available here on the ILP wweb-site.

Leeds Young Authors at Soundings, June 22nd

The next Leeds Taking Soundings event is about Leeds Young Authors. You will see a film and meet the film directors, some of the young poets, and the people who organise the project. It's on Wednesday 22nd June at 6pm in Old Broadcasting House, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds.

Leeds Young Authors are in desperate need of funds if they are to compete in a forthcoming poetry competition in the USA. They get no public subsidy. if you can spare a few pounds, this is the way to make your donation.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects?agent_desc=project&filter_text=Leeds+Young+Authors&commit=SEARCH

If you need to be convinced of what a good cause this is to support, read on . . .

The film about Leeds Young Authors, 'We are Poets' (described by Benjamin Zephaniah as poetry itself) won a prize at the prestigious Sheffield Documentary Film Festival last week.
Director(s):Alex Ramseyer-Bache, Daniel Lucchesi - Producer(s):Alex Ramseyer-Bache Co - Producer Khadijah Ibrahiim
Running time: 80 min

It might be the age of Facebook and Twitter, but a group of Leeds teenagers have chosen to define themselves through one of the most ancient forms of culture out there: the spoken word. But these aren’t any old poems but anguished, witty full-throated diatribes, voicing the concerns of a generation of British born teenagers. Brave New Voices, the most prestigious poetry slam competition in America, has chosen Leeds Young Authors to represent the UK at their upcoming competition in Washington DC (2009). Sheffield-based filmmakers Alex Ramseyer-Bache and Daniel Lucchesi, graduates of Leeds Met's Film School, follow the group as they prepare for a transformational journey of a lifetime. With a mix of cinematically crafted lyrical sequences with raw, intimate actuality documentary, 'We Are Poets' challenges our understanding of youth by giving them the stage, allowing them the chance to speak for themselves. Anyone tempted to dismiss today’s teenagers as politically apathetic layabouts better pay heed: here is electrifying evidence to the contrary.
More on Leeds Young Authors, founded by Khadija Ibrahim, here:
http://www.leedsyoungauthors.org.uk/about.html

Leeds Salon on Valuing the Arts

Forthcoming Leeds Salon debate, now part of the Emerge Leeds Festival 2011:

Valuing the Arts in an Age of Austerity

Wednesday 22 June 2011
The Millennium Room, The Carriageworks, Millennium Square, Leeds,
5:45pm (for a 6pm start) to 7:45pm.
£5 waged/£3 unwaged on the door.

With the current economic crisis and widespread cuts in public spending budgets, things are even more financially precarious for the arts than usual; and many in the arts have been forced to reappraise how they argue the case for funding.

The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is investigating techniques to assess the economic value of the arts, what it terms non-market goods, in terms of what people feel they would be willing to pay for things if they were not free.

And the February 2011 Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) pamphlet entitled Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society: Remaking the case for the arts states: "The Commission on 2020 Public Services at the RSA has called for more public investment to be evaluated in terms of a ‘social productivity test’: whether it builds individual and community engagement, resilience and reciprocity."

The pamphlet sets out to define a bold response to the challenge presented by the cuts in funding, but is there something wanting in the solutions offered?

This discussion aims to challenge the participation approach of chasing audiences, in favour of more compelling reasons why the arts should receive public funding, and ask some difficult questions such as: just how should we value the arts? Are the arts a luxury or a necessity? Do they have intrinsic value or are they best assessed in terms of outcome and impact? Does what the public think they want or like matter or should we fund the arts regardless? Do the arts even need or deserve public funding at all?

Speakers

Angus Kennedy is head of external relations for the Institute of Ideas, working principally to programme the annual Battle of Ideas festival in London and its international satellite events. He chairs the Institute’s Economy Forum and helps organise its discussions. He writes for spiked and Culture Wars, among other publications, with particular interests in the Holocaust, classics, culture and the arts, economics and moral philosophy.


Moira Innes, Director Leeds Met Gallery & Studio Theatre. Moira has a post-graduate qualification in sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art and has since worked continually in the art sector. As a founding Director for Situation Leeds, she co-organised festivals of art in public realm in 2005 & 2007 and is currently developing a series of interventions that utilise the fabric of the city. She is currently Chair of Leeds Visual Art Forum and works strategically to the profile of the visual arts across Leeds.


Councillor Adam Ogilvie represents Beeston and Holbeck ward in south Leeds where he also lives. Since May 2010, he has been the Executive Board Member for Leisure on Leeds City Council; a portfolio which includes arts, culture and creative industries, museums and galleries, events, parks and countryside, sport and recreation, libraries and cemeteries and crematoria. He is also on the Board of South Leeds Community Radio, Beeston Festival and Holbeck Gala Committees and Chair of Leeds Grand Theatre.


Andy Abbott is an artist, writer, musician and educator. He graduated from the LCAD Foundation course in 2001 and has worked and studied in Leeds since. Currently he is undertaking practice-led research for a PhD in Fine Art at University of Leeds. From 2003 Andy has worked as part of the artist collective Black Dogs and has exhibited nationally and internationally from self-organised public interventions in Leeds, to events at Tate Modern and presentations in Italy and Greece. He also teaches part-time in the Fine Art area of Foundation at LCA.


Background Discussion
Can the arts save the economy? , listen again to this Battle of Ideas 2009 session
Just what are the arts good for? , watch and listen again to this Battle of Ideas 2010 satellite
event
Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society: Remaking the case for the arts, RSA pamphlet,
February 2011
Using art to nudge the public, by Jan Bowman, Culture Wars, 20 May 2011
Melvin Bragg: why the arts have replaced heavy industry, The Telegraph, 12 May 2011
Crisis? The arts have rarely been in better health, Simon Jenkins, London Evening Standard, 23 February 2010
Culture Linked to Improved Health, BBC New, 24 May 2011

To let us know you’re coming please reply to this e-mail. If you’re not on it already, join our mailing list at: http://leedssalon.org.uk/index.php?page=contact, and join our group on Facebook.

This debate is part of the Emerge Leeds Festival 2011 being held at the Carriageworks Theatre from the 19th to 26th June.

This is also a back-to-back event with Manchester Salon. So if you can’t make 22 June join the discussion in Manchester on Tuesday 21 June.

Multiculturalism, Interculturalism, or Muscular Liberalism?

The next Leeds Taking Soundings meeting is on 'Multiculturalism, Interculturalism, or Muscular Liberalism?' Wednesday, May 18th at 6PM in Old Broadcasting House. Our speakers are Max Farrar (sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Community Engagement at Leeds Metropolitan University) and Franco Bianchini ( Professor of Cultural Policy and Planning at Leeds Metropolitan University) David Cameron has coat-tailed ten years of assaults on multiculturalism with his criticism of 'state multiculturalism'. He proposes a 'muscular liberal' assertion of core British values to which all minorities must sign up. Max Farrar will show that multiculturalism has always been a contested notion. Franco Bianchini will outline an alternative conception - interculturalism - which has the potential to overcome some of the inherent difficulties with multiculturalism.