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The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - system, we need to meet the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can all step forward into a future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Join the evolution at: https://accidentalgods.life
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 time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and those of you who've followed for a while will know that the world I grew up in does not exist anymore. I am no longer a student. I grew up when we genuinely believed that the issues of climate change would happen three, four or five generations down the line; when the concept of a meta crisis, the great transition, the great simplification, whatever we want to call it did not yet exist. Or if they did, they were whispered in such far distant corners that I didn't hear of them. And now, several decades later, we are where we are. And if you are over 40, the world you grew up in does not exist anymore. And if you're younger, the level of uncertainty I would imagine is terrifying. I find it terrifying, and the bulk of my life is behind me. And yet the people that I meet who are half my age or less approach the poly crisis (what do we want to call it?) With open eyes. Striving to find and nurture resilience, knowing what that means. They listen to the whispers of synchronicity and let it lead them and us to a world that works for all life. So I wanted to begin to talk to people who haven't got a lifetime's experience behind them, but are forging a way forward with all of the tools at their disposal.
Manda: And so today we are talking to Elliot Riley. Elliot was having his 27th birthday when we spoke. Happy birthday Elliot. It's a week ago now. Elliot is an educator, a permaculture designer, and a practitioner working to bring well-being, reforestation and perennial food production into our schools, to teach the even younger generations. Elliot graduated during the pandemic, which, frankly, I struggle to imagine how anybody manages to do that. It's an accomplishment in and of itself. But as you'll hear, when Elliot left school he was planning to join the paratroops; jump out of planes and kill people - that's his words, not mine. But after what he describes as a thunderbolt moment, he completely changed tack and despite not having the grades, was able to get a place to study history at the New College of Humanities. One pandemic and a degree later, he came to realise that mainstream education does not equip us for the challenges of the current world. So after two years upstream studying trauma informed education and permaculture in the Dominican Republic, he returned to his hometown where he now works at the Saint Leonard's Academy, leading a well-being program called Future Growth. Which supports the students while transforming the community's waste into a regenerative food forest. We will go into detail of the big, exciting composter later in the podcast. Elliot has set up an initiative called Offset, which is hoping to spread the mission further. And yes, there are links in the show notes should you feel moved to help him in that endeavour.
Manda: That's a Patreon link. And because we're talking about Patreon, this seems not a bad time to say I've had quite a lot of people contacting me on email and LinkedIn. Please try not to hit me on LinkedIn, I don't go on it very often, asking how they can support the podcast, which is lovely. We would dearly love your support and we do have a Patreon page, but there's nothing on it other than you offering to give us money, which is lovely, but I am never going to put anything behind a paywall. That is an absolute premise of this podcast, so you're not getting anything for your Patreon subscription. The alternative, I would suggest, is that you join up to Accidental Gods, and if you don't want to pay the monthly subscription in full, contact us and we will sort an amount that works for you. That would have been the equivalent to whatever you put into Patreon. But you get enormous amounts of stuff for that; you get seven modules worth of my best efforts to help you connect to the web of life, to help you regain your birthright of being fully connected to the extraordinary wisdom of everything that is alive around us. You get half price on the gatherings. There was one last night: dreaming your death awake. There will be dreaming your year awake in January, and others stitched through the year. And if you get on to doing the module on the heartmind, periodically I have an ask me anything which pretty much does what it says on the tin. Come and ask me anything about the module. So you get access to me.
Manda: If people really want to ask me anything about the podcast, we can set it up. Anything is possible. But it's a lot better value for you than pouring money into Patreon. And I would like to think that you then become part of an active community. So I will put a link to that in the show notes too. Thank you.
Manda: In the meantime, back to Elliot and everything that he's doing to change the way that education works. When we got talking about trauma informed education, and I realised how much it links to Andrew Hale last week, talking about the same in dogs, and I hadn't really realised we were going there. It felt very synchronous, very connected. The kind of thing that if we stitch it together in ourselves, allows us each to open the doors to a different way of being, which has to be at least part of why we're here. Okay, so let's get on with the podcast. We did have some really quite interesting technical issues with this one. There are some words that just aren't there, but I think you can work out what they are. And in terms of the sound, Caro has done her absolute best to render this for happy ears. So here we go. People of the podcast, please welcome Elliot Riley of Future Growth and Offset.
Manda: Elliot, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this wild and windy Monday morning?
Elliot: Morning, Manda. Yes, I'm very well, thank you. I'm currently sitting in my book nook in my bedroom in Saint Leonards. I've been 27 for about two hours now, so I'm looking forward to a really nice day. And yeah, feeling remarkably, surprisingly optimistic about everything at the moment, which is a lovely place to be.
Manda: Which is lovely. And we are recording this the week before the American election. It will go out the day after, when I assume there will be chaos, but we hope the chaos will head in the right direction. And Happy Birthday! I'm sure you did tell me that it was your birthday when we were recording, and I didn't take note of that, so welcome to 27. Thank you. That's a long way in my rear view mirror, but it was fun, so I hope you have a wonderful 27th year. So in your 27th year, after quite an interesting path to get here, which we will definitely talk about, you are bringing permaculture to school children and education seems to be an area that we really, really need to dive deeply into. I think it was Zach Stein that said young people are the R&D Department of Humanity. Definitely they are the future by definition and how we help them to grow into being full, healthy, engaged and enlivening people has to be core to getting through the meta crisis. So open up for us with your view of what permaculture is and how you can bring it into schools. Over to you. Take that wherever you want it.
Elliot: Thank you. So in terms of permaculture, there's a million different ways that it can manifest, because it's it's fundamentally a system of design. But just as a brief overview for anybody who's never heard the term before, it's a system of designing spaces or designing systems that focuses on looking after people and the planet at the same time. And really has a focus on spirals of abundance. You set up systems that become increasingly resilient and produce increasingly beneficial outputs to the ecosystem and to the people that work with them over time. So it's traditionally used with working with land. If you've heard of things like, I don't know, people digging swales or building food forests, which we'll cover later, those are usually associated with permaculture. So I suppose that's the simple answer. And then you'll get to hear a little bit more about what we're doing and what that looks like through talking about the schools.
Manda: Just before we do that, let me ask a question of 'increasingly beneficial outcomes'. We are recording a week ahead of the American election. Madison Square Gardens happened last night. There are different views of what a beneficial outcome would be. How are you, Elliot, defining a beneficial outcome. What are the baselines of what you're looking for, for the system that you're working in, which is an education system and a Land system.
Elliot: So for me, fundamentally it's about the provision of basic needs, whether those are for people, whether that's within an ecosystem. I think a lot of the difficulty that we experience socially is because of how much of our economy is focussed on things which aren't tangible, which don't meet our basic needs, but tied into this system of exponential growth. And exponential growth takes us further and further away from from basic needs. So the increasing output, the increasing benefit that you get from permaculture is to do with providing more and more food, more and more wellbeing, whilst also developing the strength and resilience of the ecosystem within which that is taking place.
Manda: Brilliant. Okay, you are going to head on in another direction. So thank you. So we've got providing basic needs in terms of food and resilience of the ecosystem. And I would assume also things like water retention, that's part of the resilience isn't it, that we're growing soil, we're storing water, we're increasing biodiversity. All of the things that that we look for in regenerative farming, you're also looking for in permaculture because they grew hand in hand. And now you're bringing it into schools. So tell us, take us deeper into that.
Elliot: So within our school, we are lucky enough to have three different flavours of area that we're working with, which fits really nicely into this zoning mentality that we have in permaculture. So our zone one, our absolute hub where we do almost everything is our little allotment space, which is a space that I inherited from some dear friends of mine who've also done some work there. A beautiful bit of synchronicity, but I'll come back to that. So we have this allotment space which has been transformed from some old cricket nets. We have a couple of beds which we do our growing in, and then the steel frame structure of those cricket nets has been turned into a water collection system. We've got our shed there. We've got a polytunnel that's waiting to be built. That's also where we have our circle, where we come together and meet.
Manda: Okay, I have a question on that. I am struggling to imagine how you turn a cricket net, I actually don't know what a cricket net is, into a bed. Because net,bed? Tell me more about that.
Elliot: So the cricket nets have become the water collection system. The beds just look like any other beds. But if you can imagine, a cricket net is made up of two tall steel scaffolding poles that have formed cubes and whilst people are batting, they practice batting inside these kind of large netted frames.
Manda: Right. So the balls don't hit the windows.
Elliot: So the balls don't hit the windows, or the other cricketers who are batting right next to them. And what we've done is we've suspended canvas from the top of these steel cubes, we've weighted them down with bricks and they are then attached into our water butts. So they catch rain as it falls from the sky.
Manda: And what size is a cricket net cube thing?
Elliot: So I suppose there's six cubes in total. Each one's exactly three by three by three metres.
Manda: Right. A useful size then. Excellent. Yeah.
Elliot: So it's really effective at capturing rain. The only issue is that the current capacity of our butts is quite low. They fill up in about three days of heavy rain. So we're looking to upgrade to IBC tanks.
Manda: Right, yeah, they're good fun. Okay. Thank you. And for people outside the country, IBC tanks take a ton basically. I don't remember the exact size, but they take a ton of water, 1000l of water at a time. And you can get them extremely cheaply. The ones we have were transporting peanut oil, organic peanut oil or something. You want the ones that were not transporting something totally toxic. They're probably still leaking PFA's into the water and definitely microplastics, but they'll store your water for you. Okay, I'll stop interrupting. So let's take a step back because you're describing the system as it exists. Why is your school helping the kids to understand about growing? Because I'm not sure that's universal at schools in the UK and certainly not schools around the world. What was it that led this school into deciding that it would be useful for the young people to engage in something like growing their own food?
Elliot: Just before I answer that, there's there's two more bits of the system that are really important to the answer. So I'd like to really briefly outline those.
Manda: Okay, go for it.
Elliot: So just above the allotment, we then have a sunny bank which is turning into our food forest, which as opposed to your annual high work vegetable patches, will be a perennial food system that, like a woodland, looks after itself but provides increasing amount of food for the next 80 years. And give it 5 to 10 years of work, it will require very little input. It'll just thrive and provide food and habitat. So that would be our zone two in permaculture.
Manda: So the sunny bank is south facing, by definition.
Elliot: A south facing sunny bank with a large school building just behind it to the north. So it gets a lot of warmth. It's quite well protected. It's pretty ideal.
Manda: What kind of size are we talking?
Elliot: The area that we're currently cultivating as a food forest is probably about 100m long and perhaps 30m across.
Manda: Okay. And how many trees will you get on that roughly, do you think?
Elliot: So we've got another five fruit trees on their way in, so we'll probably have around 13 trees in total for the upper canopy level. But that doesn't include things like hazels, tall shrubs which will be interplanted amongst those. But the exciting thing is, this is just one pocket of the school that we're working on. And why I'm so excited by food forests is it does not take a lot of space to increase the number of trees you can plant, they're really low maintenance. So once you've established one pocket, you move on to the next. And you keep doing that and you keep doing it.
Manda: Okay. All right. Trojan horses of food forests. Excellent. Okay. And there was another another field before we looked into why? So that's your zone two.
Elliot: Yes, that's our zone two. And then our zone three is the small patch of woodland which you can get to sort of around the allotment and the food forest. And I'm calling this a zone three rather than a zone five because we do coppice it. We are going to be bringing in things like wild garlic and more woodland species. So whilst it is a woodland and the kids get to experience it as their sense of the wilderness, we will also be relating with it and cultivating it a little bit as opposed to pure zone five, which is untouched wilderness and for observation only within permaculture linguistics.
Manda: Right. Beautiful. And for people who aren't familiar, zone three is more interactive, zone five is untouched wilderness. What is zone four?
Elliot: So perhaps more foraged woodland, I think. Or planted woodland that might not be a food forest, but is still kind of very much for human relation. And you might well still have things like log piles there or you might have done some swale building, You know, you've still interacted with it. But in the broad scope of zones, zone zero is the area that has the most interaction. Zone zero zero being the self. And zone five has the least interaction, being the wilderness.
Manda: And for people outside the UK, or actually people not familiar with the geography immediately around you. Can you describe a little bit about the landscape in which your school is set?
Elliot: Sure. So both ecologically and socially, it's a really interesting one. We're on the south coast of England in quite a lucky spot actually. We have a reasonable number of vineyards outside, assuming that everything remains the same and we are working on that assumption, which it will because it must, we have a really nice kind of quite mild microclimate. The sea keeps us reasonably warm, it never gets super cold. Fingers crossed. We are planting Siberian peas.
Manda: Okay, I have spent some of the weekend watching YouTubes on the likelihood of the AMOC collapsing. If that goes, all other bets are off. So let's not worry about that. You're planting Siberian peas, well done. Good.
Elliot: Sure, it's not nothing. It's not nothing. But socially the landscape is really interesting as well, because you've got a real mix of different types. Within our town we've got quite dense urban centres, with everything you'd expect from your high street; you've got your chicken shops and your co-op and your boutique clothes stores and your zero waste refillable shop. But then we quickly head into suburban spread, and then we quickly again head into some really quite wild areas of nature. We've got the South Saxon woodlands. I spent yesterday in Saint Helen's Wood. There's a lot of quite deep old green space in the immediate vicinity. So for kids who do want to get out into nature, whilst many kids aren't given that immediately, it's actually on a lot of our doorsteps.
Manda: Right. And are you leading them out there? Is that part of what you do?
Elliot: Not yet, but I do encourage them, well, it's my job to get them to spend more time in nature and hopefully to cultivate those relationships and that understanding and excitement that they may not otherwise have access to.
Manda: Brilliant. So let's loop back to why this school, why are you being given the chance to evolve different zones of permaculture when that's not universal within at least UK education, and I would say global education yet.
Elliot: So there's a number of reasons. Part of it is because the allotment site, not the food forest but the allotment site has been cultivated on and off for quite a while. There's been a history of having people working on that, including a dear friend of mine, Luke, who runs Project Rewild, which is how I first got to know the space. The school is enormous, you know, it's a really, really, really large school.
Manda: Give us a sense of what that is, because around the world, enormous has different meaning. How many students roughly?
Elliot: That's fair. I think it's about 1500.
Manda: And what age range does it go from and to?
Elliot: It's 11 to 16. So what would the size of the school and the catchment area, we do have a lot of students who struggle one way or another. So there's a really strong focus on alternative provisions for the students. Because whilst most of the school runs on a carrot and stick kind of behaviour model, there are certain students for whom that just simply doesn't work. Which is understandable because it's made to curate behaviour and that works for students whose behaviour is easily curated.
Manda: So we have a school on the south coast of England that is doing something that probably isn't wholly unique in the UK, but it's different enough for me to be curious as to how this school decided that this would be a good idea. How did they decide that this would be a good idea?
Elliot: Well, I think fundamentally there are kids who struggle with being indoors all day. You know, whether they're bouncing off the walls or whether they're dreaming and disassociating and kind of just staring out the window. There's a lot of students who really struggle to be in a classroom setting and learning effectively, or even getting into school at all. And I ended up in this remarkable position where I was offered the opportunity; a company reached out to me and said, hey, would you like a freelance job, you can do as little as you like. And I said, well, my current job is finishing, so this will be perfect. Would you like to work at Saint Leonard's Academy? That's just down the road from me. And I was thinking, you know what I've actually done a bit of work with with Project Rewild on this allotment site. To begin with maybe I can work a couple of weeks and then give them a nudge and say, hey guys, can I can I bring this on to a full permaculture site? And I think on day two, the woman who ran the provision said to me, hey, you do some outdoors stuff, don't you? Do you reckon you might be able to take our lot out there and get them rolling with it? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. Wow! What a nice idea. Yeah. I hadn't thought of that at all. And within a couple of weeks, I was out, you know, starting to explore. And that's now turned into a full time get to lead five days a week. So it's just evolved and evolved and evolved.
Manda: Excellent, excellent. So things fall into place. And you'd already done permaculture training, obviously, or they wouldn't have asked you this. Yes?
Elliot: So I was interested by a permaculture design course. But for the last four years I've been working with different education, much of which has been related to permaculture. And so I learnt a lot of this in the Dominican Republic that I went to work with. And remarkably, specifically because I wasn't able to start with them when I was expecting to, they brought in a permaculture teacher to fill my space. So by the time I arrived there, permaculture was deeply embedded within the curriculum, and I got to got to experiment with it there. But this is also part of the reason that I think that permaculture in schools and businesses is so exciting. For a lot of people practice permaculture, there's such a strong emphasis on being a level of practitioner who knows every plant combination and how to do everything.
Manda: It sounds scary.
Elliot: Yeah, there's a lot of emphasis on perfection and planning and getting it absolutely right, which if you don't have the land, the money, the resources to practice permaculture, it means that nobody gets to be a regenerative practitioner. Whereas if you approach the school and say I'm not going to do this perfectly, but I can make a space that make your students or your employees feel healthier, feel safe and feel better. You get to tick your greens. You get to have organic foods that's produced on site. You can have all of these things. I get to come in as a as a practitioner, provided you can pay my time, and then you bring in waste from the community. We're fuelled by coffee grounds from our local coffee shops. We're fuelled by blocks of mushroom mulch from our local mushroom grower. We have money coming in from different members of the community paying for trees. So rather than having one person anywhere who knows all of it, it's about bringing the resources together and creating something dynamic, that improves wellbeing, provides food, takes waste out of the way towards landfill, and actually turns it back into carbon rich soil. And you get rewarded with raspberries.
Manda: Yay! Which even kids like. They might not want the broccoli, but they're going to want the raspberries. And raspberries require less work. Fantastic. At some point I'm going to find out how to prune my raspberries, because I've never quite worked that one out. There's difference between the spring and the autumn, but we won't go into that here now. A little while ago you said trauma informed education. And last week we had Andrew Hale, whose focus is on trauma informed care in dogs. And it seems to me that general educational science in humans and the more than human world is moving towards trauma informed care. I realise we're talking about permaculture, but can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how it functions, how you understand it, and a tiny bit about the Dominican Republic, because that sounds really interesting. Over to you. Just go with that wherever you want.
Elliot: Thank you. So I'd just quickly like to clarify that there's a strong relationship between trauma informed practice and permaculture. The second value in care, so making space for humans within permaculture, you know, we're part of the ecosystem. Our resilience comes from negotiating our trauma. But in answer to your question, the system that we use is one called the Mates House. Which could be such a rabbit hole, but the the premise of the Mates House is if you can imagine a two dimensional house, a drawing of a two dimensional house, with a room in the middle, an attic above it, and a basement below it. And what this model teaches us is that through the day, if we're feeling comfortable we're in the middle room, but we upregulate and we downregulate within it. So if you need to run for a bus, your nervous system ticks up a little bit, your breathing rate increases, your heart rate increases. You get that little rush of energy to get to the bus. You sit down to a meal or even to have a difficult conversation with a loved one, your nervous system will generally teeter down a little bit, and you can tick up, and you can tick down throughout the day, completely fine and healthy. The problem comes when you cross over those thresholds, either into the attic or into the basement.
Elliot: When you tick up and up and up and up and then cross that threshold into the attic, fight and flight responses. The prefrontal cortex switches off, and we lose the ability to make decisions that are in line with our values. We kind of lose executive function to some decree, and that can look like bouncing off the walls, it can look like swearing, it can look like fighting. It can look like an inability to sit still. Or we can tick down and down and down and down and cross the threshold into the basement, which might be disassociation, it might be depression and generally looks like days of crying or kind of to hide. Its the freeze. So the way that this integrates into our work is that we work with a really broad range of students, but very often ones who are either often in the attic or often in the basement, and offer them through the process of gardening work and this nature connection work, activities that allow them to release some of that energy and to come back. So if you've got a kid who's just bouncing off the walls and can't sit still, rather than trying to sit down and have a long conversation about companion planting, you let them go in the woods for the first 15 minutes because that energy has to go somewhere.
Elliot: So if you're in a classroom it's going to bounce around the walls. If you punish them, they're just going to compress it and it'll explode bigger further later. Or if you let them loose for 20 minutes and then dig a hole, they're better. And that energy is released, it's gone and then they learn how to channel it usefully. Equally, if we have a student who's disassociated, who's feeling very low we introduce them to plants. For example honeysuckle, you show them what a honeysuckle looks like, and then get them to paint a sign to name the plant. Our honeysuckle is called Hector, for example, Hector the honeysuckle. So you get them to paint signs. You know, there's loads of specific activities that we do, where we learn how to do specific tasks. Sometimes it can be as simple as having a group of five boys who are just buzzing. You say, right, guys, the strawberries need mulching. Go and pick as much grass as you can in the next ten minutes, and we're going to use that to make a mulch. They're just like tearing grass out of the ground.
Manda: Right.
Elliot: But that energy then is active and it brings them back to a place of calm. And some of them have reported, without even being probed or told, hey guys, this is how we get more funding; they've come back and said, wow, Sir, I feel so much calmer, I feel so much better. I can actually go back and pay attention. And whilst it's a slightly different flavour, there's this amazing thread that suggests that for students with ADHD, having half an hour outside is equal to a dose of Ritalin in the impact it makes on their ability to concentrate.
Manda: Wow. Right. And much, much healthier. I know with dogs and horses that when they're over threshold, one of my early behaviour teachers said the path between excitement and calm has to be well travelled, and the horse or the dog or whatever needs to understand within itself how to bring itself down. For safety around people as much as anything else, when you're dealing with something that could weigh 500 kilos and is going to crunch you to small pieces if it runs over the top of you. With the kids, have you been doing this long enough to find that they are learning to to self-regulate or co-regulate as they're doing this? Or are you having to help them to do it on a regular basis? Does that make sense as a question?
Elliot: It totally does. And it's a kid by kid, group by group scenario. You know, some of them, the only thing that I get to be able to do is just hold space for them whilst they run around. But lots of them for whom they may do that in one session, they'll come in and they're feeling twitchy and they'll say, hey, can I go and do this for a little bit? And then they'll do that, then come and join the key activity that we're doing. So I think for me, having a student ask May I do this activity, that I can feel this, is one of the biggest things that the the wellbeing aspect is having an impact. And we see it, you know. Or can I go and paint? Those are the two big ones I get: can I go and break up the mulch, and paint.
Manda: So one is bringing me down into the main room of the house, and one is bringing me up from the basement into the living room, I guess. Yes?
Elliot: And there's lots of different modalities, loads of different channels that we play with. And when the weather's bad we often have classroom sessions and I try and introduce them to the mate's house as early as possible. We do things like breathing and we do things like shaking. And again, you get kids for whom they just think you look like a weirdo and they're not interested. But I do have students who give it a try or say, oh no, sir, the breathing didn't work, but actually the shaking was pretty good. And you then see them having a little shake later on and you're like, okay, okay, you don't want to show you're doing it, but it's going in.
Manda: Right. Okay. This feels like a really worthwhile rabbit hole because it seems to me listening to other educators, particularly Zach Stein, who's an educational philosopher, but other people in the field. That our educational system is not fit for purpose. It probably never was, but it was designed to create fodder for factories, people who would sit in rows or at benches or do whatever for long periods of time repetitively. They could read, write and do arithmetic so they could be sent to other parts in colonial worlds. You know, out to the colonies, God help us all. And they would be able to write reports that people could read. They would be able to add up columns of figures, and they would be able to function within the greater system. And there wasn't a single bit of that that was actually valuable to the children themselves. And then I recently read a thesis by Von Wilkins, who's talking about the zoocosis of humanity, which is to say that, in his opinion, most people in our culture, the Western educated, industrial, rich democratic culture, are displaying signs commensurate with captive animals in zoos. The same level of psychosis. And he says, and I quote: 'the collective developmental trauma that we experience points to a cage that is constructed through norms and conventions, and a faulty definition of sanity that condones us living in a way that is killing our own life support system. By living in a way that is anti ecological and hurting us, but then naming it sanity, we validate and condone it and then teach it to our kids. It becomes a secret cage that prevents us from living as functioning members of the Earth community.' And obviously the key there was and then we teach this to our kids. We are domesticating our children into something that is completely psychopathological and is bringing us to the edge of the sixth mass extinction. If you, Elliot, were able to redesign the entire education system along trauma informed lines, but also along lines that enabled the values of planet and people to thrive, what would you do?
Elliot: Good question. Firstly, I just want to address some of what you said in terms of that sense of sometimes being caged. Because the thing I often have to remind myself is that fundamentally I'm teaching adolescent primates how to be in the world. And kind of that context is essentially creating an environment where they can grow. But I think what you're touching on is a lot of the stuff I learned at the school in the Dominican Republic with an organisation called the Human Hive. So this Mates House model was central to their teaching. So it worked along the lines of project based education, learner led education. So the curriculum was non-linear to begin with it, rather than having a set of steps that you had to to climb to get from A to B to D to F, to all of the places that you had to get to to kind of aspire and be a successful human. Everything was broken down into six week sessions, and within each of those six weeks we would explore one of the Sustainable Development Goals. So the first session where I ended up leading a cohort, we were exploring energy and efficiency. So we had a first week, which was actually nothing really to do with the curriculum and was just us kind of settling into the space, getting to know each other, setting up rhythms for the day, becoming familiar with the dynamics. The lady who ran it, Kate McAllister, used to very affectionately refer to it as you know when your pack of dogs come together and they all go around sniffing each other's butts. And it's that kind of period when everyone gets into like, ooh, who are you? How does this work? Where are we?
Manda: And how do you facilitate that with a bunch of kids? Because there's lots of different ways children get to know each other and most of them are not socially acceptable. How did you make that happen in a way that was generative and safe?
Elliot: So they were a big fan of their six part cycles. Each day would start off with our circle time where everybody would introduce themselves, we'd have a little bit of a chat, and then students would identify whether they were in the attic, living room, or basement. Identify whether they wanted a task that would upregulate them, keep them neutrally regulated or down regulate them, and go off with a different practitioner for a walk or to play football. So you're still kind of giving them a thing to focus on, but they're making the decisions for themselves. They're learning to ask for themselves, and most important, they have the choice of how close or far from the action they want to be. Because a student could go along simply to watch the football, you wouldn't coerce them into it and be there on the edges and then when they became comfortable they would come and join. They'd get closer to the action. They might do it and lead. They might do it and just quietly get along with their stuff. They could choose what suited them best, and every activity had that built in capacity. So being watched by adults, they're being led by adults, but they have the choice of to what degree and with what energy they interact with it. And that then continued throughout the entire six weeks. So after your initial week of getting to know each other you'd then begin exploring the topic at hand, talking about energy. And rather than having an hour long lecture on efficiency, we started off looking at all of the energy that we have on the planet to one degree or comes from the sun. Even things like geothermal energy, which, as I understand it, comes from pressure, you know, it's all caused by gravity, which eventually kind of leads back to the sun. It's quite hippy and woo woo, but...
Manda: No no, a long time ago we were all hydrogen molecules boiling in the sun.
Elliot: Yeah, exactly. So you'd kind of explore that and then talk a little bit about say, you've got a light bulb; what is the purpose of a light bulb. The purpose of a light bulb is to give out light. Can you see or hear or smell anything coming off that light bulb other than light? Yeah, well, it makes a sound and heat. Okay, cool, so we're walking around marking all the things, and then we start brainstorming. Okay. so what is happening in our school or in the community that might be inefficient? Let's focus on energy efficiency. And the kids came up with different issues that they wanted to solve. And we would then build the curriculum around solving that. So a brilliant, brilliant example that my cohort came up with. First of all, they loved ice cream. But iced cream required freezers and that was a waste of electricity. But they also noticed tons of excessive energy that wasn't being utilised. So they wanted to create bikes that that used energy of the children and transform it into ice cream. And then we worked on maths, kind of looking at the gear sizes. We worked on literacy and communication as we put calls out to source different things. We had a welding workshop where somebody came in to build this bike out of an old BMX. When it came to selling the ice cream and raising funds for more bikes, then we have the opportunity to integrate all of these different areas of knowledge into the thing that you want to achieve.
Manda: Yeah. This is sounding like a dream school. Why is every school not like this?
Elliot: Turning every school into doing this kind of thing is the plan.
Manda: This is the plan. Oh right. Because it's not going to create little neoliberals, is it? How long has this been running and what are the students who have graduated from this doing now?
Elliot: Um, so the Human Hive as an organisation has existed since 2016. It was curated by a trauma informed educator and a trauma counsellor. So it's Kate McAllister and Darren Abrahams, and they transposed their work that started off with Human Hive as a bus that travelled out to Calais, to the jungle. So it was initially used to support refugees into developing skill sets that would help them. They would cook, they would sew, they would find people who have different skills that could be shared and useful, to make people feel better, but also to generate income. And it's evolved from there. In fact, there's a beautiful musical collective that Darren has just started called the One World Orchestra, which, using this same model, brings musicians from all around the world to co-create musical pieces with their own instruments, their own melodies, their own lyrics, bringing in all of these different flavours.
Elliot: And then when they perform, I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about this. When they perform, they provide the audience with drums and they teach them song lines at the beginning, so that you then have this just chaotic, beautiful celebration of life, where people can choose how much or how little they want to integrate. But you've got Palestinian, Spanish string guitarist and the audience just drumming along, and oh, it's magical work that they do. It's absolutely beautiful. And they've just released their first single, actually, I cannot recommend listening to it enough. Just make sure that you have space to move, because you will dance and you will cry.
Manda: So you will send me a link for that, and we will put it in the show notes so that people can can go off and buy it and dance to it. This sounds so exciting. Also, I need to talk to Kate and Darren obviously at some point on the podcast. That would be very exciting. Seriously, you said this is the plan and I am wondering, we are now way off Saint Leonard's, but we can get back to that. But this feels so much what the world needs now that if my generation can just stop the damage and and hold the space for your generation and for the ideas like this to percolate out. And I don't know much about schools, it's a long time since I was at school and it was living hell, and it was nothing at all like what you're describing. There was no choice or agency, because the point was to train people not to want choice and agency. And now we know that people need agency to be emotionally, mentally and spiritually whole. Genuinely speaking, from your experience, how is this integrating with general school philosophy and practicality and logistics and politics and everything that defines how schools function around the world? Because I would think it would take off like lightning, and it would just spread around the world in a year and then everybody would be doing this. Which is clearly not happening. What gets in the way?
Elliot: Well, this is the thing I think, from experience, when this is integrated into schools it does take off. You know, I've had so much fear that the school would respond with, oh, who's this hairy hippie coming in and getting our kids all muddy and whatever, but actually they love it. The students love it. They're doing better in school. They are happier. I've now got students who are repeatedly coming back to me far more than they were initially planned to, because they're doing better in school as a result of it. And this is very, very large and oh, okay, so I suppose the two key thoughts that I have here is that a very large part of the reason that I wanted to come on to the podcast, as well as being quite a large fan of yours, and wanting the opportunity to chat to you. I also really want to encourage people who want to go on and do regenerative work, but don't necessarily have the land, to approach schools and to approach businesses with this model. Because once it's in there, they love it. And the thing about perrenial food systems is that even if they choose to end this now, it will still be doing its thing.
Manda: It will still be there.
Elliot: The more time you can spend there, the better. But if anybody from the University of Brighton Academy Trust is listening, please do not fire me. But if I did have to leave tomorrow, the trees will grow and the food will continue to be there.
Manda: And the children would still have the tools you'd given them.
Elliot: They'd still have the tools, and the site would still exist for anybody else who wanted to come. it's my plan to maintain this as my site of deep implementation; this is where I want to really kind of show how far this work can go. But I'm also working to be able to assist food forest specifically in other schools, and offer support and training for other staff and develop a program from those. And the thing about a food forest is it actually doesn't require a vast amount of work to get it going. This is what I mean about permaculture earlier. It's possible to get it perfect, but you can make a huge impact with something that isn't perfect. And that, to a degree copyable, is really easy to implement. So with the set program, like I was saying earlier, the schools have the land, I've got the ability to do it, but we're lacking money for trees. And what I've been doing with OFFset, which stands for Our Food Forest, is I've been approaching local business individuals with cash to spare through Patreon on a monthly basis to allow us to develop the food forest, to upgrade our water system, to buy a big, exciting composter, which I do want to talk to you about. At the moment there's about £80 a month coming in, which is fantastic. It's brilliant. You know, that's three or four fruit trees or something like that. If we can reach £300 a month coming in through these donations, we can start supporting a brand new food forest. If we get to the stage where I have 100 donors of £20 a month, we will likely be able to support five new food forests in the community every single year.
Manda: Wow. And is there Land for those?
Elliot: The site of the food forest is hard to say. I think we're very lucky with the amount of land we have, but simply having something there. Because it will be me doing everything with them, I'll be working with the teams in the school, but because of how little work it requires, the buy in, and also having the model that we have established at Saint Leonards Academy is so easy that it's a no brainer. Hey, guys, take these trees. Somebody come out and water them with the kids whenever it's really, really, really dry.
Manda: Right and we'll show you how to catch water. So tell us about the big, exciting composter.
Elliot: So this big, exciting composter is called the Ridan Pro 400. And what it does is it has the capacity to take up to 400l of pizza and chips and grated cheese a week and turn it into fungally dominated, hyper rich, hyper fertile compost. So if you can imagine the impact of that in a school which is producing so much food waste, if you can then turn that back into fertility, it's a game changing scenario.
Manda: Right. But they're not cheap Ridans. They had one at Schumacher, I know of which I speak.
Elliot: They aren't cheap. But again, the money exists out there and there's the people out there who want to see the work being done. So whilst I can't pay for it and the school can't pay for it, the money exists. It's just a case of finding it.
Manda: Okay, so you just need a good fundraiser.
Elliot: We need a good fundraiser. I think leaning into that, Touching in slightly on the synchronicities we were discussing earlier, there's the feeling supported through synchronicity, which has led me to the firm understanding that it's not a case of trying to see if we can get a composter. We're getting one of these composters, and I'm looking to see the way that that happens.
Manda: Okay. Talk to me about that, because I think for a lot of people listening, the concept of synchronicity can become very fluffy and very middle class and very, you know, I'm going to think very hard because I want a private jet, or it can be grounded in actually doing something useful. And yours sounds grounded. So tell me a little bit more about how it's worked in your life and how you identify synchronicities.
Elliot: I want to clarify here, I do have a very deep seated spiritual belief. But for me, my relationship with synchronicity is only because I've trained my brain to look for them. And if it's purely a product of bias, then I'm really happy with that because the impact is the same. But for me, the synchronicities that I've experienced in my life have been really wonderful little nudges. They've helped me to identify the right path to take, and as I've experienced more synchronicities and thinking, wow, that one thing was actually the right thing that I needed to experience in that moment, what can I learn from it? Okay, this next thing was the right thing in this moment, what can I learn from it? You start to build up a pattern.
Manda: Tell me some of the specifics, because before we came on air, you were talking about wanting to be a paratrooper early on, and synchronicities nudged you away from that. Give people specifics, because otherwise it's really hard for people to have a sense of how they might recognise the same thing in their own lives. So just tell us a little bit of history around this.
Elliot: So for me, the experience of synchronicities can generally feel just like a little bit of a nudge from the universe, greater or lesser. Sometimes they're monumental, sometimes they're tiny. But the first one that immediately jumps to mind was between 14 and about 18, really, I was absolutely determined to to become a paratrooper. So, you know, growing fruit trees to jumping out of planes and killing people are quite different pathways. But I was really set on it. It's what I wanted to do. My stepdad did make the very, very, very astute point, he was very, very critical with this and said, Elliot, you do realise that this will be your job to jump out of planes and kill brown people, which didn't go into my 16 year old self, but I had that point made to me. But sitting on the beach when I was about 18, I hadn't meditated, I hadn't intended on anything in particular, but I have this just really distinct memory of everything slowing down and having these little grains of sand washing across my skin. And then what I can only describe as a thunderbolt moment and a voice that was partially verbal, partially not saying 'Do not kill. Life is enough. This is all there is'. And I remember sitting there on the beach thinking, well, I don't know what that was. But when you get a voice in your head, whether religious or not, it seems quite foolish to disregard it. So I remember at that moment thinking, I've noticed this, this is huge. So I could disregard it, or I could choose to identify it as being really quite significant. And that's what I did. And in that moment it was decided, the right decision to make.
Manda: Wow. How far down the line were you in terms of applying?
Elliot: Oh, not very far at all. I'd spent a long time in the cadets and actually I had an amazing time in the cadets. I don't want to rough that experience, but I was very primed for it. And I loved the idea of the camaraderie, I loved the idea of community, I loved the idea of being outdoors and exploring. I was still hoping to go to uni and go down the whole Sandhurst application route. So I hadn't started making moves on it, but having decided I didn't want to kill and that I didn't know what life would look like, but not particularly good A-level results, I ended up going for the New College of the Humanities, which I knew I didn't have grades to go to. And I thought, well, let's go and see what's going on, see what it's like. And as I was waiting for it to kick off, I was just chatting to this dude at the snacks table and telling him how I wanted to study history, but I I didn't have the grades, I didn't know how I was going to do it. And he turns around and said, well, you know, I'm the head of the history department, let's have a bit more of a chat.
Elliot: I don't know if you've come across NCH, but at the time it was very small, lecture sizes were about ten students. You'd have 1 to 1 tutorials every week. It was very old school. And I'd been reading a book called The Secret History at the time, which was very, very much based on this. We went to check out the Small History room, which is all teacups armchairs and fireplaces, and I asked, by any chance, have you read The Secret History? And he beams and says, I'm Julian, aren't I, who's their lecturer.
Manda: Right.
Elliot: So it's just these tiny, tiny little things that cumulatively just just put that little drop in. And I think as I've paid more and more attention to those, the scale of them has got bigger and bigger and the impact has become greater and greater and greater. To the point where when I first started the dream work, had this huge dream that I very quickly realised was telling me that I needed to leave London. It wasn't the right place for me and that I was going to go on a big journey somewhere with bright blue sky, huge blue sea, palm trees, lots of motorbikes. And I recounted this dream to friends because it felt so significant. And then years later, having such a strong, vivid image of this dream, having told friends about it, I found myself on that road. I found myself actually there.
Manda: In the Dominican Republic was this?
Elliot: In the Dominican Republic, yeah.
Manda: So you didn't go to the Dominican Republic because of the dream, but when you got there, you discovered that the dream had prefigured your being there.
Elliot: Precisely. And what was even more remarkable about it is... So I worked in this school in a small town called Cabrera, the human hive. And at the end of the year had been expecting to return to the UK, but the town called Cabarete, had all of these people amazing regenerative work, doing amazing trauma-informed work. And I wanted to explore it more. So it was on the road from Cabrera that I found this corner. I was like, whoa, this is uncanny. Like this place that I've been imagining that I need to go to is along this road to this new town. But the road that I took was broken. Like huge areas of roadworks that were really dangerous to ride on a motorbike. And I made the journey to Cabrera and the two towns for months and months and months and months and months. And when I moved to Cabarete the road had been fixed.
Manda: So you were able to go along the road of your dream?
Elliot: Yeah.
Manda: Goodness. Where did that lead you, Elliot? Because dreams like that don't arrive for no reason, other than recognising that dreams are there, Pre-figurative dreams happen. This should blow out of the water anybody who thinks dreams are just twitches of your neurones because clearly they're not. Your experience is unique to you, but lots of people have pre-figurative dreams. What did yours do for the balance of your life? Where did it take you?
Elliot: Well, the key themes of the dream self were, at the time I was living in London and in the dream we were on top of Hampstead Heath. Me and some friends on the top of a hill. And this helicopter rose up, an attack helicopter came level with this wooden pavillion and just started shooting bullets and annihilated the whole thing. So I'm terrified and cowering under all this kind of mechanical oppression. The cockpit opens and there were a pair of figures, kind of elf like, you know, Lord of the rings, Legolas style. Long blonde hair, silver jumpsuits, though. But one was clearly feminine. The masculine one sneered and looked over his shoulder, but the feminine one reached out her hand, and as I grabbed it, she threw me miles and miles and miles till I landed on this road. And I got up and knew, okay, well, I'm going to make my way home. And as happens in dream time, I walk down the road and then a long time happened that I wasn't there for, and I came back to the UK. But everything had changed and I didn't fit in in London anymore and was doing something different. And it was through this dream that I ended up moving out from plans of taking up a nice cushy job in education technology. You know, I really wanted to do lots of work with understanding masculinity, but I had no idea of where to start. And it was through working with feminine archetypes that I was actually able to access the masculine. And I do a lot of men's work now with different groups. So I think it it did a wonderful job of saying where and how I needed to move. And also the folks leaving the city for Thriviality and the essential understanding of the relationship between femininity and masculinity in order to do work in either.
Manda: Excellent. Gosh, we should have started the podcast with this, because that would have been a very interesting rabbit hole to go down. But we're actually over time. So at some point we need to talk about that. In the last few minutes... We've got you now, you've been to the Dominican Republic, you've come back to Saint Leonard's, you set up Offset. You're endeavouring to garner money, I will put the link in the show notes. Anyone who wants to give money to Offset you'd be very welcome, because there's a very big and exciting composter to buy. And lots of trees for food forests. And what I heard was you wanted to encourage other people to follow their dream into this kind of work, because there's obviously a need for this in schools around the world to help break kids out of the classroom model and the sit down and learn about quadratic equations, because somehow that's going to be useful in a post Google world. Is there anything else that you would say to people listening to help them to follow the synchronicities, to follow their dream, to get engaged with what really matters?
Elliot: I think when it comes to synchronicity, if ever there was a time when the forces of the universe were supporting humans to make a change in the name of a better life for us, of a better interconnected way of being, it would be now. So when things show up to give you a little flag to something, you could choose not to, but why on earth would you? Even if it is complete fluffy woo, it works. You know, it really, really, really works. And we desperately are in need of change, and people know how to do it. So if you have an idea of how to make that change happen, you should follow it. This isn't about knowing how to get things right at the beginning, but rather trusting that the next step will take you in the right direction. Because I think one of the things that I valued so much about listening to your podcast is this recognition that we will die. So the question is how and what we leave to those who follow us. And it allows you to kind of take massive risks, and it allows you to be optimistic, because the result will be the same one way or the other. So it's a case of seeing what the steps are on the way to that result.
Manda: Thank you. Were you on our gathering last night dreaming your death awake? Because that was exactly what we were talking about. So thank you. Yes. Okay. That. And I would also say I don't think it's fluffy and woo. I think the mindset that thinks that it is is a dying mindset. We need to be hospicing modernity to use Vanessa's concept, and we need to hospice that mindset that tells us that the imminence of the more than human world is not something we need to pay attention to. Alrighty. Thank you Elliot. This has been really interesting and has gone in lots of directions I wasn't expecting. So thank you very much indeed and I look forward to learning more of what you're doing. We'll put a lot of links in the show notes people, so you can follow up everything that Elliot is doing. Thank you for coming on to Accidental Gods.
Elliot: Thank you.
Manda: And that's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Elliot for opening up doors, for exploring the attic and the basement, and helping so many young people to find their way back to something that feels regulated. More and more this feels like where we all need to be in the world. That capacity to co-regulate, to find out how to be in balance in a world that is increasingly out of balance. Having the skill to help young people do this feels to me utterly invaluable. So if any of you out there want to help support anything that Elliot's doing, I have put links in the show notes to his Patreon page, to his Instagram, to the One World Orchestra's first single, so you can leap around and dance, and to the Human Hive. As well as a link to Vaughn Wilkins and his PhD thesis on the zoocosis of humanity. Because if we are able to break out of our self-imposed zoo, that would be a really good thing, I feel.
Manda: And we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot and for wrestling with this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for similarly wrestling with the video for YouTube. To Anne Thomas for what I hope and believe will have been a fairly straightforward transcript. To Faith Tilleray for not remotely straightforward wrestling with the tech this week. And as ever an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who cares about the ways that we can bring the younger generation into full, flourishing self-awareness, creating the foundations for a regenerative future, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.