Accidental Gods

In a world that feels as if all the certainties are breaking down, how can we build the communities of place and of purpose that will give us the resilience to bridge from the old structures to the new? Exploring deeply practical ways to build community with Charlie Fisher. 
 
Charlie Fisher is a co-founder and director of the Co-operative Architecture Practice, Transition by Design. He's a researcher and urban-instigator working on regenerative land use approaches and more collaborative forms of city-making driven by the belief that to unlock collective imagination for equitable societies we must remove structural barriers that are preventing people from connecting with one another.

His role over the past decade has been to build capacities within land-based organisations, primarily around urban affordable housing and mechanisms for holding land in the commons. He writes about, and runs workshops on, group dynamics, decision-making, housing finance, incorporation approaches, legal structures, stakeholder mapping, business planning, and visioning. 

In 2020, he was developing the Oxygen Fund, a £5m revolving equity fund with the Oxfordshire Growth Deal, which led him to explore how regenerative land use can be supported through Distributed Co-operative Organisations (DisCOs🕺) and web3 Regenerative Finance (ReFi) projects.

He is in the core team of regenerative blockchain-based property developer Oasa, a Swiss Association, which bought its first piece of land in 2021 at Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal. In building this ecosystem together, he is the interface between various thematic working ‘circles’ and has led the design of our sociocratic coordination system. 

He is an adviser to the Center for Community Land Trust Innovation, and in 2023 he’ll be running a cohort-based course, Unearthing Common Ground, with 50 land trusts globally and 50 regenerative web3 projects to support exchange between traditional land trust projects and web3 practitioners. 


In this conversation, we open up the key question of building communities: what does it take to create the connections between people that make communities work? What questions matter and how do we know which things we can leave till later?  How do we move from consensus to consent so that things move forward at the speed we need as our material supply chains falter? How can we engage the best in human creativity to build communities that will have the flexibility, heart and coherence to survive?  Charlie is deeply embedded in so many of these questions, and finding ways through that work in the real world.   With any luck at all, we'll be moving onto a 2nd conversation when a couple more of our hundred day segments have passed - so if you have questions, let me know.


Charlie's super site https://charliefisher.super.site/

Transition by Design https://transitionbydesign.org/

Community Land Trust network https://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/

Garden City Principles https://tcpa.org.uk/garden-city-principles/

Nabeel Hamdi: Small change: Intelligent Practice and Practising intelligence https://uk.bookshop.org/books/intelligent-practice-and-practising-intelligence/9781844070053

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/garden-communities-set-to-flourish-across-england

LILAC in Leeds http://www.lilac.coop/

Oasa Earth (which incorporates the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal) https://oasa.earth/

What is Accidental Gods ?

Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone - it is never coming back.

We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, create a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.

What happens if we commit to a world based on the values we care about: compassion, courage, integrity?

What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?

We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just lack the visions to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.

Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.

If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know 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 work together to lay the foundations of a world 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.

Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
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