Sabita Banerji

Photo: Eat Hackney website

It was a sunny Saturday morning. I was taking a shortcut across the St John-at-Hackney churchyard. Young women were collecting money for some charity. Stalls selling cheese, pies, fragrant soaps, second-hand clothes and handicrafts lined the path. People sat sunning themselves on the benches. Two squirrels were having a ferocious battle at the foot of a tree.

Stopping to watch them made me notice that beyond them, behind a gravestone, lay a young man. He was lying on his side with his arms stretched downwards towards his knees. His head flopped on the grass at an angle that didn’t imply sleep. Probably drunk, I thought. Another man stopped and looked to see what I was staring at. Perhaps he would deal with it. I was late for my appointment. I went on my way.

On my way back and hour or so later, I noticed the young man was still lying there in exactly the same position. Now there was a man in a blue uniform, jacket unbuttoned, relaxing on one of the benches.

“Do you think that man’s ok?” I asked him.

He turned round to look, shrugged and said,

“It’s not my job. I am not a policeman or an ambulance man.”

“I’m just asking you as a human being.”

“Same as you. You could call the police or ambulance!” he snapped back.

I went and had a closer look at the prone young man. He was dirty and had a few small cuts on him. He was breathing. Should I try to wake him? Would he attack me if I did? Would he need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? The thought repelled me. Should I just buy him a cup of coffee or some water and just leave them beside him to find when he wakes up?

In the end I did nothing. I decided that he probably was just sleeping off a hangover and it would have seemed ridiculous for me to leave treats for him. If he was ill, I’m sure one of the charity collectors would notice and help him. Or the priest responsible for the churchyard. I’m from out of town. It’s not really my responsibility.

I’ve felt terrible about this decision ever since. My inaction was, if anything, worse than the man in uniform because he had made a conscious, unashamed decision not to get involved. Perhaps his contract forbade him from doing so. I had no real excuse. Even if the man was simply sleeping off a hangover, it would have been nice for him to wake up to a bottle of water or a coffee – a random act of kindness. And just because he was breathing, that didn’t mean he was not unconscious or in a coma.

My inaction was worse because I make a point of being socially aware and getting involved in community projects, buying fair trade and supporting good works in far flung countries. And writing these blogs.

For whom are we responsible? To whom are we accountable?

Somewhere I read that our duty in life is simply to do what is necessary; if you are in a room that needs sweeping and there is a broom, your duty is to sweep the room. It didn’t add – “…but only if it’s your job” or “…but only if it doesn’t make you look ridiculous or repel you.” It didn’t add  ” …as long as there’s non-one else around who looks like they might do it instead.”

My latest blog post on MIT’s CoLab Radio is about the recent springing up of lots of new initiatives in Oxford that are putting food – it’s production and pricing – back into the hands of the people who eat it.

I asked four people what motivated them to make these initiatives. They include Chris Waites, who initiated The People’s Supermarket Oxford, a cooperatively financed and run food shop which is opening on the Cowley Road this Saturday (21st July) at 11 am.  Chris is pictured below beside my Just Change mural freshly painted on the People’s Supermarket wall.

Go to CoLAb Radio to read the full post

When Reg Curnock came out of the army in 1958 he and his wife moved into a house on a dirt track just outside Oxford. He started growing vegetables for his growing family, while all around his vegetable patch, streets and houses sprouted up. They were to provide homes for workers in the new car factory going up in Cowley.

Reg has seen the car industry rise and fall in his many decades on what became the Blackbird Leys Estate. And more recently everyone on the estate is feeling the pinch of the recession. Reg feels that he’s seen the “sense of community” fall too, and says the drug dealing that now goes on means the old people “keep themselves to themselves”.

But last night the community spirit was reasserting itself. Perhaps not exactly the community that Reg was used to, but a new kind of community blending black, white, Polish, English, young, old and middle aged. And Reg himself. What they all had in common was a purpose. They had gathered to discuss, over a shared meal, plans to start a community market on the estate. The organisers of the event had been gathering people’s views on the idea.

To the first question, “Does Blackbird Leys need a market?”, there was a resounding and unanimous Yes.

To the second question, “Why?”, two answers predominated. One, to provide a source of fresh vegetables to people on the estate and two, to bring the community together.

What did people want to buy at the market? Overwhelmingly, fresh fruit and veg. What would they be willing to sell? Alas, mostly cakes!

But fortunately Reg and his fellow members of the Blackbird Leys Allotment Association, were there with plans to provide the vegetables. And the fruit and herbs and flowers and seeds and seedlings…  As a father of six, whose grandchildren were weaned on his pureed vegetables, Reg knows the value of fresh produce. His wife used to keep track of what he grew and what it would have cost to buy in the shops. She calculated that they saved £18 a week in the 1970’s. “Imagine what that would be worth now,” he says. (Thanks to this rather handy website, I can tell you that £18 in 1975 would be worth £185 now using average earnings!)

At each table, over freshly cooked baked potatoes, vegetable stew and salad, we discussed ideas for the market and wrote them on post-it notes. Our excitement grew as the ideas flowed, bouncing off each other and getting more and more ambitious. Could we recreate Paul’s thrilling childhood memory of when the cast of the Planet of the Apes arrived in full costume on horseback to entertain him and the other kids at an earlier market?!

“But what makes me really angry,” said Paul, “Is Mother’s Day. On the Tuesday a bunch of flowers will be £3.99, and come Friday it will be £7.99! And that’s kids they’re taking that money from. We could grow flowers on our allotments and even if we sell them for a pound a bunch we’d still be making something, and the kids wouldn’t be being ripped off.”

Reg, who was last year’s winner of the Oxford Allotment Competition, suggested that as well as selling fruit and veg, they could provide advice to help people grow their own. They could sell seeds and show people that you could save your own seeds to plant the following year instead of buying new ones. This might not sound like good entrepreneurship on Reg’s part – but it sounds like a lot like community spirit. Long may it live.

Photos from the Blackbird Leys Allotment website. Reg is the one on the left.

My guest blog on MIT’s CoLab Radio:

http://colabradio.mit.edu/how-much-happiness-do-you-want-in-your-tea/

My local corner-shop is under new management. It’s been there, 365 days a year, sunrise to 10 pm, for all the 21 years I’ve lived here. It has solved all my grocery emergencies… like my daughter’s sudden urges to bake cakes at 9pm and we’re out of eggs, or when a friend pops in for a cup tea and wrinkles his nose at the prospect of my soya milk, or when we’re sitting down to Christmas dinner with the extended family and I realise I’ve forgotten to buy the essential ingredient for brandy butter…

The new owners are eager to please. They’ve spruced the place up and stacked the shelves high with everything they think we’re ever likely to need. They are crestfallen if they don’t have something you want, and rush off to make a note to buy it next time.

There is one small space on those shelves, though. And I’ve got my eye on it.

Perhaps, as well as the usual cheap basic groceries, newspapers, sweets and booze, it could also sell Just Change tea – grown by indigenous people (who call themselves adivasis) in South India and traded community-to-community via volunteers like me. And honey made by a friend in the next street. And vegetables and flowers grown on the local allotments…

The new owner is skeptical, but doesn’t rule out the idea completely. His family has experience of running corner shops in various parts of Oxford from the multicultural, multi-social (to coin a phrase) Cowley Road to Blackbird Leys where, he said, “most people are on benefits”. But here, he has noticed, there is a mix of “professional people” who might be interested in fair trade tea and home-made honey, and “simple people” (his words) who just want the basics at the cheapest possible price.

But why should paying producers a fair price for their goods be something only professional people can afford to do? Why shouldn’t “simple people”, people on lower incomes here be able to pay “simple people” in other countries a reasonable price for producing their food?

That’s what Bomman, a member of the adivasi group that produces Just Change tea, felt when he saw his tea for sale in a German fair trade shop. The price was way beyond the means of ordinary working people. Bomman said, “This isn’t fair. People who want to buy our tea are our friends; they should be paying less, not more”. So Just Change developed a pricing policy based on what people could afford – above a sustainable minimum set by the producers themselves.

When Just Change producers met members of Marsh Farm Outreach (MFO), a community group on a Luton housing estate, they found they had much in common; the struggle to earn a living, to own their own homes… and their love of tea. MFO now distributes Just Change tea on the estate and beyond. They do it as an act of solidarity with the adivasis and to supplement both their own and the adivasis’ incomes.

So, with this precedent to inspire me, my new mission is to persuade my new neighbour to stock fairly traded and locally produced groceries. Obviously he can only do this if all his customers—professional and “simple”—feel not only that it’s important to pay a fair price for their food, but also that it’s affordable.

Then maybe one day, we’ll all have a sense of solidarity with our fellow workers whether they are on the local allotment or they’re a thousand miles away in a South Indian tea garden.

Wish me luck. And watch this space…

Photo: The Corner Shop – Coronation Street set (Elaine Champion) / CC BY-SA 2.0

A few weeks ago, I had that moment that every woman over 50 dreads. I felt a small lump in my breast. Within 14 days of seeing my GP about it, I was in the John Radcliff Hospital where the receptionist had all my details ready. Within minutes I was seen by the duty nurse who did a check up and recommended an x-ray, ultrasound test and needle test.

I wondered how long I would have to wait for all that lot – and how much longer than that I would have to wait for the results. Uncertainty—I heard recently—is what humans fear almost more than the worst news.

But she told me to go back to the waiting room and within two hours, I had had all the tests—moving from one clinic to another down gleaming blue and white corridors, my details miraculously popping up—with the newest gleaning of information attached—in each new clinic, and finally back to the duty nurse who gave me the results then and there. Everything was absolutely fine.

This is a miracle.

Not that everything was fine (well, that too), but that I should have had access to this vast, efficient, clean, machinery so quickly and effortlessly, without having had to spend a penny more than my taxes.

Miraculous that the doctors, while delivering this life preserving service to a vast waiting room bustling with people, should be able to take the time to notice that I was terrified of the needle (my childhood reflex to run at the mention of the word is still only barely controlled) and stop and talk me through it calmly and soothingly (you hardly feel it, incidentally).

Miraculous that while waiting I could have a cup of tea in a clean, bright café staffed entirely by volunteers. And that despite offering us all this, the hospital staff and signboards kept apologising to us… for keeping us waiting.

I met a guy in India earlier this year who worked for an ambulance service there. There is no welfare state in India, so nothing is free, but if the injured person asked to be taken to a ‘public’ (government) hospital they charged them a lower rate than if they asked for a private one—the assumption being that nobody who could possibly afford private care would set foot in a public hospital. Despite some of the world’s best hospitals and doctors being in India, many fear that a stay in a public hospital will leave you sicker than when you went in.

Miraculous that I do not have to make a choice like that.

I cycled away from the main hospital, past the maternity ward and wondered if the blackbird that was decanting pure, mellifluous poetry into the afternoon sky was a descendant of the one I had heard at the same spot 18 years ago, waiting for my daughter to be born. Safely, cleanly. I cycled back to my office in the University where students are given loans to get a superb education. I cycled home through a council-maintained park full of flowers and more birdsong. And I thought to myself, what a wonderful world. If only everybody’s world was like this.

[Photo: Light at the end of the corridor by Jean-Ettienne Poirrier http://www.flickr.com/photos/jepoirrier/3597587304/]

No? Are you sure?

Not when you woke up this morning between your Egyptian cotton sheets, shuffled on your Cornish sheepskin slippers, yawned, stretched and had a hot shower? Not when you poured your Ethiopian coffee, whitened with Devon milk and sweetened with  Malawian sugar? Not when you dressed and slipped your Made in Korea mobile phone, humming with  coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo, into your Made in Bangladesh pocket? Not when you helped your neighbour with her dustbins, and put out your own recycling bin before starting your Korean-manufactured car, as its Malaysian rubber tyres turned, its Nigerian oil-based petroleum burned and the exhaust fumes drifted towards the sky?

All day you’ve been shifting atoms, raising and lowering temperatures, diverting money from one economy into another, altering the chemical composition of the air around you, causing people to have new thoughts, different emotions, higher or lower incomes…

But isn’t ‘changing the world’ about the big, meaningful changes? I hear you cry.

Yes, and each of the infinitesimally small changes you make every day is adding up… and if some of your actions trigger changes in the thoughts and actions of those around you, if they set in motion a chain of re-actions – as they well might, whether you know it or not – over your lifetime, the cumulative impact of your little changes on the world will be exponentially bigger and more meaningful.

For example, next time you reach out your hand towards a supermarket shelf, the particular pack of tea (or cotton wool, or spaghetti, or chili powder or condoms or wine) that you choose will provide a single piece of data which will contribute towards the supermarket’s decision about where to buy that product from in future and how much to pay for it. So your little action could help make the world of difference to some struggling farmer in a continent far away.

Yet a farmer who’s close enough for the tea leaves picked by her hands to be brewing in the cup that’s warming your hands, at this very moment.

You are, without doubt, changing the world. Change it wisely.

PS Tomorrow is World Fair Trade Day.

PPS Find out how Ambika, Tanya and Katie are changing the world – together.

The life expectancy of one community is 83 years.  The life expectancy of another is ten years less. One community has high levels of educational attainment,  subsequently high incomes and no child poverty. Another has a high percentage of adults without qualifications, low incomes and high rates of child poverty.

You would imagine that I was talking about global inequality – Europe vs Africa say.  But I’m talking about a place where rich and poor live much closer together. So close, in fact, that the better off community built a wall to segregate itself from the more deprived community, and urged teachers to keep their children separate  in school.

So maybe it’s somewhere like Palestine? Or  perhaps apartheid South Africa? Actually, it’s my own home town of Oxford. Lovely, leafy, Labour-dominated Oxford. Ah, but yes… Oxford, suddenly we remember when the dreaming spires echoed with the sound of screaming tyres. The Oxford Haves still shudder at the mention of Blackbird Leys and assume that the comparatively low life expectancy there is because they are all murdering one other, high on crack cocaine, rather than because of a web of social and economic factors – including low income and low educational attainment –  each of which exacerbates the other. With demise of the car industry and the prevalence of high brow jobs  in Oxford, people are trapped in this web. On the other hand they have a much stronger sense of community and identity, than most of the Have neighbourhoods.  And just like the Haves they are mostly just families getting on with their lives, bringing up their kids, enjoying the odd evening in the pub, and hoping to grow old peacefully and comfortably. It is even the home of an award-winning choir.

Late one night recently, at a Cowley Road bus stop – one of the areas of Oxford where the Haves and the Have Nots live cheek by jowl, a thin young woman came up to me and said in lilting Irish traveler tones, “Excuse me, miss.” I waited for the inevitable request for spare change to get to the night shelter. But instead she said “Can I interest you in a poem?”  Pleasantly surprised, I said I would love one and she sat herself down beside me on the wall, opened an exercise book and read out loud, in clear, measured, confident voice, what turned out to be a pretty good poem about the Easter story. I felt it was well worth the two quid I paid her. She immediately crossed the road to the chip shop, with head held high.

Maybe she knew that a fellow traveller on the rather arty Cowley road was likely to be a fellow poetry enthusiast. Whatever the reason, by reading me her poetry she made me empathise with her rather than feel sympathy for her. Sympathy is an emotion which, when acted upon, provides a warm glow of satisfaction for the person feeling it, but can be demeaning for the person who is forced, through lack of alternatives, to receive it. While empathy implies a level of understanding, of identifying with their predicament. Sympathy is something you do to someone. Empathy is something you do with them.

Donating to charity, for example, is prompted by sympathy, and most donors expect to be thanked (and even admired) for their generosity. But buying fair trade is motivated by empathy and buyers presumably do not expect gratitude for paying the  fair price for their purchase.

Oxford’s  Cutteslowe wall demonstrates that even if their immediate neighbours are Have Nots, Haves may not be moved to feel empathy for them. How much more difficult, then, for them to feel it for people on the other side of the world. Thankfully, increasing numbers of people are choosing fair trade – so many that fair trade sales are bucking the depressing trend of the rest of the retail sector. So maybe there is hope that instead of Haves and Have Nots, we will all become Have A Bit Mores and Have A Bit Less But Enough.

One pop song doth not a zeitgeist make, of course, but Jessie J’s track insisting that “it ain’t about the cha-ching cha-ching “, but that she just wants to make the world dance, does chime with a sentiment that is popping up in a number of fields lately, especially if for  ‘dance’ we read ‘co-operate’.

I’ve just been reading Pete Wallis’ hopefully soon-to-be-published book, Into the Heart of Restorative Justice. This kind of justice is not so much about the money (that was stolen or demanded in fines) but about communication, rising mutual empathy, co-operation and eventually healing for both the criminal and the person they have harmed. Restorative justice brings them together in a safe and neutral environment, overseen by a facilitator, so that they can seek to understand the feelings that caused or were caused by the crime – so that they can, quite literally, find the humanity in each other. Wallis describes how effective this process is for helping all those affected by the crime to recover from it and move on, and the high rate of success it has had in preventing re-offending compared to the adversarial, crime-and-punishment model of traditional criminal justice.

In economics, too, co-operation is becoming as respectable as competition and, believe it or not,  money is losing its monopoly of the starring role. Economist Noreena Hertz says that the self-serving, profit-obsessed “Gucci Capitalism”, as she calls it, that has dominated in the last few decades, led inexorably to the global debt crisis, which in turn has paved the way for broad acceptance of what she terms “Co-op Capitalism.” This replaces competition and the bottom line with collaboration and the community. In other words, the world is beginning to prefer a harmonious economic ‘dance’ of give and take in which we all have a part, rather than businesses treating us as a mere source of  money, money, money.

Profit, so long the unquestioned raison d’etre of business, is now increasingly being joined by two more bottom lines; people and planet. Giving a damn about what your industry does to people and to the planet is no longer shrugged off by all businesses as wishy washy nonsense, but is increasingly being accepted as common sense… because we’ve all seen what can happen to the global economy when profit is the sole motivating factor. And with India and China – whose economies strongly feature co-operative business models – on the up and up, who are we to argue?

But the preference for co-operation over competition is not new; as Professor Hertz points out, “Recent work in behavioural economics has confirmed that benevolence is not alien to human nature. In evolutionary biology we see that learning from others – sharing information with others – is the key to human success. Whilst recent findings in neuroscience alert us to the fact that we are most contented when helping others.”

I’ve seen this in practice when, as a volunteer for Just Change, I run school workshops to stimulate discussions among young people about trade justice. In round one, the group is asked to improvise a role-play depicting conventional trade; ie the object of the exercise is for each group to make as much money as possible for themselves. In this scenario, there is always much rowdy bantering and bartering. At the end, the shoppers are poorer than when they started, though not as poor the tea growers who stay poor, while the shopkeepers always get richer. Everybody, except the shopkeepers of course, says they feel rotten at the end of the round.

In round two, they replay the roles, but this time it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that everyone has enough money for their needs, which is the principle on which Just Change operates. This time, unsurprisingly, all three groups say they feel satisfied with the amount of money they are left with at the end. But I have noticed something else; in round 2 the kids always treat each other with respect and kindness rather than aggression – and the general atmosphere is always much quieter and gentler.

Peter Wallis says that “normally well grounded, sober practitioners” are so moved by the transformation that takes place in restorative justice meetings that they “start using mystical, even religious language” to describe it. I felt the same after these Just Change workshops. I felt that I was witnessing a purer, more innocent and more real side of human nature emerging.

Stan Thakaekara, one of the founders of Just Change, asks “Is [a] profit-driven market economy inevitable? Are justice and human dignity no longer relevant? Are there no other choices and options?” Through the growth of the Just Change movement in India, in which tens of thousands of families trade on Just Change principles, he has helped to prove beyond doubt that there are other options.

And every time we do our grocery shopping, most of us have options too. Choosing fairly traded products, or buying from the Co-op (or a co-operatively run store like Waitrose or John Lewis) is more than paying lip service to a good cause. It is a profound political and economic act. It is a taking step in the dance of global economic co-operation, and helping to restore a bit of economic justice by recognising and responding to the humanity in those who produce what we buy. Ok, so sometimes it might cost a little more… but it’s not about the money, money, money. Ain’t about the (ha!) cha-ching cha-ching. Ain’t about the (yeah!) ba-bling ba-bling, Wanna make the world dance, Forget about the price tag.

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Jessie J featuring B.oB, Price Tag – http://youtu.be/qMxX-QOV9tI
Restorative Justice – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice
Just Change – www.justchangeuk.org
Co-op Capitalism – http://www.uk.coop/coopcapitalism