Sustainaibility stories - Calf Cop LM

Calf Cop LM Sustainability Witness and Action Group (SWAG)

We started a sustainability group at Calf Cop Meeting in October 2010. We are charged by our Meeting to consider the issues and to report back in due course with our ideas for action.

So far we have shared some of our own responses to the issues, and how these connect for us with the Quaker testimonies. We have begun to make links with others in the local community working for sustainable solutions. We have also begun to consider what responsible stewardship of our Meeting’s land and buildings might mean in the light of sustainability.

Photo credit: Jamie-Rose Campbell

We feel clear that working on practical projects of direct value both to members of the Meeting and to the local community is a natural way to live out and share our values: spiritual and practical, outreach and testimony, all at once. We hope in this way both to inspire others and to be inspired by them in a shared response to the urgent need to change how we live.

We hope to initiate further projects to reduce our carbon impact, while also building closer links with neighbours and friends. Early ideas for projects include composting toilets for the Meeting House allotments, and planting trees to frame and preserve the site of an earlier Meeting House on the land.
The next step for us will be to share our ideas with the local Meeting as a whole, and with the Trustees of our land and buildings, and to reach agreement together about what developments are right for us as a Meeting. We know, for example, that others in the Meeting may yet need to be convinced that climate change is real, urgent, and something which Quakers should concern ourselves with!

It is early days for us as a Meeting, but in our sustainability group we already feel a renewed energy and pleasure in starting to make changes together. Our advice is, to start a group, and to start to make changes, however small. Share the process as well as the outcomes, the feelings as well as the ideas. The problems we face are global and the scale can be scary, but there is a lot of joy in responding locally and starting where we are.

By Mary Swale

We’d love to hear the story of you or your meeting too. Just email sunnivat@quaker.org.uk and tell us about it.