ELECTIVE EVENTS

Affirming the biodiversity of our creativity and activism, we will dance and dream together to catalyse best action. We will affirm and strengthen confident personal and collective agency for action. We will bridge from the future to the present to regenerate possibilities, to co-create ways of being together and forms of culture that embody our deepest values. We will share visions, clarify intentions and deepen resolve to act.

As a group of experienced facilitators, we work in a profoundly embodied and systemic way, using expressive movement, active imagination, systemic constellations and process-orientated group work to achieve these aims. In this offering, we draw particularly on the work of Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects (https://workthatreconnects.org). Joanna Macy writes: “The central purpose of the Work that Reconnects is to help people uncover and experience their innate connections with each other and with the systemic, self-healing powers of the web of life, so that they may be enlivened and motivated to play their part in creating a sustainable civilization.”

Relevance to food justice activists

There is an ongoing need to deepen relationships and networks between social activists who are driving the social movements advocating for environmental justice. There is also a need for us as activists to remain strong and clear in our vision and resolve. This workshop addresses this need.

This programme is for food activists who:

• see themselves as guardians of life
• want to commit more deeply to a vision and path that co-creates a just and life-sustaining food system
• want to create or deepen a resourceful atmosphere of support, challenge and kindness to self and others

Logistics

You can attend the workshop on EITHER Saturday the 26^th OR Sunday the 27^th of January 2019 from 9 to 5.30pm at 196 Victoria Road, Woodstock, Cape Town (https://www.196victoria.com/contact/).

We can accommodate 16 invited participants per day. Preference will be given to attendees at the Agroecology for the 21^st Century Conference, but we will be open to accommodating other food activists not attending the conference who are drawn to attend the workshop.

Teas and lunch will be provided. All costs of the workshop will be covered by the Expressive Movement Alliance. We will fund-raise for this purpose. Participants will be responsible for their own transport and accommodation. The workshop will be held in English.

Attendance Commitment

We require that participants commit to being present for the full duration of the workshop, from start to finish. Also we request that each participant make time available for a 10-minute phone conversation with Alison Moultrie during January 2019 before the workshop. Also, we offer the opportunity of a 50-minute integration coaching session to be held telephonically or online with Alison Moultrie in the period February to April 2019. We strongly request participants to commit to this coaching session as part of the workshop integration process.

To attend the workshop, please fill out the application form on the last page at https://tinyurl.com/ycgkrzge and e-mail to Alison Moultrie at alisonmoultrie@gmail.com by latest 28 December 2018. (Please be aware that there may be a delay in answering emails over the holiday period. We ask for your patience with this.)

For further information or to discuss this invitation, please contact Alison Moultrie on alisonmoultrie@gmail.com or on 0764171917 (Whatsapp text or voicemail preferable).

Comments from previous participants

Here are some comments from some participants at our pilot VisionFest in June 2017. All comments are from activists in the fields of food and environmental and social justice:

Margie Pretorius: “VisonFest enabled me to connect with other people who see clearly the present crisis of the world, and helped me to take myself more seriously as an agent of change. Using dance and imaginative exercises we created a matrix of communal energy that continues to energise and support us in building a new society, even as old and tired ways of organising society are collapsing. It was a safe space in which to explore my role in this time of transition (The Great Turning) and commit more deeply to playing my part in transitioning to a more just and lifegiving way of living.”

Claire Roussell: “VisionFest is a profound tool held by dedicated and expansive facilitators. It allows for a deep and creative process of reimagining how we could be as individuals, society, cultures, which may be a more effective spur to action than facts and figures. The effects of the workshop are still with me more than a year later and the seeds planted have germinated into all sorts of relationships, ideas and new capacities.”

Andrew Bennie: “In 2017 I had the privilege of attending two VisionFest sessions with friends and activists in Johannesburg, facilitated by Alison Moultrie, Busi Dlamini and Sian Palmer. For me the sessions were a new way of engaging with social justice issues and my own role and approach to them. Whereas I was used to focusing on the issues in my activism, this process was much more explicit about being aware of and bringing into the process my own personal feelings, emotions and insights, and hearing the feelings, emotions and insights of others in the workshop. This allowed us as activists to connect much more strongly to each other on an emotional and spiritual level, and around the problems of the world we are confronting. This was, for me, one of the key positive things about the VisionFest process.

It seems to me that there is a nascent but growing thrust in social justice spaces towards bringing in new and creative methods of connecting, analysis, and practice; that aims to generate and connect knowledge, spiritual insights, personal experience, activism and social change in innovative ways that draw not only on ‘new’ techniques but also on ‘old’ histories and traditions that might have been buried or sidelined, also in the context of the decolonisation discourse. I believe this is crucial in deepening connections between personal thoughts and emotions, and progressive collective action for social and structural change. These are the kinds of activism we need in the food justice space, and I feel, from my own wonderful experience of the VisionFest method, that it has a key role to play in bringing together and connecting, on a deep level, activists striving for change in this realm, and invigorating our energy and commitment to working for a better world that sustains life.”