Our own flavour of the future

GwyrddNi is a new project by DEG and five community enterprises that will facilitate  Citizens Assemblies on climate change across Gwynedd. Nina Bentley is GwyrddNi’s Community Climate Action Facilitator in Bro Ffestiniog. 

Blaenau Ffestiniog was the biggest and arguably therefore the most affected of the towns in North Wales during the deindustrialisation of its slate quarries. The population halved and was left in a state of deprivation. Yet out of the scorched earth, small shoots have been growing into thriving plants; native and strong. 

Locals have spent years creating and growing social and economic community outreach, community-owned buildings, businesses and enterprises. Cwmni Bro is the umbrella for fifteen social enterprises in the area and acts to promote the very best of practice and resilience in the local circular economy. 

Strength and fairness for the people is the order of the day. Working on the principles of empowering people ‘on the ground’, rather than administering the diluted regional or country-wide governance, is at the core of developing a local future here. And yet our sense of the right kind of growth, and our need to update and develop our shared values has never been more essential than now.

Y Dref Werdd is one of the social enterprises that works with all this in mind. Knowing that the principles of Community, Well-Being and Environmental richness must be inextricably linked, the organisation works across the spectrum – from fuel poverty to tree planting; from equal access, to food production.

But right now, in the midst of this asset based and environmentally active community development, we, the people of this piece of land, need to be having representative conversations about how to shape our local future. Resilience has become a matter of Sustainability. Money can’t buy air, plants, ecosystems. But our collective drive towards more sustainable lifestyles can. What are the questions we need to answer? What kind of spaces can we have these conversations in? 

This is the work of GwyrddNi Citizens Climate Assemblies. We will take us, and make our own flavour of the future. 

By Nina Bentley

Community Climate Action Facilitator for Gwyrddni in Bro Ffestiniog
Nina@deg.cymru