Dear Friend,
This is the second in a three part email series, detailing new ways of working for XR Exeter, and a new strategy to take us forwards. If you missed it you can follow the link to read the first part, Reflections, Learnings & Hard Truths.
We need to change the way we organise!
XR Exeter will no longer be using the XRUK Self-Organising System to coordinate our local group. This was a complicated set of rules that recommended dividing into lots of sub-groups and having formal internal and external coordinator roles for each of them. It didn’t work well for us as a local group.
We will also no longer be having rigidly structured meetings with agendas and action points, where we do nothing but talk.
Instead we will be focusing on community building and making hands-on use of our time together.
Workshops for creativity and to make progress towards action, trainings and skill shares to empower us, community events with food and music to bind us together, and actions focused on making systemic change.
We will aim to be together, in one group, in everything we do. We must prepare ourselves to mobilise for actions that defend the environment around us and strengthen our Exeter community, and to face together whatever threats come our way, from the environmental crisis or from rising fascism.
Local groups like the Devon Drummers are likely to continue independently as they can sustain their own membership, and we will continue working closely with them. But for many local sub-groups that are struggling, it makes sense for their efforts to be folded back into a single local group.
And together we will create and work along our own strategic pathway towards a long term goal, to keep us focused on a clear vision of change, to give us direction for activities and actions along the way, and to bring about participatory deliberative democracy here in Exeter.
Keep following for more information and an invite to our first workshop next week, on Saturday the 1st of November from 2pm. In the meantime you can help us by donating to our crowd funder.
