Category Archives: Doing my bit

On what’s been happening with the Cardiff Pound

Cardiff Pound, Cardiff Stuff, Doing my bit, , , , ,

cardiffpoundpuntcaerdydd

Four months ago tomorrow, I wrote a blog post talking about how I had been playing with the idea of a local currency for a while, and how I wanted to take steps to get one set up here in Cardiff, to benefit local traders, local people, and in the longer term help us maintain/build our local economy. I was absolutely amazed by the interest the post generated, and excited to hear that so many people seemed supportive of the idea.

What’s happened since then? Well, not as much as I would have liked to be honest – the last few months have been horribly busy from a work point of view, and of course now I have a couple of weeks break between contracts, we are well into Summer Holiday mode – which in case anyone is reading this who doesn’t have kids, does NOT equate to ‘Summer Resting Period’.

But the Cardiff Pound idea has still been ticking over in the background, so I thought it would be useful to do a roundup of what HAS happened.

Firstly, I went and spent an afternoon with Stephen Clarke, one of the founders of the Bristol Pound. This was absolutely the best thing I could have done – Stephen talked me through the setup in Bristol, answered all the questions I had thought of plus a few more, and generally confirmed my opinion that a Cardiff Pound would bring a much needed boost to our city. He explained how the Bristol Pound works in partnership with the local Credit Union & the Council,  whilst retaining its independence as an organisation, and this seems to me to be a sensible model to follow. There’s also an opportunity to work with the Bristol Pound team on certain areas of the setup, though this is an area which we haven’t explored in detail yet.

I also went to see Lorraine, the Chief Exec of Cardiff and Vale Credit Union. It’s a busy time for the credit union – they have just completed an office move into Marland House, right in the centre of town, and they have ambitious plans to bring their (excellent) savings and loan products to many more people over the next year. Lorraine was very positive about the possibilities for partnership with a Cardiff Pound and we have agreed to continue exploring how we can work together.

There has also been a very warm response from our local Councillors – thanks in part to the press coverage of the Cardiff Pound idea, and also as a result of a Small Business drop in session in Castle Arcade, where I had the opportunity to bend people’s ears talk about the project. It seems that there is a real political will to take forward a currency for Cardiff, and Cllr Ashley Govier is organising a meeting to discuss the initiative in more detail in the near future – I’ll feed back on that after the event. I am very much hoping that discussions with the Council will result in us bringing the New Economics Foundation to Cardiff to share their considerable knowledge about local currencies and the different benefits they can bring, as well as the pitfalls to be aware of when setting one up.

Looking further ahead, I have also been trying to work out how we can make sure the Cardiff Pound becomes a currency that is present in all aspects of our local economy, and is not seen simply as a retail project. Mark Hooper, director of Indycube Ventures (which is a half million pound funding stream set up specifically to invest in local startups) came up with a fantastic solution – which is to offer a percentage of startup investment funding in Cardiff Pounds! This idea is in its early stages, but feels to me like an amazing opportunity to encourage business startups in all sectors to base themselves in Cardiff. And of course if other local funding providers were to follow suit, this could provide a massive boost for our startup scene.

What else? Well, as you’ll have seen at the top of the piece, we have a logo for the Cardiff Pound project! This is with MASSIVE thanks to Marc Thomas, Editor of Plastik Magazine and a freelance journalist. Marc designed this logo for free, as part of his commitment to do good work for charities and non-profits  – and I am really grateful to him for the time he put into this. The idea is that the logo will become the face of the project in its setup stages, before holding a city wide competition for the final design of the currency itself, once all the nuts and bolts are in place to launch. Thank you Marc!

I’ve also had help and advice from a whole bunch of people, especially Owen Derbyshire of 21 Communications, Christian of I Loves The Diff fame and Gwion Thorpe, a founding partner of the Siop y Bobl project – all of whom I hope will continue to bear with me and my somewhat scattergun approach over the next stage of the journey! And I’m really looking forward to meeting the group behind Cardiff Taffs in a couple of weeks to see how we can share knowledge and hopefully work together.

So – what’s next for the Cardiff Pound? Well, soon it’ll have a website all of its own instead of a corner of LearnerMother; and in the not too distant future, with help from Cardiff Council, an opportunity to work with the New Economics Foundation to refine our plans. The project needs to be set up as a Community Interest Company, and once that’s done then more formal partnerships can be worked out – and of course the small question of how to fund this project is still to be resolved. In the grand scheme of things it’s not a huge amount of money to find – £20K or so would probably break the back of the setup costs, however that’s assuming that everyone involved can work for free. I’m still chewing over how best to work out the money side of things, I’m sure a solution will appear somehow!

It’s fair to say that the Cardiff Pound is not moving as quickly as I would like at the moment. However, please do bear with me – everything has to be squeezed in around family and work which will necessarily mean that there are sometimes periods when things go quiet. Rest assured, the Cardiff Pound is very much alive and kicking, and in a shop near you, soon!

Thanks for reading – please do get in touch via comments or @cardiffpound – looking forward to hearing from you!

Michelle

 

 

 

On Lewisham Hospital, and doing my bit

Doing my bit, ,

I have been wondering lately if I have the power to change anything, anything at all in the big wide world, or whether I might not be better just battening down the hatches and giving my full attention to looking after those closest to me. I am forever reading stuff that makes me sad – and more often mad – for example I’ve written on LearnerMother about food banks, human trafficking and ethical clothing production – all issues that I want to have the power to change. I don’t have any power of course, so I do what little I can – I try and make ethical choices when I’m purchasing goods and services; I write about stuff so my readers get to hear about it, I sign petition after petition and I tweet/fb information about issues that I think are important.

Recently though, I have been wondering – is there really any point in this? Is my status update/blog entry/sponsored run/postcard to my AM/MP/MEP ACTUALLY going to change anything? When I open my email in the morning, I have found myself looking wearily at the messages requesting that I click onto a petition link, and thinking – will it matter? Will it REALLY matter if I don’t do this?

But then look what happened this week! The High Court ruled that Jeremy Hunt’s attempt to downgrade Lewisham Hospital is in fact illegal. Not just ill advised – a muppet without its eyes sewn in yet could see that  – but ILLEGAL.

Just in case you don’t know the back story, it goes something like this. Lewisham hospital is highly rated, safe, and performing well, and has recently had a much needed £22million refurb. The South London Healthcare Trust on the other hand (which does NOT include Lewisham) is suffering crippling debts from poorly structured PFI deals, and has had an administrator appointed.

The administrator knows that the only way for a hospital to make more cash is to see more patients. Clearly, there are some detection and therefore imprisonment ethical issues with poisoning the local water supply. Hmm, I hear you say, in that case, what is one to do when one requires more sick people to service one’s debt? OH YES! Close the A and E in the neighbouring Trust! Then all those poor sick folk will HAVE to go to Queen Elizabeth Hospital Woolwich, which just happens to be in South London Healthcare Trust – I say chaps, quids in all round! Of course some of them will probably die en route, being as it can take an hour or so to get there from Lewisham in rush hour, and a few more of them will probably die in QE’s A and E, since it will have to service three quarters of a million people. So a few less folk for ATOS to profit from deal with, but they’ll take one for the team I’m sure, so all in all, problem solved! QE Woolwich will be full to bursting! HooBloodyRah!

Sorry, went off on a bit of a rant there. But you get my drift – downgrading Lewisham isn’t about rationalising services, or restructuring a poorly performing hospital. Those things have to happen, and I understand that. This, THIS is about propping up a neighbouring trust and its bloody PFI, so the government does not have to dip into its reserves to solve the problem. And more importantly, it’s just completely crazy. One A and E for 750,000 people? Really? REALLY? How long will that last? Oh, until the Tories (please all the gods in the world ever) have lost the next election and then someone else’ll be blamed. Great.

Ok. Deep breath. Stop the ranting. Back to the point.

The point is that I became aware of this because Lewisham used to be my local hospital. (Actually, Greenwich used to be my local hospital, but then it closed. Services moved to QE Woolwich, funnily enough). Anyway. Lewisham is also my sister’s local hospital. They delivered my nephew and niece safely, they looked after my niece when she was very very poorly, and they’ve also looked after my youngest when he was a baby and became scarily and suddenly ill whilst we were staying with my sister. So when I heard that they were looking to downgrade it, and the completely outrageous reasoning behind the decision, I tried to become as involved as I could.

That wasn’t very involved, in the grand scheme of things.  I facebooked, tweeted, signed petitions, wrote to Jeremy Hunt. I wanted to join my sister and her kids on the demonstrations but dragging three kids on a return journey from Cardiff to Lewisham for one day was not practical or financially possible. So I did what I could, from here. And all the time I was doing it, I had a devil on my shoulder, whispering to me ‘There’s no point. They’ll win, they always do. Now stop imagining you can change anything and get back to looking after your kids’.

But guess what? ‘They’ didn’t win. We did. This went all the way to the High Courts of Justice, who decided that what Mr Hunt and the South London Healthcare Trust wanted to do was illegal. So they can’t do it. I know, I know, that this is not the end of the story, that there is already talk of changing the law to make this sort of pillaging legal, that there will be appeals. I know that this is only one hospital that I happen to know about because of my personal connection to it, and that there will be others in the firing line. And I also know that this does not solve the problems of Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich. So it’s not all good news.

I also know that taken alone, my actions would not have made a jot of difference.  And yet, taken as one of thousands, tens of thousands, they did. If I made one, ONE person aware of this, and they made someone else aware, and the chain went on, well who knows where the tipping point is. It doesn’t even matter where it is – the point is that it IS there, and you, and me, and every person who has signed something or sponsored someone or demonstrated somewhere are a tiny but crucial part of making it happen, of making the scales slowly but surely tip.

The lesson I’ve learnt this week about doing my bit, is that my bit, though it is tiny, microscopic even, counts. As does your bit. So – please don’t do what I’ve been in danger of doing. Please don’t ignore the causes that are important to you, please, please fight for what you believe in*. Because it’s only by doing that that we can all of us hope to stop the madness and the greed, and make a fairer world.

Thank you for reading.

 

*unless you are a Tory. In which case we need to have serious words about what you believe in.

 

 

On Human Trafficking

Doing my bit, ,

Human trafficking.

Buying, transporting, selling and enslaving people, for profit.

Horrendous, isn’t it. I cannot even begin to imagine how it would feel, waking up in the morning and knowing that I will have no choice about what I do all day, no chance of keeping the money I have earned through doing it, that I’ll only get fed if someone else sees fit to feed me, and that I might well be beaten and/or subjected to sexual violence by my captors. And that when I get to fall asleep again, it’ll only be a temporary respite, because the nightmare will simply start again when I wake up.

This isn’t happening in the days of ancient roman slavery, or medieval fiefdom or even 19th century America. This is happening now, in the 21st Century, throughout our supposedly civilised world and on our doorsteps.

How does someone become a commodity, a chattel, a possession? How can one person gain control over another to that extent? Well, it’s not one person, for a start. Human traffickers operate in gangs, often spanning international borders, in a slick operational line which starts with a friendly face and the promise of a better, happier, safer life for the victim and their family. Sometimes – especially where children are concerned – the friendly face isn’t necessary – just brute force. The younger the easier, probably – it is an awful thing to know that children as young as three have been trafficked into the UK, for sex.

Once recruited, whether by force or by guile, the victims are transported to their destination, where they are made to hand over any identifying documentation before being set up in menial, labouring or sex jobs, having to give up everything they earn. In theory, there may be opportunities to escape – but would you, if you were told on a daily basis that your family, your children, would be killed if you did so? Or if you were in fear of being deported back to a war zone? Or if you were a child who spoke no English and had no idea where you would go to even if you did manage to slip away? And knowing that if you did go, and you were found and brought back, you’d probably be beaten to within an inch of your life? No, me neither.

So, like I said, horrendous. But probably, in these civilised times, we’re getting on top of the problem, yes? All those accords and treaties and directives must be moving some way towards stamping out the problem, surely. Uh, no. Not quite. It’s recently been reported in New Europe Magazine that trafficking in Europe increased by 18% between 2008 and 2010. Despite this, arrests are down, probably because only 6 out of 27 EU countries have integrated anti-trafficking directives into their legislation. (No, don’t even bother asking, of course we didn’t, the Toryboys are too busy dismantling the NHS and spreading the skivers versus scroungers rhetoric to get involved in such a non-vote winning issue.)

So human trafficking is on the increase, the political will to tackle it is on the decrease. Where does that leave the victims? Quite possibly in a nail bar or massage parlour near you. Yes, really. Just TODAY, six people in Derby were charged with trafficking men into the UK. Last month, the Independent carried an article highlighting that victims of trafficking in the UK are more likely to be prosecuted than the perpetrators. In the same article, you can read about how trafficked victims who did approach the police were fobbed off with that old ‘we can’t interfere in domestic affairs’ line, Nice, huh.

While governments here and abroad, not to mention our esteemed police force, are busy ignoring the matter, there are, luckily, a handful of organisations which exist to raise awareness of this issue, and to work towards stamping it out all together. One such organisation is Hope for Justice. Their website makes sobering reading, and is a good place to start if you want to find out more about the scale of the problem, and what you can do to help.

I didn’t know much about human trafficking before my friend began raising money for Hope for Justice. But now I do know, I want to do something about it, however small, so I’m using my place in this years Cardiff Half Marathon to raise some cash. I’ve set myself a target of £200, and I’d be massively grateful if you could help in any of the following ways:

  1. You could donate £2 via my Justgiving Page
  2. You could share this post, or my Justgiving page
  3. You could vote for my friend Liz to win £5,000 for Hope for Justice with Mountain Warehouse. Liz is putting my half marathon to shame with a programme of events ranging from abseiling to doing the Welsh Three Peaks (4 times!!)

Thank you for reading, and if you feel able to donate and/or share, thank you again.

Michelle