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What We Have Done at
Green World Trust!
See the recent replies from the leader
of the Labour party and the
Treasury to Dragonfly Trust's Proposal
for an eco-tax on petroleum and plastics
GWT's main work is now taking on the Transition
Towns model, strategically redesigning
the website and starting a local
Transition group in Highbridge, Burnham and Berrow
- Somerset, UK. |
Green World Trust (was Dragonfly
Trust, and before that was Magdalene House
Trust) has been in existence for about ten years,
the first five years of which were spent in Glastonbury, working
with casualties of modern life.
We achieved a lot of success in rescuing drug and alcohol
abuse victims, counselling those in crisis and "spiritual
emergency", housing the homeless and restoring self-confidence
and self-respect in people who had suffered emotional or physical
trauma.
We also rescued another charity that was on the verge of
collapse and brought it back to being a fully functioning,
viable operation. For this we established a charity shop and
ran it ourselves, together with volunteers from among the
people we were helping (this was a part of the rehabilitation
programme).
During that time we initiated the principle of requiring
housing developers to build “social need housing”
in direct proportion to the total number of houses built on
any one project. This was taken up by the minister for housing
at that time and is now standard practice in several areas.
Becoming increasingly aware of the urgently pressing nature
of global issues, we then decided to extend our activities
into investigating the nature of the global issues and approaches
to finding solutions for the major problems, both local and
global, that are responsible for creating problems at the
individual and local levels. This led to the formation of
our group and to many hours of learning how to communicate
with one another and with those outside the group.
As a group we came to realize how precious our support of
each other was, and how, with gentle, aware, regular support,
that reached into whatever we needed to attend to, whether
big or small, we were becoming a springboard to "Think
Global Act Local". WE WANT TO ENCOURAGE OTHERS
TO DO THE SAME AS US!! We are aware that there is still a
vital gap here, that across the planet we need small, local
groups everywhere.
We have begun to explore some of the ways in which we can
“Think Global and Act Local”, two of which are
expressed as our concept of “Planetary Citizenship”
and an original idea which we refer to as the “Twig
Rating”. We intend to continue the development of both
of these and more. "Twig Rating" in particular needs
the backing of a wide network of information. We realized
how badly we needed to contact the scientists, the lone thinkers,
to get our brilliant idea concrete enough to be taken
seriously by the universities research departments...
We thus became very aware of the importance of “strength
in numbers” and being able to reach and empower ordinary
people who often feel disempowered in the face of global change
and challenge. We saw we needed to reach out to others of
like mind, and what better way than through a website. Other
pioneers say similar things, have a look at our "Quotations"
page for inspiration. Here is Guy Dauncey writing probably
the best user-friendly book on "101
Solutions to Climate Change":
The technologies exist to make the transition into
the solar-hydrogen age. The policies that can accelerate
them have been pioneered in places as far afield as Denmark,
India, Sacramento, and Freiburg. The piece
that is missing is a worldwide movement in every village
and every city... that will create the political
will to make the transition happen.
In this way we can grow together and can become a real and
potent force for change.
This is probably our greatest single accomplishment to date,
that we have built the website and it is “open for business”.
We have qualifications in Spiritual Counselling, Life Coaching,
Management, and we have the experience of running successful
Business - but our work with Green World Trust has allowed
our horizons to expand to the call of the times and the needs
of the planet.
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