Story by Russ Grayson

Read the story of day one of the transformation of the Barrett House footpath garden.

View the photo album of the Barrett House footpath garden.

IT WAS SUCH A CURIOUSITY that people stopped to look, to ask what was going on and to talk.

“Oh… are you making a community garden here?”, said a couple passers-by, hopefully.

On of these was a young woman with two young children. The boy was especially keen on watching those of us planting.

“You can watch the lady dig for awhile then we have to get going”, the mother said to the boy as he stood watching Fiona use a spade to scoop soil to mark out where he path would go.

“He likes digging”, his mother said to me “At home he digs the front lawn”.

Steve Batley, the landscape architect council uses for design as well as garden and permaculture  education was scooping holes into the freshly laid mulch, filling them with a handful of soil and inserting seedlings of herbs, vegetables and flowers.

“Do you want to plant something”, he asked the young boy, who hurried around to take up a trowel and start excavating. Steve guided him through the planting process and his mother ended up waiting there somewhat longer than she had anticipated.

Planting, this late afternoon, has become something of a children’s participation activity and a spectacle to passers-by.

Some of the garden crew—from left: Steve Batley, landscape architect, Sydney Organic Gardens; Richard Wilson, manager 3-Council Ecofootprint Program; Fiona Campbell, sustainability educator, Randwick City Council; Cecelia Nunez, eastern suburbs permaculture.

Day two

Fiona and Richard check out the new community compost bin. The Gedeye bin that replaced the Aerobin has the virtue of simplicity, being easier to maintain, use and clean. Being a common model, people understand how to use it. The Aerobin which the Gedeye bin replaced, in common with the same model used in the community composting system in Chippendale in inner urban Sydney, created good breeding conditions for an infestation of cockroaches.

It was day two of rehabilitating the footpath planter outside Barrett House—Randwick Council’s energy and water efficient demonstration house that serves as a meeting space for community organisations and as a workshop space. You find it at the end of the commercial strip on Frenchman’s Road, between Clovelly and Carrington roads.

Day one, a week earlier, had brought the removal of the agapanthus that had previously occupied the patch and the dismantling of the community compost bin which, when Fiona started detaching the panels to clean the bin, she found to be infested with cockroaches. The bin had created ideal habitat and the roaches had set up a breeding colony in it. The new bins will be easier to clean and offer few of the nooks and crannies the Aerobins made available to roaches and their hatchlings

 Positioning the community composter

Once the garden had been cleared we discussed how best to position the Gedeye bins and the accompanying rubbish bin that would hold the  dry, carbon-rich leaf litter and other material that composters would add a handful or two or three of to the kitchen wastes they tossed into the community compost bin.

Supplying enough carbon material has been something of a challenge for community composters and it is needed to balance the nitrogen-rich kitchen wastes or the compost can get… how do I put it?… sort of sloppy, disagreeable looking and maybe even smelly. It was telling that someone commented that she could smell the compost in the bin—the one that the crew removed—when she walked past.

We decided that the best place was more or less where the bin had been—up against the moraya hedge that forms a visual barrier separating the road from the footpath. A platform will be levelled for the bins at the next stage of garden reconstruction. Meanwhile, the Gedeye composter and rubbish bin have been placed there and brought into use.

Making the garden

First task in the makeover of the roadside planter was to mark out where the path leading from the footpath into the garden bed would go. A path would be necessary for people to access the community compost bins and for maintenance and harvest of the herbs and vegetables planted into the bed.

A simple, curved path leading around the small, fruiting lemon tree planted by the three Eastern Suburbs mayors at the opening of Barrett House was the obvious solution, and this will be paved in the next phase of garden construction.

This leaves a broad band of garden along the footpath edge and a broad patch around the lemon tree. It was the footpath edge that was planted out this time. It brings the herbs and vegetables within easy reach of passers-by, which is just fine because this is a forage garden from which local people are welcome to take to supplement their cooking.

A public forage garden? Won’t people rip up all of the plants and take them? This is a common but valid question, especially because we have learned from other gardens that many people don’t know how to harvest vegetables. Instead of taking a few leaves of lettuce, for example, they take the whole plant. We expect that this will happen at the Barrett House planter and Council’s sustainability crew—Richard Wilson, manager of the 3-Council Ecofootprint Program and Fiona Campbell, sustainability educator—will simply replace the removed plants.

There is an element of trust here, and while a limited amount of vandalism might occur—we accept this possibility—more likely is that people will not trash the garden, taking only moderate amounts of produce. We could erect a low fence around the garden but all this would do is say to passers-by is ‘don’t touch’; ‘this garden is not for you’—and that’s just the impression we want to avoid. One thing that has been learned is that when you put up a fence or a ‘keep out’ sign people cease to care for what is behind that barrier. Not what we want at the Barrett House footpath garden.

In the yellow light of the setting sun, seedlings are prepared for planting.

Watching people passing by stop to look and talk with the garden makers, I realised that this—this positive, direct contact between council staff and the public—is the best sort of public relations councils can find. It is of far greater value than any number of media releases, any number of official announcements.  Why? Because it is authentic.

There’s still some work to do to complete this little patch of footpath edibles and that is being planned. Anyone in the area, including anyone from a permaculture or a Transition Town group is welcome to participate—just call Richard Wilson at Randwick Council.

As day turned into the half light of early evening I sat talking with Cecelia on the wormfarm seat below the yellow robinia tree in the tiny Barrett House garden. The pedestrian traffic was less now, but as we looked out onto the footpath garden resplendent in its cover of fresh mulch, a man passing by stopped, looked it over then bent down to smell the bright yellow marigolds. Then, we realised, we had created something worthwhile. Our work was done.

A young helper self-recruited from a family passing by the garden decided he would rather dig than walk to the shops.

Put to me in such convincing terms by Sophie from the City of Sydney’s SAVE program (Sustainable Action and Values for Everyone—quite a mouthful and an acronym-driven name if ever I heard one), how could I refuse.

First off, Sophie and I made the short journey out to Waterloo in a City Prius so that we could measure the footpath to see if it would be wide enough for the Salvation Army Waterloo Community Centre to build their footpath garden on. Plenty of room, it turned out, for the four proposed planters.

The planter construction crew with the finished product.

I asked Sophie to make sure the builders consulted Dial-Before-You-Dig to check whether there were water or gas pipes, electricity or other cables below the footpath. Had there been and had the gardeners built a footpath garden directly on the ground itself, it would have had to be rebuilt had the utility needed to dig up the underground service for maintenance. That was the thinking behind the model of raised garden planter the City was proposing in its draft policy—something with a base that could be moved out of the way and later returned, was access to underground services needed.

Next, I thought, why not try to prototype the type of planter the City was proposing in its draft Footpath Gardening Policy and locate it on the footpath to demonstrate the preferred offsets from the kerb?

The guys from Hobo-Gro, who mentored TAFE Outreach participants in the course that constructed the planters, assist to align the planters on the footpath.

The project got underway with TAFE Outreach teaching the participants, clients of the community centre, how to construct the raised planters made of marine ply reinforced with wood salvaged from freight pallets and with drainage holes in their base.

A few weeks passed and the planters were complete. I made an inspection to check them and found them strong and—in their bright orange paint—colourful… just the thing to brighten up a dull streetscape across the road from the Waterloo Estate, a large social housing conglomeration of 1960s tower blocks that, in the open space around them, features three well-used community gardens.

To make his talk more memorable, Costa brought along a feathered teaching assistant.

Lasagne gardening

Meanwhile Sophie and her colleague, Megan—who was with the City’s Sustainability crew—has arranged two workshops during which the planters would be installed, filled with growing medium, planted and mulched, two per session. That process would be led by none other than ex-SBS and now ABC Gardening Australia host, Costa Georgiadis. The workshops quickly filled.

Megan and I did our short talks, then Costa started with one of his food-focused dialogues, demonstrating how to make a wicking planter from a two litre plastic drink bottle by cutting it in half and rearranging the pieces, and discussing the value of non-hybrid seeds and other things. Then it was out to the footpath for the day’s garden construction.

Watching Costa describe how to fill the container gardens, as willing workshop attendees did the work, was like watching a garden chef make a vegetable lasagne.

A scatter of rocks was place in the base to aid drainage (drainage holes had already been drilled through the base), covered with a thick layer of sugar cane mulch, then cow manure spread over it. Next, in went a layer of lucerne, a leguminous straw that embodies in its fibre the nitrogen that plants need to grow. Following that, a powdering or rock dust to supply needed minerals to the growing plants then a layer of chook manure followed by a layer of cow manure followed by another layer of lucerne mulch, rock dust and yet more chook manure and, finally, a layer of lucerne mulch. Quite a lasagne garden indeed, and one full of varied animal droppings—not the sort of lasagne that you might be tempted to eat for dinner.

Nothing like seedlings to create interest

The layers were watered as they were placed in the container garden then seedlings planted through the mulch layer after Costa demonstrated the technique.

That done, the gardens were finished. It was quite clear that participants had enjoyed themselves as they stood back to admire their good work.

Dimensions and offsets

The planters are 1.2m in length, 0.6m wide and high. There is a base in the planters positioned 0.43m down. The purpose of this is so that they can be moved out of the way if council or some other entity imagines that it needs to dig up the footpath. With no services located below the grassy verge here, this wasn’t strictly needed as it would be were there pipes or wires below the footpath.

The planters could have been made a little longer—the draft policy stipulates that there be no longer unbroken access to the street than three metres, though that would be too long for a single footpath planter. Their height lifted them well about that which could be a trip risk, as are many of the low roadside gardens that civic-minded people construct for themselves, many built around tree bases much to the annoyance of council tree managers who think that microorganisms could transmigrate from garden soil into tree trunk and weaker their trees.

The idea in the draft policy of creating a colour contrast with the surrounding footpath area so that passers-by can avoid colliding with the planters was more than adequately taken care of by their bright orange paint job and the reflectors stuck on the planters.

An offset from the kerb to the outer edge of the planter of 0.6m was maintained as per the draft policy to allow access to and from vehicles, especially important for our ageing population and for those with mobility aids. The planters were located 1.5m from transmission wire poles to allow access for their servicing and replacement. The same consideration is made for street furniture such as seats. Plenty of space was left between the garden planters and the nearby bus stop, which is used by a small community transport bus. When we measured the footpath before the project started we realised that the required minimum 1.5m footpath width, to allow unimpeded pedestrian passage, would be more than adequately accommodated.

When the adjacent seating area with its native plants is completed, along with a tiny community gardening area for community centre clients, a rather uninteresting and unremarkable strip of street will have been converted into a biodiverse and very interesting learning and local food source, just the sort of thing we need to spice up inner urban streetscapes in a way that offers food, environmental, social and learning opportunities.

With all of those benefits, a better example of tactical urbanism would be hard to find.

Planting out could get kind-of crowded.

The planters with 0.6m offset from kerb and clear of the footway. The height of the planters lifts them above trip hazard and the colour also contributes to that by contrasting with its surroundings.

Job nearly done—a workshop participant waters the completed and mulched planter garden.

The seedling give-away was a popular part of the event.

City of Sydney Waste Projects Coordinator, Sarah van Erp, led workshops on compost making and wormfarm management at the event.

Organising crew—presenter, Costa Georgiadis (left), event organiser Megan and the author.

The author at Bourke Street Park Community Garden site with a garden bed hastily constructed and planted in time for the official opening of the park makeover of which the community garden in a component.

And go well they did over the first two meetings of the team that will set up the Bourke Street Park Community Garden, the second community garden in Woolloomooloo. That number would have been three had Housing NSW not demolished the informal (‘guerrilla’) community garden that locals started on its unused land , without permission, and operated for some time. Their idea was to put to productive use unused land in an inner urban area where public open space is in short supply. The state government department said they planned to build on the land and so the community garden must go. Go it did, but that was years ago and at the time of writing there is still no sign of Housing NSW building anything at all. What could have been a productive garden managed by local people is now a wasteland covered in the saplings of London plan trees.

The other community garden, Woolloomooloo Community Garden in Sydney Place, was established over a decade ago on its present site and before that was a tiny patch located below the Eastern Suburbs railway viaduct. It is now full, so a new community garden seems to be just the thing that is needed for Woolloomooloo, the densely populated area occupying the valley and its sides between Potts Point and the central business district.

Preparation for gardening

I had been warned that the Woolloomooloo demographic could be a difficult one, however I found the people at the meetings easy to get along with and encountered no difficulties. Woolloomooloo has a preponderance of social housing residents who are supplemented by those in private accommodation. It is what demographers call a ‘low-income demographic’ but the area is dotted with pockets of private home owners.

I worked with two smart, enthusiastic City of Sydney staff on this preliminary work—Kristin and Yvette from City Engagement, the team that organises and runs community engagement. They, with their competence and cheery attitude, were a pleasure to plan and engage with in my role, which was to assist the team of people interested in using the area set aside for community gardening get started through two meetings:

• one, to come to agreement on what their needs from community gardening might be—what in formal moments we call the ‘needs analysis’
• and at the following meeting to work out how they will make decisions, solve disagreements and communicate—what is formally known as ‘governance’, though I avoided using that term.

Social design component done, I arranged for a landscape architect experienced in designing community gardens and training community gardeners in the skills they will need to lead a participatory site design. The process will be to take the garden team through a site analysis so that they get to understand the site and what influences conditions there, then to draw up a concept plan, negotiate this with the garden team and come to agreement on any changes, then produce a working drawing that will guide construction.

The City will purchase the required number and size of galvanised iron planter boxes and these will be installed as per the plan, as will an area set aside for composting that will make use of the rodent-resiatant domestic Geddy composters.

Later, the City plants to relocate one of its old trams in the same area as the community garden and retrofit it as a activity shed for local people, what s commonly known as a ‘men’s shed’ but has been given the name of ‘men’s and shiela’s shed’ in Woolloomooloo… perhaps we should just stick with ‘activity shed’. This was not part of the original plan for the site but after it was raised and I did a simple social ROI (social return on investment analysis to estimate the idea’s potential value to local people—what they could get out of participation in it compared to the cost of installing the thing) I realised that social return—social benefit—would be analogous to that from the community garden and therefore the shed should go ahead.

A unusual mix

The garden group will be an unusual mix. There are people from both social and private housing, however the interesting inclusion will be the nearby Ozunan Learning Centre that wants to use the garden for horticultural therapy with Woolloomoloo’s homeless men.

TAFE Outeach, too, has indicated interest, offering the opportunity to create something quite innovative with the community garden, the activity shed and this diverse mix of community gardeners and social agencies.

For me, taking the project through social ensign and up to sit design stage has been interesting and rewarding. Now, its up to the gardeners to create something new in Woolloomoloo.

The crew... and the garden before starting its makeover, still infested with agapanthus.

The garden at the end of the day—free at last from agapanthus and ready to prepare the soil for vegetables and herbs at the next working bee.

Day 1

Steve Batley removes an agapanthus.

This was day one of two to repurpose Randwick Council’s footpath garden bed, at the end of the commercial strip on Frenchmans Road, from a low-biodiversity agapanthus plantation into a high-biodiversity herb, vegetable and fruit patch.

It didn’t take long for the energetic crew to remove the agapanthus outside Barrett House, the retrofitted, energy and water efficient building shared by Randwick, Woollahra and Waverley councils and used as a meeting place by community groups and for council workshops.

The day started as all such events should, sitting around the table, coffees in hand, discussing how to proceed. Day one—this cloudy and, later, rainy Thursday morning—was to bring the clearance of agapanthus from the garden bed in preparation for next Thursday’s installation of path, compost, mulch and edibles.

It was decided that the community compost bin, an Aerobin type, should be emptied but that the fruiting lemon tree planted at the opening of Barrett House by the three eastern suburbs mayors should be retained.

Agapanthus… we’ve probably all seen it because it’s quite common as a public place planting. It’s a perennial with long, dark green straplike leaves and clusters of colourful flowers on a long stalk, and it is favoured by councils for its ease of maintenance. Removing it is sometimes easy, sometimes more difficult, especially when it forms a large root mass and is quite heavy to free from the soil and lift.

The agapanthus removed, the question was what to do with them… they were offered to passers by but nobody seemed interested… so what about composting them?… that was a possibility but wouldn’t it be better to replant them somewhere? A call to council’s nursery solved the problem—they would take them all… which meant that creation of the new garden would be a zero waste operation.

Fiona Campbell cleans out the community compost bin. The Aerobin model was found to be infested with cockroaches and was removed in favour of the simpler Geddy bin which has fewer nooks and crannies where the creatures can breed and is easier to maintain and clean.

Community compost bin

The community compost bin situated in the footpath garden is used by people living nearby, and as as soon as the agapanthus was removed from around it Fiona set to work, removing its panels so as to empty it out.

As is found in other community composting systems there was a preponderance of kitchen and food scraps in it but not enough of the carbon materials that make for a balanced compost mix. Compost requires a mix of dry, brown carbon materials and moist green, nitrogen-rich material for effective breakdown.

Providing dry carbon materials has proven to be something of a challenge with community composting bins in some Sydney installations, with one group of community composters sourcing coffee husks from a nearby coffee roaster as carbon material.

The day after the gardening session, Richard and Fiona, from Randwick Council, installed a rubbish bin adjacent to the composter to hold a supply of dry leaf sweepings. It is planned that, when council maintenance staff sweep the fallen leaves from below the adjacent native fig trees in the park, they will put them into a bin from which community composters could scoop a handful to add to their kitchen wastes.

At the same time the two replaced the Aerobin with a couple of the domestic, black plastic Gedeye compost bins (also known as Dalek composters because their shape is reminiscent of the malevolent Daleks that appear in the BBC television series, Dr Who). These are easier to use that the Aerobin and compost is more easily removed.

The things you find in compost—a whole coconut would take quite some time to break down.

Community composting is a new idea presently being trailed by Randwick, Waverley and Leichhardt councils as well as by the Sustainable Chippendale team and, in Melbourne, by the City of Yarra. It’s a means of reducing household green waste for people living in apartments instead of consigning the stuff to landfill.

Footpath gardening, too, is something new, presently being done in the Randwick, Waverley, City of Sydney and Marrickville council areas.

The design and plant list for the revived footpath garden is being developed by Steve Batley from Sydney Organic Gardens, who provides garden design and education services to Randwick and other councils. The project is facilitated by Three-Council Ecofootprint Project Coordinator, Richard Wilson and by council’s sustainability education coordinator, Fiona Campbell. They were assisted this day by a Permaculture Sydney east member, Cecelia, and the author.

And next Thursday? We start on soil preparation, mulching and planting out… at the end of which the conversion of the agapanthus monoculture into a shiny and tasty new vegetable and herb garden will be complete.

Although the place is already in use, the time has come to populate it with new ideas and new community ventures and the placemaking process was ideal for this—explaining how that worked was my role. The purpose of placemaking is to engage people in generating ideas to create safe, attractive places where people like to gather. It is a participatory, inclusive process that is powered more by what citizens want than by the ideas and desires of professional designers.

The Permaculture Interpretive Garden complements the energy and water efficiency retrofitting of the community centre buildings and the associated community education program.

Fiona Campbell and Grahame Collier.of creative ideas. Grahame explained that the challenge was where those present want to take the facility now that the energy and water efficient retrofit and educational facilities are almost complete and the associated Permaculture Interpretive Garden close to completion too. A range of participatory processes was used to extract and define ideas and these were documented.

Led by Fiona Campbell, council’s sustainability educator, and sustainability education consultant, Grahame Collier, the session raised quite a lot of good ideas.

Ideas flowed:  a more welcoming entrance, drop-in centre function, video evenings and discussions, building on the social ambience during the Food Connect City Cousin weekly food box collection, the coming workshop in creating a food forest in the Permaculture Interpretive Garden, a parents’ and children’s’ group, restarting the children’s EcoHero club at the centre, activities in the garden, Sydney LETS market days, a sewers’ swap where people could exchange things sewers need such as buttons and fabric, a jelly—a co-working facility and more.

The Hub, with its wind turbine and solar photovoltaic array producing energy or the grid, has been in use since it was opened last year and is venue for council’s Living Smart, community leadership and Sustainable Gardening courses as well as for workshops and collaborative consumption-type swaps.

The construction crew. Lower left is City of Sydney Community Worker, Urban Renewal, Cara Levinson, and behind her is the author.

I met with the City of Sydney’s Green Square Community Worker, Urban Renewal—Cara Levinson—who assists this group and another, Friends of Victoria Park who work n the social side of things there. Cara informed me about what the group had in mind and I took these ideas back to the City of Sydney at Town Hall House. My role? To facilitate what it was that Green Square Growers wanted by clearing the bureaucratic bumps so that the Growers could get on with building their first project. My other role was to ensure that materials for their project were on hand, at the right place at the right time.

It was my brief in working with the City to take this pro-community approach, to ease things through the decision making structure, source funding, materials, skills and training so that people could get on with that it was they wanted to do. In this, I was encourage by what Ernesto Sirrolli, the social entrepreneur from the US-based Sirrolli Institute, said about the role of people working with local government—that they, too, could take an entrepreneurial approach and facilitate communities taking action, a role describes as that of ‘civic entrepreneur’.

Small project, big achievement

Green Square Grower’ first project was the construction and installation of a raised garden bed in the plaza outside of The Tote, an old building repurposed as a library and community centre. It was to be of the wicking bed type, a self-watering garden consisting of a garden built over a rock-filled reservoir which is periodically topped up with water.

Adding an educational diagram is always a useful passive educational device for public place installations.

A commendable criteria for the project was that it be made of recycled and reused materials to that it could serve as a model for others. A visit to Reverse Garbage sourced the timber for the raised planter, which was assembled off-site and brought on-site in prefabricated form on the morning of construction.

The location of the planter had been worked out over the preceding day and this was confirmed when the group of 12 or so turned up.

First, the planter was installed then a layer of sand was spread over the brick paving. A double thickness of builders’ plastic was laid so that its it lapped up the sides of the planter box for about 30cm or so. This contains water in the reservoir which is connected to the soil surface, added later, by a perforated tube of agricultural pipe used to top up the water supply in the reservoir. A cap is placed on this to prevent the tube filling with leaf litter. Next, recycled concrete aggregate was tipped carefully (so as to avoid puncturing the plastic liner) onto the planter base—this stabilises the reservoir which holds the water that irrigates the garden above. The aggregate was covered by a geotextile layer, the purpose of which is to prevent soil particles moving into the aggregate-filled reservoir and blocking it. On top of that compost was lid to round 30cm sep, close to the maximum depth through which moisture will wick by osmosis. Straw mulch was laid and seedlings planted through tho into the soil below.

The wicking bed built and now in use, you can only wonder what Green Square Growers next project will be. Whatever it is,Victoria Park will steadily go from empty to edible.

A level is placed across the planter to ensure it is installed straight.	Shovelling concrete rubble into the base of the planter, on top of the plastic liner.
Sabena's (left) daughter fills the rubble-filled reservoir.	The worm tube is installed. The tube was populated with worms and food scraps added. The worm waste will fertilise the garden.
One of the gardener-children places a banana skin into the worm tube.	Construction almost complete, there's only watering the seedlings planted into the mulched garden.

I’M FILLED WITH INSPIRATION as I write these words after spending two hours with about 60 others at Town Hall House in the presence of Ernesto Sirolli.

I first encountered Ernesto in the ’90s through his book, Ripples in the Zambesi, which I think I bought from Permaculture International Journal when it was based next to the Lismore City Farm.

Aid can be anything but

The title of Ernosto’s book comes from his time working for an Italian NGO in Africa. Without consulting the local people who the NGO was supposedly helping, they planted a tomato crop on the banks of the Zambesi River. But one morning they woke to a surprise…  all of those tomatoes they had planted… they were gone… as if some animal… some tomatovore… had eaten sneaked up and eaten them in the night. But where were the clues as to the fate of the missing tomatoes? There was nothing… all there was were ripples out there in the river as if there was something just below the surface… but surely that had nothing to do with the disappeared tomatoes?  Though… just what was that out there? What it was, was a wallow of hippos, their big eyes just breaking the surface… hippos no longer hungry but replete after a good and rather unanticipated feed of freshly-planted tomatoes. The NGO workers had failed to do the obvious—ask the locals about local conditions, and whether there was anything out there on the plains or in the Zambezi that would look kindly on a feed of fresh vege fruit.

As Ernesto tells the story, their misadventure with the tomato crop was the start of his seeing the whole aid enterprise as a bit of a misadventure. Disillusion quickly followed , disillusion with foreigners telling locals what they needed, what was good for them, not even asking local people if they wanted to receive aid.

Ernesto is a passionate man and he tells the story with a great deal of emotion. Listening, you come to understand how his experience in the aid industry was formative of his later work. Aid in general, he said, has been a disaster.

You don’t show up with a briefcase full of solutions when you do not know the problems

Those ripples in the Zambesi was what Ernesto started his Sydney Town Hall House presentation with and he expanded on the aid theme by warning against turning up in some lesser developed country and assuming you have the knowledge, the right even, to start to tell locals what they should do for their own good. Who do you think you are to do this, he asked.

Two things have to happen before you engage in aid work, said Ernesto. First, you have to be invited into the community. Second, you have to listen to people. This means disregarding any belief you entertain that you have the answers when you barely understand the problem. When people ask for your help, then you ask them how you can help. “You don’t show up with a briefcase full of solutions when you do not know the problems”.

But how do you get invited into communities in other countries? “You do something fantastic in your own neighbourhood”, he said. “You do something here in Sydney that people in other cities will call you and ask how you did that… then they will say ‘Please come and teach us’”.

As I sat there listening to Ernesto, that message about starting aid work at home, where you live, resonated with me because I had heard it before. That would have been around the time I had the good fortune to encounter Ernesto’s book on the shelves there in the Lismore office of Permaculture International Journal.

The person I heard it from was Badri Dahal, at the time the manager of the indigenous NGO, Institute for Sustainable Agriculture Nepal (INSAN). INSAN is one of those largely forgotten permaculture projects, you don’t hear much of it now, but it was pioneering and it had an impact of those of us who had the fortunate chance to meet Badri. What Badri said was similar to what Ernesto told the audience that day—start by helping yourself, in your own country, before dashing off imagining you can help people in less developed countries. It was a warning against allowing a very limited amount of knowledge imparted by a permaculture design or other course, especially if there is little practical work to follow it up, leading to the belief that it would be sufficient to teach people how to grow food or to do something else with their lives. It’s like the cliche says—a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

As for dashing off to help people in lesser developed countries, Ernesto put it this way: “If people don’t want to be helped you leave them alone. This should be the first principle of aid”.

Working in Australia

Ernesto is a middle aged man with thick, wavy hair and a strong Italian accent despite his years in Australia and, currently, of living in the US. Dressed in his suit and tie, he looks like someone who has just left a business meeting.

That might not be an erroneous assumption, for his work with the Sirolli Institute is training people to set up businesses, whether for-profit social businesses or not-for-profit social enterprise, as a means of making things happen.

He tells the audience the story of his enterprise facilitation work in Esperance, where he facilitated the setting up of small businesses when the town was headed full speed along the economic downhill run following government limitations on the tuna fishery that put people out of work. It was a cascading disaster, as he tells it. Catch limitations meant fewer fish which affected the fish processing plant which led to redundencies which flowed through to the other businesses in town and suddenly once-employed people found themselves in poverty. They couldn’t sell up and move to Perth because their properties lost value as the town’s economic prospects nosedived.

Council staff and other social gatekeepers explained to him that people in Esperance didn’t want to help themselves and, anyway, ” …no one wanted to do anything. The government employment service said I would make a fool of myself… people in Esperance didn’t have any ideas of heir own”, explained Ernesto. In the end, it was these gatekeepers who proved devoid of ideas and imagination when Ernesto facilitated new, small businesses among people who had lost their livelihoods.

Beginnings

For Ernesto, it started in 1975 when he picked up a book by an English economist. This book, he explained, chaged his life… it changed how he saw the world and how he acted in it. By the time he reached the last page and closed the book, his life was set on a new course, a course that he is still following. What book was this that could change lives so easiy? None other than EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

If evidence that Schumacher’s messages are as relevant today as they were when he wrote the book in the late 1960s, there is none better than it having been in print for all of those years from first publication. It affected many of us and gave us a new framework through which to act in the world, and it led to these setting up of the Intermediate Technology Development Group in the UK.

Following his disillusion with the aid industry and long before he landed in Western Australia, Ernesto had gone to South Africa to study and here he came under the influence of thinkers like Maslow, Rogers, Fromm and others who influenced Humanistic Psychology. Coming to Australia, he was supervised in his PhD, itelf influenced by Schumacher’s ideas, by the now-noted urban planning educator and author, Peter Newman. Newman has written extensively on planning and sustainability, including his recent book, Resilient Cities. Ernesto’s studies led him to the belief that people have a wish to improve themselves in some way, to be a better person. This, Ernesto says, is not culture-specific but is universal and is to do with self-actualisation.

Changing the world one passion at a time’

It is not ideas that change the world, according to Ernesto. It is passion. And you find this even in ghettoes, he says, citing the Esperance example for his notion of ‘changing the world one passion at a time’.

Those working in the social sector know of the perils of reliance on grants to keep their projects going and some, such as social entrepreneur, Nic Frances (who described the evolution of his thinking and his work in his book, The End of Charity), realised that the small business model, whether that was a for-profit business with social goals, what is known as a ‘social business’, or a not-for-profit social enterprise, offered a solution to getting off the grant applciation writing cycle.

In urban development, he says, he would like to see ‘urban hubs’, centres for enterprise facilitation in new developments where we can help each other find what we need. This would be a convivial intervention in the urban environment “where people get to know each other”.

This is Ernesto’s realisation too, and in presenting his ideas to the audience he said there are three things necessary to setting up and running a business, whether for-profit or a social enterprise:

• the product or service has to be ‘beautiful’
• marketing and sales have to be ‘beautiful’
• financial management has to be ‘beautiful’.

Business is team work

The challenge: an individual cannot do all of these things themselves. They might try, but unless their passion is in all of them, those lacking passion are likely to be only part-done. The implication of this is that small business is teamwork, it is a social activity. Look at the well known businesses that were garage start-ups and you find that two to four people were involved.

“Form the team”, Ernesto tells the audience. “Don’t force people to do what they dont like”. This suggests the wisdon of allowing specialisation. He suggests we can now find people with the needed skills online.

“Even the word ‘entrepreneur’ has been hijacked. It is not necessarily to do with business. What it really means is an entrepreneur is someone with initiative, someone who seeks opportunity”.

To help people make things happen and to fulfill his proposal that “the more of us that create the future the better we all are”, Ernesto offers the Enterprise Facilitation model of training. In urban development, he says, he would like to see ‘urban hubs’, centres for enterprise facilitation in new developments where we can help each other find what we need”. This would be a convivial intervention in the urban environment “where people get to know each other”.

Addressing the question about urban development of a council staffer in the audience, Ernesto said he ” …despairs of rules set up never to be changed… planners are the people who stop things happening… rules are made to be changed… we need to facilitate, not regulate… use your power in your work to do this”.

Reclaim the economy

The economy and the language of economics has been hijacked and we need to democratise these things. according to Ernesto.

“Even the word ‘entrepreneur’ has been hijacked. It is not necessarily to do with business. What it really means is an entrepreneur is someone with initiative, someone who seeks opportunity“. The word’s association with the excesses of the 1980s and the business eladers o that time has given it a negative meaning.

“Entrepreneurs are the pioneers, the explorers, the adventurers…

Ernesto says it is necessary to understand the difference between entrepreneurship and management because the two groups see the world differently and act differently in it.

“Entrepreneurs are the pioneers, the explorers, the adventurers. Managers are the settlers who come with their seeds and herds”.

In referring to the role of entrepreneurs, Ernesto’s  closing remarks were motivating: “Break the monopolies… find suport… and storm the citadel”.

From public servant to civic entrepreneur

I asked Ernesto a question during the time set aside for that after his talk. It was this: How can we working in local government adopt roles as ‘civic entrepreneurs‘, which is like a social entrepreneur role within councils?

What he said was that we can become facilitators of what communities need and in that way make things happen.

It reminded me of something I had thought about some time ago—the difference, on being asked whether some idea should go ahead, between asking ‘why?’ and asking ‘why not?’. One response seeks justification while the other seeks ways to make it real.

I thought Ernesto’s talk would be inspiring and that is exactly how it turned out. Now it’s for us to decide whether we’re social entrepreneurs or managers, for there’s a dire need for people who are good at either. Entrepreneurs and managers are a natural team and we need to realise which we are at so that all can work for the common good.