Ashley Green-Thompson runs an organisation that supports social justice action.
Image: Supplied
I’M writing this from Oxford in the UK where I am a delegate at the Skoll World Forum, a space for networking and connecting. I discovered the most delicious Columbian coffee in my local coffee shop here called the Learning Bean, and I’ve been starting each day with a large flat white. On Tuesday, the price went up quite dramatically, and I blamed capitalism.
My learned barista friend informed me of the annual price increase, declared that there is nothing wrong with our economic system, and blamed the farmers. Personally I would never blame the farmers, but this did get me thinking.
There isn’t a single route to get to a destination. And we don’t always have to agree on what the problem is.
The 1,500 delegates at this Forum are quite remarkable in their commitment to making change in their parts of the world. They speak with incredible passion about their developmental work, and are quite zealous in their belief that they will make a difference.
I shared an Oxford dinner at Trinity College with someone whose organisation provides loans of as little as $2,000 to small scale farmers who have no collateral to offer. An old couple have been part of an organisation that looks for transport solutions to get drugs and samples to remote areas in the world. I had drinks with an old Canadian friend who fundraises for innovative ways of helping farmers increase livelihoods in Uganda. And what about the Postcode Foundation that gets people to give to development work by using local, community-based involvement – they raise billions by get people to play the lottery, but in a way that is very different to our experience in South Africa.
There are thousands of such efforts. People are creative, and it proves to me that there are more of us who are concerned about each other’s wellbeing than not. This Forum is celebrating that, and it is important.
There are some initiatives that go a bit beyond the localised development initiative. I am looking forward to connecting with a group that gets their 200 civil society member organisations to lobby the Brazilian government for more progressive policy making. I don’t know how they agree across divergent political views, but I suspect we will have a lot to learn from their experience. And we spent time going to some of the root causes of the mess our world is in. The Uncomfortable Oxford Tour shows you more that the romance of the old Colleges and Harry Potter’s dining hall at Christchurch College, and exposes the human cost that Britain’s colonising exacted from us. A friend who works for an institution hosted by the Rhodes Trust that looks after the old colonial’s legacy was proud of their efforts to decolonise the space. They’ve just unveiled a plaque on the side of the building in lXAM, a South African language that I must learn more about and how to spell it. It says:
‘REMEMBERING AND HONOURING IN OUR WORK THOSE WHO SUFFERED AND LABOURED TO GENERATE THIS WEALTH’
We do what we must, where we can, with whatever we have at our disposal. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is. These enthusiastic efforts of people from around the world should inspire us to do our bit, and they must also make us critical about the way the world works and drive us to change it at a fundamental level.