We’ll have a stall at The Sustainable BNE Festival in Brisbane’s Roma Street Parklands on Sunday 24th May 2026. If you’re local, please come and say hello. We (Shady Lanes, ACF Community Brisbane Northside, Regen Brisbane, and others in our network) will be in the Healthy Cities Zone.
We’re working on some new posters. What do you think of this?
(updated to version 2)
Readers of my Essential Skills in a Networked World book may recognise some of the key practices used to create this poster: drawing on media assets we’ve built up over time, recombining them and leveraging to create something new. The poster creates another signpost leading people back to these original posts.
Connecting local action to wider changes is one of our challenges. We need local, visible action but risk it being dismissed as small and irrelevant. We need the wider thinking but risk it being more talk with no way of turning big ideas into reality.
It’s the connections - between people, places, and issues - that make the difference.
The locations in the photos above are connected. The water from my verge garden runs down the hill to the rain garden, under the road into the small creek, then into the larger creek where the platypus live. This is where we have a new bushcare group, supported by ACF Community Brisbane Northside, connecting with the catchment groups and the Council’s catchment officers. It’s all public land. The connections between community (residents and community groups) and Council are positive and constructive.
These are loose networks in action: working collaboratively in the messy community space to do more together than any of us could do alone.
(If you’re not in Brisbane, check your local council website for their bushcare and other volunteer information. Check for council verge garden policies in Australia here.)
This week Ed Morrison shared a post on his Notes from the Swampy Lowlands Substack.
This is the approach needed in the climate and sustainability space. Many localised, collaborative, connected responses that also build that civic layer with countless ways for everyday people (i.e. all of us in our glorious diversity) to participate and contribute.
Our verges are where we start, with a shared space and a common purpose, to connect with people who aren’t necessarily like ourselves.
This approach and the diversity of our evolving networks will determine the level of innovation and opportunities that emerge from our small, tangible, verge garden projects. It doesn’t happen by magic, it takes practice and skills that we can learn and share.
I hope to see some of you on the 24th May at the Sustainable BNE Festival, 31st May at this treeplanting event, or other events coming up.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.