This page shares my goals on personal, professional, project and political levels. Articulating clear goals is the first stage in the GaSADI design process.
Personal Goals
To have anchored nourishing self-care habits- To be in a joyful, nourishing, long-lasting relationship
- To be a competent and skilled kickboxer
- To participate in a 10k race
- To have finished by left arm sleeve of tattoos & have work done on my legs
- To have mastered basic meditation to support my self
- To have optimum nutrition and a diverse, plant-based diet
- To continue to invest energy into friendships & relationships with family
- To have invested in my spiritual development and feel a continuing deep relationship with the land
- To have a greater connection to the hardcore scene
- To have regenerative emotional, mental and physical energy and holistic resilience
To have anchored nourishing self-care habitsProfessional Goals
Overarching goals
To have a thriving livelihood:
- Designing & managing innovative, impactful agroecological projects
- Growing food and plants to share and sell that can restore my local landbase & feed my community
- Creating radical opportunities for learning
- Undertaking research that improves people’s lives and moves us towards an anarchist agroecology
As well as:
- To have a well-visited website Empty Cages Design that generates abundant opportunities and connections
- To develop my writing abilities and consistently produce high-quality writing
- To have written my book on anarchist agroecology and secured a publisher
- To develop as a Diploma Tutor and Gaia U Advisor
Learning pathway
Courses/Qualifications
- To complete the Diploma in Arboriculture
- To graduate from my MSc with Gaia University
- To have accessed grant funding & begun the Advanced Diploma in Horticulture (Crops) with ACS Education
- To have completed the Paulo Freire Foundation Programme
- To have started (and ideally graduated) with a Diploma in Education and Training
Specific Skillflexes
- To have a strong understanding of the scientific principles, applied practices and social movement interactions underpinning agroecology and know how to contribute to the field
- To have completed a training in Keyline design and applied it in a consultancy project
- To be able to utilise Google SketchUp for land based design consultancy projects
- To be able to speak intermediate Spanish
- To have a strong grasp of marketing and implemented it to the benefit of all my projects
- To develop my social media knowledge and skill flexes
- To have developed my film editing & photography skills
- To have developed my graphic design and website design skills
- To be able to utilise MapInfo or similar GIS system for use in design consultancy work
- To undertake the soil food web distance learning course
- To develop my medicine making skill flexes
- To increase my plant identification and formal botany skills
- To improve my landscape reading skills
- To know how to breed plants
- To know how to save seed successfully at a commercial scale
- To undertake more advanced forms of plant propagation
- To know how to grow mushrooms
- To know how to optimise mycorrizhae in systems
- To gain skills in nature connection guiding/mentoring
- To develop my research skills
- To develop my critical thinking skills
Project Goals
Goals for my Capstone Year Projects
Anarchist Agroecology Book
A book writing project to collate a volume of articles, case studies, pictures and resources from the frontlines of building a new food system while resisting the state, capitalism and multiple forms of oppression.
My goal is to have a publishable body of work prepared by the end of 2016. Before then I would like to build an ‘author platform’, engage in militant research, connect with potential collaborators and then submit a proposal to either AK Press or PM Press (two radical publishers that I highly respect).
Empty Cages Design
I have a number of goals regarding my website ‘Empty Cages Design’ these include:
- Increasing the number of hits I recieve
- Better disseminating my work, especially with social media
- Undertaking more creative projects, such as a photography project documenting ‘liberating landscapes’ (restored systems without exploited animals)
My meta goal is to become a worldwide point of reference for people interested in anarchism, agroecology, permaculture design and plant based systems.
Collective Projects
Please note to make this exercise useful to myself I have only included goals relating to my own personal interaction with these projects, as I feel very aware and conscious of each project’s broader aims and goals.
To gain an understanding of these projects, please find their descriptions on my Output 5 page here.
Feed Avalon
- To increase the income-earning potential for all members of the cooperative, through initiating further projects and generating other opportunities
- To successfully access a large amount of funding for the Perennial Futures Project, that aims to increase the amount of perennial-based food production and re-collectivise local land ownership through a community land trust.
- To attract more consultancy work, especially in our catchment area
- To undertake more radical, grassroots organising work
- To design more high-quality, radical learning opportunities
- To design and establish the Feed Avalon nursery at Brook End
- To develop Brook End as a permaculture and agroecology demonstration centre, and to achieve stock-free certification status
Empty Cages Collective
See our goals here.
Free to Fight
- To raise the profile of the BM3 case and increase the amount of support defendants are receiving
- To create a collaborative publication called ‘In the eye of the storm: reflections on the repression of the UK animal liberation movement’
Reclaim the Fields
- Work with others to organise an action camp in the UK summer 2015
- Design new Reclaim the Fields international website
- Organise solidarity & support for RTF related projects in the UK, such as Yorkley Court Community Farm
- To support the organising of the UK Food Sovereignty Gathering in October 2015
Vegan Organic Network
- To contribute regular articles to Growing Green International magazine
- To open Brook End for a VON site visit
- To establish a South West Network for Vegan Organic Growing & Farming
Peer & Political Goals
My goals as an anarchist and an organiser are to strategically focus on:
- Dismantling and replacing industrial and animal agriculture with systems that are life-sustaining and liberatory
- Building agroecology and food autonomy/food sovereignty
- Increasing resilience to repression in individuals, groups and movements
- Resisting the prison industrial complex and working for prison abolition
I have already undertaken large amounts of self-education in these areas. My learning goals therefore are to focus on a number of thematic areas during the remainder of my Masters. These include:
- How to better organise support campaigns and do solidarity work with defendants experiencing repression
- Think more critically about prison abolition and all of the necessities of building a ‘prison free world’ e.g. Transformative justice
- Understand the scale and role of the prison industrial complex in the UK
- Reflect more critically on my roles as an organiser and their impact
- Developing my historical understanding of social change, learning more about histories of resistance around the world including in the Spanish State, South & Central America and other areas of the Global South
- The role of education and more about critical pedagogies
History of the state- History of agriculture and the social, political and economic factors that contribute to its change
- History of anarchism and a greater understanding of the diversity of worldviews amongst anarchists
- How people have collectively managed food production historically
- Greater understanding of class in the UK, currently & historically
- Exploring some of the responses to the questions generated in my output 4 around race, species, gender and class in relationship to food system change (http://icaafs.earth/view/view.php?id=7393)
History of the stateSpecific skill flexes I want to develop are:
- How to support groups to be more leaderful
- Communication skills
- Developing as a facilitator especially around power and privilege/patrix busting in groups
- Organising events/projects/encounters that are more accessible/inclusive/anti-oppresive and really exploring this on a deeper level
- Having more effective meetings
- Learning about new frameworks such as sociocracy, holocracy and so forth
- Radical honesty
- Tracking impact and metrics for reflection and evaluation in social struggle