Learning to Lead Together

An Ecological and Community Approach

Jane Riddiford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000319675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Never before has there been such strong recognition of the importance of community-based green spaces to local communities and urban redevelopment. This book is an autoethnographic account of the challenges and breakthroughs of learning to lead together. The interwoven stories provide first-hand, evocative examples of how an ecological and community approach to organisational development and urban regeneration helped shift the business as usual paradigm. It will help you identify and step beyond individualistic and 'heroic' notions of leadership, and will inspire you to find your own way of embracing natural and shared authority.

The book focuses on the experiences of developing an environmental education charity in London; Global Generation. It shows how action research, nature practice and storytelling has successfully grown shared purpose, trust and collaboration, both within Global Generation and in the wider community.

The style and structure of the book reflects the participatory approach that it presents. The author, Jane Riddiford, deliberately challenges the norms of authorship, which is shaped by the dominant Western narrative – objective, authorless and 'othered'. This book goes beyond this narrow framework, combining different styles of writing, including traditional and autobiographical storytelling, diary entries and co-writing. Along with practice accounts of what happened, challenges raised and lessons learned, each chapter will also include other people's descriptions of their experience of being involved in the process.

1 AN INNER-CITY FOREST

Amid the complexity and immobility of the rocks, there rise suddenly toward me “gusts of being”, sudden and brief fits of awareness of the laborious unification of things, and it is no longer myself thinking, but the Earth acting.

Teilhard de Chardinⁱ

Donald Worster suggests that “mythologies create symbols and dreams for what to live by.”ⁱⁱ In this sense, the stories in this chapter are personal mythologies. They contain formative events within my cultural background, which have shaped what I bring to community-based regeneration in multi-cultural contexts. Whilst I haven’t always had the words for it, finding ways to address the long shadow of our separation from the land has been a motivation that has run through all of my working life. Māori are the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand and Pākehā refers to non-Māori New Zealanders, in my case, of English descent. I describe experiences which helped me as a Pākehā find a different relationship to the land than many of my New Zealand forebears had. I reflect on my experiences as a Pākehā from a pioneering farming family and my journey into aspects of Māori philosophy. This provides a personal lens for exploring how colonialism has affected me; a descendant of colonisers in my leadership role with Global Generation in the middle of London. To give you, the reader, an understanding of this lens, I share some background about my family and the form of colonialism and associated deforestation of land that occurred in New Zealand within the last 200 years. Writing in the style of creative non-fiction, with stories drawn from family history, has been a way of understanding mistakes of the past and also finding new possibilities for the future. In this sense, these stories offer possibilities for resolving inherited fault lines; whatever our cultural background might be.

The ghosts of the forest giants

My childhood was coloured by the bush, the rivers, and the sea. A partly volcanic land, baked by a South Pacific sun, is a land of intense contrasts. Deep blue sky that goes on for miles framed by sharp silhouettes of rising and falling hills making shapes and telling stories in the distance. Stories that would take me many years to understand. One of my earliest memories is looking up at a heavy farm horse who towered above me and above him was a small bush-clad mountain called Titoke. His name was Roanie, such was the colour of him. I must have been about 4 or 5 years old. As often happened when we were with the horses, I waited until I felt my mother’s arms around me, she picked me up and tucked me into the curve at the back of the saddle behind my sister, Liz. Just like we were in the photograph below, I held on tightly and we headed off. My other siblings and various cousins were doubled up on horses on either side of us; Starlight, Bill, and Bluey were their names. The smell of my sister’s shirt pressed against my face, the sound of hooves on the gravel was both exciting and comforting. Next came the waters of the Waimahora stream splashing. We cantered up the steep bank on the other side and I looked out and saw the sheep and the black cattle grazing. Then I saw something that haunts me to this day. All around, dotted through the landscape, were the black and charred forest giants: rata, rimu, and totara. These were the ghostly remains of the native forest that had been burned in the interests of laying down pasture for farming. We made our way through the river flats and up the other side of the valley. Arriving at a rickety old fence of totara posts with barbed wire in between, we tied up the horses and scrambled over. From an early age, I learned to go off the path, climbing to the wilder lands beyond the fencesⁱⁱⁱ. In the bush, it felt good and I liked to get lost there. The native grasses underfoot were soft and smelt sweet, fantails flew around our heads and the light trickled through the canopy of ferns.

Jane aged 4 and sister Liz on Roanie at Rangitoto farm, at the head of the Waimahora valley in the King Country, New Zealand 1967.

I always looked up to my sister, Liz; she knew all the names of the native trees. By the time I reached secondary school, she had gone on to university, but her name still hung in the memories of my teachers. I never thought I would be as bright as her, as pretty as her or as sassy as her. She was at law school, had a heavy truck drivers licence and drove a big red motorbike. School for me was pretty much about looking out the window. I did make it to university, but only lasted a year before I was called to that place beyond the fences. I dropped out, joined a theatre group that worked outdoors on stilts and then left New Zealand in the guise of being a groom for racehorses. Travelling to Australia, I went for free with Flying Tigers, a stock delivery airline.

This search took me to England. In time, the pull towards a deeper sense of meaning and connection led me into an encounter with a spiritual mentor which was to unfold and eventually unravel. It is a tale of wonder and promise. It is also a tale of misplaced heroics and abusive power dynamics that I shall return to later. Within that story and in my view, within many current stories about leadership gone awry, lies a deeper question posed by Australian eco-philosopher, Freya Mathews. How do we treat the ground beneath our feet? What is the attitude of modernity to the ground on which we walk and live?^iv Mathews goes on to describe how modern civilisations have treated land as a commodity to own, fence, and farm. The communities of plants, mycelium, and bacteria that breathe within land are reduced to a neutral substrate on which to manufacture and impose our own designs. Sub-divisions into blocks of separate parts have become the dominant refrain of an increasingly bland and lifeless landscape. A controlling picture of modernity that also shows up in the regeneration of our cities.

The return of the forest giants

I felt called to return to New Zealand; at the time, I didn’t know the real reason why. Years later, I would frame this move as a return to the land, an opportunity to find some kind of resolve for the fractures I experienced within the land. I stayed with my sister, Liz, and on the first day, she gave me a brass key. “Don’t lose it”, she said. Each day, I would feel in my pocket and handle its weightiness. One day returning to the house early when no one was home, I felt for the key and it was gone. Liz’s words returned to me, “Don’t lose it.” Panic filled my mind. I wanted to get away from the house and headed off on my small red scooter. Making my way along the edge of the motorway, I discovered a little clutch of houses nestled into the hillside. One of them took my attention. It was made of corrugated iron and outside was a for-sale sign. Over the coming weeks, I kept returning to look at the house and eventually plucked up courage to knock on the silver painted front door. It was opened by two smiling women who invited me in. Bridget and Sally had built the house, and planted a thriving garden full of native trees, including rata, rimu, and totara. That house became my home and it was a special place to be. The only problem was the noise of the motorway. Sometimes, I would close my eyes and try and pretend it was the sea. At other times, I would look across the Newton Gully where the motorway snaked through, and imagine what it would be like if the clay bank that had been stripped bare by the development of the motorway was once again covered by the mantle of dark green bush. Over the coming months, ideas turned into actions. The bank was part of the grounds of Newton Central School. My neighbour was a school governor and she introduced me to the head teacher, Tim Heath. He too had been dreaming about a return of the native forest to the denuded bank beside the motorway. Very quickly, Tim agreed for me and a friend Maurice Puckett to lead a significant re-vegetation project involving all of the children in the school and members of the local community.

Two Māori tribes, Ngāti Whātua and Tainui, had historical connection to the land this part of Auckland was built on. It was an honour and a good omen that they agreed to come together to bless the land as a ceremonial start to what became known as the Inner-City Forest^v. From that day, it became an enchanted forest; a place where different people came together with each other and the natural world. Children were allowed out of their classrooms and through growing the forest, they learned to follow the rhythms and patterns of nature. They collected seeds from a nearby remnant old growth forest and grew them around the school swimming pool which became a community plant nursery. Together, we covered the bank in logs and branches and began a gentle and effective process of restoring the soil. We planted manuka as a nurse crop and over time, we created the conditions for the forest to grow.

One of the unexpected benefits of establishing the forest in this way was that a community of people connected to the forest began to grow. One of these was a retired farmer called Buckley Fyers. In his later life, he developed a passion for weaving kete; traditional baskets made of harakeke (flax). At the time, this was an unusual thing for a Pākehā man to do; Māori custom meant that the sacred art of weaving was usually done by the women. Buckley gained the trust of well-known weavers from all over Aoteoroa, New Zealand, and in return he curated a collection of harakeke with a detailed description of what kind of weaving each variety was suitable for. He donated 24 varieties to the Inner-City Forest, and they are growing there to this day.

We developed a long term management plan for the Inner City Forest. This was created as a future resource for children of the school and their children’s children. The image on the next page shows one of the ways our plans were brought to life by children’s artwork.

Cover of the Inner City Forest Management Plan.

Eventually I returned to live in London and there was a gap of ten years before I would visit Auckland again. When I returned, I was staying with my younger sister Lucy and I got up early to make a pilgrimage to the forest. I made my way through the knot of motorways which is an unfortunate feature of that city. Wondering what I would find, I felt a knot in my stomach. Then suddenly I heard the song of a tui and on a branch nearby a fantail flew. Ahead I could see, poking through the newly formed canopy, those forest giants: rata, rimu, and totara. Walking along the winding pathways; it felt good, it smelt good and I knew the forest was being cared for. The Inner-City Forest is now an important feature in the life of the school. It is also now protected by the New Zealand department of Conservation. I maintain that the opportunity it gave me to walk in the ways of the forest is the foundation for the community-building work I have done with Global Generation in the middle of London. As I mentioned previously, it is a practice that I often describe as drawing life out from beneath the concrete, of both land and people.

Understanding the past

When speaking about the development of Global Generation’s work, I often describe how you can’t grow a forest without roots. This means that the most important part of our work is the least visible aspect, the part that lies beneath the soil. It is not the technical steps of designing workshops and growing vegetables, it is knowing ourselves and what we each bring to the work that determines how the work will flourish. The question of what we bring to our work opens bigger questions of identity; who am I and where do I come from. Philosopher, Daniel Taylor, describes how the past is “sedimented” in the present and elaborates that we are “doomed to misidentify ourselves, as long as we can’t do justice to where we come from.”^vi In 2008 and 2009, Judi Marshall, Gill Coleman, and Peter Reason were my tutors on an action-research-based MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice at Bath University. In their book, Leadership for Sustainability, they describe how if we are to create sufficiently robust change in the world, we must question the ground we stand on. This, they say, will help us find the agency, awareness, resources, and approach to take appropriate action.^vii This echoes the value New Zealand Māori place on knowing our past. Māori Scholar, Ranginui Walker, describes the importance for Māori of finding natural authority through knowing our Tūrangawaewae, which he explains is “the standing and identity of a people.”^viii

I have not always fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• The story of how this book was written
• 1 An inner-city forest
• 2 From rooftops to developer’s land
• 3 Leading as a way of being
• 4 I, we, and the planet
• 5 A cosmic story
• 6 Encounters with the high priests
• 7 Listening to land
• 8 Growing a paper garden
• 9 In the jaws of the corporate dragon
• 10 From the heart of an oak forest
• Appendix 1: Opportunities for your own inquiry
• Index