Today would have been my Dad’s 88th birthday (two fat ladies – 88!). He was 2 years old when WW2 started. When I was 2 (and three quarters) it was his 30th birthday and I recently found a recording of him and me “talking” on that day. If I can find it again easily (it’s digitised but not indexed!) I’ll post it. In it, he’s doing the most ridiculous (to me) BBC accent. That wasn’t how he spoke usually, except sometimes on the phone or when he knew he was being recorded. He told me once that he had auditioned to be a newsreader, but that John Edmunds had got the job. After he died, my mother told me that when she met him, he wanted three things – to have children, to play in a band and to programme computers. He did all three very well.
As we get settled into doing Living Culture Coffee Mornings regularly, I’m starting to think about ways that we can do things together that represent some sort of “capture” of the thinking and interactions between people in the room. I wrote (eighteen months ago?!?) about the kinds of problems I’ve encountered before with this and how the ‘metalabel’ platform might help. And I’m starting to see how doing that might also be a way into changing the relationship between such groups and the premises that they meet in.
One of the problems in that kind of relationship is that the rental model is dominant. If you have a space (especially in a big city like London) you’re “obliged” to make money out of people who book it for their own use. In the case of businesses who want to hire a meeting room or conference facilty, then that’s just an acceptable cost of doing business that you can either cover yourself or else you pass on to the people who come to your event. But if you have a space that you want to be available to a wide range of people and groups to do interesting and socially useful things, neither the organisers nor the participants necessarily have a great deal of cash to cover this and they aren’t usually thinking about how to generate revenue to pay for it because that’s just not the priority for these creative sorts of activities.
At early prototypes of Tuttle our hosts were (initially) happy with how much coffee we were buying and grateful for any extra that we could raise by passing the hat. But the more successful and popular we became, the more that the space owners saw an imbalance between what we werer getting from being there and what they were seeing in the cash register.
At C4CC we kind of got around that by having a long(er)-term relationship with the University and the Colleges but in the end it came to the same point from the hirer’s point of view – money goes in, but doesn’t really come out. Now in the case of a University, you’d hope that they might be used to the idea of investing in order to create value in the wider economy, but under the pressures of the London property market, the obsession with opportunity costs makes such relationships much more transactional and therefore vulnerable.
During my time at Guildford URC, we got around this by centralising all bookings in one person (fortunately not me!), supported by the trustees where necessary and having a flexible mix of standard rates and pay-what-you-can (even if that’s £0.00) while (mostly) resisting the temptation to take big sums from people who weren’t otherwise particularly aligned with the mission.
So now we’re doing coffee mornings monthly (and, I keep teasing, possibly weekly) and wondering whether there’s an opportunity to do things differently. Something to fill the gap between “you’ve got to pay for everything” (which excludes people without a business model) and “it’s all free!” (which risks being over-run with people who do have a business model, and you’re just reducing their costs) If you have a space that’s supposed to be about learning and spiritual growth and you have an event programme that reflects that, might there be a way to satisfy at least some of the need for rent *and* help build community between all of your “hirers” by also making and selling things for the mutual benefit of both the groups who make them and the space that hosts them?
See we really need better words than “hirers” and “space owners” – for this kind of thing the relationship needs to be about something other than the economic roles we’re playing.
If you’re interested in how this might work, then come along on Friday.
Oh the flags? I think the flags are just another instance of political trolling. Why are they doing it? I don’t think that the people putting up flags are reliable witnesses when it comes to asking what their motivations are. I think they believe what they’re saying, but the underlying motivation that gets erased is “to make snowflakes like you melt” – it’s the reaction to the action that feeds the whole thing. And I do think there are people who are coming at this as a way of stirring dissent. We encourage one group to do something that will really trigger another group. But I don’t think that the people putting up the flags and shouting about how it’s just patriotism are the ones that are benefiting most from all of us shouting at each other.
Now that most of our social media platforms are essentially corporatised 4chan we have to be even more vigilant about not feeding the trolls.
Perfect Path 