Category: community

A walk through Gaza: One meal, one glass of water, one human story

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Guest blog by Farah Hassan

I invite you to spend one hour with me in your imagination. Walk beside me through the streets of Gaza. Feel the heat of the day, hear the voices of people around you, and see the small details of life that often disappear behind the headlines.

My name is Farah Hassan, and this is not just a story about a place. It is a story about people — about families who wake up every morning trying to find the things that every human being deserves: food, water, safety, and dignity.

If you walked with me today, our first question would not be where we want to go, but where we can find what we need.

Buying food in Gaza is no longer a simple daily task. It has become a journey filled with waiting, searching, and difficult choices.

Let me take you with me on my last trip to buy food.

The road to the shop was long. As we walked, we could see people carrying bags, children moving through the streets, and families searching for basic supplies. Everyone seemed to be carrying a story of their own.

The sun was strong, and the heat followed us along the road. When we reached the shop, it was crowded. People were standing close together, asking about prices and looking for whatever was available.

Inside the shop, the air was warm and the place was filled with voices. A mother was trying to choose food for her children. An elderly man was counting the money in his hand before buying what he could afford. A shopkeeper was answering questions about prices and explaining what was available.

Everyone was making careful decisions. Nobody was buying extra things. People were choosing only what they needed because every amount of money mattered.

I went to buy simple ingredients for a meal for my family. I bought rice and a chicken breast, but even these basic items cost around $32. That didn’t include the other ingredients we needed, like spices and the wood we use for cooking.

Not everyone in Gaza can afford to buy everything they need. Prices are very high, and many families have to choose between necessities because their money is not enough to cover everything.

When I carried these items home, I thought about how a simple meal had become a difficult task. In the past, buying rice and chicken was something ordinary. Today, every ingredient has to be carefully considered, and every dollar counts.

At home, I started preparing the meal using the resources available to us. Cooking is no longer just about making food; it has become another challenge.

Because fuel for cooking is not always available, lighting a fire can take a long time. While I was trying to cook, the fire kept going out because there was not enough wood. Smoke filled the room, and I sat there trying again and again while my eyes were streaming from the smoke. But I continued because preparing a meal for my family was what I had to do.

That moment made me realize how much life has changed. Things that were once simple — buying food, lighting a fire, and preparing a meal — have become struggles that require patience and strength.

The smell of the rice and chicken filled the room, but behind this simple meal was a story of searching, waiting, and trying to survive.

After preparing the meal, it was just my husband and me sitting together. We sat in our small space at home, sharing the food we had worked hard to prepare.

The meal was simple — rice and chicken — but to us it was much more than just food. It was a moment of peace in the middle of a difficult life. We sat together, talking about our day, the challenges we faced, and hoping for better days ahead.

We did not talk only about the difficulties. We also tried to find moments of comfort, to laugh a little, and to remind each other that we were still together despite everything happening around us.

Looking at that simple meal, I thought about how things that once seemed ordinary had become precious. A meal with my husband, sitting together for a short time, and sharing what we had became a memory worth holding on to.

A meal that might seem ordinary to someone else carries a much deeper meaning for us. It represents effort, patience, and the hope that tomorrow will be better.

Water is another part of our daily reality. If you walked with me through Gaza, you would see people waiting for water, carrying containers, and trying to secure clean water for their families. Something as simple as a glass of water has become something people deeply appreciate.

But if you spent this hour with me, you would also see something else.

You would see kindness.

You would see neighbors sharing what they have. You would see families supporting each other. You would see people refusing to lose their humanity despite everything they have experienced.

And on Fridays, you would witness another powerful scene.

Many mosques in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, but people still gather to pray. They stand in the streets and among the rubble, beneath the open sky, and perform the Friday prayer.

The broken stones around them tell a story of loss, but their prayers tell a story of hope. The buildings may fall, but the faith and spirit of people remain.

Gaza is not only a story of destruction. It is a story of people who continue to live, love, help each other, and dream.

I wanted you to spend this hour with me because numbers and headlines cannot tell the whole story. Behind every meal, every drop of water, every step to a shop, and every prayer among the ruins, there is a human being with feelings, memories, and hope.

This is Gaza. This is my story. And this is the story of many people who are still holding on to life.

Farah Hassan writes professionally as Farah Rebhy, and she’s on Instagram. If you enjoyed this post, please contribute to her fundraiser – paid work is scarce in Gaza’s shattered economy and she will be very grateful!

people with a tray of seedlings

Growing food in Gaza: aid as resistance

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It was a sobering moment when in the summer of 2025, famine was declared in parts of Gaza. This is a fertile region with a strong agricultural heritage, once a major exporter of oranges and olives, with a strong horticulture sector, extensive glasshouses and arable lands.

But the recent war has put an end to that. Aerial photography shows how farming has been devastated. The UN reported in October 2025 that only 4% of farmland was in good condition and accessible, and in some areas, over half the population depends on humanitarian aid for food.

Food imports to Gaza meanwhile are restricted. Food crosses the border only in limited amounts, meaning that prices are very high, and what is allowed through does not make for a balanced diet. Protein and fresh produce are scarce, with disproportionate quantities of luxury items like sweets and biscuits.

The challenge of food distribution

Against this very challenging backdrop, two projects who are doing what they can to maintain Gaza’s food system recently took part in an online workshop for Welsh food activists, and you can watch it here.

Hala Sabbah, who is based in London, is one of the three Palestinian founders of the Sameer Project, a mutual aid initiative which for two years has been collecting donations and sending them to Gaza. Employing a team who work on the ground and know the area well, they use the funds to buy goods commercially within the Strip and make them available to the people most in need: water, food, tents, medical supplies and much else.

Their food work centres on a kitchen in Gaza City, which can supply 3000 meals a day and makes a point of cooking food that people will enjoy, bringing dignity and good nutrition to people on the edge of survival.

But their vision goes further than putting food on tables and responding to crisis. They hold a vision of a sustainable and thriving society in Gaza, and that is the basis of their partnership with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, APN. The goal is not just food security – having enough of the right sort of food, at affordable prices – but food sovereignty, a whole system of production and distribution that serves communities and is chosen by them.

Growing food under occupation

APN’s Lisa Shahin, who is based in Jordan, explains how they started with a group of agricultural engineers in 2000 during the second Intifada. A voluntary organisation supported by donations from around the world, APN has a long history of championing farmers in Palestine, standing for them through successive crises and putting them at the heart of the food system.

Their work is very varied. They have built water tanks and greenhouses and they have supplied inputs from fishing nets and sheep, to seeds, tree seedlings and beehives. They have responded to the destruction of olive groves with the slogan “uproot one, plant ten” all in the name of supporting Palestinians to maintain their farming heritage and build a self-reliant nation.

In 2024 their campaign Revive Gaza’s Farmland began, with the aim of boosting food production “from the besieged farmer to the besieged family.” This has included support for horticultural production, the restoration of wells, and the distribution of beehives and fruit trees. They have also started wheat growing and produced training materials on seed saving.

Given the challenges of joining up the components of a food system, which often have different priorities, it was particularly interesting to hear Hala and Lisa talk about their collaboration, which works as well as it does because of their shared values.

“We both are doing aid as resistance, we both do our work with the vision of the liberation of Palestine and we both don’t take money from governments,” says Hala, explaining how they first talked to APN about rebuilding the food system in Gaza after the February 2025 ceasefire. They were unable to realise this ambition because of the return of hostilities, but they continued to do small projects together when they could.

“What’s special about APN is that they’ve had this relationship for decades. It’s not like they just started working in Gaza during the genocide, they have been doing this work for a very long time, so they understand the context, they have a team there,” says Hala.

Lisa in turn values the importance of working directly and creatively with communities, bypassing the restrictions that aid agencies face.

“Throughout the past two years, not a single seed has entered into Gaza, not a single water pipe has entered,” she says. “Initiatives like the Sameer Project who are working directly with the communities, procuring locally from the inside, finding a way around all the obstacles, this is what matters. Sameer are very diverse and they are always responding to an actual need on the ground.”

The two organisations are determined to continue their work in the face of difficulties, inspired by a vision of a free Palestine. Sameer for instance has seen donations drop since last year’s ceasefire, and needs to raise more funding so it can run its kitchen at full capacity. Lisa quotes the FAO estimate of at least 6000 dunams (600 ha) of cultivatable land in Gaza and thinks they could produce 30 million kg of fresh produce in a year, making a significant contribution to nutrition.

There are parallels as well as big differences between Wales and Gaza. Community is community, and there are many people here who are feeding people who are hungry, growing more food in ecologically sound ways, and maintaining our agricultural heritage. If by raising both funding and awareness we can contribute towards the development of a healthy food system in Gaza, we can gain inspiration for our own work.

A group in Wales is setting up a link to raise money for food and farming in Gaza, and also to share stories and learning. Read more about Palestine Cymru Food Solidarity. You can make your donation here.

Images: Sameer Project and APN.

Water, wells and the flow of mercy in Palestine

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In an enigmatic story from the New Testament, Jesus meets a woman at a well in Samaria. It’s midday, it’s hot, and he asks her for a drink of water. Then he tells her that he can offer her something much better: the water of eternal life, after which she will never thirst again. She is sceptical, they debate, but she does indeed receive some insight that transforms her life and sends her away rejoicing.

The Samaritan woman sharing water at the well, sculpture at Chester Cathedral

The story touches on the relationship between material reality and the meaning that lies beneath. There is an unseen quality that flows through human societies, purifying and renewing them, like crystal waters that flow underground and then emerge from a well. It has many names – mercy, compassion, wisdom, truth, love – and although it is not mentioned much in public administration, we know when it is absent.

The way we use water reflects the spiritual health of a society. A nation that fouls its rivers and coastlines, as Britain does, must be sick in heart and mind. And imbalances in power distort its flow. In Wales, one of the great symbols of the unequal relationship with England is the flooding of the Tryweryn valley to create a reservoir for an English city. In the Middle East, the fight is over underground aquifers.

Samaria – home also of the Good Samaritan – is now part of the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Rain that falls here drains into an aquifer which extends into Israel, and it is contested, as the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine describes. Israeli settlers and soldiers have destroyed wells, tanks and pipelines, disrupting agriculture and driving Palestinians off the land. The situation is even more acute in Gaza, where the infrastructure to distribute water has been destroyed by the war.

About 60% of water here comes from boreholes sunk into the Gaza Coastal Aquifer, which has its own problems. Over-extraction has sucked in seawater, and contamination with sewage and agricultural runoff makes it unfit to drink. The remaining water comes from desalination plants (the Sameer Project is fundraising for one) or is piped in from Israel. The UN reported on 25 May that 74% of households were travelling to over 2000 collection points for their supplies, from which 24,000 cubic metres per day was distributed by 54 partners. It is an unsatisfactory arrangement with devastating impacts on public health.

a composite image of a borehole, pump and pipe
Commissioning a borehole in Gaza

A story from one corner of Gaza shows how ordinary people are affected. Khaled, one of a team of volunteers who manage the affairs of a community of 42 families, explains how they used to depend on a set of communal taps linked to a borehole, until a breakdown in community relations upended their lives.

“Our supply was always shared with many families. It would stop for periods, especially when demand was high or there were technical issues, so people had to store what they could, and the pressure was often low too. The quality was also not always reliable, so for drinking we had to be careful. But despite these challenges, it was something we had adapted to.”

Over time though, the neighbouring community who had control over the water supply began to restrict its use, eventually cutting them off altogether.

“It wasn’t driven by hostility, but by fear and shortage. Each group was trying to protect their own families with what little was available. But for us, it meant losing a vital part of daily life almost overnight.”

It was a shock and the community had to adjust quickly. For washing, there was the sea. For drinking though, they had to walk long distances with containers to reach distribution points.

“It was tiring and difficult, especially for children and older people. We had to ration carefully, using only what was necessary for drinking and cooking. People had to reduce personal washing to the minimum. Bathing became rare, clothes and bedding could not be cleaned properly, and shared living spaces became harder to keep sanitary.”

When people cannot wash their hands regularly, clean wounds, or maintain basic hygiene, infections move quickly, especially among children. Those who were already weak became more vulnerable, and recovery took longer. Dehydration was another problem, leaving people weak and struggling to cope with heat.

But the more insidious effect was on morale. Not being able to wash or put on clean clothes strikes at human dignity, and the disruption to daily routines put a strain on a community already living in dangerous conditions and dealing with terrible loss. It destabilized the delicate balance of human relations, showing up for instance as risk-taking, as people ventured into dangerous areas looking for water. At other times, the response was an uneasy silence born of fatigue and depression.

“The lack of water was not just an inconvenience. It affected the whole system of well-being. Daily life became organised around finding and conserving water, which affected everything else we were trying to do.”

The only way out was to sink their own borehole. This meant finding a suitable site amongst the rubble and then hiring equipment. This was not easy, as the blockade restricts the imports of spare parts, consumables and lubricants. Khaled and his team had to raise thousands of dollars from their international network of supporters and also to make painful economies at home. During the anxious week it took to prepare, everyone had to miss meals, even the children.

Finally one morning they had a borehole reaching down tens of metres into the aquifer, and it was time to attach the pump, powered by a generator. A crowd gathered to watch the big moment.

It was a crushing blow when the generator overheated and exploded. Children cried with the shock, echoing the dismay and disbelief of the adults. “It was like Allah had forsaken us,” said Khaled. “We starved ourselves to get that borehole, but we went from one bad situation to another.”

Now, not only did they still have no water supply, but they had lost their main source of electrical power, which they depended on for charging phones and computers. It was a glimpse into the abyss. But they carried on. An engineer was called and a second round of fundraising began, even more fraught with anxiety.

“I was afraid that if we couldn’t repair the generator quickly, the community would go on the rampage and families would start turning on each other,” said Khaled, voicing the ever-present fear that at some point the struggle to survive in the face of insuperable odds will become too much, that the bonds of community have their limit.

Four days later, though, it was done. To general rejoicing, water gushed out of a pipe into the waiting buckets and containers. Normality had returned, such as it was. They still try to find other sources for drinking water, but they can at least wash and clean with it, and the fact of having their own supply brings back a confidence that had been severely tested.

The situation across Gaza remains dire, and the only hope for restoring proper water supplies is wholesale reconstruction, which depends in turn on a stalled peace process. It can feel like the human divisions run deeper than the aquifers.

But the two people at the well in Samaria were also speaking across a divide. Jews and Samaritans were neighbours who shared religious roots but worshipped at rival sites and kept apart from each other, and the woman appears to have been a social outcast into the bargain. Nevertheless, they opened up a channel for human connection, through which joy and hope could flow. It is always possible.

The Sameer Project is fundraising for a desalination plant in Gaza. Please support them here.

people walking past wrecked buildings

Food security, lessons from Gaza

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Somewhere in the southern end of Gaza, a community of 42 families is spending their second winter under canvas. Outside the reach of aid agencies, they rely largely on donations from friends and families overseas, and strangers who donate to their crowdfunder. There is never enough for what they need – food, tents, hygiene supplies, medical care – and the overcrowding, cold and wet make survival a daily challenge that is hard for most of us to imagine.

So when recently the truck that was bringing them a food delivery was attacked and turned back, it was a disaster. A shipment of flour, rice, cooking oil, potatoes and onions which was supposed to last three weeks was gone, with no prospect of a refund. The team of seven who support the community, making daily rounds and coordinating supplies, were forced to scrape together what funds they could and buy emergency supplies on the black market.

Getting food on the table in Gaza. Food supplies to the area are restricted by the blockade, and protein and fresh produce are particularly scarce

Trading from broken down shop premises and warehouses, an informal network of suppliers buy stocks when they can and sell them on at inflated prices, several times higher than they should be. Because the banking system barely functions payment is often in USDT, a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, which is also how they receive funds from overseas. It’s an irregular system, but it means that the community can eat for a day or two at a time, while waiting for more funds to arrive.

It wasn’t enough, of course, and in the aftermath of the truck attack food supplies regularly gave out completely. For Khaled, a photographer by profession but now volunteering full time for the organising team, being unable to feed children who are crying with hunger is one of the hardest things to bear.

“When regular food supply chains break down, it feels like losing the life savings of an entire community all at once. Everything people depend on disappears, not just food, but stability, dignity, and any sense of security. It is a slow, painful collapse that affects everyone, especially the children.”

A few weeks later, things became much darker when a member of the team was stabbed and robbed on his way back to the camp with food. Not only did they lose vital supplies, but they were now obliged to spend scarce funds on hospital bills. With even less to go round, tensions began to erupt, and the community felt noticeably less safe.

“When formal systems collapse, communities fall back on whatever social infrastructure already exists – family ties, neighbourhood relationships, informal leaders, shared norms of reciprocity,” Khaled explains. “But when things stop working and people feel there is no stability or support, it becomes very easy for people to turn on each other.”

The team are feeling the pressure. All they can do is to double down on their attempts to raise funds for a new bulk order, and to maintain a dignified and fair system of distribution. That means communal cooking to provide meals for the most vulnerable, and boxes of essential foods to distribute to the families.

“Nothing here is anonymous or distant. You see the faces of the people you are helping. You see who eats and who doesn’t,” he says. “This is not a system. It is a series of human relationships under pressure, adapting day by day to scarcity.“

It is a tragic situation. But it is also an inspiring story of human resilience and the determination to maintain dignity under awful circumstances. Somehow they just keep going, and here is the lesson for us. As the global scene becomes more and more chaotic and we start to feel the shocks in the rising cost of living, their story can wake us up to what is at stake, and prompt us to get behind the values of cooperation and care that are the basis of peace.

It is mutual aid that keeps Khaled’s community going – both the self-sacrificing care that members show for each other, and the generosity of supporters around the world who want to alleviate the pain that they see on their phone screens and televisions. Mutual aid is by its nature informal and personal, individuals sharing their lives in letters and gifts, perhaps through organised programmes such as Gaza Champions or by chance encounters on social media.

It can however also be large-scale, as in the case of The Sameer Project, where a few Palestinian exiles have raised millions to fund a team of 150 workers in Gaza who know their communities well and can make sure that food, water, tents, winter clothing, medical care and companionship reach those most in need. Donations come from individuals and solidarity groups, and they run a social media campaign that shares news on the ground and emphasises individual stories.

To the extent that these connections are direct and personal, they are transformative. It isn’t just that people in Gaza are encouraged to know that strangers care about them and are willing to help. The people who donate and see the difference that it makes develop greater confidence in their capacity to contribute to the well-being of others – something we all need. They find their agency, and this benefits their home communities as well.

This is crucial, because global humanity needs to find its determination to create a better future. If we are to have a healthy, compassionate and wise society, not one cowed by extractive corporations, misinformation and greed, then we need to choose and act accordingly. We especially need opportunities for practical projects that bring us together in service and gratitude, allowing us build a shared positive vision and form the teams that will do the work.

Gaza holds special relevance for us because of our historic and religious connection with the area, giving us an many opportunities to engage and learn. Our situation in Wales is of course very easy in comparison, but for much of our history life was harder, and at some level we know that food security could become a concern for us too, as geopolitics unsettles our comfortable world. How would we cope?

Tim Lang’s Just in Case report on food security in the UK spells out just how unprepared we would be for a shock to our food supplies. Behind the scenes, our governments do consider how we would respond to threats such as cyber-attacks on supermarkets, storms and power outages, all of which have of course happened in recent years. Many of us know how reliant we are on imports, how little food is stored for emergencies, and how vulnerable we are to short term threats.

However, it is one thing to be vaguely aware of this, and quite another to look it in the face. At a recent conference on food security in rural Wales led by the Dyfed Powys Food Resilience Project (who are holding a summit on 16 March), we considered scenarios where a community or a local authority has to deal with a sudden collapse in food supplies. How would we organise ourselves so that there was enough to go round, how would we identify the people most in need, how would we deal with panic buying?

It became clear that we have work to do if we are to create a society that can respond to such challenges with dignity and not live ‘nine meals away from anarchy’. The rudiments are already here. We do after all have people who are homeless, cold and hungry now, and we have a network of food banks, community kitchens and gardens that can help. Then there are visionary initiatives such as Our Food Trust in Powys who are rising to the challenge of ‘making food security happen‘ by setting young people up to grow vegetables on small farms. We just need the imagination to scale this up and make it a priority.

We could learn from the communities of Gaza. They are practising what in Wales we have been calling the ‘well-being economy’, and what Build Palestine calls the ‘solidarity economy’, one rooted in care and dignity. If we start supporting and learning from them, as well as getting behind food projects here at home, then we can have the satisfaction of knowing that we are doing something to protect the world from the storms that may be coming our way.

A group of people who came together at last year’s Wales Real Food and Farming Conference is talking to the Sameer Project about a fundraising collaboration based around food and farming. Please come to our webinar on Wednesday 6 May if you are interested: book here. You can donate to the Sameer Project here.

Wales, Israel and Palestine: our connection to the land

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The village next to ours, Salem, is named after the chapel built in the 1820s for a once vibrant farming and mining community. From the same root as the Hebrew Shalom and Arabic Salaam, the name also carries associations with Jerusalem, or to give it its Welsh name, Caersalem. The Stronghold of Peace.

Not far away are Moriah (the hill at Jerusalem where Solomon built his temple), Pisgah (the hills east of the Jordan from which Moses caught a glimpse of the Promised Land) and Capel Seion (or Zion). And all over Wales there are dozens of villages with unlikely Middle Eastern names, from Bethlehem and Bethania to Horeb and Nebo.

They bear witness to a time when Wales was a religious nation, and not simply Christian, but deeply identified with the Israelites of the Old Testament. The Welsh found inspiration in the idea that they too were a marginalised people travelling across the wilderness, ‘pilgrim through this barren land’ as the hymn has it, their eyes fixed on a distant horizon.

The Wales/Israel tradition goes back many centuries, as Catholic priest Dorian Llywelyn describes in his 1999 book, Sacred Place, Chosen People. Since then, Wales-based Jewish writer Jasmine Donahaye has examined the relationship from a more political perspective in Whose People: Wales, Israel, Palestine. And because it was under Welsh prime minister and Christian Zionist Lloyd George that the Balfour Declaration was made, it is possible to draw a direct line between Wales and the tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza.

This line would pass through the years when the state of Israel was coming into being, reviving Hebrew as its national language. Inspired by the new state’s success in bringing immigrants up to fluency, and its confident nationhood, Wales adapted the Hebrew Ulpan immersion course as the Wlpan, familiar to so many Welsh learners and still going strong.

But things have changed in recent decades. Welsh sympathies, always with the margins, have moved to the Palestinians who were displaced by the new state. The Welsh Government has sent cash to Gaza and expressed support, while solidarity groups around the country have organised marches and fundraisers for the relief effort.

It is now the Palestinian flag that is everywhere to be seen, while the rich Jewish culture of Wales, linked to immigration during the industrial revolution, is declining. Islam, which has its own religious claim on the Holy Land as well as being the faith of most Palestinians, is now claimed by 2.2% of Welsh people in the 2021 census, again driven by immigration. Nearly half claimed no religion at all.

And yet the place names remain. Wales has covered itself in a blanket of meaning, pegged down at intervals by links to another land which most of us will never visit. It may seem quaint or even disturbing now, but it is too powerful and heartfelt simply to be dismissed as religious and political incorrectness. Perhaps it is due for reinterpretation.

Ultimately, it is about connection to land: the Jews with Israel, the Welsh with Wales – and the people now known as Palestinians with their ancestral lands. While that can be framed as ownership, a right to be fought over, in a deeper sense it points to the mysterious bonds between soil and society. The story of a journey to a Promised Land expresses the truth that land is sacred, or to put it in secular terms, it has its own integrity and the power to shape our lives. It calls us into a relationship with the soil, rivers and ecosystems that sustain life, inspiring care and respect.

Wales has developed a particularly strong reverence for locality, expressed by terms like cynefin (or rootedness) and milltir sgwar (the square mile in which we conduct our daily lives, or used to). Poets and writers have celebrated the weaving together of a particular people with a particular place, refuting the interchangeability that comes with a global consciousness and celebrating the culture of the local. Farming of course is central to that, as Carwyn Graves has shown in Tir. This sentiment has found a natural resonance in the Bible story of the Israelites, but both could be seen as an expression of a universal truth: all people have a home on this earth, and we should welcome the stranger.

The Old Testament at its best held a vision for the peaceful coexistence of peoples. It was Isaiah who spoke of beating swords into ploughshares, while prophets like Amos and Hosea regularly called for justice and mercy in social affairs. The Welsh tradition of pacifism and internationalism has its roots in the same nonconformity which built the chapels.

Now there are aspirations for Wales to be known as a nation of peace. That will certainly give us some work to do. When Wales chose to link its destiny with this piece of land at the east of the Mediterranean, it entered into a relationship – mainly but not entirely of the imagination – which makes demands on us. How do we make good on this, and serve peace in the Middle East?

Perhaps we might start by dropping the idea of a ‘chosen people’ and concentrate instead on ‘sacred land’. Then the question becomes, how might the land of Israel and Palestine be healed and support a thriving society? This would mean moving the emphasis away from the apportioning of blame, and recognizing that everyone concerned is living out a conflict that has causes beyond ordinary human reckoning. These include geopolitical forces linked to oil and trade routes, ultimately concerned with preserving a modern way of life which is already known to be unsustainable.

A powerful call to Western peacemakers comes from a TED dialogue between American-Israeli Ami Dar and Palestinian Ali Abu Awwad shortly after the Hamas attack of October 2023. Don’t side with Palestine, they say, don’t side with Israel. Don’t fuel the outrage on either side. Instead, hold a space for a better future where 7 million Israelis and 7 million Palestinians live together respectfully. This means trusting them to work it out – a big ask, it might seem, but surely the only true solution.

Meanwhile, back to the land. One of the most shocking acts of the recent war was the destruction of the Palestinian seedbank at Hebron. Shocking, because seeds adapted to local conditions are the very stuff of the connection between people and land, the source of life itself, beyond nationality. Damage to the Palestinian food system is further described in this petition. And one step up from the land, food aid is still not arriving in the quantities that are needed, a gap that is being filled by mutual aid.

The conflict in Gaza has struck a deep nerve in Wales, and elsewhere, surely in large part for cultural reasons. The Holy Land was the origin of religious movements which have shaped our culture and you don’t have to be Welsh to understand the symbolism of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. But it is also a present-day mirror for us. We too are disconnected from the land in the sense that we have forgotten our dependency on it and stopped caring for it. We too are a divided and unequal society with rifts to heal.  

Sometimes it is easier to see a problem when it plays out in another country. We should certainly do what we can to help in Israel and Palestine, given our hand in creating the situation and because we live in an interconnected world. But we should do it humbly, not presuming to know the answers, and in the spirit of a shared exploration of what it means to be humans living on the earth. Then we must put our own house (and garden) in order.

The chapel at Salem stands empty now and is being sold. The windows are broken and ivy is climbing in, but there is a still a Bible on the lectern and a sense of human presence lingers. This building held the hopes and prayers of a small community. We too can only hope and pray for the wisdom to live better.

Following discussions at the recent Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, a few of us are looking at ways to show support for food and farming in the region. Please get in touch here us if you are interested in this, and see the follow-up article Food security, lessons from Gaza.

Title changed and some small edits made, 5.12.2025. More small edits on 21.12.2025 and more on 27.01.2026

An emerging culture: community gardens as spaces for social renewal

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Over the summer, a meeting in Aberystwyth brought together a dozen people from community gardens and related organisations to share news and ideas. One person set the tone when we introduced ourselves at the beginning: working in mental health, he said, he was new to the gardening scene but wanted to be part of what he called an ‘emerging culture’. A thrill of recognition ran around the circle.

A work session at Penglais Community Garden

It’s a good way of describing the combination of people, public spaces and gardening that is such a live phenomenon in recent years. As a recent report for the Ceredigion Local Food Partnership (download in English or yn Gymraeg) shows, these growing spaces bring together many things: food growing, wildlife, beauty, social connection, composting, technical knowledge, healthy eating, cooking and therapeutic activity. There is something for everyone.

More than this though, a community garden is a valuable public space. That is, it is somewhere where we can be a person rather than a consumer, and it’s quite normal to talk to strangers. Here there is no corporate branding, no advertising, no clocks or internet to hurry us along, no reminder of institutional control. We don’t have to buy a ticket or create a login to visit. Instead it’s a place where we can experience ourselves and each other as human beings living in the natural world and connect with something deeper.

Apparently, there are bacteria in soil that work like antidepressants when we get our hands in the earth. It’s good to think that nature is on the side of our brain chemistry, but it seems unnecessary. Green things growing, the open sky, a wriggling worm and a splash of ox-eye daisies bring joy anyway, and so does a friendly chat.

This then is the background to the ‘emerging culture’, which I think is worth a closer look. Penglais Community Garden at the university, the one I know best, has created a fluid but lasting community over the last ten years. We have students just learning to grow food, getting excited about their first pumpkins and the miracle that is composting: they collected an award earlier this year. We have university staff and local people who turn up regularly and who also manage the mailing lists, the watering rota and the cropping plans. Others come just a few times a year for a Saturday session, work hard and go away again.

Then there are the visitors. We’ve got to know individuals and families who call by regularly to see how things are doing, and met countless random people who spot something interesting behind the fruiting hedge and pop in – students, their parents, staff of all types, tourists. And there are many people we don’t get to meet, who maybe take their lunch to eat in the patio area or wander around the beds, and tell us later how much they enjoyed the space and maybe picked a few nasturtium leaves to liven up their sandwiches.

We do gardening in Welsh, we’ve hosted well-being sessions for staff and students, people have used us for art classes and picnics, and we’ve run the odd cropping experiment. This year we tried out the triffid-like south American crop achocha. We’ve had people referred by their community psychiatric nurses, who’ve come for a few sessions and left visibly relaxed and happier. Arts Centre kitchen staff have popped in to pick borage, nasturtium and marigold flowers for their salads, and we’ve sold our parsley at the Bwyd Dyfi Hub.

The garden is not without its problems: we have to be on our guard against the local rabbit population and we have a few mystery human visitors who take a bit more than we’d like. Sometimes our volunteer population falls away and the weeds get the upper hand. But we get by, and there’s always something to look forward to.

Recently we have been experimenting with composting food waste from the Arts Centre kitchen. It’s a great metaphor for what we do. Just as pasta and cabbage stalks rot down into rich compost, so the worries which volunteers bring are received and metabolised into labour that creates beauty. Work pressures on staff, threats of redundancy, student loneliness, health problems, the state of the world: all are held without judgement, and we go home with a handful of chard or tomatoes or parsley for our dinner.

Long may our community gardens live, and perhaps we could see even them as incubators for a new form of human culture.

Meanwhile, here are links to podcasts I’ve helped make over the past few years which I think show the ’emerging culture’ quite well:

  • one on Aberystwyth University’s WW2 Allotment at Penglais, discussing old and new gardening methods, heritage varieties and the social, spiritual and political power of community gardening
  • one on Trefechan Bridge Garden’s water harvesting project
  • and also, two years old now, Aber Food Connections, which features Aber Food Surplus, community gardens, apple pressing and the St Paul’s community meal.

And some videos, both in Welsh with subtitles:

  1. a celebration of community gardening in Ceredigion, linked to the National Eisteddfod in 2022, by Gwledda
  2. One about Penglais Community Garden, heritage seeds and volunteering, by PLANED

You can see a map of Ceredigion growing spaces here, and download the report.

Main picture: Plascrug growing spaces, where about 100 raised beds are let out by Aberystwyth town council.

small group sitting in a circle under a tree

A people-led renaissance needs people-centred spaces

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This piece was written for Colin Tudge’s Great Re-think, which is intended to “develop the ideas needed to rescue humanity and our fellow creatures from what is now the brink of total disaster“. Colin and his wife Ruth West set up the Oxford Real Farming Conference 15 years ago.

Discussions of food and farming in progressive circles usually call for an ‘agroecological transition’. But we all know that human society in the industrialised west is heading in a different direction, locked into increasing consumption that is destroying the ecosystem that supports us. We need a radical fresh start, and that is the appeal of grassroots action, bottom-up development or, in Colin Tudge’s phrase, a ‘people-led renaissance’. 

How do we do that? I think a key step is the provision of new spaces for public discussion. The word ‘space’ is doing a lot of work here, however. We need not just physical and virtual spaces for people to meet, but also spaciousness that can allow new thinking to arise, and it is above all the quality of the space that makes the difference. This doesn’t just happen by itself; it needs to be shaped by clear intentions, in line with our values.

It’s worth asking what those values are. Instead of novelty, for instance, I think it is time to value commitment. Instead of fame and success, let’s focus on service and wisdom. Rather than building and defending an attractive self-image, we need to cultivate the willingness to face our faults and learn from mistakes. The word ‘humility’ comes from the same root as ‘humus’ and it is just as important for our flourishing. These values of course are at odds with the society around us, but they are timeless as well.

I have been attending progressive gatherings on food and farming on and off for over thirty years: Permaculture convergences from the 1990s, Soil Association conferences in the 2000s, the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) from the 2010s and more recently the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference (WRFFC) of which I am a founding organiser. These events have all marked out a space which is markedly different from the mainstream, building a vision of human community in the context of a healthy biosphere, and powerfully embodying the intention to renew our society from the soil upwards. They are invaluable.

But as the forces of business as usual intensify around us, so we must continue to differentiate our spaces from the wider culture. We do not want to be another consumer choice among many, even if we could be the most popular choice, because we stand for something deeper than that. We are trying to create a new society, after all, and each event is an opportunity to give people an experience of a new way of being. When we see how our individual aspirations mesh with the flourishing of the collective, we are simultaneous humbled and uplifted, and we leave with a new sense of direction. But we should not take this transformation for granted. Here are some thoughts on how to do it better.

Get clear on our intentions. The quality of any social space is determined by the intention at its centre. Is it to showcase a new way of doing things, making a splash in the media and changing the wider narrative? Is it to build a community of like-minded people, nurturing its members? Is it to spark debate between opposing views, and so go deeper into inquiry? All these are good things to do, but we are probably going to have to choose one of them. Unless we revisit the question regularly and get clear on why we are gathering, we will default to simply repeating a winning formula, and we will be back to the pursuit of sales and numbers, just like everybody else.

Put people before organisations. While some delegates at ORFC and WRFFC will be paying their own way, many are paid for by the organisations they represent. This brings in a transactional element: an organisation which sends a delegate may expect to get something out of it, and this colours their presence, with a knock-on effect on the whole event. A large organisation that can afford to publicise its own sessions, for instance, will attract delegates at the expense of smaller ones, and any type of organisation will tend to look after its own interests, skimming off the energy of the grassroots. We need to counter this tendency by drawing attention to it, and cultivating its opposite, which means that organisations (and individuals, come to that) make a special effort to hold back on their own agendas. My pet idea is a new convention that for every self-promoting social media post an organisation puts out, they should create at least three – or why not ten? – celebrating the achievements of others.

Honour service and experience. Equality suggests a flat structure, where everyone’s voice is heard. But the words of a farmer who has been growing food agroecologically for thirty years will naturally carry more weight than those of an office worker whose main experience of farming comes from social media. Similarly, someone who has volunteered for years behind the scenes on a community project will see things that the newcomer misses. We must learn to listen for wisdom and authority.  

Create paths for people to follow. A conference can have a big effect on its participants, shaping whole careers and projects. At the end of this year’s ORFC a woman told me that the previous year’s event had been so exciting that she almost needed medical attention. But we could do much more with this transformative power. We want to draw people along a path from customers to participants to leaders. This means getting to know them personally, over the long haul, and understanding the challenges that we all face, particularly the cycle of burnout and renewal.

Be more self-aware. All organisations and events have their blind spots and contradictions. Fortunately, it is not necessary to be perfect. What matters is that we see ourselves as we are, and are open to feedback. Whose voices are privileged, and why? Who sits hesitantly at the margins? Who doesn’t come at all, because they can’t afford it, or for fear they will not be welcome? Who is putting in long hours of unpaid work, and who is paid well for less? How well is the event fulfilling its aims?

Talk more openly. We want spaces where people can speak freely, and where ideologies take a back seat to civility and enquiry. Social media is having a polarising effect on public discourse, as the algorithms herd us into more extreme views, and we need to open up the centre ground. We need to practise deep listening and cultivate curiosity about views that are different from our own. That is much more important than the holding of correct opinions.

Put community building ahead of networking. The gaps between sessions are some of the best bits of a good conference. To meet old friends and make new ones, discovering shared intentions and bringing companionship to otherwise solitary struggles, is a joyful thing. It is also very likely to lead to new partnerships and the spreading of new ideas. But working the room, assessing people in terms of their usefulness to our projects, and checking out the competition – no. We want community, not a marketplace.

It can be very hard to stop and ask these questions. The pressure to keep doing more of the same is so great, and especially now that the economic climate drives organisations to compete and to fear for their future. But that’s all the more reason to create spaces which put humanity first, cultivating hope and solidarity and building a new vision. We must trust that that is what people are really looking for, in their hearts. From that place, we will be able to connect with others who are trapped in the vice of business of usual, and spread new hope. 

Image: Small group meeting at a Permaculture convergence in Wales, Jane Powell.

Attending the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference is a political act

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As the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference fast approaches, on 1-2 November, it’s strange to think that this is our fifth one. Each one has been so different that it’s hard to see them as a series. Following the model of the Eisteddfod (but minus the Pavilion!), we move around Wales and reflect the character of a different locality, combining it with the latest twists in the national policy scene.

This year we’re at Coleg Cambria Llysfasi, the agricultural college near Ruthin, Denbighshire. Northeast Wales may not get much national airtime, but it has a thriving food culture. Pioneering agroecological farmers, community groups, producer groups and food businesses abound, and are populating the programme, just out.

And after two days of intense conference activity – including a dinner with entertainment on the Wednesday night – there will be field trips to local farms and food projects on the Friday, following last year’s popular innovation. Meanwhile, catering by Coleg Cambria’s Yale Restaurant, featuring a mix of local and organic ingredients, will provide an inspiring example of how food culture can stimulate agroecological production.

Local and national

The purpose of the event is to bring Welsh food activity together, so that everyone involved in food – which is all of us, ultimately – can see the bigger picture of which we are all part. There is certainly plenty happening in Wales.

Opening the event will be Sarah Dickins, familiar to many as the BBC’s former economics correspondent, and who is also an organic farmer in Monmouthshire and member of the Wales Carbon Net Zero 2035 group. Closing it will be Tim Lang, with a powerful message about how Wales must adjust to the global challenge of food security.

In between, we will hear from the new local food partnerships that are springing up across north Wales, consider the potential of repurposing county farms, examine what the Sustainable Farming Scheme means for the relationship between food production and nature, looking at the true cost of food production and how it is to be paid for, and asking how we can square healthy affordable food with good livelihoods for producers.

As well as policy, there will be plenty of discussion of the practicalities of food production, including beekeeping, perennial green manures, profitable business models for small-scale growing, hydroponics, sharing growing skills in the community, medicinal plants and homeopathy for livestock health, and heritage apple orchards. There will also be interactive networking sessions, and permission to sit in the cafe or go for a walk if you need some space to think.

Food citizens

Inevitably the conference will involve much technical discussion between public and voluntary sector staff, but at the heart of the conference is the food citizen. That means that whatever hat we wear, whatever tribe we belong to, we show up as people who belong to families and communities, appreciate the place of the human family in the natural world, and are prepared to take responsibility for this.

That is why we are delighted that while we are hosted by Llysfasi, we are also being welcomed by local groups such as Ruthin Friends of the Earth and Denbigh Community Food, who are helping variously with facilitation, stewarding and publicity, and by Denbighshire County Council’s Clwydian Range and Dee Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Real change must come from the grassroots, so that we take people with us. But citizen action needs to mesh with public services, and so this year we are inviting ‘keynote listeners’ from Welsh Government and the Future Generations Office to attend the event and feed back their impressions in the final session.

As the new Future Generations Commission Derek Walker has chosen food as one of the focus areas for his seven-year term, this gives us a special opportunity. How exactly do ordinary citizens, concerned perhaps about river pollution, animal welfare, the rise of food banks and disappearing farm birds, influence public policy? How do we amplify their voices, while also bringing in the rigour of scientific knowledge and ensuring fairness for competing demands?

A political act

Attending the conference, then, is not just an entertaining couple of days out. It is a political act, where we come to learn, make new connections and above all show our faith in a better way of doing things. It is a positive choice for the future and a step into leadership.

We have had to put our prices up this year (although please note that the booking fee has gone). That’s partly inflation, and partly because last year we had extra sponsorship which meant we could keep prices down. As ever, we are very grateful to this year’s sponsors whose generosity makes the event possible, along with our volunteers, chairs and speakers. We hope that you will support us again and join the movement for good food in Wales.

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Celebrating the fourth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference

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This article was originally published on the Food Citizenship blog

What fun we had, meeting in person at the fourth Wales Real Food and Farming Conference in Lampeter late last year, where we were welcomed into the new Canolfan Tir Glas.  No longer taking for granted the wonder of being able to gather at a particular place and time, with all the random interactions that happen as you scramble for a cup of coffee or navigate an unfamiliar campus, I marvelled at how a conference can be so much more than a choreographed exchange of news and ideas.  

Looking at the photographs afterwards and seeing white-haired elders, twenty-somethings in dungarees, farmers in fleeces, salaried professionals with their pop-ups and Powerpoints, and many more, the sense is of a family gathering – a big one, with 300 people over two days of talks and discussion, plus a third day of field trips. Our registration desk doubled up as a home base for newcomers while our dinner, with poetry from Sam Robinson and music from Owen Shiers and Camilla Saunders, was a celebration of friendships going back variously decades or a day.  

Although it’s common to disparage a gathering of like-minded people as an echo chamber, I think it is no bad thing to call our tribe together.

It’s an opportunity to synchronize our intentions for a better society mediated by food and farming, and celebrate what we have achieved.

Together we puzzled over how everything fits together: getting good quality local food into school meals, bringing up children to better understand food, helping people to access land, marrying up food production with care for nature, building an inclusive food culture, reducing carbon emissions, growing the food economy, trading fairly with the rest of the world. Our 35 sessions covered these topics and more. 

Radio Four Food Programme presenter Sheila Dillon kicked us off with an overview of the challenges facing the food movement, and a theme soon emerged of how change happens. Wales is becoming well-known for its pioneering Well-being of Future Generations legislation, but not many people know how it works. A session organised by the Food Policy Alliance Cymru gave us a look at the machinery by which popular sentiment can be refined and translated into action – and it is frustratingly slow.  

“I feel like an imposter here, with so many experts,” confided one delegate, a retired person representing a small campaigning group. But in fact, she was one of the large pool of concerned citizens who are our best hope. Policymakers cannot do much on their own, and I think an important purpose of the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference is to amplify the voices of the thinking public, connecting them with the experts who can share knowledge and shaping programmes of action that are fair and realistic. 

The local food partnerships that are springing up across Wales (Food Cardiff and Food Vale were both represented) as well as other place-based partnerships like the Dyfi Biosphere, Canolfan Tir Glas and PLANED provide spaces for such conversations to happen, and so do people’s assemblies and various co-design projects such as Tir Canol in mid Wales. With mounting anxiety about the obvious unsustainability of our current way of life, we need outlets for constructive action, and participatory democracy is a practice whose time has come. 

It was encouraging that Welsh Government and Natural Resources Wales sent several delegates and contributed to the sessions at the Conference. They were there to listen as much as to speak, responding for instance to a few challenging questions that came up in discussion. One anonymous delegate, on their evaluation form, coined the term ‘keynote listener’ for this role and suggested that they have a slot at the end to respond to everything they had heard, which is an excellent idea. 

The third day of the event was given over to field trips – a vineyard, several farms, the Lampeter university campus with its collection of centuries-old volumes on horticulture – and the discussions sparked during the first two days continued in smaller groups. It was clear from talking to these enthusiasts how much the conference had achieved in terms of establishing a place for conversation and commitment and shining a light on the burgeoning goodwill. 

Spaces like this, where people can connect across divides of age and sector and begin to enact a better way of being together, are rare. And it is just as true to say they are everywhere, once we know what we are looking for. It’s just that with our busy lives we tend to forget.

We need events like this to build our confidence in our collective ability to create a better future together – and remind us that underneath all the conflicts, that is what we most deeply want to do.  

See also: From a ‘call to arms’ to carrot crushing: a review of WRFFC22, for a farmer’s perspective.

Main image: Clic Productions. Recordings of some conference sessions are available here.

three women at a table in the street

Closing the democracy gap in Wales, bottom up and top down

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Much is made of the democracy gap, which means the failure of government to deliver what the public really wants. It can be read either as the reluctance of apathetic citizens to engage with the political process – at a minimum, by voting – or as a story of political elites which are increasingly detached from society, cynically exploiting popular sentiment for their election but not troubling themselves with the details. Or a bit of both, of course.

At the closing celebration in September of Renew Wales, a project that for ten years provided action planning and peer mentoring for community groups to respond to climate change, the democracy gap was a leading topic of discussion. Councillors and activists alike reflected on the difficulty of driving the change they wanted to see at local level, and identified several causes – bureaucratic inertia, the political climate set by London and Cardiff, and public apathy among them.

Set against that, we have the Well-being of Future Generations Act, which does provide a model of how government, business and civil society can work together, even if change is slow to materialize. And several people shared their experiences with People’s Assemblies, which have been springing up around Wales in recent years and which give ordinary people a chance to air their concerns.

People’s assemblies

An online event in Aberystwyth this year, for instance, brought together 40 or so people to discuss food in the area. It was a self-selected group, mainly community food activists and a few farmers, and hardly representative of the town and its hinterland, given that the supermarkets and cafes were not there. Nevertheless, there was enough difference of opinion to make it lively and instructive. A strong contingent spoke up for local food: short supply chains, buying food from people you know, growing more vegetables around the town and so forth. But this cosy consensus was challenged by some of the farmers.

“We need to question what we mean by local food,” said one (in Welsh). “Most people in the UK live in urban areas, they can’t grow their own food and they don’t have access to land or free time to do it. Is it right for us, in a nice rural area, to define local as Ceredigion or mid Wales?” From his point of view, urban Wales, England and the EU are the traditional markets, and also the responsibility, of Ceredigion farmers. It didn’t make sense to throw away a finely honed farming system in favour of much less reliable horticulture and arable crops, simply to satisfy the notions of idealists.

Is he right? That isn’t the point here. What matters is that people get to share their perspectives in an atmosphere of active listening, where the principle is that we want to hear from everybody, not to win arguments. This allows complexity to emerge and builds trust. For the local food contingent, it was an opportunity to sharpen up their ideas – what support might they be able to give farmers to diversify, if that’s what they really want? Meanwhile the farmers were, I think, gratified by the interest that people showed in food production, and glad of the opportunity to explain what they do and why.

Culture change

Change is also coming from the top. The Well-being of Future Generations Act makes it mandatory for public bodies to consult and collaborate with the public, and the Welsh Government has accordingly developed a programme of cultural change which aims among other things to level power differentials and encourage creativity, concentrating particularly on how meetings are conducted. Silent pauses for reflection, talking in rounds so that everyone gets heard, and even meeting outdoors are all encouraged. Although the Act is only binding on public sector staff, any civil society group wanting to change its working methods is invited to join in, for instance joining a ‘community of practice’ or simply trying out tips for better meetings.

Clearly we need a wave of change across Wales if we are to realize the potential of the Future Generations Act, and the recent proliferation of People’s Assemblies is an encouraging sign. Around the same time as the Aberystwyth event, Swansea held a similar one to develop a plan for its Bwyd Abertawe initiative, now funded by the Sustainable Food Places project. Later, an in-person People’s Assembly in Denbigh in June gave a boost to an emerging food partnership which was still buzzing at last month’s Denbigh Plum Festival.

All of these Assemblies drew on a growing pool of trained facilitators and a method of working which began in the Extinction Rebellion movement and then flourished on Zoom during lockdown. They also drew on the networking capacity developed by Renew Wales with its Food from the Ground Up events, the government’s culture change programme, and others.

Now, Vicky Moller of Grwp Resilience and Dawn Lyle of 4theRegion are creating a new organization to support deliberative and participatory democracy in Wales, training facilitators and sharing best practice. As Dawn says, “If we want the Welsh Government, and other public bodies, to involve more people in decision making and embrace the principles of participatory, deliberative democracy, then we urgently need to develop the resources and the expertise to do it well, here in Wales.”

Co-design and co-production

Farmers at a Tir Canol co-design meeting

There are many other strands to this citizen movement. In Gwynedd, the Lottery-funded Gwyrdd Ni project has been pioneering community assemblies to develop a shared approach to climate change. In mid Wales, the former Summit to Sea project – now Tir Canol – used a co-design approach over two years, running workshops and consultations with farmers, environmental groups and rural businesses in order to produce a ‘blueprint‘ for the area. It has now severed its ties with the original funder and partners are using the blueprint to seek funding for a range of projects to restore both human and natural wealth.

Another example of co-design comes from the Valleys, where the people of Treherbert came together to make a plan for the woodland around their town, documented in this film. Inspiration also comes from the Co-Production network which promotes citizen involvement with public services, and will be part of the as yet unnamed project that picks up the work of Renew Wales next year.

It’s easy to spot the weaknesses in government, whether at UK, Wales or local level. That presents us with a choice: we can give up and retreat into our private worlds, or we can seize the opportunity to create something new. In Wales, the government is inviting us, however imperfectly, to step up and join in. Let us all ask what we can do for our communities, and get involved.

The Well-being Economy Alliance Cymru (WEAll Cymru) is organizing a Zoom discussion on Revitalising Democracy on Thursday 10 November 2022 at 7pm. The Wales Real Food and Farming Conference on 23-25 November 2022 in Lampeter will feature many examples of citizen action, including a session organized by Sustainable Food Knighton who are planning a demonstration at the Senedd in February 2023.

Both images courtesy of Tir Canol