2022 is an important year for us living near Birmingham and in the West Midlands as we celebrate the Commonwealth Games coming to the city, especially being part of the Embracing Cultures programme funded through Our Creative City and Birmingham City Council https://www.birmingham2022.com/festival/creative-city
We are continuing our commitment to Climate Justice and participatory art activism through engagement with the use of the recyclable and sustainable products in our creative work on Birmingham’s Flora costume making. We will be supporting a Green Games agenda by participating with West Midlands Coalition on these matters.
Following our positive involvement with COP 26 last year, we plan further work with young people to share information, tools for engagement in parks and creative activity, so that during these troubled times, we can strengthen resilience in health and well-being. This can form part of a genuine welcome to all the visitors and athletes who will be converging on Birmingham this summer. It will generate a sense of pride in showing them our city, our parks, our diverse and dynamic cultures that make this region such a vibrant place to live and work.
We are committed to working on a small artistic and economic scale with different partners to facilitate and engage in this ‘Great Turning’ of our times as identified in the stories from Joanna Macey and Satish Kumar. Kumar writes in Soil, Soul, Society:
‘We need to shift from the old paradigm of fragmentation, dualism, disconnection and division to a new paradigm of wholeness, connectedness and relatedness. In this new paradigm the economy will be cyclical as in nature: take with gratitude, use sparingly, replenish what is taken and put back what is left over into the earth as compost – no waste, no pollution and no depletion.’