Hello. My name is Simon Berry and I am on a mission to pull together a collective vision of rural Britain in 2020. The above video shows how we kicked this process off at the joint ruralnet|uk and Action for Market Towns conference in Skipton in October 2008.
So why do we need a vision and why take a collective approach?
Let’s deal with the collective bit first. We want to do this collectively simply because many heads will be better than one or two and something put together by hundreds of people will carry a lot more weight than a vision written by one or two people.
So why a vision? It’s really important to be working towards a vision of how you’d like things to be. Visions can inspire and motivate, they can inform policy and influence strategy. They can help ensure that independent actions don’t simply cancel each other out.
At the beginning of October 2008, at the joint ruralnet|uk and Action for Market Towns conference in Skipton, 230 of us made a start on this collective vision when we gave ourselves 8 minutes to draw on our individual experience and expertise and write down (or draw) a contribution to the collective vision.
We considered things that we’d like to see change; things we’d want to preserve and things we don’t have now that we’d like to have in the future. These contributions formed the basis of this website and now we need as many people as possible, people like you, to build on this foundation by commenting on these ideas or sending in your own ideas AND telling your friends to do the same.
We’ve made it really easy for you to find the contributions you’re interested in by using keywords (or tags). These are in the righthand column of every page. There is also a search facility to take you straight to content you’d like to comment on.
Please use all the channels available to you to publicise this experiment far and wide. The more people that know about it the better the vision will be and the bigger impact it will have.
If you have any questions on the process please use the comment link to this video and ask them there.
Many thanks.