Morag Gamble:
Welcome to the Sense-making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble.. Permaculture Educator, and Global Ambassador, Filmmaker, Eco villager, Food Forester, Mother, Practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever. And even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on? So our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, and reconnection. What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.Today I welcome my TAS region friend, Dr. Millie Rooney to the show. Millie is the national coordinator for Australia reMADE, which is a vision-based collaboration of everyday people and community leaders working to build the country where people and planet come first. Millie talks about how she loves the passion and the power that emerges when we start collaboratively dreaming the world that we want. Millie’s PhD research was about local community and social norms around neighborhood sharing and community building. And it’s something that’s been in her since she was a child. She talked about this desire to care and to make a contribution. She talks about how, when she was a child, she actually had a dream of becoming a butterfly dancer on stilts to be able to catch the eye of a journalist, to be able to make front page news in order that th ere c ould be some good news for a change. Really ha s a lways worked from the principle of delight, not fright. It’s my great delight to welcome Mi llie t o the show today, to share with us some of the insights that sh e’s d iscovered as she’s been researching around the country. the kind of dreams and hopes that people are holding as their vision for the future of this country and also for the planet. Thanks for joining us today. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show today Millie. I’ve been waiting for this conversation. I absolutely love what you do, and I’m really excited to share it with the listeners here on Sense-making in a Changing World. So you’re right down in the bottom of Australia, right? Whereabouts are you located?Dr. Millie Rooney:I’m down here in Hobart in the country, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful autumn day today. It’s quite lovely.Morag Gamble:
And the thing that gets me really excited about the kind of work that you’re doing is you’re asking some of those bigger questions that don’t typically get asked very often. I was reading on your website. I’m just going to read it out because I want to get it right. So imagine you’ve woken up in the Australia of your dreams. What is it like? I mean, before you even sort of share with us, what kind of responses you’re getting to that, like what brought you to ask these kinds of questions? Where’s that come from with you?Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah , so , I mean , the project came from a few years ago, a bunch of civil society leaders across really different sectors. So first nations environment , social justice, et cetera. A group of them got together and said like , we are losing on everything, you know, and we’re very good at saying, no, we’re always saying, stop this, stop that no, this, no that, but what’s that big Yes. And it was around the time Naomi Klein put out her book. No is not enough. So, yeah, it was a big sort of collective question of like, what’s our yes? What are we aiming for? And then beneath that, what are the systems changes that have to happen that we all have to work towards? So that was really the question. And the group got together, had a lot of conversations and actually started the initial draft of what the vision for Australia could look like. And I remember being in that, in reading that first draft and thinking, yeah, it’s got some fantastic high-level stuff and it’s also saying things like more streetlights to keep women safe. And I was like I think maybe we’re not aiming high enough. Of course you can’t write vision for Australia when it’s mostly white, mostly middle-class mostly sort of paid professionals creating that vision. So really it was about, well, what does everybody else think? And what’s the question that we could ask and really simplifying it instead of, you know, anything technical, but really wwhat’s the world you want. And I’ve asked many questions as a social research but that is my favorite question to ask because people unfold. no one asks that question.Morag Gamble:
Really. Cause really, what you were trying to access there were people’s hopes and their dreams and their big visions of things that they kind of hold dear. But like you’re saying, we don’t get a chance to really articulate that very much, except, you know , maybe with your closest friends. So what were some of the things that you were uncovering or that you were noticing as common threads that came through that?Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah, I mean the first thing that really surprised me was how unpracticed people were at thinking about that vision. And I would say people don’t even talk about that with their friends. We particularly, I think about my own circles. It’s a lot of like, oh my gosh, this is terrible in the world. Oh my gosh, that’s terrible. We should fight this. And it feels a bit too indulgent to sit and think about, well, what do we actually want? But so we would in these conversations, you know, I’d give people five minutes to kind of tell me about what’s really pissing you off and you know, get a few rants . Then people would talk abou I want , I wanna straight where the shade is plentiful. That’s one of the lines in the vision that I think was directly acquired . We have really different groups. Some people would say, I want to be able to have a nice glass of wine with my mom on a Saturday or whatever. And another group of guys who are like, oh , I want to have, I want to have a barbecue and shoey. And I was like, what the heck is a shoey? Anyway, I’ve lived a sheltered life. It turns out it’s an Australian thing to drink beer from a shoe. I didn’t know this, but there were the same things. Very different ways. Someone wants a nice glass of wine in an actual glass. Someone wants a beer in a shoe it’s about connection and community and being together. And so that was a really strong, that’s really strong thread. We heard a lot of stuff. A lot of comments around really reconciling with our history, our history of invasion and first nations people here. And a lot of, not necessarily answers, but deep desire for that to be better and recognized for sort of the trauma and the incredible culture. And just simple things, you know, I think that that’s no one was talking about wanting mansions or, you know, jewelery-crusted in bathtubs, which I’ve also learned is a thing. People just wanted a safe climate time with their family. They want their work to be valued, whatever work they do. Really simple things, but beautifully expressed across different groups of people and different backgrounds. Yeah.Morag Gamble:
How did you approach that? Like how did you go out and ask that question? How did you find the people to, did you walk up to people as you’re walking down the street? Or did you arrange groups or how did that?Dr. Millie Rooney:
So it was a mix of putting the word out generally. So I ran some groups down here in Hobart, put it out to the local newsletters saying are you interested in the country of your dreams, you know, come along, tell me what you think. Then also approached groups of people who, groups of people and leaders, who we thought were likely to be interested, but whose voices are rarely heard. So for example , just around networks we connected someone from the Vietnamese community in Melbourne and that heavily involved in that local group. And they brought together the Vietnamese community. And actually we’re going to bring in a bunch of other migrant communities , but decided to stick with the Vietnamese s o t hat I could have a translator so that everybody could access it, b ut beautifully, all the other migrant communities provided the food for the day. Which is just utterly gorgeous. And that one was particularly beautiful because I wasn’t there, but apparently there were these three older women who sat on this couch for the entire time, the workshop was run in their hats, scarves and their c oats. They didn’t speak English and just intently sat and contributed to the conversation. We’ve got a beautiful blog on three women on a couch of their vision. So that was through networks had, t hrough people who’d been connected with t he civil society groups, but really seeking out whose voices are not usually invited in. So, unions and workers young guys, some migrant communities, refugee communities. Y e ah, full range, really.

Morag Gamble:
So it seems to me like there was quite a spread then of , of very personal hopes and dreams to something quite, global and existential. Where did it kind of sit back in the, kind of the picture of Australia as a whole? Did you get a sense of that, or it was more in the, sort of the granularity of the individual that you found?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
I would say not really in the individual. I mean the individual examples, like the wine and the shoey sort of very individual examples, but really it was about things like everybody should have a home, everybody, it was a real, there was a real sense of universalism in the conversations and people tied it to themselves, but I mean, still very much thinking about the broader good, and there are a few things that came up in just small groups, stuff around well, what’s Australia’s role in the world. What’s how , you know, not only should we be respecting refugees and supporting them, but how about we don’t contribute to them being created in the first place. And so there was that kind of level of scale , um, as well. And I think, you know, more recent work, we’ve been doing another round of questions around the public good. Again, I’m really surprised that it’s not, it’s not individual and it’s , it’s not even within people’s own personal experiences. So I’ve been asking a group of young people and some older people about the public good. And the first thing the young people say is, I want a place where the older people belong in society, valued and recognized. The older group is saying, I want the young people to feel safe and have a future. And they’re both surprised that the other groups are speaking about them like that. So I think, when it comes back to those values, we all want a safe climate, we want a safe place to live. We want to be able to contribute our QCOS has this lovely phrase of contribute, matter and belong. And I think actually sums it up. That’s what we were hearing. People want access to healthcare. They want access to good education. They want their unpaid work to be valued . But they don’t just want theirs. They want everybody’s. Yeah.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. That’s beautiful to hear. There’s that underlying sense , because I think quite often what we hear is something else, but we don’t hear that story. And I guess that’s really what you’re trying to do with this work is to share a different story, to hear different stories and then share that out. So with all these questions that you’ve been asking people and all the responses you’re getting a nd all their sort of threads of connection you’re finding, how are you making sense of that together in your work and how are you then offering that forward and where, where to?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah. Oh, they’re such such great questions. I mean, firstly, the very first thing is we just need to be more practiced at thinking about what we want, you know , and wild thinking. I used to work at a university and I remember this activity where we were put in groups and t old let’s think about how Hobart could develop in the next 10 years, it’s waterfront. And I w as i n my group I was like, well, let’s have t rampolines that kids can jump on and like wild, impossible stuff. But I was shut down so quickly and I thought this i s a t a university. This is not, we’re not being assessed on whether this is g oing t o work. This is the brainstorming phase. W e’ve forgotten how to brainstorm. So I think that really the first part of our work is saying let’s practice these wild ideas of what’s possible and let’s let’s practice feeling what it could be like if, to address climate change, addressing justice requires a huge amount of work and sacrifice in some ways and to remind ourselves o f why we’re actually doing it and to feel like we’re connected to other people who are doing it, not for the power and the glory, because there’s not really any but f or l ove, about love. And this is about how we put words and shapes and f orm around a collective sense of love i n Australia. People can shy away from that. But I think part of it is saying practicing, thinking about what we want is a really important skill for building the world that we’re trying to do and for fighting injustice.

Morag Gamble:
So just before you head into the next part of the question. What can you suggest ways that we can nurture that in our own communities, that wild thinking?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
I mean, I think very first of all is asking the question. I was reflecting, we’ve had an election down here recently and reflecting on the way the parties said, we will have to do X, Y, Z to win. I don’t really care about what you have to do to win. I want to know what you’re going to do when you’ve won. Why are we not even having that conversation? So I think one is , it’s just asking those questions in your community. And one of the activities we often do in Australia reMADE it in the event we run is start off by saying no . Okay. Imagine if you put down the burdens that you carry, imagine letting go of, imagine not being afraid about having somewhere to live or being able to eat or witnessing injustice or experiencing in justice. Imagine not having to fight for a safe climate. Imagine letting that go. And then you get people to close their eyes and imagine waking up in the country that we dream. What does it feel like? Smell like . I like, I cry even sort of modeling that to you almost because it’s imagine! Imagine that if we run the world that we think is possible, but that’s a weirdly confronting kind of grief that it brings up, I think. But it means that you start a conversation from an utterly different position. I think it’s really powerful and people can shy away from that because, oh , it’s a bit soft and impossible and naive. Like heck! we need to be soft and naive.

Morag Gamble:
Absolutely. And you know, it’s, oh gosh, because we can get so sidetracked and also caught up understandably in the grief and the anxiety of it and not have that spaciousness. I think we, I think like you’re saying we have to practice the thinking. I think we also need to practice making space for these things. Cause it’s I know in my life too, it’s always, there’s some other really important project that needs to be done, but actually taking the time to have that reflection and not just personally, but collectively as well, so that why stays fresh and relevant. And it’s not a why from 20 years ago, it’s the why that’s present now and that it might, it embodies all of that experience in everyone else’s experience , but we keep re-imagining our why and restating our why .

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah. And that moment of pause to sort of indulge in a possibility, I think is also part of the future that I want. So why wait for the future to have it when we can build it now. And I was having a great conversation with someone from Friends of the Earth. He was talking about a really long-term campaign in Victoria where they constantly got fracking banned in the constitution. And we were talking about that struggle of like doing urgent work slowly. That’s a real, a real tension. And I think it’s doing urgent work slowly, but it’s also doing urgent work kindly. It’s doing urgent work with love and strategy and smarts. It’s not to say those things can’t go together.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. That’s a really, really good point because quite often when we get caught up in the urgency, a lot of that stuff does fall away. So important to keep that in there. I’m so glad you said that.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah. Yes . And that’s kind of dovetailing into the other part of your question about what do we do with this work? There’s the vision stuff, which is the heart, it’s the community. We get people say , oh, I read it. And I cried, everyone cried. People have used it in different ways and there’s someone, a few people ran in a local council election on a version of the nine pillars of Australia reMADE. They’ve made it relevant to their local community. This town at Gloucester that won against a coal beat off a coal mine and against coal seam gas used it to shape a community event they ran. So people are using it. Then we’re also doing the work of, well, what’s the underlying systems change that we all have to also work on? At the same time, what’s the strategy? We’ve got a framework that we use called the five D’s. It’s not very nicely worded, but it’s decolonize , democratize, decarbonize, demonopolize and democratize . And you know, that’s pushing back against the forces that are stopping a lot of this other stuff. So it’s really trying to balance the love, the community building, the hope because we, I think we have a moral obligation to talk about hope with the world what’s the deeper strategy and very lucky that we have the luxury to do both of those things because people are fighting really important spot fires, and that’s a very c lose space often.

Morag Gamble:
Do you want to just tell us a little bit more about the nine pillars?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah. Okay. Always have to have my handy booklet of them. So when we went around and asked people about the country of their dreams , one of the things we wanted to capture what we heard and we didn’t want it to be a laundry list. If we will have this and this or this, cause it gets boring. It would’ve been wonderful if we could have had a vision for the country that was in fivewords and everyone could remember them, but turns out it’s actually more complicated. So we ended up with nine pillars and there , first people’s heart and natural world for now in the future, an economy for the people, a society where all contributions count and every job has dignity. And that one was really very much about recognizing care and invisible work. A diversity of people living side by side , a country of flourishing communities, a new dawn for women, a thriving democracy, and a proud contributor to a just world. And you know, this very high level that there’s a lot of text under each and they’re very high level and they were written, we had this , a lot of conversation about how do we write this because we don’t want it just to be some kind of lefty in club language. And somebody, one of the women involved had an uncle called uncle Trev, and he was a one nation voter and not like me, basically someone different to me and we kept in mind, like what would uncle Trev say? H ow w ould he read this? And unfortunately he died just before w e finished it. So we never got to know what uncle Trev would say, but it was really written in a way that was trying to get really deep down into what people were talking about rather than use language or words that a re associated with any particular side of politics. Y eah.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. And I’m just thinking that , so that people can find out what these nine pillars are. I’ll make sure that we put the link below in the show notes so that people can read those and get all that detail there. Because I think as you were speaking them thinking about ways that permaculture could, we could describe permaculture through those or they could describe permaculture. I was fascinated to see those, where those different high-level principles or values intersect. And it helps to help different communities to make sense when there’s an alignment like that. Because for me that just, they make so much sense. So I heard you say Gloucester, the community of Gloucester they used your approach. What I felt when you said it was that they found a sort of a strength and a togetherness or understanding of the, well , what is the yes. Then be able to move forward to address a big issue that was affecting their community. Because one of my questions to you was about, how do communities then take this kind of thinking and this kind of work and bridge it across to what’s happening in their local community. And Gloucester is, is one example, but how other communities doing it all, what are some of the ways that people can really engage with your material and take it to their communities?

Dr. Millie Rooney:

Yeah. So there’s a few sort of different ways. I mean, in the case of Gloucester, they’re a town that had spent years fighting off a coal mine and then coal seam gas and driven by coal group of people and tensions in that community, obviously around any of those kinds of issues. They had been running sustainable futures conventions every couple of years as a way to , to start that yes, conversation. And I met Julie [inaudible] and she came and was at the launch of the nine pillars and then went back to Gloucester and said, Hey, I think we could run our next convention around this as a way to not just limit the conversation to environment. But to know the nine pillars mean there’s nine entry points to have a shared world, rather than saying, you have to be an environmentalist to come in here. You can care about gender or whatever. So they used it as a framework. They ran this two day convention and sent invitations out to people saying, do you fit a pillar? Do you want to run a workshop? Do you wanna run a seminar, whatever. And they actually set it up in a way that they felt had integrity to the vision. So the first pillar there is a first people’s heart and they worked with their local Aboriginal community and said, the first two hours of the program is yours. You can set everything up, you can, we don’t care what you do, you set the tone. So there were ways that they , they kind of use the nine pillars. Similarly, I’ve done something. When I used to work, I used to run an internship program and I ran it through the nine pillars. It was a sustainability program, but what if we included democracy in that? What does it look like to run a sustainability internship program that has integrity with the pillar of democracy or the pillar? And it radically changed how I ran the program. So one thing people can do is actually just take the pillars and think, how is the work that I do have integrity with this? And it’s hard, you know, it’s not a simple tick box. You have to think a bit creatively, but it pushes it. So that’s one way and there’s resources on our website that we can link to that step people through some of that. I think again, just that envisioning question of starting , if you want to do something in your community, start there! Start saying what do we want and then work out. We’ve got resources to walk people through that, but then in a slightly different way , we put out these remake memos, which go out we’ve probably have about three a year, but it really depends. Last year we had the bushfires and COVID and the budget and then memos for peoples to say, how do you respond to a bushfire in a way that builds towards the country you want? And isn’t just, we need to buy more water bombing helicopters, which we may well need to do, but how do we deal with that whole , systemic issue of climate change and how do we link the immediate to the long-term and how do we, in our response to a crisis actually lower the groundwork or not lock ourselves into, to a disaster response necessarily. So there are a couple of ways, and then we also have a new project at the moment on the public good, which I would love more people to get involved with, which is hosting these conversations in their communities, but in a way that actually networks back to organizations and national networks, so that we’re starting to build a collective language and conversation and space that takes up space saying, let’s drive our country around these values rather than just the economy.

Morag Gamble:
Can you tell us a bit more about that? Like how do people engage with that and what kind of conversations are you having?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah, so I ran a pilot last year on the public good, where similar to how we got the nine pillars , mtalked with about 20 different groups and said, you know, assuming the public good is our kind of agreement that the things that we agree as a community are important are available and accessible where, and when they’re needed . If we think about public goods, not just as things, there can be things like public toilets , railway stations , healthcare , hospitals , the public service, but also connections, you know, family time, culture, faith, like what have we thought about that as a public good. Then frameworks like democracy, safe climate, democracy, the justice system. So really part of the project is pushing out what we might think of the public good , and ask people what do you want available to you and your communities? And, again, the answers are things, housing comes up number one. Even across people with very secure housing. Housing, healthcare, education, access to nature and the internet, I think we’re the top five. Um, but very quickly I then heard people say, well, actually I want a place where the coffee is free, where I can participate in community without financial transaction. Where I can contribute to my community at a local level and at the much higher governance level of not just voting every three years, but I want a say on how this country is run. And it really hammered home to me that all the kind of campaign work that goes on, the single biggest thing we can do is build that community. And as we do that work, build the community because the community is the whole point. That’s why anyone wants to do anything. So kind of a reminder of community’s infrastructure for the change we need.

Morag Gamble:
Interesting take on, we’re thinking about activism that actually building community and caring and loving and creating those sort of spaces is a very powerful form of activism for the kind of world that we want.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yes! If we can connect them. Imagine if the CEO Green Peace or ACF got up and said, you know, the work we are doing is for the public good, we’re on the same team as you who is running a small community library like that is the public good. We are allies. We are comrades whatever language works for anyone, but you know, like we do this together and a local community library enables the bigger work of Greenpeace or ACF. And I think they’re starting to use that. So part of that project there is how do we push an agenda, but isn’t pushed by Australia reMADE. It’s created by the community, but we just help hold a space for it to be created.

Morag Gamble:
How is that bridge happening between the big organizations and the individual communities and even governments to have these collective conversation for the public good. Where does that, where is that thread happening?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah, so that’s, that’s the project I’m running at the moment. We’ve been inviting people. We’ve started with kind of networks so for example group refugee voices is participating in the united church is participating. Some of the neighborhood houses are participating. So that’s just some of them. And they are going to be running these conversations on the public grid with their communities and thet run three in a year and the first conversation will be, what public goods do you want available to you in your community? The older facilitators are then going to come together with me and we’re going to set the agenda for the next conversation. We’ll do the same for the third conversation. And part of this is set up so that we don’t operate in silos anymore. So that we’re starting to talk to each other. Oh, the refugee communities really saying this, how does the work that the environment groups are doing either actively support it , or at least not getting away , you know , at the very least remove any friction of what one group might accidentally be undermining the work and other . Um , and if we take up space with a shared language, and that doesn’t mean a shared hashtag or shared slogan, but a shared way of speaking about the world. We hope that will push the Overton window really. And in terms of how that connects to some of these big groups. Partly they’re on our secretariat. So we’re feeding that partly they’ll participate I mean through the memos. That’s where a lot of this information is shared, but if anyone does want to get involved, we can, I’m sure you’re happy to put the link because we’re looking for community members to run it. You know, we talk about being a network of civil society leaders that could be a CEO, or it could be whoever down the street leadership president all sorts of forms . Yeah .

Morag Gamble:
Mm fantastic. So I was, when I was looking through your website and all the different ways that you’re operating, I spotted your reMAKER U. Can you tell us a bit about what that is?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Yeah. So, I mean, that’s partly where we’re trying to, there’s the beautiful vision stuff. There’s a community engagement stuff. And then the reMAKER U is where we’re trying to put all the kind of deep thinking that goes on the behind the scenes unraveling really what is going on in the world and how do we get there and what are the pieces that are sort of causing this issue? Then what are the building blocks for remaking? So we sort of have unraveling and remake them . And partly because, because everybody in the activist space or in the world building space is so very busy, mostly fighting spot fires. We noticed that when COVID hit, you know, people were saying, oh, we’ve got this moment. What should we fill it with ? Then we weren’t ready as a collective. There were a few things that people could put forward, but our deep analysis and understanding of the systems change, just wasn’t there. So reMAKER U is a bit of a mix of practical resources for how to apply this thinking. And then some of our thinking as it evolves. So the public good, we’ve got a paper on the public good, which is, has evolved. You know, I look at it, I wrote it a year ago and I’m looking at it now, and we’ve done all this work and it’s different, but it’s also making transparent thinking. So for people who really like to say, yeah but what’s the theory behind what you’re doing, but that’s , that’s what it’s for. And it’s one of those things where we had a bit more money. We’d love to make it really, really sing and be a course that people could go through. But at the moment, it’s such a small operation.

Morag Gamble:
So I’m wondering whether this kind of work that you’re doing here in Australia, you’re seeing different communities in other parts of the world doing? Have you got any sort of relationships, I suppose, with groups in other parts? Like, where are you seeing that work happening?

Dr. Millie Rooney:
I mean, this was really inspired by a Canadian group called Leap. So they had The Leap manifesto, it was Naomi Klein , had set up again a beautiful vision, beautiful artwork. So that was The Leap m anifesto then they became an organization called The Leap, which was doing a lot of this work and particularly, a lot of mobilizing around the green new deal proposal and l istening to a lot of communities. And they are a much bigger organization than us, but they h ave recently had to close because haven’t got any funding. Yeah. They did amazing work in this kind of space. And there’s another group, in the UK called Compass. They do similar stuff to us, but they work much more closely with politicians and I think the labor party particular. So it’s been interesting to look around t heir groups that do a lot of t heir background thinking, deep dive into democracy and those sorts of things. N one s eem to do what we do, which is t heir vision community deep dive, but we’re still s o very small. So it feels a bit ambitious in the face of these b ig organizations in the US a nd the UK. Y eah.

Morag Gamble:
But certainly, you don’t have to be big though. I don’t think. To be able to open up really important conversations. I think that’s something we get stuck in. I know we’ve talked about this before about how as local communities that, what we’re doing, we can feel and know that is actually a really important part of that bigger picture. It’s kind of that whole sort of systems nesting and that what we do locally, kind of myceliates. I wonder, what you’ve seen as well, you know, what are people picking up about what you’re doing and taking to other places. You probably don’t even know, because it’s probably just being picked up and taken and who knows where it’s, where it’s headed.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
And I think part of the way that we work, which is quite different, it’s a bit of a radical trust model of like , you can take our work, you can use it. I often don’t know where it goes. And then someone will tell me, oh, no, no, not a whole thing around, oh, whoa, pretty nice to know because it’s hard to do this work when you. We’re talking about bringing down neoliberalism changing the world in a radical way. I’m not going to do that on my own. And I’m also not going to see the impact that this work has it’s not like stopping a coal mine. So b ut there are beautiful ways that it pops up. You know, I know someone who is considered a pretty ha rd-ass c ampaigner a n d she said to me, oh yeah, when I’m really di stressed. I pull out the vision and I read it and I carry on, you know? So there’s that kind of, y eah. Then other bigger organizations. have said, oh y eah, we read a remake of memo and it shifted how we think about X, Y, Z. I mean, I think so much about our role really is just throwing something out there saying this is possible. This isn’t a, you know, like this is an amazing example in the world of democracy. This is why it links to the pillars. You know, you can be part of this community. Like you are connected. And I think that’s particularly in this very isolating world. We’ve moved on from bring your own, keep up that’s your job. We’re being told. The problem is enormous. Yo u k eep cu p w ill never help. Oh but we don’t have anything to , you know, an d s o being connected to a bigger story, I think, is really essential for giving people the courage and heart to start small and trust th at, like you just got to start really. Yeah.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. That’s, that’s really beautiful. I wanted to ask you, what are the things that are inspiring you at the moment? What are you reading or what are you watching. Where is your inspiration and your fuel to keep you going.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Three instant things. I mean, I’ve really loved watching their voices for movement. T he independent candidates movement kind of t ake off. T here obviously there’s been nine years, I think in the electorate of C athy M cGowan and Helen H aines and being totally inspired by that story. Not so much ca use t h eir i ndependence, I’m not for against pa rties p articularly, but the way that that community said, we ‘re n ot having good conversations around democracy, let’s see what’s possible. They had fun. They had idea of radical tr ust. So people were trusted to spend money on c a mpaign hubs the way they wanted to, and wa s s ort of a bit shocked when they were told, you know, go forth. It’s you do it, u m , a nd re ally i ntegrity an d y o ur v alues and integrity wh en i t c a me t o that. And not only did that change the conversation in Indi, i t’s enabled Indi to flourish in a whole lot of other ways and do things no one thought was possible. That also inspired a whole lot. I think at the moment there might be 70 or 80 voices. No maybe I might have that wrong, but people from at least 70 or 80 electorates are interested in this and there was a f orum run recently where people attended from those electorates and ‘ve been calling them amateur yes people lik e pe ople who don’t know exactly how politics works, but who ‘ve ju st said, okay, we can be better and I’ll do it better. And I’l l ju st, I think that’s so exciting what’s going on. A similar model with the friends of the story in Vi ctoria and the anti-fracking campaign again, it was people who started off talking around kitchen tables who were supported by Friends of The Earth, but whose voices were giv en a hundred percent freedom to run the campaign the way that they did across real difference. People with very different political views. Again, it was about fun. It was about making it relevant locally. I think, and building community, giving people the whole point of community. I’m shocked that people I know don’t know those stories because they’re what we want, that’s what we’re working for. And then they’re really exciting. Then the book that I’ve been reading has re ally made me enthusiastic is Rob Hopkins, F ro m Wh at Is to What If because I love his story about getting cardboard boxes to build the community that you want and then that becoming reality. And I’m ver y ke en to try that.

Morag Gamble:
I had a go at that a couple of years ago with one of the nature kids programs, or it was sort of a youth program. And we had had this wonderful program that I’d like to do it with adults too. That would be fun.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Imagination and play. I’m really shocked that we so much in the activists, progressive, whatever movement is about being earnest and making sure you don’t say the wrong thing. And if you’re sort of having fun, well, maybe you should feel a bit guilty because there’s people suffering in the world. And I think we need to bring that back. You know , I think we need to embed that as part of the world that we want. And that’s, it’s not only fun. It’s clever, it’s actually clever to be imagine to play.

Morag Gamble:
The little points that I’ve written down here was that I picked up, there’s like a common thread coming through was that you started talking about wild thinking and there’s a playfulness and that we can do this and have fun. And that people want to feel that kind of the connectedness and alive and that, yeah. I mean, I’m also prone to becoming very earnest. I’m known in my family as being the least funny one. Mummy doesn’t tell jokes. I try to, I’m learning, I’m learning, but the wild thinking and the stepping outside of the zones and what we’re used to and what we think are kind of okay space to be in. And often that’s where the most interesting, amazing, and engaging and fun things that are going to attract more people to come and get involved in it. And I’ve kind of known this from being involved with city farms and all things are that, how do you, how do you get people to come and be part of this project. You put on a party and you have a big feast and you know, and the music comes and it’s people from the local community, like, for example, last night, sorry, a couple of nights ago, just up the road from me , we were doing a fundraiser for refugees and we invited a whole lot of local musicians to come in and play. And there was, yeah, beautiful feast, home-cooked and homegrown food. Local artists were donating prizes that could be raffled off. And then there was a huge, beautiful party. And it was all about supporting a refugee young man who we work with who’s decided to use music and song as his way of bringing attention to what’s going on and to rippling out positive stuff. And I just stood back at a moment there and looked at what was happening and thought, wow, this is amazing. Absolutely uplifting for the community. People felt connected, felt they were doing something really important, and they could do it in a way that they could come out from under the rock where everyone’s been for awhile and celebrate together and celebrate with purpose and celebrate with meaning and feeling like they were able to not just have fun and frolic, but have fun in a way that they were giving back to the most vulnerable people in the world.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
I mean, I think there’s also, you know, sounds weird like a moral obligation to have a good time cause I think that everything that we talk about of like, well, if we don’t act on this climate change is going to get us and it’s going to be terrible. Like I’m new to that idea. I don’t want to know it, you know, and I feel like if the future has been stolen, we cannot steal the present as well. And so I think that making the present alive is an important kind of moral act really. And again, like clever, you know, there’s another one of my favorite examples is I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s called CIRCA Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and they don’t exist anymore, but they had huge success as these bunch of clowns. I can’t remember the protest , but they managed to breakthrough four walls of riot police purely because the police were laughing so hard that the clowns just walked through. You know, they just, they just and then there was an army group where they were signing up people to join the army and all the clowns turned up and started pulling everything out of their pockets. And eventually the army had to just give up and the clowns set up their own recruitment booth and you know, like this really serious stuff that would achieved through that sort of shock and delight, you know , surprise that brings to light.

Morag Gamble:
It’s shifts from that . It shifts from the fight, doesn’t it, when the same thing that when that we know that needs addressing that, rather than fighting it head on, we become very clever and creative with how we address it in an add in a sort of new perspectives and new ways of seeing it. And it kind of opens up that possibility and you know, something that’s on my mind a lot at the moment is peace . I mean, I started my whole journey as a teenager, as a peace activist. When I look around the world now, all I’ve got to do is sort of open up any news. And all I see is war and conflict. I talk to people in various different parts of the world, you know, Armenia and everywhere. And I just hear these stories of disaster and finding different ways that we can solve problems. Different ways that we can communicate. You know, it’s such it , I don’t know if you, what, what’s your take on how you see this? What is peace? That’s a huge question, but how do we even begin to start to know with this climate change, but then because of climate change, because of all the stretches everywhere between like the fractures are opening wider and wider between different groups, creating greater levels of conflict. So this kind of work of coming together. I just want to share one little example. Recently one of the refugee settlements, the permaculture teacher was doing work with the refugees and sharing the stories and the wonderful things were happening. And they got a call from the office of prime minister who kind of oversees the camp and he thought , oh my gosh, you know, they’re going to tell me off. Cause as a refugee, you don’t have that many rights. So he went to the office and they said to him, so R icky, why is it that you are only doing this work for refugees? What about the host community? T hey’re just as needy as well. And he j ust went sure. So he approached me and we w ere managed to get some funding so that he could run a women’s program that brought together women from the host community, with women from the refugee community who a re from various different places. T hey’d never spoken to before m en. Many of them been there for over a decade. This group was afraid or annoyed at that group. And this group didn’t know how to even like get in touch with them. They came together, they spent two weeks together. They were a little bit sort of uncertain, of course, uncertain to start with, but then they started helping garden over here together and set up a garden over here. They started exchanging seeds. They started exchanging food. They would cook up a field meal over here and t hen cook up a meal. And the kids s tarted t o play i n t he, and the h usband started to meet. And then there’s this film that he made at the end saying in this course, we learned a thousand different ways to love one another. And we want this to continue. Now, t hat was just this simple little program, but held in a way that brought them together to have fun with one another to do stuff together. I know that that’s not g oing t o solve the world’s problems, but, you know, as you were saying before, it’s something about what happens at that community level when we feel cared for when we feel a space where we can care. And it’s, anyway, it’s a big question that I’m sitting with at the moment, you know, like we have the layer of climate and t hen we have the layer of war that’s going on everywhere t hat, and p eople fleeing in mass numbers around the world. It’s so it’s such a challenging thing to take in and then to be able to continue to do the local work, but finding a way to do the local work that connects with that.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
And I think it’s something that I really do struggle with because there are so much of what we’re talking about at Australia reMADE are laid with vision ramparts the possibility. You can talk about the hard stuff, but looking at what’s going on in the world, there are some things happening where you can’t put a positive spin on it and it feels sort of wrong to be like, this terrible thing is happening, but we could do, you know, like , uh , the , there is a tension there. And I think part of what I try and do with that is say, imagine if this wasn’t a case and try and do that, but also how you connect that local. So in my local community, we’ve got a School Hobart sustainable community. And it’s been around for about 12 years. And it started off as a bit of a transition town type thing. The community has done lots of great things and bought a whole lot of solar panels that I’ve run, you know, how to heat your home days all of those sorts of things, but they’re primarily around, it’s a pretty wealthy community. How can we buy our way out of this mess more or less together, but still , still how we buy it. And we’re about to do a visioning activity here where we’re going to try and throw in a much bigger thing, like where beautiful, wealthy community really , we’ve got the highest number of scientists in the country. I think that we used to have the highest number of domestic solar panels in the country. All these sorts of things, but what if we start to think about our local community, you know, what can we do for us? Sure. But how do we do it in a way that addresses the big systemic challenges because people are feeling kind of powerless. So one of the proposals I’ve been suggesting as well. In this valley, I reckon we’ve probably got about $400 million in mortgages, superannuation, insurance, that sort of stuff. Half of that is probably moveable . If, what if we divested from our from fossil fuels in this community. The university they’d be trying to push the university to divest and that’s only 40 million. So, you know, 200 million, 40 million, we could, we could do something. The geography is such that we could say, let’s lock the gate basically on fossil fuel investments in this community. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got $15 or $15,000 or a hundred feet. Like it’s a collective effort, but what if we didn’t stop there? What if we said, part of what we want to do is also think about how do we create the world that we want? Well, actually the Northwest they’re really struggling financially, much more conservative vote, much less action on climate change. What if we made a deal with a bank and said, if we can move X dollars, can you invest a percentage of that in renewable energy, community care and something, something up in the Northwest? Like what if we used our power as a relatively wealthy community to do something good in the world, but we made it work extra hard on other issues. Like we could totally do that. So I think that’s, again, that’s a small group of five people doing localized things that also involve having pancakes in the park or, but we’ve built the infrastructure now to be able to launch off, to think about what power do we have that we can, but it’s again, it’s fascinating how people struggle to see how those connections could be made and how often people are like, oh yeah. Buy a new bike path would be great. So I think again, we just have to keep practicing.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. I think you’re right. I think we just, we do need to keep practicing and it’s and the community infrastructure, what are you saying that invisible infrastructure of the connections between people to make the space for these conversations to happen is where we will see that shift and once people feel in a way I guess, safe and that they have the freedom to think together, then we’ll start to see it more, thinking like that. Because like you’re saying the potential is enormous. That’s a brilliant idea. Absolutely!

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Potential and the link to power. So they’re not just recognizing where we have power and actually reclaiming some of the power we’ve kind of outsourced because community stuff is fantastic. It’s a thing close to my heart and we need to connect it to big systemic, powerful change.

Morag Gamble:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well that was a very jam packed conversation, full of wonderful, wonderful approaches. I mean, I think the key thing that I really want to take away from that is that it is about, it is about connection and it’s about practicing connection and it’s about being playful with that and holding that bigger picture and being part of creating that bigger picture. I know. Is there any sort of final way that you’d like to encourage people to get involved in this kind of work? Like where can they find out about you? What way can they engage with the work that you’re doing and what would you like to encourage people who listen to this to go out and do.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Well? You know, go to our website, join our mailing list and see the projects we’ve got done . I mean, I think it’s that thing of, you know, we talked about the idea of playing around, you know, we’ve got financial c apitalist p ower, we’ve got social capital, b ut we’ve also got courage capital and kindness capital, and we can access them. And I think I feel there’s a real defiance, active defiance in that playful joy vision stuff that we can use. And really anyone is welcome to join us. I will reply to your email and this is something we have to do together. And Australia reMADE is holding a space for this, but we don’t own the word. We really invite everybody. Anyone. There is a space for you i n this. Yeah.

Morag Gamble:
Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with me today, Millie. Lovely to have you on the show and I’m feeling totally inspired. I sort of hope whole thread of different investigations that I’m going to go off and do after this. Thank you.

Dr. Millie Rooney:
Thank you so much.

Morag Gamble:Alright. Lovely to see you again. So that’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining us. Head on over to my YouTube channel, the link’s below, and then you’ll be able to watch this conversation, but also make sure that you subscribe, because that way we notified of all new films that come out and also you’ll get notified of all the new interviews and conversations that come out. So thanks again for joining us, have a great week and I’ll see you next time.