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“What motivates us to act is a sense of possibility within uncertainty – that the outcome is not yet fully determined and our actions may matter in shaping it. This is all that hope is, and we are all teeming with it, all the time, in small ways.”
—Rebecca Solnit, Why Climate Despair is a Luxury
This open source dashboard and wiki celebrates and synthesises three years of collective exploration around what Doughnut Economics could mean for Ladywood, Birmingham UK. Together with neighbours of all ages, researchers, partners and visionaries we launched the Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait at the Ladywood Launch Event in October 2022 and are excited to now make this work available as a living interactive document that will continue to be developed and iterated over the short and longer term.
The Neighbourhood Doughnut Portrait is a synthesis of everything we’ve discovered so far: a community and data snapshot of our work and of the neighbourhood which we are building for the long term, co-created together with our neighbours and partners. ****It asks big questions, acts as a compass, and helps us navigate this journey together. It also enables us to see an overall picture of ourselves: the challenges, opportunities, beauty, joy, dreams, data and stories of our place. This helps us ask: Who are we? What do we need to transform? Who could we be? What bold goals are we working towards?
Ongoing collaboration as a neighbourhood in Ladywood is part of our wider and emerging mission focusing on the civic infrastructure that is required for neighbourhoods to be at the forefront of their climate transitions.
Today we are seeing how multiple globalised systems are entangled in ways that have cascading impacts on society and the natural world we rely on. This global ‘polycrisis’ affects every aspect of our lives, and is experienced most viscerally as multiple impacts begin to converge on the places we live, play, eat, rest, learn, love, heal and grow.
It’s our homes, streets and neighbourhoods that bring together the big picture, our bold goals, expansive dreams, immediate everyday challenges and opportunities, as well as the experience of crisis, mutual aid, and real barriers to overcome, which manifest in a way that we can interact with, share in and feel the effects of as neighbours.
“Outdated theories have permitted a world in which extreme poverty persists, while the wealth of the super rich grows, year on year. And its blind spots have led to policies that are degrading the living world on a scale that threatens all of our futures.” ** —Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist