Groups: Keeping the Momentum Going
How to start or keep your group project going without burning yourself out
We can imagine a successful group project with lots of people involved, lots of gardens planted out, and the activity drawing more and more of the community into planting and into joining your group. Everyone doing their bit to make the dream a reality.
But how do we get there?
It doesn’t just happen by chance although from the outside it might look like things just evolved.
And it doesn’t happen by group leaders putting in an enormous amount of work organising, inviting, reminding for lots of individual events. When projects rely on one or two leaders to keep driving things, those leaders burn out, or give up and move on.
It can happen by people working together - steadily and consistently - with a shared purpose, making incremental progress, and doing the doable with each and every step.
Here are some tips
Aim for frequent, low-risk events that all move in the direction of your end goal.
Look for events and projects that give the maximum benefits for the least effort and resources.
Remember to leverage by building on previous events and extracting every bit of juice you can out of each activity.
Some easy events to get your project going could be:
A group visit to one of your member’s verge gardens to let them talk about the plants and how the verge fits the council guidelines. When you have enough verges, you could do a walking trail.
A group visit to a member’s verge yet to be converted. Discuss the issues to be considered - who else uses the space, existing street trees, what plants might suit and why, the context of the neighbourhood.
Workshops about some aspect of verge gardening - use the free posts in Understanding the Space for some talking points.
Visits to your local community nursery so people know where to source their tubestock and to reinforce the idea that we use local native plants.
ACF Community Brisbane Northside started their project with an event at their local community nursery, combining a short workshop on the users of the space with a tour of the nursery. They gave away some free tubestock plants suitable for verges at the end.
Leverage everything:
Encourage all your members to post their verge story on the Shady Lanes website, on their individual or your group Substack, and share those stories on social media during quiet times. A steady trickle is better for maintaining momentum than a deluge followed by silence.
Take photos or videos of all your events and share them too.
Keep an eye out for members who might not be able to provide a verge garden but have photography, video, or writing skills to help out.
Link the events with a narrative that threads through your project. This month we are visiting a finished verge garden to give us ideas for the next garden design.
See more on leveraging here
Work with other groups:
If you run combined events with other groups (information events, working bees, etc) you get all the benefits of holding an event but with much less work and fewer resources needed. Because you all promote the event, you’ll also reach more people.
Take note of the people in your group who are members of other groups or organisations. These boundary-spanners can bring you surprising opportunities.
Please share your ideas with other readers running or starting group activities in the comments below. What’s worked for you? What experiences have you learned from?
Here's an example. During the Banyo Pilot project there were several working bees. Instead of the Banyo group just doing it themselves, they brought in the local ACF community group to help run and publicise it to their members. They also invited a community group in a nearby suburb that is just starting their group verge project to come and plant or to just drop in and have a look at some established verge gardens and talk to the Banyo residents about their experiences.