Understanding Relational Values in Conservation Practices

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Dinda Prayunita is currently pursuing an MSc in Sustainable Development at KU Leuven. She has extensive experience in forestry and biodiversity conservation and has become increasingly interested in the social science domain to achieve better conservation outcomes. To pursue this interest, she recently organised a webinar on more holistic ways of doing conservation that featured Cobra Collective member Julia Jung. As her interests are highly aligned with the Cobra Collective approach, we invited Dinda to share some reflections on her … Read More

Radically hopeful cooperation in community food-growing

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In March-April 2022 the course on ‘Visual Storytelling about Community Food-Growing’ held its third and final instalment. Six participants of the cohort made engaging video stories; many more exchanged their experiences in the discussions.  This blog gives an overview of the insights gained, before introducing each story.  The spring 2022 video stories had resonances with many from the first two cohorts of the course, namely: During the Covid-19 pandemic, people were seeking ways to overcome social isolation in ways that … Read More

The Exquisite Corpse Process: Expanding our participatory art-based methods

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Since joining the Cobra Collective in Oct 2020, I have been participating in a number of Cobra Collective projects and developing my own research focus within the Collective by expanding our array of participatory creative methods. Now, I’m very excited to share the outputs from my first independent research project in collaboration with Ocean Networks Canada – the Exquisite Corpse process, a group-based multi-week asynchronous art project. The idea behind the Exquisite Corpse process is to use art and creative … Read More

Connecting Wetlands – Celebrating World Wetlands Day 2022

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This year, we are celebrating World Wetlands Day with a story spanning three different and diverse wetlands connected through the SMART project. In this project, we are co-designing flood monitoring tools to be used for wetland management together with communities and diverse actors in Guyana, Sri Lanka and Scotland. Our three sites, the North Rupununi wetlands in Guyana, the Colombo urban wetlands in Sri Lanka and Firth of Forth river and estuary in Scotland are incredibly different. Yet, they are … Read More

Digital Storytelling about Community Food Growing Project: Second Insights from autumn 2021 course

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In early 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted community food growing initiatives, while also revealing and intensifying the stark social inequalities in our society. People’s social isolation prompted even greater interest in community food growing initiatives. In the ‘Grassroots Visual Storytelling about Community Food-Growing’ course, which began in spring 2021, participants gained skills in digital visual storytelling, while exploring and promoting their experiences of community food growing during the Covid-19 pandemic. From the spring 2021 films, the First Insights page described … Read More

“We feel at home” at the Calthorpe: Community garden volunteers share their experiences

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“We feel at home here” was a common view of community garden volunteers at an event hosted by the Calthorpe Community Garden, central London. This was the September Spotlight Garden of Urban Harvest 2021, organized by the Capital Growth programme. Held on Friday 24th September, the event began by screening short films made by participants in various community-gardens (see our project below). The films stimulated a discussion about volunteers’ experiences, especially getting to know different kinds of people, sharing their skills, … Read More

Using Storytelling to Engage in Complex Social-Ecological Challenges

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How do we navigate our way through complex challenges and how can storytelling support this process? Julieta Vigliano Relva and Cobra Collective member, Julia Jung, have recently published an article that explores this key question. This blog post is a brief summary of the article which can be freely accessed here. Our current times are complicated and contradictory. The impacts and need to address the climate and biodiversity crisis are becoming increasingly more clear and urgent with unprecedented environmental disasters … Read More

Community food growing helps build the future differently: An invitation to tell your visual story

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Have you experienced benefits in your everyday life through community food growing activities? Would you like to learn how to produce visual stories to share your experiences? Can you help us investigate how community food growing has helped individuals and communities cope with the Covid-19 crisis? Then we want to hear from you! Starting in September 2021, we are recruiting a second cohort of participants for a collaborative digital-storytelling project organised in partnership with The Open University, Sustain and RISC. … Read More

Digital Storytelling about Community Food Growing Project: First Insights

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Our first engagement process has produced some exciting visual stories, click here to view them. Over the past decade or more, community food growing has attracted more people, inspired cultivation skills and helped to build a sense of place and strengthen relationships. People have shared their knowledge about cultivating and preparing healthy food, thus contributing to a wider food culture. There has been ever-greater evidence that people gain many benefits including emotional well-being, self-confidence, cooperative relationships and mutual learning. In … Read More

New online course for strengthening community mental health resilience

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The Cobra Collective is proud to announce the launch of its freely available OpenLearnCreate course on community mental health resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to increasing demand for mental health services while also highlighting the key role that mental health plays in our daily lives. “Good mental health is absolutely fundamental to overall health and well-being,” as expressed by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the associated economic recession, … Read More

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