At our recent Preston event, one person said to me that he’d never feel involved if we kept using that language; he felt like we’d been using a dictionary which the outside world wouldn’t understand either. And that would limit NatCAN’s appeal...

It’s tricky because some of the long words save a load of sentences: “neo-liberalism”, for starters. But if you don’t know a) what they mean or b) what the speaker thinks they mean, it’s a bit like walking into GCSE Latin half-way…

I've been teasing out the questions about CD and Asset Based CD and Community Organising as if it mattered to anyone except national organisations flying the flag for one of these approaches. Clearly, as a member of CDX it has a lot of impact on us, not least because the Govt had such a downer on CD before they "arranged" to get into power, perceiving CD as both left wing (radical CD) and entrenched in New Labour top-down programmes (managerial). So damned if you do, damned if you don't.…

Tyranny of Structurelessness http://www.midiaindependente.org/media/2001/07/203242.pdf

This is thinking in progress, for all of NatCAN to debate and toss around. But it got me out of bed at 5am on a Saturday bloody morning to get it out of my stupid head and onto a screen, so here you go....

At NatCAN conference this week, a number of people lit up when Jo…

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow”. (Ecclesiastes 1:18) 

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” .(Antonio Gramsci,Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will”. (Antonio Gramsci, Letter from Prison , 19 December…