Plyometrics for Runners - what to know and how to apply them

This is the urban political. The podcast on Urban Theory, Research and Activism. Thank you so much for joining us for our conversation today. This podcast has been developed as part of the Change Stories project. Change Stories is an international research partnership that aims to spark dialogue and learning through storytelling about urban change that supports sustainability, health and well-being for all residents. In this project, we explore how urban grassroots movements, such as the Take Back the City campaign in Belfast, are creating spaces for sanctuary in the city, while resisting infrastructural and colonial forms of violence. Our work also contributes to the growing literature, an insurgent planning and collectivist approaches to urbanism, campaigns and organizing. We hope to explore envisions that can receive futures with the like to introduce yourself, Daisy. Thanks. My name is Dezi Donnelly. I'm currently a member of the Ravoltek Cooperative, which is a cooperative-supportant social movements to use tech to affect change more effectively. Previous to that, I had worked with PPR for about 16 years. I was a member of the first construction staff in cohort at PPR, and I left it around 2022. Thank you. Sean? Hey, it's Dave. Thanks very much for getting this on the podcast. I'm Sean McBride, and I'm a community organizer with the Gargian Fobo project, which is the rebbe of PPR, kind of thing. Basically concentrate on how to get people involved in food, climate, energy. The initiative is in the rural areas and started with Gargian and Fobo and West Bell Fast, this used community garden. I said, I previously worked for PPR with Household and Dezi and everybody else in PPR, on housing, assailant, unemployment, right to work. And before that, trade union organizer, before that various other different sort of community roles and have been involved in the Irish language movement for many years, might have screwed in through the Irish language school system, so that was natural enough to. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Zadea. My name is Zosul Muhammed. I am also an organizer at PPR, worked with both Sean and Dezi. I worked with different combat and tech bugs in the city and lived the bank and economy mainly organizing with refugees and asylum seekers. And I'm also a refugee from Sudan, came to Bell Fast like nine years ago and before coming to Bell Fast, I was also involved in activism in Sudan. I grew up in, and there is a regime of Muslim brothers and army, Dictator, I spent most of these things at, and came to Bell Fast to continue to, after coming to Bell Fast, I also started with other colleagues of mine, Anaka Women's Collective, which is a collective for women mainly from the refugees and asylum seeking community, but also open to all women in the community. Amazing. Dezi, the city of Bell Fast is conventionally described as a divided city, marked by residential segregation, peaceful, sectarian conflict, and competing communal identities. Much policy, academic and media discourses frame Bell Fast as an arena of two communities, or just the unionist, is taken as a public special and political, such a narrative obscures the deep political processes used the city's special order. In your view, what is the best framework to understand current, structuring of urban space and land governance in Bell Fast? It's political and social dimension, and its impact on the contemporary land and housing inequality. Can I start off with an easy question? I want to allow you a lot of time to explore and reflect. There's two dimensions, I think, to Bell Fast segregation or the division within the city. One would be class-based. That probably wouldn't be too different from other western countries. And then we have the sectarian division that exists in the city, and I suppose to understand that, you'd have to go back to examine how the city was divided. The division became more and back in the 1960s, when there were pogroms of the city. When Moab went out of communities, particularly in areas like West Bell Fast and North Bell Fast, when you think of Bombay Street, that kind of iconic Bombay Street, that was one of the catalysts behind the emergence of the provisional area. But the division was created through pogrom, and then during the conflict during the war, that division was institutionalized whenever the Peace Walls or they called them the barricades, that kind of litter across working class areas of Bell Fast were given an architecture. So physical walls were built to maintain security between different communities. And to a large extent at that time, people wanted those walls up. People wanted the walls up in the sense that it did provide some element of, well, some protection, to some degree from Moab violence. However, then you have to look at how far we are now. After the good Friday agreement, the Peace Agreement almost 30 years after that. And very, very few of those walls have been taken down. And why that is, you have to look at the Bell Fast population. And what interests are there to keep those walls and to keep the city divided? You know, in Bell Fast chain in the last 10 to 15 years, once a vast kind of unionist control, the kind of symbolism of the one-party state in terms of unionist control has dweathered. It's no longer politically a unionist majority city. There's certainly more diverse polity in the sense that you will have everything region from Green Party to Sinn Feind of people before profit. You know, you have a kind of a diverse political landscape, which now holds a majority within the city. But what goes alongside with that is declining power. And that power is also kind of manifests itself in what would be, previous when you talked about this kind of sectarian division in the city. Loyalist communities, urban working class, communities are increasingly becoming one more elderly, and number two, more depopulated, which then has an implication not only in terms of votes for unionist political parties, but it also then feeds into what do you do whenever you have a changing population but a stagnant around those areas. Now, a solution to the housing crisis in class areas is to secure land or to use publicly available land to build new housing. But because of this sectarian division in the land, there's a block and there's essentially a veto that says we can't build over there because we can't, that is considered to be the, well, for one, of a better term, ownership of one community, not the other community. So in some ways, that suits political interests that want to repopulate those areas, that want to kind of engineer or bring back their power base in certain communities, but it absolutely runs contrary to human rights. And the thing is because the housing crisis is so acute, you will get families moving into these communities, reds from Loyalist families there. And I think it's, it's a, it's a, a minority with communities that are exercised and violent control over these communities that are able to put out families who happen to be from a Catholic background or who happen to be from an immigrant background or who happen to be from a non-white background in a attempt to entrench single identity community. And keep the kind of political makeup and the demography of, of Belfast what it was back in the 1970s. I think you said a very powerful introduction to our conversation. Sean Belfast Peace Walls, Interface Barriers and Signgregated Neighborhoods are often explained as the legacy. Yet when we passed to other colonial city agers, Cape Town, Mumbai, PPR 2016 report showed that political will, rather than land availability or funding, is the primary barrier to addressing housing inequality and homelessness. Why do you think housing continues to function as a political tool in Belfast? Used both to control land and to divide communities? Desi sent it up well in terms of the contacts for a divided city and a walled city and a city with barricades, warehouse and fits and that is the primary element of the patchwork quilt. And in the early year, it became obvious very quick in North Belfast who were honest, had a direct correlation in the main of powerful unionist political figures with their credits, their votes. So if PPR is built upon the premise of a contracting population and this is sort of the story of Ireland, it's also the story of all those other countries that the union where you basically have a contracting or a minority population trying to exert control over a majority. Like the story of Dublin is that story. The story of all the colonial institutions that emerge from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of the politic of Ireland, women and kids who are living in hostels for e-geneers and years on end, less than a hundred yards on available housing. The men, but the housing on the other wall, are less away from available land, available property, available resources. But that resource is deemed to be their geft, their purview. Gurdwood was the perfect example of that. And Gurdwood is essentially a macrocosm of the state, massive public resource. Clearly had a potential to solve long-standing housing crisis with deep inequalities, structural inequalities. Instead of being built and allocated to be a store need and meet need where it was at, it was turned into another one of the money in the piece project, which essentially is a way to often project, establish to do anything but rattle the status quo. And we seen that time and time again, took that powerful dynamic, which was consented to by most powerful people. You know, it was consented to the Gurdwood deal, it was not a union project. It was consented to by a nationalist posse by the middle of the road politicians, by the, you know, there was no political voice, sir, that was going against that deal, that deal was done by all. And it was the price of peace, if you imagine, to keep these women homeless. So they mapped out where the land was, where the money was, where the need was, and they developed their own agenda around that. And that was really, I think, a really critical factor in taking the promises of the Gurd Ferry Agreement and turning them into actual tools for people on the ground, where you're not waiting for the powers of B to tell you where the answers are going to come from. You're going to season them yourself. And that imaginative approach has evolved in the, what's the stuff that Tosul and families are involved in the day. Our politics has matured enough, the opportunity of a multi-culture hood and the class where homes are required. It fits the steel loan, sectoral tax of the past, but the jury's out. They look too good at the minute, but the opportunities the fixer wagon have to want to. It raises an important question about how peace is sometimes framed as maintaining the status quo rather than of inequality. With over 13,500 households in Belfast alone waiting for housing. Child homelessness is clearly a major concern in Belfast. Children are living in homeless situation, which can have significant adverse impacts on their education, health and future outcomes. Tava Solin, in your view, what are the primary systemic and structural causes of homelessness in Belfast today? And how is your campaign addressing these challenges in practice? Looking at homelessness, to me, the primary reasons are as simple as that people who have the power to change this, to solve the housing crisis, don't really care about people. At this last year, you'll find that more than 40 million pounds was spent on temporary accommodation. This was bad. It was bad so that people can live in dignity or in suitable accommodation. This money was bad to private landlords and to hotel owners just to keep people living in wealthy houses and houses that need repair and maintenance and completely unsuitable accommodation. If you look at the refugees and asylum seeking community, people come to the country and they join us. This temporary and emergency accommodation people living will be places where families will be moved from one place to another without asking them, without considering their life, how long they lived in a place where kids go to schools and all. In the last few years, we have been supporting families who would have lived in Belfast for years and years and then all of a sudden housing executive would be sending them to another city. Sometimes cities that are too hours away from Belfast on public transport. When you're talking about families who most of the time don't speak English, having been here long, kids can't go to school because it's far away and can't move to a closer school so you don't know if you're going to be here tomorrow or not. We're taught money that is spent and given to private landlords like Meers, Meers is a company if you know that's responsible to accommodation of asylum seekers and if you have heard news in the last couple of weeks, they got a profit like 14 million pounds profit over the threshold that the government set for public contracts so they made extra profit on this contract. When we were talking about this with the families we have been supporting because we worked with families who stayed in Meers accommodation for years and years and I was explaining to this mom about this extra profit Meers made and this is a single mom and I know that because we were supporting her from PPR and they live in the type of accommodation they're not given money but the homophys are given pounds per week per person but then this food that's provided was like she sent me photos of the food so it was like five bananas per week. So she was like how could they make all this money and then don't give me just food like something as simple as that. I think if the same money is spent and given to these private landlords, private landlords, private companies is spent properly like spend on building social houses suitable for people to live in that will be better for everyone. What we do is we campaign around different sites like Sean said, families identified, a few empty sites in Berthas and this last one we are campaigning around. My keys is publicly owned and it's in an area with the highest housing demand so it makes sense for social houses to be built there and this is what we are focusing on now like working with homeless families from different backgrounds from different communities, all of us trying to get houses there, social houses for everyone. Excellent. I would like to shift the conversation slightly. Can you tell us a bit about for example, what were the political conditions and forces that led to the emergence of PPR and how did it take shape within the broader political culture from which it inherited its organizational practices, ideological orientations and modes of mobilization? I think PPR bears the kind of mark of its founder and his McCormick. She was a kind of lifelong treating feminist. She was a secretary to the McBride Principles of Fair Employment in the 1980s which was a kind of transformer of impact on the conflict here and it from the kind of social partnership, motor practice for the trade union. She spent her presidency going around the island reaching out to various social movements, more groups of women's groups and trade union branches. I suppose, remember that PPR was kind of founded and it's always a cross-border project. It was always an all-arlin project but at the very beginning it was a coalition and it was a coalition of the trade union movement, civil liberties organization, so CHA in the North and the Irish Council civil liberties in the South. There was a community foundation in the North. There was various kind of community organizations in the South and I think it was formed in a kind of frustration as to both states on the island. In the North this was around probably 2003, 2004 and I think PPR keeps to this day is this kind of strategic impatience with where things are at. It's not a kind of an orc kind of thing but it's very much saying no it's not enough. We will not work with what it is right now. Whenever you had that kind of coalition of all these groups, we started the first kind of staff where employees were thinking what's our organizing model, how do we go about, what do we do? I think it was initially anyway and I think that some of the BDPR is that what evolves, it doesn't stay still, the organizing might have a similar value which will go into the second but it kind of reflects the personalities and the skills, yes, the inequalities that both created and fueled and sustained the conflict that they exist today. Part of the agreement was that these inequalities would have to be dealt with. So there was this technical term section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act but it basically said that the state has an obligation to tackle inequalities if it is evidence that inequalities exist. That sounds like just a administrative thing but actually the guidance behind it was fueled by participation. What it said was not only do you have to tackle that inequality but the people who are most impacted by that inequality have to be an integral part of the decision making process. So in some ways it was an attempt to kind of bypass representatives of democracy and use participative democracy to tackle inequality and poverty. Now that's the maximal kind of definition and the kind of interpretation of it that social movements could kind of use to do that. But the problem with these things that, you know, the Section 75 gets a bit of legislation that translates and have got this architecture where it's in staff with 40 to 50, every public authority has a policy officer and then all civil society now have policy officers who are equality officers, you know, charged with engaging in the system. And so then you have something, so every time a public authority needs to make a decision then it has to do something called an equality assessment, impact assessment. Suddenly this kind of transformational thing which was about kind of targeting and inequalities, generating participation so that those furthest away from the table will be involved in it becomes a matter of procedural compliance. So did they take that box there, did they take back box there and the people further not involved in the process at all? It is mostly professionalized class of policy officers. But of course, with us, it was a cycle of course, we're gonna go housing, we just figure out, need to figure out how to do it. So that's when we started organizing then it's actually in the Seven Towers in North Belfast because they said, "Well, who is furthest away from here?" When you look at Catholic inequality and housing in the North, which is systemic, it's still systemic today, who's furthest away? So we looked at women who most of them, single mothers, young women in the Seven Towers, which includes a hostel as well, and we started organizing with them. And then it was a case of, well, how do we use all of these pieces of paper and legislative commitments as organizing tools to try to put pressure on political power to deliver that as well? So the organized model I would say from that that's the kind of political context it came out of. I think it was also, we worked with community groups between PPR and community development practice and that also means that you look in the critical kind of lens through what the state does and you have to develop a robust challenge to that. Community development practice at the time was still in the mode of let's give a piece of chance. The institutions were still bedding down. Things just need to be worked through, meaning the politicians time, and we were saying, absolutely not. Now's the time where it shouldn't bed down 'cause it beds down in this, we're screwed, 'cause this is gonna be the trajectory for the next 20, 30 years, which is what happened. You know, as opposed to like, you have to go in there and kind of tear the tear up a bit and kind of be a bit of the upstarts, you know? I can't imagine the British government cared too much, really. But what you're using that framework allowed us to do was pull in rapid tours from Geneva, from Brazil, from Kenya, from South Africa. It looks like for all intensive purposes, there's an international spotlight of what's going on here and suddenly the international narrative isn't not so much look at these two-hist or communities coming together in this magnificent piece process and bed and done piece, is that what Sean said before, and what I didn't say, is what's happening is that political progress and deals for political progress is being broken on the backs of the poor. And the poor here are the ones that are being left behind. And yes, we're creating plenty of upward mobility, particularly for Catholics, you're moving out of working class communities, the middle class communities, but actually you're not changing the class and also within that, then the inequality, the religion of equality. I would like to ask you Sean, about the kind economy work that PPR does and how that translates into the Airborne Regeneration. Since PPR grounds its work in the principles of kind economy and ethical solidarity, its approach to Airborne Regeneration must also be understood through that lens. Can you tell us a bit about the idea of kind economy and how these shape model of PPRs organizing? And how do these principles influence the ethos and strategies of the campaigns, particularly in relation to Airborne Regeneration and movement building? - Another easy one, I don't know. (laughing) - I've selected carefully. (laughing) - It's simple. To explain to your listeners, what is the kind economy from PPR's perspective, but as I remember it, the kind economy campaign, remember conversations of an alpha and other organes with people who were going to be input through the home office asylum system. It's totally degraded. I mean, the hostile environment, as it was called, and as it is, it's basically obviously a racist tool to break the back of people who are being forced to flee. Climate change, war, destitution, abuse of the world, and people who are common to embrace international rights for asylum, that within the corridors of Westminster, a deeply racist kickback, I mean, you see this all over the world, you see this in the politics of America, you see this, and you always have seen that the wake over the head by the powerful, blocked out of potential to support themselves or their families through the work ban, through the marginalization, even the categorization of people in the hotel units, instead of living in communities, all those changes were all an effort to acetyl it out and asylum populace to classify them as a drain on society, and then to use them as a political tool to maintain the power of weight-private management in Westminster and weight-private management locally to put it bluntly. So when we were organising on that, the left of the bar and campaign, as it was, was about lifting the bar on asylum figures, having the capacity to go to work, to earn money. Rather than being manned, I left in a sort of economic black hole. What can our contribution be in this context? How do we evolve? So these were conversations amongst the asylum seekers, refugees, supporters, activists, you know, that kind of thing that led us, and there's a thing we do in PPR constantly, which is to map power, to do a power map, to ask yourself the question, where does the power come from, to do the thing to us, or where can we get par to make our thing happen? I'm going to start it looking around this sort of latent network that have been built in for years, and seeing a lot of agonomic power within the network. So there were businesses and there were people who were, you know, really shying people, who weren't racist white supremacists, you know what I mean? Those people, with that ethos, and that weight, and the way it manifested was a group of businesses, group of people with needs for goods and services, a group of people with skills and capacity created this, what we call the candy economy. So it was a small sort of local, bail fast-based organization effort to basically do something a bit bigger, which is break the economic backbone behind the resources policy. And it landed a lot of the other campaign and like the rate to work rate the welfare, people who are unemployed and also in the housing sphere, like homelessness is highly profitable. There are a lot of people making millions of pounds at homelessness, the vast majority of people who are officially homeless here, aren't living on the streets. They're living in a private landlord's accommodation, and the private landlord is getting welfare. They're getting housing benefit. They're making a mint, and then you've got these cluster landlord groups and bigger landlord groups. And we're all there, you know, like how many of the MLAs are landlords, and how many of the councillors actually seen one when I was walking around here today, like I had owns about 110 properties in the university area. I was asking all those questions, that's what can economy came from? The came from people saying, "Well, where's our part? Where do we have wit? Where do we have resources?" And how can we stop going with the bag and bowl to people who aren't going to their part ourselves? And then the concept of mail, like that old understanding that our community needs something, our community has the skills to deliver that something, and we may need resources that are either being extracted from our community or are beyond our community, but we're going to leverage them. So let's do it. Nah, have a rejane. Don't say it, do it. Get our people together, and let's get out of it. So those two things for me are naturally blended concepts or ideas. And I actually think are a big part of the solution to the problem we'll face in the world, as a man, that communities become more organized, more mobile-as. Something which quite fascinates me about how you recreate the concept of mail hell in Garchin of Fouball, the community garden bellfast, in bringing people to the land, bringing children to the land. And a few times, when I had the opportunity as well to join, you showed us the remaining Irish rainforest, and you explained to us that the Irish were the forest people. And I wanted to hear from you how that experience is connected to the way you understand change in city, the kind of change that you want to see in bellfast. The thing of the forest people, I can. So Ireland is. And these are things I've come to learn this last low-years working on the community garden and re-wedding projects with other people. So everything I say here is an idea that comes out of someone else's head. So Ireland is the worst country in Europe for natural free coverage. That's an accident. We've been massively exploited centuries, that pre-Christian sort of pagan singularly focused on. on high-important land, the sun, the stars and all of that. That is the harvests in moving with that rhythm. That culture has been also totally decimated, or almost completely decimated. completely decimated. So if you think about it, the Irish language, that's one element of sort of destruction or the Irish land is the other element. If you travel around Ireland, you see green fields and green mountains. And such as the shift in Biaisland in our consciousness is that Manif has found that to be beautiful. And in fact, Manif has won the NACE-Prem-Tremd lawn, much like the aristocracy would have had when they took over all the land. I'll give an example of it last weekend. We were in the Belfast Hills with the Black Mountain Rewellen group, birthed 30 to the community activists there. Some of them are on behalf of their kids, and we claimed up on loans and we planted 250 native trees. Not really different delata. You see this happening? But happy to be stuff all over the place. Except for me, it's about the connections in that project. So all of those trees were looked after. They were foraged, planted, and maintained in schools and youth clubs across the city. And you'll find that there are hundreds of people connected to just that small batch of trees. So when you take the initiative and you go back up the hills and you bring back the forest of the future by planting oak trees that'll grow for 400 years, you're doing that with an on behalf of all the kids who came to the gardens all you're in and some of the kids were up with us, who are planting them and mending them and asking themselves the questions like why don't we have trees? Where did our trees go? What's going to happen next? For me, next January are the people who will raise up, take the land back and return it to its former glory and work out a way for us all to live sort of in peace and harmony on it. That's not too happy to be for you. That's what we're talking about. Because I've been that the land with you and the kids and I've found that experience very enriching and it always makes me think about when we talk about urban change, these are the kind of changes that we don't often see. Like another change which you mentioned about the connection between the land and the language. And we now have a growing Irish speaking community in Welfast. In your view, how these growing Irish speaking community has transformed Welfast as 30 years? Well, obviously what is that we have a better population now who can raise and that isn't just as simple as being able to speak a language that isn't English. That's about again asking those questions, "Belfastia, that turned into Belfast." Does it mean as Belfast or as Belfast you mean? Or people being able to go on a journey, they're seriously asked questions about where we came from, where we are and where we're going. I think it's connected in a language as well. But it's not good enough that simply push for language. You can end up with patti nationalism. You know what I mean? You can end up with patti flag, we're in patti nonsense there. It has to be a boat class and has to be a boat social and economic rates. It has to be a boat agriolabrium and nature and climate rates and all of that stuff because the last thing I would say that those sort of pioneers of the modern Irish language movement in Belfast would want is any version of the Woodersey and Nye and the Siddles Irish Reitt talking about Ireland first people. You know that they aren't they don't do that in my view as well as emerged in the Irish language movement which is cross-cutting and embracing and multicultural and multi-platform and intersectional and all of that type of stuff. So I mean obviously I would say that I came through the Irish language school so I'm going to say something good about it as well when I say something that's all good but for me we received a revolutionary education and that's good thing and we went through revolutionary and radical processes in our education and that has churned out a lot of people who are turning their skills to the next sort of fears of that and in every room that I walk into with our activists I can find people who are fluent Irish language speakers so that's not unique to that one community and that one language but certainly there is something and my business has been done there that's turning out what I believe to be a good caliber people. There were some very interesting conversations came about connection between Irish language activists and I know as an activist from Sudan yourself have you have been involved in many of the projects organized by for example Gartian of a Boyle Eglernomona and other Irish community organizations. In one particular initiative which I think you contributed was the Irish language anti-racism charter which was launched few months ago and I recall that there was food prepared by kind economy chefs and you had very beautifully organized that event. A lot of is coming from near until the area. I would like to hear about how you would see your engagement with such an initiative. First speaking about Irish language community and Irish language campaign in Berfast as soon as I arrived and I started working with PPR and meeting different activists and speaking about the struggle people went through to get rights to their language and all and then we started speaking about different indigenous languages around the world and like in Sudan we had so many languages before the British came and the British also forced Sudanese people who had more than 200 local languages before the British came they forced them all to speak one language Arabic which isn't English but it was Arabic because they were accompanied by Egyptians even the British started in Sudan they they didn't allow kids to speak they're nobian language in schools and like kids were threatened they were forced to speak Arabic so I think this is one of the first things I noticed like these shared experiences within the Sudanese community in Berfast there is a big nobian Sudanese community and first thing I thought of was introducing the nobian Sudanese community to the Irish language campaigners which tend into a great collaboration like the nobian the Sudanese nobian association they do a lot of activities with Irish language campaigners in the garden in the center and I so much respect for the Irish language campaigners for all they did to preserve their culture and language and I remember going on tour with Sean I think in the cemetery in West Perfas and I know for people who grew up here and who fought against colonization and all I know they feel like they haven't achieved all they wanted celebrations land and all but looking at it coming from Sudan which is still at war and new wars start every day with displacement is a genocide and all and I just respect everything people did still a way to go and to achieve more and all but still they achieved a lot going to the kind of community and all the work we did with Glearnumona and all to me the most unique kind economy is that it's presenting might as an asylum seeking community this is not to say charity isn't needed it is much needed especially when people arrive new in the country and most of the time they arrive with nothing because they spend their money on the journey to arrive here and they need help with basic things like food like clothes and not just money but also the social support most families arrive here they don't speak English and they know no one and they are isolated most of the time so they need this help and support but also people quickly feel like they don't want just charity and I hear this every day when people join the kind economy like people come to the kind economy and feel the difference because they are not going to charities to get help and support and donations they are actively contributing to the community here and giving their time and their skills and qualification maybe we didn't go as a lift the bank campaign and speak about antiracism and the struggles of refugees and asylum seekers but because it's around food and different cultures it brings people together and makes it easier for local people to understand the shared things more than the differences between us like people have normal conversations about their kids and schools and just normal life instead of all the blaming refugees for the lack of housing and lack of services. Tavaston thank you so much for the very powerful and emotional sharing of your experience as a person coming from Sudan with your very rich background of activism in your own country and bringing that rich experience to bail fast and building the campaign. I mean you're one of the key people people in the movement building, back the city campaign, kind economy campaign. And I think there is this code from Audrey Lord, who says activism is not a single dimensional tank. You can't just be activist in one section, in one tank, and forget about the rest. And I've seen how you are deeply motivated and engaged within your own community, Sudanist community, but also with many other communities, women from Anaka, while people like yourself who are very important in creating this campaign are often cast down and not really given the visibility. So my question is, how does your campaigning and activism challenge these colonial and sectarian logics? I feel privileged to work in PPR, all the amazing activists there, but also to be paid for this job, because I couldn't afford to do this in Sudan, because activism in Sudan was always something you do as extra or on the side. You don't usually get paid to do it. And usually people who work in human rights organizations and get paid, most of the time it becomes more of a business and a career than being activists. So I'm happy to be doing this. And then I came into PPR and everyone have been working here for a long time and their family is a context, and their country, their history, and their culture. So then you think I could bring to PPR is working with my community and refugees on asylum-seeking communities. It's not just refugees on asylum-seeking fighting for their rights, but they are fighting for the rights of everyone in the community, all the marginalized people and people who live in poverty. And that's how I feel about it, even when I'm subjected to racism. Like I went to one of the protests, and I was in the front line, and there was a woman on the other side. And as soon-- like they were chanting an all, but as soon as she saw me, she started directing all the hate, calling me an answer and all, "Fill angry at me." But why are you doing this should be on the same side? So working, for example, in the tech back the city campaign, people come to the campaign with housing issues, if it's houses with mold or dump or maintenance problems or people being homeless, and people come from different backgrounds, and they usually come for their problems to be solved. But then they come to the campaign group and find other people who are still in housing stress or who got their issues solved. But they are still there to help other people. And then for local people who are thinking of refugees as people who come and take their benefit and take their houses, and then they meet them, and they see, like, these are moms who just want good life for their kids. And then the conversations and the relationships, then brings people to think how we solve this together. And then you see when a local white woman is being evicted from her house, and then women from the refugees community and from the kind economy come to the house to help her resist eviction, they bring food, and they support, and all. And I think this is the best about movement, building. So Desi, you already explained about the PPR philosophy and the retos and the organizing models. We would like to explore a little bit about the strategies that PPR has adopted in order to enact the human rights framework. PPR is widely recognized for its human rights based approach to organizing. What, in your view, are the defining features of this approach? These strategies, you know, add chords about participation. You know, it's about seeing who's marginalized, and then what PPR does brilliantly is bringing an organizer and a policy resource behind that, and other alliances as well, and works with a group to kind of let them define what their problem is, you know, maybe give some kind of policy architecture around that. So what's the state's obligation doing, what it isn't doing, and then say, for example, with doing that, I say, well, how do we make the reality? I think Sean before about the more kind of mutual later approach in building the shell, or building the new and the shelves the old. Think, you know, that in its early days, I think PPR strategies were very much pivoted towards an accountability-based model where we are, for a month of a better term, you know, the dynamic was, we're asking the state to do something, but we're asking them to do something that they've committed to doing, so we're trying to hold them to account them. We're pulling every tactic and strategy we can to try to force power to live up to its commitments. And maybe it's something, I suspect it's not, but it's our own kind of unique situation that we have a broken political system in the North, you know? It's evident for anyone with their eyes open that this place is not going anywhere new. Certain is delivering some change for people and certainly getting solutions, but it's not getting the structural change that's required. So I think there was a shift through the kind economy, through the housing organizing, through the right to work, where we started to go, yes, the accountability worked, still needs to proceed, but how do we start doing more autonomous organizing where we're starting to develop community-based solutions that don't give the state a veto over progress? So what Sean was talking about, Micheal, how do we look at our assets, how do we look at the resources the community have and start solving the problems ourselves? Not that you're going to do it in isolation, but actually you show them that it can be done and try to gather momentum around that to build kind of bigger momentum, but it changes the way you're dealing with the state, because now you're not going, please do that for it. You're saying we're going to do it anyway? We need our people who have experience of going to a public authority to try to get their issues solved multiple times, being knocked back, being degraded, being humiliated. What was the problem? Pinpoint where the problem is, you went to him, what did he say? You went to him, what did he say? OK, well then we're not going to do that. We're going to circumvent that. And it's just about building strategies based on people's experience, not some sort of abstract three-arritical model about that. And then you just need, I think, the human element to be able to kind of nurture the strategy with people. Thank you so much, Daisy. I want to ask a fair-to-question on something you said about how you build on your relationship with people in order to develop strategies. In a way, the work with PPR has always shown me how the everyday work is so relational. It very much depends on how people relate to each other and how they create a space. And how this space is always collective. It's not owned by anyone. And unlike many NGOs that I have worked before, there is no established hierarchy in PPR. What I found interesting is how we could think of this model of organizing and campaigning in a broader scale, because from my own experience of working in few countries and different NGOs, I have not really come to any organization with this kind of structure, which has been able to sustain itself for quite a long period. The first thing about the kind of structure, PPR has the structure of an NGO. It has a board. It's got the directors, the funders, it's accountable, and all that. But I think it's more about the values of the people in the organization and the disposition of the people in the organization. So the danger is always there that an organization that could revert back to a more hierarchical kind of mode of working. But I think just the organizing model is so ingrained and related to PPR that it's the people that are running-- the people involved in the campaigns are the people that make the tactical and strategic decisions about the campaign. And then what you have is PPR, so the policy officers, the board, their allies, to support kind of first kind of conferences we had was fast. We brought over housing experts from Brazil and Kenya and Canada to sit on a panel and hear from people and human rights standards. And the minister at the time was Margaret Richie, the housing minister. And she heard that there was going on, but she didn't hear about it, was going on until she got the press release the day before, because we kept a very quiet and a kind of element of surprise. And you know, we were doing that. And that night she phoned in us and she said, can we meet to discuss this? And I just said, certainly we can meet, but you won't be meeting me. You're going to meet the women who live there. And you're going to meet them in their community. And the minister couldn't do that. Now any other organization you would have an egotistical. And I don't mean that necessarily the character judgment, but just the model of people who usually take director jobs. OK. PPR has never been a mass organization. But again, I go back to the points not necessarily the structure. It's about the value base of the people within that structure and the culture and the organization culture there. The second thing about the North, you know, I don't know if that's intentional or not. I mean, I don't think it's intentional. I think you just have contradictions. And contradictions at the core of our governance that are unfolding to the degree that they seem to be irreconcilable. And we did go through a long, high-discrimination. in the North when we didn't have an executive, and that executive wasn't there because a basic failure of political unidim, except the right civil state. I'm moving towards you. You reach kind of an intractable inflexible position in an inflexible government governance that, look at our health service, look at our housing system. It's not so much that we're in a really bad state. It's that you don't see any way out of this stuff, you know? People are naturally going to look to, "Where's the dynamic that I can actually change this?" And that's what's up for grab right now with all referendum debate and all this sort of stuff, you know? Another thing I'm curious about is how this organizing model interacts with institutions like government or housing authorities. When you're negotiating with more hierarchical systems of power, does the collective and relational approach create challenges, or does it actually strengthen the communities' ability to push for change? What are the dynamics that you create to kind of engage with government yet at the same time this engage? Yeah, and this is the thing. I don't think it's an intentional strategy to this engage with government. I mean, I'll go back again to what I always said is you always have to give people the opportunity to do the right thing. You know, you're not trying to set out to show that they're so inflexible. You know, you go with your demand. You go with your creativity. You go with your answer as well and you try to work with them. And sometimes that works. My point is that tends to be on a case-by-case basis as opposed to structural basis, you know? And structural change doesn't happen because there are a few good individuals in there. Amazing. I now go to Sean. This is the last question. Thank you so much for your patience. PPR campaigners have long drawn inspiration from urban grassroots movement in other post-conflicts. PPR has a rich history of traveling to learn, traveling to show solidarity and open your arms to people who travel here for the same thing, at reciprocity, anything. I had lots of opportunity to go and learn from movements across the world because of the organization in PPR and because people like Dezzy and others who were going, "That's found out a bit, but what's going over there?" Or, "You know, you're trying to make those connections." And I mean, there's not a PPR thing either. Ireland and Monsensis are very internationalists. You know, we do have a legacy of colonialization, of oppression, so there's correlations. So in one way, in a very selfish way, internationalism is about picking up good practice from all over the world and places that are delivered in another way. It's a Julian in obligation to use whatever weight or power that you have for your comrades across the world. You know, to mean the people you need it, but not doing it in that sort of patronizing sort of way that you see often. So learning from people what their struggles may need from yours and digging within your own struggles to find what can a solidarity could come from abroad and international struggles. And then also all of that layering and institutionalization of the totally abnormal happens because it happens in the dark and it happens closed in in the Northern Ireland framework where people are just a fan of themselves as the price of a piece. But when you bring the international lands to burn on that, in any way, even the international activist class or you know people from South Africa are coming here and going, "Really? That's how it goes." And the flip of that, for me, there's massive potential to think the PPR was always going as to say, our local system of some power control isn't right. I'm a repartement of an organization to do the listening, to find the ways to do the listening so that you can hear what people are saying. The problem actually is, and the very specifics of it, that could only be known to those people, could only be known to a group of women living in higher blocks or a group of residents on the Shangled Road whose teacher is littered with the glass or a group of people who have been through mental health services and facilities who have had direct or a group of people who have come through a migration system, a resistance, and so on. The only real way to get to the actual on the ground. Problems is to do that organization on the ground and to do that listening on the ground and then the fan wears to turn those issues that have been raised in the statistics. For example, Belfast City Council have legions of employees, millions of pounds of capital flowing around, policy officers, press officers, blah, blah, blah. When you organize in communities, particularly around, for example, community garden, you find that they don't exist on the ground. They actually don't exist in that layer. You're a strong, you can organize there, you can mobilize communities there, and you can get away with a Bamberburn at that Mkalski show and that's about when Storm and Pistone. I mean, let's see what we can get away with when they're not looking. So if a person is very weak, maybe they're around every once in a while for an election or around every time there's a bad news story or something. I really appreciate your time, your wisdom, your insights, and a lot of food for town. I'm sure for everyone who listens to this podcast. Thank you. Thanks for listening.