Danny Sriskandarajah - the radical who left Oxfam to fight for democracy
A really interesting interview by Zoe Williams where I found myself agreeing with most of what he says, and that doesn’t happen often with people at his level. Well worth a read, but I’m posting this mostly for this bit:
He carefully enunciates the fungal theory of change – that when “mushrooms” (consequential movements or individuals) spring up overnight, it’s because of a vast, invisible, underground network. “Those manifestations of the angry mob or the system-change activist will only happen if we nurture civic life in all of its forms,” he says. “Start with whatever you’re passionate about. It could be as simple as the kids’ football club. Get involved, volunteer, connect with your community – do stuff.”
I like this a lot. There’s a huge psychological problem with feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the issues facing our survival as a species and our inability to do anything about it, and anything which bridges that is always welcome. It’s essentially a spin on “think global, act local” focussed on community building as means to consciousness raising.
Williams keeps pushing back on this, which I like as it’s a bit counter-intuitive (especially if you have a platform on an international news website where you have some change of enacting change).
I still struggle to process how getting involved with kids’ football could have arrested the country’s slide into British exceptionalism and casual discursive racism, but Sriskandarajah’s point is that you have to be able to imagine yourself as part of a world in which things improve. You can’t do that on your own: you need models of change, either looking outside to the world or backwards to the past, but you also need an “associational life” – to be part of a collective that does some positive, tangible thing.
“Models of change” can come from anywhere.